mind reaches for him so many miles away. Daring to hope, just a little, where no hope had been was logical. But the startling reality is how much it impacts her. She knows fatigue is in charge now. If there’s some uncontrolled, starry-eyed tendency to slide toward falling in love with him, it would be, she thinks, like falling in love with Elvis before he passed. She’s mature enough to know that myth and reality are seldom connected, except in the mind.
She knows all of it, and yet Kip to her has become as compelling as gravity.
Diana shakes her head and tells her common sense to immediately search out and destroy such little-girl fantasies. After all, the man
The thought is interrupted by a shout from one of the console positions.
“Hey, everyone!
Strange, Kip thinks, how climbing back inside feels like spoiling a good stage exit. He looks around the tiny, tublike interior of the airlock, working to suppress his feelings of claustrophobia.
The whoosh of air from the interior fills the tiny space quickly and he can feel the rigidity of the space suit diminish. The green light indicating equal pressure comes on and he works the inner door locks and swings it open, taking his time again in extricating himself.
For just a moment he considers leaving the suit in place and pressurized before remembering the limited oxygen in the airpack. He cuts it off and secures the little arm-mounted control panel before removing his helmet, securing it before working to adjust himself back into the command chair. The bulky space suit is a bit easier to handle when deflated, but he wishes he could have just kept it sealed. Bill’s physical decomposition is now stomach-turning. All the more reason, he thinks, to take his leave outside in the most spectacular arena imaginable.
But he’s agreed with himself to try the rocket one last time, on the chance it might make a difference. And now, sitting in front of the command panel, the thought hits him that if it fires, he’ll then have an incredibly complicated flying machine to guide through the atmosphere but without benefit of flight training. Not to mention figuring out how, and where, to land it. Succeeding in a spacewalk repair, a deorbit burn, and a reentry, only to crash and die in a botched landing would be awful. Worth a complaint to DiFazio himself.
And the thought makes him chuckle.
The humor masks the fear that’s contracting his stomach, and he’s already flipping through the checklists looking for the very page that turns up now, a reference to another checklist he hasn’t seen—one for emergency reentry.
The discarded headset is floating to his left, disturbed by his movements, and he wonders if he should put it on and try the radios one last time.
The storage compartment for the ship’s manuals is just out of reach, and he has to unbuckle again to lean far enough over to open it, worry now rising that he won’t be ready in time.
The checklist is in his hands and he opens it, reading too quickly, having to force himself to slow down and reread it.
Someone down there, Kip thinks, decided that with one astronaut aboard each flight, it made good sense to write the checklist so that a rank amateur could follow it.
And even with a dozen glider flights and basic stick and rudder skills, and a couple of fixed-wing flights in a single-engine Cessna in his head, Kip has never felt so much like an amateur.
He checks the time. Twelve minutes to go. Just time enough to learn how to place the small bullet-shaped icon on the attitude indicator in the arms of the moving “V” that is the flight director, the key to keeping the ship in the proper attitude on the way down.
He keeps looking for the information on how to punch an autopilot button and let the ship fly itself, but it either doesn’t exist, or he can’t find it. He’ll have to manually follow the small, projected dot on the attitude indicator all the way and hope for the best—flipping the tail assembly into the split reentry configuration at the right moment, reconfiguring on time, and keeping the engine pointed in the right downward direction until coming through ninety miles up.
“We have a live picture, General,” the duty controller announces, bringing Chris Risen’s eyes around to the front of the room where the slightly fuzzy image of
“Where are they?” Chris asks, moving alongside the controller, a sharp young female captain.
“Twenty-one miles and closing, sir.”
“So, we’ve got a sudden telemetry reactivation, good pressure, Kip apparently back inside, and the cosmonauts within spitting distance. I’d say his impending demise has been greatly exaggerated.”
The captain glances up at the four-star, wondering if she has permission to chuckle, or the need to give him a charity laugh.
She does neither.
“Bastardized Mark Twain,” Chris explains. “Sorry.”
“He has a chance, sir, provided he doesn’t light off his engine.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, he’s coming up to a retrofire point for coming down at Mojave in just six or seven minutes, and if he knows that, and doesn’t know the Russians are coming…”
“And if he’s fixed his engine as effectively as he’s apparently fixed some of the radios…”
“Yes, sir. He might try to deorbit, and he’s not a pilot. I mean, I understand he’s had some glider training toward a license, but that’s it.”
The thought of an untrained, unlicensed pilot trying to guide a spacecraft through a precise series of return maneuvers sends a chill up his spine, and he forms a small prayer that, regardless of Kip’s mechanical prowess, the engine won’t fire.
“ASA is trying frantically to reach him and tell him to just sit tight,” the captain adds.
“But no contact?”
She’s shaking her head. “Nothing yet. The Russian crew is trying to signal him with a low-powered laser. But there’s no response.”
Chris Risen glances at the frozen crawl from Kip Dawson’s laptop.
“And he’s written nothing more.”
“Yes, sir. I noticed that.”
“Which means he’s getting ready to try. Captain, get a line to Baikonaur’s Mission Control and make sure the
“Yes, sir. See, that’s what I was getting at, General.”
“Sorry?”
“The
“Oh, Jesus! Hurry up!”
