Apollo's Outcasts (4 page)

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"That's the magcat!" I exclaimed.

That woke up Melissa. "Whu...where?" she said sleepily. "Are we there yet?"

"Yes, we are," Dad said. "And you're right, Jamey...that's the magcat. There's where you and your sisters are going."

Because my father was a planetary geologist who worked for the ISC--along with other reasons--I knew a little more about space than the average guy. Perhaps not quite as much as Jan, who actually aspired to go out there, but I'd picked up a few things over the years, not only from dinner table conversations but also from books and vids I'd downloaded into my pad.

One of the things I'd learned was a good working knowledge of ISC launch facilities. There were three in the United States: the primary one at Cape Canaveral, Florida; a slightly smaller one on
Matagorda Island in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast; and the smallest, located on Wallops Island, Virginia.

A long time ago, this place had been operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a launch site for experimental rockets. After NASA was dissolved, ISC took over Wallops and expanded it to become the major East Coast launch spaceport. Rising ocean levels had damaged many of the launch pads at the old Kennedy Space Center before the Florida stretch of the Atlantic Sea Wall was finished, but Wallops had been protected by the mid-Atlantic part of the wall, and for awhile it and Matagorda Island had served as the two biggest US launch sites.

And the magcat was the principal means of sending people and cargo into space.

Something occurred to me just then. A thought that nearly stopped my heart.

"Dad," I asked, "why are you taking us to the magcat?"

He didn't reply, but instead stared straight ahead.

"Dad, are you putting us on the magcat?"

"Oh, no...no way." Melissa was fully awake by then. "There's no way I'm going to..."

"Hush, Melissa." Jan opened her armrest compartment and pulled out a laminated card. She placed it on the dashboard below the windshield. "Whatever you do, just be quiet."

The van was approaching another causeway, this one above a river. It was blocked by a security gate. A uniformed guard stepped out of a booth beside the gate and held up his hand. Dad came to stop beside him; rolling down his window, he held up his ID badge. The guard briefly inspected it, gave the dashboard card a quick glance, then nodded and walked back into the booth. The gate opened and Dad drove through.

Jan let out her breath. "We're in. So much for the hard part."

"No...that's just the beginning." Dad looked back at me. "All right, Jamey...now you and Melissa can hear the rest. Yes, I'm
putting all three of you on the magcat. There's a cargo shuttle scheduled for takeoff at 5 a.m., just about--" he checked the windshield display "--an hour and a half from now. All three of you are going to be on it."

My fingers involuntarily curled around my mobil's armrests. "Dad...you know I can't ride that thing. It'll kill me."

One of the reasons why I was interested in space was because I was born on the Moon. However, I'd always figured that vids and books would be the closest I'd ever get to going there. Because I'd spent my infancy in low gravity, my bones were weaker than normal. Lunar Birth Deficiency Syndrome was why I'd spent almost my entire life in a mobil. I couldn't walk without crutches, and it was only in the neutral-buoyancy environment of a swimming pool that I was able to move about without assistance.

Sure, I could have been fitted with an exoskeleton, but they were incredibly expensive, and besides, I didn't want to go through life looking like a robot. So I'd tried to build up my muscles over the years, and swimming laps had put me in pretty good shape. There wasn't much anyone could do about my bones, though. Even with calcium supplements and other medicines I routinely took for LBDS, I'd break my legs if I tried to run, and a hearty bear hug could crush my ribs.

Mom made a major mistake when she decided to go to the Moon with Dad, but it wasn't her fault; neither of them realized she was pregnant. I was beginning to suspect that Dad was about to make a similar mistake, but this time consciously.

"Relax," he said. "We've taken that into account. There's a way of sending you up that won't hurt you. Trust me...you'll see."

We were on the causeway by then, and I could see the magcat more clearly. No longer simply a row of lights, it was now an elevated monorail nearly two and a half miles long that extended straight out toward the Sea Wall. Until then, I'd regarded it much the way just as about anything else I'd read about. A nice bit of engineering, but nothing I'd ever thought I'd have to experience myself.

Suddenly, that changed. Now the magcat was utterly terrifying.

I didn't reply to what my father said. I just hoped that he was right.

We reached the other side of the causeway and drove past marshland and saltwater ponds; Dad had left his window half-open, and a cool sea breeze drifted in. After a mile or so we turned left onto another road, this one running parallel to the beach. A chain-link fence barred our way, but the scanner mounted above its gate read our dashboard card and opened the gate for us.

A half-mile down the road, we entered the launch center. We drove past administration buildings, the containment dome of the fusion reactor that powered the magcat, and three giant spacecraft hangars--the doors of two were shut, and the third was open and empty--until we reached a semicircular building with a control tower rising from its domed roof. T
ERMINAL
, its sign read.

Dad entered the parking lot, but he didn't head for the front entrance. Instead, he drove around back to the employee lot. Two cars were parked next to a rear door; a small group of people stood near them, apparently waiting for us. Dad brought the van to a halt beside them; as he got out and walked over to them, Jan opened the side hatch and lowered the ramp for me. Melissa reluctantly removed our bags from the back; her uncustomary silence told me that she was just as frightened as I was.

I hadn't yet received my last surprise this morning. The next one came when I told my mobil to take me toward the people waiting for us. The group included three kids, and among them was someone I knew well.

"Logan?" I asked. "What are you doing here?"

Logan grinned at me. "Same thing as you, I think."

Logan Marguiles was my best friend. We'd known each other for
as long as I could remember; his father was another ISC senior administrator, and our families were close. We were classmates at school. I'd seen little of him since the summer trimester had ended last month, but that wasn't unusual; his family traveled more than mine did. I expected that we'd be on the swim team again when the fall trimester began next month.

It was looking like it would be awhile before either of us swam relay again.

Dr. Marguiles was talking to my father. Logan's mother was with them, and she was wiping tears from her face. Another pair of grownups was nearby, kneeling beside the other two kids. The boy was about two or three years younger than Logan and me, and his sister couldn't have been any older than eight or nine; I'd never seen either of them before.

Logan nodded to Jan and Melissa. Jan smiled back at him while Melissa pointedly looked away; it was obvious which of my sisters liked my friend and which didn't. Stepping closer to me, he squatted beside my mobil.

"Guess your dad signed the same petition as mine did," he said quietly.

"Looks like it," I whispered back. Logan and I didn't often talk about what our fathers did; for us, ISC was just the place where they went to work every day. But we knew about the petition, and Logan must have learned that it made his father just as much a marked man as mine was. "I'm getting the feeling they worked this out ahead of time, just in case."

Logan raised an eyebrow. "He didn't tell you?"

I shook my head. "Only Jan knew. I'm just the little brother, remember?" I glanced at Melissa. "But I don't blame him for not letting MeeMee in on it..."

"Oh, hell, no! Not unless you want it all over DC by lunchtime..."

"I heard that!" Melissa said, still not looking at us.

Logan ignored her. "Looks like they planned this in advance." Lowering his voice, he cocked his head toward the other kids standing nearby. "Same for their folks. They work at ISC, too."

"Yeah, okay, I get that," I said. "But who ever thought Wilford would be assassinated and Shapar would take over?"

Logan gazed at me evenly. "Who said that the president was assassinated?"

"It's on the radio. The White House..."

Realizing what I was saying, I stopped myself. Logan slowly nodded. "There's more here than meets the eye," he murmured.

I was about to reply when Dad turned away from Logan's folks and started walking toward us. Jan followed him, and he paused to take Melissa by the arm. Logan excused himself as they approached my mobil; he knew a family meeting when he saw it coming.

"Here's where I'm going to have to leave you," Dad said. As usual, he got straight to the point, but even though my father wasn't the sentimental type I couldn't help but notice that his voice was choked. "You're in good hands, and when you get to where you're going, there's going to be people who will..."

"I don't understand." Melissa was both scared and impatient. "Where are you sending us?"

Clueless as always, she hadn't figured it out yet. "We're going to the space station," I told her before Dad could reply.

"No, Jamey," Dad said. "You're going to the Moon."

Now it was my turn to be surprised. No...surprised isn't the right word. Shocked? Stunned? I'm not sure there's even a word for what I felt at that instant.

When Dad told us that we were going to board a shuttle, I'd figured that it was one bound for Station America. Certainly it was big enough to take in six kids; more than three hundred people lived on the giant wheel in geosynchronous orbit 22,300 miles above Hawaii. And since it was visited almost every day by passenger shuttles, no one would notice one more scheduled arrival.

But...the Moon? I opened my mouth to say something, but the words refused to come out. I wasn't the only one who was speechless. Melissa had gone pale; she swayed on her feet, and for a second or two I thought she was going to faint. Jan wasn't surprised; she'd known all along what Dad and his friends were planning.

"I can't...I can't..." I finally managed to stammer.

"Yes, you can...and you will." Dad knelt down beside me, gently put his hand on my wrist. "There's no other place for you to go. The government has extradition treaties with just about any other country where we might send you, and they could easily pull you off Station America...and I have no doubt it'd be only a day or two before they found out that you were there. If I could send you guys all the way to Mars, I would..."

"The Mars colony is too small," Jan murmured. "Even if we had a launch window, it'd take months for us to get there."

"Right." Dad nodded. "Mars is impossible, and the space station is only a temporary solution. But Apollo is big enough for you to disappear into, and even if the government finds out you're there, it's under international control." A grim smile. "And believe me, I have friends there who'd sooner walk out an airlock than hand you over."

"But Mom..." I stopped myself before I could say the rest:
But Mom died there. She gave up her life to save mine, and I've been haunted by that my whole life....

"If Mom were still alive, she'd welcome you and your sisters with open arms." There were tears in the corners of his eyes; it was hard for me to see that, so I quickly looked away. I knew that he'd never remarried because Mom was the only woman he'd ever loved; the couple of girlfriends he'd had since her death had only reinforced his loyalty to her memory. "And the people up there you'll meet knew her, so..."

The terminal's back door opened and a man about my father's age stuck his head out. "We're ready," he announced. "You need to hurry...launch is scheduled for one hour from now."

I ignored him. "Why can't you go?"

"There's only six seats available. If we can get on another shuttle, we will. But until then...well, so long as they're searching for us, they're not going to looking for you." Dad glanced at Logan's folks and the parents of the two other kids. "We're getting out of here as soon as you lift off. With any luck, we'll be a thousand miles away by the time you reach orbit."

I rather doubted that--the shuttle would be in orbit only a few minutes after it left the island--but I let him get away with the exaggeration. He gave my shoulder a fond squeeze, the closest thing he dared to giving me a hug without hurting me. "I'll get in touch with you guys as soon as I can," he said as he stood up, speaking to Jan and Melissa as well as me. "And I'll bring you back home when..."