The getaway special

JERRY OLTION

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

THE GETAWAY SPECIAL

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Eleanor Wood for being wonderful, Bob Gleason for being patient, the Oregon Writers Colony for refuge from the real world, and Pat Dooley for writing a computer program to calculate the Tangential Vector Translation Maneuver.

Preface

I owe you an explanation.

If you've read another book of mine called
Abandon in Place
, you've met a character named Allen Meisner. He's a genuine mad scientist, a card-carrying member of the International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination, and he helped a couple of astronauts figure out how to make a spaceship out of goodwill and wishful thinking.

He's in this book, too. In fact, he actually came from here first. The first section of this book predates
Abandon in Place
by about fifteen years. I wrote it as a short story back in 1984, and it was published in
Analog
magazine in April of '85.

That was before the Soviet Union collapsed and the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was still in full swing, and people were afraid the world could go up in a mushroom cloud at any moment. I wanted off the planet, and I wanted off
now
. From that impetus, "The Getaway Special" was born. People liked the story. They kept asking me to write a novel based on it. I tinkered with it a little here and there, but years passed without much progress. In the meantime I wrote
Abandon in Place
, and I needed a mad scientist for that book, so I borrowed Allen from here. Never mind that the two books describe wildly different universes; Allen seemed adaptable enough, and he wasn't doing much over here. He had to leave his invention behind, but that was okay, too; there was plenty of wonky science for him to do in
Abandon
.

But playing with Allen again got me to thinking about
The Getaway Special,
and Tor expressed an interest in publishing it, so here I am writing it after all. The world is a different place than it was when I wrote the original short story, and Allen has been living in an alternate universe for a while, but that's okay. Reality has never been all that easy to pin down anyway.

The short story that started everything became the first part of this book. I adjusted it for the politics of the day, but there was surprisingly little change necessary. The Soviet Union may not be the Evil Empire anymore, but the pieces it left behind are still a nuclear threat—in many cases a more dangerous threat than the parent country. The International Space Station that we were talking about building in the

'80s is still not up and running, and nobody seems to know what we'll call it when (if) it is. The space shuttle is still our only way to put people into orbit, despite the steady aging of the fleet. And so on. In 1984, Allen Meisner saw all this and said, "Enough!" Now it's 2000 and he's back from a consulting job in another universe, still eager to get on with the business of busting humanity out of the cradle. So am I. I'm glad to have him back.

THE GETAWAY SPECIAL

Allen Meisner didn't look like a mad scientist. He not only didn't look mad, with his blonde hair neatly brushed to the side and his face set in a perpetual grin, but—at least in Judy Gallagher's opinion—he didn't look much like a scientist, either. He looked more like a beach bum. But his business card read: "Allen T. Meisner, Mad Scientist," and he had the obligatory doctorate in physics to go with it. He also had a reputation as an outspoken member of INSANE, the politically active International Network of Scientists Against Nuclear Extermination, and he held patents on half a dozen futuristic gadgets, including the electron plasma battery that had revolutionized the automobile industry. He had all the qualifications, but he just didn't look the part. That was all right with Judy. In her five years of flying the shuttle, most of the passengers she had taken up
had
looked like scientists, or worse: politician's. She enjoyed having a beach bum around for a change.

Right up to the time when he turned on his experiment and the Earth disappeared. She didn't enjoy that at all.

It started out as a routine satellite deployment and industrial retrieval mission, with two communications satellites going out to geostationary orbit and a month's supply of processed pharmaceuticals, optical fibers, and microcircuits coming back to Earth from Space Station
Freedom
. It was about as simple as a flight got, which was why NASA had sent a passenger along. Judy and the other two crewmembers would have time to look after him, and NASA could reduce by one more the backlog of civilians who had paid for trips into orbit.

1

Another reason they had sent him was the small size of his experiment. Since the shuttles had begun carrying pay-loads both ways there wasn't a whole lot of room for experiments, which meant that most scientists had to wait for a dedicated Spacelab mission before they could go up, but Allen had promised to fit everything he needed into a pair of getaway special canisters—small cylinders designed for schoolkids' experiments and the like—if NASA would send him on the next available flight. After all the bad publicity they'd gotten for nationalizing the space station and carrying the laser and particle beam weapons into orbit, they'd been glad to do it. It would give the press something else to talk about for a while.

They had even stretched the rules a little in their effort to launch a scientific mission. Most getaway specials were allowed only a simple on/off switch, or at most two switches, but they had allowed Allen to plug a notebook computer into the control line for his. It had seemed like a reasonable request at the time. After all, he would be there to run it himself; none of the crewmembers needed to fool with it. Officially his was a "Spacetime Anomaly Detection and Transfer Application Experiment." One of the two canisters was simply a high-powered radio transceiver, but the other was a mystery. It contained a bank of plasma batteries with enough combined power to run the entire shuttle for a month, plus enough circuitry to build a supercomputer, all wired together on a hobbyist's integrated circuit board three layers deep. That in turn was connected to a spherically radiating antenna mounted on top of the canister. Rumor had it that someone in the vast structure of NASA's bureaucracy knew what it was supposed to do, but no one admitted to being that person. Still, someone in authority had vouched for it, and it apparently held nothing that could interfere with the shuttle's operating systems, so they let it on board. It was Allen's problem if it didn't work.

So on the second day of the flight, as Mission Specialist Carl Reinhardt finished inspecting the last of the return packages in the cargo bay with the camera in the remote manipulator arm, he said to Allen,

"Why don't you go ahead and warm up your experiment? I'm about done here, and you're next on the agenda."

Discovery
, like all the shuttles, had ten windows; six wrapping all the way around the flight controls in front, two facing back into the cargo bay, and two more overhead when you were looking out the back. Allen was blocking the view out the overheads; he'd been watching over Judy's shoulders while she used the aft reaction controls to edge the shuttle slowly away from the space station and into its normal flight attitude. He nodded to Carl and pushed himself over to the payload controls, a distance of only a few feet. In the cramped quarters of the shuttle's flight deck nearly everything was within easy reach. It was possible— if you floated with your feet in between the pilot's and copilot's chairs and your head pointed toward the aft windows—to strand yourself without a handhold, but to manage it you had to be trying. Allen had put himself in (hat position once earlier in the flight, and he'd gotten the worst case of five-second agoraphobia that Judy had ever seen before she could rescue him. After that he kept a handhold within easy reach all the time.

Judy finished maneuvering the shuttle into its parking orbit and watched the shadows in the cargo bay for a few more seconds to make sure the shuttle was stable. She checked Carl's progress as he latched down the manipulator arm, glanced upward through the overhead windows at the Earth, then turned to watch Allen.

Here, in her opinion, was where the action was on this flight. For years NASA had promoted the image of the shuttle as a space truck, and that's what it had become, but for Judy the lure of space was in science, not industry. She wanted to explore, not drive a truck. But she was thirty years too late for Apollo, and by the looks of things at least thirty years too early for the planetary missions. If they happened at all. Driving a space truck that occasionally did science projects was the best she could hope for.

It hadn't always been that way. For a while, when she'd first joined NASA, the future had looked as bright as ever. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the entire defense industry without a purpose, so it seemed only logical that its vast experience with rockets and supersonic aircraft and other high-tech gadgetry would be put to use in space. Logical to people like Judy, at least. But the military, unused to peace, kept right on preparing for war, and just as Allen's group had predicted, they had soon enough found another enemy. Dozens of them, in fact. It sometimes felt as if the Pentagon had joined the Enemy of the Month Club. The Middle East seemed to have taken on Evil Empire status, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Europe was chock-full of unstable countries and becoming more so by the moment as individual economies collapsed under the weight of the foundering Eurodollar. France was especially hostile at the moment; they had already blamed America for most of their cultural woes, so it was easy to lay blame at the same feet for their financial problems as well. The final straw had apparently come when the Premier's daughter, after a vacation to San Francisco, had brought home a $250,000 credit card bill and when her father had asked what she had bought, she had answered, "Je ne sais . . . whatever." It had all been downhill from there. France had plenty of sympathizers, too. Never mind that most of Europe had been American allies through two world wars; the Russians had been allies before the Cold War, too. They'd been friendly again after the Berlin Wall came down, but that hadn't even lasted long enough to finish building the space station. Now the only thing the French and the Russians were putting into orbit was laser weapons.

It seemed like the only country that
hadn't
sided against the U.S. was China, but everyone knew you couldn't trust the Chinese.

Judy thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Humanity had been given one final chance to get into space before they ran out of resources for good or bombed themselves back to the stone age, and they had blown it. She was one of the last generation who would get into space at all; she was willing to bet that after the shuttles wore out there would be no replacement for them. The military would keep a few unmanned boosters flying so they could keep sending up "defense" satellites, but that would be the end of it. And eventually, if INSANE was right, the world's nuclear-equipped nations would use their arsenals on one another and pave the way for cockroaches to take over the planet. So she planned to enjoy every minute of her time in space while she still could. She was looking over Allen's shoulder now. He had Velcroed his computer onto a corner of one of the interchangeable panels that had been installed for controlling yesterday's satellite launches. Beside it was a simple toggle switch, which he flipped on. He watched a self-check routine on the computer's display, then when it gave him the okay he pushed a function key labeled "Transmit/Time." The computer gave a loud beep, a beep echoed over the ship-to-ground radio link, and the top line of the display began counting forward in seconds. Allen nodded and pressed another key, which reset the counter to zero, then he tapped a few more instructions into the keyboard. Judy saw a series of numbers flash on the display. They were in groups of three, but she could see no particular meaning to them.