Starfire

by Unknown

  “Copy, Houston. Thanks for the help.”

  The pause was a fraction of a second longer than it had to be. “We aim to please, Travis. You do likewise.”

  Travis ignored the implied rebuke and took comfort in the promise. He really wasn’t ready to think about what state his life must be in, that he’d rather stake it on this desperate chance than allow himself to be barred from space forever. It wasn’t the time for that kind of introspection, anyway.

  “Travis, assuming you’re lying down in that thing, you should find Beta Aquarius straight ahead. Do you have any question about its identity?”

  “No. I have Beta Aquarius in the verniers.”

  “Copy.”

  Again there was silence. He lay supine in a cockleshell raft, adrift on the river of night, judging its current by the stars and nebulae that washed over the gunwales.

  “Travis, we want you to take aim on Beta Aquarius and initiate the preset charge precisely on our mark, T minus thirty seconds. Do you copy?”

  “Copy.” Again he nudged the fat barrel of the retrorocket and sighted through the open cross hairs at the white star.

  “Travis, I have a note here from Guidance. Says the common name of Beta Aquarius is Sadalsuud, if I’m pronouncing that correctly. It means the Luckiest of the Lucky.” The Capcom’s voice was without emotion, as if she were afraid to jinx the omen by regarding it as anything other than a useful datum.

  He would need the luck. The first unmanned test pods had had an attitude problem. The pods were meant to skitter across the top of the atmosphere like a pebble on a pond, until they slowed enough to sink straight in. With the wrong attitude, a pod didn’t even bounce before tumbling into meteoric ruin. After NASA had licked that, the test pods began making it into the atmosphere, their beacons beeping right up until ionization blackout—but after that, nothing.

  “Ten seconds to de-orbit burn…”

  He listened to the numbers and thought of nothing but keeping the retrorocket braced, the star in his cross hairs. When the count ran all the way down, he squeezed the trigger.

  This time flame spurted between his toes. His stomach sank. The impulse was gentle, but it seemed to go on forever. The stars slowed, and Euclid wheeled away into darkness before the rocket flickered out.

  “A good burn, Travis. Now all you’ve got to do is roll into eyeballs-in position.”

  “Roger.” With quick bursts of gas he rotated the pod until the surface of the planet was rolling away beneath his feet. Below him the Earth was darkening, and scattered lights winked on in the great glacier-planed desolation of central Canada. The regions of middle air were hung with milky veils of northern light. He unlatched the spent rocket and gave it just enough of a shove over the side to ensure that it wouldn’t re-enter on top of him.

  “We’re scrambling ASR from Johnson Island. See you in Waikiki.”

  He knew this communicator, a red-haired kid, pretty and smart and tough as nails. “You meet me in person and I’ll buy you a mai tai.”

  “Can’t pass up an offer like that.” She paused. “Go with God.”

  Choked good wishes from other voices in Houston and aboard Euclid joined in, whispering in his headset—writing him off, he thought.

  He kept his amen to himself.

  Like a tetherball wrapping around a pole, the escape pod accelerated as it dove toward Earth. The first widely spaced molecules of air offered resistance. Travis began to feel a bit sludgy. He pulled the thermoplastic cover over his head and peered through its fishbowl window; between his helmet and the window there was so much refraction that he could no longer make out the stars.

  A bead of sweat trickled from the inside of his brow, down the side of his nose, into his eye. Stung like hell—that’s gravity for you. He could feel his weight now, pressing against all the ridges and wrinkles of his clammy suit. The wad between his legs was as oppressive as a loaded diaper.

  Something whispered in his ears, and a flicker of red licked over the glass, inches from his eyes. Perhaps he was imagining it, but the pod seemed to vibrate with febrile energy, nervy as a wet fingertip sliding around the rim of a glass.

  The window was all red, tending to orange—not the red of flame, but the diffuse red of a neon sign, glowing with gas discharge. The abused air molecules outside the pod were hot, excited enough to glow, but too far from one another to transfer much heat to the pod.

  That proved to be a temporary state: molecules swiftly swarmed closer as the diving pod continued to accelerate against the braking force of the air. The window was ablaze with pearly light, and inside Travis’s spacesuit the air was getting unmanageably hot. Vapor clouded his faceplate. Sweat poured into his eyes.

  Steady white flame outside the window, and a banshee’s wail rattling his eardrums…he hadn’t been prepared for the noise, inexpressibly louder than the controlled bellow of a returning space shuttle, a painful shriek drilling into his head, straight through his solid helmet. He groaned but couldn’t hear himself. Neither could anyone else, for by now the falling pod was deep inside the cone of ionized gas that blocked the passage of radio waves.

  Each second was a minute, each minute a year. Ten minutes in real time he basted in his juices in the howling furnace, waiting for death. The gee forces increased as fiery air slowed the onrush of the escape pod from 29,000 kilometers an hour to 19,000, to 9,000, all the while piling stones on his collapsing belly.

  His brain force-fed on blood, and black flecks swam before his eyes; his oppressed guts threatened to heave. He closed his eyes, but that was worse: he began sliding dizzily toward unconsciousness as an inner voice said calmly, as if it had no stake in the matter, this may have been a mistake.

  The white glow flickered again, fell back through pearl to pink to red, and once more to black. The shriek subtly altered, and groggily he perceived that he was hearing not just the vibration of metal and plastic but the sound of wind. A drop of condensed moisture fell from his faceplate onto his cheek.

  The ride got bumpy; the pod encountered seemingly solid layers of air, then dropped into wells of vacuum. He was slammed from one side to the other as the pod bucked in the turbulence. He knew he had five minutes to fall before he got down to air thick enough to grab his chute, but his time sense had been destroyed. Was the blackness outside the window due to high altitude or merely to night? He had no choice but to trust the pod’s altimeter.

  The turbulence increased; his helmet bounced painfully off the useless window. For a moment he was sure he was traveling up, not down, and he heard a rattle of hail like a handful of birdshot thrown against the pod cover. Lightning glared through his window. Thunderhead! He had to suppress momentary panic—a primitive fear, left over from student pilot days.

  Not that a thunderstorm couldn’t still destroy him.

  Suddenly the ride was smooth again. As his throat relaxed into the beginning of a sigh, the pod’s cover ripped away and the mortar shell he was sitting on blew him into the night. He tumbled like a rag doll through the air. The unsecured oxygen package slammed into his face, shattering his faceplate, and he pawed at it and tore it from its connection. Somewhere deep in the back of his skull the self-that-refused-to-get-involved noted another useful design change.

  The drogue caught and the chute spilled and streamed out behind, tugging him upright just before it blossomed and braked him with a bruising jerk. He craned his head back to check the shroud lines. His shattered helmet got in the way; he twisted it, dragged it off his head, hurled it aside. He saw that the shrouds ran taut up to a small round canopy high above his head, darkly silhouetted against a sky of blue-black clouds and moist stars.

  He twisted the wrist locks on his gloves and consigned them to the air. He lifted his waist flap and worked at the waist ring until the top and bottom of his suit were detached, but the parachute harness prevented him from shedding more weight. He hung there, swinging in the night, with a fragrant breeze pushing into his nostrils and a wad of fabric crushing his bal
ls, and he began to worry.

  He could not yet see the surface below him, but he imagined the rolling immensity of the ocean. Already he was faint from the effort of pulling off his helmet and gloves—a few weeks in microgravity is sufficient to decondition the hardiest body—and he dreaded what was to come.

  Inky ripples resolved out of the darkness beneath his white-booted feet, liquid black running on gray, teasing the eye to imagine a curve of moonless sea. Travis fidgeted with the parachute harness release. The ripples became swells; waves textured the swells. A tang of salt mist…

  He pulled up his knees and flipped the releases as the heaving floor of black water rushed up and struck him. All was dense and ringing darkness, with something yanking hard at his foot, tumbling him into boiling confusion. There were bubbles all around him, he could feel them bulging and slithering between his inner and outer suit and wobbling over the skin of his face, but he could not see them.

  Whatever it was still dragged at his foot, but his attention was completely focused on the mass of aluminum and nylon that swaddled his upper body. With a deliberation born of terror he held firmly to his open left sleeve while withdrawing the arm inside it, inevitably also pulling the garment over his face, where it clung. He did not panic—he had moved through panic to a place where the universe was reduced to a single dimension, a straight space-time line, allowing one act only, and then another—but reached outside with his free left arm and taking hold of the right sleeve, forcing his reach against the rigid metal of the upper waistband now levering into his neck, pulled those arms apart…until the smothering whiteness of the upper suit was gone.

  The lower half next: he pushed at its waist ring to no effect; his feet were stuck in his boots. He tucked himself as if doing a sit-up, but his abdominal muscles were so much spent elastic. He could reach to his boots, but he had no strength to pull at them.

  He lay back then, and almost inhaled ocean. It seemed much the easiest solution, not only the easiest but really the only sensible course, because he was so very tired, and after all he had done his best…after all…

  …his all…over…

  That damned thing tugged on his leg again his shoulders slammed into the dirt a rock pounded into his ribs an oak thicket tore the side of his face and his ankle was about to snap the hooves were slamming into the caliche throwing yellow dust up his nose no goddam horse is gonna do that to me you sonofabitch all he had to do was reach up and grab that stirrup strap and haul himself up to where he could grab the saddle horn and grab that fancy long mane and he’d kill that fucking bonehead animal by God he’d put a .45 slug right in its ear if it was dumb enough to run all the way back to the barn with him still on it my Daddy’ll give me the gun to do it too you’ll see

  His arm was over the side of the raft and his right leg was out of the spacesuit bottom. The floating parachute harness still tugged at the empty boot. Irritably Travis kicked at the other leg, and the garment slithered off and silently sank.

  There was a lot of stuff he was supposed to do now. Flares. Radio. Salvage the chute and all that. He’d get to it. Right now he needed rest, with his cheek snugged against this hard rough bosom smelling of rubber cement, the salt water dribbling into his mouth…

  He gagged and choked. He raised himself and screamed an obscenity—against the night, against his weakness and cowardice—and with strength he got from some unknown place he pulled himself into the bottom of the raft.

  He had passed out before he knew he was safely aboard. When he woke he felt nothing but his own immense weight, and something punching him rudely in the stomach. The sea. Six inches from his face was a curved wall of textured yellow, brilliant in sunlight—the raft’s inflated gunwale. His soggy Snoopy hat, its radio dead and worse than useless, muffled his hearing, but beyond the lap and gurgle of water under his ear he could make out another sound, a distant rhythmic hiss and sharp intermittent crack, which puzzled him. Until he recognized it.

  Surf.

  Travis rolled carefully onto his back. The sky was soft blue, the clouds were benign billows of vapor, high and white, and the sun on his face was a warm caress. He dragged off the communications cap and hauled himself up, half sitting, half lying against the gunwale. The water beside the raft was of a startling blue—not the royal blue of the deep sea but the turquoise blue of a sandy lagoon.

  A meter away, floating belly up just beneath the surface, was a three-meter-long hammerhead shark, dead as a plank. Did I land on it? Travis wondered, and started to giggle.

  Repeatedly jumping up over the jagged horizon formed by the little nearby waves he saw, on the farther horizon, a long curl of white water curving away to the right and a flat strip of yellow sand beyond, surmounted by a uniform fringe of coconut palms. And on this side of the surf, coming toward him, were two palm-log canoes powered by outboard motors, driven by fat brown young men in orange and purple undershirts.

  Travis tried to stifle his giggles, but it was really too funny. This wasn’t Johnson Island. He wondered what the boatmen would think when they found this guy in a raft wearing this ridiculous suit of long underwear…

  Still snorting and chuckling, he went back to sleep.

  Later, waking in the bottom of a canoe to the racket of a two-cycle engine and the smell of unburned motor oil and fish, he did ask, but he couldn’t understand the answer. He had never taken French.

  Later still, in Houston, after they’d pumped him full of electrolytes and nutrients and reassured him that everybody on Euclid was in good health and fine spirits, including his friend Max, the pilot of the tender, whose undetected neurological aberrations would have grounded him even if he hadn’t OD’d on solar protons, a bureaucrat who was still trying to decide whether to treat Travis as a hero or a dangerous madman showed him on a map the exact point where he’d impacted: twenty-seven miles east-northeast of Manihi atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago.

  He’d drifted for half a day, asleep the whole time, while search planes homed on his beacon. He was not implicated in the death of the shark.

  2

  DEATH-DEFYING BAIL-OUT FROM NEAR-EARTH ORBIT (New York–Los Angeles Times)

  AMERICAN COSMONAUT-SPY ABANDONS STRICKEN COMPANION, PLUNGES TO EARTH IN FIERY SPACE ESCAPE (Pravda)

  ORBITAL ESCAPE SYSTEM PROVES ITS METTLE (London Times–Monitor)

  TRAVIS TO NASA: LOOK MA, NO WIRES (Us People)

  The verdict, in the West anyway, was “hero.” The newsheads saw to that.

  NASA bit its collective lip and went along with the gag. As ever, the agency was desperate for good publicity. As ever, it was paranoid schizophrenic on the question of what sort of publicity was good.

  Safety-conscious to the point of absurdity for the first quarter century of its existence (to so absurd a point, in fact, that at first NASA had wanted to make its systems pilotproof), by the advent of the shuttle era the agency had fallen victim to its own propaganda. Estimates of risk were based on engineers’ choices of adjectives. One guy would say “occasional,” and that got written down as ten thousand to one; another guy would say “remote,” and that came out a hundred thousand to one. We are safety-conscious, therefore we are safe, they thought—the sort of logic that proves fatal.

  Which was one reason why, deep down, NASA still hated its heroes. NASA’s engineers turned managers had never stopped resenting individual initiative when it bucked the system. As an eloquent defender of the profession once phrased it, engineering has its existential pleasures. But it seems they are more likely to be found on the CADD screen or in the shop. Hell, as an earlier, more cynical existentialist had pointed out, is other people. And individuals with initiative have an alarming tendency to reveal the system for what it is—an assemblage of ordinary folks whose judgment is sometimes questionable and who rather frequently make mistakes.

  Worst of all, NASA hated to remind the tax-paying public that men and women would die in space, inevitably, even when the system was functioning perfectly—if only because the w
ork was inherently, irremediably dangerous.

  That Travis. He could have died right out there in front of everybody. NASA resented him for making a personal choice, even when no other lives were at risk, and secretly some of them resented him even more for surviving his personal choice, for who knew how many others might be tempted to pull the same kind of dumb stunt?

  Through some fluke he was a hero, though, and they had to treat him that way until it all blew over. The public affairs people obligingly facilitated numerous video and fax interviews with Travis and his mates aboard Euclid, and the Polynesian fishermen who had beaten the search planes to the rescue and plucked him out of the raft, and his mother and brothers and uncle; they supplied animated reconstructions of his re-entry trajectory, plus background sheets on orbital mechanics and escape pod design; they talked about the importance of the research he had been doing aboard Euclid, searching the skies for eccentric Earth-crossing comets and asteroids.

  Higher up, the administrators reluctantly decided they had to let Travis go back into space one more time. They played up his colorful remark about how his ma had always made him get right back on the horse after he’d been bucked off, but they kept him to a short tour on Archimedes (little radiation danger there). Not once did anyone ever say to him in so many words, you’ve had it, Hill, you’re washed up with us.

  Behind Taylor Stith’s gray steel desk a north-facing picture window overlooked an irrigated green lawn—thick Bermuda grass, tough as wire, with a pond full of rocks in the middle of it—the focus of the Johnson Space Center’s college-style campus. Fifty years after its planting the Bermuda grass was holding up fine, thriving in fact, but the surrounding buildings, plastered with quartz chips which had once gleamed so pristinely in the sullen Gulf sun, were succumbing to livid rust streaks and tarry black scabs where the wall adhesive had failed. An astute observer might have inferred that NASA was in that stretch of the economic cycle where it found itself tempted to promise too much on too low a budget.