Authors: Anne McCaffrey
Johnny had followed Peter’s diagnostics on his control panels. “I see.”
Xiang Liu snorted. “That’s why we carry six computers on board. They’re always going down.”
“Sir,” Peter said, remembering his drills, “flight rules state that we report when we fall below five voting computers.”
“If we tell them, Peter, we won’t be going anywhere,” Johnny replied at his drollest.
“Let me see if I can jog it back on-line,” Lieutenant Liu offered. “And I’ll look at MPU Two while I’m at it.” He got out of his seat, graceful in free fall as he pulled himself over to the MPU control rack and started pulling off access panels.
“Good idea, Mr. Liu,” Johnny agreed.
Peter was still uncomfortable. “Sir, I was told that there were no old, bold pilots.”
Johnny snorted at Peter’s re-rendering of the old saw: There are old pilots and there are bold pilots but there are no old bold pilots.
“Mr. Reidinger,” Johnny said, “we have seventy-one minutes until OIM-2. If we can’t get one of the computers back by then, we’ll abort the mission. In the meantime, I want you to stand watch while Mr. Liu and I troubleshoot these wonders of electronics provided to the space station by the lowest bidder.”
“Probably Russia,” the copilot murmured, but only Peter heard him.
Xiang Liu managed to get MPU Five back on-line after jiggering with it for some minutes.
“Okay, now we’ll be go for OIM-2,” Johnny told Peter. “I’m going to head aft and suss out the rest of the crew and the passengers.”
Before he gave permission to unclip safety harnesses, Johnny gave the usual reminders about the hazards of free fall, the procedures to take in the event of nausea, and the action-reaction phenomenon. He advised the newbies to keep one hand on something. Anything a luminous pale blue was safe to grab. Peter quickly recognized who had traveled in space before. The noncoms floated gracefully up and away from the safety seats; two of the Japanese army officers moved with equal facility and were encouraging their tentative and nervous comrade. The solar heating engineers, all civilians, were very cautious about moving at all: obviously the matter of action-reaction had been emphasized in their briefing for this journey.
Johnny checked readouts with the copilot and then assigned watches. Sergeant Bat Singh and Corporal Gopal Ahn were getting crew pay on this leg of the journey and Peter was to get experience. Then Johnny called a coffee break.
“This your first time in space, Reidinger?” one of the noncoms asked, watching Peter glide easily toward the galley while evading the clumsier movements of the engineers.
“I’ve done some EVA,” Peter replied modestly, grinning. “Great feeling, being weightless.”
“Not that you carry much,” the sergeant remarked, eyeing Peter’s light frame. Bat Singh had massive shoulders, a heavy torso, and arms disproportionately long for his height.
“Wrestler?” Peter asked.
Bat Singh shrugged and nodded, pleased by the guess.
Just then one of the engineers vomited. Liu hurriedly slapped the access panel back over the control rack to prevent any further accidents occurring with the ship’s computers.
“There’s always one,” Singh remarked in an undertone that only Peter was near enough to hear as the sergeant pushed off the side of the cabin to get a spew-bag.
The sicker was strapped into his bunk in the sleeping area where he was assured he would recover.
“What if I don’t?” he asked anxiously as he was assisted aft.
“I haven’t heard of anyone who hasn’t,” Bat Singh replied genially. “Not if you passed phobics.”
Peter was relieved of his watch by Xiang Liu who told him with a certain amount of disgust, “Those computers are always going down and I’m sick of babying ’em. Why don’t you take a break? You did real good,
Mister
Reidinger.” He grinned as he gave the thumbs-up of approval. “You can come back up for OIM-2.”
“Yes, sir,” Peter said, happily floating toward the rear of the cabin.
The passengers were all grouped around the ports, looking at Earth. Peter found himself following the Earth’s geography and referencing the list of gestalt-capable generators at the same time. Let’s see, he said to himself. Dhaka had the Ehrain Station, then Hong Kong, Brisbane, Melbourne, Auckland, Midway, Honolulu, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego all at once, followed by Denver, Dallas, Jerhattan, Miami, and Buenos Aires. Then there were no big stations until Europe. Peter hadn’t worked with many but he’d seen pictures of the huge installation built by the CERN people in Geneva.
He did know that the nice people at the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire had been the first to put together gestalt circuitry.
They
were trying to understand how psychic powers worked in the physical world, so the gestalt was more of a scientific curiosity than a practicality for them. Peter remembered hearing Rhyssa comment once about how the CERN and FermiLab physicists were vying for the very small amount of research time the Eastern Parapsychic Center allotted for telekinetics. If Professor Gadriel had not had some minor telekinetic ability, that vital research might never have been as enthusiastically pursued. And
Gadriel was always trying to get complete use-energy readings for his investigations—like those that Peter and Johnny had been generating for their Padrugoi contract. Peter made a note to contact the professor and see about giving him copies of the data.
I
t seemed like five minutes, not the sixty-five that had really passed, when Johnny hailed Peter back to the cockpit.
“I think you’ve had enough excitement for your first flight,” Johnny said. “I just want you to observe the next couple of burns.”
Peter grinned. “That’s fine with me, sir.” He strapped himself back into the engineer’s seat and walked through the OIM-2 preburn checklist.
In his mind, Peter called up the carefully memorized schematics of the Limo’s construction.
Limo-34
, part of the three-oh series, was the fourth of its class completely assembled at Padrugoi. The Limo one-oh series had been mostly assembled on Earth, with only bolt-together occurring in orbit. The Limo two-oh series crafts were about 70 percent complete when brought up from Earth.
Because they had never had to be lifted from Earth as nearly completed craft, the Limo three-ohs looked the least like a traditional spacecraft than anything since the Lunar Module of ancient Apollo days. For all of that, Limo three-oh still bore a striking resemblance of plan to the US Space Shuttle—but stretched.
The long cargo compartment was almost exactly twice the length of the old Space Shuttle’s cargo compartment because it was constructed from the original Space Shuttle tool-and-die set. There were no wings because they were not needed; Limo was never intended to reenter the Earth’s atmosphere. At the rear of the lengthened cargo bays, where the wings might have been mounted, there were instead the spacecraft’s fuel tanks. Stubby landing pads were located under the fuel tanks—with the forward pair sticking out from the front of the crew compartment. Instead of the black heat tiles and white heat-resistant felt covering, the Limo gleamed all over with protective gold Mylar covering. The forward compartment was a modified version of the Space Shuttle shirtsleeve crew section—nearly half again the length—and there were three EVA airlocks.
The Limo didn’t require the three huge Space Shuttle Main Engines
and that, right there, saved a lot of mass. For its engines,
Limo-34
had two OMS kits—Orbital Maneuvering Systems—at the rear and a series of maneuvering thrusters on the ship’s nose. The OMS kits were another Space Shuttle hand-me-down and included both the large 26.7-kilo Newton thrusters and a series of smaller maneuvering ones. And the Limo did not need a tail. Instead, the designers had mounted an antenna array in the same spot. As a safety precaution, the Limo designers had made the entire rear section of the Limo—tanks, antennae, OMS, and all—to be ejectable.
“Of course,” as Lieutenant Liu had remarked to Peter when he had explained this feature months ago during his training, “all you’d have left then is enough life support to keep you alive until you could get to the life pods and enough maneuvering thrusters to stop the ship from tumbling. If you were lucky.”
Peter didn’t need Xiang Liu to tell him that any crew that had to jettison their propulsion system was quite obviously
not
lucky.
While the first burn, OAM-1, had required only 76 percent of full power for just a little over a second—and a thrust of a bit more than a tenth of standard gravity, OIM-2 would require the Limo’s two main engines to use 95 percent of full power for nearly two seconds—but again at the same thrust.
The burn went perfectly. Except that MPU Five and One both went out.
“What is it with these things?” Liu muttered angrily under his breath, as he pulled the two failed units off-line and opened the access panel to them. It took him the better part of half an hour before he got MPU One back on-line. He spent the next thirty minutes working with Bat Singh as they tried to troubleshoot MPU Five.
“Computers report high oxygen readings,” Peter told Johnny.
“Accept their change,” Johnny said. “They reported the same problem about half an hour ago and I took their advice. We’re feeling no pain, are we?”
Peter had to agree. He yawned. Maybe the stress of the mission was beginning to get to him.
“Liu, Singh, cover up that access panel and get into position. We’re coming up on TLI-3,” Johnny ordered. “After that we’ll coast on up to good ol’ Luna for five days and drop ourselves in on Colonel Watari.” He
switched on the Limo’s intercom and called the passengers. “Everyone strapped in back there?”
When he got no response, Johnny sent Sergeant Singh back to check up. The sergeant came back in a few minutes with a big grin on his face. He yawned hugely for a moment, then excused himself. “Sorry, sir. Everyone back there is all netted into their bunks and asleep.”
“Can’t blame them,” Johnny said. “Passengers usually crash about now—although they tend to gawk down at Earth until TLI.”
“Three minutes until TLI-3,” Lieutenant Liu reported.
Peter checked his engineering panel again. “Computers are reporting that the oxygen levels have crept back up.”
Johnny yawned and nodded. “I see it. I’m correcting it.”
Oxygen levels were very special in space. The Limo’s environmental control system regulated oxygen by partial pressure. On Earth, while total air pressure was one standard atmosphere, oxygen made up only 21 percent of the air and so the partial pressure was 21 percent of one standard atmosphere. In space, rather than building spacecraft capable of handling Earth’s standard atmosphere, a lower pressure was used with a correspondingly higher percentage of oxygen so that astronauts could have the same amount of oxygen.
Fires consumed oxygen when they burned and a fire in pure oxygen could burn much hotter and faster than the same fire in a standard atmosphere. Until the
Apollo 1
disaster—when one such disastrous pure-oxygen fire in the Apollo capsule had claimed the lives of three astronauts—the United States had used a pure-oxygen system. Afterward, to avoid such disasters, the US switched to a mix of oxygen with just enough nitrogen to prevent explosive fires.
If the oxygen pressure got too high, it could cause euphoria and loss of concentration as well as damage to nerves, especially eyes. If the oxygen pressure got too low, the astronauts could be asphyxiated.
S
paceflight was still a tricky and expensive proposition. Because of that, any spacecraft on any flight was subject to intense scrutiny. Since the days of the US Space Shuttle, there had been ways to keep in contact with ground stations regardless of the shuttle’s position above Earth, and in modern times, those methods had been considerably improved.
Tracking Data Relay Satellites, or TDRSs, ringed Earth and provided continuous telemetry and communication between spacecraft, Padrugoi, and Earth.
Limo-34
, by virtue of its crew and mission, was subject to even more scrutiny than most.
Commander Sakai had made special arrangements to get a data feed to his console and had monitored all the problems the Limo had experienced.
While he had followed many Limos in their flights to the Moon, there was something about this one that bothered him. He couldn’t put his finger on it, at least not enough to call it to General Greene’s attention or suggest to Admiral Coetzer that the mission be scrubbed, but—there was something. He scratched his head, trying to make sense of it.
“Y
ou know, we’re being watched,” Johnny said with a laugh. “Watched like a hawk.”
Lieutenant Liu nodded. “All the time. Coming up on TLI in thirty seconds.”
“Committing TLI parameters to the computer,” Johnny said. “Now all we have to do is sit back and relax.” He turned to Peter. “Pretty soon you’ll be able to walk around the old
Apollo 12
site. It’s just a hop, skip, and a jump from First Base, you know.”
Peter spent a moment recalling pictures of the Apollo 12 Memorial Park. He had enlargements up on the board in his room. He’d watched the tour videos, too. He felt a thrill as he imagined
being
there himself: the kid who’d never once thought he’d get out of the damned hospital bed. You never knew, did you?
“You know,” Bat Singh said to no one in particular, startling Peter with almost his exact thoughts. “Either I could use some sleep myself or I could use a beer.”
R
HYSSA!
Amalda Vaden’s sharp cry jolted Rhyssa out of a deep sleep.
Something’s wrong. With Peter
.
In the Eastern Parapsychic Center alarms blared suddenly, alerting everyone on duty.
What is it?
Rhyssa demanded of both Mallie Vaden and Budworth, the watch officer.
The precogs! They’ve got something
, Budworth replied.
I’ve got five corroborations, all strong
.
What?
Rhyssa shot back, willing Mallie, the strongest precog that she had set on watch for anything involving Peter, to answer.