The Tranquillity Alternative (10 page)

He looked her straight in the eye. “It feels great,” he replied. “How about you?”

Lewitt broke up laughing; even Bromleigh began to chuckle from behind the lens. Rhodes turned several shades of red. “You better be glad this isn’t live,” she murmured as she lowered the mike.

“Ma’am, this is a live countdown, and we’ve wasted enough time as it is.” Parnell knelt to pick up his notebook where he had placed it on the ground. “So let’s cut the crap already,” he added softly. “We’ve got a job to do here, and despite rumors to the contrary, this isn’t a press junket for your benefit.”

Bromleigh unjacked the microphone and let the male end drop to the ground before he quietly walked away, leaving Rhodes and Parnell alone for a moment. “I understand you’ve been told to cooperate with the press,” Rhodes said as she began to coil the mike cable. “At this rate, I’ll be having a few words with your boss before this is wrapped up.”

“Fine with me,” Parnell said. “But get it straight, ma’am … I’m in charge of this mission, not you, and I don’t give a rat’s ass what Goldin thinks. In fact, I could throw you and your producer off this flight right now, and you can catch a ride back to the press mound and cover the launch from there for all I care. Your boss will be real pleased if I do that, won’t he?”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“Give me an excuse … please.” When Rhodes didn’t respond, he went on. “Like I said, these people have a job to do and you’re getting in their way. Keep this up and I’ll leave you behind. It’s your call.”

As if on cue, the launch talker’s voice came over the loudspeakers again:
T-minus thirty-two minutes and counting. All unnecessary ground personnel, please evacuate the pad and proceed to safe distance. Final hold will commence in five minutes.

Workmen were already beginning to trot down the metal stairs from atop the launch platform, heading for the white vans parked on the crawlerway near the base of the mound. A siren blew, echoing faintly off the metalwork of the gantry, itself long-since pulled away on its rails. Cold white fumes wafted down from the first stage, curling around the mammoth supports of the launch cradle, pulled by enormous fans into the maw of the flame trench beneath the mobile platform. Parnell heard a sharp whistle from the bottom of the launch tower; a pad tech impatiently waited next to the service elevator, where Ryer, Lewitt, Bromleigh, and Dooley had already gathered.

Parnell ignored the summons. “Your call, Ms. Rhodes,” he repeated. “You cooperate with me, I’ll cooperate with you … but only on my terms. Got it?”

For a moment, he wondered if she was actually going to call his bluff … and it
was
a bluff, for he knew that if he left her behind, the agency would send her to the Wheel aboard another ferry, even if that meant delaying the mission’s third phase by at least a week while another Atlas-C was rolled out to the pad. The ugly truth of the matter was that NASA wanted good press so badly that it was willing to hunker down on all fours and lick the boots of the Berkley Rhodeses of the world, if only to ensure that a relative handful of middle-management bureaucrats and senior officials could retain their civil-service jobs….

Which, of course, was just one of the many reasons why the space program was in such sorry shape. The agency had become so used to kowtowing to a fickle press, it had forgotten that its primary purpose was to launch rockets. But, just for once, Parnell wanted to put the fear of God into one of these leeches. He could see that he had succeeded when she blinked.

“Got it,” she finally whispered. “I understand.”

Parnell nodded. “Good. Then let’s go … we’ve got a launch window to meet.” He turned and led her toward the elevator.

If the rest of the mission went so easily, he would have nothing to worry about for the next ten days.

The elevator creaks as it gradually rises through the tower’s central shaft. No one in the cage says anything during the long ascent; through its wire-mesh walls, they can see the flat landscape of Merritt Island spread out before them, the giant white cube of the Vehicle Assembly Building dominating the scenery from three miles away, the Florida mainland a green line across the distant western horizon.

Constellation
’s sleek fuselage looms next to the launch tower. They rise past the vast wings of the first-stage booster, past the ropy coils of fuel cables, past the gently tapering second stage, where a thin skein of frozen condensation from the supercooled fuels within the rocket’s fuel tanks has affixed itself to the hull like hoarfrost, until they reach the top of the tower. They catch a brief glimpse of the orbiter’s vertical stabilizer before it vanishes behind its sharp delta wings as the elevator slows and comes to a clanking halt.

A technician in a white jumpsuit and helmet opens the cage door and leads them across the open platform to the crew access arm. A chill morning breeze, tinged with salt, moans through the skeletal girders and sings past the wires of the emergency cable car leading from the tower to the ground far below; their last view of Earth is from this aerie above the marshy coast, so near and yet so far.

Parnell is the first person to walk onto the access arm. He feels a gentle vibration through the soles of his shoes as he strides down the enclosed bridge, a tactile sense of restrained power that trembles against his palms as he touches the handrails.
Constellation
is a monster beginning to awaken from its slumber.

At the end of the access arm is the whiteroom. Here, there is no wind, no salt air, no sound, only a small sterile chamber nestled up against the rocket’s fuselage. One technician hands Parnell his helmet, helps him fit it over his head and attach the dangling line to the communications carrier on his waist. Another technician guides him to an open circular hatch and gives him the customary backslap as he climbs into the belly of the beast.

Parnell climbs up a narrow ladder past rows of swivel-mounted acceleration couches until he reaches the top of the passenger compartment. He clambers into his couch on the starboard side and begins to fasten the lap- and shoulder-harnesses around his body. Through the open hatch above him he can see the narrow confines of the cockpit; Kingsolver and Trombly, the pilot and co-pilot, glance briefly over their shoulders as they continue running through the pre-launch checklist, repeating each item as they gaze at the myriad dials and digital indicators on their wraparound consoles, their gloved hands snapping toggles and depressing buttons.

“Primary BFS check …”

“BFS transferred, check. GPC on Mode Five, green light.”

“Control, GPC and BFS checks complete, over.”

“Select three-plus-one on screen three.”

“Roger that …”

Sunlight lances down, as if through a narrow skylight, from the cockpit windows. Below him, Parnell can hear the rest of his crew as they climb the ladder into the cockpit. A few moments later, Cris Ryer hoists herself into the couch on the port side of the vessel, just across the aisle from him. He can barely make out her face inside the open visor of her helmet, yet she looks pensive as she snaps the worn buckles of her harness and tightens the webbed straps.

“Remember to extinguish all smoking materials,” he says.

“Right,” she murmurs. The joke was old and tired before she was out of diapers, and she pays no attention to it.

“I sort of meant the look in your eyes,” he adds.

Ryer casts him a look which somehow manages to be both hot and cold at the same time, yet she doesn’t say anything. “If there’s something you want to discuss …” he continues.

“No, Commander, there isn’t,” she says, looking away again. “In fact, I’d just as soon not talk about anything right now, thank you.”

The ferry pilots have paused in their metronomic recitation of the checklist. Although neither of them are looking their way, it’s obvious that they’re eavesdropping on the conversation. After a moment, they resume their work.

“Go for OMS pressurization.”

“Third stage OMS pressurization beginning. Switch is armed, check …”

“We’ll talk about it later,” Parnell says. He hesitates, then adds, “And we
will
have a discussion, Captain.”

Ryer’s expression is glacial. “Yes, sir, Commander.”

Parnell sighs and shuts his eyes for a moment. He feels a headache coming on; whose swell idea was it to allow women aboard spaceships in the first place, for Christ’s sake? He gropes through his jumpsuit pockets for the Tylenol stashed in there somewhere as his eyes land on the digital chronometer above the cockpit hatch.

T-minus eighteen minutes, thirty-four seconds, and counting. They’ve come off the obligatory nine-minute hold in the countdown; unless the boys in the firing room find a reason to call another hold or even abort the launch, they’ll be on their way in less than twenty minutes. That’s eighteen and a half minutes too long for him.

“Mission, this is
Constellation
, conducting voice check, over … voice check, one, two, three.”

“Load OPS-1 flight plan.”

“Loading OPS-1, roger. ERR log switch set to reset. Enter Spec nine-niner, check on screens one and two.”

“Roger that, Mission, we copy. Voice check over.
Constellation
out.”

He finds the Tylenol tin, opens it, pulls out two tablets, and pops them into the back of his mouth, tasting their blandness on his tongue for a moment before he swallows them without the benefit of water. From somewhere behind and beneath him, he can hear muted conversation as one of the whiteroom techs struggles to help Dooley into his couch. Judging from the strident sound of the young man’s voice, he seems to be having a last-minute panic attack, manifesting itself as general inability to fasten himself into his couch.

Parnell shuts his eyes again, trying to let the painkillers do their work. What did he do to deserve this? A final trip to the Moon with a hostile lesbian for a first officer and two media vultures and a computer geek for passengers. The only sane person in his crew is Lewitt; if it weren’t for Jay, he’d be off this ancient tub already, taking the elevator to the nearest phone, where he’d call Goldin and tell him where he could shove this mission and exactly how….

“Go for MPS pressurization.”

“Initiating MPS cycle, roger.”

This ancient tub.
Funny how that thought just came to him. Opening his eyes again, Parnell gazes around the narrow passenger compartment. He can remember when the first Atlas-C was delivered by ocean barge from the North American Rockwell plant in Palmdale, California: brand-new, high-tech, seemingly the last word in astronautical engineering. Now, looking at it with fresh eyes,
Constellation
’s interior looks as antique as that of a B-52 bomber. The multipaned Plexiglas of the portal next to him is friction-scarred, the view of the blue sky overhead dimmed with age. The riveted seams of the beige-painted steel show the first signs of rust; the fabric of the acceleration couch is shiny with age, with a corner of his seat beginning to fray, white tufts of lining peeking out from between the stretched threads. There’s a small square patch almost directly above his head, not old but not very recent either, where a nameless hangar worker once replaced a section that had suffered metal fatigue, and the bolt-holes around the service panels below the ladder are scratched and eroded from hundreds of business meetings with torqueless screwdrivers.

Parnell feels a cold shiver run down his spine. He remembers what he told Judith just last night, that
Constellation
is a reliable old bird. Now he’s not quite so certain. The seats of the first Atlas-A orbiters had been equipped with evacuation capsules, much like enclosed ejection seats; if there was an emergency during launch, in theory the passengers could hit a couple of switches that would close the capsules and jettison them from the craft. But there were so many problems with the capsules—including a misfire that had killed a crewman—that they were removed from the ferries.

No one talks about it, but the Atlas-C’s are flying coffins during the first three minutes of flight. If something goes during launch, the only possible recourse is for the pilot to fire the third-stage rocket and attempt an abort-to-ground landing. At least, that was the theory; he’d hate to be aboard the first spacecraft to actually attempt such a high-speed maneuver.

“Ground crew signals secure and all clear.”

“Roger. Go for lock-down of main hatch …”

He hears the sound of the belly hatch slamming shut. Trombly unbuckles himself from his couch and quickly climbs down the ladder to dog it tight from the inside. Although he can’t see the access arm from his porthole because of the starboard wing, Parnell knows that the bridge must be swinging away from the hull. The pad should be vacant now, save for a handful of technicians double-timing it to a waiting van; cabin lights flicker for a moment, a clue that
Constellation
has switched to internal power.

Placing his palms on the armrests, Parnell can feel the vibration of the ferry’s fuel tanks pressurizing to maximum capacity. He doesn’t have to look at the chronometer to know that the stately minuet of clocks and computers is entering its final movement.

“Abort advisory check satisfactory.”

“Check, AAC is satisfactory. Channel two is clear.”

“Roger, Launch Control, channel two is clear. Cabin pressurization is nominal, proceeding with hydraulic pressure check …”

And so it goes, on down the checklist, until in the final sixty seconds of countdown, somewhere between the closure of the first-stage vents and auxiliary power unit shutdown, Parnell finds himself murmuring a prayer under his breath. He has never considered himself a particularly religious man, especially not when it comes to leaving the ground. A bird is a bird, regardless of whether it’s his Beechcraft or a three-stage rocket, and intellectually he knows that his fate rests more in the eyes, ears, and hands of the distant launch controllers and the thousands of people who prepped
Constellation
for flight than those of a mythic deity whose very existence he has always doubted.

God doesn’t work for NASA, he tells himself. Yet, when he casts a stray glance in Ryer’s direction, he’s vaguely surprised to see that her own mouth is moving silently, and he doesn’t have to be a lip-reader to know what she’s saying:
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name
…