Текст книги "Orbit"

Автор книги: John Nance

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 18 (всего у книги 21 страниц)

Chapter 41

ABOARD INTREPID, MAY 21, 10:38 A.M. PACIFIC

Kip sits in the command chair staring at the western edge of the planet, wondering why a bright blue light had been sparking intermittently on the horizon line.

But his mind is consumed by a thought that pulls him away from what he’s seeing.

Here he is, ready to die. But what if he doesn’t?

Maybe, he thinks, the CO ₂is winning at last. He feels clearheaded, yet his longing to return and have another stab at life—his desire to see his kids again and use the insights he’s gained—seems somehow cheapened. It’s as if his impending death has suddenly been deemed privileged and noble, and an escape back to life anything but. It’s like the narrative he’s been writing for some future reader—the angst of one solitary man—is actually somehow a small contribution to humankind.

This is stupid,he thinks.

But there’s a part of him protesting that to live through this is to cheat himself of a legacy, to be just a mere survivor, not an example.

An example of what? An example of foolishness? Crying in my laptop for days before figuring out what to do?

Yet the feeling is all too real. It astounds and depresses him. As if deorbiting would be a cop-out, a cowardly retreat.

Kip snorts out loud at the irony.

But that’s not it, he realizes, his eyes flaring wide as he sits up a bit straighter with a smile on his face.

No, that’s not it at all!

What it is, is his father again. It’s his dad’s template for life imprinted in his brain like an indelible operating program, looking for a way even in the eleventh hour to impose duty and sacrifice and stoic acceptance of responsibility over any breath of self-determination.

He is, he realizes, being drawn back to that myopic world like a sailor lured by Sirens, believing not what fills his eyes and his consciousness, but what fits his parental rule book yet again: That doing something for himself is wrong. That speaking his truth is wrong.

My God, I’m thinking like a Calvinist! Surviving is wrong if there’s a chance I might enjoy the result. The only thing missing is a hair shirt.

How tired and old and sad his father had seemed toward the end, and suddenly he understands why. No wonder visiting him was like tiptoeing to the edge of a black hole.

My father’s manual for enduring life. But this time I’ve caught you red-handed, Dad!He looks around at Bill’s bagged remains as if the bag also contains the part of his father that he’s never put to rest.

His voice booms through the diminutive interior. “No more, Dad! No more. I’m going to give this my best shot, and if somehow I succeed, I’m going to have a go at really living like you never did. Like you should have. And you know what? I’m going to do it, even if I die trying. I’m bidding you good-bye, Dad, wherever you are. I love you, but I’m not listening to you anymore. And it’s… it’s time for you to go… to the light, whatever that is, or wherever. Just… go.

There is a tear in the corner of his eye he didn’t expect and the feeling of a weight lifting from him. Only his imagination, of course, but he could swear something slipped away from this small enclosure, something dark and sad.

He turns back forward with a renewed spirit, the laptop keyboard beckoning. But there are only four minutes remaining.

For some reason it feels good to speak out loud, after so many days of silent thoughts, at full volume, and now that he’s started, he likes the broken silence.

“So, are we ready?”

He looks at the attitude indicator, noting the target dot nestling snugly where it should be in the “V” for retrofire. Five minutes of rocket thrust at more than three g’s of deceleration will be required to get home. If he’s slow in firing, he’ll drift eastward, away from Mojave.

He pulls the laptop over suddenly, unable to resist.

Okay, I have two more things to say. First, I’ve just been outside and tried to repair this little craft, and I have no idea whether I made any difference, but I’m going to try to fire the engine once more in a few minutes. Second, I have finally realized something that to me is very important: It turns out that I have never been Kip Dawson until now, until I was forced to be honest about my life. But a few minutes ago, in effect, I buried my father and gave him back his book—his operating program. I am electing life on my own terms, and even if I have only a few minutes of it to enjoy, it feels wonderful. I get the point now. Self does matter.

Just under one minute left.

Kip positions his hand on the sidestick controller, fanning his fingers and waiting as he forces from his mind the fatalistic “reality” that the motor will not fire. Of course it’ll fire. He’ll simply willit to fire. All positive thoughts. Mind over matter.

Faith can move mountains, but dynamite works better,someone once said. So he’ll use both—faith and the dynamite of determination. He demands that the friggin’ engine fires, so it damn well has no choice!

So there.

Why do they say T minus? What does the T stand for?He wonders, watching the secondhand crawl below ten seconds, unable to resist the urge to voice his own countdown.

“Nine, eight, seven…”

The words seem to echo in the small cabin, something he hasn’t noticed before. He’s bracing for the thrust in his back.

“Two, one, and we have ignition!"

Kip’s left index finger shoots toward the ignition sequence button and presses hard. He can feel the click of the switch.

And that’s all.

For just a second he sits with his finger still depressing the switch, as if the engine is just thinking about it and may get around to firing in a few seconds. But the seconds start moving toward a minute as he pulls his finger back and presses the switch down again and again, not frantically, but with a determination to get his message across: You are hereby commanded to fire!

The engine, however, isn’t complying, and where he’s expected to feel either instant acceleration or great angst at a failed firing, he feels strangely composed and calm. Like he’s entering a zone reserved only for fighter pilots and astronauts with Chuck Yeager’s right stuff: perfect tranquillity in the face of disaster and anything but acceptance.

Kip pulls his hand away, his mind moving steadily back over the checklist items needed to fire the engine. The checklist is in his lap, and he finds the right page and begins moving down the list, double-checking every switch, aware that more than a minute and a half have already passed and he’ll commit himself to landing somewhere way east of Mojave if they light off. The thought of waiting for another orbit flickers across his mind and is just as quickly swept away by the reality that he doesn’t know how much breathable air he has left.

“Ignition primary and secondary bus transfer switches should be off. They are. Ignition emergency disconnect relay one and two guarded on. Where are those? Oh yeah, they’re positioned right.”

He stares at the switches whose name he just spoke. Small red plastic covers known as “switch guards” cover each toggle switch to prevent a sleeve or wayward hand from accidentally flipping the tiny lever.

So are they off or on when closed?he wonders, opening one of the guards to expose the metal toggle lever inside.

It’s off. So when the guard is closed and down, the switch is off.

“Wait a minute.” He flips open both guards and moves the switches to the “on” position, double checking the language in the checklist.

“For God’s sake, don’t tell me that’s why the engine didn’t fire four days ago!”

Were they open or closed then, those guards? He read the checklist items very carefully on the first day, but the image in his memory of the two little switch guards is flip-flopping between whether they were open or closed. Up or down. He can’t remember.

At least now, he figures, they’re in the right position.

His breathing has accelerated and he can feel his heart pounding and his face reddening, more from embarrassment than anticipation. All this because he didn’t follow the checklist four days back?

Yet the thought is instantly calming, and in the space of only a few seconds he gets over it, embracing the thought that what he’s learned in accepting his own demise is worth a lifetime, and the thought that if the problem is that simple, then hallelujah! He’s going home.

Once again his index finger stabs at the ignition switch.

ABOARD SOYUZ, 10:39 A.M. PACIFIC

“One thousand meters, closing at five per second,” Mikhail intones in the calm voice of a man serenely on the razor edge of his technology.

Sergei Petrov nods, his eyes still focused on the radar screen and the just-received message from Baikonaur Mission Control that is wrinkling his features.

“You believe we should drop down in case he retrofires?” Sergei asks, knowing the finite amount of fuel in the maneuvering jets and estimating how much it will take to change orbit even that slightly.

“The warning came from NORAD, no?”

“Yes. NORAD. Not from Houston.”

“You’ve been watching with the binoculars, Sergei. Have you seen any movement? Any evidence that he’s seen the laser I’ve been flashing?”

“ Nyet.Nothing. But let me look again.”

Sergei plucks the instrument from where it’s been floating by his face and focuses once more on the forward windows of the backward-flying American space plane. The image steadies and suddenly looms larger, as if he’s triggered a zoom lens, and he shakes his head in confusion before pulling the glasses away and finding the very same zoom happening in his unaided vision.

“What am I…”

“Sergei!” Mikhail is barking the words. “He’s coming! Coming at us!”

The mission commander grabs for the controls, time dilation already slowing the sequence as the American craft looms larger in the Soyuzwindow, coming directly at them, Sergei recalling now the sight of a burst of somethingalongside the craft just as it started zooming in.

Sergei’s hand reaches the firing control and jams their main engine to life, thrusting forward while canting the angle of firing downward, but the oncoming vehicle is accelerating toward them.

A rapid calculation flashes through Mikhail’s mind pairing five hundred meters with the steady acceleration of the ASA ship and yielding a catastrophic closing speed by the time it reaches them.

Intrepidis looming large now, its relative closing speed marked more by how fast it seems to be growing in size than by any lateral movement, but at last the two cosmonauts can feel their craft thrusting ahead of the oncoming space plane’s trajectory as it approached soundlessly.

It’s too late to do more, and as the American spacecraft fills the forward window both men cringe in anticipation of a thunderous impact that doesn’t come.

As if it were a holographic projection, as soon as Intrepidfills their eyes, it flashes past, missing their craft by a tiny margin they can only guess at, shooting through the empty space around them, no wake turbulence to rattle their craft, and nothing but the accelerated heartbeats in the Soyuzcapsule to mark its passing.

“He fired his engine!” Mikhail says.

“You think?” Sergei says, staring into the same void with a death grip on the control stick. “The phrase they use in Houston is: No shit, Sherlock!”

Chapter 42

ABOARD INTREPID, MAY 21, 10:40 A.M. PACIFIC

Kip doesn’t have a spare second to be confused.

No time to wonder about what flashed past the forward windscreen less than a minute after ignition. Maybe a satellite. Maybe nothing. Whatever it was, it seemed so incredibly close, yet, it whooshed past without a sound, like an illusion—some computer-generated sequence projected on the windscreen. He still has the mental image of what the thing looked like somewhere in his memory, and it’s a familiar shape somehow, but his attention is too focused on the forward panel to think it through.

Kip’s right hand is working the sidestick controller constantly with small, intense movements, and there’s a tiny flash of pride that he’s already learned not to overcontrol. Three g’s of thrust are pressing at his back and pulling at his face, but it’s all as handleable as the ascent was four days ago.

The physical impact of the light off was nothing compared to the psychological shock that the engine really fired. His mind is still trying to work through how that happened. At the same time, he’s trying to make sure he doesn’t do anything else terribly wrong, like face the rocket engine the wrong way and boost himself on a one-way trip to outer space. He’s already figured out that, with enough fuel left to subtract seventeen thousand miles an hour of momentum, this spacecraft, if turned in the opposite direction, could easily reach the escape velocity of twenty-three thousand miles per hour and soar away from Earth’s gravity forever.

He double-checks that he’s aimed Intrepid’s nozzles in the right direction, and holds the ship steady with a massive force of will, playing a video game with life-or-death consequences in keeping the tiny dot in the “V” on the attitude indicator screen. The nose slowly comes up, changing the rocket engine’s thrust vector from all horizontal deceleration to a mix of both vertical and horizontal, keeping gravity from yanking Intrepidtoo rapidly back toward Earth.

The engine should cut out, the checklist says, when he’s at eighty degrees nose up, still flying backward, at an altitude of ninety miles and dropping at less than three hundred miles per hour, with almost no forward speed. Intrepid,he knows, uses fuel and thrust to slow down instead of trading speed for heat—using the type of red-hot thermal braking through the atmosphere that incinerated the shuttle Columbiayears ago. He’ll have less than a minute, when the fuel runs out and Intrepidbegins to freefall, to use the reaction thrusters to raise the tail and turn the space plane completely around. Then he’ll be falling like some sort of man-made leaf into the upper reaches of the atmosphere, belly first, never going fast enough through the thickening air to melt the structure with frictional heating.

It’s a hard concept to grasp, this frictional heating and airspeed. He knows, because he tried to explain it to Julie for a school science report one night as Sharon rolled her eyes and left for bed. He reruns the memory, every word of it ringing clear in his head, even as he works the control stick and watches the forward panel.

“Honey, below four hundred thousand feet above the planet Earth—eighty miles high—the atmosphere begins with just an occasional molecule of air. On a space shuttle reentry, every molecule gets hit at nearly orbital speed as the spacecraft descends lower and lower into more and more air, and with each tiny collision, there is a transformation of the massive speed of the collision into heat. At four hundred thousand feet it doesn’t amount to much, but hitting two hundred thousand feet, where the still-thin air molecules are much more closely packed together means a lot more of those tiny heat-producing collisions are happening, and the heat begins to raise the temperature of the spacecraft itself thousands of degrees, each collision stripping away electrons from the molecules and creating a super-heated plasma that can be seen from the ground as a long trail of fire. It was at two hundred and seven thousand feet over Texas,” he told her, “that the Shuttle Columbiabegan to break up, killing the crew.”

Julie had seen Sharon’s response, and it had limited her attention span. He never had the chance to talk about airspeed, and why a spacecraft flashing through those edge-of-space altitudes at thousands of miles per hour could show an indicatedairspeed of less than a hundred miles per hour, something that always fascinated him.

A calculation he needs to make in his head snaps him away from the memory. He was four minutes late firing the engine, and so the result will be a landing somewhere in eastern Arizona. He needs to know soon where he is, what state he’s over. Unlike the shuttle, which starts down around the California coast in order to land in Florida, he remembers from his indoctrination that with Intrepid,he’s just dropping into whatever state he’s over.

There’s a button to be pushed on the HSI—the horizontal situation indicator—when he turns the ship around nose down, and the screen is supposed to show the airfields he can reach, but he’s getting ahead of himself with the engine still firing, and right now all he can do is play the video game and hang on, battling the feeling that he’s not really here.

The three minutes elapse, feeling like ten. The nose-up angle is nearly thirty degrees now as he slowly arcs backward toward the planet. The numbers on the screen indicating forward velocity are down below eight thousand miles per hour, the stars still visible outside the window.

The chilling thought that keeps running through his head is that with or without the help of the map computer, he’ll have only one shot at finding a place for Intrepidto land—let alone figure out how to fly her there.

But so far his control movements are steady, competent, even professional, and he can’t figure why. He doesn’t know nearly enough to do this. Yet here is his right hand, moving the stick with calm competence, as if he’s channeling a realastronaut—a golden connection, a reserve of assurance and intellect from somewhere beyond himself.

Suddenly the noise and thrust and shaking and moving numbers that are the cacophonous reality of this descent back to Earth begin to recede, as if a sound engineer somewhere was moving the master volume down slowly. He feels an unexpected tranquillity descending over him like a warm blanket—reassuring, comforting, validating that his hands really do have it under control and his mind is free to float so he can turn and watch himself. He’s being enfolded by a peace he’s never felt, and along with it there seems to be a rising, gentle chorus of voices against the sound of a thousand strings, like the most magnificent space movie on the most amazing screen he could ever dream up, the orchestral and choral harmony all around him now, as if the unity and connectedness of uncounted souls are trying to put his fear in a perspective he’s never imagined.

It’s a crystalline moment of aching, indescribable beauty, and, as has happened several times in this odyssey, tears come unbidden to his eyes.

They are, he realizes, tears of appreciation for just being,and for the first time in his life he finds himself overflowing with a love of the moment and of life as it is akin to nothing he’s ever experienced—a love so deep, so complete, that even if it all ends within seconds, the contentment will have too much force not to live on. It’s a place he’s never been, a moment he never wants to leave, and one he’s quite sure he was never supposed to glimpse.

Kip Dawson’s mind returns to the reality of Intrepid’s cabin, the sounds rising in volume around him but altered now and somehow incapable of threatening him, even as his adrenaline flows like a flood-stage river.

He shakes his head against the steady g-forces. There’s a strange comfort, he thinks, in the force of this rocket-propelled deceleration pressing him down in the seat—an affirmation that Newton’s laws are still relevant. Back in the Mojave ground school he’d thought the math beyond him and was astounded to discover how straightforward the equations are for the dynamics that are shaking him now. So many thousands of pounds of thrust out of the engine nozzles for so many seconds in the absence of air raises or lowers speed predictably, and he’s filled with awe that, in essence, Intrepidis merely coming to a stop before dropping back into the atmosphere. No screaming trail of charged, burning plasma across the sky. No three-thousand-degree temperatures to be absorbed and deflected. Just a small, private ship dropping back in like a badminton birdie.

The countdown to engine cutoff is on the screen and less than forty seconds away, the nose-up angle approaching sixty degrees. Forward speed is coming under a thousand five hundred miles per hour, and still he’s hanging on and holding the dot in the V.

He wonders if any radar facility will pick him up, or if anyone at Mojave even has a clue he’s not still in his stable orbit. If he can’t find an airport and ends up hurt or dead in the back country of Arizona, he figures they won’t find him for days or weeks.

Or maybe even years.

Poor old Kip,he thinks with a smile, the boy just disappeared while on orbit and no one ever knew why.

And still he can feel the serenity growing within. It doesn’t matter. Everything is as it should be.

Ten seconds to cutoff.He almost doesn’t want the thrust to stop, but the noise has been deafening and he looks forward to quiet.

Engine shutdown catches him by surprise, kicking him forward. Again he’s in zero gravity and it seems wrong. Shouldn’t he feelthe downward pull of Earth—the increase of thirty-two feet per second in speed every second?

Technically he’s still in space, just nowhere near high enough or fast enough to stay there any longer.

Kip checks the descent speed. Two hundred sixty feet per second. He sees the target dot on the ADI, attitude deviation indicator, blinking red as it starts moving down. He moves the sidestick controller to follow, startled when the Earth swims back into view. Intrepid’s nose changes pitch from near vertical through the horizontal and continues downward to twenty degrees below the horizon. He wants to look at the surface below and try to figure out where he is, but his eyes have to stay riveted on the ADI until he feels the ship stabilize. Funny how suddenly it seems so easy, and just a few days ago he’d been spinning out of control like a crazed gyro.

The steadiness of the ship now that the engine is quiet is almost unnerving, and he remembers to consult the checklist Velcroed to his knee before reconfiguring the space plane and raising the tail structure to keep down the speed of reentry. Instead of his finger shaking like before as he points it at the next section of the reentry checklist, his hand is now steady, and his index finger tracks the next few steps as he reads through the verbiage, and triggers a small hydraulic pump.

A tiny whine akin to an energetic mosquito begins complaining from somewhere aft, confirming its operation. Lights illuminate on the forward panel and a series of lighted pushbuttons that control the process of feathering the ship light up as well. He pushes them in sequence, checking and rechecking each step and feeling the change in the tail structure as the twin-boomed empennage begins to rise to a nearly eighty-degree upward deflection.

Kip recalls the explanation almost verbatim: “As the air molecules begin to flash past, the tail will align vertically, leaving the body almost horizontal into the relative wind, the tremendous drag keeping the speed from building too high. Like a shuttlecock,” the instructor had added, sending Kip to the dictionary only to discover that “shuttlecock” essentially meant the same thing as “badminton birdie.”

Four hundred thousand feet… eighty miles,Kip thinks, the upper beginning of the atmosphere.

His gaze takes in the horizon once again as he uses the sidestick to bring the nose up, stopping at ten degrees down.

Speed is what? Okay, five hundred twenty knots and accelerating.

In less than five minutes, Intrepid’s heat-coated belly will peak at a temperature of just over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit—as long as he holds the right attitude. He thinks he can feel the molecules of air beginning to impact the fuselage, even though Intrepid’s relative, indicatedairspeed is still not even registering. But the true speed through the near vacuum around him is now just under twelve hundred miles per hour.

The curvature of the Earth is still pronounced, the darkness of space beyond still stark and amazing, and he realizes he’s seeing the same view as those who ride suborbitally to the same height.

Three hundred fifty-one thousand!

The ship seems to be moving ever so slightly now, not unlike an airplane in stable flight, but he knows the motion will increase along with the sound of the high-speed air impacting his fuselage.

Where am I?The question now becomes urgent. He cranes his neck to see better through the forward windscreen, looking for anything identifiable. The map display should be showing what he’s over, but for some reason it’s switched to some diagnostic screen and Kip punches first one, then another of the buttons around the perimeter to get the map back.

Oh my God, the seat!

He’s almost forgotten to reposition it, rotating the bottom upward and leaning it back in accordance with the checklist and tightening his seat and shoulder harness against the five-g peak deceleration to come.

The thought of Bill Campbell’s lightly restrained body behind him suddenly flashes in his consciousness. Only small Velcro straps are holding the plastic bag to the back bulkhead, and up to now all the deceleration has been backward. But when the real atmospheric braking starts, the body will tumble forward, and he wonders how to secure it.

He could strap it into his passenger seat close behind, but it’s too late to get out of the harnesses. The thought of the body crashing forward and into his hand on the control stick worries him, but he’ll deal with it when, and if.

Three hundred five thousand, velocity twenty-four hundred feet per second… sixteen hundred miles per hour straight down!

He can see a line of snow-covered mountains far below, and as he looks north, one of them resembles Pikes Peak and he wonders if he’s coming down in the middle of New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo range.

But when he looks more closely, he realizes Colorado is apparently much farther north.

He could twist the sidestick controller around and yaw left or right to see better, but he’s afraid of disobeying the V on the ADI in front of him and he stifles the need. He’ll wait until Intrepidis an aircraft again with the tail aligned before looking for airfields.

A hint of slipstream noise is becoming more pronounced, a clear rising protest of assaulted atoms of nitrogen and oxygen shoved aside by a bow wave, a supersonic bow wave, as he descends below three hundred thousand feet, no longer in space but clearly still in the far upper reaches of the atmosphere. The speed is fairly steady now, just under Mach 3, and the indicated airspeed has begun to move upward in single digits.

A red symbol has begun blinking urgently on the forward display and Kip leans forward to read it.

WARNING: LEFT STRUT UP-LATCH NOT LOCKED.

He understands. The twin tail booms are in the up position for reentry, yet the left one is not locked, and the increasing pressure of the airflow is trying to force it down. If that happens, he’ll start spinning and speeding up until either the gyroscopic forces or the overheating kills him.

Kip pulls the other checklist to his lap from its storage slot and pages through, amazed that he isn’t frantic. He flips to the section covering major emergencies and locates the one labeled “Strut Up-latch Unsafe Warning during Reentry.” The first step is to verify the hydraulic pump is still on, and he looks at the appropriate part of the panel.

The switch is on. But the pressure is zero, indicating the pump has failed.

Ever so slowly, as he looks at the horizon, Intrepidbegins to rotate to the left.