The End of the Beginning

by Mark H Culbertson

  A hundred objections went through my mind, everything from the boys being too young, or it being too dangerous. I even thought about “don’t you think that’s a man’s responsibility?” But I didn’t say any of it. These boys knew more about responsibility than any man that I had known. By the time I looked around again, they were gone.

  I didn’t know what to say so as we drove I asked about the plans for the New Americans. Thomas told me that he had retrofitted the bus fitted for napalm cannons. I wasn’t sure what he meant by the term cannon in conjunction with napalm so I asked him. It seems that these were light metal tubes that had a lead or glass canister inside of them. The canister was filled with napalm and then fitted on the end with a wax projectile that was filled with crushed glass or jagged shards of metal. The napalm would push the projectile out of the tube when lit and shower everyone around it with glass, metal and liquid fire. Kind of like a flaming anti-personnel mine.

  I wasn’t sure it would work and said so. Mike looked at me and said “It work Ray, believe me when I say it work.” She elaborated on the plan. The idea was to push the bus down the hill into the camp of the New Americans and then detonate the tubes. There were almost 250 different tubes on the bus all pointing at different directions and elevations. The bus was loaded with over 1,100 gallons of napalm. After the last canister had fired it was set up to detonate the bus. If I hadn’t of spent a couple of weeks lying in a hospital bed because of them, I would have felt sorry for them. As it was, I just tried to shut the picture out of my mind.

  I didn’t say a lot after that. I kept trying to think of another way, but I slowly realized that it wasn’t my fight. I was getting ready to pull out. I didn’t want to but, I didn’t have a choice. The folks topside needed me. Not that they ever had before, but if I wanted our civilization to continue, I had to come through for them. Thomas, David and Robert and the rest of the people down here had a new direction to go, one that may or may not involve us.

  Chapter 13

  The plan was to stick to the old interstate system as much as possible. That kept us out of the congested areas with buildings that were close to the street and lowered the chance of ambush. We did have to pay close attention to overpasses and underpasses. Any opportunity to be blindsided had to be investigated before we stepped into it and not after it was too late.

  We were roughly twenty miles from Lambert International and it looked like we were averaging a little over twenty-five miles an hour. I wondered out loud about how the boys on horseback were going to keep up and Thomas said “you don’t have to worry about those lads, but I know you will any way so I’ll explain”. He went on to tell me how the some other boys had ridden on ahead to scout out most of the closer intersections and overpasses taking along extra fresh horses with them. The boys that left just before us would be riding cross country to reach those boys that had been rested overnight. There they would switch horses, much like the Pony Express riders of the eighteen hundreds. They would then ride parallel to and ahead of us as we moved closer to Lambert scouting the trail.

  Although they had boys camped at several points, the majority of them, along with a few of the men were camped at the intersection of I-70 and Page Boulevard. There was fresh water there and plenty of open territory that was easily defended. I asked Thomas about the possibility of attacks from inside the city. He replied “The city is dead. There are a few wild animals roaming around inside the city, some of those on two legs as well as the four legged ones. But there are no organized factions inside the city. As far as I know we are the closest organized camp to the actual city. St. Charles has a small enclave of people that we have communicated with and even traded with at times but that has decreased as the New American’s became stronger.”

  We were traveling along on what used to be the west bound lanes and were almost to Woods Mill Road when the Ford in front of us slowed and turned left off of the shoulder of the highway onto the outer road bordering the Interstate. We, as well as those behind us, followed. Mike and I looked to Thomas with questions in our eyes. Thomas grinned and said “our young escorts have spotted something ahead that they didn’t like, so they are detouring us around it.” He paused for a couple of seconds before he said, “There were a few rocks strewn across the highway. Not anything that you would really notice, unless you happened to be looking for it.”

  We bypassed the Woods Mill Road and Highway 141 exits by a circuitous route. As we got back onto Woods Mill Road from the outer road I noticed what I remembered to be a hospital on the right. The building looked like it had been bombed. Thomas noticed my look and started giving us a running commentary, like a tour guide. “The places that got hit the hardest were the hospitals and the pharmacies. The gangs from the inner cities thought that this was their chance to capitalize on the junkies. The only problem was that their supply dried up almost immediately. The gangs were organized and well armed at the time. The hospitals didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Most of the drug addicts began to starve to death in the first two weeks. They were too strung out to think of anything but getting a fix. They became desperate and turned on those that used to supply them. That’s when we started getting the massive migration of gang members out of the city. Mostly it was the older or smarter ones.

  Sometimes the entire gang would come our way. I grieve when I think of the young men and women that died at our front gate.” He was visibly moved, and shuddered as he finished the story.

  We continued along Woods Mill Road and took it north to Ladue road, there we headed west again. It was only a few minutes until we were at Interstate 270. There was one of the younger boys waiting on us there. The driver of the four wheel drive slowed as he stepped out of hiding and pulled up next to him. That’s when I realized that it was Robert. They spoke for a few minutes and then he headed back towards the Humvee. Thomas opened the door, he climbed in next to his grandfather and shut the door.

  As we started moving again, he told us that the roads between here and the airport were clear. Mike looked at him and said “but what of the roads behind us?”

  Robert grinned and said “New American’s be waiting a long time for us to come to big road with roads going many different directions.” I puzzled at that for a minute, when Thomas said “He means the intersection of Highway 61 and interstate 270. There are many different hiding places and that would be a good place for an ambush. I’m assuming that Robert and the other young men found sign that they were waiting.”

  “Yes, maybe twenty men, almost fifty dogs. They were camped south of there at a house, but were set up to follow you. We snuck in and cut fuel lines early in the morning. They will have a long walk back home.”

  Thomas grinned and said “good job my boy. At least you were able to delay them without having to kill anyone.”

  I thought this strange from a man who was willing to launch a full frontal assault on that same enemy, an assault that, if it succeeded would possibly kill several hundred of those same men as well as the women and children also in that camp.

  Mike evidently was thinking along different lines, she looked at Robert and said “how did you get past dogs?” Robert grinned and replied “take dog fur from one that we had killed before, rub it all over. Dogs don’t smell me, they smell other dog.”

  “The dog’s sense of smell has seemed to diminish as they have gotten smarter. Just like humans, the more intelligent that they get, the more they rely on their intelligence and not their senses to protect them. In this case I hope it proves to be their downfall” said Thomas thoughtfully.

  “But either way, these kids had to be within feet of those dogs. I know that they are good, but that seems pretty incredible”, I said.

  Thomas looked directly at me when he said, “Many of these young men have killed deer by jumping from trees onto their backs and then cutting their throat. Getting by a dog that doesn’t have the sense of smell or hearing that a whitetail deer has isn’t really that great of a feat for these child
ren, as you call them.”

  I began to be glad that Robert had seen the patch on my uniform before he had a chance to slit my throat. I’m not sure that I would have been able to stop him had he been so inclined.

  Mike interrupted my thoughts by saying “Steve you many want to start telling us what you know about where Prometheus is stored.”

  She was right. I began to tell them what I knew. I knew that McDonnell Douglas was on the east side of Lambert International Airport. I explained to them that we would probably have to manually run the hydraulic lifts to get her to ground level and that we would have to do some routine maintenance just to get her so that I could take off. I wasn’t worried about landing. All I had to do was get her into orbit and after that it was someone else’s problem. I started outlining a list of the spare parts that I needed to take topside, circuit boards, rubber seals, wheel bearings, anything that was light or that we couldn’t manufacture easily topside, along with any of the heavy metals that the moon did not have.

  Based on my calculations, I needed sixty percent fuel to be able to get her where I needed her. Most of the fuel consisted of Magnesium and LOX or liquid oxygen. We hadn’t used the solid rocket boosters in years. NASA had finally figured out the payload mass to fuel ratio that worked best so that we didn’t have to dump boosters every time. That and the fact that they had worked out how to utilize magnesium during the different stages of the boost in order to gain a few gees pretty well spelled the end of the solid fuel boosters and made the space stations affordable.

  During the initial boost I wouldn’t have to endure as many gees as the original shuttle crews, but I would have to endure them for longer. The original shuttle crew reached orbital velocity in about eight minutes. I would need almost two hours to reach that 7500 km per hour mark. We had changed the model for takeoff so that we didn’t take off straight up any more. The idea was to slowly accelerate while gaining altitude, then we I got to about 150,000 feet I would change my azimuth to a lower angle and increase the amount of magnesium and LOX that were hitting the engines. It was like the combination of a slingshot effect and a rock skipping across a stream. I would endure just over one gee for the initial part of the trip and jump to almost three gees when I poured on the steam. I would hit a low earth orbit height of just under 600 km in about two hours but I would have to take the long way around to get there.

  Considering that I had a crew of consisting of only me, I should be able to handle over ten tons of payload at full fuel capacity. The initial shuttles could handle over thirty tons but they also needed two million tons of propellant to put them at orbital velocity. The key was that I wasn’t sure that we would even come close to the full ten tons even if we could fully refuel. I didn’t know if there were there ten tons of useful parts left in McDonnell Douglas. But I knew that I would find out soon.

  I spent the next few minutes telling Mike that she needed to lighten the load on Nemesis as much as she could. Nemesis was already refueled and she could take off with the same payload that Prometheus could, but I was concerned with that missing front tire and how much wind drag it would present until that car hood was blown free. She nodded several times and finally put both hands on each side of my face and said “I get it. We dump everything that we don’t need. The extra stuff will be off before we try to leave ground.”

  I know what she was saying, but I didn’t believe that Mike would dump payload if she thought that she may need some of that added weight to help Thomas in his fight. But it didn’t matter. She wasn’t going to listen to me anyway. I knew it and she knew it. She was just trying to make me feel better or to forget about it. I knew that Nemesis was fully fueled and that if anyone could get her off the ground that person was Mike. I just wanted to be there or better yet have neither one of us be there.

  We were just coming into Bridgeton on I-270 when Thomas asked me how much runway I would need cleared for takeoff. I said “The longest runway at Lambert is just barely over 2 miles long. I would like to have every inch of it clear of any obstructions if I’m going to get her in the air. I’m not sure how much debris was there, but I do know that there was no way that we could attempt a landing on it.”

  Thomas looked at Mike and said “do we have enough time, is there a launch window that we are trying to hit?”

  I didn’t laugh, but Mike smiled. Launch windows had gone away when shuttles stopped going straight up. They had still been used for big payloads that were unmanned, but for manned flights that used the gradual approach your launch window was about 8 hours wide each day. If you missed the first one, another came along the next day just about 49 minutes later in the day. Since we were shooting at the moon, the idea was to meet the moon as it rose, thus cutting down on flight time. It was a bit more complicated than that but I didn’t have a NASA mission control with twenty controllers and about a dozen other people that were there just so that they could feel important. We were gonna do this by the seat of our pants. We had been doing that for the last twenty years with the station approaches, this was just on a bigger scale.

  Our driver had pulled off the road and was driving cross country, I could see the edge of the runway about a half mile in front of us. I had taken off a few times from this runway as a pilot and quite a few more as a passenger. Things were starting to look familiar and I asked “Does anyone of you know which building the McDonnell Douglas building is?”

  Our driver spoke for the first time during our trip. “Mr Thomas didn’t pick me or the rest of us for our looks. I worked for Douglas as a security guard for two years before everything went to hell. Bradley in the next vehicle was a data input specialist for them for about 4 years. Between us, we should be able to help you find what you need.”

  “Do you know where Prometheus is birthed,” I blurted out.

  “I know where all the activity was during those last two weeks, and if your bird isn’t parked there, then I’ll kiss your ass.” He was right. The emphasis during those last days had to be on getting everything either launched or protected. I know that they hadn’t launched Prometheus, so I hope that they had set her up for storage. They knew we were up there. They had to know that we would come back down someday to see what we could find.

  Chapter 14

  We pulled up in front of an enormous building that looked familiar to me. I didn’t quite remember it the way it looked now, the last time I saw it there were couple of thousand cars in the parking lot and the shrubbery was neatly trimmed and didn’t look quite so brown. I did hope Thomas knew where we were going because I was looking at several acres of building in front of me and I didn’t relish playing hide and go seek with a space shuttle that could be two or three stories below ground.

  I did knew that there were four different levels, other than the ground floor, that it could be on. If it wasn’t on the ground floor, then we had to get the hydraulics working on the lifts in order to get Prometheus up to where I could try to take off.

  The key word was “try”. It had been over twenty years since she had been put together and since I had trained on her. She wasn’t tested, and neither was I, and even if she would have worked twenty years ago, I had no guarantee that she would work now.

  Twenty years will do a lot of damage to tires, seals and wiring, not to mention everything else. There was a good chance that Prometheus wouldn’t be flyable, but there was also just as good of a chance that she would be. After all she was put together to endure vacuum for a year or more at a time. Vacuum can be just as hard as air on the stuff that will deteriorate. I just hoped that they had a chance to secure her in that nitrogen chamber.

  I didn’t think about how stiff I would be as I climbed out of the Humvee. If Mike hadn’t of hit the ground before me I probably would have fell. My knees had locked up and didn’t want to bend. I was sure that I wouldn’t have been one of NASA’s top picks for this mission. I had a few spots that I was pretty sure were bleeding again, but I wasn’t going to say anything. This had to work.

 
; We approached the main building from the east and stopped in front of the middle entrance on the east side. Our driver backed into the Visitor’s spot next to the front door. Thomas had us wait until the rest of the convoy parked with us before we got out of the vehicles.

  I noticed that everyone had parked pointing out. I didn’t say anything, but it did look like they were set up for a quick escape. I only trusted that it was set up as an offensive posture and not a defensive one.

  As we unloaded from the vehicles I realized that there seemed to be a lot more people than we had originally loaded. I counted at least thirty, when I mentioned this to Thomas, he just grinned and said “do you think that these four vehicles and those young lads carried our whole contingent? We’ve had people investigating this location since I found out what you were after.”

  I’m firmly convinced that Thomas could have out maneuvered Erwin Rommel. He knew more about tactics than Eisenhower ever had a chance to learn. He had troops that were appearing out of and disappearing into nowhere and I was pretty sure that only he had an accurate count of how many people that he could mobilize.

  There were several men that I didn’t recognize forming a huddle in the parking lot in front of the vehicles. That didn’t mean much to me, except for the fact that I was sure that none of them had been in our little convoy from Chesterfield.

  Without warning, Thomas barked out “Gentlemen, Report!” With that, two men broke off from the group that I had been watching and walked our direction. Two of the teenagers that had followed us in on horseback also approached.

  Surprisingly, Thomas looked to one of the teenage boys first. “Zach, how do we stand from a tactical standpoint?”