Back to the Moon (10 page)

Cecil hung up the phone, asked his secretary to do the faxing, and patiently waited. An hour later he heard a polite tap at his door. His secretary escorted in the town constable, Sergeant Buckminster Taylor, Trooper Buck, as he was called. Buck hefted his bulk into the chair nearest Cecil's desk. “Damnedest thing, Cecil, got a call from the FBI just a few minutes ago. Asked if I'd mind baby-sitting you for an hour or so. There's a couple of agents on their way from Tallahassee to see you. You in any kind of trouble?”

“Let's just say I think I know why they're coming.”

“Why's that?”

“I believe I'll hold fire on that for now, Buck.”

Trooper Buck, who kept an eye on everyone on the Key, didn't miss a beat. “Didn't I see your missus leaving town last night with both the kids?”

“A little vacation,” Cecil said.

“I almost believe you,” Buck said, turning in his chair. “You expecting trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“Where's Jack Medaris these days, by the way? Went out to the plant, everything's deserted.”

Cecil nodded. “Believe I'll hold fire on that one, too, Buck.”

POSTINSERTION CHECKLIST (2)

Columbia

“Houston, this is Penny!” she yelled into her headset. “Houston, answer, dammit!” Then she remembered she hadn't heard anything since the big technician had “fixed” her headset. “Shit!”

Penny stopped and listened. She heard nothing except the sound of her own shallow breathing. It was unnerving. “Hello? Who's here with me?” she called, but no one answered. She didn't know whether to unstrap or not, what she should do. She squinted, a habit when she was worried or scared. Was there enough air in the cabin? Did something need to be done to turn the oxygen and nitrogen banks on, to get the filters scrubbing?

“Houston, come in, Houston!” she yelled into her mike, but no one answered. She'd seen Cassidy dragged through the open hatch. What had happened to him? And where was the big technician? And the man who had somehow climbed past her to the flight deck during ascent? My God, he had to be strong to do that! Penny had been unable to even raise her arm at the time.

The middeck was dark, gloomy, a pale blue fluorescent glow from a single square ceiling panel providing the only light. She sniffed the air, wrinkled her nose. The cabin's stale, sour smell, like a mix of old athletic socks and detergent, made her wonder how many unwashed bodies had camped out inside the tiny compartment. She tried to focus on the frost-white lockers in front of her but couldn't get a fix on them. Up and down seemed to have no meaning. Her LES suit felt light, crinkly, as if it were made of paper. Then she saw a tiny silver circle, a washer, wobble past her eyes. She watched it, fascinated by its independent trajectory, wondering what bolt it was supposed to encircle and what else had been left undone on
Columbia.
It was an old bird, after all. Not
it,
she recalled from her PR briefings,
she, her:
the shuttles were feminine, the same as ships.
Columbia,
then, was an old lady. Penny had been in middle school when the world's first shuttle had made her maiden voyage into space. That had been more than twenty years ago. God only knew what else was wrong with the damn ancient thing!

Penny snapped back to her situation. Those men—who the hell were they? Only one answer fit: She was probably on board with hijackers. And then—in a tumble of thoughts—she realized that whatever had happened, or was about to happen, it was going to make one hell of a story. The end result, if she survived, might be the attainment of all that she had ever desired: superstar status, perhaps even love. She reveled in that thought for a split second before cursing herself for having had it. What manner of insecure person was she that, in the midst of disaster, she was pondering if her public would love her for it? Still, if she lived... she
was
Penny High Eagle! Her public had to be served. And what a hell of a story!

Penny's internal debate was interrupted when she heard movement behind her seat and then the ingress technician's voice. “Jack?” she heard him call out. “Jack?” Then there was the unmistakable sound of vomiting. Penny wrinkled up her nose again.

Then the man who had climbed to the flight deck came floating headfirst through the hatch, pulling himself hand over hand down the ladder. He was dressed in the flight coveralls of an astronaut and Penny reflexively thought perhaps there had been some kind of mix-up at launch, that in fact she was still in the hands of NASA. Then she saw the ugly red scar that ran from the man's left jawbone around to the back of his neck and she knew he was no astronaut. “Dr. High Eagle?” He was upside down, his head above hers. “I don't know how you got aboard but just tell me this. What happened to the rest of the crew?”

Penny scrutinized the man. She had learned to memorize features to help her in recreating people for her articles. Even wearing coveralls and upside down, she could tell he was trim and athletic and probably in his early forties. He had black hair, dabbled with silver threads, and a strong chin. His clear brown eyes seemed to brim with intelligence. She thought about not talking to him but then dismissed the idea. Who else was she going to talk to? “The last time I saw them they were on the elevator,” she said, pulling off her helmet. She let it go and it drifted away. She watched, mesmerized by its motion. “I came up alone in the other one.”

He seemed to study her. Penny had the sense he was trying to make up his mind about something. “I'm Jack Medaris, Dr. High Eagle. I think I'm going to need your help to get this spacecraft configured.”

She looked up at him, squinting. “Would you mind turning right side up? You're making me sick to my stomach.”

“Do you have SAS?” It sounded like an accusation.

“S-A-S?”

“Yes,” he said, his upside-down eyes looking deep into hers. “Do you have it?”

She turned away from him. The man talked in riddles, the same as every other NASA engineer she'd run into during the past six months. “Who the hell are you, Jack Medaris?” she asked.

“I know you've got questions and I'll get to them,” he replied, at the same time complying with her request and rotating until he was in a heads-up position relative to her. “But right now I need your help. How about it?”

“Why should I help a hijacker?”

“I'm not a hijacker. I have a contract.”

“What?”

“It's top secret. As soon as we're done, we'll land. I'll explain it all later. Got to look at my PLT and SMET. How about helping out? Start by activating the WCS.”

Penny's head was spinning. “What's a P-L-T and a smet? And what's a W-C-S?”

He apparently had not heard her, or chose to ignore her. He disappeared beneath her seat. “Let's have a look, Hoppy,” she heard him say.

Penny pulled off her gloves, released her belts, and disconnected her suit connections, then watched in dismay when her feet floated toward the ceiling. She awkwardly twisted around, grappled with the back of her seat, managed to pull herself into a position to look behind it, toward the aft bulkhead. Medaris was there, Cassidy beneath him, apparently unconscious. “Listen,” she said. “I need some answers.”

“Just a minute, Dr. High Eagle,” Medaris said in a mildly irritated voice.

“Listen, you...” She pulled over the top of the seat, expecting to drop down beside him, but instead she banged into the aft bulkhead, bounced off it, and went flying, arms and legs flailing, until she managed to snag a cloth foot restraint strap on the deck. She fully expected to be laughed at but Medaris was busy tightening a cloth belt from his overalls above a spreading red spot on Cassidy's right thigh. A haze of red seemed to hover above it and Penny realized with a shock they were floating blood drops. “Medaris, what happened to him?” she asked, shaken.

“Remain calm,” Medaris said, turning to look at her. “Moving around too much in preact isn't a good idea. It can degrade several EC parameters to off-nominal. Are you going to get the WCS activated?”

Penny stared at him. “Can you speak English?” she asked. When he didn't answer, she put her boots together and launched herself at him, intending to grab his collar, make him talk sense to her. She crashed into the airlock instead, and bounced back, flailing. Her eyes filled with tears of pain and frustration. Then she seemed to lose her ability to focus. She closed her eyes, tried to figure out which way was up or down. When she opened them again, she saw Medaris pondering her from across the deck. “Is there any particular reason why you keep doing that?” he asked.

“Screw you,” she grumped.

He pulled to the bank of stacked lockers, opened one up. “The reason you can't go where you want to is because you're judging your trajectory based on one g.” He slid out a drawer, pulled shaped pieces of foam from it. He plucked out a white box by its handle. A green cross was inscribed on it. “Your brain is programmed for horizontal range as computed on earth,” he continued while she gaped at him. “Range on earth is the product of velocity squared divided by the gravitational acceleration constant and the cosine of twice the launch angle. Here in space the gravitational constant is essentially zero. That's why you can't hit your target.”

Penny was certain she was being mocked. Nothing made her angrier. “You son of a bitch, I'm going to kick your ass.”

He frowned at her, as if she was something he needed to fix. “Do you have a vocabulary other than curse words?”

“Do you have a vocabulary other than acronyms?” she replied, squinting.

He ignored her comment. “I've got a wounded PLT and—” he peered past Penny “—what appears to be a sick SMET. I need to take care of them first. Then I'll take care of you.”

Penny took his words as a threat. She held her hands turned flat, moved them in a circle. “Take care of me? You come near me, you son of a bitch, I'll kill you! I have a black belt in karate.”

“Dr. High Eagle,” Medaris said patiently, “we have a long haul in front of us. To get through it we're going to need to be friends.”

His comment was so ridiculous that Penny spontaneously burst out laughing, only to quickly strangle it. She hated her laugh. She'd been told by her last boyfriend that her laugh sounded like a braying mule. She'd kicked him out that night, sent him packing without even his toothbrush. “Friends?” she rasped, choking the laugh down her throat. “I don't need any friends, especially a damn spacejacker!”

He arched an eyebrow. “Your laugh... it sounds a little bit like a—”

“Screw you!” she interrupted, then squinted, jabbed her finger toward the deck. “I want to go down, now!”

“You're aiming in the wrong direction,” he said, opening the box.

“What?”

He pointed at the deck. “When you point in that direction, you're not pointing at the earth. We're in an omicron plus-X center-of-earth attitude. The direction you're pointing is out along the plane of the solar system. That's a generalization, of course.”

“Well, let me give you a generalization, shithead,” Penny sneered. “I want the hell off this goddam shuttle.”

He shrugged, took scissors from the box, began to snip away the red-soaked material on Cassidy's pants.

“All right,” Penny breathed. “Let me make this a very simple question. Are we going to land? And no P-L-T or W-C-S acronyms!”

“PLT and WCS aren't acronyms,” Medaris replied, folding the hole in the material back with his finger. “They're initials. PLT means pilot. WCS is the waste control system. SMET's an acronym. Shuttle main engine technician. You didn't know that?”

Penny was starting to feel homicidal. The man was a complete nerd. “I know this,” she seethed. “If you don't answer my question, I'm going to use that goddamn equation of yours, gravitational whatever and twice the goddamn whatsit, and come over there and wring your stinking stupid-ass neck, even if I have to wait until you're asleep to do it.
Are you going to land this thing or not?
”

“Yes,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing. She had a surge of hope until he added his final word. “Eventually.”

“Bastard,” she hissed.

“My mother would hate to hear that opinion of her favorite son,” he said, disarmingly.

Penny refused to be disarmed by a spacejacking geek. “You and your mother can go...” she muttered, trailing off, because she had suddenly become aware of her bladder. It felt as if it had swollen to the size of a basketball and someone was sticking needles in it. A remnant of a class she'd had in Houston came back to her. There was something called space adaptation syndrome. SAS! So that's what this idiot was talking about! Weightlessness in space caused a shift of blood to the head, disorienting the brain. The stomachs of astronauts often paid a price for that. But blood also poured into the upper torso, causing the body to create urine in copious quantities to get rid of the excess fluid. Penny groaned when another thought struck her. Ollie Grant had insisted she drink a lot of water that morning, saying it would keep her from being dehydrated in space. She realized she'd been had. But it didn't change the fact she had to pee, seriously,
now.

CEDAR KEY (2)

Office of Cecil Velocci, Attorney at Law, Cedar Key, Florida

Two FBI agents arrived three hours after Cecil had made his call to the Department of Transportation. By then Trooper Buck had received a call concerning a fender bender on Gulf Street and left. The agents pounded up the steps and strode purposefully past Cecil's secretary, who waved her arms at them futilely before they hit the door. “Cecil Velocci?”

“Attorney-at-law. Yes. FBI?”

“You got it,” one of them said, displaying his shield. The other agent did the same. “What is all this? I understand you turned in a report, something having to do with the shuttle?”