The Glass Lady

by Douglas Savage

  “Looks like a contact, Skipper.”

  Flying nose first, upside down, Endeavor’s radar beacons had been searching the nighttime sky for the radar footprint of LACE. But the beacons had wandered aimlessly at the speed of light to bend toward the very edge of the universe. Until now.

  “Got a MAP, Jack?” The Colonel squinted at the green CRT before him where print and a graphic, three-dimensional box slowly rotated like a teenager’s video game.

  “Looks like we have a message acceptance pulse, Will.”

  “Soyuz?”

  “Don’t think so. Not in this radio spectrum, Skipper . . . There.”

  The video graphic cube steadied as the two pilots with their heads nearly touching peered into the open graphic box on the television.

  “LACE?” the command pilot inquired gravely.

  “I’m interrogating it again.”

  Enright’s left hand worked his computer keyboard and Mother instantly sent her encrypted electromagnetic waves of greeting out to the planet’s far corner.

  “And we have our baby, Skip. Solid lockup. Range five thousand meters.” The hairs on Enright’s neck tingled.

  Both fliers jumped into their shoulder harnesses when one of Endeavor’s nose jets barked out a plume of orange flame into the darkness just eight feet in front of their faces. Mother was automatically maintaining their even keel upside down. Each pilot smiled sheepishly.

  “Might close in here, buddy.”

  Jack Enright nodded at his captain.

  “Best tell Mother, Jack.”

  Without words, the copilot in the right seat which his floating body barely touched tapped at the keyboard’s black keys. The computers reached out into the black vacuum with electronic fingers which wrapped around LACE’S black body.

  “See anything, Jack?” Both men peered into the darkness.

  “Can’t even see the stars with these floodlights in here.”

  Seventy-six minutes out, Endeavor glided 720 miles east of Samoa toward the Equator 900 miles to the north. At the Earth’s far eastern comer, the curvature of the horizon was visible as a hair-thin band of pink with blackness above and below. Because Shuttle flew bottoms-up, the curving pink lines of their South Pacific sunrise looked from the flightdeck like an airy smile with the Earth’s reddening limb curving up at its edges.

  “Mornin’, Skipper.”

  “And to you, Number One, ’Bout time to go out to fetch the newspaper from the front porch.”

  “Watch that first step, Will.”

  Both pilots chuckled 14 minutes from their next ground station contact. They watched the upside-down horizon turn quickly from pink to red to orange as the sun’s white disk erupted over the edge of the world with an explosion of blinding daylight like a magnesium flare.

  From the top of their helmets, the pilots pulled a tinted visor down over their closed faceplates advertised as laser-proof.

  Far below, the sea was still black and colorless as the ship raced in daylight toward the sun. On the South Pacific islands beneath Endeavor’s white backside, the horizon was only three miles away and the new sun had a long way to go before it climbed over the edge to awaken the gold-skinned islanders. For Shuttle, the horizon where the sun sat was a thousand miles distant. Endeavor flew in daylight which the palm trees below would not feel for another hour.

  Two minutes after the dazzling sunrise 720 miles northwest of Tahiti, the black glass bricks on the underside of Endeavor’s wings and body were baked by full daylight. The flash evaporators sweated profusely as the freon in Shuttle’s veins warmed to the blinding sunlight.

  Flying upside down and racing over the gray sea 80 minutes from home, Enright’s window faced north and the left seat pointed toward the south. The copilot squinted outside to search for Christmas Island 750 miles to the northwest. He could see only endless green sea in morning twilight. Wisps of clouds dotted tiny islands where turtles and crabs were the only life stretching in the morning sunshine. The clouds covered the islands but not the ocean. Two minutes and 600 miles from crossing the Equator, the upside-down command pilot squinted east toward the dozens of cloud-covered islands of French Polynesia.

  The pilots watched their green television screens, which depicted their target ahead of them and moving eastward with Endeavor. The shuttle was lower than LACE, which gave the pilots a faster orbital speed than their target. As their range closed, the glass starship would catch LACE from below and would move steadily upward toward the laser satellite. During the final moments of the chase, during Terminal Phase Initiate, Shuttle would pass underneath LACE and would end the game of space tag by coming up east of LACE and ahead of it. The final rendezvous would then be shot from a position in front of LACE in a matched tandem orbit.

  “Rev Two, Skipper,” Enright called as Endeavor crossed the Equator northbound 82 minutes into the mission.

  Unlike prior American manned spacecraft whose orbits were numbered from the west longitude meridian of Cape Canaveral, Shuttle orbits, or revolutions, are counted from the point where Shuttle crosses the Equator while flying from south to north. As Endeavor sped over the Equator, she began her second Earth revolution, although her position along the orbital track was still 4,000 nautical miles west of Cape Canaveral. Her second revolution thus began after only five-sixths of a complete orbit around the earth.

  “Eight minutes to acquisition of California voice, Jack.” Endeavor would travel 2,400 miles during that eight minutes over open water before hearing from the ground. They pursued LACE alone with Mother’s warm black boxes at the helm. Their first United States landfall would be Texas in thirteen more minutes after a pass over northern Mexico.

  The white sun was low in the eastern sky. On the blue-green sea 128 nautical miles beneath the inverted shuttle, it was 7:30 in the morning. With Endeavor’s nose and black belly between the cockpit and the morning sun, the flightdeck went dark gray, just dark enough to make reading impossible. The center annunciator panel’s forty lights illuminated white, yellow, and red for an instant. Then the warning lights and all of the cabin floodlights went out.

  There was only the gray gloom and a silence absolute as the lights and the three televisions and the cabin fans went dead.

  The two pilots sat quietly in the silent semi-darkness. To keep their weightless arms from floating against the instrument panels, the pilots tucked their hands into their chest straps. There were no simulations for Mother suffering a stroke.

  “So I was jest wond’rin’, Jacob,” the AC drawled calmly, like any old farmer talking over the back fence with his cousin from ’cross the creek.

  “Yeah, Skipper,” the copilot asked with his very best, downhome “so how’s your old mare?” voice.

  “Meant to mention it: Did you pay the ’lectric bill ’fore we left this mornin’?”

  “Didn’t have time, Skipper. Do it when we get home.”

  “Reckon that explains it,” said the Colonel in the half darkness.

  “Think we could mail it in?”

  “Think you can find the mailbox, Number One?”

  Both airmen chuckled in the air which was quickly becoming stuffy without cabin and suit fans.

  “Think Mother’s state vectors are off the line, too?”

  “Don’t even think it, Will.”

  The two pilots abandoned their gallows humor. Parker reached over his head to Panel Overhead-13.

  “Let’s see, Jack. Circuit breakers, Essential Bus 1BC are all closed, rows A and B. Essential Bus 2CA, breakers closed. And Essential Bus 3AB, also all closed. She’s alive here. Try your side, Jack.”

  Enright felt for the long instrument panel, Right-1, by his right elbow. He tried to get his face closer to the barely visible array of 96 switches, pushbuttons, and circuit breakers on the single 12-by-32-inch electrical systems panel braced to the cockpit wall.

  “Okay, Skipper. AC controller, all nine breakers, still closed. Let’s put AC bus sensors One, Two, and Three, from auto-trip to off. Invert
er AC-1 to on, AC-2 to on, and AC-3 to on. Let’s try control bus power, DC Main A to reset, DC Main Bravo to reset, and Main Charlie to reset.”

  “Damn” was all Parker said when the cabin lights blinked on, along with the three green televisions. The hum of the cabin fans filled the stale flightdeck.

  “How can air from a bottle taste so sweet, Skip?”

  “Amen, Brother Jacob.”

  “What about Mother?”

  The command pilot watched his attitude indicator ball swing upside down as the ship’s three inertial measurement units caught their electronic breath. The digital numbers on the Mission Elapsed Time clock located just above the forward windows blinked on showing 00:01:29:30 and counting up. The pilot in the right seat checked his wristwatch sewn into the sleeve of his pressure suit. His watch read 10:29 Houston time, in agreement with the MET clock. Mother had not missed a beat.

  Enright pulled a clipboard from beneath his seat. On it were a complex series of graphs and square grids full of numbers. The pilots called it a Buzz Board in honor of retired, Apollo astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, the man who followed Neil Armstrong down the ladder of the lunar lander Eagle at Tranquility Base, the Moon. On Aldrin’s first spaceflight on board the two-man spacecraft Gemini-12 back in 1966, Astronaut Aldrin had concocted his own, long-hand tables for executing a space rendezvous with an Agena target satellite by eyeball-only. The other astronauts laughed and dubbed the quiet, intense airman, “Doctor Rendezvous.” But on Gemini-12, the ship’s rendezvous radar failed before astronauts James Lovell and Buzz Aldrin could catch their Agena target in the heavens. Aldrin pulled out his home-grown charts, and with them, Twelve shot a perfect rendezvous and docking without radar help. No one laughed after that performance.

  “What’s the Buzz Board say, Jack?” the Colonel asked impatiently as they coasted northeast, headsdown, over blue water halfway between Hawaii and Mexico City.

  “It says: Range to target 1 point 2 miles, R-dot 30 feet per second and closing. Does Mother agree, Will?” It was Enright’s turn to sound anxious.

  The AC tapped his computer keyboard beside his right leg. On the center television, Mother’s green face printed “1.2 R . . . 28.3 R.”

  “Seems we’re still in business, Number One!”

  “Neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night, Skipper.”

  “Endeavor, Endeavor: GDS listening at 90 minutes.”

  “Greetings, California,” the AC drawled from a thousand miles due west of Guadalajara, Mexico.

  “Bet you boys are just sitting up there, hands folded, looking out the window while everyone down here has to work for a living.”

  The two upside-down pilots looked at each other across the twenty-inch-wide center console separating their seats.

  “You got that right, Goldstone,” Enright replied without smiling.

  “Thought so, Endeavor. Your temps look fine. When we get a good hard lockup on your uplink, we’ll update your state vectors via GDX.”

  The two great dish antennae at the Goldstone tracking station in southern California carry the designators GDS and GDX.

  “ ’Kay,” a Kentucky voice called from the black sky full of sun.

  “You’re 2½ from Baja. We show you 1 point 2 behind your target and closing at R-dot of 26 feet per second. Soyuz is station-keeping two hundred meters from the target and they remain radio-silent. Backroom wants you to roll plus Z throughout TPI. You should have no problem using the COAS for the final approach alignment.”

  “Roger, California. Understand attitude-hold in headsup. We’re still anxious about our temperatures with the doors closed in the bay.”

  “We’re watching it for you, Shuttle. Your next sunset will be at two hours, two minutes. No problem with your heat load till then.”

  “Flight, you got a time hack on opening the bay doors? Don’t want to rely on the flash evaps one minute longer than necessary.”

  “We hear you, AC. We’re hoping to have you on station with the target on this revolution by the time you lose Bermuda. We should be able to cycle the bay doors and engage the radiators during your BDA contact.”

  “Okay, Houston. We’ll plan on getting the doors open before we lose Bermuda. How’s that timewise?”

  “Ah, standby one, Jack . . . You’re AOS Bermuda at 01 hours, 49 minutes. Then your LOS seven minutes.”

  “Roger, Flight. It’s already warmin’ up in here . . . And we’re now rollin’ to plus-Z.”

  “We see you rolling over. The evaporators should be able to handle the heat load another ten minutes, no problem. We show you now crossing Baja California, at 01 hours, 02 minutes, MET. See it?”

  “Sure do from the right seat, Flight. It’s very clear, very reddish.”

  “Believe that, Jack. And we show your range to target one mile even. We’d like to try a COAS shot here. AC: Your target should be about sixty-seven degrees above the horizon. Sun now about forty-five degrees high in the east, well below the Celestial Equator. Target should be in motion ahead and above you and rising against the stars Vega, low, and Alphecca, high, both northeast.”

  The command pilot riding headsup squinted against the sun burning through his center, side window. His face was close to the small mirror of his COAS alignment sight.

  “Lookin’ . . . Lookin’. Have stars Altair very low in the east, and Antares about forty degrees high southeast.”

  The command pilot gently nudged Endeavor’s nose from side to side with pre-programmed, one-tenth-second bursts of Shuttle’s two small vernier thrusters one on each side of Endeavor’s nose. Each tiny thruster popped with only 24 pounds of thrust for very fine attitude adjustments. The pilot fine-tuned his ship’s position with his control stick as he searched near the faint star Rasalhague in the equatorial constellation Ophiuchus nearly invisible against the sun in the east.

  “Good star field, Flight. Wait one . . . One of’em is moving . . . moving upward. Jack is checking on it.”

  The copilot tapped his computer keys asking Mother to resolve the Crew Optical Alignment Sight observation with the vector to LACE by the rendezvous-radar. Mother’s green face blinked at her pilots.

  “Visual contact confirmed, Flight. Range one mile, and R-dot of sixteen feet per second. Angle 71 point three degrees high and increasing as we pass under the target. Have a very bright Soyuz in the starfield ahead.”

  “We hear you, Jack. You’re Go for braking maneuver your discretion. KSC will remind you via MLX to confirm Hughes, anti-laser visors down and locked.”

  “No need, Flight. They’re in place and secured.”

  “Copy that, Endeavor. And welcome home! You are over Texas now at 95 minutes out. Configure LOS Goldstone. With you by Merritt Island.”

  “Mornin’, Florida. See you later, California, thanks. Our range-to-go now zero point niner miles, and Jack and I both have a real visual dead ahead. Brightest thing I’ve seen out here. Brighter than approaching an Apollo CSM for sure. Sun angles must be just right.”

  “Copy, Will. You’re four and one-half minutes from Bermuda acquisition which will occur over Georgia. And put Jack on the day watch; backroom says his eyeballs are sharper than yours, Will.”

  “Thanks, Flight. Just don’t call me Gramps yet . . . You heard the man, Number One. Into the crow’s nest with you!” the AC grinned with his very best Wallace Beery voice which always convulsed Jack Enright.

  “Aye, Captain Bligh,” the copilot laughed, flying headsup, 130 nautical miles above southern Texas 180 miles west of Houston.

  “Step lively, Mister Christian,” drawled Wallace Beery with a touch of Blue Grass country in his raspy voice.

  “You guys all right up there or what?” the headphones crackled as Shuttle over Texas spoke with Cape Canaveral’s antennae.

  “Too much sun, I reckon,” the AC grinned.

  “Sounds like it, Will. Make Jacob wear his hat.”

  “Roger, Flight.”

  “And, Endeavor, we see you really close now. Advise when b
raking.”

  Endeavor approached LACE from below. In her lower orbit, Shuttle sped over the ground slightly faster than her target.

  “Range half a mile; R-dot down to 12 feet per second. Target is right in the COAS field, dead center and 83 degrees high. Great visual out the windows. And there’s Brother Ivan five degrees below the target. I can just make out the new window in the work-station module. Must be a Soyuz-TM alright.”

  “Real fine, Will. Your freon loop temps still look good from here.”

  “A real traffic jam up here, Houston.”

  “Roger that, Jack. Don’t run over anyone.”

  “Try not to. Skipper is now on the THC for final approach.”

  “Copy, Jack. Understand Will is braking manually.”

  The Aircraft Commander had powered up the translational hand controller, a square handle with four spokes forming a fist-size cross at the lower left side of the forward instrument panel. With the THC in his left hand, Parker called upon the RCS thrusters which fire fore-aft, up-down, and left-right, to nudge Endeavor into minutely different orbits en route to LACE. With the rotational hand controller, RHC, in his right hand between his knees, the Command Pilot adjusted the attitude of Shuttle’s rightside-up body. Both pilots had an RHC control stick between his thighs, but only the pilot in command had the translational controller for moving the ship through space under rocket power. Pushing the THC into the instrument panel fired two RCS jets in each of the tail’s OMS pods. These pushed Shuttle forward. Pulling back on the THC handle fired three 870-pound-thrust jets in the nose for slowing Endeavor’s forward velocity.

  Squinting into the tubular COAS sextant and out the window, the AC had his hands full of starship. He had to slow their closing speed with exacting precision to stop right at LACE in an orbit perfectly matching LACE’s orbit. Any alignment or velocity error would send Shuttle silently above or below their target, an error grossly costly in propellant. Such an overshoot, called a “wifferdil,” would require enormous amounts of precious RCS fuel to fix.

  In close pursuit of LACE over the heartland of the Old Confederacy, the command pilot flew his terminal approach while his copilot read out the numbers of the chase.