She inhaled deeply and let out another rebel yell. 'Yee-haaaa! Oh, yes. Go, baby, go!'
Charley kept the steering centered on that pathway into space. No doubt there was an autopilot in this thing somewhere and a simple push of a button would couple the ship to it, but she had no idea where it was or how to work it. Even if she had known, she probably would not have used it.
Outside the sky was almost black, a deep obsidian black arcing over the blue planet. They were high, twenty or thirty miles, she guessed, and going higher. The ship was still accelerating at four G's with the canopy pointed toward earth, climbing at about a forty-degree angle. With the earth above them, the concept of up and down seemed to no longer apply.
The glowing of the saucer's nose faded as the ship raced through the last remnants of the atmosphere. Although slightly muffled now, the dull roar of the rocket engines still filled the saucer's cabin with sound.
Orbital velocity was eighteen thousand miles per hour. Charley Pine had to accelerate to at least that speed or she would merely go over the top and begin reentry. Excess speed would cause her to orbit higher and higher. If she accelerated past twenty-five thousand miles per hour, escape velocity, the saucer would fly off into space on a voyage into eternity.
Charley knew the physics cold; what she didn't know was the computer program that she was using as a flight director. If only she could read the words and numbers!
This had to be the right program! It had the right look; the physics seemed right; everything about it seemed right.
But how was she going to know when she reached orbital velocity? And how high would this orbit be?
Why was she asking herself these questions? The saucer flew, whoever designed it obviously knew their stuff, whoever made it sure as hell built it right. Whoever they were…
She was well out over the Indian Ocean now, which appeared above her since the saucer was inverted. The curvature of the earth was quite prominent, the atmosphere a hazy blue line on the curved horizon. Clouds, small gauzy cotton things, stuck to the sea's surface. A squall line, a front, obviously, appeared as a row of clouds, tiny things with minuscule shadows.
The earth hanging over her head, the deep black of space, the roar of the rocket engines hurling her into that blackness, the G pushing her into her seat like the hand of God… the experience was sublime, a sensory feast, and Charley Pine shouted again from pure joy.
Beside her Rip Cantrell was fighting to get erect so he could see out of the canopy. She glanced at him. Sweat coated his face, the veins in his arms stood out like cords. He lifted himself even with her, fighting the G.
'Oh, wow!' he breathed, then filled his lungs and joined her in a shout.
Just then the pathway disappeared from the computer screen. One second it was there, then it was gone.
Charley Pine shut down the rocket engines, and Rip shot forward as the G instantly stopped. His contracted muscles propelled him right into the instrument panel.
He bounced off the panel and floated toward the back of the cabin, weightless. 'Hot damn! We made it!'
Charley laughed. She felt so terrific.
Rip kicked off a bulkhead and caught himself on the arm of the pilot's seat. He anchored himself there and studied the earth hanging above them, the riot of subtle colors, the blackness of space framing it all.
'There's the Persian Gulf and the Himalayas.'
'Earth,' said Charley Pine and laughed again.
'Are we in orbit?'
'Maybe. Maybe not. If the ship starts heating up, we didn't make it.' All of the red had now disappeared from the saucer's skin.
The earth seemed to be rotating slowly above them. Cloud systems and smears of land moved steadily along. They watched mesmerized as they crossed the zone from day into darkness.
'It's really weird with the earth above us,' Rip commented. 'Can you turn the ship?'
Charley Pine nudged the stick sideways a trifle, then recentered it. The nudge was enough. Slowly the saucer rolled until the earth was below them. Then Charley stopped the roll with another small displacement of the stick.
'Oh, man!' Rip exclaimed. 'What a show!'
Charley felt the same way. It came to her then that she had lived her whole life to get to this moment. Everything led to this.
Without thinking she rubbed her hand absently through Rip's hair. He didn't seem to notice.
Rip was the first to come back to reality. He began punching up displays on the computer, studying the graphics, looking for something, anything, that might tell him the dynamics of their orbit.
He found a display, finally, that depicted an elongated oval. 'This is us, I think,' he muttered, studying the symbols.
'Anything on how to get down?' Charley Pine asked.
'Not that I've seen yet. If you have any ideas, this might be a good time to trot them out.'
She too began playing with the computers. In the weightless environment, being strapped to the pilot's seat was a distinct advantage. Floating in the air, Rip held himself in position with the fingertips of one hand.
Charley was scrolling through displays one by one when she hit it — a presentation of the descent path over a planet. The two of them studied the presentation, a complex three-dimensional graphic.
On impulse Charley reached for the screen with a fingertip. The planet rotated under her touch.
'It's earth,' she said. 'There's North and South America, the Azores… '
'Well, look at that!' Rip exclaimed, and pointed. The Mediterranean Sea was dry, without water. 'And there, the English Channel.' On the presentation the British Isles weren't islands at all, but part of the mainland.
'That's Earth as it looked long ago,' Charley said, thinking aloud. 'I wonder how long?'
'Use your finger to spin the planet to Missouri, then touch it.'
'Is that where you want to land?'
'Yeah. If we can get down, we'll put this thing on my uncle's farm.'
'He's a farmer?'
'Uncle Egg lives on a farm, but he's no farmer. He's a bit of everything — inventor, wizard, mechanic extraordinaire… He has about twenty patents in a variety of fields, lives off his royalties.'
She did as he suggested. A tap of the fingertip on Missouri caused the graphic to change. Now the point of a long cone rested there. The body of the cone rose and bent westward a third of the way around the globe, with the wide mouth just west of the Hawaiian Islands.
'We'll have to try it on our next orbit,' Rip said. He pointed. 'See the small dot of red light? That's us, I think, and we're in the wrong orbit. We need a trajectory change to get us to the reentry point.'
Charley kept scrolling through the displays. 'Here it is, I hope.' She studied the three-dimensional graphic, then pointed. 'The minimum burn will be right here.'
'How much fuel will it take?'
She played with the displays for almost a minute before she said, 'I don't know. If we burn up all our fuel maneuvering, we won't have enough to get out of orbit. If we lose orbital velocity but don't burn long enough to hit the cone, we'll skip off the atmosphere like a rock, over and over, until finally we go in steeply.'
'Steeply? I don't like the sound of that.'
'We'll probably burn up in the atmosphere like a meteor.'
'How much fuel do we have remaining?'
'See this display?' Charley pointed at another computer presentation. 'This might be fuel remaining. We're under five percent, I think.'
Rip looked slowly around. 'These saucer people must have taken on another load of water from the mother ship while they were in orbit.'
'No more than a few gallons. Water in space is precious. One suspects they used the mother ship to make cross-track trajectory changes.'
'So what do we do? Missouri or where?'
'Let me work with the computers,' she said and bent to study the screens.
Finally she took a deep breath. 'I think we can make North America. Missouri. We'll make the orbit change, then fire th
e rockets to drop us into that cone on the computer.'
Rip nodded vigorously. 'We'll coast down over the Pacific and plop into the good ol' U. S. of A. If we overshoot, we'll hit the Atlantic.' Rip smiled confidently. 'But not to worry, Charley baby. North America is a big target. We'll be okay.'
'Uh-huh.'
'Trust me.'
'Don't call me baby.'
'Nothing personal, Captain Pine, you being an older woman and all.'
The ship had rotated on its axis about ninety degrees, or so it seemed. The dark planet was off to their left, filling half the sky. They fell silent then, stared at the massive orb.
'We're coming up on the U.S. now,' Charley whispered.
Sure enough, the lights of Los Angeles soon came into view, twinkling merrily, covering the hills and valleys. The huge city was a vast smear of light. The orbiting saucer soon left it behind. The Mojave Desert was black and empty, the interstates tiny twinkling ribbons, the little towns mere splotches in the darkness.
When Rip finally looked into space he saw only unwinking stars against an obsidian sky. A shiver ran through him.
The peril of their position washed over him like a cold shower. They were several hundred miles above the surface of the earth in an ancient spaceship that he had jackhammered from a rock ledge. If anything went wrong, both he and Charley were going to die. In this saucer. Very soon.
He felt slightly nauseated. It's the weightlessness, he told himself, wanting to believe that. The reality of his recklessness he tried to ignore. Pine wanted to come, he thought; she was here of her own free will.
He wondered about the water, how much remained in the tank.
Would the rocket motors start? An anxious dread came over him, brought a layer of sweat to his brow.
The motors have to start. They must! It can't end like this, the two of them marooned in orbit, condemned to die when the air went bad.
Here came the sun!
With a dazzling rush the sun rose over the earth's rim and filled the inside of the saucer with its light.
Charley Pine watched the sun climb toward the zenith, then went back to playing with the computers. She went back and forth between the three displays before her. She looked calm, as placid as if she were receiving e-mail on the Internet.
'If the engines don't start, we're toast,' Rip told her. 'You know that?'
She glanced at him, her expression unchanged. 'I tried to focus your attention on the risk before we started.'
'I'm focused as hell now.'
'The risk hasn't changed. We are no more or less in jeopardy than we were when we were fifteen feet above the ground.'
'It sure feels more dangerous,' he replied, his eyes inadvertently drawn to the planet looming over the ship. Towering cumulus clouds low in the atmosphere cast distinct shadows with military precision. There were thousands of clouds.
She went back to the computers.
'I got a bad feeling about this,' he told her, but she was concentrating on the machines and didn't hear him.
He pushed gently away from the pilot's seat and floated effortlessly across the small compartment. When he came within reach of a bulkhead, he pushed off, continued slowly back and forth across the compartment while the earth sped by beneath the saucer and Charley Pine played with the computers.
Okay, she's a tough broad. Tough.
He was floating along thinking about things when the rocket motors fired. He went crashing into the rear bulkhead. After about three seconds, the motors stopped.
'Hey!'
'Sorry. Forgot to warn you.'
'Well, at least the engines work,' he acknowledged grudgingly. 'What was that all about, anyway?'
'That was the cross-trajectory burn. Now we are in the proper orbit, lined up with the descent cone.'
He floated over to look at the display.
As he hung on, Charley turned the saucer and pointed it backward, lining it up with a set of crosshairs that showed in the holographic display on the computer. 'About five more minutes, more or less.'
'Okay.'
He wasn't frightened anymore. Maybe he should have been, but he wasn't. A great peace came over him. Whoever made this saucer was long dead, yet he felt a kinship to those creatures… people… whoever they were. He was flying their ship as they must have done, and somehow that seemed all right. They had the courage to face the unknown, and now, with no boasting or bravado, Rip Cantrell knew that he had it too.
'We're going to be okay,' he said to Charley, who was busy fooling with the computer again.
'Yeah,' she replied, intent on examining another display.
Then she brought the reentry holograph back onscreen and rearranged herself in the chair.
'Perhaps you should strap into a seat,' she said.
'Just for the burn.'
'Okay.'
He settled himself into the nearest seat and put on the belt.
He got a glimpse of the display blossoming as they entered the cone and the flame on the display that commanded engine power. Charley came on with the juice and didn't stint. She went smoothly up to full power while keeping the ship properly oriented.
Just as she reached full power, the motors cut out for a second or so. When they came back on, they weren't at full power. Maybe half, a little less. Despite his resolve, Rip's heart threatened to leap up his throat.
The engines burped again, two, three, four times…
'Come on!' That was Charley, talking to her steed. 'Don't do that to me.'
Rip was out of the seat, clawing his way up toward the pilot's seat so he could see the displays. 'What's wrong?'
More burping from the rocket motors. Then they quit. On the main display, the holograph was commanding full power.
'Uh-oh.'
'This isn't good… '
'Oh, man!'
Charley fiddled with the controls, jiggled the throttle grip, pushed on it fiercely.
The motors came up to power for a second, two… three…
'We're out of the cone,' Charley said, her voice taut.
'Keep flying it. There's nothing we can do.' Rip's voice was calm and controlled.
She got a steady burn of about four seconds, then the computer commanded a shutoff. The cone was well below the flight path recommended by the computer, which presented its recommendation as a crosshair of attitude and heading.
Charley used rudder and side stick to turn the ship, point it down the cone facing forward.
'Are you going to dive into the cone?'
'Too dangerous,' she replied and gestured toward the scene out the canopy. The earth filled most of the windscreen. The nose was definitely down, maybe fourteen or fifteen degrees.
She held the precise attitude recommended by the computer and let the saucer race downward toward the waiting air.
Minutes passed. The earth seemed no closer. Rip asked nervously, 'Are you sure we got slowed down enough?'
'No, I'm not sure. Maybe you better strap in and hold on.'
Reluctantly Rip propelled himself into the nearest seat. He had just got the straps fastened when he felt the forward tug of deceleration as the ship bit into the upper edge of the atmosphere.
Telltale flecks of fire raced over the canopy, too fast to really see. They were just streaks.
By moving her head as high as she could, Charley Pine could just see a pinkish glow radiating back from the nose and growing redder by the second as the ship dove deeper and deeper into the atmosphere.
Due to some freak combination of light and moisture, a visible shock wave developed on the canopy aft of the apex about ten minutes into the descent. It played across the transparent material as Rip watched, then was swept aft as the air thickened.
Charley Pine concentrated on keeping the attitude and heading crosshairs centered on the computer display as the saucer plunged into the earth's atmosphere like a meteor coming in from deep space.
Chapter Eight
The saucer appeared on a computerized display
console at the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) inside the Cheyenne Mountain bunker near Colorado Springs. It appeared as a blip on the radar screen displaying the Pacific sector west of California. The computer was programmed to remove orbiting satellites and space junk from the display and present only objects traveling faster than or below orbital velocity.
Halfway through a long four-hour watch, the operator was drinking coffee and listening to background music piped in over the loudspeakers as she flipped listlessly through the two dozen possible presentations available at her watch station. She was also thinking about her new boyfriend, who had made it crystal clear last night that he had serious designs on her body.
She stared at the fast-moving blip for several seconds before it cut through the fog of boyfriend, music, and ennui. She slid an icon over the blip and clicked once. Above the blip this information appeared: Co8z 8143 5zNM. Course in degrees true; speed in hundreds of knots; height in thousands of feet until one hundred thousand was reached, then in nautical miles.
The operator rang the alarm bell to attract her supervisor, then pushed buttons to put the blip on the main display of the United States that occupied most of die wall in the front of the room.
The supervisor arrived at her console within seconds. The operator pointed.
'Fourteen thousand miles an hour?'
'It almost looks like a space shuttle coming in, but there isn't one up there. Maybe space junk reentering, or… '
The unspoken possibility was that the blip was an inbound ICBM warhead. In fact, the primary mission of this facility was to detect and track ICBMs launched from anywhere on the planet.
'Any launch indications?'
'No, sir.'
'Anybody,' the supervisor thundered over the PA system, 'do we have any indications of missile launch anywhere on the planet in the last two hours?'
Silence.
'Anywhere?' he repeated, his amplified voice sounding in the operator's headset as well as over the public address system.
'The target appeared a few seconds ago, sir. As if it dropped out of orbit.'
The supervisor was an old hand. He had seen space junk come in dozens of time. It always decelerated very quickly and burned up long before it could reach the ground. He was watching the numbers on this blip now, waiting for the quick deceleration. Its speed was slowly dissipating, but nowhere near quick enough.
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