Orbital Decay (17 page)

Lisa saw Hamilton’s face blanch as George spoke. “Go read your newspaper, George,” she said, giving him a swift, hard look. George shrugged and lurched back toward the kitchen. She looked at Hamilton. “Didn’t do so hot on the Vomit Comet, didya, Jack?”

He smiled ruefully. “It wasn’t bad after the first time… but I don’t want to repeat that experience again. Be honest with me. How bad is the liftoff?”

She lifted an eyebrow as she took a sip from her coffee. “It’s not bad. Lot of noise and g-force at first, but not even as bad as, say, a takeoff in a small single-engine plane in a crosswind. It’s reaching orbit that sometimes gets people, more than the launch. Did you eat a big breakfast?”

“No.”

“Good. Smart move.” She leaned closer. “George’s a malicious bastard sometimes. He gets new people like you and tempts ’em into having a big meal. Last good food on Earth, all that stuff. He tries to fill ’em up with Spanish omelets, smoked sausage, home fries, all that stuff, so they’ll get spacesick once we…”

“I do not!” George yelled from across the counter. “I heard that, Barnhart, and I don’t try to…”

“Shut up, George,” she threw over her shoulder. “Seriously, though, it’s hard to tell. The KC-135 trips are a poor substitute for the real thing. People who were doing somersaults in the cabin on that flight lose it sometimes as soon as they turn their heads or look out a window. They don’t even feel sick; one look out the window, and there they go. Sometimes they were borderline cases in the Comet, and when they get up there they’re fine, or at least no worse than taking a plane trip during bad weather. How did you do on the training flights?”

“Borderline,” Hamilton admitted, fluttering his hand up and down.

Lisa smiled. On impulse, she reached across the table and gripped his wrist. “You’ll do fine,” she said. “No one as handsome as you could lose it up there.”

“Thanks,” Hamilton said. Unexpectedly, he took her hand and gave it a squeeze in return.

“Watch it, pal,” George yelled. “She’s married!”

“Shut
up
, George!” Lisa snarled. She felt her face grow hot. Christ, she was feeling like a teenager sneaking feelies in the lunchroom. She glanced up in time to see Jack Hamilton’s face turning red as well. He released her hand.

“Sorry,” he muttered, and cleared his throat. “How do you like… I mean, how does your husband… ah, dammit…”

“I like it,” she said. “Carl, well… I guess he’s getting over it, or has gotten over it by now. He teaches gym at Titusville High, and the way teachers are paid these days, what he makes manages to buy the groceries and not much else.”

“Any kids?”

“Yes,” she said. “A daughter. Annie. Only a year old last month.” She smiled, wistfully, and stared off at a wall for a moment. “Like I was saying, spacesickness isn’t that big of a worry, as long as you didn’t…”

“I bet she’s proud of her mother.”

She stared down at the tabletop. No, c’mon, Lisa. Don’t break down crying in front of this guy. “I think she is,” she managed to say. “It’s hard to tell with babies, y’know…”

They were both silent for a little while, and George even managed to keep his mouth shut. After a few moments Hamilton cleared his throat again, a nervous gesture. “I, uh, heard through the rumor mill that the guy I’m replacing had some problems of his own,” he said. He stopped, and quickly added, “Not to say that you have any problems, I mean…”

“That’s okay,” she said. She snuffled back a tear and patted his hand. “We’ve all got problems, Jack.” Lisa sat up a little straighter and picked at her plate of now-lukewarm food. “I don’t know much either, but what I heard was that he… well, he got unglued, to make it simple. Nothing very serious, not like trying to shoot himself through an airlock or anything, but someone who was shuttling back from Skycan…”

“Skycan?”

She grinned in spite of herself. “Skycan. Don’t ask. You’ll find out why soon enough. Anyway, he started talking to walls or something, and the doctor there, Ed Felapolous, decided that it would be better if he was transferred back to Earth. Don’t worry about it. That’s rare up on Skycan. I hear it’s a little dull, but I’ve never taken anyone back in a straitjacket.”

“Oh,” he said, “that’s nice to know.”

Lisa looked up at him. “Oh, God, listen to me,” she said with a sigh. “I’m being honest with you, Jack. There’s nothing really to worry about, either with the launch or living up there. It’ll be rough, don’t let yourself think otherwise, but it’s no worse than any place else people have gone. The launch won’t be serious. You only…”

The intercom near the ceiling announced:
John Hamilton
,
John Hamilton
,
please report to Room A-12. John Hamilton
,
to the bus at Room A-12.

“Up the elevator, turn right, and straight down the hall to the end,” George said in a matter-of-fact tone without looking up from his newspaper. “Can’t miss it.”

“I suppose that’s my cue.” Hamilton got up reluctantly, shouldering his bag strap. “I guess I’ll probably see you at the pad, huh?”

“No. Actually, you won’t,” she said. Lisa looked up and smiled at him. “You’re going into the cargo deck down below, down the ladder into the OVT. I’ll be up on the command deck. I’ll arrive after you’re stowed away with the rest of the baggage, and the flight’s so short you’ll be on your way out only fifteen minutes after we’ve left the ground.”

“Oh. That’s too bad. I was beginning to enjoy this.”

So was I, she thought. As he turned to leave, she said, “Listen, Jack, when they put you into the OTV, get one of the rats to lend you a headset. Um, there’s a woman named Crissie who’ll be working on the tower. Tell her I said it was okay, because regulations say they’re not supposed to do it.”

“Do what?”

“Give you a headset,” she repeated. “So you can talk to me and I can talk to you. The OTV’s under automatic pilot, and supposedly it distracts the pilot to be talking to passengers, but I’ve done this so many times I won’t be bothered. The jack fits into a socket under the armrest, just like on an airliner. I’ll give you a ring once we’re underway, okay?”

“All right.” Hamilton grinned. “I’d like that.”

“No problem. Hey, and one more thing. Some of the guys going up think they’re supposed to be Iron Man or something. Don’t be a jerk. Take the Dramamine tabs they’ll offer you, okay?”

“Okay.” He turned around and headed for the door. “Thanks a lot, Lisa.”

“Have a good flight,” she said, and on impulse added, “handsome.”

When he had disappeared through the door, Lisa finished her breakfast. She swigged down the rest of her coffee, then picked up her clipboard and walked toward the door. “Have a good flight, handsome,” George mimicked as she headed out.

“Gag on it, pegleg,” she replied, and let the door slam behind her. Lisa could hear him laughing as she strode down the hall.

She paused on the concrete apron at the bottom of the gantry tower before getting on the elevator, and watched dawn break over the Cape. As a pale yellow glow spread from the east over the Atlantic, she could hear sounds of stirring life in the surrounding wildlife sanctuary: bird songs, the sullen
garrumph
of bullfrogs, the quiet chitter of crickets, even the echoing
gawwmp
of an alligator yawning or whatever it was that gators did when they made that sound, mixed in with the sound of machinery at work and the occasional beeping of a horn from the tower.

This was Lisa’s favorite part of Friday morning, the early dawn hours just before a launch. Three miles away, she could see the mellow sunlight shining on the walls of the VAB. Hawks were circling their nests on top of the huge rectangular building. The spotlights were being turned off now; the dawn’s light gave everything a crystal-clear clarity, reflecting off the windshields of the tourists’ cars and campers parked by the old KSC press mound near the VAB, on the other side of the barge-turning basin. Shuttle launches from the Cape had long since become so routine that the press had given up its once jealously guarded front-row seats to the tourists, who still flocked in from Cocoa Beach and Titusville and Orlando. Lisa smiled. Maybe she wasn’t greeted by reporters when she made her walk out to the pad, but it was still nice to have an audience. One day she would have to get Carl to bring Annie out to the old press mound to watch her mommy take off….

She shut off the thought deliberately, and turned to walk toward the elevator. A pad rat, wearing a NASA cap and a headphone dangling around his neck, wordlessly took her up as she studied the white skin of the
Willy Ley
passing by them. The Mark II shuttle was still looking good for an old bird with several thousand flight-hours behind her, but it was only a matter of time now before she would be retired for one of the Mark III’s which were beginning to come off the Rockwell assembly lines. Eventually they would get the bugs worked out of the prototype hydrogen ramjet, and an economical HTOL would make these old, history-reeking launch pads obsolescent. By then I’ll be too old to retrain to launch off a runway, Lisa thought. Just as well. Maybe I’ll take up teaching or something.

A technician, dressed in a white jumpsuit with the Skycorp logo stenciled on the back, escorted her down the catwalk to the whiteroom at the end of the umbilical arm connected to
Willy Ley
’s main hatch. She made small talk with a couple of more pad rats who helped into her escape harness, and let them guide her through the circular hatch onto the flight deck, but she insisted on putting on her own helmet and strapping herself into the couch—for no particular reason except that she had always felt annoyed at being treated like baggage.

S. Francis Coffey, her copilot, was already strapped into his own couch behind the wraparound console and going through the preflight checklist. He peered at her through his bifocals, looking as usual like an aging, grandfatherly walrus. “Getting later all the time, sweetheart,” he grumbled.

“We’re on schedule, aren’t we?” she said, plugging in her headset and turning over a page on the notebook strapped to the console between them. Already the spacecraft was shuddering and grumbling, as if it were angry at the long checkout delay and ready to depart at once.

“On seven-thirty, right on the money,” he replied. “Sleep well?”

“Is it that evident?” she asked.

Willy Ley
,
this is Launch Control
, the voice of CapCom said over the radio.
Radio check
,
over.

Lisa touched a switch on the console to her left. “Roger, out,” she responded. “Annie was being a bitch last night and kept me up.”

“Don’t worry, it doesn’t show. You look just beautiful.”

What’s that
,
Willy Ley
?
We don’t copy.

“Never mind, Launch Control,” Coffey replied easily, and snapped off his comlink. “For cryin’ out loud, Lisa…” he began, before they both broke up laughing.

For the next hour and fifteen minutes they went through the systems check, running down the list with Launch Control while the ground crew finished loading the rest of the liquid fuel into the booster and SME’s. She wondered briefly during the activity how Jack Hamilton was feeling, sitting alone in the tiny spacecraft in the shuttle’s cargo bay and listening to the exchange of jargon over the comlink. She was nervous about launches even after having done them on a weekly basis for almost three years, and the ritual of the checklist was all that kept her from going bananas during these last few minutes until liftoff. No telling how he felt, waiting out his first launch, sitting by himself in the OTV with nothing to do except listen and wait. I’ll give him a call after booster separation, she promised herself.

There was an obligatory ten-minute hold before launch; although neither she nor Coffey needed the time to catch up on their checklist, Launch Control used the period to go through its own final check. Lying on their backs, gazing through the windows at the clear blue sky above and the edge of the launch tower overhead, she and her copilot had their usual prelaunch disagreement.

“I want country music,” S. Francis Coffey said sternly.

“No. I’ve gotten tired of listening to Willie Nelson doing ‘Whisky River’ every time we launch. I—”

“We’ve only listened to that two times now.”

“The last two times as I recall. I’m really tired of that song, Steve, so—”

“No Willie this time.” He grinned and held up a cassette he had pulled from his breast pocket. “Something you’ve never heard before, darling. A classic Jimmy Buffett recording.
A1A.
Got a beauty song on it, ‘A Pirate Looks At Forty.’”

“What’s it like?”

“Kind of slow, mellow…”

“I’m not in the mood for slow and mellow,” she insisted. She unzipped a hip pocket and produced a cassette of her own. “Look, I’m trying to go halfway with you…”

“No, no, no,” he said, shaking his head and holding his hand up. “Not Paul Winter Consort again. I don’t care if they use a fiddle, I’m not going to listen to ‘Icarus’ one more time when we lift off.”

“Philistine. This is Aaron Copland, the ‘Hoedown’ suite from
Rodeo
, You’ll love it.”

“Is it country?”

“No, it’s last-century American classical, but…”

“Forget it,” he said sternly, holding his hand in front of the cassette player they had jury-rigged to the console between them months ago, when they had started piloting together and had learned that they both liked to have background music during launches. Strictly speaking, it was against Skycorp regulations, but almost everyone in both Skycorp and NASA looked the other way. It didn’t affect their flying performance as long as they kept it at a low volume, and astronauts had been carrying cassette music into space since the Project Apollo days. “I don’t want any of that violin and trumpet shit.”

“Cut it out, Coffey, you know better than that.” Lisa knocked his hand out of the way and slid the tape into the slot. “Besides, you told me that the next time we flew I would get the pick because you simply had to listen to Willie Nelson again when we took off.” She reached over and adjusted the digital timer so that the tape would start just after rollover, seven seconds after launch. “Think of it as some culture coming into your miserable, backwoods Kentucky-bred existence.”