Back to the Moon

by Homer Hickam

  “We believe you, Colonel,” Jack said grimly. “How did you get out of the Soyuz ?”

  Dubrinski shook his head, as if amazed at what he’d done. “I awoke in twisted wreckage, half hanging out of the spacecraft. Colonel Grant, as you can see, was knocked out. She is a great pilot but apparently has gone quite insane. I had no choice but to disconnect the air umbilical from the Soyuz and try to attract your attention. I was very pleased to find the wire running along the side of your spacecraft. I used it to come forward after I got over the shuttle’s tail. Then I saw Dr. High Eagle and used the handrails on the bulkhead to come up so she could see me. I apologize for frightening her.”

  “I’m afraid you’ve gotten out of the frying pan into the fire,” Jack said. “We’ll be hitting the atmosphere in one hour and it’s going to be a close thing.”

  “You are the pilot?”

  “I’m going to give it my best shot.”

  “I was trained for many years on simulators to be a Buran pilot,” Dubrinski said eagerly. “Perhaps I can help.”

  Jack didn’t hesitate. “I think maybe you can.” He led Dubrinski to the cockpit.

  The Russian settled into the pilot’s seat, scanned the bank of switches and instruments, and pushed the rudder peddles. “Are your hydraulics activated?”

  “The APUs are up,” Jack confirmed. “We have full aerodynamic control.”

  “Show me everything,” Dubrinski said, clearly overjoyed at the prospect of flying Columbia. “Now I will have the chance to fly a shuttle to the earth from space after all!” He stopped, looked sorrowfully at Grant. “Will she be all right, do you think?”

  Penny was beside her, the medical kit in his hand. “We’ll do what we can for her,” she said.

  SMC

  Sam reacted to Jack’s announcement by raising his palms toward the ceiling. What else could possibly happen on this mission? America Control had fed all the information it had to Columbia. All that could be done had been done. Jack’s idea of using the tether as an aerodynamic brake was a roll of the dice. Not much was known about how it might work except for a theory relayed down by the Italians in Huntsville as to the satellite’s drag coefficient in the upper atmosphere. The computers had subsequently calculated that it might just be enough to slow Columbia to a velocity that was sur vivable. The likely effect of having a burned Soyuz-Y and a flapping RMS arm hanging off her tail was a complete unknown. If it burned off quickly enough, Tate’s people told him, then perhaps there would be little effect. If it stayed attached, then Columbia would probably be out of control even if she managed to survive to the lower atmosphere. At least, the port OMS rockets were still functional. If they had been damaged, it would have been all over.

  “Okay, people, heads up,” Sam announced as the moment of reentry approached. “This is the hairy part.”

  He heard a low burble of laughter emanating from the consoles beneath him. When he looked sharply at them, Mary Cantrell, the GUIDO, let him know why they were all laughing. “Sam, how can you say this is the hairy part? This ol’ thing’s been like one of Dolly Parton’s wigs from the get-go.”

  Despite his belief in the need for decorum during desperate moments, Sam had to laugh with them.

  Columbia

  Jack and Dubrinski sat at the cockpit controls, having worked out what each would do in the various stages of reentry, from the first moments when Columbia hit the atmosphere, until she got low enough to operate as a glider. They went through it again and then started their first checklist. They quickly lapsed into their own lingo.

  “OMS TVC gimbal check,” Jack called.

  “Port only, yes,” Dubrinski replied, his head swiveling between the checklist and the oddly familiar panels. “The Buran ’s console looked very similar to Columbia ’s, Jack,” he added.

  “A coincidence?” Jack smiled.

  Dubrinski shook his head, embarrassed. “I do not think so.”

  “APU restart?” Jack called out from the checklist.

  “Restart on-line.”

  Jack took a breath. “Check CRT two GNC fifty Horizon SIT and CRT three BFS, GNC five zero Horizon SIT, then return CRT two to GNC SYS SUMM one and CRT three to BFS....”

  Dubrinski scanned the monitor to his left. “Yes, I have it. RCS dump?”

  “Roger but only fifty percent. We may need control in the nose. Exercise brake pedals.”

  “Yes. Nominal APU performance.”

  “Roger.”

  Jack turned to look over his shoulder. Virgil was in the footloops in front of the aft flight deck view ports. He was to control the tether at the critical moment. Penny sat in one of the two seats bolted to the flight deck behind the cockpit. She had Paco in his transit box bungeed between her feet, prepared to take him with her in case of a fast evacuation. She also had the kit that contained all her cell culture samples and film cans. “Ready, Penny?” he asked her.

  “I was born ready.” she replied, although her voice betrayed her nerves.

  He gave her a thumbs-up. “Attagirl. We’re gonna be fine.”

  Jack took another moment to consider their situation. One problem with using the tethered satellite for an aerobrake after the final OMS burn was that the cargo bay doors had to stay open to keep the tether out, but had to be closed for Columbia to enter the atmosphere. He thought he had resolved that problem by having Dubrinski fire the OMS, then rotate Columbia so that the tether, twenty miles long, was pointing toward earth. When it hit the atmosphere ahead of them, it would troll through the air and slow them down. Then when Columbia hit the first stray molecules of nitrogen and oxygen and ozone in the upper atmosphere, they would let it continue to drag through the denser layer twenty miles below. Then Virgil would cut the tether, Jack would close the doors, and Dubrinski would use the dwindling RCS jets to rotate Columbia again, put her tiles down toward earth. The Cray in Houston thought that might be enough for the shuttle to survive reentry.

  After the OMS burn Jack called, “Go for it, Virg.”

  “Roger that, Jack.”

  Jack knew Virgil would let out just enough on the reel to keep the cable from breaking. He waited calmly for Virgil’s report.

  “ATESS is hitting the atmosphere,” Virgil called. “She’s dragging big time, Jack!”

  Jack kept his eye on the accelerometers. “It’s working,” he breathed. He looked over his shoulder again. “Penny, it’s working.”

  “That’s my man.”

  Jack knew what was happening far below. The tethered satellite was heating up, its aluminum shell glowing and then sloughing away. When it finally burned up, if he’d done his calculations correctly, it would have slowed Columbia to a velocity of fifteen thousand miles per hour, just below orbital speed.

  “She’s gone, Jack,” Virgil called, meaning the satellite had burned up. With it gone the tether would recoil back at them, perhaps to wrap around the shuttle. “I’m cutting the tether,” Virgil continued, indicating that he’d eliminated that dangerous possibility. Jack heard him climb into the seat beside Penny. “You can close the doors, Jack,” he said.

  Jack gave the command. The great doors slowly rotated about their pivots, closing tightly. Columbia was ready to reenter.

  Jack and Dubrinski had decided to reenter at a steep angle and then pull up when Columbia ’s wings began to develop lift. This would give the shuttle time to cool, since her tiles weren’t built for the temperatures likely at such a high velocity. It was a risky technique but Jack thought that Columbia, out of all the shuttles, could handle the stress of repeated reentries. Because she was the first shuttle, she had been built with thicker beams and heavier attach points than her successors.

  Columbia made her first dip into the atmosphere, indicated by a blue haze coming off her nose. Jack could see they were over the mid-Pacific. Then the haze caused by the air friction turned into a fireball. A shudder and rattle aft indicated that the impact of hitting the atmosphere had torn off the Soyuz-Y and the RMS. Jack could feel Columbia �
��s tail started to yaw.

  “Compensating with the RCS,” Dubrinski said, working the controls. “No response. I will go with the OMS to flatten us out.”

  Jack felt the g’s build, then they were staring at cool, dark space again. He ran his fingers across the keyboard, watched the numbers march. “We bounced back up twenty miles.” He whistled.

  Dubrinski guided the shuttle into a flat trajectory. The blue haze formed again and then turned into a white-hot fireball. “Give it more OMS,” Jack commanded.

  Dubrinski complied, using the last of the OMS propellants. Columbia flattened out and then bounced twelve miles high. She was now eighty miles mean altitude and neither Dubrinski nor Jack could pinpoint where they were.

  Jack watched approvingly as Dubrinski keyed in the digital autopilot. Then the Russian dived Columbia again. She began a flat skid just as she caught denser air. A klaxon alerted Jack that the DAP was losing aerodynamic control. “Full RCS, Yuri,” Jack ordered.

  Dubrinski made the manual firing. “I’m doing this by the seat of my pants!” he confessed.

  Jack said nothing, let his pilot do his work. Columbia skipped, this time five miles high. But she was out of her skid. “The seat of your pants is better than any computer, Yuri,” Jack said.

  Sweat poured off the Russian. He mopped his face with his sleeve. “Thanks, comrade,” he said.

  “All right, Colonel,” Jack said calmly. “Let’s try it again.”

  Dubrinski took a deep breath and keyed in the DAP. He kept his hand on Columbia ’s controller, ready to take over as soon as she gave him aerodynamic control. A calm settled over him. The man who sat to his right had given him complete trust, a man as calm and collected in a crisis as any he had ever seen. It was not simply a matter of his own survival. Dubrinski burned to perform at maximum efficiency for this man.

  Columbia hit the atmosphere with a flash and an audible thump. But this time the fireball was more of a glow and the DAP held Columbia steady. Automatic elevon trim began and then Jack called out what Dubrinski longed to hear. “Aerosurface control, q-bar at two dot zero.”

  Columbia was dropping like a brick with wings. Jack looked down and saw clouds. “We’re in!” he exulted. “We’re in!”

  Dubrinski marveled at Columbia ’s feel as her wings began to develop lift and she began to glide. He eased forward the rotational hand controller and felt the shuttle’s wings bite into the air. When he eased back, she seemed to sigh under his touch, skimming frictionlessly over an invisible high lake of clear air. Columbia was magnificent, he thought. The love of an aircraft and her pilot seemed to flow between Dubrinski and the shuttle, her great heart and his mixing into one energy, one mind.

  Jack called up a descent profile, snapping Dubrinski out of his metaphysical musing. “Energy management looking good, Yuri.”

  Dubrinski fixed his eyes on the eight-ball indicator. The wings were exactly level. He swiveled his gaze to the horizontal situation indicator. It was giving a readout, but any navigational information it was picking up was probably bogus.

  Jack watched the mach meter and the vertical velocity indicator. On the screens above his head was the position of the flaps. Everything was on the money. Dubrinski was flying Columbia with consummate professionalism. No, by damn, Jack thought: with genius!

  That was when everything went to hell. The first tile gave way on the starboard wing, stressed past all design limits by the wild reentry. When it tore away, it took four more tiles with it. A millisecond later two more chunks also ripped from Columbia ’s belly.

  Dubrinski felt the turbulence in his seat a fraction of a second before it came through the stick. He struggled with it, Columbia almost pitching into a tumble. He managed to level her but she was shaking as if she were his grandfather’s sleigh crunching over remelted ice while the big horse pulling it tossed its maned head.

  Jack deduced the problem when he heard a big chunk let go beneath him. “We’re losing tiles! Can you hold her?”

  “I think so!” Dubrinski said between gritted teeth.

  Jack turned to Penny and Virgil. “You’re going to have to activate the pole! Go!”

  The two stared at him. “Go!” Jack screamed at them again.

  A sudden turbulence bowled them over just as they unbuckled their belts. Virgil went howling into the bulkhead, striking his head. He sat down, moaning, blood streaming down his face and soaking the collar of his coveralls.

  “Jack.” Penny gasped. “I think we’re going to need help.”

  Dubrinski clapped Jack’s shoulder. “Go, Jack. I have Columbia. Help them!”

  Jack unstrapped, crawled to the side hatch jettison handle, and slammed it down. Four shaped charges blew the hinges, and three thruster packs drove the hatch into the windstream. A blast of frigid air filled the flight deck, a snowstorm of ice crystals exploding from the humidity in the cabin air. Jack fought the blast and tore open the aluminum cover to get at the egress pole. The pole—a curved, spring-loaded, telescoping steel cylinder weighing 240 pounds—was needed to get crew members safely past the leading edge of Columbia ’s port wing. He struggled with the pole, pushed it through the hatch, and ratcheted it into its bracket.

  Penny grabbed him. “Medaris, I can’t do this!”

  “What the hell are you saying, High Eagle?”

  Her eyes were wild. She stepped back from the blast of air, Columbia ’s gyrations throwing her off-balance. “I can’t go out that door. I’m afraid of heights!”

  Her illogic floored him. “But you’ve walked on the moon!”

  “This is a hell of a lot scarier than that! I’m going to ride Columbia down!”

  “The hell you are!” Jack advanced on her, grabbing the straps on her parachute pack and dragging her to the hatch.

  “I see something, Jack!” Dubrinski called out. “An island!”

  Jack snapped the lanyard attach ring on her pack to the snap hook on the pole. “Did you hear that, Penny? We’ve got a place to go.”

  “You mean to land?” she asked hopefully.

  “In a manner of speaking.” He slapped the top of her helmet, threw her out of the hatch, then helped Virgil to his feet, hooked him onto the pole, latched Paco’s box to his belt, and shoved him out behind her.

  There had been three parachutes left. Dubrinski had refused to wear one, reasoning that the pilot would be the last to need it. Grant, still unconscious, was strapped to the deck. Her only chance of survival was with Dubrinski. “Go, go!” he called to Jack. “I’ll try a water landing. They need your help!”

  “See you on earth, Colonel!” Jack saluted. He dragged the bag of moon dirt to the door, clipped it to his belt, clicked his parachute ring to the pole, and, picking up and holding the bag to his chest as tightly as he could, flung himself into the blue-gray hurricane outside.

  ON A CRYSTAL-BLUE SEA

  The Linda Joyce

  Gladstone Powery looked through the salt-smeared window of his shrimper Linda Joyce as the familiar scrub of his home island slid past. He had come in from the open sea after a month of working the banks to the north and had managed a decent haul, enough at least to pay off his men, clean his boat and make repairs, and perhaps break even. His crew, most of them teenagers, sat up on the bow, smoking and eagerly watching the coast and laughing with the excitement of coming home after being at sea for so long.

  He had heard a strange thunder only minutes before, a pealing double clap. The sky was clear except for the low fog that always stood off the coast in the morning so Powery had dismissed the sound. Odd things were always happening at sea. Then he heard an excited call and saw one of his boys pointing off the starboard bow. He eased up on the throttle and peered into the morning mist. There were three orange objects bobbing on the light swell out there. Flotsam of some sort, maybe something that he could use, Powery thought. He’d take a look. He hoped it wasn’t the marijuana or cocaine bundles that often drifted in to shore, brought from who knew where by the currents. When he foun
d those, Powery either sank them or drove right past. To attempt to turn them in to authorities was to invite suspicion and probably a search of his boat. He carried no contraband but who needed the government delaying him and his catch? The Linda Joyce eased through the smooth ocean. “Gladstone, there be somebody wavin’,” one of his boys called.

  Powery told his boys to go fetch his rifle and then idled in beside the first life raft. Two other rafts were attached to it by bright yellow lines. A man with a scar along his jaw was in the first raft, holding a duffel bag close to him as if it contained precious gems or gold. A woman was in the second raft, a beautiful woman. She had long black hair and she was throwing kisses at the boys on the bow. A big bear of a man struggled in the third raft. He had a white box with him from which seemed to come meowing sounds. “Help them, boys!” Powery called, and cut his engines and raced on deck.

  The woman was brought up first. She carried some kind of a helmet in her hand. Powery saw that a symbol was sewn on her coverall over her left breast. He knew that symbol. “NASA?” he asked in wonder. “You be a space woman?”

  The woman grinned. “Captain, the High Eagle has landed again!”

  The man with the scar climbed on board the shrimper carrying the duffel bag. One of his boys tried to help him with it but it was so heavy, he almost dropped it on the deck. “Careful,” the man said. “It weighs thirty kilos.”

  The big man was also clutching the box. The boys pulled it up. The letters F-L-E-A were inscribed on its side.

  “Captain, where are we?” the man with the scar asked Powery.

  Powery wondered if he was dreaming. “Well, mon,” he said, “you be on the planet Eart’.”

  “Yes,” the man said patiently, “but where, exactly?”

  Powery turned toward shore, gesturing dramatically. “I don’t reckon it be no secret. Where else you see such fine clear blue water? Why, mon, this be Grand Cayman.”