The Tranquillity Alternative (12 page)

Somebody wasn’t being smart, Parnell thought, that was for damn sure. If she had served on the Mole, even as a shuttle jockey, she must have had CIA clearance … and if she had ever posed a meaningful risk to national security, then she would have passed Top Secret info to the Russians long before now. The fact that Ryer was still on active duty more than a decade after the MOL phase-out was enough to demonstrate her loyalty.

Then why was she being drummed out of the NASA astronaut corps? Was it simply because she had been discovered carrying on a sexual relationship with another woman? Or was there another reason he didn’t know about?

Stretching against his harness, Parnell leaned across the armrest. “Look, Cris,” he said quietly, “about the thing with the keys …”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” Ryer gazed out her porthole again. “I’ve probably said too much already. No offense, Commander, but just leave me alone, okay?”

He was about to prod her when sunlight lanced through the windows.
Constellation
was coming up on the daylight terminator; looking through the window, he saw the sun rising above Baja California, describing a hazy blue line that stretched from San Diego to Mexico City.

“Okay, look sharp back there,” Trombly called out from the cockpit. “We’re coming up on periapsis burn, so everyone buckle in. We’ll be firing at T-minus five.”

Parnell heard a soft groan from someone behind him—Dooley perhaps, or maybe Bromleigh—as Lewitt pulled himself along the ladder until he reached his seat. There was no need to tighten his own harness, since the burn would last only a couple of minutes and would be nowhere near as violent as the staging maneuvers during launch. He made certain that his helmet was safely stowed beneath his couch, then watched through his porthole as the American West Coast, seen through a swirl of clouds, slowly glided into view.

As much as he wanted to ignore it, though, something about Ryer gnawed at Parnell’s guts. He knew that he wouldn’t be satisfied until he discovered exactly what it was.

The periapsis burn occurred as
Constellation
passed over the Gulf of Mexico. At the end of a brief countdown from the cockpit, the main engine fired and the ferry surged forward, the blue horizon rushing away beneath the vessel as it was kicked into a Hohmann transfer that would carry the orbiter on an elliptical trajectory into higher orbit.

When the burn ended, Parnell unbuckled his harness and floated out of his couch. He bent and straightened his legs to relieve the cramps he’d been feeling for the last few minutes, then grasped the ladder—which now seemed to lie horizontally along the floor—and pulled himself forward to the cockpit.

“Permission to come up, Captain?” he asked as he stuck his head and shoulders through the hatch.

“Hmm?” Captain Kingsolver glanced over his shoulder. “Oh … permission granted, Commander.” He reattached his clipboard and pen to the console between the seats, then turned around. “Thanks for asking,” he added. “Some of the VIPs we carry up don’t give us the courtesy.”

“Not that there’s all that much room.” Trombly sucked a tube of orange juice as he watched the autopilot display. For at least a little while,
Constellation
was able to fly herself, guided by the navigation computers and the laws of inertia as it glided toward its rendezvous with the Wheel. “You’re welcome to make yourself at home, though, if you can, sir.”

“I’ll try, Commander … and you can call me Gene, by the way.” There was very little room in the cockpit, but Parnell was able to squeeze himself into a space between the seat backs and the aft bulkhead. “Nice launch you guys pulled off.”

“Thanks. We do our best.” Kingsolver stolidly nodded his head, acknowledging the professional compliment. “Of course, it wasn’t anything special to an old-timer like yourself. Probably like riding in a commuter jet.”

If only he knew. The cockpit layout was much the same as Parnell remembered it, except that some of the analog dials had been replaced by digital instrumentation. Japanese-made, of course, he noted with some dismay, but wasn’t everything these days? He noticed also that the toggle switches and computer keyboards were shiny with overuse, and the brown leather grips of the control yokes had been repaired with black friction tape. In the old days, worn-out equipment would have been long-since replaced, but there were precious few spare parts left in the NASA inventory. Budget cuts, as always—although it was debatable whether the aerospace manufacturers who had built the originals still stocked them in their warehouses.

Kingsolver seemed to read Parnell’s mind. “She’s a tough old bird,” he said, giving the yoke a fond pat, “but she gets us where we want to go. Even if we’re down to cannibalizing
Intrepid
for odds and ends every now and then.”

“I heard,” Parnell said. “I flew
Intrepid
on her shakedown mission. She was a brand new ship back then.” He caught the apologetic look on Kingsolver’s face and shook his head. “Don’t worry about it, skipper. I was one of the guys who signed the papers to take her off the flight line. Broke my heart, but it had to be done.”

An uncomfortable silence descended upon the cockpit, broken after a moment by tinny voices coming through Trombly’s headset. The co-pilot listened for a few moments, then reached up to click the KU-band transceiver. “Ah, we copy that, Wheel.
Constellation
at angles nine-three-six, range three-five-zero. We’re in the grid and preparing for OI burn. Over.”

Through the angular panes of the canopy, Parnell could see the broad, blue-green curve of Earth sweeping back into view, shining against the matte-black darkness of space. The ferry was flattening out its trajectory as it began to enter the wheel’s orbit. In another few minutes, the pilots would take the controls off auto and fire the main engine one more time to match its heading with Space Station One.

Holding onto the seat backs, Parnell carefully edged himself a little farther into the cockpit until he was able to crane his neck and look straight up through the ceiling window. He listened to Kingsolver and Trombly as they traded checklist instructions and spoke with the Wheel’s traffic controller, the captain’s fingers tapping softly upon the keyboard as he entered instructions into the orbiter’s main computer.

Then he spotted it: a tiny white oval, rotating clockwise on its axis, drifting slowly into view. Looking like an old-style bicycle tire someone had left in the sky, just the way he had last seen it many years ago. He found himself grinning at the sight. Jesus, it was beautiful….

“Commander? Gene?” Kingsolver’s voice was apologetic as he interrupted Parnell’s thoughts. “We’re coming up on OI burn, sir. I’m going to have to ask you to return to your seat. Sorry.”

Parnell forced himself away from the windows. “That’s okay, skipper. I understand.” There would be just enough g-force during the orbital insertion burn to throw unsecured items around the cockpit, and that included a visiting passenger. “Thanks for letting me come up front. I appreciate it.”

He was beginning to backpedal out of the cockpit when Trombly suddenly reached up to tap the back of his hand. “Hey, Commander,” he said quickly, “there’s one more thing you might want to see. Check out my window at ten o’clock.”

Parnell grabbed bulkhead rungs to brake himself, then gently pulled himself back into the cabin until his head and shoulders were next to the co-pilot’s. For a moment, he saw nothing except the limb of the earth … then a new object, until now invisible except to the ship’s radar, coasted into view.

It was another spacecraft, matching course with the ferry as it headed for rendezvous with the Wheel.

Almost the same size as
Constellation
, the spaceplane was a sleek, elongated bullet with narrow, wedge-shaped wings at its aft end that tilted upward above its blunt stern. The lower fuselage was perfectly flat, its landing gear bays invisible within the reentry tiles which comprised most of the vessel’s outer skin. There were no portholes to be seen except a couple of windows near the front of its tapering bow.

The ESA space shuttle
Dornberger
resembled the
Constellation
about as much as a Concorde SST looks like a Douglas DC-3. The
Horus
-class orbiter had ridden into space on the back of a manned Sanger booster, which in turn had lifted from a runway in French Guiana … more than half an hour after
Constellation
had been launched from Cape Canaveral, if Parnell correctly remembered the mission schedule. Even now, as
Constellation
’s boosters were still being recovered from the Atlantic Ocean, the Sanger was probably touching down for landing on the same airstrip it had left barely an hour ago, its scramjets ready for refueling in a fraction of the time that it would take
Constellation
to be remated with its boosters, patched up one more time, and hauled out to the pad for its next mission.

“The hare and the tortoise,” Parnell murmured as he watched the
Dornberger
glide past them.

“Pardon?” Kingsolver said. The pilot didn’t look away from his controls, but Parnell noticed how tightly he clutched the control yoke.

“You heard what I said, Captain.” He pushed off from the seat backs without another word and exited the cockpit, clumsily making his way down the center aisle to his seat.

Everyone was watching the German shuttle through the portholes; as Parnell floundered into his seat, he noticed that Bromleigh had recovered from spacesickness enough to hoist his camera and grab a shot of the
Dornberger
. Maybe that would impress the folks back home when they saw it on the evening news.

On the other hand, they’d probably just click over to a rerun of
Who’s the Boss?

From
The New York Times;
July 21, 1969

MEN LAND ON MOON—

10 ASTRONAUTS AVOID CRATER,

SET CRAFT ON A ROCKY PLAIN

By John Noble Wilford

(
Special to
The New York Times)

HOUSTON, July 20—Men landed on the moon today. Ten Americans, astronauts of Luna One, rode their giant spacecraft safely and smoothly to a historic landing at 4:17:40
P.M.
, Eastern daylight time.

Major John Harper Wilson, the 38-year-old United States Space Force expedition commander, radioed to Earth and the control room here:

“Houston, Tranquillity Base here. Eagle One has landed.”

Eagle One is the code-name of the 160-foot space vessel that carried Wilson and his colleagues from Space Station One to their landing site on a level, rock-strewn plain near the southwestern shore of the arid Sea of Tranquillity. It was soon followed by the successful touchdowns of Eagle Two and Eagle Three, two unmanned yet nearly identical cargo vessels.

The astronauts reported a bleak, gray landscape covered with rocks and boulders of varying sizes, with the sun hanging low over the eastern horizon and small craters filled with shadows.

Their landing was witnessed by an audience estimated to be in the millions, who watched live television transmissions sent from Eagle One as it made its final descent. Shortly after a successful landing was confirmed by Mission Control, President Robert F. Kennedy offered his congratulations to Wilson and his crew by telephone from the White House.

“This is a great day for the entire human race, and your country is very proud of you,” President Kennedy said. “God bless you.”

2/16/95 • 1317 GMT

S
EEN FROM A DISTANCE
, the Wheel looked much the same as when Parnell last visited it twenty years before, yet as
Constellation
closed in on the station, the illusion of permanency slowly evaporated until he was faced with undeniable truth.

The space station was falling apart.

The Wheel was composed of twenty sections, each constructed of flexible fabric and nylon which had been transported into orbit in collapsed sections. Once the sections were linked together and the 250-foot torus was pressurized like an enormous inner tube, an outer hull of sheet aluminum had been built around the fabric and nylon inner wall to serve as a meteor bumper. Internal water tanks arranged evenly between the hulls served not only as internal stabilizers but also as passive radiation shields; after the interior compartments had been completed, small rocket engines along the outer hull had been fired to rotate the station clockwise at nearly three rpm’s, producing one-third Earth gravity within the torus.

Parnell remembered the station when it was still new. Back then, it was the epitome of American know-how, a symbol of his country’s military and technological superiority. But that had been a generation ago, and things had changed.

The meteor bumper was now a patchwork of replaced plates, the older ones rendered off-white by long-term radiation exposure, the newer plates scarred and pockmarked by micrometeorite impacts. The silver Mylar insulation protecting the electrical conduits that ran alongside the two hub spokes was torn and frayed in places; likewise, the oxygen and auxiliary water tanks on the bulb-shaped hub looked as if they had been repaired many times. The troughlike mercury boiler which ran along the top of the torus had been nonfunctional ever since the nuclear generator was installed at the hub’s north turret sixteen years ago; the edges of the boiler itself were battered, and one section was missing entirely. The big high-gain antenna at the hub’s south turret had a small hole in the dish; some of the portholes along the torus were permanently sealed from the outside.

Overall, the Wheel resembled an old battleship rusting in port. Its decrepitude wasn’t so much the result of thirty-one years of hard service as it was of benign neglect. Space Station One had become an unwanted derelict, a giant symbol of a frontier that had been conquered, then abandoned. Keeping it operational was only slightly less costly than dismantling it altogether.

Through the cockpit hatch, Parnell could hear the pilots murmuring to each other as they eased
Constellation
into a parking orbit a half-mile from the station. Watching through his porthole, he could see the
Dornberger
as it closed upon the station’s hub. Motors rotated the south turret counterclockwise to produce a stable target at the docking bays, but unlike
Constellation
, the German shuttle was equipped with a universal docking adaptor which enabled it to link up directly with the Wheel.
Constellation
, on the other hand, would have to await the arrival of a taxi that would ferry her crew and cargo to the station.