Back to the Moon (6 page)

Penny nodded dutifully. She was determined to be a good trooper on this flight. “Four glasses, Olivia.”

“Good.” She glared at the others, then beckoned them to follow her. “All right, ladies. Let's go to space.” Grandly, she burst through the swinging doors of the suit room and into the hall that led to the waiting crew transfer bus. She nodded to the applause of admiring engineers and raised her hands aloft in a triumphant gesture.

Penny dutifully trudged along behind until she spotted the reporters shouting questions outside. All of them were calling to her, so she stopped and pirouetted as gracefully as the LES suit and the heavy black boots would allow. Playing to the press was such a natural thing for her that she didn't even notice the sour faces of her fellow crew members waiting impatiently at the bus door. She believed the press existed for one reason: publicity. Her job was to keep them interested, keep the publicity flowing. The day before, on the tarmac after the T-38 jet ride from Houston, Penny had shown them a glimpse of the frilly white bra she wore underneath her flight suit. She thought it was pretty funny when a reporter asked Ollie Grant to show what she was wearing under
her
flight suit too. For a moment Penny thought Grant was actually going to coldcock the reporter.

“Dr. High Eagle,” a reporter shouted at her, “are you scared?” He was a handsome young man, obviously one of the fluffball anchors on local television.

“Of you?” Penny grinned, her perfect teeth flashing. “Petrified!”

The anchor laughed appreciatively. “No, of flying into space!”

The NASA publicist, a shrill-voiced woman dressed in a severely tailored gray suit, stepped protectively in front of her. Penny wanted to shove her out of the way. “Dr. High Eagle is prepared,” the publicist told the reporters in a boring monotone. “She has trained diligently.”

“Yeah, right,” Janet Barnes gibed from the bus door.

A female correspondent waved her hand. “Dr. High Eagle, how do you justify going into space? According to my estimates it will cost the American taxpayer one million two hundred thousand dollars to send you into orbit. Considering all the problems here on earth, does it make sense to keep spending money on space?”

Penny pushed past the publicist so she was in front of the cameras again. “One million, two hundred thousand dollars is about what Americans spend on cat litter in a week,” she said, adding a dazzling smile. The reporters wrote her comment down. She waited—timing being everything—and then got serious. “I am, as you well know, a qualified biologist. I have a series of experiments that I will be performing in the microgravity environment of space that may very well have practical applications in the medical field. My seat on the space shuttle has been paid for by a one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, which is intensely interested in the results of these experiments. I believe the American taxpayer is going to get a good return on the investment of flying me into space.”

Penny waved at the excited reporters and correspondents, who were still yelling questions at her as she climbed aboard. The rest of the crew had grabbed front seats together, so Penny worked her way to the back. The bus stank like a closetful of wet rubber raincoats because of the LES suits. “Hey, High Eagle.” Astronaut Janet Barnes snickered. “You know the difference between you and God? I do. God don't think he's you!”

“Shut up, Janet,” Grant snapped, standing as she spoke. She walked down the aisle, leaned into Penny's face. “High Eagle, have you got makeup on? Wipe it off. You're not wearing powder into space. It'll pop off you in zero g and float around and I, for one, don't want to breathe it.”

“I guess I'm one of those women who like to look their best wherever they go,” Penny replied in a reasonable tone. She didn't want a fight. Not now.

Grant reached above her, opened a locker, and threw her a box of tissues and a bottle of water. “Where you're going, honey, all you need is a bag to puke in.”

Penny shrugged but complied. She was getting her jaunt into space, would get her book out of it, hit the best-seller lists again. On her way to success she'd dealt with a lot worse than Grant and her pumped-up astronettes. Penny finished, threw the tissues on the floor, and looked forlornly out the window as the lush swamp of Banana Creek slid by. People lined the road, waving. She waved back and then suddenly felt very alone. Penny had hoped she would be able to find at least one friend among the women astronauts. It was ironic, she knew, but it was the truth. Her books and articles about her adventures had made her one of the most famous women in the world but she had no friends, just associates, employees, and agents.

The crew bus slowly made its way to the access road that paralleled the reinforced concrete crawlerway. Pad 39-B loomed ahead. Penny drank in the sight.
Columbia
was beautiful. A wreath of surrealistic white mist, the liquid oxygen boil-off, swirled around the huge spacecraft. For a moment Penny allowed herself to savor the adventure ahead.

The guard trucks peeled off as the bus braked in front of the pad, and Penny followed the crew outside to the launch tower. When the elevator doors opened to take them up to the crew access level, Grant and the three other astronauts shuffled aboard. A guard approached Penny, holding an autograph book and a pen. “Would you mind, ma'am?” he asked politely.

“We're not going to wait,” Grant snapped at her from the elevator.

Penny had learned long ago she could not be who she was without her fans and they came first, even here in
Columbia
's shadow. “Go ahead,” she said to her grumpy commander. “I'll catch up.” More scraps of paper were being thrust at her and she was more than happy to oblige. Neither she nor the excited guards heard the nearly inaudible thump as the pulleys of elevator number one disengaged halfway between the fourth and fifth level where there was no floor structure.

THE IG TEAM

Fixed Service Structure, Launch Complex 39-B, Kennedy Space Center

On the highest level of the tower, where even the pad rats rarely ventured, Jack stood beneath a vast bowl of clear blue sky and savored the salt-laden breeze coming off the rumbling Atlantic shore. He turned as Virgil came up the steps behind him. The big man nodded, took off his hard hat, and wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “I checked the ET, boss. Tribble and Estes did a great job. I couldn't see the seam at all. We're ready to rocket and roll.”

Virgil was talking about the inside job two MEC employees had performed in the external tank plant in New Orleans. MEC had contracted with Lockmart, the tank manufacturer, to study the use of the ET as a cargo carrier. It had been expensive but it had gotten Tribble and Estes inside the plant, working all hours of the day. One night they'd put cargo in the base of
Columbia
's tank, then covered it with insulation, leaving no trace. Then they had gotten the hell out of there.

Virgil was in the white coveralls of a NASA IG (Inspector General) team official, festooned with all the necessary badges, all perfectly authentic, all completely fake. IG teams were feared on the pad. They came looking for errors and could destroy a career with one critical report. “Everything else copacetic, Virg?” Jack asked his engine man.

“As long as my little girl's getting help, I'm happy.”

Jack patted Virgil on the shoulder, gave him an encouraging smile. Virgil had put much of the bonus he'd received for the mission into gene therapy for his daughter. The experimental treatment for cystic fibrosis was expensive and medical insurance wouldn't pay for it, but Jack knew their daughter meant everything to Virgil and his wife.

Virgil left and Jack watched the ocean waves marching in and out, line after line, as if translucent blue ranks of soldiers. Then he heard the ringing of another set of footsteps coming up the steel steps. Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, outfitted in blue astronaut coveralls, leaned on the rail beside him. “Hot damn, Jack,” he bellowed over the roar of the surf. “It's gonna be a fine day, one for the books, eh? God, I can't wait!”

Despite his bravado Jack caught a flash of anguish on Cassidy's face.
He's scared,
Jack thought. Captain Craig “Hopalong” Cassidy, the best shuttle pilot on the planet, was scared. Cassidy was blond and blue eyed and looked every bit the part of what he had once been: America's premier astronaut and fantasy figure of millions of women. He had piloted each of the shuttles several times, spent six months aboard the Russian
Mir,
joined a team of spacewalkers to repair the Hubble Space Telescope, and commanded a team of scientists on the
Spacelab XXI
mission. He had flown every high-performance aircraft in both the Air Force and Navy stables and even built his own experimental airplanes, using one to break the civilian altitude record. He could fly anything that had wings and land it on a dime. Or at least, that had once been true. Now, he was another NASA outsider, thrown out for one drunken brawl too many. And he was scared, needed reassurance. Jack gripped Cassidy's shoulder. “This is going to be your day, Hoppy. You're going to show the world you're still the best shuttle jock there ever was.”

Cassidy nodded. The wind rustled his blond locks. “Thank you for believing in me, Jack,” he said after a moment. “I'll do you proud, I promise.”

“You've done that already, Hoppy, just by agreeing to go with us.”

“Wouldn't have missed this for the world.” Cassidy laughed. “Or the moon.”

The two men, outcasts to the community they loved, laughed together, and faced defiantly the constant, unceasing Atlantic wind whistling through the launch complex. Beneath them huge steel pipes grumbled and groaned as an immense wash of super-cold liquid propellants flooded through them into the shuttle's external tank. At launch
Columbia
with her stack weighed 2,250 tons. Eight hundred and fifty tons of that was liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Immersed in the cacophony of wind and propellant Jack felt excitement crawl up his spine. He was ready, tired of waiting, and willed the clock forward. He was supremely confident but he also believed that the day's work would be difficult, and all that followed filled with pitfalls. He didn't care. The clock was counting. It was time to go into the history books or hell. Maybe both. “Let's go do it,” he said to his pilot, and together they turned away from the wind.

THE JSC DIRECTOR

Building 1, Sixth Floor, Johnson Space Center, Houston, Texas

Frank Bonner, director of Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, surveyed each of his managers at the conclusion of the meeting he held every morning in his office. Sullen faces looked back. As was his habit, he'd chewed each of them out by turn. “That's it,” he said. “Any questions?”

There were none. His managers had learned over their tenure that to ask a question was to invite a biting retort. Bonner didn't like questions. He wanted action. They also knew today he was in an especially foul mood. One of his shuttles was being retired. That didn't sit well with the director of Johnson Space Center. He needed every shuttle he could get to keep flying his astronauts into space.

Lily Acton, his secretary, came bustling into his office while the managers filed out. She straightened his tie, brushed lint off the sleeves of his suit jacket. “Law, Frank, you can't go down to the press room dressed like a tramp.”

Bonner frowned. “I don't need you to look after me, Lily.”

“Somebody needs to,” she admonished.

When Lily finished checking him, she left, going back outside the heavy oaken doors to maintain her vigil, to keep away anyone other than approved personnel. Bonner still had fifteen minutes before he would go down the six floors and walk across the JSC campus to Shuttle Mission Control. He went to his floor-to-ceiling office window and drew back the curtains. His view was of a grassy park where a giant
Saturn V
moon rocket lay splayed on its side like a beached whale. It never failed to remind him of Huntsville, the city where the von Braun team had built the giant booster. When he'd first come to work for the agency, he'd spent a year as an engineering intern in the Rocket City. He'd enjoyed the work with the researchers and engineers of Marshall Space Flight Center. Most of the Germans who'd built the big boosters for
Apollo
had retired by then but he'd met the daughter of one of them, a vivacious, gregarious young woman named Katrina Suttner. She was a fellow engineering intern in the Propulsion Lab and he'd fallen hard for her, as hard as he ever had imagined that he could. He had doggedly pursued her, wore her down with long phone calls filled with his longing. He went after her as if he were on a campaign, every waking moment dedicated to the question of how to win her. For six glorious months he used logic on her, debated with her the relative merits of being single versus marrying someone such as himself. He was going somewhere in NASA, he'd told her. So was she. Together, they could change the agency and the world. When he'd asked her to marry him, to his astonishment and utter joy she'd said yes. Then she shared with him her greatest secret, what the late Wernher von Braun had arranged for her when she was a child. It was the happiest time in his life and he'd dedicated himself anew to NASA, to make everything she'd wanted come true for both of them. Sometimes, he would just wake up grinning. Every love song that was played on the radio seemed to be for him and Kate. He couldn't get enough of her, ever. Then all his hopes and dreams of romance came crashing down. Someone else had taken his place, an arrogant man named Jack Medaris.

Bonner found himself angrily gritting his teeth. He turned away from the old rocket and the old memories. He left his office, the proud and tough director of JSC, to bitterly watch the last launch of
Columbia
from Shuttle Mission Control.

AUTOMATIC LAUNCH SEQUENCE