The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  He took control and steered the craft back toward Patrick Air Force Base, back to the world of men, of weather, of cities, of hierarchies and official regulations. He did this alone, silently; he didn’t need Jill’s help or anyone else’s. He flew the craft from inside his buttoned-tight pressure suit, frowning at the panel displays through his helmet’s faceplate.

  Automatically, he checked with ground control and received permission to slide the heat-shield back. The viewpoint showed him a stretch of darkening clouds spreading from the sea across the beach and well inland. His earphones were alive with other men’s voices now: wind conditions, altitude checks, speed estimates. He knew, but could not see, that two jet planes were trailing along behind him, cameras focused on the returning spacecraft. To provide evidence if I crash.

  They dipped into the clouds and a wave of gray mist hurtled up and covered the viewport. Kinsman’s eves flicked to the radar screen slightly off to his right. The craft shuddered briefly, then they broke below the clouds and he could see the long, black gouge of the runway looming before him. He pulled back slightly on the controls, hands and feet working instinctively, flashed over some scrubby vegetation, and flared the craft onto the runway. The landing skids touched once, bounced them up momentarily, then touched again with a grinding shriek. They skidded for more than a mile before stopping.

  He leaned back in the seat and felt his body oozing sweat.

  “Good landing,” Jill said.

  “Thanks.” He turned off all the craft’s systems, hands moving automatically in response to long training. Then he slid his faceplate up, reached overhead and popped the hatch open.

  “End of the line,” he said tiredly. “Everybody out.”

  He clambered up through the hatch, feeling his own weight with a sullen resentment, then helped Linda and finally Jill out of the spacecraft. They hopped down onto the blacktop runway. Two vans, an ambulance, and two fire trucks were rolling toward them from their parking stations at the end of the runway, a half-mile ahead.

  Kinsman slowly took off his helmet. The Florida heat and humidity annoyed him now. Jill walked a few paces away from him, toward the approaching trucks.

  He stepped toward Linda. Her helmet was off, and she was carrying a bag full of film.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said to her. “That business about having a lonely life. You know, you’re not the only one. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I can get to New York whenever—”

  “Now who’s taking things seriously?” Her face looked calm again, cool, despite the glaring heat.

  “But I mean—”

  “Listen, Chet. We had our kicks. Now you can tell your friends about it, and I can tell mine. We’ll both get a lot of mileage out of it. It’ll help our careers.”

  “I never intended to . . . I didn’t . . .”

  But she was already turning away from him, walking toward the men who were running up to meet them from the trucks. One of them, a civilian, had a camera in his hands. He dropped to one knee and took a picture of Linda holding the film out and smiling broadly.

  Kinsman stood there with his mouth hanging open.

  Jill came back to him. “Well? Did you get what you were after?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “I guess I didn’t.”

  She started to put her hand out to him. “We never do, do we?”

  TEST IN ORBIT

  * * *

  Kinsman snapped awake when the phone went off. Before it could complete its first ring he had the receiver off its cradle.

  “Captain Kinsman?” The motel’s night clerk.

  “Yes,” he whispered back, squinting at the luminous dial of his wristwatch: three twenty-three.

  “I’m awfully sorry to disturb you, Captain, but Colonel Murdock called—”

  “How the hell did he know I was here?”

  “He said he’s calling all the motels around the base. I didn’t tell him you were here. He said when he found you he wanted you to report to him at once. Those were his words, Captain: at once.”

  Kinsman frowned in the darkness. “Okay. Thanks for playing dumb.”

  “Not at all, sir. Hope it isn’t trouble.”

  “Yeah.” Kinsman hung up. He sat for a half-minute on the edge of the bed. Murdock making the rounds of the motels at three in the morning and the clerk hopes it’s not trouble. Very funny.

  He stood up, stretched his wiry frame and glanced at the woman still sleeping quietly on the other side of the bed. With a wistful shake of his head, he padded out to the bathroom.

  He flipped the light switch and turned on the coffee machine on the wall next to the doorway. It’s lousy but it’s coffee. As the machine started gurgling, he softly closed the door and rummaged through his travel kit for the electric razor. The face that met him in the mirror was lean and long-jawed, with jet black hair cut down to military length and soft blue-gray eyes that were, at the moment, just the slightest bit bloodshot.

  Within a few minutes he was shaved, showered, and back in Air Force blues. He left a scribbled note on motel stationery leaning against the dresser mirror, took a final long look at the woman, then went out to find his car.

  He put down the top of his old convertible and gunned her out onto the coast road. As he raced through the predawn darkness, wind whistling all around him, Kinsman could feel the excitement building up. A pair of cars zoomed past him, doing eighty, heading for the base. Kinsman held to the legal limit and caught them again at the main gate, lined up while the guard sergeant checked ID badges with extra care. Kinsman’s turn came.

  “What’s the stew, Sergeant?”

  The guard flashed his hand light on the badge Kinsman held in his outstretched hand.

  “Dunno, sir. We got the word to look sharp.”

  The light flashed full in Kinsman’s face. Painfully sharp, he thought to himself.

  The guard waved him on.

  There was that special crackle in the air as Kinsman drove toward the Administration Building. The kind that comes only when a launch is imminent. As if in answer to his unspoken hunch, the floodlights on Complex 17 bloomed into life, etching the tall, silver rocket standing there, embraced by the dark spiderwork of the gantry tower.

  Pad 17. Manned shot.

  People were scurrying in and out of the Administration Building: sleepy-eyed, disheveled, but their feet were moving double time. Colonel Murdock’s secretary was coming down the hallway as Kinsman signed in at the reception desk.

  “What’s up, Annie?”

  “I just got here myself,” she said. There were hairclips still in her blonde curls. “The boss told me to flag you down the instant you arrived.”

  Even from completely across the colonel’s spacious office, Kinsman could see that Murdock was a round little kettle of nerves. He was standing by the window behind his desk, watching the activity on Pad 17, clenching and unclenching his hands behind his back. His bald head was glistening with perspiration, despite the frigid air conditioning. Kinsman stood at the door with the secretary.

  “Colonel?” she said softly.

  Murdock spun around. “Kinsman. So here you are.”

  “What’s going on? I thought the next manned shot wasn’t until—”

  The colonel waved a pudgy hand. “The next manned shot is as fast as we can damned well make it.” He walked around the desk and eyed Kinsman. “You look a mess.”

  “Hell, it’s four in the morning!”

  “No excuses. Get over to the medical section for pre-flight check out. They’ve been waiting for you.”

  “I’d still like to know . . .”

  “Probably ought to test your blood for alcohol content,” Murdock grumbled.

  “I’ve been celebrating my transfer,” Kinsman said. “I’m not supposed to be on active duty. Six more days and I’m a civilian spaceman. Get my picture in Photo Day and I’m off to the moon. Remember?”

  “Cut the clowning. General Hatch is flying in from Norton Field and he wants you.�
��

  “Hatch?”

  “That’s right. He wants the most experienced man available.”

  “Twenty guys on base and you have to make me available.”

  Murdock fumed. “Listen. This is a military operation. I may not insist on much discipline, but don’t think you’re a civilian glamour boy yet. You’re still in the Air Force and there’s a hell of a bind on. Hatch wants you. Understand?”

  Kinsman shrugged. “If you saw what I had to leave behind me to report for duty here, you’d put me up for the Medal of Honor.”

  Murdock frowned in exasperation. The secretary tried unsuccessfully to suppress a smile.

  “All right, joker. Get down to the medical section. On the double. Anne, you stick with him and bring him to the briefing room the instant he’s finished. General Hatch will be here in twenty minutes; I don’t want to keep him waiting any longer than I have to.”

  Kinsman stood at the doorway, not moving. “Will you please tell me just what this scramble is all about?”

  “Ask the general,” Murdock said, walking back toward his desk. He glanced out the window again, then turned back to Kinsman. “All I know is that Hatch wants the man with the most hours in orbit ready for a shot, immediately.”

  “Manned shots are all volunteer missions,” Kinsman pointed out.

  “So?”

  “I’m practically a civilian. There are nineteen other guys who—”

  “Dammit Kinsman, if you . . .“

  “Relax, Colonel. Relax. I won’t let you down. Not when there’s a chance to get a few hundred miles away from all the brass on Earth.”

  Murdock stood there glowering as Kinsman took the secretary out to his car. As they sped off toward the medical section, she looked at him.

  “You shouldn’t bait him like that,” she said. “He feels the pressure a lot more than you do.”

  “He’s insecure,” Kinsman said, grinning. “There’re only twenty men in the Air Force qualified for orbital missions, and he’s not one of them.”

  “And you are.”

  “Damned right, honey. It’s the only thing in the world worth doing. You ought to try it.”

  She put a hand up to her wind-whipped hair. “Me? Flying in orbit? No gravity?”

  “It’s a clean world, Annie. Brand new every time. Just you and your own little cosmos. Your life is completely your own. Once you’ve done it, there’s nothing left on Earth but to wait for the next shot.”

  “My God, you sound as though you really mean it.”

  “I’m serious,” he insisted. “The Reds have female cosmonauts. We’re going to be putting women in orbit, eventually. Get your name on the top of the list.”

  “And get locked in a capsule with you?”

  His grin returned. “It’s an intriguing possibility.”

  “Some other time, captain,” she said. “Right now we have to get you through your pre-flight and off to meet the general.”

  General Lesmore D. (“Hatchet”) Hatch sat in dour silence in the small briefing room. The oblong conference table was packed with colonels and a single civilian. They all look so damned serious, Kinsman thought as he took the only empty chair, directly across from the general.

  “Captain Kinsman.” It was a flat statement of fact.

  “Good, em, morning, General.”

  Hatch turned to a moon-faced aide. “Borgeson, let’s not waste time.”

  Kinsman only half-listened as the hurried introductions went around the table. He felt uncomfortable already, and it was only partly due to the stickiness of the crowded little room. Through the only window he could see the first glow of dawn.

  “Now then,” Borgeson said, introductions finished, “very briefly, your mission will involve orbiting and making rendezvous with an unidentified satellite.”

  “Unidentified?”

  Borgeson nodded. “Whoever launched it has made no announcement whatsoever. Therefore, we must consider the satellite as potentially hostile. To begin at the beginning, we’ll have Colonel McKeever of SPADATS give you the tracking data first.”

  As they went around the table, each colonel adding his bit of information, Kinsman began to build up the picture in his mind.

  The satellite had been launched from the mid-Pacific, nine hours ago. Probably from a specially rigged submarine. It was now in a polar orbit, so that it covered every square mile on Earth in twelve hours. Since it went up, not a single radio transmission had been detected going to it or from it. And it was big, even heavier than the ten-ton Voshkods the Russians had been using for manned flights.

  “A satellite of that size,” said the colonel from the Special Weapons Center, “could easily contain a nuclear warhead of 100 megatons or more.”

  If the bomb were large enough, he explained, it could heat the atmosphere to the point where every combustible thing on the ground would ignite. Kinsman pictured trees, plants, grass, buildings, people, the sky itself, all bursting into flame.

  “Half the United States could be destroyed at once with such a bomb,” the colonel said.

  “And in a little more than two hours,” Borgeson added, “the satellite will pass over Chicago and travel right across the heartland of America.”

  Murdock paled. “You don’t think they’d . . . set it off?”

  “We don’t know,” General Hatch answered. “And we don’t intend to sit here waiting until we find out.”

  “Why not just knock it down?” Kinsman asked. “We can hit it, can’t we?”

  Hatch frowned. “We could reach it with a missile, yes. But we’ve been ordered by the Pentagon to inspect the satellite and determine whether or not it’s actually hostile.”

  “In two hours?”

  “Perhaps I can explain,” said the civilian. He had been introduced as a State Department man; Kinsman had already forgotten his name. He had a soft, sheltered look about him.

  “You may know that the disarmament meeting in Geneva is discussing nuclear weapons in space. It seemed last week we were on the verge of an agreement to ban weapons in space, just as testing weapons in the atmosphere has already been banned. But three days ago the conference suddenly became deadlocked on some very minor issues. It’s been very difficult to determine who is responsible for the deadlock and why. The Russians, the Chinese, the French, even some of the smaller nations, are apparently stalling for time . . . waiting for something to happen.”

  “And this satellite might be it,” Kinsman said.

  “The Department of State believes that this satellite is a test, to see if we can detect and counteract weapons placed in orbit.”

  “But they know we can shoot them down!” the general snapped.

  “Yes, of course,” the civilian answered softly. “But they also know we would not fire on a satellite that might be a peaceful research station. Not unless we were certain that it was actually a bomb in orbit. We must inspect this satellite to prove to the world that we can board any satellite and satisfy ourselves that it is not a threat to us. Otherwise we will be wide open to nuclear blackmail, in orbit.”

  The general shook his head. “If they’ve gone to the trouble of launching a multi-ton vehicle, then military logic dictates that they placed a bomb in it. By damn, that’s what I’d do, in their place.”

  “Suppose it is a bomb,” Kinsman asked, “and they explode it over Chicago?”

  Borgeson smiled uneasily. “It could take out everything between New England and the Rockies.”

  Kinsman heard himself whistle in astonishment.

  “No matter whether it’s a bomb or not, the satellite is probably rigged with booby traps to prevent us from inspecting it,” one of the other colonels pointed out.

  Thanks a lot, Kinsman said to himself.

  Hatch focused his gunmetal eyes on Kinsman. “Captain, I want to impress a few thoughts on you. First, the Air Force has been working for nearly twenty years to achieve the capability of placing a military man in orbit on an instant’s notice. Your flight will be t
he first practical demonstration of all that we’ve battled to achieve over those years. You can see, then, the importance of this mission.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Second, this is strictly a voluntary mission. Because it is so important to us, I don’t want you to try it unless you’re absolutely certain—”

  “I realize that, sir. I’m your man.”

  “I understand you’re transferring out of the Air Force next week.”

  Kinsman nodded. “That’s next week. This is now.”

  Hatch’s well-seamed face unfolded into a smile. “Well said, captain. And good luck.”

  The general rose and everyone snapped to attention. As the others filed out of the briefing room, Murdock drew Kinsman aside.

  “You had your chance to beg off.”

  “And miss this? A chance to play cops and robbers in orbit?”

  The colonel flushed angrily. “We’re not in this for laughs. This is damned important. If it really is a bomb . . .”

  “I’ll be the first to know,” Kinsman snapped. To himself he added, I’ve listened to you long enough for one morning.

  Countdowns took minutes instead of days, with solid-fueled rockets. But there were just as many chances of a man or machine failing at a critical point and turning the intricate, delicately poised booster into a flaming pyre of twisted metal.

  Kinsman sat tautly in the contoured couch, listening to them tick off the seconds. He hated countdowns. He hated being helpless, completely dependent on a hundred faceless voices that flickered through his earphones, waiting childlike in a mechanical womb, not alive, waiting, doubled up and crowded by the unfeeling, impersonal machinery that automatically gave him warmth and breath and life.

  He could feel the tiny vibrations along his spine that told him the ship was awakening. Green lights started to blossom across the control panel, a few inches in front of his faceplate, telling him that everything was ready. Still the voices droned through his earphones in carefully measured cadence:

  three . . . two . . . one.

  And she bellowed into life. Acceleration pressure flattened Kinsman into the couch. Vibration rattled his eyes in their sockets. Time became meaningless. The surging, engulfing, overpowering noise of the mighty rocket engines made his head ring, even after they burned out into silence.