The Getaway Special

9

Judy tugged hard on the hand controller, trying to right the capsule before it started tumbling. For a moment the attitude jets strained against whatever force had pushed them to the side, but just as the jets seemed about to win, the capsule gave another lurch and tilted the other way. Judy felt them go completely over, the seat harness digging into her shoulders and the capsule shuddering ominously as they plowed headfirst into the atmosphere.

That should have been impossible. They were weighted all wrong for that attitude. The center of gravity was down below the seats in order to keep them aimed bottom-first in their descent. To turn them the other way, something had to be trailing away behind them like the tail of a kite, and as soon as Judy realized that, she knew what it was. The retro rocket. It hadn’t jettisoned automatically after firing, and since all her experience had been with the reusable shuttle, she hadn’t done it manually, either. Now it was back there on the heat shield, disrupting the air flow and holding them at the wrong attitude.

Judy reached forward to the violently pitching control panel and flipped the manual jettison switch, but nothing happened. The electrical connection to the explosive bolts had already burned through. Unfortunately the bolts themselves hadn’t gotten hot enough to blow, or their problem would have been solved.

They only had a few seconds in their headfirst attitude before the capsule would burn up. Judy shoved the controller hard to the side and the capsule pitched over, but with the retro rocket trailing behind, it wouldn’t go all the way. She rolled the capsule to the other side, the motion throwing her hard against Allen, who held the getaway special canister tight to his body to keep it from flying loose and bouncing around inside the capsule. Judy had to roll the descent module back and forth twice more before the straps or fuel lines or whatever was holding the engine on gave way and the capsule once again flipped around to ride blunt end first.

Another piece of flaming debris swept past the window, but this time instead of pitching to the side, the capsule steadied out and fell smoothly through the rest of its descent.

The gee force grew stronger as they dropped into thicker air. It didn’t feel at all like the gees the shuttle pulled on launch and descent; this felt far more personal, as if the universe had invented a brand new force just to torment Judy and Allen. Judy gritted her teeth and concentrated on not blacking out.

Terror helped immeasurably. Her heartbeat stayed up around 200 or so as she waited for the heat shield to burn through, and as she wondered how much damage those few moments of headfirst re-entry had done. The parachute was packed into a compartment in the nose of the capsule, and if that had gotten too hot—if it had melted in there, or if the release mechanism had warped enough to jam—then they were as good as dead.

She’d know in another couple of minutes, because they were coming out of the fireball now. The bright orange flames quit roaring past the window, giving way to blue sky. They were in the lower atmosphere. Judy rolled the capsule around so she could see the ground, but was startled to find only water below.

They’d missed. They were supposed to land somewhere in the United States , but somehow they’d missed the entire North American continent. Not only that, but Judy had no idea whether they’d overshot or undershot. She’d seen the ocean dozens of times from this vantage, but there was no way to tell whether this was the Pacific or the Atlantic .

Then the shoreline swept past and she laughed with relief. It was a lake! Probably Lake Michigan—no, there were snow-covered mountains to the east of it. That had to have been Salt Lake , then, in Utah .

The mountains rushed past below, giving way to high plains, then desert. Not good. The Air Force had no doubt tracked the fireball on the way down, and even though the descent module was invisible to radar now, they could calculate within a few dozen miles where it was going to land. In a forest or a city, Judy and Allen might have time to escape before anybody could get a helicopter out to capture them, but if they landed in the desert they might as well just switch the emergency beacon back on and wait to be picked up. Especially in this desert; Judy could see snowdrifts in the lee of whatever vegetation was down there. Even the most inept tracker in the world could follow them through snow.

The attitude jets wouldn’t alter their ground path enough to matter, and the only engine that could—the retro rocket—was a burned-up lump of metal falling on its own trajectory miles away. The only thing Judy could do to change their course would be to deploy the parachute early, and hope they had already slowed down enough that the shroud lines wouldn’t snap the moment the ’chute filled out. Assuming it opened at all.

Not yet, though. The gee force was easing off, but they were still braking, which meant they were still way above terminal velocity. Judy looked over at Allen, who was trying to say something to her, but the capsule was bouncing too much for her to read his lips and the interior was still in vacuum so his voice didn’t carry. That wasn’t good either; atmospheric pressure from outside could crumple the walls if there were any weak spots.

There should have been a valve to allow air to bleed inside, but if there was, then it had melted shut or been plugged by debris. All the same, they needed to equalize the pressure, so Judy did the only thing she could think of under the circumstances; she blew the hatch.

She’d trained for explosive decompression before, but never for the reverse. Even at their high altitude, air rushing to fill the vacuum slammed her sideways into Allen, then shoved him against the wall of the capsule. Sound returned, the sound of wind shrieking through the open hatch frame, tugging at the canister in Allen’s lap and flapping the loose ends of their harnesses against their heads and shoulders.

Nuts to this, Judy thought, reaching out to the parachute switch and flipping the toggle. She heard the bang this time, and a moment later a jolt as the drogue ’chute streamed away, filled out, and pulled the main ’chute after it.

The main parachute opened with a bone-jarring snap. The capsule had been traveling nearly parallel to the ground; there was a moment of freefall as it swung around like a pendulum to hang downward instead, and a sickening few seconds of oscillation before Judy used the attitude jets to stop their swing. The jet made a loud hiss in the air, but when it cut off, the capsule was nearly silent.

Is… is it always like that? Allen asked. She still had to read his lips. Even though there was air around them again, his voice didn’t make it through his helmet.

She tried not to let her laugh become hysterical. “Are you kidding?” she replied when she could breathe again. “I was sure the whole way down that Gerry was telling the truth.”

She loosened her harness and leaned over to look out the hatch. The ground was still a couple miles below them. Judy could see another lake to the west, with some green that might have been scrub pine on the hills around it, but when she looked straight down she saw a whole lot of badlands and not much else. Snow covered the low ground and drifted in the lee of anything tall enough to provide a windbreak, but there was plenty of reddish-brown dirt sticking through.

“Well, we don’t have to worry about hitting anybody,” she said, straightening up and tightening the straps again.

They swayed slightly as the capsule descended through the different layers of air over the high desert. The parachute was oversized, designed to bring them in slowly so they would survive a landing on solid ground. Judy kept reminding herself that the Russians had done it that way for years, but as the horizon crept upward into view outside, she thought for a moment she could see the face of her father in its outline, then when she blinked she saw her mother in the clouds.

My god, she thought, your life really does flash before your eyes.

Then the capsule slammed into the ground, tipped over backward, and rolled, clanging against rocks and kicking dirt and snow inside the hatch. Judy saw sky, then ground, then sky again, then a sagebrush jammed momentarily through the opening, then finally, after about three complete revolutions, the capsule came to rest with the hatch pointing up into the air.

“You okay?” Judy asked. She dangled sideways, only her harness keeping her from falling on Allen.

I think so, he replied, his helmet still muffling his voice.

Judy realized it wasn’t just her harness that was squeezing her. Atmospheric pressure was pressing her spacesuit tight against her body as well. She shut off her oxygen flow and opened the equalization valve, then reached up to her helmet, twisted it sideways, and slid it off. She took a cautious sniff. The air was cold, and stank of scorched metal, carbon composites, and sagebrush. After days of canned air on board the shuttle, it smelled wonderful.

Allen was lying on his side on what was now the floor. He had to struggle to get his hands free so he could pop his own helmet off, but even then he was having trouble. Judy loosened her straps so she could help him, and together they managed to lift the bubble from his head.

“This reminds me of a car wreck I had once,” he said.

“That’s encouraging,” she muttered. She released her harness completely, bracing herself against the control panel, then climbed up on the seat backs and stuck her head and shoulders outside, wiggling sideways to get the life-support backpack past the hatch frame. It had been easier in zero-gee.

The capsule had come to rest on a sagebrush-covered hillside. The ground between plants—and there was a lot of open space—was reddish dirt, scattered with rocks and covered spottily with snow.

“It looks like we went to Mars after all,” she said.

“What?”

“Never mind.”

She hoisted herself out and slid down around the capsule’s curved side to stand in the dirt. The snow immediately around the capsule had melted, and little puffs of steam still rose from beneath the hot metal to blow away immediately in the breeze. Judy was glad for the snow; if they’d landed in the summer they might have started a fire. As it was, the capsule had gotten plenty hot. Soot streaked its sides, and the rivet heads holding it together had actually begun to melt. It was already cooling, though, with the air blowing onto it from the snowbanks.

The parachute had tangled in the sagebrush. Good thing it had; there was enough wind for it to drag the capsule for miles if it hadn’t. But now it was a huge orange-and-white target for anyone flying over. That was no doubt the designers’ intent, but it was the last thing Judy wanted. She gathered it up while Allen tossed their helmets out through the hatch, then hoisted the getaway special canister up for her to take. The capsule teetered precariously when he stood up, so Judy wadded the ’chute between it and the ground to steady it, then took the canister from him and lowered it to the ground.

“Is this the valuable one?” she asked, “or did we go to all that trouble just to save the radio beacon?”

“I don’t know,” Allen said. He slid to the ground, then unscrewed the canister’s top. Judy looked over his shoulders and was relieved to see the same nest of wires and circuitry that she’d seen inside the shuttle when he’d had to fix it.

“We’ve got the right half,” Allen said.

“Good. I think. On the other hand, if we’re going to get caught, I’d just as soon they don’t find that.”

Allen said, “Let’s try not to get caught.” He looked at the blackened capsule. “I wonder if we can camouflage this thing.” He tried breaking off one of the sagebrush stems, but the gnarled wood refused to give, even when he twisted it round and round like an apple stem.

“Wait a second,” Judy said. “The parachute.” She pulled it back out from under the capsule and shook it out.

The orange and white stripes were three feet wide. She and Allen had to fold it in layers so only the white showed, but they had plenty of material to work with, and plenty of shroud lines to tie it down. When they had finished, the descent module was just a white lump in a vast red-and-white desert.

“Now what?” Allen said. He turned once around, scanning the horizon, but there was little more to see in the distance than at their feet. Sagebrush, rock, dirt, and snow went on in every direction. Presumably it did, anyway; the hillside they had landed on blocked their view to the north. At least Judy thought it was north; her direction sense was usually pretty good. If it was, then the sun was just a little west of south, so they still had a few hours of light. Not too many, though; the sun set early in the winter in Utah . Or had they gone all the way into Colorado ?

“Let’s climb up to the top and see if we can see any sign of civilization,” she said.