by Homer Hickam
It surprised Bonner that there was little urgency or anger in Vanderheld’s voice as he got straight to the point. “In the absence of a NASA administrator, Frank, the President has put me in charge as the chair of the Space Council,” he said. “It is not a situation I relish but I will do my best. I will, of course, need your support.”
“You have it, Mr. Vice President,” Bonner replied, keeping his voice level. Lily brought in a cup of coffee, black, and retreated to the outer sanctum.
“This is bad, Frank. I’ve worried about another Challenger for years.”
“Mr. Vice President, this is no Challenger, but there are always risks in spaceflight,” Bonner said, working hard to keep emotion from his voice. Everything needed to seem calm, situation under control: the NASA way. Bonner knew Vanderheld didn’t care a whit about shuttle safety anyway. He was just looking for an excuse to ground them. But it was difficult to be angry with him. He was an American institution, a man who had made a career of trying to help the poor and afflicted in the country. The legislation he had sponsored had always been for that overarching goal: the care of the people who needed it the most.
Bonner leaned into the receiver. He’d heard the vice president was a little deaf, sometimes forgot his hearing aid. “We inspect every component of the shuttles before launch. I don’t know how we could possibly make them any safer.”
“You don’t have to tell me how NASA does business,” Vanderheld said lightly. “I’ve known every NASA administrator there’s been since the very beginning, heard all their spiels. All I know is, I think the shuttle’s a cranky old beast.”
“Sir, we have tried-and-true methods of ensuring shuttle safety,” Bonner said, determined not to get angry.
“But something certainly went wrong this morning, didn’t it?”
“That was a foul-up at the Cape, sir. Houston isn’t in charge of Kennedy.”
“Oh, I know that, Frank.” The old man chuckled. “But pointing fingers won’t help us, either, will it?”
Bonner flushed at the accusation but held his tongue. He changed the subject to one he could control. “Mr. Vice President, we believe that one of the men who perpetrated this crime was wounded prior to launch. We also observed that Columbia was steered into a different orbit than what we had programmed. It seems these hijackers know something of the shuttle.”
“An inside job?”
You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Bonner thought. “There are many people across the country and the planet who know all about how our shuttles operate, sir.”
“I understand,” Vanderheld said, and then paused. “Frank, I believe we have a military situation on our hands. These are likely terrorists aboard. I’m going to consult with the Air Force.”
Bonner almost came out of his chair. “Mr. Vice President, Columbia is NASA property!”
“The Air Force has many assets that might be useful in this situation,” Vanderheld replied blandly.
“I’d like to go on record opposing bringing in the Air Force on this,” Bonner said. His voice sounded shrill even to him, but it was all he could do. The Air Force had tried unsuccessfully for years to take over the shuttle program. They still had hope of creating their own astronaut corps, their own spacecraft. If NASA stumbled during the hijacking, this could be their foot in the door.
“Frank, you can write your protests but it won’t do any good. The President is with me on this. Now I’m afraid I have to go. The President is getting ready to leave for Iraq and I want to see him off. Keep trying to determine the facts. I have called a meeting of the Space Council in the morning at Camp David to discuss this event. I want you to be prepared to brief the attendees on all you know by then.”
“All right, sir,” Bonner said dejectedly. “If that’s what you want.”
“My decision on the Air Force is nothing personal, you understand. It doesn’t reflect my opinion of your capabilities.”
“Yes, sir, I do understand.”
After he hung up, Bonner sat quietly. He had no doubt the media was going to make a circus of this, calling the Columbia hijack a bloody disaster for NASA. He felt helpless, impotent. How could he fight Vanderheld? How could anyone expect him to? When it was learned that the Air Force was taking charge, he was certain the agency, and especially JSC, would become the laughingstock of the nation. Vanderheld had helped to kill Apollo. He’d retired Columbia. Now he was leading the charge in a NASA disaster. God only knew what the old man might do!
He thought about the Rawhide, wondered if he could hide out there for a while to think. Then he dismissed the idea. That was the first place the media would look for him. Everyone in Houston knew that he regularly held court in the grungy old bar just outside the center’s gate. JSC employees who could not see him during regular working hours could find him there nearly every night, in the corner he’d staked as his own, nursing his Jack D.
Oddly enough, it had been mostly astronauts who had sought him out at the Rawhide, saw that his bright red Porsche with its distinctive license plate—JSC-1—was outside, then sat with him amid the smell of stale beer and crushed peanut shells, and told him, over the constant blare of a television switched to sports, of things he knew he’d never get to see for himself, of the awesome power of the shuttle engines kicking them in the butts as they were shoved into space, of the orange external tank breaking away from the shuttle, tumbling like a gigantic dead leaf falling from an impossibly high tree. They told him of what it was like to float in zero gravity, what they felt when they looked through the view ports and saw the planet, an endless blue-and-white marble, rolling beneath them, how awestruck they were and sometimes even frightened by its immensity. Bonner heard them, envied them, and sometimes he rewarded them, finding them a position on a crew, or a commander’s job. Other times, according to his whim, he didn’t. Sometimes, because he didn’t like their looks or they’d said something he didn’t like, he made certain they never flew again. It was the chance they took when they took the Rawhide route.
A few times, when it was clear she was willing, Bonner took a woman astronaut home with him from the Rawhide, and bedded her with a minimum of conversation and foreplay, just a scrambling, grunting, violent coupling as if he were giving her some of his power quickly before he changed his mind. He never believed the women were with him for anything more than advancement of their careers. While he watched them from his bed, they usually told him what they wanted while they climbed back into their jeans to leave. The women had about the same percentage of success for their gift of sex as the men and women who told him their stories at the Rawhide.
Bonner kept pondering his situation. Let the Air Force try its hand at solving the hijacking, he decided. They’d make a mess of it, one way or the other. He’d seen their heavy-handed clumsy attempts in space fail before. Bonner crossed to the window, looked at the Saturn. A glimmering of a plan was forming. He knew how to get his shuttle back after the Air Force screwed up. All he’d need was a few volunteers. This could yet be NASA’s finest hour.
POSTINSERTION CHECKLIST (4)
Columbia
Jack had made his decision. He had no pilot but he didn’t need one until landing and that was days ahead. There was time to come up with a solution. He peered through the cockpit window. Columbia was in a vacuum sea on a tether of gravity, her nose straight ahead, her back turned to earth, streaking through nothing at five miles a second. She was swinging into nightfall again, arcs of crimson, pink, and azure outlining the curved horizon of the bright blue planet below. Jack broke away from the view and began to hustle from panel to panel, throwing switches according to the postinsertion checklist. The first thing he needed to do was configure the software needed to activate the shuttle’s life-support and power systems. If he didn’t get the air circulation system going, they wouldn’t last another hour.
Before he got far, Penny stopped him. “Listen to me!” she growled. “I need to know at least this: Are you going to kill me?” Her long black hair,
pulled back into a ponytail, coiled behind her, forming what appeared to be a question mark.
Jack’s mind had been clicking ahead, figuring out what he’d need to do to fix things, get back on track. At first her question didn’t even register. Gradually, it formed in his mind but it didn’t make any sense so he chose to ignore it. “Can you throw switches?” he asked her instead.
She looked at him as if he were mad. “Do you think I’m a complete idiot?”
“I need some help throwing some switches according to the postinsertion checklist,” he said.
“Why should I do that?”
“Do you want to stay alive?”
“I want you to land this bucket of bolts and let me the hell off.”
Jack reflected for a moment that she’d probably be sorry if he tried. He decided to suggest an alternative. “Will you clean up Hoppy’s blood while I activate the shuttle systems?” Then he realized she didn’t know the circumstances. “I didn’t kill him. It was an accident.”
“You didn’t know the gun was loaded, right?” She glared at him, then seemed to relax. She had an interesting face, Jack thought; full lips, big brown eyes with long lashes, fine aquiline nose, and the most perfect skin he had ever seen. She wasn’t beautiful, not by traditional standards, but her face commanded your attention, made you want to study it, an exotic and at the same time elegant face, though a bit puffy, he noted, from the fluid shift caused by microgravity. “Are you staring at me?” Penny asked.
“No,” he lied. “I’m just waiting for you to make up your mind. Sometime today would be nice.”
“It’s all right. I’m used to people staring at me.”
“I wasn’t staring. Are you going to help or not?”
“All right. I’ll clean it up,” she relented. “But only because I don’t want to breathe it.”
“There are some absorbent wipes in one of the lockers,” Jack said. “Look on the labels and you’ll find them. Also, get a surgeon’s mask and latex gloves out of the same drawer. They’ll protect you.”
“I know what I need,” High Eagle snapped. “I don’t need you to tell me everything.”
“Glad to hear it. In the meantime I need to get Columbia activated.”
“What happens then?” she asked.
“We’ll have air and heat and guidance—”
She shook her head, exasperated. “God, you’re so damn literal! I mean what happens to me ?”
Jack was confused. “In what way?”
“Forget it,” she grumbled, and flew off.
Jack watched her for a moment, saw that she was opening the correct drawer for the absorbent tissue and surgeon’s mask, and then went to check Virgil. He was curled up. “Sorry, boss. I’ve never been so sick in my life.”
Jack patted him on the shoulder. “You’ll live, Virg. A few hours from now you’ll be fine.”
“Don’t have a few hours,” Virgil mumbled. “We got to get Columbia activated. I got to do my part.”
“Your part is to stay very still. High Eagle’s helping me.”
Virgil opened a single eye. “What did you tell her?”
“That we’re running a few tests. Then we’ll land.”
“Boss, you better think about that. She needs to know the truth.”
“If I tell her, God only knows what she might do. I need her hands, Virgil. They’re all I’ve got right now.” Jack opened the medical kit, selected a hypodermic needle, and filled it from one of the bottles within. He punched the needle into Virgil’s arm. “Phenergan,” he said. “It’ll settle your stomach, but the only real cure is time. I’ll start activation. You’ll snap out of this quicker if you just stay quiet.”
Virgil squeezed his eyes closed. “This ain’t gonna work. Without Hoppy, how can we do this?”
“Nothing’s changed. I can land the shuttle if I have to.”
“No, boss...”
Jack pulled out a sleeping bag, wrapped Virgil in it, and Velcroed him to the wall. Then he gently placed Cassidy in another bag; saw to it that his face was covered. He hung him on the airlock Velcro tabs. It was all he could do for his pilot until he had some more time. He heard a thumping noise and turned to see Penny awkwardly moving around the cabin, armed with paper towels, trying to catch the blood droplets. She was kicking as if she were underwater and kept bouncing against the bulkheads. As he watched, she hit her elbow on the panel of switches in front of the food dispenser. “Ouch!” she griped, vigorously rubbing her elbow, which sent her into another awkward flight. She was muttering curses. Jack thought she had a most remarkable knowledge of them. “Make slow movements,” he told her as he stabbed her with a hypo in the shoulder. “And don’t kick.”
“Hey!” She gasped, but he held her still by clutching her arm with a single powerful hand.
“Medicine,” he said. “It’ll ease your stomach.”
“Jesus. You almost broke my arm,” she muttered after Jack had withdrawn the needle. But she kept working, trying to catch the blood. “This damn stuff is everywhere,” she complained.
“You’re doing fine,” Jack said. “When I get the environmental system activated, the rest of it will be absorbed into the filters.”
She turned, her hand on one of the chairs. “Let me see. I’m just checking here. I did tell you to go to hell already, didn’t I?”
For a reason he couldn’t quite fathom, Jack liked to banter with this woman. “Yes, but I don’t have the time right now.”
She arched a well-plucked eyebrow. “You might as well put on your asbestos underwear because the goddamn Pentagon is probably right now trying to figure out how to blast you there.”
“As long as we’re on this shuttle together, where I go, you go,” Jack pointed out.
“Screw you!” she snapped.
“Great comeback.” He smiled despite himself.
She flushed. “You’re a dead man, Medaris.”
Jack heard Virgil groan. He had another plastic bag to his mouth. The sight of his pitiful SMET gave Jack an idea. “Would you mind looking after Virgil?” he asked her. “You’re a doctor, right? You agreed to the Hippocratic oath and all. I believe you have to do it.”
Penny crossed her arms. “I don’t have to do anything. I’m not a medical doctor. As far as I’m concerned, Virgil can puke his guts out before I help him.”
Amused, Jack watched while High Eagle began to rotate, the action of her crossing her arms causing her to involuntarily demonstrate the law of conservation of angular momentum. It was the same principle that made figure skaters spin. He started to point that out to her but thought better of it. “Then what kind of doctor are you?” he asked. “I suppose we can safely eliminate anything to do with human compassion and care for your fellowman.”
She grabbed a handrail, stopping her spin. “My PhD’s in biology. And what the hell are you grinning about?”
“Virgil’s a good man, Dr. High Eagle. He has a wife and a little daughter. He’s never hurt anyone in his life. He didn’t mean for you to get caught up in this and neither did I.”
Penny looked at the big technician, still softly coughing into the plastic bag. She shrugged. “Skip the sob story,” she said. “I’ll check on your friend.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re not welcome.”
An hour later Penny’s stomach had calmed and her bladder was back to normal. She was starting to think clearer too. She decided to try to convince Medaris again to land the shuttle. She found him in the commander’s seat. As soon as she got close, he turned and looked quizzically up at her. But Penny didn’t look back. She was staring through the cockpit window. She pulled herself to the pilot’s seat. “My God...” she whispered. Where there should have been only stars and the blackness of deep space, there was the enormous orange external tank, still firmly attached to Columbia. Even with her limited knowledge of the space shuttle, she knew this was not normal. “Why is the tank still attached?”
“We need it for what we have in mind,”
he said, his hands busy throwing switches.
“What do you have in mind?”
He uncovered a plastic checklist and began to throw more switches. “We’re going to conduct top secret tests in the upper atmosphere. The ET has a storage volume in its base. There’s some special equipment there we’ll be using.”
Penny’s bladder chose that moment to strike again. “I don’t believe you!” she declared over her shoulder as she headed back down to the WCS.
“After getting to know you, it is an opinion,” he called after her, raising his voice as she receded, “that doesn’t surprise me!”
* * *
It was probably a few minutes but it seemed like only seconds to Jack before High Eagle was back. “Why did you murder Cassidy?” she demanded.
“It was an accident,” he said irritably. “High Eagle, I don’t have time to talk to you right now.” He was inside the difficult procedure required to open the cargo bay doors. They had to be open to release the heat generated by the fuel cells, the devices that provided the shuttle her electrical power. To leave the doors closed could cause the fuel cells to rupture, a catastrophic failure. Jack rushed through the procedure. He wanted to get into the cockpit and take a star sight so he could set the inertial module units to tell Columbia exactly where she was.
Penny grabbed his leg, hanging on determinedly. “Call Houston,” she grunted. “Tell them to bring us in.”
Jack gave up trying to reach a switch on an overhead panel, and unwound her. He watched her wrap herself in a defensive ball. Too tired to worry with her, he moved her into the center of the cabin, threw the switch he needed, and moved on to the next panel. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her unwrap and try to reach a handrail. When she couldn’t, she yelled at him: “Hey, no fair, you jerk!”
Jack grabbed another procedure manual and soared past her, dodging her hands as he went by. He snagged a handrail, stopped, and considered her. “If I move you so you can hold on to a handrail, will you promise to leave me alone?”