by Homer Hickam
Penny and Jack hugged. “We made it,” she said, nuzzling his cheek.
“Jack?”
It was Virgil. He had taken the rifle away from the crewman. He held it on Jack and Penny. “Captain, how deep is the water here?”
Powery frowned at the big man. “We’re over the Cayman Trench, mon. Couple miles, mebbe more.”
Jack separated from Penny. She took a step away. Virgil kept the rifle leveled on Jack’s chest. “Jack, pick up the bag. Throw it overboard. Don’t move, Penny,” he warned.
“Virgil—” Jack began.
“They got to me, Jack, a long time ago. Said they’d kill my family if I didn’t do what they said.”
“Who, Virgil?” Penny asked quietly. “Who got to you?”
“The January Group, the same people who paid Perlman to build his fusion plant.”
Penny squinted at him. “That doesn’t make sense. If they paid for the plant, why would they want to stop us?”
“I’ll tell you why, Penny,” Jack said, his eyes locked on the unwavering barrel of the rifle. “They want the technology, just not now. They want to keep things on an even keel, let oil be the energy choice of the world. They own most of it, one way or the other, so why not? But when the oil runs out, they’ll be ready with fusion. Nothing will change. They’ll still have a lock on energy. It will be a nice, preplanned transition, maybe in a few decades.”
Virgil blinked, nodded sorrowfully. “They’ve known everything right from the beginning. I disabled the security system that night they smashed Prometheus. They weren’t supposed to hurt you but what could I do, Jack? They went away after that. I thought they’d leave me alone. Then when they found out what you were doing with this mission, they called me and said for me to help out. I think they were having an argument between themselves. They told me to call from the pad, get my last instructions. Use the pistol, they said. Stop the launch. But Hoppy surprised me, took the gun away from me. I couldn’t hurt him or you, Jack.”
“So what’s changed, Virgil?” Jack asked softly.
“I promised them if they would leave my family alone, I’d make sure the dirt didn’t get back. After we got into orbit, you kept pushing and I couldn’t figure out how to stop you without killing you and Penny. Then Sally promised on the SAREX to call Lori and Dawn every day, to let me know how they were doing. I also got her to tell Lori to be careful, to hire some guards to protect herself and Dawn. She did but nobody tried anything anyway. I guess January figured I was their ace in the hole. They’re right. I got to get rid of this stuff or me and my family will be running for the rest of our lives.”
Jack tensed. “You won’t kill me, Virgil. Not after seeing me safe all the way to the moon and back.”
“Don’t try it,” Virgil warned. “Nobody’s more important to me than Lori and Dawn.” He nodded toward the deck. “Jack, pick up the bag. Pitch it overboard. I’m desperate. Do it, now!”
Jack looked toward shore, then out to sea. He sighed, picked the bag up, walked to the boat rail. He stopped. “This is wrong, Virgil. We can figure out a way to look after your girls.”
“I can’t take any chances.” Virgil cut his eyes to the sea. “Throw it, Jack. Get rid of it.”
Jack looked toward shore and then down into the gloom of the Cayman Trench. Sighing, he took several practice swings and then, with a mighty heave, threw the bag off the starboard side as hard as he could. It hit the ocean, then went under, a few bubbles all that was left of the treasure that had come back from the moon.
Columbia
Dubrinski looked toward the distant speck of land. After the Americans had left, he had managed to trim Columbia enough to maintain level flight. He dared not try to control her further.
The speck grew into a dark hump. It was an island, the white rim of surf defining its coast. Dubrinski could make out a few roads cut into red soil and patches of lighter colors indicating clearings, perhaps small farms. Columbia flew on, her airspeed dropping and her altitude decreasing surprisingly slowly. The air must be very humid, Dubrinski thought, to keep supplying the heavy craft with so much lift. He hadn’t seen air like that since he had been stationed in Cuba. The ridgeline of the mountains he was soaring past almost looked familiar. He looked again. He could have sworn...
A tone sounded in the cockpit. Columbia was stalling. Dubrinski pushed the stick forward and her nose dipped. He still thought he recognized something familiar about those hills. Can it be... ? Dubrinski questioned himself. Have I already crashed and this is some sort of cosmic joke by God? And to think I have just started to believe in Him!
Dubrinski could see a town... no, it was a city! A mountainous cove slipped past and there it was, a huge city stretching into the distance. The big harbor was below, filled with anchored boats of every size and color.
Dubrinski recognized the harbor. He had flown over it dozens of times. Eagerly, he let Columbia bring herself in, flashing over the startled heads of sailors on the fishing boats. Columbia entered the ground effect thirty feet off the sea and then settled in. The Big Dog engine performed its final function, its weight pulling the spacecraft down by her tail so it hit the water first. Huge domes of water formed on both sides of the tail for an instant and then shattered into a wave of spray as Columbia collapsed on her belly. She slithered along, her wake a giant V. Then she stopped.
Dubrinski unbelted himself and Grant and dragged her to the side hatch. The shuttle was settling fast, so he did not hesitate. Holding Grant, he jumped into the water and then crawled up on the wing, pulling her to safety. A gray patrol boat appeared and circled the spacecraft. A big boil of steam suddenly erupted from the port OMS pod and the boat raced away and then came back, as if its driver was too curious to let fear keep him away. The Russian was laughing, cheering, jumping up and down. The boat settled in beside him, the boys on the flying bridge behind the machine guns pushing back their olive drab hats and looking at him as if he were a space alien. There were women on board the patrol boat, and children too. Dubrinski swam to the boat, pulling Grant along. The children, too excited to stay still, jumped in the water beside him, laughing and chattering, and supporting Grant’s head.
Dubrinski looked up at the uniformed man standing in shock on the bow. “Cuba, si?” he asked.
“Cuba. Si! ” the man confirmed.
STAR CITY
In the Air Between Moscow and the Yuri Gagarin Training Center
Puckett rode the bench between Livia and Boris in the little Hind helicopter. Painted olive drab with the big red star of the dead old Soviet Union on its sides, it had swooped into the courtyard of the Tsup in Kaliningrad to carry Puckett to Star City, the gated and fenced complex east of Moscow where the cosmonauts lived and trained. When the Soyuz-Y carrying Grant and Dubrinski had stopped transmitting, it had been assumed that the mission had failed, perhaps proved deadly to the crew aboard. It was time to get out of Dodge, or in this case the Tsup, and Bonner’s new best Russian friends graciously saw to it. They thought Star City was the best place for him to go since they had recently purchased it, lock, stock, and neutral buoyancy simulator.
Puckett leaned against Livia, who was asleep. He wasn’t entirely unhappy. True, every one of his hopes, plans, and schemes had been foiled, but new opportunities always beckoned. The Russian “family” that had adopted him was very interested in his welfare. After all, he was a veritable fount of knowledge of the interworkings of the federal government in Washington, D.C. That was potentially useful to them since they had expressed an interest in penetrating it, acquiring some of its machinery for their own use. Puckett assured them that he could assist them. A little money properly applied, Puckett had explained, went a long way along the banks of the Potomac River if one knew just the right place to apply it.
Puckett smiled. He was going to be all right. He would learn Russian, climb to a leadership position with his friends. They already controlled much of the Russian government. He had already discussed with them his insertion ba
ck into the United States after the present furor had subsided. Puckett settled back. Yes, he would be fine.
That was why it was such a shock when Boris nudged him and Puckett looked into the barrel of a 9mm pistol. “Tell me your Belize bank account number or you are a dead man!” the huge man rumbled.
Puckett looked from the barrel to Boris’s tiny, sad eyes. “Don’t be a fool,” he shouted over the whining helicopter engine and the rushing air around its blades. “If you kill me, you won’t have the number. If you let me live, I will pay you handsomely.”
“You don’t understand, Mr. Puckett,” Boris replied stolidly. “I have been ordered to kill you in any case. I just want the number before you die.”
Puckett could not fathom such a thing. Kill him? He was way too valuable for that. He decided Boris was bluffing. He swiped at the barrel. “Don’t be an idiot, Boris. Put that thing away.”
Puckett’s move surprised Boris and the pistol went off. Both Boris and Puckett looked forward. There was a hole in the back of their pilot’s helmet that Puckett swore hadn’t been there before. To his dismay the pilot’s head wagged to one side and the helicopter banked in the same direction. “Uh-oh,” Puckett said.
The guards at the main gate at Star City leaned nonchalantly against their guard shack, smoking and talking while watching with boredom the empty road that disappeared into the darkness. A distant helicopter attracted their attention and they observed its running lights. The lights were dancing, as if the pilot had decided to emulate the moths that battered themselves against the helmeted lights on their shack, swooping and turning, rising and falling. Then there was a flash of light, a boil of orange flame that rose out from behind the black forest that lay in front of them. The guards estimated that the helicopter had gone down two kilometers away. They discussed among themselves whether to call anyone or to mount a rescue mission. When no decision was made, which was in itself a decision, they shrugged and went back to smoking and talking of women and football and hockey. Helicopters crashed all the time in Russia these days, after all. Airplanes dropped out of the sky. Trains jumped off their tracks. The economy of the country itself kept opening and folding like an accordion. Why should they trouble themselves because some fool had decided he was a helicopter pilot? Somebody would take care of the mess left out there, clean up the burned, blackened bodies. Somebody would care. All they knew was they didn’t.
Off Grand Cayman
Virgil sat on a stack of shrimp netting, holding his face in his hands. Powery had taken the rifle away from him, stowed it. Jack touched Virgil’s shoulder. “It’s all right, Virg. You did what you thought you needed to do.”
“I’m sorry, Jack.”
“I know.” Jack looked at Powery. “Can I borrow that scuba gear, Cap’n?”
Penny came over. “Jack, even you can’t dive down two miles!”
Jack let the cocky grin spread across his face that had once made her hate him, made her love him now. “I don’t think I’ll have to go that deep.”
Jack took a giant step off the starboard side, holding his mask and regulator tight against his face. Before he threw the bag overboard, he had been watching the Linda Joyce ’s drift toward a line of demarkation, a place where the water turned from dark purple to faded blue. He had thrown the bag as hard as he could toward the line that marked the sheer, vertical wall, the famous Cayman Wall that came arching out of the Cayman Trench. If he still had any luck left...
Jack spiraled down toward the wall. A turtle swam by, spotted Jack, flippered hard to get away from the crazy diver laughing in his regulator. Jack swam up to a big piece of pillar coral growing on the wall. He admired that kind of coral, always had. It formed itself into giant fingers that were almost abstract art. Scuba divers usually were careful to skirt around their jagged stands. Pillar coral could snag anything that came into contact with it, even a strap on a bag of dirt from the moon.
A NEW START
Who has known heights shall bear forevermore
An incommunicable thing
That hurts his heart, as if a wing
Beat at the portal, challenging;
And yet—lured by the gleam his vision wore—
Who once has trodden stars seeks peace no more.
—Mary Brent Whiteside, ”Who Has Known Heights”
3 YEARS LATER...
BACK TO THE CAPE
Cape Canaveral
It was a perfect day for a launch. The Cape sparkled in golden light as the sun peeked above the dark blue horizon, illuminating a single white puffy cloud hanging high in the sky. The crowd of dignitaries stood at the base of pad 39-B and admired the rocket sitting on its own squared-off base. It looked larger than it was because it sat by itself on the concrete pad. The gigantic towers of the shuttle era were gone. Only a small portable gantry, now rolled back, was needed for this machine, the first of the operational single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) fleet fielded in three years of intensive effort and remarkable economy.
A siren wailed and the crowd tensed. Launch was imminent. A loudspeaker crackled beside the stands. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Medaris Engineering Company’s single-stage-to-orbit vehicle, Moondog !”
Flames immediately erupted at the base of the rocket and it powered smoothly off the pad, swept up into the sky, and disappeared within seconds. A thin cloud of water vapor, its only residue, hung in the air and then began to disperse in the light winds. The crowd oohed and ahhed appropriately and applauded enthusiastically. The doors on a concrete hangar beside the pad opened and a rail car, carrying another Moondog SSTO, crept out and started trundling toward the pad. “The second Moondog will be erected and ready for launch in thirty minutes,” the woman over the loudspeaker said. “Powerful, safe, and economical, Moondogs are available for immediate lease. Terms are available.”
Jack Medaris shook some hands, stepped down from the viewing platform. He looked with pride at his accomplishment, the Moondog reusable SSTO. His company had gone public and accomplished the design and construction of the Moondog using funds from the sale of its stock. In effect, a vast number of Americans had decided to risk their capital on Medaris’s enterprise. A cluster of five Big Dog engines provided the boost to get the composite aerodynamic shell and the heavy cargo aboard a Moondog into orbit. Once there and its payloads deployed, a Moondog automatically reentered and landed back at the Cape or wherever it was ordered, tail-first. A quick once-over and refueling and she was ready to go again. After a few more test flights the Federal Aviation Administration was scheduled to clear Moondog s to be launched from anywhere in the United States. Jack’s plan was to keep a fleet of six of them at the Cape to take advantage of the trained work-force there.
Jack used binoculars to inspect the adjoining Pad 39-A. The tower there was in the process of being dismantled. No more space shuttles of the Columbia class would ever fly off either pad again. After the final flight of Columbia the space shuttles of NASA never flew another operational mission. They were used instead in a rigorous test program, pushed to the far edges of their flight envelopes, NASA learning everything they had to offer about maneuvering in space and working in the hypersonic range of velocity in the upper atmosphere. It was the test program the shuttles should have undergone from the beginning.
There had been many changes at NASA. The space agency had gotten out of the operations business and moved into the forefront of research and development, handing over its scientific and engineering knowledge to American commercial space operators. With the data it had gained from the shuttle tests, the agency already had a prototype scram-jet that could fly into orbit from Edwards Air Force Base, deposit a payload, and return. NASA had fielded the prototype for a half-billion dollars, ten times less than the original estimate. That estimate had been made before MEC, by taking Columbia to the moon, had demonstrated what could be done with a little money and a lot of engineering guts. The scram-jet looked good, and the older and larger aerospace companies around the world waited ea
gerly to get their hands on it. But Jack was convinced his Moondog design would beat the scram in head-to-head competition. Or perhaps there might be room for more than one SSTO spacecraft. The commercial markets that had opened up since his moon flight were going to be too big for a single enterprise. It was as if that flight had opened some sort of mental floodgate. The possibility that so much could be done if the will was there to do it was energizing not only to the aerospace field but in all the scientific and even political disciplines. There were new starts everywhere. Anything was possible. To prove it, NASA was also cutting metal on a prototype fusion engine using helium-3 as fuel. This was an engine that could scoot out to the moon in hours, Mars in days. The entire solar system might soon be within America’s grasp.
Medaris watched the group of VIPs, all potential customers, excitedly watch the erection of the second Moondog. With cheap access to space just on the horizon, commercial enterprises were making plans to produce a great number of products in space—new materials, new medicines, and new concepts such as tourism, space sports, and even homesteading. Jack intended that MEC would be able to provide the transportation to space they required. Although Penny High Eagle had been disappointed to find that immersion in salt water had destroyed her unusual cell culture experiment, her description of the nerve cell growths she had observed had caused great excitement in the medical community. Attempts to repeat her serendipitous experiment became a top priority of pharmaceutical and medical companies the world over. Industrial Orbital Facility, Inc., a private joint Japanese-American company that had taken over the old International Space Station, announced that it would launch a new man-tended laboratory the following year aboard an improved Japanese H-2D booster. Competitive bids were being taken from the clamoring companies for room aboard the module. There was renewed hope among people paralyzed by spinal cord trauma and disease that space research would deliver a cure.