Silver Tower

CHAPTER 5

"Lift off. We have lift-off of the Space Shuttle Challenger, STS Mission 51-L. It has cleared the tower." The Challenger's pilot ran his fingers down the Space Shuttle Main Engine, the SSME status readouts on his computer monitor. "All main engines look good… "

The young woman beside him acknowledged with a nod. No NASA simulator could ever fully prepare a person for the feeling of a space shuttle at lift-off. Noise. Incredible, earsplitting, thundering noise. Vibration enough to feel intestines shake…

As the stowed service arm and gantry slid from view out the forward windscreens, Ann Page could even see a few seagulls scurry from the fiery behemoth as it lifted upward. The sight of the petrified sea gulls made her smile despite the adrenaline coursing through her, tightening her muscles, constricting her throat.

"Instituting roll maneuver… roll maneuver complete, Challenger, you look beautiful…"

On hearing the last report from Ground Control, Ann reached up through the gradually building "g"-forces to the upper left of her left forward instrument panel and flicked the ADI attitude switch to LVLH. "ADI attitude switch to local vertical, local horizontal," she announced over interphone. Her pilot in the right seat nodded and did the same on his panel. "Thank you, Dr. Page," the pilot said over interphone, and suddenly the pilot looked young — very young. Like a guy she had known in high school.

Ann watched the mach meter on her main instrument panel while at the same time checking her number-one cathode ray tube computer monitor and panel C2, the computer control panel and manual main engine controls. The engine control sequence for launch and ascent was controlled by computer, but she was obliged to be ready for any malfunction right up to complete engine failure. If that happened, it would be up to her and her pilot to control the engines manually and set up her shuttle for an RTLS-Return to Launch Site abort. As she watched her instruments she kept in mind her training — think "abort, abort" until five minutes into the flight, after that think "orbit, orbit. "

Forty seconds after takeoff the shuttle exceeded the speed of sound, and Ann saw the main engines throttle back automatically to sixty-five percent. "Control, this is Challenger. Main engines at sixty-five percent. Confirm."

"Challenger, we confirm SSMEs at six-five percent, right on the mark. "

They were approaching a critical phase of flight when all aerodynamic forces affecting the shuttle — thrust, drag, gravity, and lift — were exerting equal pressure on the ship all at once. It was "max Q. " The main engines were throttled back to avoid tearing the shuttle apart as it reached, then exceeded max Q. The shuttle's computers would control the delicate transition as the huge craft sliced its way skyward.

A few moments later Ann could see the pilot give a sigh of relief as the main engines began to throttle up under strict computer control. "Control, this is Challenger. Max Q. Main engines moving to one hundred percent. "

"Copy that, Challenger. Max Q. Max Q. Max Q…"

A blinding flash of light, a sensation of warmth, a feeling of weightlessness. "Max Q., max Q."

Ann was suddenly awake, waves of pain lancing through her abdomen. The rumpled sheets felt like damp mummy's shrouds, strangling her. She fought back the pain and kicked the sheets free. "A damned nightmare," she said half-aloud, her breath coming in gasps. After months of briefings, simulators, studying, she had finally had a Challenger nightmare.

Exhausted, drained, she rolled across the bed and glanced at her watch on the nightstand. Two A.M. That made the eighth time in five hours she had been forced awake by butterflies invading her stomach and her dreams. Butterflies? Those things were dive-bombers, nuclear explosions, earthquakes. Forget it, sleep was impossible.

They had warned her about Challenger nightmares, everyone from mission commanders to local food-service people — nearly everyone even remotely involved with the rejuvenated space shuttle program seemed to get one. But she figured it was even worse for her… a civilian mission specialist with very little flight-deck training. Well, even though she had two hours until her alarm would go off, she crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. Trying to sleep would only prolong the punishment.

Feeling as drained as if she had run a marathon, Ann stripped off her nightshirt and panties and stood in front of the mirror in the glare of the bathroom's single light bulb. Her doomed attempts to wrestle a few hours sleep had left her, she noted, with light brown circles under her dark green eyes… "Too bad they don't wear helmets in space any more, at least the visor would hide this," she told the unappetizing mirror image. In fact, little she saw in a mirror ever pleased her. People said she was always her worst critic, but still… She frowned at the too-round green eyes, the straight auburn hair, the unremarkable breasts, the too-skinny legs… although the ankles were good. (But great ankles never got a girl a date.) All right, she wasn't bad, but nothing to write home about either. A seven. Maybe a seven and a half…?

Besides, a body was not something to show off — it had always been something to work on, to operate. She had exercised hard all through high school and college, not because it was the thing to do but because she wanted to excel at one thing — running. She had trained her body to perform well in track and field events, not to win beauty contests. She even had a few trophies on display at her parents' house. The results of her efforts were a healthy if less than spectacular body, a daily running habit — and dates too few and far between. Who was it who said you couldn't be too thin or too rich? Half-right, whoever it was…

She unwrapped clear plastic from a drinking glass, filled it with lukewarm tap water and took a sip. She could feel the liquid go down, then seem to solidify in an acid lump in her throat. Wouldn't go down and it wouldn't come up. Great way to start the day. Strange, she hadn't thought about high school or college or her social life in months. Even the shuttle pilot who'd popped into her dream had been a long-forgotten high school boyfriend. On a day like today she'd better be thinking of something else.

She took her time after her shower, drying herself and combing her long red hair, and still found herself with an hour to go before her planned wake-up time — two whole hours before her taxi was due. She dressed in thin cotton long underwear, cotton gym socks, and her powder blue NASA flight suit. She put up her hair in her trademark ponytail, redid it twice to kill time. It didn't help. Still an hour and forty minutes until the taxi was to arrive. Nothing on TV at three in the morning.

Once again her stomach started to gnaw at her… To hell with waiting for the taxi. She slipped on her black flying boots, left the room key on the bed, turned out the lights and closed the door behind her.

In the lobby of the Vandenburg Air Force Base Visiting Officers Quarters, she had to cough twice to get the clerk's attention. "Can you call the base taxi and get me a ride to the Shuttle Flight Center?"

The clerk stared at her shuttle crewmember flight suit and did a double take — even with one-a-month shuttle launches from Vandenburg, a shuttle crewperson was an unusual sight. "Transportation is swamped on a launch day," the clerk said. "The Shuttle Flight Center will pick you up—"

"At four A.M. I want… I have to go out there now."

The clerk caught the hesitation in Ann's voice, and her expression changed from bored to irritated. "I'll check."

As the clerk dialed a desk phone Ann wandered through the lobby and over to a wide, floor-to-ceiling window facing the Pacific Ocean. Washed clean by the night air and lingering Santa Ana winds, the predawn sky glistened with hundreds of stars. A tiny sliver of moon was about to dip a horn into the cold water, and the big bright planet Jupiter sparkled brilliantly. "Miss?" The clerk had to raise her voice to get Ann's attention. "Transportation says they can't get out earlier than four-thirty."

"Never mind," Ann said, heading for the door. "I'll walk."

"Walk? To the Shuttle Center? That's ten miles." But Ann was already out the door…

Ten blocks later she had left the main base behind. Ahead was miles and miles of emptiness — abandoned thirty-year-old wooden barracks, parking lots, crumbling buildings and athletic fields giving way to occasional sand dunes and grassy meadows.

As the bright glow of civilization behind her melted away, the feeling was electric, and she found her pace quickening. The ocean breeze was like an amphetamine. To the west the stars appeared so bright and near they seemed to cast a reflection off the gentle ocean waves, To the east the first faint outlines of the San Rafael Mountains could just barely be made out.

She found herself now in a gentle, easy jog… the butterflies, the nightmare, even the grouchy desk clerk, all seemed part of some happy conspiracy to make her experience this rush, this mysterious communion with earth and sky. Her boots crunched on hard sand, and her cheeks stung from the cold breeze as she stepped up her pace, the chill air seeming to flow into her veins and through her whole body.

This was her place, all right. Free. Open. The thought of being cooped up, strapped in, locked in place seemed scary, repugnant.

She had reached the top of the small rise, and abruptly found herself a few hundred yards from a tall fence illuminated every fifty yards by powerful searchlights. A concrete guard shack blocked the road in front of her. Air force security guards with rifles and dogs patrolled the fence; the dogs were barking, straining against their leashes, their supersensitive noses picking up the intruder.

Three miles beyond the twelve-foot-high fence stood a massive structure, brilliantly illuminated and clearly visible in spite of its distance. It looked like a skyscraper sitting in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred yards from the building was a squat, ungainly shape dwarfed by the skyscraper, surrounded by open-skeleton towers on two sides and also illuminated by large banks of super-powered spotlights. She was looking at the ultimate, the rebuilt space shuttle Enterprise. And the skyscraper-like building to the right of it — the one she had first seen when she had come over the rise — was the new Vandenburg Vehicle Assembly Building. There was movement of the men near the front gate and the concrete guard shack but it didn't register in her mind. Her attention was all on the ungainly, squat machine sitting on top of a tall concrete pedestal in the distance.

From a distance it looked so small. She had seen many shuttles, of course. She had been in Enterprise numerous times on dry-run rehearsals, emergency egress training, orientation walkarounds. From up close at the shuttle's base or on the access tower the thing looked huge. She had never felt confined or claustrophobic around the shuttle — until now. From this vantage point it looked like a toy model.

And she was going to strap herself in that toy and let someone ignite four million pounds of propellants and rocket fuel under her, blasting her at twenty-five times the speed of sound hundreds of miles into the sky. Was she crazy?

Even crazier was that she had had to work to get aboard that thing. She had to apply, be interviewed, beg, plead, cajole just to be considered. After that there had been months of waiting, then six months of training, study, simulators, tests, exercises, presentations — all so she could live hundreds of miles above the earth's surface, breathing recirculated air, eating irradiated food, drinking chemically produced water and coping with microgravity.

She was so caught up in conflicting emotions that she didn't notice the air force security police jeep drive up alongside her. It was the heavy breathing of a huge Doberman pinscher that pulled her back. "This is a restricted area," one patrolman said as he approached, shining a flashlight into Ann's face, his M-16 automatic rifle at port arms. "Identification. Now."

She absently reached into a right thigh flight-suit pocket to retrieve her ID card. It wasn't until she had unzipped that the guard recognized her. "Dr. Page?" He took the ID card from her, scanned it, handed it back. "Saw your picture in the paper, You're going on this morning's flight…"

"Yes, right," she said, hoping she sounded more official than she felt.

The guard handed the dog to an airman beside him, looped the rifle back onto his right shoulder. "You shouldn't be out here alone." He stopped and looked at her. "Everything okay?"

"Yes. I was just a little impatient to get to the pad so I decided to walk…"

"From the main base?"

"I… I ended up jogging. It felt good, peaceful."

"Yeah, I guess it would," he said. "I'd probably do something like that if I was going to ride that candle… I'd want to take one last look at ol' Mother Earth before leavin'… Well, I'll have to take you to the Shuttle Flight Center, Dr. Page. You can't be walking around out here by yourself. I'm surprised someone didn't pick you up when you left the main base."

She scarcely heard him, had withdrawn into her thoughts again. What was it that was bothering her? Was it fear of death? She had never confronted death before. Even in shuttle training, even through all the briefings and classes, she had never thought about dying. Besides, that was a no-no, everybody knew that.

She let herself be led to the jeep, rode with the security guard commander, nodding absently at his comments.

No, damn it, she wasn't afraid to die. She knew it was possible, knew it could happen any moment without any warning. But, to coin a cliché, it went with the territory, and it was a territory she badly wanted.

As her attention drifted back to the security guard, she heard him saying he'd always wanted to go up on the shuttle but didn't have any specialized degree beyond a B.S. Besides he was only an enlisted man… "All you need is a technical degree and you can be any rank. Doesn't matter. Hey, I don't have any rank. I'm a civilian. They need technical degrees and volunteers willing to dedicate themselves to the program. Back in the seventies and eighties they wanted experienced flyers and senior officers. Now, they need crewmembers for a whole range of jobs… "

Ann realized she sounded like a NASA recruiter. Was she really as enthusiastic as she sounded? Was it really so simple? Right now she needed to believe that this flight into space was at once routine and a chance of a lifetime. That's the only way she'd get through this thing.

As the jeep pulled up in front of a low steel-and-concrete building, the Vandenburg Shuttle Flight Center, she took a final look overhead. The ebony sky was brightening to azure blue, closing off the vastness that would soon enclose her.