Stuart quickly scanned his instruments. Cockpit indications were still good, except that he had already lost a major portion of his pressurized cabin air. His first thought was that a fuselage door had somehow opened. He looked at the door warning lights. They showed all the doors closed. Had a faulty window blown out? No. The decompression was much too rapid for that, and what had caused the jolt? A bomb. It had to be a bomb, he thought. What is happening back there?
Stuart looked at the cabin altimeter-the differential pressure gauge-which told him at what relative altitude the cabin pressure was. The hands of the cabin altimeter were spinning upward like those of a broken clock. The cabin pressure, which had always been kept at 10,000 feet, was now at 19,000 feet. Losing pressure. Hold the pressure. They were losing the artificial atmosphere that they had brought with them-this atmosphere from earth that made it possible to live at 62,000 feet-throwing it out into subspace, through some large hole.
Stuart glanced at the two altimeters together. The ground altimeter showed that the Straton had only gotten down to 55,000 feet. The cabin altimeter showed that they now had an artificial altitude pressure of 30,000 feet, then 35,000 feet. Stuart estimated that the artificial atmosphere would bleed off at about the time the Straton hit 50,000 feet. Then the altimeters would read the same. Subspace would be in the cabin.
Stuart started to feel light-headed. Instinctively, he pushed the autopilot button back on. He slammed his hand into the automatic descent selector, pushing it to its maximum rate of descent, letting the computer bring it down as fast as it was safely possible. He sat back in his seat. His head was pounding with pain. Sinus cavities. The air pockets inside his skull could not adjust to the rapid rate of cabin altitude change. His nose began to bleed. A river of blood poured down his white shirt. His lungs had already been emptied of most of their air. He felt hollowed out. His hands and feet were cold, and he didn’t know if it was from loss of blood or loss of cabin heat.
The Straton’s four engines were sucking up and compressing the thin outside air and pumping all the pressurized air they could into the ruptured cabin. As they descended lower, the air was slightly thicker and the pressurized airflow became stronger. But Alan Stuart suspected, knew really, that it was a losing battle. There was one hell of a big hole back there, and the arithmetic of the problem… If a basin has ten gallons of water and is losing one gallon a second through the drain, and a tap is replacing a half gallon every five seconds, how long before… Too long. His head was bursting, and he couldn’t think of anything but the pain now.
Captain Stuart turned his head slowly toward McVary. McVary had strapped on the copilot’s oxygen mask and was transmitting an emergency radio message on the international distress frequency. Stuart shook his head. “Useless,” he said softly, but he also reached for his oxygen mask and pulled it on, tightening the straps hard against his face. He looked back at Fessler. Fessler was lying slumped across his desk. Blood was pouring from his mouth, ears, and nose.
McVary continued to transmit the distress signal, though his speech and thoughts were fragmented. He sucked hard on the oxygen mask as he spoke, and blood collected in his mouth and he had to swallow it.
McVary knew that the oxygen mask alone was not enough. Without a sustaining pressure to force the oxygen into and through his lungs, it was almost totally useless. The flight deck’s emergency oxygen canister, behind Fessler’s panel, could just as well be back in San Francisco for all the good it was doing them. Only a military pressure suit-a space suit-of the type he had once worn could exert the necessary pressure on his body so that he could breathe. But he knew that even if he had one, there would not have been enough time to hook it up.
Dan McVary, who as a young man had flown exotic military jets through wild maneuvers, was suddenly more frightened than he had ever been. How had this happened? Commercial transports were not supposed to completely decompress the way military craft did when they were hit in combat. The possibility of sudden decompression was so slight that it had been ignored by the aeronautical engineers who built the Straton. There were no air-lock doors or pressure bulkheads between the sections as there were watertight compartments on a ship or airtight compartments on modern dirigibles. These safety features were too heavy for an airliner. Too costly. A complete decompression was not supposed to happen. But it had. How? He wondered if airtight compartments would have helped anyway. The image of the Titanic with its so-called watertight compartments flashed through his mind. Engineering marvels… every contingency planned for… only a set of the most… the most unusual circumstances… his head was splitting and he felt a coldness deep down in his body that chilled him in a way he had never felt before. Dan McVary knew he was dying.
Captain Stuart’s vision began to blur. He pushed his face forward to read the digital clock. Over a minute had passed since he felt the jolt. The Straton was still on autopilot and was beginning to descend very rapidly. He could see that the vertical descent rate had increased to 12,000 feet per minute. They passed through 53,000 feet. The cabin pressure was up to 45,000 feet. They were definitely not going to get down to a level where the oxygen masks could be used in time to save anyone who was still able to use them. They would not get into the naturally breathable atmosphere for several minutes after that. He shook his head. They were all dead.
For an instant, Stuart considered the passengers. They were his responsibility. But there was nothing he could do, or even say. There were no slow sinkings on an aircraft, no dramatic speeches from the captain, no leisurely good-byes or farewell toasts. There were only a few minutes or seconds of horror, then death.
In the tourist cabin, the noise from the wind and escaping air had lessened considerably as the inside and outside pressure approached equilibrium. People could hear each other now, but there was very little talking. Most people sucked hard on their released overhead oxygen masks, inhaling and exhaling deeply, puzzled by the absence of that familiar feeling of having taken a good deep breath.
A coldness permeated the cabin and deepened the effects of shock and increased the effects of oxygen deprivation. Layers of condensed moisture formed along the ceiling, caused by the natural onboard water vapor that had suddenly been squeezed out by the reduced cabin pressure. The passengers stared up at these forming clouds, unsure of what they were or what they meant.
Someone yelled, “Fire!” and some people screamed, but most remained silent, accepting this new aberration, too numbed and disoriented to react. The cloud moved through the cabin like a sea fog rolling into a coastal city, casting an amorphous gray haze over the silent people. The cabin lights shone with an unearthly luminescence through the cloud. Eerie white ice particles began forming on the walls and windows. Near the starboard hole there was a brief snow flurry.
The moisture dissipated and the cabin atmosphere became dry except for the breath fog still exhaled by the living and the blood pouring from the open wounds of the dying. Blood and breath crystallized and formed frosts of red and white wherever they touched a freezing surface.
The outside sounds of the four Straton engines and the airflow past the gaping holes grew louder as the sound of the outward-rushing air lessened. These new noises filled the tourist cabin and drowned out the weak moans of the injured.
An uncounted number of people were dead or dying, and most of the rest were in shock. But it appeared that the worst of the ordeal was over. The aircraft was still flying and showed no visible signs of crashing. A strange calm, a pleasant languor simulating the effects of alcohol or tranquilizers, took hold of the passengers of Flight 52 as the first effects of oxygen deprivation began to register. There was still the pain behind the eyes, in the ears, but it did not seem so acute now.
Captain Stuart pressed his face against his console. Everything appeared dark in the cockpit, but he could see that the instrument lights were working. They shone like dying suns in a faraway galaxy, yet they seemed to emit no light beyond their surface. He read the two altimeters. Aircraft altitude was 51,000 feet, and descending. Cabin altitude was also 51,000 feet and descending now with the aircraft. The cabin differential pressure was zero. Inside was outside. Outside was inside.
The autopilot was taking the aircraft down, as fast as it could safely go, into the thicker atmosphere at 30,000 feet where they would find enough ambient pressure to make the oxygen masks workable. The rate of descent was racing against the physiological effects of anoxia-suffocation-and suffocation was winning. Stuart could see no way out of it. All the numbers-airspeed, altitude, rate of descent, rate of pressure loss-had been predictable. He knew the numbers before he had ever stepped into the cockpit of his first Straton. If only the damned hole had been smaller…
In the first-class lounge, an elderly man, John Thorndike, released his seat belt and quickly stood. A familiar sensation gripped his chest and he reached for a pillbox in his jacket. He paled, then turned blue as his heart gave out. He tottered for a moment, then fell forward across the cocktail table, landing on his wife, who tried to scream but couldn’t.
In the tourist and first-class cabins, older people began dying. Some slipped away noiselessly, others moaned their protests as hearts and lungs failed.
