by Homer Hickam
“What are you doing?” she worried, trying to see the computer screen.
“I’ve called up the maneuver display board for the orbital maneuvering system.”
Penny leaned over and looked at his monitor. “You’re changing our orbit?”
“Very good, Doctor,” he said sarcastically. “Go to the head of your class.” When she pushed in closer, he leaned back and looked at her. “How come you’re squinting all the time? You need to borrow my glasses?”
She blinked, opened her eyes wide. It embarrassed her when she was caught. “It’s a bad habit,” she confessed. “I do it when I’m confused. . . or thinking.”
Jack shrugged and went back to the keyboard.
“What are you doing now?”
He let out a long, weary breath. “I’m putting in the engine selection and the trim load.” He kept tapping. “Don’t forget the external tank mass,” he said, apparently to himself. She certainly didn’t know what he was talking about. “Burn solution coming up.”
Penny was nervously gripping her seat and squinting. She couldn’t help it. He looked at her over his glasses. “Relax. I’m just making a little change in delta V to catch up with an old friend. On my mark, ten-nine-eight-seven. . . OMS burn now!”
Penny heard a muffled thunderclap, Columbia shuddering her length. The burn lasted for only a few seconds and then abruptly shut down. “IMUs are good,” he muttered. “Let’s see what the optical alignment sight says. I’ll aim it at that little ol’ star there.” He held the instrument to his eye, turned knobs on its side. “On the money,” he said at length. He put the instrument down, rubbed his eyes.
Penny heard a noise above her and then saw Paco on the ceiling, trotting unconcernedly across it, his claws leaving little nicks in the spongy material. Jack gave him an upside-down pat and he promptly ran down his arm into his lap.
Columbia was again moving into nightfall. “Look at that!” Jack pointed as the cat curled up in his lap.
Penny followed his gesture. There were no stars. A full moon had dazzled them away as if it demanded its own velvet backdrop. She turned and was surprised to see Jack had fallen asleep, just like that. Paco had also tucked his head in, was making contented squeezing movements with his two front paws. Except for the whirs and clicks and gurgles of Columbia, it was quiet on the flight deck. Outside, the dark line of night swept inexorably toward them. For the first time since the launch, which seemed a hundred years ago, Penny could go anywhere, do anything she wanted. Now was the time to get the medication. She could render both spacejackers unconscious for a very long time, get on the horn, call Houston, and get Columbia in on automatic. She could do it. Nothing could stop her. And she might have done it, too, if only she hadn’t watched Jack and Paco sleep for just a little longer than she should have, and then fallen completely, utterly asleep herself.
MISSION ELAPSED TIME: 1 DAY AND COUNTING . . .
THE CAMP DAVID CONFERENCE
Thirty-one Thousand Feet over the Outer Banks, North Carolina
At oh-dark-thirty Ollie Grant had been in a teleconference with John Lakey, chief of the Astronaut Office, and Frank Bonner. The conference was short and to the point. Bonner led the discussion. To just sit and idly watch while hijackers operated the shuttle, he said, was a sacrilege to NASA. He outlined his plan. Lakey said little. Grant enthusiastically endorsed Bonner’s bold scheme. It was settled. She was the commander of STS-128. No matter she’d been left behind, it was still her mission, her bird.
Grant screamed off the Cape runway in her T-38 and rocked into the cool dense morning air. An hour later she streaked past Kitty Hawk, throttled back over the Potomac, and landed at Andrews Air Force Base. A sedan with the NASA meatball symbol on its doors waited for her on the tarmac. Lights flashing, its driver sped her out of the airport, heading east to Camp David.
She arrived at the presidential retreat two hours later, just in time for the meeting. She entered the conference room in the Rosewood House and noticed a large picture window that presented a quiet, forested panorama. A bucolic view, she thought, for a team gathered to crisis-manage the hijacking of her space shuttle. She looked around the gathering and saw the Air Force contingent. They waved her over. “Hey, NASA,” General Bud Carling called jovially, “come slum with us blue suiters.” In a room full of strangers she gratefully took a seat behind him. Carling had been her F-15 wing commander in Germany before she’d received her assignment to NASA. She shook his hand, met the rest of his contingent, a group of nonpilot Space Command commandos. Technically sharp, she assumed, but none of them were up to her standards. If you weren’t a pilot, you weren’t worth much in her book. “Listen, Ollie,” Carling said quietly, leaning in close. “Sorry about all this. No pilot likes to think about somebody else’s butt being in his seat.”
“Whoever it is is dead meat, Bud,” Grant replied, bristling.
“Take it easy, lady,” Carling advised. “This is now in the hands of the big boys.”
If that was supposed to make Grant feel better, Carling had failed. The big boys? He might as well have slapped her in the face. She turned away from him, perused the assembly. Besides the Air Force the group included representatives of the Navy and the Central Intelligence Agency. Bonner sat at the front of the table. He kept snapping his fingers and flunkies kept conferring with him and flying off at a dead run. One of them came back with a muffin, another with a cup of coffee. Bonner was an enigma to Grant. He was a solid engineer and manager. A lot of people at JSC said there would have been no shuttle program, no International Space Station, no astronaut corps, if it weren’t for his continuing struggle against NASA’s foes. But he could also, on a dime it seemed, turn into a savage adversary of one of his own people. Everyone who worked for Bonner was afraid of him. It got him acquiescence to his commands but it got him little respect and very little loyalty. Then there were the stories from her fellow women astronauts. During some of the late-night bull sessions a few of the women astronauts had admitted they’d gone to the Rawhide, and then let Bonner take them home and climb on top of them. Grant had slugged one of the women who had confessed to having sex with Bonner and said it was going to get her a command position. That wasn’t the astronaut corps Grant had signed up to fly with!
Grant caught Bonner’s eye and he nodded to her and then crooked his finger. She reluctantly approached him. “If I call on you, go ahead and give your pitch. If I don’t, we’ll wait for a better time. Do you understand?”
Grant started to argue, thought better of it, and nodded. When she went back to her seat, Carling looked over his shoulder, gave her a sardonic smile. She ignored him. There was nothing funny about any of this. She should have been in space, not cooped up in a cabin on a mountaintop in Maryland.
There was a stir at the door and Grant saw a tall, thin, and nearly bald man enter the room—the veep, as he was popularly known. With a perpetually puffy, pasty face, framed by a smartly cut white beard, Vice President Vanderheld wore a brown corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows. Grant thought he looked more like a friendly old English professor at a junior college than a vice president. Grant recalled that he’d been a senator for practically forever from some western state—North Dakota? She wasn’t sure—and had taken second place on the ticket after the President’s first choice had been knocked off for some obscure campaign finance scandal. Vanderheld apparently was considered safe by the politicos because he had no presidential ambitions of his own. He was too old, for one thing. Most people in his party figured he’d leave when the President did, at the end of his almost assured second term. Still, he was a beloved old guy. Grant remembered a poll she’d seen that named him the most popular man in the government, even more so than President Edwards. A career of passing laws that gave largesse to poor people was obviously a very popular thing; trying to shut down NASA didn’t hurt, either, she thought sourly. Still, like everyone, she respected Vanderheld. He seemed to have a conscience, which was more than most politicians had
, she supposed.
When Vanderheld finally stopped shaking hands, he eased himself into a seat at the table and tapped the mike in front of him. The few remaining hairs on his head blew wispy and white in the light air from the air-conditioning ducts overhead. “Before we begin, I wish to make a general statement,” he said in a surprisingly strong voice. “As you know, the President is preparing to fly to Iraq to broker a peace treaty between Iran and Iraq. This treaty will bring peace and stability to a region of vital strategic interest to the United States. As you may know, I, too, have a high-priority situation on my plate: the Senate vote on the World Energy Treaty next week. WET, along with the end of the war in the Middle East, is required for the continuing prosperity of this country and peace across the world. Now we have this situation, which may divert the people’s attention from these two great endeavors.”
Vanderheld put on his glasses, scanned the executive summary that each participant around the table had been given. He shook his head, took his glasses off, looked around the table with disgust clearly etched on his face. “President Edwards has given this council the responsibility to address the issue of the hijacked space shuttle. He hasn’t asked us to find out how this hijacking happened or why. I know you’d all like to talk about that. So would I.”
The assembly laughed. Vanderheld smiled, very briefly, put his glasses back on, and tapped the report. “Like you, I’ve wondered why in heaven’s name would anybody want to hijack a shuttle? What could they possibly want with it? Blackmail, perhaps? Ransom?” He shook his head. “Nothing makes sense. In any case, the Justice Department is looking into that. Our charge is to give the President options on how to bring the space shuttle home, and in short order. So I’m going to need some suggestions.” He nodded toward Bonner, who grimly nodded back. “I’d first like Frank Bonner of NASA JSC to bring us up to speed on the situation.”
Bonner made his remarks sitting down, his hands flat on the table before him. The situation was unchanged, he droned, since the day before. Columbia was in a high orbit, 558 nautical miles, at an inclination of 28.7 degrees. An eyewitness had identified one of the men aboard Columbia as former astronaut Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, who had apparently been shot by one of the hijackers. It was not known why Cassidy was on the launch tower. A garbled conversation with Dr. Penny High Eagle on downlink had established that she was on board the shuttle with probably two or more hijackers and that Cassidy was probably dead. “Mission Control in Houston continues to monitor Columbia downlink,” Bonner said. “As far as we can determine without communication with whoever is on board, the shuttle is in good shape. We continue our analyses, sir,” he said, folding his hands to indicate he was finished. “I will forward you any conclusions we reach as soon as I have them.”
Vanderheld acknowledged Bonner’s report, told him he’d done a good job, and expressed respect for the employees of NASA. Grant sank deeper into her chair. It was crap, eyewash. The proof of that followed with the next thing Vanderheld said. “Unless somebody can convince me otherwise, I believe this crisis requires a military response. Therefore, I’ve decided the Air Force should take front and center.”
Grant started to rise in protest but Bonner caught her eye, gave her a short, negative cut of his head. She subsided, fuming.
General Carling looked around his assembled colonels and majors and then leaned over his mike. “Well, sir, I guess the question Air Force Space Command needs to ask is what do you want done with Columbia ? If you want us to shoot her down, we can do that. Well, I take that back. We can blow her up but she won’t come down. She’ll stay up there until her orbit degrades. That might take some time.”
The door opened and Grant saw a man enter. Some members of the group started to rise to greet him, but he used both of his hands to signal them back down. Whoever it was was a sharp dresser, Armani all the way. Grant thought he looked like a fox, sharp faced and cunning. He was also wearing what was clearly a very bad wig. The hair on it was so dense and solidly black that it looked like the fur of a dead animal just come out of a dye vat. “Bernard Sykes,” she heard one of the Space Command weenies say. “White House chief of staff.” Sykes found a chair directly behind the vice president, a toothy grin on his foxy snout.
“Perhaps you should skip to the bottom line, General,” Vanderheld was saying. “What do you recommend?”
“Well, I wouldn’t blow Columbia up, sir,” Carling rasped. “It’s pretty valuable American property and we have one of our own aboard.”
“Dr. High Eagle,” Vanderheld said. Grant seethed, her gut a knot. Neither she nor the astronauts of STS-128, the second all-female shuttle crew in history, had been officially recognized by the gathering. Now they were talking about High Eagle, a mere payload specialist, as if she were the only one of them who mattered!
Grant wanted to get up and make an announcement, get everybody in the room squared away. They just didn’t understand. She had ridden her people hard, pushing them through simulation after simulation, honing them for instant response to her orders. Then, without even asking her what she thought about it, NASA headquarters had decided to put a usurper on her crew. Penny High Eagle’s presence had completely offended Grant before she’d ever met the woman. As far as Grant was concerned, High Eagle had shamelessly used her ethnicity and sex to capture a string of dubious distinctions—the first Native American woman to go to the South Pole (she had posed topless for photographers at the Amundsen Station), to climb Mount Everest (dragged, Grant was certain, by about a dozen stout Sherpas), to visit the Titanic (she had stayed clothed for her submarine ride, at least)—the list seemed endless. Every adventure had resulted in either a book or an article. Although the Astronaut Office in Houston had fought to keep such self-promoters off the shuttle, High Eagle had taken a different approach to get into space, convincing the giant pharmaceuticals that sponsored most of her adventures to purchase her a payload-specialist seat under the flimsy pretext that she would perform a cell culture experiment.
“How about some options, General?” Vanderheld asked, snapping Grant back to the meeting.
Carling had been dithering, consulting with his other officers. “Well, sir, like I said, we can send an ALMV—that’s an air-launched minivehicle—and bust the shuttle wide open,” he said. “Or, my personal favorite, we can leave Columbia alone, wait these guys out.”
Vanderheld glared at Carling. “Unfortunately, neither of your options is politically viable, General,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “The press is already out there stirring everybody up. The American people will want this solved in short order without anyone getting hurt. We can’t wait and we can’t blow the shuttle up. I need something better.” The vice president rested his head in his hand. Grant thought he looked tired or maybe he was just disgusted with having to deal with the situation. “Suppose you damage the shuttle with one of your missiles, just enough to make it come down?”
Carling conferred with the colonel behind him. “No, sir, at least not with any certainty. The shuttle and the AMLV are high-energy vehicles traveling at five miles per second. If they hit each other, it’s going to be like smashing two eggs together. The crew cabin is pressurized at one atmosphere. You crack that cabin in the vacuum of space, whoever’s aboard wouldn’t survive. And as I said before, nothing’s going to come down. It’ll just be debris in orbit. Bodies floating around up there for a long time. Public relations is not my line, but somehow I suspect we would be criticized if that happened.”
Vanderheld scanned the room, stopped on Bonner for a moment, and then moved on until his eyes lit on Grant. “Colonel Grant? My condolences to you and your brave crew. As the second all-woman crew to fly into space, you would have represented this administration’s continuing efforts to insure a multicultural and nonsexist society.”
What a sack of politically correct shit, Grant thought. She looked at Bonner, who nodded back. This was her moment. She’d better make the best of it. She stood and cleared her thro
at before speaking. “Thank you, sir. My crew trained long and hard for their flight and would have performed in an outstanding manner.” She left it at that. Grant was not a speechmaker. She was a pilot and an engineer. She got right to the point. “One thing you should know is that NASA has the ability to land the shuttle automatically; but the crew aboard must release manual control for the autopilot system to work.”
“Is there a way to talk to Dr. High Eagle back-channel?” Dr. Bill Carmichael, the CIA rep, interrupted. He had a degree in aeronautical engineering, Grant recalled.
“High Eagle is a payload specialist—not a real astronaut. She hasn’t been trained on shuttle systems, so talking to her wouldn’t do us a lot of good. But that’s not what —”
“Not an astronaut, Colonel?” Carling chuckled, looking slyly over his shoulder. “She’s in space, ain’t she?”
Grant refused to take Carling’s bait. Carling knew that only members of the astronaut corps in Houston were allowed to have the title, a distinction NASA had made for three decades. You could spend a year in space, but if you weren’t from NASA Houston, you weren’t an astronaut. She took a deep breath, not wanting to get into that, and looked at Vanderheld. “Sir, I propose to take space shuttle Endeavour, rendezvous with Columbia, board her, and bring her home.”
A rumble of voices rose in the room. Vanderheld leaned forward, his rumpled jacket rising off his neck. “Can you do that, Colonel?”
Grant’s eyes glittered. “You bet your sweet. . . Yes sir, I can. We’ve got Endeavour on Pad 39-A almost ready to launch.”
A woman stirred at the end of the table. “What about Endeavour’s payload?” she demanded. “It’s a pretty important piece of hardware, a node for the Space Station.”
The woman’s nameplate identified her as Betty Velasquez, National Science Foundation. Grant had anticipated the question. “We’ll put the node in orbit first, ma’am, then rendezvous with Columbia. All we need is to give the Cape permission to prep Endeavour early and get her off the pad.”