Callahan's Key

by Spider Robinson

  The only improvement I would suggest would be a more flexible policy regarding number of legs. I understand why they need to keep out dogs, but I wish they’d make an occasional exception for sentient ones who have taught themselves to use human plumbing. (Really—I’ve seen it.) Ralph insisted he didn’t mind waiting out in the parking lot, and later loudly claimed to have had a splendid time with a cute little Airedale in the same fix, but we all knew better. It’s just not fair, that’s all.

  On the other hand, since there were no other dogs inside, there was nothing for Pixel to cause a commotion by killing.

  The rest of us, though, all went to bed that night happily exhausted. It’s so rare in this life that you feel like you got what you paid for. We’d only scratched the surface, of course—you could spend a month at Disney World and not see it all—but somehow that awareness only made what we had experienced the sweeter. We could come back. When my head hit the pillow, one of my last thoughts was it doesn’t get much better than this.

  And then the next morning, of course, we all got up early and went to see a genuine miracle.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Static Test Site Road

  “For NASA, space is still a high priority.”

  —J. Danforth Quayle, September 5, 1990

  WE LEFT DISNEY WORLD

  just before dawn, in the most orderly and timely departure of our trip to date. A good thing, as I got us lost twice on the way. Jim Omar and the Lucky Duck had left even earlier, at high speed in the horrid little VW, and of course since the Duck was involved the timing worked out perfectly. Just as I was standing at the edge of the traffic jam from hell, trying to breathe pure carbon monoxide and having one of the most surreal conversations of my life with a Florida state trooper who wanted me to move all those ugly friggin’ buses right God damn it now, Omar and Ernie came roaring up along the shoulder, back from Merritt Island, waving from the passenger window the stack of magic orange stiff-paper rectangles they’d managed to wheedle out of a guy Omar knew from his college days. It’s always pleasant to watch a hard-on in a uniform detumesce. Clout can be a beautiful thing—when you’ve got it.

  The orange cards were distributed one to a bus, placed prominently in their front windows, and one by one we pulled onto the shoulder and drove slowly and smugly past hundreds of other stopped vehicles full of envious strangers. When we came to the huge barrier that was stopping them all, beefy cops horsed it out of our way and gestured us through. We were waved through a couple of checkpoints, stopped and very briefly questioned at a third, then passed over a small bridge and found ourselves on a two-lane road through flat tidal plain country. Deep drainage ditches on either side of the road, nothing much visible in any direction except wet-looking tall grass. The sun was up by now, and there was fog on the ground here and there.

  Shortly we found ourselves on the tail end of a slow moving line of cars, most of them considerably more expensive-looking than anything we had. We tooled along for a while at about twenty miles an hour, and once or twice the line stopped altogether for a minute or two, when more important vehicles up ahead had a use for that particular road.

  I didn’t mind a bit. My hands were trembling so badly from excitement that I’d have had trouble controlling my bus at anything over twenty. I heard my own pulse playing a Krupa solo in my ears, I could feel myself grinning like an idiot, my voice when I spoke sounded to me like a chipmunk on methedrine. Zoey and Erin were equally buzzed, and probably so was everyone in the caravan. Even Pixel felt it; he sat rigid on Erin’s lap with his head thrust forward, staring out ahead and purring as loud as the bus in low gear.

  And then suddenly we were there.

  Find a spot, pull approximately into it, brake to shuddering halt, slam her in neutral, set brake, kill engine, leave keys, crank open door, spring for the stairs, bounce off wife, spring for stairs again, trip over cat, fall backward, land heavily, whack skull, feel daughter leap down onto chest from car seat and run down torso to stairs, curse feebly, spring for stairs again, fall down stairs onto hard blacktop, whack forehead, get up, postpone checking for broken bones or concussion and join thundering herd sprinting uphill past the souvenir stands and portable toilets to the viewing area—

  —where, like everyone else, I stopped in my tracks and stared, gaped, gawked, slack-jawed as a country yokel seeing his first transsexual hooker, awestruck as an atheist in Paradise, silent on a peak in Florida—

  —stared, with my own personal eyeballs, across no more than a couple of miles of stunningly beautiful country, at an honest to God spaceship, right there at the edge of the shining sea.

  Apparently Omar’s friend had prudently concluded that our caravan was just a little too flagrantly weird for the Kennedy Space Center’s main VIP site; the passes he’d supplied us were for the secondary VIP viewing area on Static Test Site Road. I didn’t give a damn. I was forty-something years old and I was standing in a fucking spaceport.

  The weather was less than ideal; there was a good deal of ground fog, and the air was on the chilly side. I didn’t give a damn about that either. Let ’em hold! I was prepared to wait—to stand right there in that spot without shifting my weight or shitting my pants—for a week if necessary.

  Suddenly I let out a squeak, spun in my tracks, and sprinted back downhill to the parking area, for the binoculars we had all forgotten when we’d spilled off the bus. I collected all three pairs, plus a reference book, the camera, and a collapsible tall chair for Erin to sit in, so I wouldn’t have to carry her on my shoulders to let her see over the heads of the crowd. Then I sat on the bottom step and waited for my breathing and pulse to return to normal—it seemed a poor idea to die just now—then I got up and trudged slowly back up the hill. Stopping along the way at a tourist-vacuum to load myself down further with two coffees, an apple juice, film, postcards, a NASA sunhat for Erin, NASA ballcaps for myself and Zoey, and three pairs of sunglasses. Fortunately I was able to offload an awful lot of money. With my total mass thus lowered, I was able to achieve escape velocity, and reached the top of the hill before my main engine ran completely out of fuel.

  While I was setting up Erin’s high chair and lifting her into it with the last of my strength, Pixel drank about a third of my coffee. I claimed it from him and finished it, then aimed my binoculars across the Banana River at Pad 39-B, and began serious gawking.

  She was fucking gorgeous.

  Discovery, she was. Flight STS-29, the twenty-eighth Shuttle mission. (STS-28, Columbia, had developed serious problems, we were told, and would not lift until the following August.) A heartbreakingly beautiful sight, standing there against the sky. This would only be the second launch since the Great Hiatus that had followed the Challenger Tragedy—the horrid pause that might well have turned into the end of the space program, if blessed Richard Feynman had not thought of a novel use for a glass of ice water. For a while I had feared I might never have a chance to see such a sight as this again.

  All my reading had not prepared me for how big she was. Oh, I know the Space Shuttle is a midget compared to the old Apollo Program boosters—from where I stood, I could see that the immense doors of the Vehicle Assembly Building off to the left were almost twice as tall as they needed to be to pass a Shuttle. But knowing that brontosaurs once walked the earth does not diminish the impact of your first close-up encounter with an elephant. I could not believe they proposed to hurl that enormous massive object into the air, so high that it wouldn’t come down until it was damn good and ready. I felt an enormous thrill of pride to belong to a species that could even conceive of a thing so splendidly arrogant—let alone pull it off.

  There were maybe two hundred or so of us scattered across that bluff. Some were sober serious professionals, busy setting up complex and obviously expensive equipment of various kinds. Dozens of others had set up simple tripods, and were mounting and testing either cameras or video gear. An equal number was preparing for handheld work—and perhaps half the total crowd had co
me simply to watch. Two boomboxes could be heard, one softly playing anonymous music, one somewhat louder tuned to a local newsfeed. Two giant and powerful loudspeaker towers were supplying us with live transmissions between Mission Control and Discovery’s flight deck, but at this point in the launch sequence, exchanges were infrequent and usually incomprehensible.

  I had my breath back under control, but my heart was still hammering like mad. I could feel it.

  “Can you see okay, Pumpkin?” I asked my daughter.

  “It looks foggy down there, Daddy,” Erin said. Sitting there high on her aluminum throne in her yellow sundress and sunglasses, she looked quite regal. “Do you think they’ll launch on schedule?”

  She was right: Discovery stood somewhere between ankle-deep and knee-deep in ground fog. But the sun had risen well above it by now. “Hard to say, honey. They never have once, so far. But they might—or they might come close, anyway. The sun will burn that off pretty quick, I think.”

  Behind me, Jim Omar’s voice said, “Two-hour hold, max—if nothing else goes wrong.”

  “Well, tell ’em not to hurry on my account,” Zoey said, tugging at Erin’s yellow sundress to straighten it. “This is a nice place to sit and be.”

  “Amen,” Omar said.

  His diagnosis was prophetic: that bird was scheduled to lift at 8 A.M., and it was only a little after 10 when they went into the final countdown.

  Okay, you’ve probably seen film or video footage on TV. But if you haven’t been to a launch, at least as close as the thousands of cars stacked up back out on the highway, you just don’t know anything about it.

  At first the world is nothing but horizon, endless ocean and sky, all of it still, tranquil, serene. Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree Spielberg, rich and vivid. Lazy clouds overhead, a flight of birds just visible gliding low over marsh flats in the distance, a few boats out on the water. The stillness is not perfect—there is the countdown bellowing out of those superb speaker horns, and there is the internal thunder of elevated pulse—but basically the world is as it has always been: at rest, indifferent to anything any of the scurrying ants on its surface might come up with.

  Then Hell breaks loose.

  A dirty white explosion spreads in all directions. At its center, beneath the stacked array, a Beast is born. It is mighty. And angry. Its roar shatters the world, splits the sky, echoes up and down the Florida coast and miles out to sea. You thought you knew what to expect, but this is louder. The sound is tangible, hits you with physical force, vibrates up your legs from the ground beneath your feet, scares the living shit out of you. Your first thought is that you are witnessing a disaster even more awful than Challenger: an on-the-pad explosion.

  Then the Beast’s two big brothers wake up—the giant solid rocket boosters—and Heaven, Hell, Purgatory, and Limbo all break loose together and start to argue. The sound is indescribable, just short of unbearable. So insensate is the rage of this new Beast that the world itself will not have it. No matter that something the size and weight of an apartment building is sitting on its back: it lifts from the ground on a raving column of its own fury and rises impossibly into the air, becomes a thick growing tower of white smoke, the 128-ton Shuttle stack balanced on top like a Ping-Pong ball on the stream from a firehose. The bonds of Earth can be as surly as they like: the Beast is surlier, shrugs its terrible shoulders, and slips them clean.

  You realize that you are pounding your hands together and screaming “Go, baby, go!” like an idiot at the top of your lungs, and you gather that everyone around you is doing the same, but you can’t hear any of it. Part of you wishes you had control of your hands so that you could take photos like you planned to, and another part is amused at the audacity of the notion that this literally earthshaking event could possibly be squeezed through a pinhole and captured on a piece of celluloid smaller than a matchbook. Instead you watch in reverent terror as a utensil built by bald apes flings ninety-seven tons of metal and plastic two million miles.

  With five live men aboard.

  You can read about something like that, and see it on television, and spend a large portion of your leisure hours trying to imagine what it must be like and thinking about what it means, and you think you get it. You’re a space buff: if anybody gets it, you do. And I suppose you do—as an intellectual concept. Then you go there and see it with your own eyes, feel it with your own bones…and are astonished to discover that only now, for the first time, do you really Get It. Until now space travel had been real to me in the same sense that World War II was real to me, or China: I’d been told about it and had no reason to doubt what I’d been told. Now I got it.

  My automatic pilot reminded me I hadn’t checked on Erin in too long; I snatched a glance, saw her just behind me, in her chair where she belonged, and turned back to the spectacle.

  For two million years it had been only a fantasy, a monkey dream. For the first fifteen years of my own life it had still been only a fantasy, something a teacher or a scientist might laugh at you for believing in. For the next quarter century it had been a news story—one that seemed to bore most of my fellow citizens silly. But now it was reality—real reality; that is, the part experienced by me—and the two-million-year-old dream had really come true:

  The species I belonged to had figured out how to climb the biggest tree there is. We were already becoming familiar with its lowest branches.

  In that moment, I knew, as fact, with utter certainty, that one day we were going to climb all the way to the top. Nothing was going to prevent us. Not presidents, proxmires, press, public opinion, economic forces, or nuclear winter.

  No, it could be delayed, but it could not be stopped. This was evolution in action, before my eyes. As surely as we had come down out of the trees, as surely as we had crawled up out of the tidal pools in the first place, we were going to do this thing.

  As long as we don’t end the universe first, came the thought, and suddenly I was terrified.

  When Nikola Tesla had first told me I had to save the universe I thought I Got It. Hell, I’d helped save the world, twice: what was the big deal? Glibness, flipness, denial. Now I got it.

  Sometime in the next ten years or so, I was going to be involved in something alongside which this paradigm-shifting world-shaking thing I was now experiencing was an utterly insignificant event.

  This had only required billions of dollars, millions of people, and a few centuries of scientific advance. But for my immensely more important and difficult task, I had access to…my wife, my kid, and a bunch of rummies personally known to me to be collectively about as reliable as an Internet connection.

  The big white beanstalk rose toward heaven, carrying a truck, carried it so high that it appeared to dwindle away to nothing at all, while I stood there and felt myself sweating.

  I was snapped out of my fog by the sound of Long-Drink McGonnigle’s annoyed voice behind me. “Where the hell are they going?”

  Low Earth Orbit, of course; what the hell did he mean? I turned to him, saw him looking around and glaring. So I looked around myself.

  The crowd was leaving.

  Half of them were already gone, disappearing down the slope past the souvenir stands and portable toilets toward the parking area. The rest were in the last stages of disassembling tripods, packing gear, collecting possessions, clearly about to depart. Some were taking their time about it, but clearly only because they knew there was going to be a jam-up out in the parking lot: none of them watched the white beanstalk anymore, and none of them appeared to pay the slightest attention to the two speaker towers, which were still broadcasting live transmissions.

  I couldn’t believe it.

  Three college kids near me finished strapping up their packs and started to amble away. I put out a hand to stop one of them. “Excuse me, but where the hell are you going?”

  He stared at me. “Daytona Beach. Why, you need a ride?”

  “No, I mean…I mean…how the hell can you go?” I gestured
helplessly at the curving white beanstalk above us, and the glowing dot still visible at its tip. “Now?”

  He turned and glanced at it, turned back to me. “It’s over,” he said, as one stating the obvious.

  “Over?” I scroaned. “Are you out of your fucking mind? The SRBs are still firing! It was later in the flight than this when the…” I trailed off, superstitiously unwilling to speak the Challenger’s name while there was a bird in the air.

  Zoey tugged my arm. “Jake—”

  “For Chrissake,” I told the kid, “they haven’t even reached the first abort point: at this point we don’t know if they’re going to Low Orbit or Portugal—”

  “Thirty seconds to SRB separation,” the speakers brayed.

  “—you see? It’ll be at least five more minutes before MECO—before we’ll know whether those five poor bastards are gonna live through the next four days or not.” I pointed to the nearest speaker tower. “When we do, we’ll know it before anybody else in the country. How can you possibly leave?”

  He looked at me as if I were a penguin at a zoo, with mild interest and just a trace of pity. “The show’s over, Pop,” he explained, and took off to catch up with his friends, who had paused to see if he needed help kicking the old hippie’s ass.

  “Jesus, what’s wrong with that generation?” Long-Drink asked. “Do they think all this is, like, a rock concert? One big spectacular special effect? And as soon as it’s off the screen it doesn’t exist anymore? Is this what comes of putting on Pink Floyd laser lightshows down at the Planetarium?”

  “It’s nothing to do with age,” Tommy Janssen said. “Look around.”

  He was right. People of all ages were leaving. Even people who looked intelligent, seemed educated. Everybody but me and my hundred-odd friends, most of whom were looking just as baffled as I was.