The Glass Lady (11 page)

With two long strides, the tall flier stood beside the naked young woman. He avoided Dr. Casey's dark brown eyes heavy with the night. She said nothing.

William McKinley Parker laid a large, warm hand upon the girl's bare shoulder. The girl blinked enormous and clear blue eyes. He had not seen such blue for over 20 years. Then, he had pressed his younger face to the small window of a two-man Gemini spacecraft 150 miles above Bermuda's azure reefs.

When the tall man's face creased into a warm and genteel smile, the crimson flush left the young woman's neck and cheeks. She had a face like Truth.

“Have you a name, child?” the Colonel whispered softly.

“Maria.”

The Colonel smiled as his hard hand hid her bare shoulder.

With his large right hand, the sad-eyed pilot engulfed completely her small left breast.

“Breathe deeply,” Parker said softly. The girl's narrow chest pressed warmly against his large hand.

“Again, child.” Her other breast disappeared completely into his palm.

Colonel Parker blinked a wetness from his gray eyes. He turned to the old physician who stood with his mouth open.

“Carry on, Doctor,” Will Parker commanded firmly.

“Live long, and be happy, Maria,” Colonel Parker said softly over his broad shoulder as the heavy door closed behind him.

The long airman resumed his vigil in the hallway where he slouched against the wall beside Trauma Room One.

He shook his head. What a day, he thought. His mind returned to an afternoon press conference an hour after Jack Enright had nearly drowned. A wire-service reporter asked the reigning Iceman how he would approach his unprecedented rapid countdown and dangerous Intelsat-6 repair mission. Colonel Parker had glanced at Jacob Enright with his hair still wet. Enright's eyes were still red. “Get it up. Get it done. Get it down,” the Colonel had replied soberly as a NASA technocrat gasped behind him and Enright stifled a roaring laugh. I could go on the road with this act, the pilot thought with a broad grin as his back held up the hospital wall.

“A few more midnight meetings, and we'll all become mushroom people who shrivel up in daylight.”

Admiral Hauch smiled weakly. The large man was beyond exhaustion. He was spent and used up inside, like a smoking shell coughed from its white hot breech and dumped into a pile of useless brass. Above him, beyond the glass walls, the clock on the bunker wall read 2 a.m. in the morning, Eastern Time.

“There will be no stenographer tonight. No official record. Any officer here who ever breathes a word, a syllable, of our discussion here will find himself spending the rest of his career as latrine orderly at our weather station on the Dibole Iceberg Tongue. That's within two hundred miles of the South Pole, if anyone has need to make travel plans. You civilians who feel the need to impress some cowgirl at Gilley's with all you know will have ample opportunity to impress the locals from our embassy at Liberville in Rio Muni, a West African country too small to be in your edition of
The Statesman's Handbook
.”

As the Admiral mopped his face, six grim and tired men squirmed in the Crystal Room's chill and tasteless air.

“What I have to say comes from upstairs . . . Even the President knows nothing of this meeting or its contents.”

The blurry-eyed seaman studied each face, each pair of blank eyes, until those eyes turned away from the cold wind of the Admiral's glare.

“Brother Ivan has demanded a contingency plan in the event, God forbid, that Soyuz is fatally disabled by LACE.”

“I would hope so,” Commander Mike Rusinko offered with a voice tired and strained from fatigue.

“Be patient, Mike,” the Admiral cautioned abruptly.

“We are here to discuss the Sleep Tight alternative to destroy Shuttle in the terrible exigency of the fatal loss of Soyuz.”

The big man sighed deeply. Six sagging faces heavy with midnight examined the perspiring, round face at the head of the table.

“Gentlemen: if Soyuz is lost to LACE, Sleep Tight will be initiated—for the sacrifice of Shuttle Endeavor with extreme prejudice . . .”

“You cannot be serious, Admiral.”

“As I could possibly be, Dale. If Soyuz goes in, Shuttle goes in . . . Four men in place of everything which lives and breathes on our sorry little planet.”

“My God, Admiral.”

“I know, Dale. I know,” the Admiral said to Colonel Stermer from Cape Canaveral and the U.S. Space Command.

“But, Admiral—”

“Parker and Enright are both officers,” the big man interrupted. “Their duty includes biting the big one. That is one of the reasons their choice for this crew is so perfect.”

“And the other reasons, Admiral?”

The Admiral hesitated for an instant.

“Neither man has family, Mike. The people upstairs have thought of everything, so it would seem. Just too late.”

No one responded.

“Now, Dr. Pritchard, you have been briefed thoroughly. I understand you speak HAL/S, the program language of the shuttle's five on-board computers.”

“Fluently,” the small, bespectacled engineer gloated. “You have analyzed your assignment, Doctor?”

“Yes. In every detail, I might add.”

“Can a termination program be implanted into Endeavor's computer banks, Doctor, without detection?”

“Excuse me, Admiral. We are talking assassination here, murder—and of our own people!”

“Colonel, I know that!” The harried Admiral sagged in his great chair. With his elbows upon the shining table, his hands rubbed his face.

“I know that, Colonel. May I remind you that when you were a light colonel taking daily health checks on your senior officers in hopes of an opening so you could go silver, I was working and drinking with these two men, Parker and Enright. I was eating in their homes. Don't tell me what we are about here! We are here to avert a space war, nothing less than global suicide . . . Let's get on with it. Please, Doctor?”

“Thank you, Admiral. May I lay out for everyone the system we're discussing? The shuttle's on-board data-processing systems.”

“Can you do it without putting the rest of us into a coma?”

“I'll try, Colonel Stermer. If I may continue . . .”

The thin engineer bore the pursed and sallow features behind his thick glasses of a man with too much bile circulating through his translucent skin. His hollow cheeks had a sickly yellow pallor.

“First, the nuts and bolts. The general purpose computers, or GPC, five in all, are exquisitely complex, utterly beautiful. Almost sensuous.”

As the little wizard prattled on in his engineering reverie, the five listeners with half-closed eyes squirmed in discomfort.

“Imagine: each of the five computers—four primary and one backup—has as its heart a central processing unit. This CPU can perform 450,000 functions every
second
. The CPU's talk to thirty-eight Shuttle systems. The link between the CPU's and Shuttle's subsystems are electronic relays called multiplexer-demultiplexers, or MDM's. The computers speak to Shuttle over the MDM's. The CPU's think forty times faster than the computers used in the Apollo moon-landing spacecraft!

“The four, primary shuttle computers are completely isolated from the fifth computer. This fifth GPC is reserved for the backup computer system. The four primary GPC's compare electronic notes among themselves. They actually vote on major flight-control decisions at least once every second. They synchronize themselves with each other three hundred times every
second
. And, they speak their computer language at the rate of 787,000 words per
second
.

“Now, here is my plan: The GPC's have an internal separate Control Application Program. This is the computer program, about 400,000 written lines of it, which flies the shuttle's re-entry profile into the atmosphere.

“Now, the programs and the re-entry trajectories are physically stored in two tape-recorder type, mass memory units, MMU's. Shuttle's operations sequences programs are stored in the MMU's. The program software is subdivided into smaller core programs called major modes. The actual re-entry into the first fringes of the atmosphere is Major Mode 304 . . .”

“Doctor, please!” the Admiral pleaded with his face in his large hands. “Get to it.”

“Well, all I have to do is tinker with this Major Mode 304. Put in a programmed sequence of re-entry flight maneuvers—put it into both the primary and the backup flight control systems, the BFS. Such maneuvers would subject Endeavor to lethal structural loads. Break the ship's back, as it were . . .”

Five men grimaced.

“You see, re-entry is profoundly delicate for Shuttle, which comes home from orbit as a 100-ton glider without main engine power. It is flown with a maximum of three G's. A load of only 3 and three-tenths G's will fatally overload the wings and body of the shuttle. Program in a sudden dip of the nose from the normal, forty-degree, nose-up attitude down to say twenty degrees . . . and it is done. We call this maneuver an ‘alpha sweep.' Takes only a few seconds. I figure an automatic, computer-induced pitch-over to twenty degrees would take two seconds, at most. The crew takes another second or two to realize that they have a flight-control system failure. Then another two or three second pull-up manually commanded by either pilot—it will be a reflexive pilot response. The high G load in the pull-up will do the job.”

The thin engineer paused. His exhausted observers scrutinized his yellow face. A smile?

“So, Dr. Pritchard. You just saunter on over to Pad 39-A with your little screwdriver and a few key-punch cards?”

“Not at all, Colonel. The automatic, computer-controlled countdown by the Launch Sequence Processor can be instructed to insert my computer programs into the five flight computers over the pre-launch Ground Command Interface Logic software. This is a normal prelaunch computer and navigation up-date always done on a shuttle launch about twenty minutes before lift-off . . .”

“And our crew just quietly incinerates themselves?”

“Not quite, Major. We simply tell the crew that we intend to fly an automatic test of the re-entry flight systems. It's called a Programmed Test Input. These PTI's, sets of up to seventeen of them, were routinely flown on the first six shuttle missions. Tell the crew we need another PTI sequence to check out the flight systems and they won't raise an eyebrow.

“Just before the re-entry, we advise the pilots either to execute the PTI or not to run it as part of Major Mode 304. We only use the lethal PTI if it is necessary.”

“That's it, Doctor?”

“In full, Admiral: Clean, quick, and buried within 400,000 lines of computer programs. And the final beauty of my plan: If the go-ahead is given to the crew for my PTI, it will be run during the early re-entry, during the normal communications blackout caused by the initial heat pulse. Endeavor will go into the blackout, but she will not come out of it.”

The Admiral felt his bowels twisting.

“You can do all that between tonight and launch in fifty-six hours?”

“Admiral, that is my job.”

“Tell you one thing, Jack, give me a good old truck stop over a dinner jacket joint anytime.”

“I'll buy that, Skipper.”

With morning sunshine warming their faces by the window of a truckers' diner along Interstate 45 just north of Houston, the newly anointed prime crew for the Intelsat-6 rescue mission relished bacon and eggs laced with greasy hashbrowns and the scent of diesel fuel.

“The best, Number One,” the big man drawled. His face looked uncommonly drawn to his junior partner.

“Look tired, Will,” Jacob Enright offered cautiously over his black coffee. He braced for a captain's look to warm his face at 8 o'clock in the morning.

“Just worked late and too early to the office, Jack. A mornin' off before we fly to the Cape should restoke the old furnace.”

Enright was surprised by the Colonel's benign response. The long pilot had not raised his face from his eggs.

“Yeh, Skip. I'm lookin' forward to a few hours off. No simulator, no briefings, no Stoney, no Hutch, no Tommy. May take my cycle for a spin.”

“You be careful, buddy . . . Does feel good, don't it?” The command pilot smiled a tired grin.

“About this morning's briefing, Will. I'm still surprised about running a PTI this late in the game. We're pretty much routine since the first few flights after the Challenger stand-down. Maybe they're still learning how she flies? Strange, though.”

“Oh, I don't know, Jack. We'll be there anyway. Might as well give the backroom its money's worth. Just push a button and let Mother fly us home. No sweat.”

“I suppose. What you gonna do with your whole hour of R and R?”

“Got a visit I want to make. See a friend up north. Drive from here.”

“Got a girl, Skipper?” the thin pilot smiled.

The gray-haired airman thought for a long moment. Enright attended to his eggs. He thought the older flier had forgotten his question.

“Yeh, Jack. A girl.”

Hastings Manor sprawled majestically across the sundrenched hills an hour from Houston. White stucco buildings glowed in the clear, chill air. A relic from the Mexican heritage of Texas, the old mansion was elegant as Colonel Parker walked with a limp along a pathway between cottages.

Staff members in street clothes waved cheery goodmornings at the familiar, long-legged visitor. “Have a safe trip, Colonel,” they called and smiled. The tall man nodded and returned the cheer of the glorious winter's morning.

Colonel Parker stopped outside a large, single-story cottage, white and ancient, with clay arches over a red tile veranda.

“Morning, Colonel,” smiled an older woman with a plastic name tag upon her chest.

“And to you, Sister.”

“You are well, Colonel?”

“As any old salt can hope to be, Sister.”