“If he didn’t, she’ll find out the wrong way within minutes.”
“Hold on.” Within half a minute he’s back. “Yes, thank God, he did it.”
“Anything else I… need to know?”
More silence. Telling, pregnant silence, unbroken by an offered explanation, and she elects to sidestep it.
“Okay, you tell me whatever you think I need to know when I need to know it. Just don’t let me twist in the wind.”
“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”
“Are we going to get them back, Richard?”
She fears the answer to the question she’s blurted, but beneath the facade she’s struggling to maintain, she feels like a frightened little girl watching the twisting trails of a shattered
“I don’t know, Diana. I do know we’re going to try everything.”
The chief of security leans into John Kent’s newly reoccupied office with a grin on his face and something in his hand, aware the chief astronaut is concentrating totally on the deluge of papers before him.
“Hey, John?”
Kent looks up, more curious than startled, and smiles. “Daniel. Missed the fireworks, did you?”
Daniel walks in, fanning the air with a small plastic security badge. “I was crushed I didn’t get to escort you out at gunpoint myself.”
“Yeah, right,” Kent laughs, recalling the hours the two of them have spent talking about security matters on one of the post-9/11 committees.
“But I’m happy to bring you back a new badge, freshly minted with zero limitations and even a nice, fresh clip.”
“Didn’t know you made house calls.”
“Oh, indeed. When one gets a call from the office of the President directing immediate reinstatement of even an Air Force guy, I hop to.” He lays the badge on the overburdened desk, his expression turning serious. “I heard what you’re working on. Can we do it? Launch that fast, I mean?”
Kent meets his eyes. “I don’t know, but the President says it’s a national priority to try, so… I’m working on it.”
“I’ll leave you alone, then.” He hesitates halfway to the door. “I knew Bill Campbell, too, you know.”
John is nodding, aware of the past tense. “Could be he’s still with us, Dan, and just hurt.”
“Could be.”
“But we’re going up regardless.”
“Yeah. You might call the alternative Shear madness.”
John shakes his head, a sworn enemy of puns. “Get out of here.”
“Yes, sir.”
The door closes and John works back through a list just e-mailed in from the Cape. His clandestine effort has now become the twenty-four/seven focus of the entire Kennedy Space Center, and the orbiter is already on its way aboard the crawler-transporter from the vehicle assembly building to Pad 39B, the nearly fourteen million pounds of launcher and spacecraft moving at less than a mile per hour.
John stops for a second, placing the pencil he’s been using on the desk and sitting back to clear his head.
He doesn’t envy Bill Campbell’s current dilemma, whatever it is, but he’s watched the project in the Mojave with a certain longing for the last five years, knowing he’s in Houston nursing a dinosaur that doesn’t see the asteroid-sized meteor coming. To be able to just
John leans back into the calculations. It will be mid-morning before the final assessment can be made on whether an early rescue launch is possible, and the decision will not be his.
And despite his hostility to Geoff Shear and his megalomaniacal tendencies, he shares the same nightmarish worry: Another shuttle loss from pressing safety limits is unthinkable.
Chapter 16
It’s sunset when Kip awakens.
There are sixteen sunsets per day in low Earth orbit, and at first he has no idea which one he’s looking at as
He glances at his watch, startled at how late it is back in California. He’s been asleep for hours, and it’s dark in Mojave, where he and the spacecraft should now be parked. He was supposed to be drinking champagne right now at a postflight party.
In sleep there were dreams he almost recalls, confused, kaleidoscopic, but dreams of his kids and meadows and for some reason a fast convertible that kept trying to get through a snow-covered pass in the Rockies with his father aboard.
But he’s pretty sure what he’s perceiving now is reality, and it sucks. All the excitement of being where he is, seeing what he’s seeing, floating in zero gravity, is ruined by the reality that he’s stranded and in grave danger.
He laughs, a short, loud expression of disgust.
Another small wave of buzzing dizziness passes over him and he realizes it has nothing to do with the zero gravity and his inner ear and vestibular balance system. It’s his mind working overtime to reject this reality, like a kid with his fingers in his ears mouthing “na-na-na-na-na!” as loud as possible to drown out unwanted information.
Kip can’t believe he’s chuckling, but the chuckle is building to a laugh, and he’s laughing hard enough to draw tears.
Ground school details are coming back, and he remembers the discussion about the air cycle machines and the fact that the life limit isn’t oxygen. It’s getting rid of carbon dioxide—the same problem that threatened the
It has to be written down somewhere, he thinks. Maybe in one of the checklists. He starts pawing through the nearest one, locating a table in the back in small print, a grid with the number of people aboard plotted against the capability of the CO2 scrubbers.
At least, he figures, without communication he won’t have to listen to Sharon say, “I told you so.” That in itself is a blessing, but the forced joke falls flat and he finds himself reviewing the arrangements he’s made.
The life insurance will pay, and they’ll all be financially okay without him. Besides, even if there was no insurance, her well-heeled father wouldn’t let her go wanting. The house in Tucson will be paid off and there will be
