The Tranquillity Alternative

by Allen Steele

  Within the ferry, everyone took a deep breath.

  Parnell thought he still remembered what it was like to ride a fireball into the heavens; as he raised a trembling hand to lift the visor of his helmet, though, he realized that his memory wasn’t quite as sharp as he’d once believed. If there were four minutes in anyone’s life that were as terrifying or traumatic as being inside an Atlas-C during launch, then it had to be birth itself … and nobody remembers what that’s like.

  “Jesus,” he murmured as he stuck his fingers inside his helmet’s foam padding to wipe away the sweat. “I’m too old for this crap.”

  He shifted his buttocks against the upholstery of his couch, only to discover that his ass barely rested against the seat. Indeed, it felt as if he were now floating a half-inch above the couch, restrained only by his harness. There was a moment of disorientation until he realized what had happened.

  Weightlessness.

  Free-fall.

  There was a low, mechanical groan as the acceleration couches cantilevered in vertical position; what had once been walls were now floors. He turned his head to the right, ignoring the painful crick in his neck as he peered around the edge of his helmet through the porthole next to his seat. For a few moments, he could see nothing but starless, pitch-black nothingness, as fathomless as the deepest abyss imaginable….

  Then the pilots ignited RCR’s along the fuselage to roll the ferry over on its back, and Earth hove in view, upside-down and as vast as the eye could see. Bright sunlight sparkled across the surface of the South Atlantic, filtering through sparse white clouds which cast shadows upon the ocean. Parnell caught a glimpse of a tiny silver shape dragging faint wake-lines behind it, and then the ship—probably an oil tanker the size of a small island—was gone from sight, replaced now by the mottled brown edge of a giant landmass which, after a moment, he recognized as Africa’s northwest coast.

  A low chuckle began to rise in Parnell’s throat as he felt tears stinging the corners of his eyes. It had been so long, so long …

  He was in space again.

  Not everyone aboard the ferry had done well during launch; someone always gets spacesick during a passenger flight. In this instance, it was Paul Dooley and Alex Bromleigh who came down with motion sickness, despite the Dramamine tablets they had taken before boarding the rocket. Berkley Rhodes had managed to keep her breakfast down, although apparently only by sheer force of will; she lay in her couch, her eyes tightly closed, not daring to look out the window.

  While Constellation circled Earth in preparation for the periapsis burn which would boost the ferry into higher orbit, Jay Lewitt unbuckled himself and floated aft to tend to the ill passengers. Fortunately, both men had found the vomit bags tucked under their seats and had remembered to use them, so there were no free-falling messes that had to be cleaned up.

  Parnell remained in his seat while the ferry completed its first orbit, contenting himself with the view from his window. He watched Africa pass beneath him until it disappeared beneath a dense cloud bank which extended as far as Madagascar; then the ferry crossed the nightside terminator above the Indian Ocean. Australia appeared as a cluster of city lights surrounding Perth and brief flashes from a thunderstorm over the outback; the coast of New Guinea was outlined by the harbor glow of Port Moresby.

  “You can never get tired of it, can you?” Cris Ryer said.

  He looked across the aisle at her. She was still strapped into her couch on the port side, gazing down at the sparse constellation marking the Bismarck Archipelago. It was the first time she had spoken since they left the Cape.

  “I once thought I was,” he said, and she looked querulously at him. “Tired of the view, I mean,” he added. “Do a couple of tours of duty on the Wheel and pretty soon you get tired of everything.”

  Ryer smiled a little as she shook her head. Like Parnell, she had removed her helmet; her fine blond hair had risen from her scalp until it surrounded her head like a halo. “Not me,” she said, brushing the hair back from her face. “I never got tired of watching. Whenever I had a chance, I spent it in front of a porthole … just looking.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you were stationed on the Wheel. When was this?”

  “I wasn’t on the Wheel,” she replied, looking out her window. “After I joined NASA, I did a three-month tour aboard the Mole. That was back in ’eighty-two, before I transferred to the Lunar Support Team.”

  “You were on the Mole? I’m impressed. What did you do there?”

  The Mole was the nickname for Space Station Two, officially known as the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbital Laboratory. One of the last holdovers from the Space Force, the MOL had been established during the mid-sixties in polar orbit 160 miles above Earth. A small zero-g station—essentially a retrofitted upper stage of an old Atlas-B ferry—Space Station Two had served as a military reconnaissance platform, keeping tabs on the old Soviet Union until the early eighties, when unmanned spy satellites had finally rendered it obsolete.

  Since the station had been capable of supporting only a handful of people at any one time, there weren’t too many NASA astronauts who could claim that they had spent time aboard the Mole. Most of the vets had retired from active duty, while others had taken jobs at the CIA, the National Security Agency, or the National Reconnaissance Office. Even the Mole itself was gone; a sustained period of solar activity had expanded Earth’s upper atmosphere, in turn causing the station’s orbit to deteriorate. By then, NASA had neither the funds nor the inclination to rescue the tiny station, and when it had plummeted to a fiery death over Antarctica in 1983, only Greenpeace had objected on grounds of the environmental hazard it posed.

  Ryer glowered at him. “If I told you what I did there, Commander,” she said with mock severity, “I’d have to kill you.”

  “Great …”

  “I was a shuttle driver, that’s all. I took spooks up from Vandenberg and I took them back down when they were through. Pretty boring work, all things considered.”

  “You passed over Russia several times a day. That counts for something.”

  “If you say so.” She shrugged. “Now and then one of the spooks would let me check out the scope so I could get a good eyeful of Baikonur … enough to know that they were screwing up their space program only slightly worse than we were screwing up ours. Nobody aboard the Mole was taking the Russians very seriously anymore, despite all the ‘evil empire’ stuff coming out of Washington.”

  Ryer peered out her window again at the dark expanse of the Pacific Ocean. “So when the Pentagon announced that it was shutting down the Mole, I skipped over to the LST and became a moonship driver. Thought that would give me some job security and all that….”

  Her voice trailed off. “Great idea, huh?” she murmured. “Sometimes I’m so smart I amaze myself.”

  Somebody wasn’t being smart, Parnell thought, that was for damn sure. If she had served on the Mole, even as a shuttle jockey, she must have had CIA clearance … and if she had ever posed a meaningful risk to national security, then she would have passed Top Secret info to the Russians long before now. The fact that Ryer was still on active duty more than a decade after the MOL phase-out was enough to demonstrate her loyalty.

  Then why was she being drummed out of the NASA astronaut corps? Was it simply because she had been discovered carrying on a sexual relationship with another woman? Or was there another reason he didn’t know about?

  Stretching against his harness, Parnell leaned across the armrest. “Look, Cris,” he said quietly, “about the thing with the keys …”

  “I don’t want to talk about it.” Ryer gazed out her porthole again. “I’ve probably said too much already. No offense, Commander, but just leave me alone, okay?”

  He was about to prod her when sunlight lanced through the windows. Constellation was coming up on the daylight terminator; looking through the window, he saw the sun rising above Baja California, describing a hazy blue line that stretched from San
Diego to Mexico City.

  “Okay, look sharp back there,” Trombly called out from the cockpit. “We’re coming up on periapsis burn, so everyone buckle in. We’ll be firing at T-minus five.”

  Parnell heard a soft groan from someone behind him—Dooley perhaps, or maybe Bromleigh—as Lewitt pulled himself along the ladder until he reached his seat. There was no need to tighten his own harness, since the burn would last only a couple of minutes and would be nowhere near as violent as the staging maneuvers during launch. He made certain that his helmet was safely stowed beneath his couch, then watched through his porthole as the American West Coast, seen through a swirl of clouds, slowly glided into view.

  As much as he wanted to ignore it, though, something about Ryer gnawed at Parnell’s guts. He knew that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he discovered exactly what it was.

  The periapsis burn occurred as Constellation passed over the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of a brief countdown from the cockpit, the main engine fired and the ferry surged forward, the blue horizon rushing away beneath the vessel as it was kicked into a Hohmann transfer that would carry the orbiter on an elliptical trajectory into higher orbit.

  When the burn ended, Parnell unbuckled his harness and floated out of his couch. He bent and straightened his legs to relieve the cramps he’d been feeling for the last few minutes, then grasped the ladder—which now seemed to lie horizontally along the floor—and pulled himself forward to the cockpit.

  “Permission to come up, Captain?” he asked as he stuck his head and shoulders through the hatch.

  “Hmm?” Captain Kingsolver glanced over his shoulder. “Oh … permission granted, Commander.” He reattached his clipboard and pen to the console between the seats, then turned around. “Thanks for asking,” he added. “Some of the VIPs we carry up don’t give us the courtesy.”

  “Not that there’s all that much room.” Trombly sucked a tube of orange juice as he watched the autopilot display. For at least a little while, Constellation was able to fly herself, guided by the navigation computers and the laws of inertia as it glided toward its rendezvous with the Wheel. “You’re welcome to make yourself at home, though, if you can, sir.”

  “I’ll try, Commander … and you can call me Gene, by the way.” There was very little room in the cockpit, but Parnell was able to squeeze himself into a space between the seat backs and the aft bulkhead. “Nice launch you guys pulled off.”

  “Thanks. We do our best.” Kingsolver stolidly nodded his head, acknowledging the professional compliment. “Of course, it wasn’t anything special to an old-timer like yourself. Probably like riding in a commuter jet.”

  If only he knew. The cockpit layout was much the same as Parnell remembered it, except that some of the analog dials had been replaced by digital instrumentation. Japanese-made, of course, he noted with some dismay, but wasn’t everything these days? He noticed also that the toggle switches and computer keyboards were shiny with overuse, and the brown leather grips of the control yokes had been repaired with black friction tape. In the old days, worn-out equipment would have been long-since replaced, but there were precious few spare parts left in the NASA inventory. Budget cuts, as always—although it was debatable whether the aerospace manufacturers who had built the originals still stocked them in their warehouses.

  Kingsolver seemed to read Parnell’s mind. “She’s a tough old bird,” he said, giving the yoke a fond pat, “but she gets us where we want to go. Even if we’re down to cannibalizing Intrepid for odds and ends every now and then.”

  “I heard,” Parnell said. “I flew Intrepid on her shakedown mission. She was a brand new ship back then.” He caught the apologetic look on Kingsolver’s face and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, skipper. I was one of the guys who signed the papers to take her off the flight line. Broke my heart, but it had to be done.”

  An uncomfortable silence descended upon the cockpit, broken after a moment by tinny voices coming through Trombly’s headset. The co-pilot listened for a few moments, then reached up to click the KU-band transceiver. “Ah, we copy that, Wheel. Constellation at angles nine-three-six, range three-five-zero. We’re in the grid and preparing for OI burn. Over.”

  Through the angular panes of the canopy, Parnell could see the broad, blue-green curve of Earth sweeping back into view, shining against the matte-black darkness of space. The ferry was flattening out its trajectory as it began to enter the wheel’s orbit. In another few minutes, the pilots would take the controls off auto and fire the main engine one more time to match its heading with Space Station One.

  Holding onto the seat backs, Parnell carefully edged himself a little farther into the cockpit until he was able to crane his neck and look straight up through the ceiling window. He listened to Kingsolver and Trombly as they traded checklist instructions and spoke with the Wheel’s traffic controller, the captain’s fingers tapping softly upon the keyboard as he entered instructions into the orbiter’s main computer.

  Then he spotted it: a tiny white oval, rotating clockwise on its axis, drifting slowly into view. Looking like an old-style bicycle tire someone had left in the sky, just the way he had last seen it many years ago. He found himself grinning at the sight. Jesus, it was beautiful….

  “Commander? Gene?” Kingsolver’s voice was apologetic as he interrupted Parnell’s thoughts. “We’re coming up on OI burn, sir. I’m going to have to ask you to return to your seat. Sorry.”

  Parnell forced himself away from the windows. “That’s okay, skipper. I understand.” There would be just enough g-force during the orbital insertion burn to throw unsecured items around the cockpit, and that included a visiting passenger. “Thanks for letting me come up front. I appreciate it.”

  He was beginning to backpedal out of the cockpit when Trombly suddenly reached up to tap the back of his hand. “Hey, Commander,” he said quickly, “there’s one more thing you might want to see. Check out my window at ten o’clock.”

  Parnell grabbed bulkhead rungs to brake himself, then gently pulled himself back into the cabin until his head and shoulders were next to the co-pilot’s. For a moment, he saw nothing except the limb of the earth … then a new object, until now invisible except to the ship’s radar, coasted into view.

  It was another spacecraft, matching course with the ferry as it headed for rendezvous with the Wheel.

  Almost the same size as Constellation, the spaceplane was a sleek, elongated bullet with narrow, wedge-shaped wings at its aft end that tilted upward above its blunt stern. The lower fuselage was perfectly flat, its landing gear bays invisible within the reentry tiles which comprised most of the vessel’s outer skin. There were no portholes to be seen except a couple of windows near the front of its tapering bow.

  The ESA space shuttle Dornberger resembled the Constellation about as much as a Concorde SST looks like a Douglas DC-3. The Horus-class orbiter had ridden into space on the back of a manned Sanger booster, which in turn had lifted from a runway in French Guiana … more than half an hour after Constellation had been launched from Cape Canaveral, if Parnell correctly remembered the mission schedule. Even now, as Constellation’s boosters were still being recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, the Sanger was probably touching down for landing on the same airstrip it had left barely an hour ago, its scramjets ready for refueling in a fraction of the time that it would take Constellation to be remated with its boosters, patched up one more time, and hauled out to the pad for its next mission.

  “The hare and the tortoise,” Parnell murmured as he watched the Dornberger glide past them.

  “Pardon?” Kingsolver said. The pilot didn’t look away from his controls, but Parnell noticed how tightly he clutched the control yoke.

  “You heard what I said, Captain.” He pushed off from the seat backs without another word and exited the cockpit, clumsily making his way down the center aisle to his seat.

  Everyone was watching the German shuttle through the portholes; as Parnell floundered into his seat, he not
iced that Bromleigh had recovered from spacesickness enough to hoist his camera and grab a shot of the Dornberger. Maybe that would impress the folks back home when they saw it on the evening news.

  On the other hand, they’d probably just click over to a rerun of Who’s the Boss?

  From The New York Times; July 21, 1969

  MEN LAND ON MOON—

  10 ASTRONAUTS AVOID CRATER,

  SET CRAFT ON A ROCKY PLAIN

  By John Noble Wilford

  (Special to The New York Times)

  HOUSTON, July 20—Men landed on the moon today. Ten Americans, astronauts of Luna One, rode their giant spacecraft safely and smoothly to a historic landing at 4:17:40 P.M., Eastern daylight time.

  Major John Harper Wilson, the 38-year-old United States Space Force expedition commander, radioed to Earth and the control room here:

  “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. Eagle One has landed.”

  Eagle One is the code-name of the 160-foot space vessel that carried Wilson and his colleagues from Space Station One to their landing site on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid Sea of Tranquillity. It was soon followed by the successful touchdowns of Eagle Two and Eagle Three, two unmanned yet nearly identical cargo vessels.

  The astronauts reported a bleak, gray landscape covered with rocks and boulders of varying sizes, with the sun hanging low over the eastern horizon and small craters filled with shadows.

  Their landing was witnessed by an audience estimated to be in the millions, who watched live television transmissions sent from Eagle One as it made its final descent. Shortly after a successful landing was confirmed by Mission Control, President Robert F. Kennedy offered his congratulations to Wilson and his crew by telephone from the White House.