“Control says it’s probably nuclear powered. Did you go inside?”
“Yeah, I had to, but only for a little while. I’m fine.”
An extended silence echoed with Wahlquist’s doubt. Then he spoke.
“Now what?”
“I sure want to get back home. How’d you like to play catcher?”
“How’s that?”
“I had to jettison the backpack to get inside. I want you to jockey the bird around where I can just jump into the bay. Can you do that?”
Jupp heard the forced bravado.
“If you can pitch it, I can catch it.”
“Great! Are you at the controls?”
“Yep. I’ve been feeling around; I’m into it. Talk to me.”
“You’re about forty-five degrees from my plane of rotation. This polecat was trying to get you in its sights again, by the way.”
“Thanks, podnuh.”
“Anytime. Let’s start simple. Give me a little port roll to get the plane of your wings perpendicular to my rotation. Not too much. Smidgen to the right. Wait’ll I go around to get another good look. Just a hair to the left. Okay, that looks pretty good. We’ll tune it up later. Now let’s see if we can get a parallel lateral shift to the right. You want to hit the front and the rear left thrusters by just the same amount. No. Too much nose! You’re moving but spinning. A little right nose! Now some right rear. Let me get my bearings, I can only see you once every twenty seconds. You’re still drifting. Give me just a light brush on the right. A little more. Okay, let me watch again for a minute.”
Jupp had realized throughout this exercise that they would never get a perfect alignment, with Wahlquist having no direct visual feedback. They might stop the spin of the shuttle, or the drift, but to get them both stabilized at once was asking too much. He could maximize his chances, but he was still going to have to hit a moving target from a merry-go-round. And he was the projectile.
He spent a few more minutes with Wahlquist until they seemed to have the drift minimized. The shuttle passed before his eyes once every twenty seconds, its open bay yawning a welcome to him. The craft hovered a little below him but had a slight upward drift. It was also in a slow clockwise spin from his perspective. He planned to push off from the Cosmos when he faced at right angles to the shuttle. His inertia from the spinning satellite would carry him sideways toward the bay. The problem was timing. Even if the shuttle were perfectly stationary, he could release too soon and be thrown past the tail; too late and he would sail helplessly past the nose. He could increase the target angle by bringing the shuttle in closer, but then there would be too great a chance of collision.
He waited until the shuttle was pointed with its long axis along his plane of rotation so that he had the best chance of landing in the bay. He worked his body around until his feet were under him. He crouched on the side of the Cosmos and held onto a brace with one hand behind him, like an ungainly swimmer about to begin a race. He waited a minute, three more revolutions, and then as he saw the tail of the shuttle come into view to his extreme left, he pushed off.
He immediately sensed his error, and the panic of falling gripped him again. He had concentrated so hard on timing his leap to the rotation that he had not paid enough attention to pushing straight off from the side of the satellite. He had pushed himself slightly upward, exactly the wrong thing to do with the shuttle a little below him. He felt as if the shuttle were drifting downward, even as he rocketed toward it, arms and legs flailing wildly in ungrippable space. He began to tumble, and as he caught occasional glimpses of the shuttle, he could see the edge of the bay drop below his inexorable path. He steeled himself to see the shuttle float by, his last connection to humanity fading in the vastness of space.
The blow nearly took his breath away, a surprising painful rap from his left shoulder blade to his right kidney. As he bounced back, he caught a twisting view of the bay rotating in his line of sight, and then a pole. He spread-eagled, reaching for his life. His left arm and leg hit it; he swung his right arm around, reaching, clawing, grabbing, hugging. And then he was still, legs tightly wrapped around the manipulating boom, his arms clasping it to his bosom. He closed his eyes and listened to the pounding of his heart, racing as never before. The sweat ran stinging rivulets into his eyes, clinched though they were. At last he opened them and looked around. The clamshell door. He had missed the cargo bay, but had collided with the edge of the extended door. He looked at the boom immediately before his eyes. Had it not been for the plastic barrier of his faceplate, he would have kissed it.
He tried to speak, choked, and then tried again.
“Larry?”
“You okay?”
“I’m home. Don’t go away; I’ll be right in.”
“Hot damn!”
Jupp shinnied his way carefully down the boom, and using handholds in the bay, made his way to the airlock. He rotated through and nearly collapsed with relief at being back within the confines of the familiar shuttle cabin. He drifted up through the hatch. Wahlquist was standing next to the pilot’s seat, waiting for him, his faceplate up, listening intently, compensating already for his lack of sight. Jupp floated to him and without thinking grasped him in a bearhug. Wahlquist was surprised for a moment, but then responded in kind and the two figures stood for a long moment locked in a cumbersome space-suited embrace.
Finally Jupp felt control return. He held Wahlquist off at arm’s length.
“Okay, buddy, we’ve got work to do. Let’s bag that bird and get out of here.”
He guided Wahlquist to the copilot’s seat and then settled into the comfortable familiarity of the pilot’s seat. He jockeyed the thrusters and loved every response of his craft. He loved his eye-hand coordination, and he loved the total absence of the terrible repellant artificial gravity that dwelt on the object out his window.
He maneuvered the shuttle until it was beneath the Cosmos once more, craning to see through the window over his head to position the boom. When he was satisfied, he moved to the boom controls at the rear of the flight deck. He released a catch and watched the life-saving mirror drift off to join the other detritus of their mission. Then he raised the boom until it was just beneath the Cosmos. He flipped the switch that set the rotatable stanchion on the end of the boom spinning and with it the payload interface claw. Monitoring the picture from the camera that spun with the claw, he adjusted the speed until the image of the bottom of the Cosmos was fixed, the claw rotating at exactly the same speed. He then closed the gap to the Cosmos and thrust the claw up into the open wound where the bottom antenna had been. He could feel the shuttle rock as the spinning claw sought a purchase on the satellite and transmitted small torques through the stationary boom. He could see the claw span a frame member and he locked it on.
Now for the tedious part. He had to slowly decrease the speed of the claw. Too fast and he could snap the boom or the brace in the Cosmos with equally disastrous results if the spinning satellite should collide with the main span of the boom. As he decelerated the tremendous angular inertia of the Cosmos, it was transferred to the shuttle, setting it spinning. Jupp called orders to Wahlquist who operated the thrusters to remove the spin.
An hour later the Cosmos and the shuttle were one in motion. Jupp slowly lowered the boom until the Cosmos was just out of the bay, the jury rigged wings that had abetted his entry blocking the final nesting. With some reluctance he floated back down through the hatch, passed through the airlock, and stared once again at the hulking satellite. He anchored a tether to his suit, pulled a torch from the rack and affixed it to his belt.
He started on the structure with which he had first collided. His skin crawled to see the gaping hole of the laser port, and its smaller, ragged companion where he had found his first grisly hand-hold. He was too fatigued to do more than a butcher job, but it still required fifteen minutes to sever the blunt structure and shove it off into space. He continued around, doing two more in three-quarters of an hour. He was b
one tired. He floated back to the deck of the bay and scanned the remains. He was sure he could position the thing to one side of the bay so that the final wing would fit. God help them if it bounced around during re-entry. He hung up the torch, detached the tether and slipped back through the airlock.
More careful manipulation of the boom brought the Cosmos into the bay, the remaining wing just clearing the hinges where the port clamshell would close. He hit the switch and watched the doors swing shut on their captive with the relief of a beleaguered traveler whose suitcase finally closes. He journeyed once again into the bay and secured the huge bulk as well as possible with various cables and clamps.
For a final time he floated up onto the flight deck and buckled himself into the pilot’s seat. He programmed the computer and they began the descent to near Earth orbit. He suggested to Wahlquist that he discuss with mission control the best mode of re-entry with an evaporated vertical stabilizer, tilted his chair back, and slipped into a heavy sleep.
He awoke fighting the sleep, caught in a fear that if he did not arouse now he never would. He could sense without opening his eyes that the booster was not firing. They were in parking orbit.
“Back in a minute,” he told Wahlquist, as he pried himself out of his chair. Down on the operations deck he stripped off his gloves and undid his helmet. He went to the medicine cabinet and washed down a couple of benzedrine tablets. Wouldn’t do to sleep through re-entry.
Back in the pilot’s seat, he listened intently to Wahlquist. They had immediately concluded that a routine landing at the Cape was out of the question. Emergency crews were assembling on the dry lake expanses of Edwards Air Force Base in the Mohave. Part of the vertical stabilizer was still intact and the guess was that it would provide sufficient stability during re-entry. The problem was that maneuvering in the atmosphere would be severely hampered. They could make some gentle turns with judicious use of wing spoilers, but without the rudder a proper coordinated turn was impossible. Not a job for computers, no programs were written for laser-blasted equipment. Jupp had to fly. He’d known that as he fell asleep, and as he had pawed for the stimulant.
His senses were keen as they did the final burn to start their descent. They began in standard orbital orientation, upside down, rockets pointed in their direction of travel. The rockets thrusted and they dropped into an ever lower, ever faster trajectory. As they entered the atmosphere, they flipped over to the normal atmospheric configuration, nose forward, tiled belly down into the heat. Jupp immediately felt the vibration. Something was wrong with the damaged tail. The mangled remains of the rudder still clung to the lower portion of the vertical stabilizer. The vibration grew to a teeth-clattering shudder. Jupp felt a cool wisp of irony amidst his fear. They would die now together, the shuttle and the Cosmos, after being through so much.
His mind raced, scenes of childhood, his technician’s sense wondering what would give out first, a wing come off, a rupture in the hull? Then in a heartbeat it was gone. The shorn rudder succumbed to its own lack of aerodynamic perfection. The tremendous heat of re-entry ablated and then finally swept it away.
They came out of radio blackout only fifty miles off course. Jupp applied a little spoiler. Not the most perfect turn, his flight instructor would have washed him out had the ball drifted that much in training, but they were back on course. There were the chase planes. God, they were lovely! There was the strip. No graceful turns for position, they were going right down the pipe.
He was going to miss the painted center stripe by a quarter mile, but he couldn’t worry about that. Without the capacity for a coordinated turn he could not risk a destabilizing crab this close to the ground. A bit too hot, too. Can’t be helped. Flaps down. Gear down. Nose up, drop the forward speed as much as possible. Wasn’t this strip supposed to be long? Isn’t that the warning marker? Nose higher, ease her down. Now, nose down, even her up, here we go, flare, flare! Down, bounce, down, down, DOWN!
Jupp heard the ground crew swarm over the craft. He began the post-flight shutdown, responding automatically to prompts from ground control. We’re down, he thought. We made it. We brought the son-of-a-bitch back. I should feel happy. I do feel happy. He looked over at Wahlquist. Below the sightless eyes was a wide, relieved grin.
Then he felt the first grip of nausea.
Chapter 4
Rhein Haartvedt hurried along the narrow, dirty street in the fading light, trying to place his carefully polished shoes in the least distasteful spots, his thoughts eddies of conflicting currents. He badly wanted to give this speech, his maiden public stand against apartheid, but conflicting images of past and future crowded his mind. The knowledge tore at him that the way of life that had nourished him, and that his loved ones loved, must be destroyed. He pictured his father: tall, stern, and unyielding, fair in his own way, but blind to the screaming inequities of their system. He imagined his family—father, mother, two sisters—shocked, hounded, uprooted, deprived of their privileged existence, and he felt the pain they would feel at his perceived betrayal.
He paused in a rutted intersection and looked again at the crude map Roy M’Botulu had scrawled for him. Roy was wise, witty, urbane. Unbelievable that he came from this place. Rhein tried to ignore it, but the repulsive poverty and ignorance radiated at him from every angle. To subjugate someone like Roy was a crime of monstrous proportions, but was it conceivable that these people could ever be raised from the squalor in which they mired themselves? As a child, he knew in his heart that it was wrong that all the faces at the table should be white, all the hands serving, black. Roy had carefully fanned that flame of disquiet, had shown him the depraved depths of the sin of man against man. He believed those words, had made them his own, and wanted to fight for Roy’s cause, but the quiet passions of a coffeehouse were not reflected in the dim reality surrounding him now. Could these people really rule themselves?
A greater question, could they rule Rhein’s people? Irrationally, his mind filled with an image of his mother in all her refinement banished to one of these hovels, serving some filthy hag with a scrawny child stuck on one teat. Rhein shook his head, banishing such thoughts. If Roy could rise above this, so could others. For the hundredth time he mentally ran through the opening lines of his speech, which were carefully memorized Swahili. According to the map, the small meeting place was just a block away, around the corner. Roy would be there to give him strength.
He peered in the dark and stepped with his left foot over a puddle. As he placed his foot on the other side and leaned forward to design his next step, he felt strangely heavy, and then he was dying.
Something shot from the puddle, shattered the femur of his extended thigh near the pelvic joint, and ripped a hole in his upper leg. Then, because he was leaning, it penetrated again at the bottom of his rib cage, blew a thumb-sized hole in his aorta, and punched out through the base of his neck, nicking his ear.
Rhein collapsed forward heavily, his hips in the puddle, his face in a pile of day-old dog shit. He struggled to turn his nose from the stench and felt the fetid water seep into his trousers. He blinked his eyes open and saw a small, fat-bellied child staring at him from a doorway. A dark circle narrowed his vision until all he could see were the eyes. White eyes. Strangely sideways. Roy’s eyes. I’m dying Roy. Trouble for Roy. I’m sorry. Roy.
* * *
Maria Latvin held the hand of the figure that lay with swaddled head against the crisp whiteness of the hospital bed. She could feel the pressure of his hand, was sure he knew she was there.
She looked through a faint mist of tears at the gray, sixtyish man who stood on the other side of the bed. Until the—accident, she had known Ralph Floyd only vaguely as manager of the operations at Paul’s laboratory.
“What are you asking of me?” she asked plaintively. “How can I do this thing?”
“Someone must care for him. You’ve seen that he responds to you. There are many people who depend on him, now we must depend on you.”
&nbs
p; “But he needs medical help. I can not do that.”
Floyd looked at the man standing quietly behind Latvin’s chair, stethoscope draped around his neck.
“Dr. Crawford has done all he can for him here at the lab in terms of immediate medical attention. His body is healthy. He is just not in complete control of it. We need someone to look after him, while we seek expert consultation for his remaining—problems.”
“But shouldn’t he be taken somewhere, to a city, to a big hospital?”
“There are many complications, my dear. He is the head of a large complex structure, far more than this lab that has been his recent headquarters. Much of this complex runs on its own without his day to day intervention or control.” Floyd shrugged. “But if he should die, there would be many problems. The situation is even worse in his present state— alive, but not competent to run his affairs. If that news should become general knowledge, the result would be chaos. You must keep him, care for him, while we seek to restore him to full health.”
Maria Latvin looked deeply into the eyes of the older man. She did not know his true motivation. Was he merely trying to maintain order in a difficult situation, or did he have deeper desires for control of this complex of which he spoke? She felt the pressure of the hand in hers again. She owed this man much. Here was a chance to hold to him, and to the life she had come to love so deeply, a bit longer.
Somebody stood up and turned on the room lights. Isaacs jerked his head up from the photograph he had been studying. In his bleariness he had not realized that the bright Sunday afternoon sun had faded. He scanned the accumulated disarray of their four-day marathon and looked out the window of the conference room. He tried for a long moment to figure out what time it must be from the purpling of the evening light. He finally remembered to look at his watch. 8:38. Eastern daylight. God, was he tired.
He thought back to the return of the shuttle, the Cosmos laser satellite. Could that have been three weeks ago? Now April was gone, spring replaced by the summer heat of early May.
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