Meantime, the return of POSIM-38 had claimed primary attention. People who wanted details, say, on energy release or gravity fluctuations during the collision were being put on hold. Virtually every instrument under the lab’s auspices was aimed at the Possum.
For her part, Andrea was delighted to be back at work. Windy had even signed papers to grant her status as a temporary employee. (It turned out the government had rules against using volunteer professionals without paying them.)
By this time a small network of stations directly involved in the effort to get rid of the Possum were linked directly to the Lowell. These stations included the Lyndon Johnson Space Center in Houston, Feinberg s temporary location at Hartsfield, the Mauna Kea Observatory in Hawaii, Palomar in California, an advisory post at Cambridge University, and the AstroLab. All other communications to the Lowell were furineled through the Orbital Lab.
Most of these were either for Keith Morley from his producers, or for the president. The latter were, for the most part, scrambled.
Andrea was a professional. She did not try to eavesdrop, but it was her duty to stay on the circuit until she was sure connections had been made. In so doing she’d learned that Evelyn Hampton, the chaplain, and Rachel Quinn had all received book and movie offers. She also knew that the president had spoken to the families of Tony Casaway and Bigfoot Caparatti; that Hampton had called Jack Chandler’s son.
She wondered about Chandler. He hadn’t been on the microbus, but she knew he’d volunteered to stay behind. What had happened?
A new Lowell radio operator had appeared. The voice was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. “This is Andrea Bellwether,” she said. “Do I know you?”
“Yes you do, Andrea,” the voice said. “This is Mark.”
“Chaplain, hello.” They’d been only casual acquaintances at Moonbase, but now he Seemed like an old friend. “You’re the comm officer now?”
“Yes. Bottom of the barrel, you know. I’m glad you got back all right.”
“Thanks,” she said. “I think you had a rougher ride than I did. Tell me, are you going to get rid of that thing?”
“I hope so. I think Charlie Haskell will go after it with a pickax if he has to.”
Percival Lowell Utility Deck. 1:19 P.M.
Evelyn and Saber stripped off their p-suits. Lee Cochran was gracious enough to keep his back turned. “I think we did pretty well,” he said.
They had. They’d established that four of Feinberg’s preferred sites were located on solid ground, and eliminated two others. Three to go.
Evelyn was stiff and sweaty, but she felt good. She’d come through the most desperate crisis of her life and had been nothing but extra weight the whole time. Until today. Today she’d gone out with Lee and Saber and they’d wrestled the laser drill around, bored holes, collected samples, gotten back inside, and waited while Rachel moved the ship to another niche on the rock’s surface, where they got out and did it all again.
They were accomplishing what they needed to and they were running ahead of schedule.
She cleaned off in the scrubber, changed back into her blouse and slacks, and went to the galley for a quick lunch. Mark Pinnacle looked up as she walked in. “Hail the conqueror,” he said. “We’ve got some great videos of you and Lee with the tractor.”
“Thanks.” She opened the refrigerator door and pulled put a QuikPack. Turkey sandwich with cranberries. “Save me one to put over my desk.”
Lee walked in. “That is a very big boulder out there,” he said. “Seven pairs of rockets don’t seem like much against it.”
“Seven is historically a sacred number,” said the chaplain. “Seven sacraments, seven sins against the Holy Spirit, Japan’s seven gods of happiness, the Seven Against Thebes. Maybe we’ll add to the canon.”
“Let’s hope so,” said Evelyn.
The chaplain had been munching a piece of meat loaf. He swallowed it, finished off a container of apple juice, and got up to go. “Got to get back to my work station,” he said, looking pleased with himself. “By the way, they’ve got one of the Moonbase people manning communications at the Orbital Lab.”
“Really?” asked Evelyn. “Who?”
“Andrea Bellwether.”
“I don’t think I know her,” said Evelyn.
“Is she by any chance related to Frank Bellwether?” asked Cochran.
“His daughter,” said the chaplain.
“If we’re going to talk about omens,” said Cochran, “that’s not a good one.”
Frank Bellwether, the pilot who’d bounced. Who had come in with damaged instruments and a damaged Ranger, and who had tried to insert himself into the atmosphere at the precise angle needed to maneuver between a ricochet and a burn-up, and who had ricocheted. Beyond any hope of rescue.
There’d been talk about the incident recently, of using a Lowell-type vessel to recover the Ranger, which in its lonely solar orbit was still visible on the world’s radar screens. But the consensus seemed to be that it was better to leave the ship where it was. Evelyn shared that view.
“Nobody’s talking omens,” the chaplain said, a surprising edge to his voice. Out of character. Evelyn wondered if he was beginning to feel the pressure.
SSTO Berlin Flight Deck, Hartsfield Maintenance Facility.
1:43 P.M.
“Try it now, Gruder.”
The flight engineer looked down at the yellow box they’d mounted on the bulkhead by his hip, and pressed the black button. This time, lamps lit up and machinery moved beneath the deck. The engineers who were crowded together on the hangar floor, where they could see the undercarriage, jabbed fists upward and shook hands with each other. “That’s good, Gruder,” said Kathleen’s voice in his earphones. Kathleen was down below with the engineers. “It was a loose cable. We’ll put the panels back, try it one more time, and we should be ready to go.”
The SSTO was on a cradle so the pitons wouldn’t dig up the hangar floor.
Gruder nodded to his captain.
Willem finished going over his preliminaries and glanced out at the engineers. One of them was a deliciously attractive blonde.
“When we come back,” said Gruder, “we will be heroes. Women like that will be our oyster. They will open to us on request.” He grinned and the captain grinned back. It was, of course, quite true.
The ground crews brought in three flatbeds of brown earth. They drove them under the spacecraft, positioning one beneath each of the three pitons.
Kathleen spoke to him: “Okay, Gruder, try it again.”
He hit the button and felt the spikes come down. Felt them dig into the dirt, felt the spacecraft lift slightly as weight was transferred from the landing gear, watched the lamps stay amber until a string of lights indicated the pitons were fully extended. Grader touched a presspad and flanges pushed out in three directions from the head of each piton, anchoring it. If necessary, he had a break switch that would jettison the units and allow the SSTO to lift away from the surface. The break switch was hidden inside the box to prevent its being accidentally activated.
“Retract,” said Kathleen.
They would not be able to retract on the Possum, where the pitons would be anchored in rock. But here, it was no problem. Grader keyed the command. The flanges released their grip and the pitons withdrew into the mounts. The undercarriage creaked.
They went through the exercise a second time, after which the pitons received a thorough cleaning and lubrication. The engineers, satisfied, walked away, and Kathleen, after shaking hands with a couple of them, left the group and returned to the plane.
“Berlin,” said a voice in Gruder’s earphones, “installation is complete. We are ready to move you out.”
Kathleen came onto the flight deck and took her seat. “You know,” she said, “I wish they’d come up with something more appropriate than ‘Operation Rainbow.’”
“Why?” said Willem. “It’s a reference to the aftermath of the flood. Everything turned out all ri
ght.”
“Only for Noah and his family. Everybody else drowned.”
Kathleen was a distant cousin of Gruder’s, although he hadn’t known that until they began working together. Both were from the Bremerhaven area, both had flown combat jets, and both had the same birthday, although Gruder was a year younger. They were fond of thinking their lives were linked, and that time would either uncover or produce other parallels.
They already had one: They were both on the same historic mission.
The earth-haulers reappeared and left the hangar. Now a pair of tractors tied onto the spacecraft and began to draw her outside into the bright afternoon daylight.
“Tower,” said Willem, “Berlin is ready for departure.”
“Roger, Berlin.”
The tractors connected them to the SSTO track, which hauled them inside the Transatmospheric Terminal and began moving them slowly toward the launch tunnel. They passed the boarding plaforms, which ordinarily would have been crowded with passengers.
Willem started the engines.
“Berlin” said the tower, “you are locked and loaded. Go in sixty seconds.”
Cruder looked at his watch, but failed to note the time. All the women you could possibly want. He wondered what Kathleen was thinking.
CNN NEWSBREAK SPECIAL REPORT. 2:05 P.M.
This is Mark Able reporting from the mouth of the Transatmospheric Tunnel outside Rico, Georgia, where the first space plane is ready to launch….”
4.
Along the Chattahoochee River, west of Rico, Georgia.
2:11 P.M.
Steve Gallagher had pulled over to the side of the road to watch the launch. He liked space hardware as much as he liked military hardware. There was something in the cold, gray, utilitarian vehicles moving between Earth and Moon that stirred the depths of his soul in a way that no woman, no cause, ever could. And among the LTA’s assorted buses, trucks, and ferries, nothing made his blood race like the Single Stage To Orbit space plane, the rocket-powered vessel with its sleek wings folding back while it raced into a moonrise. It genuinely hurt him to contemplate destroying one of them. He hoped that the free men and women of the future would appreciate the sacrifice he was making in their name.
The radio was saying launch was imminent. Tad opened his door, got out, and turned toward the east. “Should come right up over those trees,” he said.
The trees were about fifty yards away, lining one side of a schoolyard. There were kids running around a circular track, others simply chasing one another, skipping rope, playing games. The colonel could see movement in the classrooms. “You’d think they’d bring everybody out here to watch,” he said. “The government claims it’s saving the world, and they don’t even care enough to inspire the kids to watch.” He’d always understood that the people who worked for the government weren’t individually vindictive. It was the institution that corrupted them, the institution that was mindless and overbearing. He’d seen enough TV interviews to know that the feds really believed the propaganda they put out, really believed they were on the side of the angels. But sometimes that faith in human nature was shaken, and he wondered whether they were not individually malignant and knew exactly what they were doing. How else did you explain the fact that they claimed the spacecraft of Operation Rainbow were going to save the, world and then failed to rally the kids to watch the effort?
Maybe everyone knew it was a facade. They knew, but they went along because they saw no other course. It was like Orwell, except that Big Brother had turned out to be a lot more subtle, a lot more insidious, than anyone had expected.
“There it is,” said Tad.
The space plane sailed out over the trees, riding twin contrails, ascending sharply toward a bank of glistening white clouds. Then they heard the sound of its passing, a distant rumble, like the sea breaking on a remote shore, its volume descending and then rising again. A few of the kids turned to watch.
Steve stood a long time after it had vanished, his anger growing against the men—and women too, God damn them—who forced him to take military measures.
The Chattahoochee wasn’t much more than a narrow stream, nor did it harbor, as he’d hoped, any patches of forest. But at one point it ran behind the Golden Apple Health Spa. The spa looked closed, and heavy shrubbery partially shielded it from the view of neighbors. A Little League field lay on the far side of the river. “Looks ideal,” said Steve.
Tad nodded. There were no vehicles anywhere on the grounds, and no sign of life in the neighborhood, save for a black Labrador retriever barking at them from the porch of a frame house across the street.
“We ought to shoot him,” said Tad. “I brought a silencer.”
Steve looked at him reprovingly. “Dogs bark,”, he said. “Forget it.”
The Golden Apple was a long brick building with a row of glass doors opening into a lobby. Its rear rose to two stories. A row of windows lined an Olympic-sized pool from which the water had been drained. An oval driveway circled the front.
The radio reported that another launch was only minutes away.
“I’d feel better if we could get the van out of sight,” said Steve. “Neighborhoods like this, they remember strange vehicles. Somebody might even copy down the license number.”
Tad surveyed the street. “I don’t think anybody’s even home.”
Steve considered this. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
The radio announced that a second space plane was being towed out of the hangar toward the launch ramp.
“Timing’s perfect, Colonel,” said Tad. Steve nodded. He liked Wickett’s enthusiasm.
He was saddened and disappointed that, in the hour when the Legion was taking the high ground, his brother had proved wanting. “We’ll have to restrain him,” he told Tad, glancing back over his shoulder. Jack sat propped against the wheel well, glaring at him. His feet were pressed against the launcher. “Secure him to the seat anchors.”
Both sides of the spa’s grounds were lined with enormous hedges that hadn’t been trimmed in several weeks. Steve parked as close to the shrubbery as he could. Tad slipped out his side, went around to the back of the van, and opened up.
Mimat, North Dakota. 1:17 P.M. Control Daylight Time
(2:17 P.M. EDT).
The army bus in which Marilyn and Larry had been riding pulled onto a football field saturated with other buses. They’d now been in the vehicle almost seven hours, and they were still in North Dakota.
The driver, a portly little man who was trying hard to remain cheerful, maneuvered into a line of parked vehicles in an open space beside a football stadium, and then got up and turned to face his passengers. “I’m sorry, folks,” he said. “Our traffic control is telling us the road ahead just isn’t moving very much. There’re a couple of rest rooms here we can use, and the Red Cross is supposed to be in the area somewhere. We’re going to take a forty-minute break. Take care of yourselves, do whatever you have to, and we’ll meet back here at, uh, three.”
“We’re not gonna get out of here, are we?” demanded a big man with a thick curly beard and a childish pout.
“We’ll be fine,” said the driver. “The cops are trying to clear the traffic up ahead.”
“The cops all took off,” The bearded man turned to the woman behind him. “Wouldn’t you?” he demanded.
Maybe they were too weary to be terrified. Marilyn stood up and tugged at Larry. Live or die, she wanted something to put in her belly. “You coming?” she asked.
Larry nodded, and they headed for the door. The bus emptied out.
The washrooms were located under the stands. There were long lines, and it was here that they finally separated from the last of the people from Louise’s party.
The Red Cross wasn’t visible. Marilyn hadn’t eaten for hours. They wandered back to the bus to see if anyone had located food. Nobody had.
“I think I’ve had enough,” Larry said. “Why don’t we stay here until it’s over.�
�
“We’re still inside the red zone,” said Marilyn.
“We aren’t going to get out of it on this thing,” he said, looking at the bus.
She thought about it. By this time tomorrow, one way or the other, it would be over. And he was right: The bus was going nowhere. It reeked of sweat and bodies and she didn’t think that she wanted to be on it when she died.
“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go have a look at the town.”
The driver overheard and frowned. “You’re not coming back?” he asked.
“No,” said Larry.
“I can’t be. responsible,” he warned them.
“Nobody’s ever responsible,” said a harsh voice in back. “That’s what’s wrong with this country.”
TRANSGLOBAL SPECIAL REPORT. 2:18 P.M.
“St. Louis. Transglobal correspondent Shannon Gardner was seriously injured and her cameraman was killed when he tried to come to her assistance the morning. During on-air coverage….”
5.
SSTO Tokyo Passenger Cabin, Transatmospheric Terminal,
Hartsfied Airport, Atlanta. 2:31 P.M.
Orly Carpenter sat across the aisle from Wes Feinberg. The physicist looked drawn. “First time into orbit?” Carpenter asked.
Feinberg managed a smile. He looked out at the tarmac, which was moving slowly past the windows, and back at Carpenter. “Yes,” he admitted.
“Nothing to be afraid of, Doc.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said; “I’m not afraid of these things. Truth is, I have a touch of indigestion.”
“Good. It’s not much different from an ordinary airplane.”
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