The Tranquillity Alternative (11 page)

“Roger, Launch Control, we’ve got APU green-for-go, over.”

“Main engine gimbal complete, all systems configured for launch.”

“Roger that …”

Then Ryer’s eyes move in his direction, and when she finds him looking at her, the words stop as her face blanches. Before she can look away again, though, Parnell smiles and gives her a sly wink as he silently completes the verse:
Thy kingdom come. Thy will he done in earth, as it is in heaven
….

She reluctantly returns the smile.

“Main engine start on three.”

“Five …”

“Four …”

The countdown reaches T-minus three seconds, and five thousand two hundred and fifty tons of hydrazine and nitric acid ignite beneath them in a deafening roar which shakes the vessel as if an earthquake had erupted directly beneath the pad. For an instant, the ferry sways back and forth within its cradle as the monster struggles against the invisible bars of its prison.

“Main engine start.”

“Two …”

“One …”

And then the countdown reaches zero, the cradle opens wide, and
Constellation
slowly begins to rise.

Editorial from
The Manchester Union-Leader,
Manchester, New Hampshire; August 28, 1968

A “Lunatic” Idea

If one needs any further reason to question the fitness of Democratic Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, it’s his campaign promise to dismantle the U.S. Space Force and replace it with a civilian space agency.

During a campaign speech delivered last Wednesday at the McDonnell Douglas Corporation’s manufacturing facility in St. Louis, Senator Kennedy told aerospace workers that as President of the United States he would phase out the USSF, and in its place, substitute a new Federal space organization which would concentrate on “peaceful and scientific” uses of outer space instead of “strictly military goals.”

Unfortunately, Little Bobby the Boy Senator has considerable support for his proposal from the liberals in Congress, who have begun to question the Pentagon’s oft-stated intent to use the Moon as a base for scientific research as well as in the pursuit of national security. It should also be noted that Little Bobby’s cohorts in the so-called Youth International Party have seconded the notion. “If we can go to the Moon for some other reason than making war,” says Jerry Rubin, “then that’s fine with me.”

Of course Red Jerry would agree! He and his gang of hippie radicals have already made headlines by protesting at the front gates of Cape Canaveral, including the “sit-ins” which have prevented military personnel from reporting to duty. If Kennedy got his way, he would probably appoint Abbie Hoffmann to be the director of the space program. That way they could have a “love-in” with “Hanoi Jane” Fonda on the Moon!

What the Senator and his
de facto
Communist friends don’t mention is that this idea has been floated already. In 1959, Little Bobby’s older brother, Little Johnny, proposed much the same thing with his Space Act, which was supported by Little Johnny’s former Democratic running mate, Senator Lyndon B. “Claim-Jumpin’” Johnson of Texas. This was only one of the reasons why the Kennedy/Johnson ticket was soundly defeated in the 1960 presidential election; the American people recognized the fact that we need a strong military presence in space in order to offset the international Communist conspiracy.

Now, eight years later, we’ve got old whine poured into new bottles. It’s clear that Little Bobby wants to vindicate Little Johnny’s political reputation, although Boston’s mayor could care less since he’s busy destroying the city’s schools with his desegregation program. It doesn’t seem to matter to Senator Kennedy and his running mate, Senator Eugene “Pot-head” McCarthy, that the very reason why America has Space Station One in the first place, and will be sending the first reconnaissance mission to the Moon next December, is its commitment to preserving the ideals of liberty and freedom.

During this past decade, President Nixon has held the public trust by insisting upon a military space program. Conducting scientific research on the Moon is a great idea, but a civilian space agency cannot possibly fulfill the objectives of the U.S. Space Force. As a ranking member of the Senate Armed Forces Committee, Little Bobby must know this … which makes us question why he would propose something as ludicrous as a civilian space program.

Could it be that Senator Kennedy’s fellow travelers have received instructions from the Kremlin to stop Project Luna?

—William F. Loeb,

editor and publisher

2/16/95 • 1232 GMT

C
ONSTELLATION
LEFT EARTH ATOP
a dense column of fire, the twenty-nine motors in its first-stage booster consuming more than a thousand tons of liquid propellant in less than ninety seconds.

The rocket’s ascent could be seen from hundreds of miles away. On Florida’s Gulf Coast, the vessel was a tapering contrail rising at a sharp angle from the eastern horizon, while on Cocoa Beach the sand itself seemed to vibrate as early-morning beachcombers paused in collecting shells to watch as the enormous rocket ripped upward into the deep blue sky. Within a minute and a half,
Constellation
had climbed almost twenty-five miles into the sky and was a little more than thirty-one miles downrange from the Cape. Traveling 5,256 miles per hour, it left in its wake a sonic boom that rattled the windows of houses far behind.

At this point, the pilots throttled the engines back to 70 percent.
Constellation
began to gradually fall, its nose dipping slightly toward the horizon. Left on its own, the rocket would have continued its shallow dive until it finally crashed at hypersonic speed into the Atlantic Ocean, but the throttle-back was only the prelude to its primary staging maneuver.

The first-stage engines expired, its fuel tanks drained, and a couple of moments later explosive bolts at the juncture of the first and second stages ignited. The winged booster cleaved away from the second stage; as it began to fall toward the ocean, a ring-shaped parafoil made of whisker-fine mesh steel blossomed out from beneath the wings, braking its descent until it splashed-down in the Atlantic nearly two hundred miles from the Cape, where it would be recovered by a NASA freighter and towed back to Merritt Island.

Long before this occurred, though, eight engines in the second stage fired at full-throttle as 155 tons of fuel kicked
Constellation
farther into the upper atmosphere. For two more minutes, the ferry fought its way up the gravity well, penetrating the topmost regions of the atmosphere until, at an altitude of nearly forty miles and more than 330 miles downrange, the second stage was jettisoned, whereupon it followed its mate on a parafoiled glide into the drink.

By now
Constellation
had lost most of its take-off mass and was accelerating at more than fourteen thousand miles per hour. Behind the orbiter’s delta wings and vertical stabilizer, its single engine throttled up as the spacecraft accelerated to nearly 18,500 miles per hour … until, sixty-three miles above the Atlantic and a little more than seven hundred miles downrange from the Cape, the third-stage engine shut down and the winged craft coasted into low orbit.

Within the ferry, everyone took a deep breath.

Parnell thought he still remembered what it was like to ride a fireball into the heavens; as he raised a trembling hand to lift the visor of his helmet, though, he realized that his memory wasn’t quite as sharp as he’d once believed. If there were four minutes in anyone’s life that were as terrifying or traumatic as being inside an Atlas-C during launch, then it had to be birth itself … and nobody remembers what that’s like.

“Jesus,” he murmured as he stuck his fingers inside his helmet’s foam padding to wipe away the sweat. “I’m too old for this crap.”

He shifted his buttocks against the upholstery of his couch, only to discover that his ass barely rested against the seat. Indeed, it felt as if he were now floating a half-inch above the couch, restrained only by his harness. There was a moment of disorientation until he realized what had happened.

Weightlessness.

Free-fall.

There was a low, mechanical groan as the acceleration couches cantilevered in vertical position; what had once been walls were now floors. He turned his head to the right, ignoring the painful crick in his neck as he peered around the edge of his helmet through the porthole next to his seat. For a few moments, he could see nothing but starless, pitch-black nothingness, as fathomless as the deepest abyss imaginable….

Then the pilots ignited RCR’s along the fuselage to roll the ferry over on its back, and Earth hove in view, upside-down and as vast as the eye could see. Bright sunlight sparkled across the surface of the South Atlantic, filtering through sparse white clouds which cast shadows upon the ocean. Parnell caught a glimpse of a tiny silver shape dragging faint wake-lines behind it, and then the ship—probably an oil tanker the size of a small island—was gone from sight, replaced now by the mottled brown edge of a giant landmass which, after a moment, he recognized as Africa’s northwest coast.

A low chuckle began to rise in Parnell’s throat as he felt tears stinging the corners of his eyes. It had been so long, so long …

He was in space again.

Not everyone aboard the ferry had done well during launch; someone always gets spacesick during a passenger flight. In this instance, it was Paul Dooley and Alex Bromleigh who came down with motion sickness, despite the Dramamine tablets they had taken before boarding the rocket. Berkley Rhodes had managed to keep her breakfast down, although apparently only by sheer force of will; she lay in her couch, her eyes tightly closed, not daring to look out the window.

While
Constellation
circled Earth in preparation for the periapsis burn which would boost the ferry into higher orbit, Jay Lewitt unbuckled himself and floated aft to tend to the ill passengers. Fortunately, both men had found the vomit bags tucked under their seats and had remembered to use them, so there were no free-falling messes that had to be cleaned up.

Parnell remained in his seat while the ferry completed its first orbit, contenting himself with the view from his window. He watched Africa pass beneath him until it disappeared beneath a dense cloud bank which extended as far as Madagascar; then the ferry crossed the nightside terminator above the Indian Ocean. Australia appeared as a cluster of city lights surrounding Perth and brief flashes from a thunderstorm over the outback; the coast of New Guinea was outlined by the harbor glow of Port Moresby.

“You can never get tired of it, can you?” Cris Ryer said.

He looked across the aisle at her. She was still strapped into her couch on the port side, gazing down at the sparse constellation marking the Bismarck Archipelago. It was the first time she had spoken since they left the Cape.

“I once thought I was,” he said, and she looked querulously at him. “Tired of the view, I mean,” he added. “Do a couple of tours of duty on the Wheel and pretty soon you get tired of everything.”

Ryer smiled a little as she shook her head. Like Parnell, she had removed her helmet; her fine blond hair had risen from her scalp until it surrounded her head like a halo. “Not me,” she said, brushing the hair back from her face. “I never got tired of watching. Whenever I had a chance, I spent it in front of a porthole … just looking.”

He raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know you were stationed on the Wheel. When was this?”

“I wasn’t on the Wheel,” she replied, looking out her window. “After I joined NASA, I did a three-month tour aboard the Mole. That was back in ’eighty-two, before I transferred to the Lunar Support Team.”

“You were on the Mole? I’m impressed. What did you do there?”

The Mole was the nickname for Space Station Two, officially known as the U.S. Air Force Manned Orbital Laboratory. One of the last holdovers from the Space Force, the MOL had been established during the mid-sixties in polar orbit 160 miles above Earth. A small zero-g station—essentially a retrofitted upper stage of an old Atlas-B ferry—Space Station Two had served as a military reconnaissance platform, keeping tabs on the old Soviet Union until the early eighties, when unmanned spy satellites had finally rendered it obsolete.

Since the station had been capable of supporting only a handful of people at any one time, there weren’t too many NASA astronauts who could claim that they had spent time aboard the Mole. Most of the vets had retired from active duty, while others had taken jobs at the CIA, the National Security Agency, or the National Reconnaissance Office. Even the Mole itself was gone; a sustained period of solar activity had expanded Earth’s upper atmosphere, in turn causing the station’s orbit to deteriorate. By then, NASA had neither the funds nor the inclination to rescue the tiny station, and when it had plummeted to a fiery death over Antarctica in 1983, only Greenpeace had objected on grounds of the environmental hazard it posed.

Ryer glowered at him. “If I told you what I did there, Commander,” she said with mock severity, “I’d have to kill you.”

“Great …”

“I was a shuttle driver, that’s all. I took spooks up from Vandenberg and I took them back down when they were through. Pretty boring work, all things considered.”

“You passed over Russia several times a day. That counts for something.”

“If you say so.” She shrugged. “Now and then one of the spooks would let me check out the scope so I could get a good eyeful of Baikonur … enough to know that they were screwing up their space program only slightly worse than we were screwing up ours. Nobody aboard the Mole was taking the Russians very seriously anymore, despite all the ‘evil empire’ stuff coming out of Washington.”

Ryer peered out her window again at the dark expanse of the Pacific Ocean. “So when the Pentagon announced that it was shutting down the Mole, I skipped over to the LST and became a moonship driver. Thought that would give me some job security and all that….”

Her voice trailed off. “Great idea, huh?” she murmured. “Sometimes I’m so smart I amaze myself.”