The Getaway Special

1

Another reason they had sent him was the small size of his experiment. Since the shuttles had begun carrying pay-loads both ways there wasn’t a whole lot of room for experiments, which meant that most scientists had to wait for a dedicated Spacelab mission before they could go up, but Allen had promised to fit everything he needed into a pair of getaway special canisters—small cylinders designed for schoolkids’ experiments and the like—if NASA would send him on the next available flight. After all the bad publicity they’d gotten for nationalizing the space station and carrying the laser and particle beam weapons into orbit, they’d been glad to do it. It would give the press something else to talk about for a while.

They had even stretched the rules a little in their effort to launch a scientific mission. Most getaway specials were allowed only a simple on/off switch, or at most two switches, but they had allowed Allen to plug a notebook computer into the control line for his. It had seemed like a reasonable request at the time. After all, he would be there to run it himself; none of the crewmembers needed to fool with it.

Officially his was a “Spacetime Anomaly Detection and Transfer Application Experiment.” One of the two canisters was simply a high-powered radio transceiver, but the other was a mystery. It contained a bank of plasma batteries with enough combined power to run the entire shuttle for a month, plus enough circuitry to build a supercomputer, all wired together on a hobbyist’s integrated circuit board three layers deep. That in turn was connected to a spherically radiating antenna mounted on top of the canister. Rumor had it that someone in the vast structure of NASA’s bureaucracy knew what it was supposed to do, but no one admitted to being that person. Still, someone in authority had vouched for it, and it apparently held nothing that could interfere with the shuttle’s operating systems, so they let it on board. It was Allen’s problem if it didn’t work.

So on the second day of the flight, as Mission Specialist Carl Reinhardt finished inspecting the last of the return packages in the cargo bay with the camera in the remote manipulator arm, he said to Allen, “Why don’t you go ahead and warm up your experiment? I’m about done here, and you’re next on the agenda.”

Discovery, like all the shuttles, had ten windows; six wrapping all the way around the flight controls in front, two facing back into the cargo bay, and two more overhead when you were looking out the back. Allen was blocking the view out the overheads; he’d been watching over Judy’s shoulders while she used the aft reaction controls to edge the shuttle slowly away from the space station and into its normal flight attitude. He nodded to Carl and pushed himself over to the payload controls, a distance of only a few feet. In the cramped quarters of the shuttle’s flight deck nearly everything was within easy reach. It was possible— if you floated with your feet in between the pilot’s and copilot’s chairs and your head pointed toward the aft windows—to strand yourself without a handhold, but to manage it you had to be trying. Allen had put himself in (hat position once earlier in the flight, and he’d gotten the worst case of five-second agoraphobia that Judy had ever seen before she could rescue him. After that he kept a handhold within easy reach all the time.

Judy finished maneuvering the shuttle into its parking orbit and watched the shadows in the cargo bay for a few more seconds to make sure the shuttle was stable. She checked Carl’s progress as he latched down the manipulator arm, glanced upward through the overhead windows at the Earth, then turned to watch Allen.

Here, in her opinion, was where the action was on this flight. For years NASA had promoted the image of the shuttle as a space truck, and that’s what it had become, but for Judy the lure of space was in science, not industry. She wanted to explore, not drive a truck. But she was thirty years too late for Apollo, and by the looks of things at least thirty years too early for the planetary missions. If they happened at all. Driving a space truck that occasionally did science projects was the best she could hope for.

It hadn’t always been that way. For a while, when she’d first joined NASA, the future had looked as bright as ever. The collapse of the Soviet Union had left the entire defense industry without a purpose, so it seemed only logical that its vast experience with rockets and supersonic aircraft and other high-tech gadgetry would be put to use in space. Logical to people like Judy, at least. But the military, unused to peace, kept right on preparing for war, and just as Allen’s group had predicted, they had soon enough found another enemy. Dozens of them, in fact. It sometimes felt as if the Pentagon had joined the Enemy of the Month Club. The Middle East seemed to have taken on Evil Empire status, but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Europe was chock-full of unstable countries and becoming more so by the moment as individual economies collapsed under the weight of the foundering Eurodollar. France was especially hostile at the moment; they had already blamed America for most of their cultural woes, so it was easy to lay blame at the same feet for their financial problems as well. The final straw had apparently come when the Premier’s daughter, after a vacation to San Francisco, had brought home a $250,000 credit card bill and when her father had asked what she had bought, she had answered, “Je ne sais… whatever.”

It had all been downhill from there. France had plenty of sympathizers, too. Never mind that most of Europe had been American allies through two world wars; the Russians had been allies before the Cold War, too. They’d been friendly again after the Berlin Wall came down, but that hadn’t even lasted long enough to finish building the space station. Now the only thing the French and the Russians were putting into orbit was laser weapons.

It seemed like the only country that hadn’t sided against the U.S. was China , but everyone knew you couldn’t trust the Chinese.

Judy thought the whole thing was ridiculous. Humanity had been given one final chance to get into space before they ran out of resources for good or bombed themselves back to the stone age, and they had blown it. She was one of the last generation who would get into space at all; she was willing to bet that after the shuttles wore out there would be no replacement for them. The military would keep a few unmanned boosters flying so they could keep sending up “defense” satellites, but that would be the end of it. And eventually, if INSANE was right, the world’s nuclear-equipped nations would use their arsenals on one another and pave the way for cockroaches to take over the planet.

So she planned to enjoy every minute of her time in space while she still could.

She was looking over Allen’s shoulder now. He had Velcroed his computer onto a corner of one of the interchangeable panels that had been installed for controlling yesterday’s satellite launches. Beside it was a simple toggle switch, which he flipped on. He watched a self-check routine on the computer’s display, then when it gave him the okay he pushed a function key labeled “Transmit/Time.” The computer gave a loud beep, a beep echoed over the ship-to-ground radio link, and the top line of the display began counting forward in seconds. Allen nodded and pressed another key, which reset the counter to zero, then he tapped a few more instructions into the keyboard. Judy saw a series of numbers flash on the display. They were in groups of three, but she could see no particular meaning to them.

“What are those numbers?” she asked.

“Coordinates,” Allen replied.

“Coordinates for what?”

Allen smiled and pushed the function key labeled “Jump.”

“Us,” he said.

The radio beeped again. Carl, who was still looking out the aft windows into the payload bay, shouted something like “Whaaa!” and leaped for the attitude controls.

Judy’s flinch launched her headfirst into the instrument panel in front of her. She swore and pushed herself over beside Carl. “What happened?”

He pointed through the overhead windows, but it took Judy a second to realize what he was pointing at, or rather what wasn’t where he was pointing. In normal flight the shuttle flew upside down over the Earth, making for an excellent view of the planet overhead, but now there were only stars where it should have been. She pushed off to the front windows and looked out and to either side, but the Earth wasn’t there either.

Allen said, “Don’t worry, it’s—”

“Not now,” Judy cut him off. First thing in an emergency: shut up the passengers so you can think. Now, what had happened? She had a suspicion: Allen’s experiment had blown up. It had to have. She pulled herself back to the aft windows to get a look down into the cargo bay where the getaway special canisters were attached, next to the forward bulkhead. She couldn’t see that close in, but there was no evidence of an explosion, nothing that could have jolted the shuttle enough to flip it over. Besides, she realized, nothing had. They would have felt the motion. The Earth had simply disappeared.

A long list of emergency procedures reeled through her mind. Fire control, blowout, toxic gasses, medical emergencies—none of them applied here. There was nothing in the book about the Earth disappearing. But there was always one standing order that never changed. In any emergency, communicate with the ground.

“Don’t use the jets,” she said to Carl; then, turning to the audio terminal, she flipped it to transmit and said, “Control, this is Discovery, do you copy?”

Allen cleared his throat and said, “I don’t think you’ll be able to raise them.”

Judy shot him a look that shut him up and called again. “Control, this is Discovery. We have a problem. Do you copy?”

After a couple of seconds she switched to another frequency and tried again, but still got no response. She was at the end of her checklist. What now?

Allen had been trying to say something all along. She turned around to face him and said, “All right. What did you do?”

“I—ah, I moved us a little bit. Don’t worry! It worked beautifully.”

“You moved us. How?”

“Hyperdrive.”