Orbit

by John J. Nance

  Locked! God, I did it!

  Kip forces his torso back into the reclined command chair and fumbles for the seat and shoulder harnesses, the very act of getting back in clearing his vision.

  One hundred ninety thousand feet, he reads. When his eyes have cleared, he realizes the left spinning is slowly stopping, the world outside slowing from a blur back to identifiable landscape, the curvature of the Earth still pronounced, but the horizon showing a distinct atmospheric glow.

  The indicated airspeed is climbing through a hundred and ten knots now, the downward true through-the-airspace velocity slowing toward the speed of sound. His entire body is hurting from the fight with the g-forces and he has to remind himself to look back at the checklist. The procedure is only half complete. If the hydraulic system can’t lock a wayward tail boom, it can’t unlock it and move it downward, either, and with the tail in the flipped-up position, Intrepid is uncontrollable.

  The g-forces are slowly diminishing with his speed as he once again concentrates on the checklist items, wondering what other T-handles he’ll have to find.

  He’s missed a section, Kip realizes. He never checked to find the circuit breaker for the hydraulic pump, and apparently there’s a backup pump as well.

  Once more he leans forward, remembering the slightly higher kick panel compartment with the circuit breakers before recalling the panel of breakers overhead. His head hurts but he forces himself to focus on the placards next to each breaker until he locates one that has, indeed, popped out.

  Primary Tail Boom Hydraulic Pump. That’s it!

  He pushes the small round button-type breaker in, feeling the click and hearing the tiny mosquitolike whine once more as the forward panel shows the pressure rising.

  Thank God! he thinks, realizing he’s solved the problem perhaps too soon. The tail shouldn’t be reconfigured until sixty thousand feet and Intrepid is only coming through a hundred and fifty thousand.

  But he’s steady at last, facing generally south, and he thinks he can make out the Rio Grande River as it defines the Texas-Mexico border around El Paso, somewhere to the southwest.

  Which means I’m coming down in southeastern New Mexico.

  The computer map is still not showing and he attacks that problem now in frustration, searching for the right button before the map suddenly swims into view on the lower screen, his position clearly indicated over the moving map of New Mexico.

  One hundred two thousand.

  As soon as the tail is realigned he’ll be a flyable glider with only one chance at landing. He can glide miles in any direction then, but where should he go?

  Somewhere on the panel he knows there’s a switch or a button that’s supposed to project potential landing sites, but he can’t tell where it is.

  He strains to look outside, but he’s still too high to make out a strip of concrete a mile or two long.

  I can’t be too far from Roswell, or maybe Cannon Air Force Base.

  Surely, when he gets under sixty thousand feet, something will pop up. But why won’t the computer help now?

  He tries the checklist as he comes through eighty thousand, the downward speed now slowing transonically below six hundred miles per hour, but if there’s a section on how to get the map computer to display emergency airfields, he can’t find it.

  Seventy thousand.

  The tail boom transition will be at sixty thousand, and he checks his ears, straining to hear the tiny whine of the hydraulic pump against the roar of the airflow around the space plane.

  Okay, let’s see…I’ll need to know where the landing gear switch is, and the approach speed.

  The handle is easy. It’s a small recessed switch on the left side of the panel, and he remembers enough to know there’s some sort of air bottle that blows the gear down and in place. But he knows there are no speed brakes or flaps, and Intrepid’s speed just before landing will be close to two hundred miles per hour, it’s stubby wings providing lift only in the most cursory way.

  The altitude is coming through sixty thousand now, the ship buffeting slightly, and Kip goes back to the page on tail reconfiguration.

  “Hold twenty-degree-nose-down attitude until booms unlock and hold attitude until down locks are engaged, then recover from dive being careful not to exceed three g’s in the pull-up.”

  He pushes the stick forward, feeling the engagement springs working the manual flight control surfaces and watching the ADI for the appointed twenty-degree nose-down attitude.

  There. Twenty down.

  He pushes the buttons for boom release and retraction and hears the whine increase as everything begins to change. When he was hundreds of thousands of feet above, moving the booms upward caused little but mechanical shuddering, but now the nose is pitching down severely as the tail aligns and he can see the indicated airspeed rising and feel, and hear, the slipstream increase.

  Two green lights flash on, indicating both tail booms are locked, and he pulls hard, feeling the g-forces climb as he searches for a meter or an indication of how heavy they are. He thinks he knows what three g’s feel like, and he holds that until the nose is up and he realizes he’s no longer riding a spacecraft, he’s flying a high-speed, heavyweight glider, and probably headed in the wrong direction.

  I don’t want to go due east, do I?

  He looks back down at the screen, relieved suddenly to see airfields indicated, apparently in response to the reconfiguration of the tail. But the direction he’s now flying, at nearly five hundred miles per hour, is showing no airports within the purple arc on the screen that he assumes is his gliding range and he banks back left, startled at the responsiveness of the craft and frightened by the descent rate which is over twelve thousand feet per minute.

  He can barely see anything through the small windows with the seat pitched back, and he remembers he’s supposed to change it upright again. He moves the two levers on the right of the command chair, relieved when the seat slides back into a normal pitch.

  He pulls the nose up more, diminishing the descent rate and the forward airspeed as he shifts his eyes to the screen.

  There’s got to be an airport beneath me somewhere! Kip thinks, trying not to imagine the consequences of impacting the parched landscape of western New Mexico at two hundred miles per hour.

  Roswell is sixty miles to the west, and it looks like the biggest and maybe the only available runway. The purple circle has increased in size as his descent rate has decreased, and he slows more now as he brings Intrepid around to a western heading, hoping to expand the range circle by slowing until it includes Roswell’s airport.

  And finally it does! Roswell is within gliding distance.

  But at what speed?

  He’s dropping through forty thousand feet with a forward airspeed of three hundred fifty miles per hour.

  Slow more…under two hundred.

  He’s squeezing his memory for every ounce of his limited flying experience, and decides that finding the stall speed is the most important element.

  He brings the nose up even more, now to almost twenty-degrees nose-high, watching the rate of descent decrease to nearly zero as he trades airspeed for maintaining altitude.

  One ninety. She’s still controllable.

  He’ll let her slow, he figures, until the nose drops suddenly and he’s in a stall, then he’ll simply recover like all airplanes recover. At least he’s always assumed that’s how it works.

  One hundred sixty.

  She’s mushy now but still flying, the nose way high, and suddenly he realizes the descent rate has started increasing again quickly to four thousand feet per minute even with the nose up at almost thirty degrees above the horizon.

  Somewhere he’s read about this sort of thing, a stall in a high-speed jet with the nose up, and he feels the cold possibility that he’s gone too far.

  Kip shoves the control stick forward, but nothing happens. The nose remains high, the airspeed languishing at one hundred sixty knots. He’s falling strai
ght down with Intrepid’s belly in a nearly horizontal position, and the descent rate is now over ten thousand feet per minute as he comes through thirty thousand, feeling again fear creep into his gut. In a nanosecond his mind has dredged up all the old feelings of insecurity and assaulted the incredible idea that he could survive everything else and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory by screwing up basic flight. How dare he try something he didn’t fully understand? Now Intrepid is stuck in a nose-up stall, and even as he starts rocking the wings back and forth, she won’t come out of it. It’s like he’s back in the reentry configuration, his ship’s belly to the ground as he screams toward it. The impact will be too great to feel, of course. He’ll simply disintegrate. But how damned unfair that he could come this far and still die.

  Something in that last series of thoughts snags, and a kaleidoscope of images flashes through his mind until the tail appears clear and unmistakable as the solution. The hydraulic pump keeping the tail in a horizontal position for reentry is still on!

  With one quick stab at the appropriate button he once more ports the hydraulic pressure to unlock the twin boom tail and move it toward the UP position, poising his finger over the opposite control switch as he feels the aerodynamics drastically changing.

  Suddenly Intrepid flops forward, nose down, and just as quickly Kip punches the retract button as he keeps forward pressure on the stick, once again seeing the two green locked lights illuminate before pulling g’s to raise the nose and slow the renewed airspeed that peaks at less than three hundred miles per hour.

  But now he’s below twenty thousand, and a quick glance at the map tells the tale. The purple glide range circle has shrunk drastically, and Roswell is completely out of reach.

  There is, however, a new target colored red just to the southwest, and he understands: a short runway. But if he runs off the end of concrete at a slow speed, he might survive.

  He knows now to keep Intrepid above a hundred and ninety miles per hour. Maybe even two hundred since he’ll need energy to flare and bring his descent rate down to a survivable vertical speed at touchdown.

  He banks to the right, bringing the ship to a southerly heading, the altitude now coming through fifteen, but the rate of descent only three thousand per minute and holding.

  He sees a few towns below, and he can see roads and section lines and a few rail lines.

  Eleven thousand.

  He can see evidence of wind below, plumes of dust when he looks closely, indicating a strong west wind.

  And he can see the purple circle retracting away from the airport he’s trying to reach, the edge of the circle finally passing over it.

  No more airports within the circle.

  Kip feels his pulse rate climbing again as he begins searching through Intrepid’s windows. Empty fields everywhere. A few railroad tracks and a small number of cultivated fields, but, other than a few country roads, no runways, no airports, no ribbons of concrete.

  Except for the highways.

  He has no choice. There will be power lines and signs and maybe even an occasional overpass—not to mention cars and trucks going one heck of a lot slower than two hundred miles per hour—but he’s through eight thousand feet now with nowhere else to go.

  He searches for an interstate, but whichever ones may be around are probably too far north. He’s close enough to the ground to confirm that the wind is still out of the west, and he sees a two-lane highway running east and west and turns to the east, paralleling it, putting what seems a comfortable distance for a turn between the roadway to his left and Intrepid, and at the same moment he rolls out of the turn it hits him that there’s no logic in waiting until he’s lower to turn into the wind. He keeps Intrepid turning left, bringing it around steadily and overshooting slightly, then moving left a quarter mile until he’s tracking straight down the highway below and coming through four thousand feet. There’s a small rain shower off to the south and what looks like a dust devil off to the right of the highway, and he can see a big truck moving toward him perhaps a mile distant.

  Landing gear!

  He checks the airspeed, holding at two hundred ten, and flips the switch for the gear. He hears a whooshing noise and several “thunks” and three green lights appear on the upper right-hand panel. Unlike the first private suborbital craft, Intrepid actually has a steerable nosewheel, and he reminds himself that the rudder pedals control it.

  Three thousand.

  The wind isn’t exactly from the west, it’s a quartering crosswind from the left. He’ll have to steer aggressively to keep from running off the road.

  Two thousand two hundred.

  The truck passes safely beneath him but he can see another one coming at him, and he knows even Intrepid’s short wingspan is too wide to fit both of them on the same two-lane road at the same time.

  One thousand five hundred.

  The rate of descent is frightening. It’s like he’s just dropping at the roadway, and a brief glance at the vertical velocity indicator shows why: more than four thousand feet per minute descent rate. A normal airplane touchdown is less than two hundred feet per minute.

  The truck is more distinct ahead, a tanker of some sort, the gleaming metal of his tank reflecting the afternoon sun. Kip is covering three miles per minute and the truck perhaps one, but it’s more than a mile away and coming toward him. No other cars or trucks that Kip can see, but now, like a parade of apparitions, several more big rigs rise from the undulating heat waves over the highway, and of all things to encounter in flat eastern New Mexico, he sees an overpass crossing the highway probably two miles ahead.

  Kip’s fingers are fanning themselves on the stick controller, his eyes taking in the road, the truck, and the horizon before flitting quickly to the last items on the Before Landing checklist.

  Gear down and locked, seats up…I think that’s it.

  Something to the right of the roadway a mile or more away ahead catches his attention, another roadway or something like it at perhaps a forty-five-degree angle. But there’s no time to evaluate anything else and he locks his eyes back on the highway, wondering if the oncoming truck drivers have spotted him dropping from the sky straight ahead of them. If so, there’s no indication. The big rigs are getting closer by the second, the plume of black smoke from the lead vehicle streaming from its stacks and its speed constant.

  There’s nowhere else to land, but he’s too wide to simply use the right lane and pass them safely, even if he puts her down on the right shoulder. One or more of the eighteen wheelers will end up taking him out, or wreck themselves trying to avoid him.

  Airspeed?

  He’s holding just over two hundred miles per hour, afraid to pull off any more, but it’s clear that if he doesn’t flatten the glide, he’s going to take out the first truck.

  The angled ribbon of concrete or blacktop or something to the right looms in his mind and he focuses on it as an alternative. Whatever it is, even from a mile out he can see it’s overgrown with weeds and cracks that will probably kill him.

  The road ahead is impossible, and he makes the choice without another thought. Kip pulls on the stick gingerly, feeling the craft respond as he settles through five hundred feet, calculating how much bank to use and when to angle onto the other roadway. The thing seems to end barely a mile or more in the distance, like it’s merging into the desert, but at least the terrain on the other end is flat.

  The overpass is still ahead, about a mile or so distant, the beginning of the strip of angled road he’s aiming at starting on the far side. He’ll have to fly over the overpass before angling onto the road.

  The road, he realizes, is an old runway, maybe military, and there are a few buildings along the far end.

  He pulls his aim point to the right, just above the overpass, still aligned with the highway he can’t use.

  One eighty-five!

  He doesn’t dare get slower before being right over the threshold of the old runway. He feels the remaining two hundred feet
of altitude more than reads it on the altimeter, his eyes focused now on missing the overpass as he turns toward the end of the old runway. He rolls right slightly, feeling Intrepid drop more as he stops the turn, coming through fifty feet as the concrete abutment of the overpass flashes beneath him.

  And in an instant he’s yanking Intrepid to the right, using the rudder to help skid toward the end of the concrete ribbon, holding his breath as the truck he’d been aiming at disappears behind him. The ship aligns with the runway and he snaps it back to wings level, yanking the nose up to stop the frightening rate of descent, trying to exchange speed for lift as the threshold of the cracked and broken concrete runway moves beneath him.

  He feels the airspeed bleed away, unsure how far off the surface he is, amazed when the main wheels squeal onto the surface.

  Suddenly it’s like trying to control a kid’s tricycle accelerated to a hundred miles per hour on a bucking surface. He plops the nosewheel on the ground only to find himself rocking wildly left and right and working the control stick as he fights to stop overcontrolling the nosewheel steering while racing over a washboard. He steers back close to where the centerline used to be, the speed now showing less than a hundred miles per hour and slowing, Kip unwilling to pull the nose up as he’s seen the astronauts do for aerobraking.

  Seventy.

  There’s a partially collapsed hangar to the right ahead and a still intact building of some sort; he sees a weed-infested taxiway leading to a ramp where two Stearman biplanes—crop dusters he hadn’t noticed before—are sitting.

  His speed is below forty and he gauges the fairly broad expanse of concrete in front of the building and decides to risk hitting the brakes, pressing on the top of the pedals as he steers right, bringing Intrepid off the runway and coasting to a halt in front of the old brick structure, kicking up a cloud of dust and dirt in the process.

  And the unbelievable fact that he is once again sitting static on the surface of Earth, still alive, begins to sink in like a distant rumor gaining credibility.