Orbit

placards next to each breaker until he locates one that has, indeed, popped out.

Primary Tail Boom Hydraulic Pump. That’s it!

He pushes the small round button-type breaker in, feeling the click and hearing the tiny mosquitolike whine once more as the forward panel shows the pressure rising.

Thank God! he thinks, realizing he’s solved the problem perhaps too soon. The tail shouldn’t be reconfigured until sixty thousand feet and Intrepid is only coming through a hundred and fifty thousand.

But he’s steady at last, facing generally south, and he thinks he can make out the Rio Grande River as it defines the Texas-Mexico border around El Paso, somewhere to the southwest.

Which means I’m coming down in southeastern New Mexico.

The computer map is still not showing and he attacks that problem now in frustration, searching for the right button before the map suddenly swims into view on the lower screen, his position clearly indicated over the moving map of New Mexico.

One hundred two thousand.

As soon as the tail is realigned he’ll be a flyable glider with only one chance at landing. He can glide miles in any direction then, but where should he go?

Somewhere on the panel he knows there’s a switch or a button that’s supposed to project potential landing sites, but he can’t tell where it is.

He strains to look outside, but he’s still too high to make out a strip of concrete a mile or two long.

I can’t be too far from Roswell, or maybe Cannon Air Force Base.

Surely, when he gets under sixty thousand feet, something will pop up. But why won’t the computer help now?

He tries the checklist as he comes through eighty thousand, the downward speed now slowing transonically below six hundred miles per hour, but if there’s a section on how to get the map computer to display emergency airfields, he can’t find it.

Seventy thousand.

The tail boom transition will be at sixty thousand, and he checks his ears, straining to hear the tiny whine of the hydraulic pump against the roar of the airflow around the space plane.

Okay, let’s see… I’ll need to know where the landing gear switch is, and the approach speed.

The handle is easy. It’s a small recessed switch on the left side of the panel, and he remembers enough to know there’s some sort of air bottle that blows the gear down and in place. But he knows there are no speed brakes or flaps, and Intrepid’s speed just before landing will be close to two hundred miles per hour, it’s stubby wings providing lift only in the most cursory way.

The altitude is coming through sixty thousand now, the ship buffeting slightly, and Kip goes back to the page on tail reconfiguration.

“Hold twenty-degree-nose-down attitude until booms unlock and hold attitude until down locks are engaged, then recover from dive being careful not to exceed three g’s in the pull-up.”

He pushes the stick forward, feeling the engagement springs working the manual flight control surfaces and watching the ADI for the appointed twenty-degree nose-down attitude.

There. Twenty down.

He pushes the buttons for boom release and retraction and hears the whine increase as everything begins to change. When he was hundreds of thousands of feet above, moving the booms upward caused little but mechanical shuddering, but now the nose is pitching down severely as the tail aligns and he can see the indicated airspeed rising and feel, and hear, the slipstream increase.

Two green lights flash on, indicating both tail booms are locked, and he pulls hard, feeling the g-forces climb as he searches for a meter or an indication of how heavy they are. He thinks he knows what three g’s feel like, and he holds that until the nose is up and he realizes he’s no longer riding a spacecraft, he’s flying a high-speed, heavyweight glider, and probably headed in the wrong direction.

I don’t want to go due east, do I?

He looks back down at the screen, relieved suddenly to see airfields indicated, apparently in response to the reconfiguration of the tail. But the direction he’s now flying, at nearly five hundred miles per hour, is showing no airports within the purple arc on the screen that he assumes is his gliding range and he banks back left, startled at the responsiveness of the craft and frightened by the descent rate which is over twelve thousand feet per minute.

He can barely see anything through the small windows with the seat pitched back, and he remembers he’s supposed to change it upright again. He moves the two levers on the right of the command chair, relieved when the seat slides back into a normal pitch.

He pulls the nose up more, diminishing the descent rate and the forward airspeed as he shifts his eyes to the screen.

There’s got to be an airport beneath me somewhere! Kip thinks, trying not to imagine the consequences of impacting the parched landscape of western New Mexico at two hundred miles per hour.

Roswell is sixty miles to the west, and it looks like the biggest and maybe the only available runway. The purple circle has increased in size as his descent rate has decreased, and he slows more now as he brings Intrepid around to a western heading, hoping to expand the range circle by slowing until it includes Roswell’s airport.

And finally it does! Roswell is within gliding distance.

But at what speed?

He’s dropping through forty thousand feet with a forward airspeed of three hundred fifty miles per hour.

Slow more… under two hundred.

He’s squeezing his memory for every ounce of his limited flying experience, and decides that finding the stall speed is the most important element.

He brings the nose up even more, now to almost twenty-degrees nose-high, watching the rate of descent decrease to nearly zero as he trades airspeed for maintaining altitude.

One ninety. She’s still controllable.

He’ll let her slow, he figures, until the nose drops suddenly and he’s in a stall, then he’ll simply recover like all airplanes recover. At least he’s always assumed that’s how it works.

One hundred sixty.

She’s mushy now but still flying, the nose way high, and suddenly he realizes the descent rate has started increasing again quickly to four thousand feet per minute even with the nose up at almost thirty degrees above the horizon.

Somewhere he’s read about this sort of thing, a stall in a high-speed jet with the nose up, and he feels the cold possibility that he’s gone too far.

Kip shoves the control stick forward, but nothing happens. The nose remains high, the airspeed languishing at one hundred sixty knots. He’s falling straight down with Intrepid’s belly in a nearly horizontal position, and the descent rate is now over ten thousand feet per minute as he comes through thirty thousand, feeling again fear creep into his gut. In a nanosecond his mind has dredged up all the old feelings of insecurity and assaulted the incredible idea that he could survive everything else and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by screwing up basic flight. How dare he try something he didn’t fully understand? Now Intrepid is stuck in a nose-up stall, and even as he starts rocking the wings back and forth, she won’t come out of it. It’s like he’s back in the reentry configuration, his ship’s belly to the ground as he screams toward it. The impact will be too great to feel, of course. He’ll simply disintegrate. But how damned unfair that he could come this far and still die.

Something in that last series of thoughts snags, and a kaleidoscope of images flashes through his mind until the tail appears clear and unmistakable as the solution. The hydraulic pump keeping the tail in a horizontal position for reentry is still on!

With one quick stab at the appropriate button he once more ports the hydraulic pressure to unlock the twin boom tail and move it toward the UP position, poising his finger over the opposite control switch as he feels the