The getaway special

by Jerry Oltion

  "Spy or not, I'm trying to save your lives. If you take an EDM, you'll burn up in the atmosphere."

  "What makes you so sure of that?"

  "I was on the committee that approved them."

  Was he? Judy tried to remember, but astronauts were on so many committees she could never keep straight who was on what. But even if he was, should she believe him about the modules' safety?

  NASA would never approve an emergency system that didn't work, would they? If an emergency ever happened, it would make them look even worse than if they had no system at all. Gerry said, "I mean it. Judy might survive if she goes alone and skips a couple of times before she takes the final drop, but Allen, you're fifty pounds too heavy. Even if you take your own module, you'll go down like a meteor the whole way."

  Judy finished loading her pockets. "Bullshit, Gerry. The EDMs are old technology. It worked with the Gemini capsules, and it'll work now. Allen, put on your suit." He didn't move. "Are you sure, Judy? What's Gerry got to gain by lying to us?"

  "I'll tell you what he's got to gain," Judy said as she straightened out the bottom half of her spacesuit, did a half somersault, and stuck both feet at once through the waist ring into the legs. "Two more scapegoats to share the blame with. Without us, all the heat's going to fall on him." Allen didn't look convinced, especially not when Gerry laughed and said, "Nice rationalization, Judy, but it doesn't change anything. Those EDMs are death traps." Judy didn't have the time to argue with him. She would have just ignored him, but Allen wasn't suiting up, and they had to be out the airlock before Carl docked the shuttle with the space station; otherwise their airlock would open directly into captivity. So she said the only thing she could think of to convince him.

  "All right, Gerry, I'll call your bluff. How about if I let you come with us?"

  "What?"

  "If I turn you loose, I'm betting you'll opt for an EDM, too." Gerry bit his lip, then laughed. "No way. Besides, there's only two spacesuits."

  "I'd carry you in a rescue ball. Unless those are bogus, too." Rescue balls were another cost-and weight-saving idea: instead of providing spacesuits for the entire crew, the shuttle carried half a dozen yard-wide airtight balls. In an emergency, the odd men out climbed inside them with portable oxygen tanks, zipped them tight, and had the astronauts with spacesuits carry them through the airlock to safety. Gerry thought it over for a long moment, then he said, "All right. Let me go." Judy nodded. "Okay, just a minute." To Allen she said. "There, you see? He was lying. Put on your suit."

  Allen looked once more at Gerry, clearly not convinced, but he began to suit up. Judy reached for the top half of her own suit and pulled it on, linking the waist rings, then putting on the gloves.

  "Let me out first," Gerry said. "I'll get the rescue ball."

  "Hold on," Judy told him. She helped Allen on with his own suit and gloves, then before she set his helmet in place she said, "Don't use the radio. Carl will overhear us if you do. I don't want him to know we're there until we're already out the airlock."

  Allen nodded. Judy secured his helmet and helped him into the airlock, then started to follow him. She was lowering her own helmet into place when Gerry shouted, "Hey, let me out of here!" She twisted around to face him. "You lied to me, I lied to you. Consider us even, Gerry." He growled and tugged at the sliding panel that held him captive, but the wire tying it shut held fast.

  "I wasn't lying about the descent modules!" he shouted. "I never planned to get that far! I was going to take over the ship again and fly it to Mir."

  Mir II was a duplicate of the old Soviet space station, launched by the Russians in a fit of nationalistic pride when they got kicked off the American project, but they had quickly run out of money to maintain it and had to sell it to the French. Judy supposed Gerry could still get political asylum there, if he ever made it that far. But he never would, and he knew it. He'd be a sitting duck for days while he transferred from Freedom's orbit to Mir's. If the U.S. didn't shoot him down, somebody else was sure to.

  "Sorry, Gerry," she said as she pulled herself into the airlock, "but I just don't believe you."

  "I hope you go down in flames!" he shouted. "I hope you feel it the whole way down! I hope you—"

  She slammed the airlock door and cut him off.

  8

  Two people in an airlock made for a tight fit. "Are you sure about this?" Allen asked, his voice about half an octave higher than usual. Even with full air pressure around them he was barely audible with two layers of glass between his mouth and her ears; she read his lips as much as heard the words.

  "Sure I'm sure," she said with exaggerated mouth motions. She turned the airlock depressurization control knob to 5 psi, held it a minute to make sure the suits weren't going to leak, then turned it to zero. While they waited for the air to bleed out, she turned her head until her face was right in front of his and said, "As soon as we get out, grab your hyperdrive canisters and follow me to the descent module." I can't hear you, he mouthed, leaning in to touch his helmet against hers.

  "That doesn't work," she said. "You have to read lips." It doesn't work? He looked like a kid who'd just learned that the Tooth Fairy wasn't real.

  "Not enough surface area in contact," she said.

  I'll be damned, it doesn't work. What did you say?

  She spoke slowly and enunciated each word separately. " I . . . said . . . get . . . your . . . hyperdrive . . . canisters . . . and . . . follow . . . me." Right.

  When the airlock pressure fell to half a psi, Judy opened the outer hatch. The last of the air puffed out in one final whoosh, and she let it pull her out. Swinging around the edge of the hatch, she helped Allen through, then pulled herself down onto a flat package in the cargo bay where she could get a good solid surface to kick off from toward the space station overhead. It was only twenty feet away or so; Gerry had nearly held them back too long.

  They didn't have time for the Manned Maneuvering Unit, the thruster chair that they normally used for moving around in space, nor did they have time to set up a cable and traverse the distance with carabiners. They would have to jump free. While Allen unstrapped his hyperdrive engine, Judy kicked off. For a heart-wrenching moment she was sure she'd screwed up and would miss the space station entirely and drift off into space until she ran out of air, but at such a short distance she'd have had to be trying hard to keep from hitting something. As it was, she'd gone nearly straight up; she had to push off from the stations airlock and scramble along handholds to reach the descent modules. Carl had seen her pass over his target. The radio came to life with his frantic call, "Judy, what the hell are you doing out there?"

  She didn't answer. Every second counted now. If the station had someone suited up and waiting in the airlock, he could still stop them.

  "Judy, answer me."

  She pulled herself up against the closest descent module, opened the hatch, and climbed inside. It was a tiny thing, barely big enough for the two seats it held. Judy crawled into the one farthest from the door and studied the control panel. It was simple enough; a power switch, a switch to blow the bolts holding the module to the station, a joystick to control the attitude thrusters, and a single red button labeled "Retro." Gauges and radio controls and manual overrides for the retro jettison and parachute release systems filled up the rest of the panel, but she had seen more complicated kitchen appliances. She flipped the switch that put the emergency locator beacon in manual mode, made sure the manual switch was set to "Off," then she flipped the main power switch and smiled when the green light above it lit up.

  "Who do you think you are?" Carl demanded. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? You're in space, for god's sake! You can't just steal a horse and ride out of town!"

  "Wanna bet?" she muttered, but her mic was still off. She leaned back out the hatch to see how Allen was doing. He had one of the canisters loose, and was working on the other. Judy waited nervously while he got the second one free, tucked one under each arm, then tilted his hea
d back to see where she'd gone. She waved at him from the hatch of the descent module. He waved back, but nearly lost the canister under his right arm. He grabbed it again, but that motion lifted him off from the cargo bay and started him tumbling. He realized his predicament instantly, but instead of waiting for Judy to come get him, he kicked out with his left leg, evidently hoping to at least get himself moving toward her.

  It didn't work. Judy watched, helpless, as he tumbled away at a forty-five degree angle. He'd managed to do the nearly impossible; it looked like he was going to miss the entire station, and there was nothing Judy could do to help him. If she jumped to intercept him, they'd both float off into space, and if she took the time to clip her safety line to a handhold, she'd never reach him. The radio was a confusion of voices, Carl calling "Man overboard," Mary shouting orders to someone else inside the station, and ground control demanding to know what was going on. Judy was about to switch on her transmitter and tell them to shut up and do something useful, like send someone out with an MMU, when Allen did the only thing he could do to save himself: he took the canister from under his right arm and threw it as hard as he could out into space.

  Judy gasped. The hyperdrive! Or part of it, anyway. She hoped Allen had saved the valuable half. It didn't look like he'd even stopped to consider it, though; he'd just thrown what he'd had in his hand. The canisters weighed nearly a hundred pounds each; the reaction was more than Allen had expected. He nearly swept by the station on the other side, but Judy scrambled out of the descent module, gripped a handhold, and stuck her feet out in his path. He grabbed her boot on his way past and pulled her over backward hard enough to pop joints in her spine, but she held on and let him climb down her body until he reached the handhold.

  He paused with his helmet next to hers and mouthed a single word: Thanks.

  "Any time," Judy replied. "Come on, let's go before Carl sends the cavalry after us." She pointed inside.

  She let Allen climb in first this time, motioning for him to sit in the far seat with the remaining canister on his lap, then she climbed in after him and pulled the hatch shut. She flipped the separation switch, and the module shuddered as the explosive bolts freed them from the station. With the joystick, Judy rolled it over until she had a clear shot out through the payload bay; then she used the forward thruster to move them free of both the station and the shuttle. She kept up the thruster burn until they were moving away at a couple dozen feet per second; at that speed they could fire the retros in less than a minute without damaging anything with their exhaust.

  She checked her suit's oversize digital wristwatch. They were about halfway through their descent window. Good; that meant if they missed a little they'd still come down somewhere in North America. Judy hoped it would be someplace rural, but she would take what she could get. Carl and Mary and ground control were all still shouting at her. Their combined voices were nothing but a distracting babble, so Judy switched them off. She swung the descent module around until the nose was pointed backward in their orbit, and when she was sure she had it lined up right, she pushed the big red "Retro" button.

  Acceleration slammed her back in the seat. The shuttle spacesuits weren't designed to be sat in under thrust; Judy felt all the internal hoses and seams pressing into her back and legs, and the waist ring drew a painful line between her kidneys. She tugged at it until it fit into the hollow of her back. The thrust died away as the retro rocket burned the last of its fuel, and they were once again in free fall. Judy nudged the joystick left a little to keep them lined up properly, and waited for the first contact with the atmosphere.

  It came as a gentle rocking, easily corrected with the thrusters. Then a little heavier, buffeting rather than rocking. Judy corrected for that, too, keeping the heat shield beneath them aimed straight into the onrushing air. She could feel the drag now, pushing her into the seat the same way the retro rocket had. Only this time the force didn't stop at one gee. It built up, two gees, three, more. With the gee force came the fireball. Long streaks of flame shot past the hatch window, engulfing the entire capsule.

  Judy looked over at Allen. He was looking out at the flames with eyes as wide as fried eggs, and his mouth was gaping open. Judy couldn't tell if he was screaming or just hyperventilating.

  "It's all right," she told him. "It's an ablation shield. It's supposed to do this." Then a big flaming chunk of something swept past the window, and the capsule pitched violently to the side.

  9

  Judy tugged hard on the hand controller, trying to right the capsule before it started tumbling. For a moment the attitude jets strained against whatever force had pushed them to the side, but just as the jets seemed about to win, the capsule gave another lurch and tilted the other way. Judy felt them go completely over, the seat harness digging into her shoulders and the capsule shuddering ominously as they plowed headfirst into the atmosphere.

  That should have been impossible. They were weighted all wrong for that attitude. The center of gravity was down below the seats in order to keep them aimed bottom-first in their descent. To turn them the other way, something had to be trailing away behind them like the tail of a kite, and as soon as Judy realized that, she knew what it was. The retro rocket. It hadn't jettisoned automatically after firing, and since all her experience had been with the reusable shuttle, she hadn't done it manually, either. Now it was back there on the heat shield, disrupting the air flow and holding them at the wrong attitude. Judy reached forward to the violently pitching control panel and flipped the manual jettison switch, but nothing happened. The electrical connection to the explosive bolts had already burned through. Unfortunately the bolts themselves hadn't gotten hot enough to blow, or their problem would have been solved.

  They only had a few seconds in their headfirst attitude before the capsule would burn up. Judy shoved the controller hard to the side and the capsule pitched over, but with the retro rocket trailing behind, it wouldn't go all the way. She rolled the capsule to the other side, the motion throwing her hard against Allen, who held the getaway special canister tight to his body to keep it from flying loose and bouncing around inside the capsule. Judy had to roll the descent module back and forth twice more before the straps or fuel lines or whatever was holding the engine on gave way and the capsule once again flipped around to ride blunt end first.

  Another piece of flaming debris swept past the window, but this time instead of pitching to the side, the capsule steadied out and fell smoothly through the rest of its descent. The gee force grew stronger as they dropped into thicker air. It didn't feel at all like the gees the shuttle pulled on launch and descent; this felt far more personal, as if the universe had invented a brand new force just to torment Judy and Allen. Judy gritted her teeth and concentrated on not blacking out. Terror helped immeasurably. Her heartbeat stayed up around 200 or so as she waited for the heat shield to burn through, and as she wondered how much damage those few moments of headfirst re-entry had done. The parachute was packed into a compartment in the nose of the capsule, and if that had gotten too hot—if it had melted in there, or if the release mechanism had warped enough to jam—then they were as good as dead.

  She'd know in another couple of minutes, because they were coming out of the fireball now. The bright orange flames quit roaring past the window, giving way to blue sky. They were in the lower atmosphere. Judy rolled the capsule around so she could see the ground, but was startled to find only water below.

  They'd missed. They were supposed to land somewhere in the United States, but somehow they'd missed the entire North American continent. Not only that, but Judy had no idea whether they'd overshot or undershot. She'd seen the ocean dozens of times from this vantage, but there was no way to tell whether this was the Pacific or the Atlantic.

  Then the shoreline swept past and she laughed with relief. It was a lake! Probably Lake Michigan—no, there were snow-covered mountains to the east of it. That had to have been Salt Lake, then, in Utah.

  The mountain
s rushed past below, giving way to high plains, then desert. Not good. The Air Force had no doubt tracked the fireball on the way down, and even though the descent module was invisible to radar now, they could calculate within a few dozen miles where it was going to land. In a forest or a city, Judy and Allen might have time to escape before anybody could get a helicopter out to capture them, but if they landed in the desert they might as well just switch the emergency beacon back on and wait to be picked up. Especially in this desert; Judy could see snowdrifts in the lee of whatever vegetation was down there. Even the most inept tracker in the world could follow them through snow. The attitude jets wouldn't alter their ground path enough to matter, and the only engine that could—the retro rocket—was a burned-up lump of metal falling on its own trajectory miles away. The only thing Judy could do to change their course would be to deploy the parachute early, and hope they had already slowed down enough that the shroud lines wouldn't snap the moment the 'chute filled out. Assuming it opened at all.

  Not yet, though. The gee force was easing off, but they were still braking, which meant they were still way above terminal velocity. Judy looked over at Allen, who was trying to say something to her, but the capsule was bouncing too much for her to read his lips and the interior was still in vacuum so his voice didn't carry. That wasn't good either; atmospheric pressure from outside could crumple the walls if there were any weak spots.

  There should have been a valve to allow air to bleed inside, but if there was, then it had melted shut or been plugged by debris. All the same, they needed to equalize the pressure, so Judy did the only thing she could think of under the circumstances; she blew the hatch.

  She'd trained for explosive decompression before, but never for the reverse. Even at their high altitude, air rushing to fill the vacuum slammed her sideways into Allen, then shoved him against the wall of the capsule. Sound returned, the sound of wind shrieking through the open hatch frame, tugging at the canister in Allen's lap and flapping the loose ends of their harnesses against their heads and shoulders. Nuts to this, Judy thought, reaching out to the parachute switch and flipping the toggle. She heard the bang this time, and a moment later a jolt as the drogue 'chute streamed away, filled out, and pulled the main 'chute after it.