Powersat (The Grand Tour) (36 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Powersat (The Grand Tour)
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D
an’s foul mood only worsened as he flew the Staggerwing back to Matagorda. He tried to forget about Jane and the mess his personal life was in. Yeah, he told himself as he banked the biplane around a massive thunderhead that was building up above the Texas plain. Forget about her. That’s easy. Like forgetting about breathing. Think about business, he commanded himself. Get your mind off Jane and Scanwell. Stop thinking about them together.
All right, concentrate on business. What if something goes wrong with the satellite? You’ll have every VIP you could coax down to Matagorda standing there watching.
What if something goes wrong? You’ll be laughed out of business, that’s what. Like that old Vanguard rocket, back in the beginning of the space age. Everybody in the world watching and it blows up four feet above the launch stand.
So what can I do about it? Dan asked himself. We push the button and the powersat doesn’t turn on. Some glitch. Something goes wrong. The Staggerwing bounced through a layer of turbulence as he began his descent toward the airstrip at Matagorda. I ought to have the spaceplane ready to go, Dan realized. Have the bird on the pad with Adair and a maintenance crew ready to take off at a moment’s notice. That’s what the spaceplane’s for, after all. Quick reaction. Immediate access to orbit.
As he cranked down the biplane’s landing gear and lined up on the airstrip Dan made up his mind. Put the spaceplane on the pad, have her ready to go if an emergency comes up. That means the launch crew has to come in to work today and the rest of the weekend, too. Garrison’s comptroller won’t like that.
The plane’s wheels touched the concrete with a screech and twin puffs of rubber. Dan let it roll to the end of the strip, thinking, If we have the spaceplane ready to go, even if there’s a glitch the news media will have a launch to photograph. So we’ll spend a little more of Garrison’s money, so what.
It was nearly noon by the time he pushed through the double doors of the newly painted control center building. Standing in the midst of the quietly tense technicians, Lynn Van Buren yanked off her headset when she saw Dan coming up the aisle between the consoles toward her.
“Glad you could make it,” she said, a grin dimpling her cheeks. “We were about to start her up without you.”
“I was unavoidably detained,” Dan muttered.
Eying him up and down, she said, “My god, chief, your clothes look as if you’ve slept in them.”
Dan broke into a wolfish grin. “That, I did
not
do.”
“Lucky girl.”
“Are we investigating my sex life or getting the powersat on the air?” he demanded, trying to sound severe.
“Everything’s up and running, chief. Everybody’s in place. Even Mr. al-Bashir dropped in.” She pointed to the Tunisian, who was sitting at one of the spare consoles, a headset clamped over his dark hair. Dan felt his face tighten into a frown. Al-Bashir’s sticking his nose into every damned thing, he grumbled silently. Then he thought, He’s your conduit to the money; you’ll just have to put up with him.
Everything seemed to be humming along efficiently, Dan saw. The technicians were bent over their tasks at their consoles, display screens flickering with images and data.
He went to the console where al-Bashir was sitting and tapped him on the shoulder. Al-Bashir looked up, startled for a moment, then relaxed into a smile.
“This is exciting,” he said.
Nodding, Dan said, “It sure is.”
Something in al-Bashir’s eyes troubled Dan. There was more than excitement there, more than anticipation. The man’s eyes glowed as if this moment was going to be a personal triumph for him.
Dan heard himself warn, “Don’t touch any buttons.”
Al-Bashir chuckled politely. “Not to worry. Your Mrs. Van Buren has disconnected all the controls on this keyboard. I am a passive spectator, nothing more.”
But his eyes told Dan there was a lot more going on than that.
Excusing himself, Dan went back to where Van Buren was standing in the central aisle.
“I want the spaceplane on the pad, ready for launch. Now.”
“Now?” she gasped.
“Now. This afternoon. Get Gerry Adair and the maintenance geeks and tell them to hold themselves in readiness for an immediate launch.”
“But why? What’s—”
“Today is Saturday,” Dan said, jabbing a finger at her for emphasis. “Tomorrow’s the big turn-on in front of all the VIPs, right?”
Van Buren nodded, still confused by his insistence.
“If anything goes wrong with the test today, if anything screws up at the big ceremony tomorrow, I want a crew
ready to belt the hell out of here and get up there and fix the bird. Understand?”
Recognition finally dawned in Van Buren’s eyes. “Oh. I see. But everything’s been going so well—”
“Murphy’s Law, Lynn. If anything goes wrong I want us to be able to fix it. Pronto.”
“For what it’s worth, chief, I don’t think it’s going to be necessary.”
“Do it anyway.”
“It’ll be so damned expensive.”
“Do it!” Dan snapped. “To hell with the money. I want to be ready for any emergency.” Then he let a hint of a smile bend his lips slightly. “Besides, it’ll give the camera crews some sexy footage, with the spaceplane sitting up there ready to go at an instant’s notice.”
“Okay,” she said reluctantly. “We’ll have to get some LOX and hydrogen here, PDQ. They’ll charge premium rates, you know.”
“Let’em,” Dan said. “It’s Garrison’s money.”
Van Buren went to the central console and picked up its phone. After a few minutes she returned to where Dan was standing, arms folded across his chest.
“Okay. Adair and the crew are entitled to overtime pay, and flight pay, too, if they have to go up.”
Dan grunted.
“Strictly business, chief,” Van Buren said, fixing the headset over her mouse-brown hair. “Strictly business.”
They went through the final checkout swiftly. One by one, the technicians reported that the subsystems they were monitoring were set to go. It’s a simple machine, Dan told himself as the technicians went through their checklists. No moving parts, practically. But it’s got a lot of pieces to it. A lot that can go wrong.
The last item on the checklist was the receiving antenna station. One hand pressing the earphone to the side of her head, Van Buren called White Sands. “Rectenna farm ready and waiting,” she announced.
Dan wet his lips, then said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
The head engineer gestured to the master console. No one was sitting at it.
“I thought you’d like to press the button yourself, chief,” she said.
Dan hesitated, then shook his head. “No, Lynn. That’s your job. I won’t deprive you of it.”
Her brows hiked up. “You certain?”
“The pleasure is all yours,” Dan said, surprised at the superstitious dread that kept his hands jammed in his trousers pockets.
Van Buren wasn’t superstititous. “Okay then.” She raised her voice so that everyone in the crowded, tense room could hear her. “On my mark, five seconds and counting. Mark!”
Dan knew that the team at White Sands heard her, too.
“Three … two … one.” Van Buren leaned ostentatiously on the red button that activated the satellite.
“Section one is go,” sang out one of the techs.
“Section two, full output.”
“Section three okay.”
One by one the fifty component solar panels began converting sunlight into electricity.
“Inverters powering up.”
“Magnetron one, on.”
“Magnetron two …”
The magnetrons converted the electricity into microwave energy.
“Antenna powering up.”
The antenna was a compartmented metal box nearly a mile long that focused the microwave power and beamed it toward Earth.
Suddenly Dan realized he didn’t remember if the checklist included making certain that the antenna was pointed correctly at the rectenna farm. It has to be, he told himself. They use a laser beam as a guide. If it strays out of the rectenna field the magnetrons turn off automatically. Yet he couldn’t recall if he’d heard anyone check out the beam’s aim.
Van Buren gave a sudden whoop. “White Sands is receiving power!”
Dan raced her to the console that displayed the data White Sands was transmitting. Leaning over the seated technician’s back they saw the power curve ramp up almost exactly along the predicted curve. Five hundred megawatts. A thousand. Dan’s insides were churning. He could feel his heart thumping so hard it was threatening to break through his ribs. Two gigawatts. Four. Six.
“Ten gigawatts!” Van Buren hollered at the top of her lungs. Everyone roared. Dan grabbed his chief engineer and danced in the aisle between consoles with her. Technicians threw their headsets in the air.
“Break out the champagne!” somebody yelled.
Dan waved his arms and shouted as loudly as he could, “No celebrating until she’s run for thirty minutes! Then we’ll shut her down and head for Hangar A. That’s where the champagne’s stashed.”
More quietly, he said to Van Buren, “And I want the bird on the pad, ready to go.”
“You won’t need it,” she said confidently.
“I hope you’re right,” said Dan. “But get her set on the launchpad, anyway.”
Then he noticed that al-Bashir had his cell phone pressed against his ear, jabbering away over the noise of the impromptu celebration.
I
t was just after three A.M. when the van carrying Nikolayev, Williamson, and Bouchachi stopped at the base of the gantry tower. The three men clambered down stiffly from the van onto the steel flooring, each of them encased in a cumbersome, dull orange spacesuit, the visors of their fishbowl helmets open. A dozen technicians in quilted coats and
leather hats with earflaps bustled around them. The big Proton rocket loomed above them all, illuminated glaringly by huge spotlights, icy white vapor wafting from its upper stage.
“The world’s most reliable rocket,” Nikolayev said cheerfully. “Safer than driving automobile.”
Williamson scowled at the Russian and his faked joviality. “Let’s get on with it, then,” he said, heading for the open cage of the elevator.
Bouchachi, shivering from the cold even inside the thick spacesuit, clumped glumly after him.
As the elevator creaked and groaned slowly upward, Nikolayev asked, “You know of red hands disease?”
Bouchachi’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about?”
Nikolayev explained that in the old days of the Soviet Union, guest cosmonauts from communist nations were allowed to ride up to the Salyut space stations for short visits. When a Hungarian cosmonaut returned to the ground after a week in orbit, the medics were disturbed to find that his hands had turned red. They feared some strange space malady and wondered what to do about it.
“Finally, one of doctors asks Hungarian about his red hands,” Nikolayev went on. “Hungarian says, ‘Of course I have red hands. I am guest on Russian space station. Every time I went to touch anything in space station one of Russians slapped my hands.’”
Nikolayev laughed heartily, while Bouchachi managed a polite smile and Williamson frowned.
“I understand,” Bouchachi said as the elevator stopped at the uppermost level. “We are guests aboard your spacecraft. We are not to touch anything.”
“Or you get red hands,” Nikolayev warned, still laughing.
There were six more technicians waiting for them at the top level. The wind was howling up there, cutting icily. The sky was dark and full of stars. Williamson turned a full circle on the steel platform, searching for one particular star that should be bright and steady low on the horizon. The powersat. He couldn’t see it. Of course not, he realized. It’s on the other side of the world.
Two of the technicians touched his shoulders and nudged him toward the hatch of the Soyuz TMA spacecraft. Williamson had practiced this a hundred times in the simulators, but somehow this time was different. He stubbed his booted foot on the lip of the hatch and would have toppled to his knees if the technicians hadn’t been there to hold him up. They literally lifted him off his feet and shoved him through the hatch, boots first.
Inside, the spacecraft was as cramped as a sardine tin. Grumbling inwardly about how stiff his spacesuit felt, Williamson clambered over two of the couches that had been shoehorned in among all the equipment and controls, then slid awkwardly into the farthermost couch, banging his helmeted head on a protruding electronics box as he leaned back.
Nikolayev slipped in next to him, so close that their shoulders pressed against each other. “Is easier once we reach orbit,” the Russian said confidently. “In zero gravity this coffin gets bigger. You’ll see.”
Bouchachi clambered in hesitantly. He was still settling into his couch when the technicians closed the hatch and sealed it.
We’re in for it now, Williamson thought. No way out.
Nikolayev adjusted the pin microphone inside his helmet and began chattering with the controllers in Russian. After several minutes he said, “Down visors.” He slid the visor of his helmet down and it sealed with a click. Williamson and Bouchachi did the same.
“Now we wait,” Nikolayev said, his voice muffled by the closed helmets. His cheerful demeanor was gone. He looked totally serious to Williamson.
Got to piss, Williamson realized. There was a relief tube in the suit, but he wasn’t certain he was connected to it properly. The dour technicians, mostly Asians, who had helped them get into the spacesuits had paid little attention to the plumbing. Would it short out some electrical circuits if it leaks? Williamson wondered. He decided not to try it. I’ll wait. I can hold it.
He heard thumps and grinding noises. Pumps starting up?
he wondered. Or something gone wrong. The tight, hot little metal sarcophagus started vibrating like a tuning fork.
“Ten more minutes,” Nikolayev said.
More bangs and groans. Metal expanding, Williamson told himself. Or contracting. He thought he heard the wind keening outside. A storm coming up?
“Five minutes,” said the Russian. “Everything automatic from here on.”
The big rocket was coming to life. Pumps gurgled, pipes shuddered, the lights on the instrument board six inches in front of their faces blinked several times, then steadied. Most of them were green, Williamson saw. A display screen lit up with a complex of grid lines and colored curves.
Nikolayev adjusted a dial below the display screen, but it didn’t seem to have any affect on the image.
Williamson and Bouchachi had radios in their suits, earphones built into their helmets. But Nikolayev had not bothered to patch them in to the circuit he was listening to.
The cosmonaut said something in rapid, fluent Russian. Then he broke into a big grin and nodded inside his transparent bubble of a helmet. “Da, da! Dah sveedahnyah!”
Once they lifted off, Williamson knew, there would be no more communications with Baikonur.
Something exploded. For a flash of an instant Williamson was certain that the rocket had blown up and they were about to be killed. Then an enormous invisible hand squeezed down on his chest so hard he could barely breathe. His arms were too heavy to lift off the seat rests. Pain and terror flaring through him, he managed to turn his head toward Nikolayev. The Russian’s face looked as if someone were flattening it out with an invisible pressing iron.
The noise and vibration were terrifying. Williamson couldn’t see Bouchachi, on the other side of the Russian. The pressure got worse and all of a sudden Williamson’s bladder let go. He heard a moan and wondered if it was his own tortured voice or Bouchachi’s.
And then it stopped.
It all just suddenly stopped. No noise, no vibration, no
pressure. Williamson saw his arms floating up off the seat rests as if they had a will of their own. He turned his head to look at Nikolayev and a surge of dizziness made his eyes water. He felt as if he were going to upchuck.
“Zero gravity,” said Nikolayev happily. “In forty-five minutes we make rendezvous with transfer rocket.”
Williamson wondered if he could survive forty-five minutes without heaving up his guts into the fishbowl helmet.

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