Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

by Timothy Zahn

  "That's stupid!"

  "That's bureaucratic thinking," Captain Kyser corrected—or agreed; Whitney couldn't figure out which. Leaning over Whitney's shoulder again, she spoke toward a small grille next to the display screen. "Carl? Did you get all that?"

  "Yes," the intercom answered, "and I suspect Mr. Whitney's basically right. But there have to be emergency procedures for something like this—else why have the program stored aboard in the first place? It should simply be a matter of getting an adequately prominent official to give an okay. I'll get the tower on it right away."

  "And hope your prominent official can move his tail this early in the morning," she muttered under her breath.

  Whitney had been thinking along a separate track. "There's one other thing we can try," he said. "Can you patch me into the regular phone system from up here?"

  "Trivially. Why?"

  "I'd like to call my former supervisor back in Houston. He might be able to get the package, either from his own office or from someone in L.A."

  "You just said it was illegal to release the code," Henson objected.

  "To you, yes; but maybe not to me. I work for the company, after all."

  Henson started to growl something vituperative, but Kyser cut him off. "We'll complain to the FAA later. For now, let's take whatever loopholes we can get our hands on. Put on that half-headset, Mr. Whitney, and I'll fix you up with Ma Bell."

  The call, once the connection was finally made, was a remarkably short one. Dr. Mills, seldom at his best in the early morning, nevertheless came fully awake as Whitney gave him a thumbnail sketch of the crisis. He took down the names of both the diagnostic program and the loading code, extracted from Captain Kyser—via Whitney—the instructions for placing a return call to the Skyport, and promised to have the package for him in fifteen minutes.

  "Well, that's it, I guess," Whitney remarked after signing off. "Nothing to do now but wait."

  "Yeah. Damn."

  Whitney looked up at her as she stared through the computer console, concentration drawing her eyebrows together. She had been something of a surprise to him, and he still found it hard to believe a Skyport wing captain could be so young. Marinos, he estimated, was in his early fifties, and Henson wasn't much younger. But if Betsy Kyser was anything past her early forties she was the best-preserved woman he'd ever seen. Which meant either United was hard up for Skyport personnel or Captain Kyser was one very fine pilot. He fixed the thought firmly in his mind; it was one of the few things about all this that was even remotely comforting. "Uh... Captain?" he spoke up.

  She focused on him, the frown lingering for a second before she seemed to notice it and eased it a bit. "Call me Betsy," she told him. "This isn't much of a place for formalities."

  "I'm Peter, then. May I ask why you need to know about the electronics right now? I would think the shuttle's safety would be the thing you need to concentrate on."

  "It is, but we can't do anything about that until we're sure more shuttles can dock safely." He must have looked blank, because the corner of her mouth twitched and she continued, "Look. Whatever we wind up doing to the shuttle, odds are we don't already have the necessary equipment on board. That means—"

  "That means you'll have to bring it up via shuttle," Whitney nodded, catching on at last. "So you need to find the glitch in your docking program and make sure it hasn't also affected the other modules' equipment."

  "Right. After that the next job'll be to either get the passengers out or secure the shuttle into the bay, whichever is faster and safer."

  Whitney nodded again. In his mind's eye he could see the damaged shuttle hanging precariously out the back of the Skyport, holding on by the barest of threads. The picture reawakened the half-forgotten vertigo of his first—and last—rollercoaster ride twenty years ago, and he discovered he was gripping the arms of his chair a shade more tightly than necessary. Firmly, he forced his emotions down out of the way. "There's going to be a fair amount of drag on the shuttle from the Skyport's slipstream," he commented, thinking aloud as a further distraction from discomfiting images. "That means a lot of stress on the docking collar. Would it help any if the shuttle dumped its fuel, to make itself lighter?"

  "Just the opposite; the eng—" She paused, a strange look flickering across her face. Behind her, Whitney saw peripherally, Marinos had swiveled around, his attention presumably attracted by Betsy's abrupt silence. "Paul," she said without turning, "run a calculation for me. At its present rate of burn, how much fuel has the shuttle got left?"

  "What diff—?" Marinos stopped, too, the same look settling onto his own features. Turning back, he began punching calculator buttons.

  "Right," Betsy muttered tartly. "We've gotten too used to the easy transfer of fuel between shuttle and Skyport... or I have, anyway." Whitney had figured out what was going on, but Betsy spelled it out for him anyway. "You see, Peter, the shuttle's currently firing its engines, at about medium power, to counteract the drag you mentioned. I guess I was subconsciously assuming we could feed it all the fuel it needed from the Skyport's reserves."

  "But the connections are out of line?"

  "Almost certainly. The fuel line's on the starboard side, too, which means there's not likely to be enough room to even get in and connect them manually. Probably no access panels close enough, either, but I guess we'll have to check on that." She grimaced. "Something else to do. I hope someone's keeping a list."

  "Got it, Betsy," Marinos said, looking up once more. "At current usage, he'll run dry in a little over seven hours."

  "Seven hours." She pursed her lips. "And that assumes neither of his main pumps was rattled loose by the impact. Carl?"

  "I heard, Betsy," the intercom grille said. "That's not a lot of time."

  "No kidding. How much fuel has the whole Skyport got; for our own flying, I mean?"

  "At our current speed, a good ten hours. All the tanks were pretty full."

  "Okay. Thanks."

  "Still no word from ground control on your program," he added. "They're trying to look up the regs and track down the guy who's got the actual package, and doing both of them badly."

  "Betsy?" Marinos again. "Sorry to interrupt, but it's Eric Rayburn on the shuttle. He wants to talk to you."

  Whitney started to reach for the earphone he was wearing, but Betsy shook her head, stepping back to her chair and picking up her own set. "This is Kyser," she said into the slender mike.

  "Liz, what the hell's going on up there?" a harsh voice said into Whitney's left ear.

  With the kind of crisis they were all facing up here, Whitney wouldn't have believed the tension on the flight deck could possibly increase. But it did. He could feel it in the uncomfortable shifting of Henson in his chair, and in Marinos' furtive glance sideways, and in Betsy's tightly controlled response. "We're trying to figure out how to get you and your passengers out of there alive," she said.

  "Well, it's taking a damn sight too long. Or have you forgotten that John's in bad shape?"

  "No, we haven't forgotten. If you've got any suggestions let's hear them."

  "Sure. Just open this damn collar and let me fly my plane back to Dallas."

  Betsy and Marinos exchanged glances; Whitney couldn't see Betsy's face, but Marinos's looked flabbergasted. "That's out of the question. You don't even know if the shuttle will fly any more."

  "Sure it will! I've still got control of the engines and control surfaces. What else do I need?"

  "How about electronics, for starters? You apparently don't even have enough nav equipment left to know where you are. For your information, you wouldn't be flying 'back' to Dallas, because we haven't left—we're circling the area at fifteen thousand feet and about two-seventy knots."

  "All the better. I won't need any directional gear to find the airport."

  Betsy's snort was a brief snake's hiss in Whitney's ear. "Eric, did you turn your oxygen off or something? Neither you nor the shuttle is in any shape to fly. Period." Rayburn st
arted to object, but she raised her voice and cut him off. "We know you're worried about your first officer, but once we make sure it's safe to dock again we can have doctors and emergency medical equipment brought aboard to take care of him."

  "And then what? Try to land with me still hanging out your rear? Don't be absurd. Like it or not, you're eventually going to have to let me go. Let's do it now and get it over with."

  "No," Betsy said, and Whitney could hear a tightness in her voice. "There are a minimum number of tests we'll have to run before we can even consider the idea. You can help by starting a standard pre-flight check on your instruments and systems and figuring out what's still working. Other than that, you'll just have to sit back and wait like the rest of us."

  "Wait!" He made the word an obscenity.

  "Skyport out." Betsy reached over and flipped a switch, then pushed her mike off to one side. Whitney couldn't see much more than the back of her head, but it was very obvious that she was angry. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, wishing he were somewhere else. There'd been elements about the whole exchange that had felt like a private feud, and he felt obscurely embarrassed that he'd been listening in.

  "Don't let him get to you, Betsy," Henson advised quietly. "He's not worth getting upset about."

  "Thanks." Already she seemed to be getting her composure back. "Unfortunately, he did hit one problem very squarely on the head."

  "The landing problem?" Marinos asked.

  Betsy nodded. "I don't know how we're going to handle that one."

  "I don't understand," Whitney spoke up hesitantly. "You would just be separating off this module and landing it with the shuttle, wouldn't you?" A horrible thought struck him. "I mean you aren't thinking about landing the whole Skyport... are you?"

  Betsy did something to her chair and swiveled halfway around to look at him. "No, of course not. There isn't a runway in the world that could take an entire Skyport, although the space shuttle landing area at Rogers Dry Lake might be possible in a real emergency."

  "Then what's the problem? The modules are supposed to be able to land on an eighteen-thousand-foot runway, and Dallas has to have at least one that's that long."

  "The eighteen thousand is for a wing sections by itself, Peter," Marinos said patiently. He held up a hand and began ticking off fingers. "First: with the extra weight and—more importantly the extra drag—we'd have to put down at something above our listed one-sixty-five-knot landing speed. That'll add runway distance right off the bat. Second: one of the weight savings on the wing sections is not having thrust reversers on our engines to help us slow down. We rely on landing wheel brakes and drogue chutes that pop out the back. With the shuttle adding weight out the back—and its gear will be at least a couple of feet off the ground when ours touches down, so there'll be a lot of weight—our balance will change. That means a little less weight on the front landing gear, which means a little less braking ability for those six sets of wheels. Maybe significantly less, maybe not; I don't know. And third, and probably most important: the drogue chutes come out the center and ends of our trailing edge—and we won't be able to use any of the center ones while the shuttle's in the way." He shook his head. "I wouldn't even attempt to land on anything shorter than twenty-five thousand under conditions like this."

  "I'd hold out for thirty, myself," Betsy agreed grimly. "We just don't know how much extra room we'd need. And don't bother suggesting we put down on a cotton field or straddling both lanes of Interstate 20. One of the other ways you save weight on a Skyport is in the landing gear, and landing on something too soft would tear it to shreds."

  An idea was taking shape in the back of Whitney's mind... but he wanted to think about it before saying anything to the others. "So that leaves, what, the Skyport maintenance facility outside L.A.?" he asked instead.

  "Or the one in New Jersey," Betsy said. "L.A.'s closer." She looked at her watch—the fourth time, by Whitney's count, that she had done so in the last ten minutes. "Damn it all, what's holding up ground control?"

  As if in answer, the intercom suddenly crackled. "Bets, this is Aaron," a voice said. "We're ready here to start on down."

  —

  "Roger, Aaron; keep your line open," Betsy's voice said, too loudly, in Greenburg's ear. He resisted the impulse to turn down the volume on his portable half-headset; in a moment there would be another aluminum-alloy deck between them that should take care of the problem.

  "Right. We're opening the access hatch now." As Lewis looked on, Greenburg undid the three clasps securing the surprisingly light disk and levered it up, making sure it locked solidly into its wall latch. Feeling around the underside of the hatch rim, he located the light switch and turned it on. The blackness below blazed with light, and with a quick glance to make sure he wouldn't be landing on unstable footing he grasped the rungs welded to the hatch and started down the narrow metal ladder, tool belt banging against his thigh. The lowest of the Skyport's three decks was devoted to passenger luggage and general cargo and to the equipment necessary to move it from shuttle to Skyport, between wing sections where necessary, and back to shuttle again. The hatch the two men had chosen led to one edge of the cargo area, and most of the equipment in Greenburg's immediate area seemed to be motors and electronic overseers for the intricate network of conveyor belts and electric trams that sorted incoming luggage by destination and carted it to the proper storage area. All without human supervision, of course—and, despite that, it generally worked pretty well.

  "The bay is straight back that way." Lewis had appeared beside him, clutching a sheaf of computer paper. "I think around that pillar thing would be the best approach."

  They set off. Greenburg had been on a Skyport cargo deck only once, back in his training days, and was vaguely surprised at the amount of dirt and grease around the machinery they passed. Within a dozen steps his blue jumpsuit had collected a number of greasy smears and he found himself wishing he'd had the extra minute it would have taken to change into something more appropriate for this job. But even a minute could make a lot of difference... and Bets was counting on them.

  They reached the curved wall that was the lower half of the docking bay within a few minutes, arriving just forward of a wide ring bristling with hydraulic struts that Greenburg knew marked the position of the emergency docking collar. He glanced back at it as they headed forward under the wall's curve, wondering why the backup system hadn't worked. It should have kicked in as soon as the main collar's supports gave way.

  "Watch your step," Lewis said sharply, and Greenburg paused in midstep, focusing for the first time on the dark-red puddle edging onto the path in front of him. Peering along the base of the wall, he could see more of the liquid, more or less collected in a narrow trough there. He squatted, touched it tentatively with a fingertip. It felt thick and oily. "Hydraulic fluid?" Lewis asked.

  "Yeah. From the emergency collar, probably." Greenburg straightened and, with only a slight hesitation, rubbed the fluid off on his jumpsuit. Stepping carefully around the puddle in his path, he continued on.

  The panel they'd decided on was precisely where the blueprints had said it would be: some two meters around the port wall from the heavy forward clamp machinery at the docking bay's forward tip. About forty centimeters by seventy, the panel sat chest-high in the wall and was, for a wonder, not even partially blocked by any of the conveyor equipment. Selecting a wrench from his belt, Greenburg began loosening the nuts.

  "I hope there's nothing in here that can't take low air pressure," Lewis remarked as he untangled the two oxygen sets he was carrying and clipped one of the tanks onto the back of Greenburg's belt. "You want me to put the mask on you?"

  "I'll put it on when I get this open," Greenburg grunted as he strained against a particularly well tightened nut. "I don't like stuff hanging from my face while I'm working. Distracts me."

  "Put it on before you lose pressure in there, Aaron," Betsy's voice came in his ear.

  "Aw, come on—Bets
," he said, the last word a burst of air as the nut finally yielded. "We're only a thousand feet or so higher than Pikes Peak, and I've been climbing around up there since I was ten. I'm not going to black out up here for lack of air."

  "Well... all right. But I want it on you as soon as you've finished with the panel."

  "Sure."

  It took only a couple of minutes to loosen all the nuts and, with Lewis's help, remove them and force the panel out of its rubber seating. For a minute there was a minor gale at their backs as the pressure inside the cargo deck equalized with that in the bay, and Greenburg realized belatedly he'd forgotten to check whether or not Lewis had remembered to close the hatch behind him. If he hadn't this windstorm was going to keep going for quite a while... but even as he finished adjusting his oxygen mask over his nose and mouth the rush of air began to subside and finally stilled completely. "Here goes," Greenburg muttered as, stooping slightly, he eased his head through the opening, blinking as a cold breeze swept his face.

  It was an impressive sight. Even twisted too far toward the bay's starboard wall, the shuttle's nose still seemed almost close enough for him to touch as it loomed over him, vibrating noticeably in the incomplete grip the broken collar provided. To his left and only slightly below him, he could see that the shuttle's front landing gear had descended just as it was supposed to, and was hanging tantalizingly close to the extended forward clamp. Moving his mike right up against his oxygen mask—it was noisier in the bay than he'd expected—he said, "Okay. First of all, I can't see anything that could be interfering with the clamp or arm. Rick, do the telltales read the arm as fully extended?"

  A short pause, then Henson's voice. "Sure do. It's still got lateral and vertical play, though. Want me to swing it around any?"

  "Waste of time, as long as it's too short. Someone's going to have to go down there and take a look at it, I guess."

  "That's not your job, though," Betsy spoke up. "Carl's lining up a mechanical crew to come up from the airport as soon as it's safe. They can do all the work that's needed in the bay."