Back to the Moon (52 page)

Puckett leaned against Livia, who was asleep. He wasn't entirely unhappy. True, every one of his hopes, plans, and schemes had been foiled, but new opportunities always beckoned. The Russian “family” that had adopted him was very interested in his welfare. After all, he was a veritable fount of knowledge of the interworkings of the federal government in Washington, D.C. That was potentially useful to them since they had expressed an interest in penetrating it, acquiring some of its machinery for their own use. Puckett assured them that he could assist them. A little money properly applied, Puckett had explained, went a long way along the banks of the Potomac River if one knew just the right place to apply it.

Puckett smiled. He was going to be all right. He would learn Russian, climb to a leadership position with his friends. They already controlled much of the Russian government. He had already discussed with them his insertion back into the United States after the present furor had subsided. Puckett settled back. Yes, he would be fine.

That was why it was such a shock when Boris nudged him and Puckett looked into the barrel of a 9mm pistol. “Tell me your Belize bank account number or you are a dead man!” the huge man rumbled.

Puckett looked from the barrel to Boris's tiny, sad eyes. “Don't be a fool,” he shouted over the whining helicopter engine and the rushing air around its blades. “If you kill me, you won't have the number. If you let me live, I will pay you handsomely.”

“You don't understand, Mr. Puckett,” Boris replied stolidly. “I have been ordered to kill you in any case. I just want the number before you die.”

Puckett could not fathom such a thing. Kill him? He was way too valuable for that. He decided Boris was bluffing. He swiped at the barrel. “Don't be an idiot, Boris. Put that thing away.”

Puckett's move surprised Boris and the pistol went off. Both Boris and Puckett looked forward. There was a hole in the back of their pilot's helmet that Puckett swore hadn't been there before. To his dismay the pilot's head wagged to one side and the helicopter banked in the same direction. “Uh-oh,” Puckett said.

The guards at the main gate at Star City leaned nonchalantly against their guard shack, smoking and talking while watching with boredom the empty road that disappeared into the darkness. A distant helicopter attracted their attention and they observed its running lights. The lights were dancing, as if the pilot had decided to emulate the moths that battered themselves against the helmeted lights on their shack, swooping and turning, rising and falling. Then there was a flash of light, a boil of orange flame that rose out from behind the black forest that lay in front of them. The guards estimated that the helicopter had gone down two kilometers away. They discussed among themselves whether to call anyone or to mount a rescue mission. When no decision was made, which was in itself a decision, they shrugged and went back to smoking and talking of women and football and hockey. Helicopters crashed all the time in Russia these days, after all. Airplanes dropped out of the sky. Trains jumped off their tracks. The economy of the country itself kept opening and folding like an accordion. Why should they trouble themselves because some fool had decided he was a helicopter pilot? Somebody would take care of the mess left out there, clean up the burned, blackened bodies. Somebody would care. All they knew was they didn't.

Off Grand Cayman

Virgil sat on a stack of shrimp netting, holding his face in his hands. Powery had taken the rifle away from him, stowed it. Jack touched Virgil's shoulder. “It's all right, Virg. You did what you thought you needed to do.”

“I'm sorry, Jack.”

“I know.” Jack looked at Powery. “Can I borrow that scuba gear, Cap'n?”

Penny came over. “Jack, even you can't dive down two miles!”

Jack let the cocky grin spread across his face that had once made her hate him, made her love him now. “I don't think I'll have to go that deep.”

Jack took a giant step off the starboard side, holding his mask and regulator tight against his face. Before he threw the bag overboard, he had been watching the
Linda Joyce
's drift toward a line of demarkation, a place where the water turned from dark purple to faded blue. He had thrown the bag as hard as he could toward the line that marked the sheer, vertical wall, the famous Cayman Wall that came arching out of the Cayman Trench. If he still had any luck left...

Jack spiraled down toward the wall. A turtle swam by, spotted Jack, flippered hard to get away from the crazy diver laughing in his regulator. Jack swam up to a big piece of pillar coral growing on the wall. He admired that kind of coral, always had. It formed itself into giant fingers that were almost abstract art. Scuba divers usually were careful to skirt around their jagged stands. Pillar coral could snag anything that came into contact with it, even a strap on a bag of dirt from the moon.

A NEW START

Who has known heights shall bear forevermore
An incommunicable thing
That hurts his heart, as if a wing
Beat at the portal, challenging;
And yet—lured by the gleam his vision wore—
Who once has trodden stars seeks peace no more.
—Mary Brent Whiteside,
”Who Has Known Heights”

3 YEARS LATER...

BACK TO THE CAPE

Cape Canaveral

It was a perfect day for a launch. The Cape sparkled in golden light as the sun peeked above the dark blue horizon, illuminating a single white puffy cloud hanging high in the sky. The crowd of dignitaries stood at the base of pad 39-B and admired the rocket sitting on its own squared-off base. It looked larger than it was because it sat by itself on the concrete pad. The gigantic towers of the shuttle era were gone. Only a small portable gantry, now rolled back, was needed for this machine, the first of the operational single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) fleet fielded in three years of intensive effort and remarkable economy.

A siren wailed and the crowd tensed. Launch was imminent. A loudspeaker crackled beside the stands. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Medaris Engineering Company's single-stage-to-orbit vehicle,
Moondog
!”

Flames immediately erupted at the base of the rocket and it powered smoothly off the pad, swept up into the sky, and disappeared within seconds. A thin cloud of water vapor, its only residue, hung in the air and then began to disperse in the light winds. The crowd oohed and ahhed appropriately and applauded enthusiastically. The doors on a concrete hangar beside the pad opened and a rail car, carrying another
Moondog
SSTO, crept out and started trundling toward the pad. “The second
Moondog
will be erected and ready for launch in thirty minutes,” the woman over the loudspeaker said. “Powerful, safe, and economical,
Moondogs
are available for immediate lease. Terms are available.”

Jack Medaris shook some hands, stepped down from the viewing platform. He looked with pride at his accomplishment, the
Moondog
reusable SSTO. His company had gone public and accomplished the design and construction of the
Moondog
using funds from the sale of its stock. In effect, a vast number of Americans had decided to risk their capital on Medaris's enterprise. A cluster of five Big Dog engines provided the boost to get the composite aerodynamic shell and the heavy cargo aboard a
Moondog
into orbit. Once there and its payloads deployed, a
Moondog
automatically reentered and landed back at the Cape or wherever it was ordered, tail-first. A quick once-over and refueling and she was ready to go again. After a few more test flights the Federal Aviation Administration was scheduled to clear
Moondog
s to be launched from anywhere in the United States. Jack's plan was to keep a fleet of six of them at the Cape to take advantage of the trained work-force there.

Jack used binoculars to inspect the adjoining Pad 39-A. The tower there was in the process of being dismantled. No more space shuttles of the
Columbia
class would ever fly off either pad again. After the final flight of
Columbia
the space shuttles of NASA never flew another operational mission. They were used instead in a rigorous test program, pushed to the far edges of their flight envelopes, NASA learning everything they had to offer about maneuvering in space and working in the hypersonic range of velocity in the upper atmosphere. It was the test program the shuttles should have undergone from the beginning.

There had been many changes at NASA. The space agency had gotten out of the operations business and moved into the forefront of research and development, handing over its scientific and engineering knowledge to American commercial space operators. With the data it had gained from the shuttle tests, the agency already had a prototype scram-jet that could fly into orbit from Edwards Air Force Base, deposit a payload, and return. NASA had fielded the prototype for a half-billion dollars, ten times less than the original estimate. That estimate had been made before MEC, by taking
Columbia
to the moon, had demonstrated what could be done with a little money and a lot of engineering guts. The scram-jet looked good, and the older and larger aerospace companies around the world waited eagerly to get their hands on it. But Jack was convinced his
Moondog
design would beat the scram in head-to-head competition. Or perhaps there might be room for more than one SSTO spacecraft. The commercial markets that had opened up since his moon flight were going to be too big for a single enterprise. It was as if that flight had opened some sort of mental floodgate. The possibility that so much could be done if the will was there to do it was energizing not only to the aerospace field but in all the scientific and even political disciplines. There were new starts everywhere. Anything was possible. To prove it, NASA was also cutting metal on a prototype fusion engine using helium-3 as fuel. This was an engine that could scoot out to the moon in hours, Mars in days. The entire solar system might soon be within America's grasp.

Medaris watched the group of VIPs, all potential customers, excitedly watch the erection of the second
Moondog.
With cheap access to space just on the horizon, commercial enterprises were making plans to produce a great number of products in space—new materials, new medicines, and new concepts such as tourism, space sports, and even homesteading. Jack intended that MEC would be able to provide the transportation to space they required. Although Penny High Eagle had been disappointed to find that immersion in salt water had destroyed her unusual cell culture experiment, her description of the nerve cell growths she had observed had caused great excitement in the medical community. Attempts to repeat her serendipitous experiment became a top priority of pharmaceutical and medical companies the world over. Industrial Orbital Facility, Inc., a private joint Japanese-American company that had taken over the old International Space Station, announced that it would launch a new man-tended laboratory the following year aboard an improved Japanese H-2D booster. Competitive bids were being taken from the clamoring companies for room aboard the module. There was renewed hope among people paralyzed by spinal cord trauma and disease that space research would deliver a cure.

There were mining outfits represented by the men and women filing into the stand to observe the launch. The interest in helium-3 had reached fever pitch as soon as Dr. Perlman had come up into the bright sunlight of the Montana summer. Using the thirty kilos of beads found at Shorty Crater and rescued from the Cayman Trench, Perlman had demonstrated the full power of his plant. Montana Power & Light was working overtime to string in lines to it for commercial use. Energy companies the world over were flocking to the United States to learn more. The President of the United States, a year after
Columbia
's landing, had agreed to make the technology of fusion power available to the world. Helium-3 was the new gold of the solar system and mining companies were lining up to dig it out.

There were government officials from several countries observing Jack's
Moondog
flight. The moon treaties of a previous era had been revoked and governments across the earth had staked out claims. The United States and Russia made the first, based on their landings there, but other nations—England, Germany, France, Brazil, India, Japan, China, even Portugal, recalling a past history of exploration and colonization—asked for and received territory set aside on the moon. An international agency was organized at the United Nations to act as an arbiter of the claims. If the land wasn't secured by a manned landing within twenty years, it would be auctioned to the highest bidder with the proceeds going into an international spaceflight general pool. Some people were already calling this as yet unnamed international agency by a familiar name: Star Fleet.

Jack knew his company was in a good position to take commercial advantage of both the commercial and political activities. A
Moondog
could carry a Big Dog aloft and place it into a parking orbit. All a nation or a company needed to do was to put its mooncraft in orbit, dock with the Big Dog, and then use it to reach escape velocity. There was a great land rush coming a quarter of a million miles away from earth across the Armstrong Sea.

The January Group was no longer a secret society. It had moved boldly into the open, especially after its members were exposed and they had no choice. From their positions of power these men and women began to espouse their belief that the world would be better without spaceflight or technological development. A movement was formed called Janism. Janists already controlled governments of small countries and had their eye on big ones. Another struggle began on earth for men's souls.

Jack could only hope that Janism would never catch on. He couldn't imagine that it would, considering the excitement of rolling back the new frontier. Sam Tate had been appointed administrator of NASA. Shirley Grafton joined Tate as his assistant. When a new president was elected, Tate and Grafton were invited to stay on.