Time Bomb And Zahndry Others

Between a Rock and a High Place

"Ladies and gentlemen, shuttles one and two for United Flight 1103 are now ready for general boarding: Skyport service from Houston to Dallas-Ft. Worth, Los Angeles, and San Francisco."

Peter Whitney was ready; he'd been standing at the proper end of the waiting lounge for the past several minutes, as a matter of fact, eagerly awaiting the announcement. Picking up his carry-on bag, he stepped to the opening door, flashed his boarding pass for the attendant's inspection, and walked down the short tunnel to where the shuttle waited. The excitement within him seemed to increase with every step, a fact that embarrassed him a little—a twenty-eight-year-old computer specialist shouldn't be feeling like a kid on his first trip to Disney World, after all. But he refused to worry too much about it. Professional solemnity was still, for him, a recent acquisition, easily tucked out of the way.

The shuttle itself was unimpressive, of course: little more than a Boeing 727 with a heavily modified interior. Following the flight attendant's instructions he sat down in the front row, choosing the left-hand window seat. Pushing his bag into the compartment under his chair, he fastened his lap/shoulder belt and spent the next few minutes examining the ski lift-style bars connecting his pair of seats to the conveyors behind the grooves in floor and ceiling. He'd seen specs and models for the system back in St. Louis, but had never given up being amazed that it worked as well as it did in actual practice.

His seatmate turned out to be a smartly-suited businesswoman type who promptly pulled out her Wall Street Journal and buried herself in it. A bored executive who flew in Skyports every week, obviously, and her indifference helped dispel Whitney's last twinges of guilt at having taken the window seat.

Within a very few minutes the shuttle was loaded and ready. The door was closed, the tunnel withdrawn, and soon they were at the edge of the runway, awaiting permission to take off. Whitney kept an eye on his watch with some interest—Skyport logistics being what they were, a shuttle couldn't afford to be very late in getting off the ground. Even knowing that, he was impressed when the plane roared down the runway and into the sky only twelve seconds behind schedule.

They turned east, heading into the early-morning sun to meet the Skyport as it headed toward them from its New Orleans pickup. Whitney watched the city disappear behind them, and then shifted his gaze forward, wondering how far away something the size of a Skyport could be seen. Docking, he knew, would take place seventy to eighty miles out from Houston; assuming the shuttle was flying its normal four-ninety knots—five-sixty-odd miles an hour—meant an eight to nine minute trip. They'd covered seven of that already; surely they must be coming up on it by now. Unless...

With smooth abruptness, the horizon dropped below the level of his window, and Whitney knew he'd goofed. The Skyport was somewhere off to the shuttle's right, and the smaller craft was now circling around to get into docking position. Belatedly he realized he should have asked the flight attendant which was the scenic side when he boarded.

The passengers on the other side of the aisle were beginning to take an interest in the view out their windows, and Whitney craned his neck in an effort to see. Nothing but ground and sky were visible from where he sat; but even as he settled back in mild disappointment the shuttle leveled out and began to climb... and suddenly, ahead and above them, the Skyport loomed into view.

No film clip, scale model, or blueprint, Whitney realized in that moment, could ever fully prepare one for the sheer impact of a Skyport's presence. A giant flying wing, the size of seven football fields laid end to end, the Skyport looked like nothing else in aviation history—looked like nothing, in fact, that had any business being up in the air in the first place. The fact that it also flew more efficiently than anything else in the sky seemed almost like a footnote in comparison, though it was of course the economic justification for the six Skyports now in service and McDonnell Douglas's main argument in their ongoing sales campaign. Staying aloft for weeks or months at a time, the Skyports were designed for maximum efficiency at high altitudes and speeds, dispensing with the heavy landing gear, noise suppressors, and high-lift flaps required on normal jetliners. And with very little time spent on the ground amid contaminants like dust and insects, the Skyports had finally been able to take advantage of the well-known theories of laminar flow control, enabling the huge craft to fly with less than half the drag of planes with a fraction of their capacity. In Whitney's personal view, it was probably this incredible fuel efficiency that had finally convinced United and TWA to take a chance on the idea.

The shuttle was directly behind the Skyport now and closing swiftly. From his window Whitney could see five of the seven basically independent modules that made up the Skyport and, just barely, the two port engines of the sixth. That would be all right; since only the center module's engines fired during this part of the flight, docking one module in from the end was essentially equivalent in noise and turbulence to docking in the end section. Docking one module from center, on the other hand, was rumored to be a loud and rather unnerving experience. It was a theory he wasn't anxious to test.

A flash of sunlight off to the left caught his eye—the second Houston shuttle, making its approach toward the second-to-last module at the other end. He watched with interest as the distant plane nosed toward its docking bay, watched it until the port-side engines of his own shuttle's target module blocked it from sight. The silvery trailing edge of the Skyport was very near now, and the slight vibration that had been building almost imperceptibly began to increase at a noticeable rate. Whitney was just trying to estimate the vibrational amplitude and to recall the docking bay's dimensional tolerance when a sound like a muffled bass drum came from the fuselage skin a meter in front of him and the vibration abruptly stopped. The docking collar, clamping solidly around them. With the noise of the Skyport's engines still filling the cabin, Whitney's straining ears had no chance of picking up the nosewheel's descent into the docking bay; but he did distinctly hear the thump as the bay's forward clamp locked onto the nosewheel's tow bar. Only then, with the shuttle firmly and officially docked, did he realize he'd been holding his breath. He let it out with a wry smile, feeling more than ever like a kid on a ride Disney had never dreamed of.

Another soft thump and hiss signaled that the pressurized tunnel was in place. A cool breeze wafted through the shuttle as the outer door was opened—and suddenly Whitney and his seatmate were moving, their ski lift seats following the grooves in floor and ceiling as they were moved first into the aisle and then forward toward the exit. They turned left at the doorway, and Whitney caught just a glimpse of the shuttle's other seats in motion behind him. Then, with only the slightest jerk of not-quite-aligned grooves, they were out of the shuttle and into a flexible-walled corridor that looked for all the world like the inside of an accordion. The tunnel was short, leading to another airplane-type doorway. Straight ahead, stretching down a long corridor, Whitney could see a column of seats like his own, filled with passengers for the shuttle's trip back down to Houston. There didn't seem to be enough room beside the column for the emerging seats to pass by easily, but Whitney was given little time to wonder about it. Just beyond the doorway his seat took a ninety-degree turn to the right, and he found himself sidling alongside a wall toward what looked like a lounge. To his left he could see the rest of the shuttle's seats following like a disjointed snake. The airlines had balked at the ski lift system, he remembered, complaining that it was unnecessarily complicated and expensive. But the time the shuttle spent in the docking bay translated into fuel for its return flight, and the essence of that was money... and the ski lift system gave the shuttle a mere ten-minute turnaround.

It was indeed a sort of lounge the chairs were taking them into, a rectangular space done up with soft colors and a carpet designed to disguise the grooves in the floor. In the center was a large, four-sided computer display giving destinations and the corresponding modules in large letters. Whitney's seatmate retrieved her briefcase from under her chair and hopped off as the chair entered the room and began to sidle its way across the floor; glancing at the display, she strode out through one of the wide doorways in the far wall. Whitney obeyed the rules, himself, waiting until the seat had come to a complete stop before undoing his belt and standing up. He was in module six, the display informed him, and passengers for Los Angeles could sit anywhere in modules one, two, six, or seven. Since his boarding pass indicated he'd be disembarking from module six anyway, it made the most sense to just stay here, a decision most of the others also seemed to have reached. Picking up his carry-on, he joined the surge forward. A short corridor lined with lavatory doors lay ahead; passing through it, he entered— Instant disorientation.

The room before him was huge, and was more a combination theater-cafe-lounge than an airplane cabin. Directly in front of him was a section containing standard airline chairs, but arranged in patterns that varied from the traditional side-by-side to cozy circles around low tables. To either side were small cubicles partially isolated from the main floor by ceiling-length panels of translucent, gray-tinted plastic. Further on toward the front of the Skyport, partially separated from the lounge by more of the tinted plastic, was a section that was clearly a dining area, with tables of various sizes and shapes, about a third of them occupied despite the early hour. Beyond that, the last section seemed to be divided into three small movie/TV rooms.

It all seemed almost scandalously wasteful for a craft that, for all its size and majesty, still had to answer to the law of gravity; but even as Whitney walked in among the lounge chairs he realized the extravagance was largely illusory. Despite the varied seating, little floor space was actually wasted, and most of that would have been required for aisles, anyway. The smoked-plastic panels gave the illusion that the room was larger than it actually was, while at the same time adding a sense of coziness to all the open space; and the careful use of color disguised the fact that the room's ceiling wasn't much higher than that of a normal jetliner.

For a few minutes Whitney wandered more or less aimlessly, absorbing the feel of the place. A rumble from his stomach reminded him that he'd had nothing yet that morning except coffee, though, and he cut short his exploration in favor of breakfast. Sitting down at one of the empty tables, he scanned the menu card briefly and then pushed the call button in the table's center. Safety, he noted, had not been sacrificed to style; the table and chair were both fastened securely to the floor, and the metal buckle of a standard lap/shoulder belt poked diffidently at his ribs.

"Good morning, sir—may I help you?" a pleasant voice came from behind him. He turned as she came into view to his right: a short blonde, trim and athletic-looking in her flight attendant's uniform, pushing a steam cart before her. The cart surprised him a bit, but it was instantly obvious that true restaurant service for what could be as many as eight hundred passengers would be well-nigh impossible for the module's modest crew. Out of phase with the decor or not, precooked tray meals were the only way to serve such a crowd.

There were some illusions that even a Skyport couldn't handle.

"Yes. I'd like the eggs, sausage, and fruit meal—number two here," he told her, indicating it on the menu.

"Certainly." Opening a side door on her cart, she withdrew a steaming tray and placed it before him. The aroma rising with the steam made his stomach rumble again. "Coffee?" she added.

"Please. By the way, is there anything like a guided tour of the Skyport available? Upstairs, too, I mean?"

Her forehead wrinkled a bit as she picked up a mug and began to fill it. "The flight deck? I'm afraid not—FAA regulations forbid passengers up there."

"Oh. No exceptions, huh?"

"None that I know of." She set the mug down and placed a small cup of cream beside it. "Any special reason you'd like to go up there, or are you just curious?"

"Both, actually. I work for McDonnell Douglas, the company that built this plane. I've been doing computer simulations for them, and now they're transferring me to L.A. to do some stuff on their new navigational equipment. I thought that as long as they were flying me out on a Skyport anyway, it would give me a jump on my orientation if I could look around a bit."

The attendant looked duly impressed. "Sounds like interesting work—and about a million miles over my head. I can talk to the captain, see if we can break the rules for you, but I can't make any promises. Would you give me your name, please, and tell me where you'll be after breakfast?"

"Peter Whitney, and I'll probably be back in the lounge. And, look, don't go breaking any rules—this isn't important enough for anyone to get into trouble over."

She smiled. "Okay, but I'll see what I can do. Enjoy your meal, Mr. Whitney, and if you need anything else just use the caller." With another smile she turned her cart around and left.

Picking up his fork, Whitney cut off a bit of sausage and tasted it, and then sampled the eggs. Piping hot, all of it, but not too hot to eat—and it tasted as good as it smelled. Settling himself comfortably, he attacked his tray with vigor.

—

There was something magic about a Skyport flight deck.

Betsy Kyser had been flying on the giant planes for nearly eighteen months now—had been a wing captain, in charge of an entire hundred-meter-wide module, for four of them—and she still didn't understand exactly why this place always hit her so strongly. Perhaps it was the mixture of reality and fantasy; the view of blue sky through the tiny forward windows contrasting with the myriads of control lights and glowing computer readouts. Or perhaps it was the size of the flight deck itself, better than twice as large as that of a jumbo jet, that struck a chord within her, half awakening the dreams of huge spaceships she'd had as a child. Whatever the reason, she knew the feeling would wear off sooner or later... but until that happened, it was there for her to enjoy. Standing just inside the flight deck door, she drank her fill of the magic.

Slouched in the copilot's seat, Aaron Greenburg glanced back toward her, the gold wings on his royal-blue jumpsuit's shoulderboards winking at her with the motion. "Morning, Bets—thought I heard you come in," he greeted her.

"Morning, Aaron. Tom, Rick," she added as the pilot and flight engineer turned and nodded to her. "Any problems come up during the night?"

Tom Lewis, in the pilot's seat, raised his hands shoulder high in an expansive shrug. "What could go wrong?"

He had a point. Only the middle three wing sections ran their huge General Electric CF6-90C1 turbofan engines during normal flights, the outer two of those shutting down during the lower-speed shuttle pickups. Perched on the Skyport's starboard end, Wing Section Seven was essentially along for a free ride, with little to do but keep the passengers happy and make sure the fuel the shuttles brought up went down the internal pipeline to the sections that needed it. "You trying to tell me you get bored up here?" she asked in mock astonishment. "Here, aboard the greatest flying machine ever built by mankind?"

Before Lewis could answer, a voice spoke up from the intercom. "Wassa-matta, Seven; isn't our company good enough for you? What do you want—home movies and pretzels?"

"We could let them have some of the navigational work," a new voice suggested.

"Great idea. Seven, why don't you hop outside and take a sun-sight?"

"I've got a better idea, Five," Lewis said, turning back to the intercom grille. "Why don't we do a Chinese fire drill and send One, Two, and Three around to hook up the other side of us and let us drive for a while."

"Sounds like fun," a voice Betsy recognized as One's night-shift pilot broke in. "It'd confuse the passengers all to hell, though. Do we tell them, or see if they figure it out by themselves?"

"Oh, we could switch back before we got to L.A.," Lewis told him.

"I've got an even better idea, Seven," the rumbling voice of Skyport Captain Carl Young said from Four. "Why don't you all cut the chitchat and get ready to receive the Dallas shuttle."

Lewis grinned. "Yes, sir. Chitchat out, sir."

Betsy stepped forward. "All the way out, as a matter of fact. You can go on back, Tom, I'll take over here."

"I've still got over a half hour left on my shift, you know," he reminded her.

"That's okay—the quality of intercom banter this morning indicates everyone on this bird is suffering gobs of boredom fatigue. Go on, get some coffee and relax. And maybe work on your one-liners."

Lewis gave her an injured look. "Well-l-l... okay. If you insist." Pulling off his half-headset and draping it across the wheel, he slid out of his chair and stepped back from the instrument panel. "All yours, Cap'n," he added. "Try not to hit anything; I'll be taking a nap."

"Right," she said dryly, slipping into his vacated seat. "Aaron, Rick—you two want to flip a coin or something to see who goes on break first?"

There was a short pause. Then Greenburg glanced back over his shoulder. "Why don't you go ahead," he said to Rick Henson. "I'd like to stay for a bit."

Henson nodded and got up from his flight engineer's board. "Okay. Be back soon." Together he and Lewis left the flight deck.

Betsy looked curiously at Greenburg. "Never known anyone before who didn't jump at a mid-shift coffee break with all four feet," she said.

"Oh, don't worry—I'll take mine, all right. I just wanted to give you a word of warning about the shuttle coming in. Eric Rayburn's flying her."

Betsy felt a knot form directly over her breakfast. "Oh, hell. I sure have a great sense of timing, don't I?"

"I can call Tom back in if you'd like," Greenburg offered. "You're not technically on duty for another half-hour."

She was sorely tempted. By eight o'clock Skyport time—seven Dallas time—the shuttle would have come and gone and be back on the ground again, and Eric Rayburn with it. She wouldn't have to talk to him, something she was pretty sure both of them would appreciate; and with her blood pressure and digestion intact she could go back to just flying her plane—

And to avoiding Eric.

"I can't avoid him forever, though, can I," she said, with a resigned sigh. "Thanks, but I'll stay here."

Greenburg's dark eyes probed her face. "If you're sure," He paused. "Shuttle's calling now," he informed her.

Nodding, she took the half-headset and put it on, guiding the single earphone to a comfortable stop in her left ear. Even before it was in place she heard Rayburn's clipped Boston accent. "—to Skyport Eleven-oh-three. Beginning approach; request docking instructions."

Betsy pursed her lips and turned on her mike. "Dallas shuttle, this is Skyport Eleven-oh-three. You're cleared for docking in Seven; repeat, Seven." Her eyes ran over the instrument readouts as she spoke. "Skyport speed holding steady at two-sixty knots; guidance system radar has a positive track on you."

"Is that you, Liz? Son of a gun; I had no idea I was going to have the honor of docking with your own Skyport. This is indeed a privilege."

Betsy had been fully prepared for heavy sarcasm, but she still found her hands forming into tight knots of frustration at his words. Liz—early in their relationship he'd learned how much she despised that nickname, and his continual use of it these days was a biting echo of the pain she'd felt at their breakup. "Yes, this is Kyser," she acknowledged steadily. "Shuttle, you're coming in a bit fast. Do you want a relative-v confirmation check?"

"What for? I can fly my bird as well as you can fly yours, Liz."

"We're sure you can, Shuttle." Betsy's voice was still calm, but it was a losing battle and she knew it. "Dock whenever you're ready; we're here if you need any help." Without waiting for a response, she flipped off the mike and wrenched the half-headset off, cutting off anything else he might say.

For a moment she stared at the instruments without seeing any of them, slowly getting her temper back under control. Greenburg's quiet voice cut through the blackness, "You know, I'm always amazed—and a little bit jealous—whenever I come across someone with as much self-control as you've got."

She didn't look up at him, but could feel the internal tension ease a little. "Thanks. You're lying through your teeth, of course—I've never seen you even raise your voice at anyone—but thanks."

Her peripheral vision picked up his smile. "You give yourself too little credit, and me way too much. Inherent lack of temper isn't comparable with control of a violent one. My weaknesses are gin rummy and gin fizzes—usually together." He shook his head. "Eighteen months is a long time to carry a grudge."

"Yeah. I will never again let that old sexist clich? about a woman scorned go by unchallenged—some of you men are just as good at hell's fury as we are."

"If you'll pardon a personal question, is all this nonsense really just because you were chosen for Skyport duty and he was left back in the shuttle corps? I'd heard that was all it was, but it seems such a silly thing to base a vendetta on."

She was able to manage a faint smile now. "That shows you don't know Eric very well. He's a very opinionated man, and once he gets hold of an idea he will not let it go. He is thoroughly convinced United put me on the Skyport because of my looks, because they thought it would be good publicity, because they needed a token female—any reason except that I might have more of the qualities they were looking for than he did."

"One of his opinions is that women are inferior pilots to men?" Greenburg hazarded.

"Or at least we're inferior pilots to him. My flying skills were perfectly acceptable to him until United made the cut. In fact, he used to brag a lot about me to his other friends."

Unknotting her fists, she stretched her arms and fingers. "The irony of it is that he'd be climbing the walls here his first week on duty. He's a good pilot, but he can't stand being under anyone's authority once he's left the cockpit. Even the low-level discipline we have to maintain here around the clock would be more than he'd be willing to put up with."

"Maverick types we don't need here," Greenburg agreed. "Well, try not to let him get to you. In just over ten minutes he'll be nothing more than a bad taste in your memory."

"Until the next time our paths cross," Betsy sighed. "It's so hard when I remember what good friends we once were." A number on one of the readouts caught her eye, and she leaned forward with a frown. "I still read him coming in a shade too fast. Aaron, give me a double-check—what's the computer showing on his relative-v?"

Greenburg turned to check. As he did so, Betsy felt the Skyport dip slightly, and her eyes automatically sought out the weather radar. Nothing in particular was visible; the bump must have been a bit of clear air turbulence. No problem; with a plane the size of Skyport normal turbulence was normally not even noticed by the passengers—

Without warning, her seat suddenly slammed up underneath her as the flight deck jerked violently. Simultaneously, there was a strangely indistinct sound of tortured metal... and, as if from a great distance, a scream of agony.

—

Betsy would remember the next few seconds as a period of frantic activity in which her mind, seemingly divorced from her body by shock, was less a participant than a silent observer. With a detached sort of numbness she watched her hands snatch up her half-headset—realizing only then that that was where the distant scream had come from—and jam it into place on her head. A dozen red lights were flashing on the instrument panel, and she watched herself join Greenburg in slapping at the proper controls and shutoffs, turning off shorting circuits and leaking hydraulics in the orderly fashion their training had long since drummed into them. And all the time she wondered what had gone wrong, and wondered what she was going to do....

The slamming-open of the door behind her broke the spell, jolting her mind back into phase with reality. "What the hell was that?" Henson called as he charged full-tilt through the doorway and dropped into his flight engineer's chair. Lewis was right behind him, skidding to a stop behind Greenburg.

"Shuttle crash," Betsy snapped. Emergency procedures finished, she now had her first chance to study the other telltales and try to figure out the exact situation. "Looks bad. The shuttle seems to have gone in crooked, angling upwards and starboard. Captain Rayburn, can you hear me? Captain Rayburn, report please."

For a moment she could hear nothing through her earphone but a faint, raspy breathing. "This is—this is Rayburn." The voice was stunned, weak, sounding nothing like the man Betsy had once known.

"Captain, what's the situation down there?" she asked through the sudden tightness in her throat. "Are you hurt?"

"I don't know." His voice was stronger now; he must have just been momentarily stunned. "My right wrist hurts some. John... oh, God! John!"

"Rayburn?" Betsy snapped.

"My copilot—John Meredith—the whole side of the cockpit's caved in on him. He's—oh, God—I think he's dead."

Betsy's left hand curled into a fist in front of her. "Rayburn, snap out of it! Turn on your intercom and find out if your passengers are all right. Then see if there's a doctor on board to see to Meredith. If he's alive every second could count. And use your oxygen mask—you've probably been holed and the bay's not pressurized."

Rayburn drew a long, shuddering breath, and when he spoke again he sounded almost normal. "Right. I'll let you know what I find."

A click signified the shuttle's intercom had been switched on. Listening to him with half an ear, Betsy pushed the mike away from her mouth and turned back to Greenburg. "Have you got a picture yet?" she asked.

The copilot was fiddling with the bay TV monitor controls. "Yeah, but the quality's pretty bad. He took out the starboard fisheye when he hit, and a lot of the overhead floods, too."

Betsy peered at the screen. "Port side looks okay. I wish we could see what he's done to his starboard nose. Top of the fuselage looks like it's taken some damage—up there, that shadow."

"Yeah. A little hard—"

"Betsy!" Henson broke in. "Take a look at the collar stress readouts. We've got big trouble."

She located the proper screen, scanned the numbers. There were six of them, one for each of the supports securing the docking collar to the edge of the bay. Four of the six indicated no stresses at all, while the other two were dangerously overloaded; and it took a half second for the significance of the zero readings to register. "Oh, great," she muttered, pulling the mike back to her lips. "Rayburn?"

"Passengers are okay except for some bruises and maybe sprains." Rayburn's voice was muffled, indicating he'd put his oxygen mask on. "We've got a doctor coming to look at John."

"Good. Now listen carefully. You're holding onto the Skyport by the skin of your teeth—four of the collar supports have been snapped, and the drag on you is straining the last two. Start firing your engines at about—" She paused, suddenly realizing she had no idea how much power he'd have to use to relieve the strain on the clamps. "Just start your engines and run them up slowly. We'll tell you when you're at the right level."

"Got you. Here goes."

It took nearly a minute for the stresses to drop to what Betsy considered the maximum acceptable levels. "All right, hold at that level until further notice," she told him. "Is the doctor in the cockpit yet?"

"He's just coining in now."

"When he's finished his examination give him a headset and let him talk to one of us here."

"Yeah, okay."

Pulling off her half-headset, Betsy draped it around her neck and looked over at Greenburg. "Stay with him, will you? I need to talk to Carl."

Greenburg nodded, and Betsy leaned over the intercom. "Carl? This is Kyser on Seven."

"We've been listening, Betsy," the Skyport captain's calm voice came immediately. "What's the situation?"

"Bad. We've got a damaged—possibly wrecked—shuttle with a probably dead first officer aboard. A doctor's with him. Somehow the crash managed to tear out four of the docking collar supports, too, and if the other two go we'll lose her completely."

"The emergency collar?"

"Hasn't engaged. I don't know why yet; the sensors in that area got jarred pretty badly and they aren't all working."

"The front clamp didn't make it to the nosewheel, I take it?"

"No, sir." Betsy studied the TV screen. "Looks like it's at least a meter short, maybe more."

"Those clamp arms aren't supposed to run short, no matter where in the bay the shuttle winds up," someone spoke up from one of the other wing sections. "Maybe it's just hung up on something, and in that case you should be able to connect it up manually from inside the bay."

"There isn't supposed to be anything in there for the arm to hang up on," Greenburg muttered, half to himself.

Young heard him anyway. "Unless the crash jarred something loose," he pointed out. "Checking on that should be our first priority."

"Excuse me, Carl, but it's not," Betsy said. "Our first priority is to figure out whether something aboard Seven caused the crash."

"A board of inquiry—"

"Will be too late. All our fuel comes up via these shuttles. If a flaw's developed in Seven's electronics or computer guidance programming we've got to find out what it is and make sure none of the other wing sections has it. Because if something is going bad, it has to be fixed before we can allow any more dockings. Otherwise we could wind up with two smashed shuttles."

Behind her, she heard Lewis swear under his breath and head over toward the flight deck's seldom-used computer terminal. "You're right," Young admitted. "I hadn't thought that far. Can you run the check, or shall I send someone over to help?"

"Tom's starting on it now, but I'm not sure what it'll prove. The computer's supposed to continually run its own checks and let us know if there's any problem. If there's a flaw the machine missed, a standard check isn't likely to find it, either."

"Then we'll go to the source. I'll put a call through to McDonnell Douglas and see if they can either run a deeper check by remote control or tell us how to do one."

Betsy glanced at her watch. Six-forty St. Louis time; two hours earlier in Los Angeles. They'd have to get the experts out of bed, a time-consuming process. She was just about to mention that fact when Paul Marinos, Six's captain, spoke up. "Wait a second. There's a guy aboard who works for McDonnell Douglas—Erin told me he'd asked her about a tour of the flight deck."

"Does he know anything about our electronics?" Young asked.

"I don't know, but she said he does something with computers for them."

Betsy turned around to look at Lewis, who shrugged and nodded assent. "Close enough," she told the Skyport captain. "Can you get him up here right away?"

"I'll go get him myself," Marinos volunteered. "I'll be there in a couple of minutes."

"All right. Let's get back to the shuttle itself, then," Young said. "Betsy, you said the collar supports were broken. Any idea how that happened?"

"I can only speculate that the collar had established a partial grip before the shuttle did its sideways veer into the bay wall."

"In that case, the crash may have left both the outer shuttle door and the exit tunnel intact. Any chance of getting the two connected and getting the passengers out of there?"

"I don't know." Betsy peered at the screen, made a slight adjustment in the contrast. "They're out of line, for sure. I don't know if the tunnel will stretch far enough to make up the difference."

"Even if it does, we'd need portable oxygen masks for all the passengers," Henson pointed out from behind her. "They have to be using the shuttle's air masks, and they can't travel with those."

"That's not going to be a problem," Young said. "I've already invoked emergency regulations; we're bringing her down to fifteen thousand feet."

"Well, there's nothing more I can tell from here." Betsy shook her head. "Someone's going to have to go down and take a look. Who aboard this bird knows the most about docking bay equipment?"

There was a pause. "I don't know whether I know the most," Greenburg spoke up diffidently at Betsy's right, "but I've seen the blueprints, and I worked summers as a mechanic's assistant for Boeing when I was in college."

"Anyone able to top that?" Young asked. "No? All right, Greenburg, get going."

Betsy put her half-headset back on as Greenburg removed his and stood up. "A set of the relevant blueprints would be helpful," he said, looking back at Lewis.

"I'm having the computer print them," the other told him. "If you want to go down and get the oxygen gear together, I'll come down and give you a hand."

Greenburg glanced questioningly at Betsy. "Can you do without both of us that long?"

She hesitated, then nodded. "Sure. But make it a fast look-see. You're not going down there to do any major repair work."

"Right," Greenburg started for the door. "Meet you by the port-aft cargo access hatch, Tom."

Lewis waved an acknowledgment, his eyes on the computer screen, as Greenburg exited. Betsy turned back to face forward, and as she did so Rayburn's voice crackled in her ear. "Skyport, this is Rayburn. The doctor says John's alive!"

A small part of the tightness across Betsy's chest seemed to disappear. "Thank God! Is the doctor still there? I want to speak with him."

"Just a second." There was a moment of silence punctuated by assorted clicks, and then a new voice came tentatively on the line. "Hello? This is Dr. Emerson."

"Doctor, this is Wing Captain Elizabeth Kyser. What sort of shape is First Officer Meredith in?"

"Not a good one, I'm afraid," Emerson admitted. "He seems to have one or more cracked ribs and possibly a broken collarbone as well. The way the fuselage has bent inward and pinned him makes it hard to examine him. I could try pulling him out, but that might exacerbate any internal injuries, or even drive bits of glass into him from the broken windows. He's unconscious, but his vital signs are stable, at least for the moment. I'm afraid I can't tell you much more."

"Just knowing he's alive is good news enough," Betsy assured him. She thought for a moment. "What if we could cut the whole chair loose? Is there enough room behind him to move the chair back and get him out that way?"

"Uh... I think so, yes. But I don't know what we would do after that. I heard the flight attendant say the door was jammed."

Betsy frowned. Rayburn hadn't mentioned that to her. "We might be able to force it open anyway and get it connected to the rest of the Skyport. Are the rest of the passengers all right?"

"A few minor injuries, mostly bruises due to the safety belts. We've been very lucky."

So far. "Yeah. Thank you, Doctor. Please let us know immediately if there's any change."

"Got the prints, Betsy," Lewis called as she turned off the mike. "I'm heading down."

He was gone before she could do more than nod assent, leaving her and Henson alone. For some reason the empty seats bothered her, and she briefly considered calling in some of Seven's off-duty crewmen. But as long as they were stuck in this virtual holding pattern, extra help on the flight deck would be pretty superfluous. Turning back to the instrument panel, she felt a wave of frustration wash over her. So many unanswered questions, most of them crucial to the safety of one or more groups of people aboard the Skyport—and she was temporarily at a loss to handle any of them. For the moment there was nothing she could do but try and line up the problems in some sort of logical order: if A is true then B must be done, and D cannot precede either B or C. But it was like juggling or playing chess in her head; there were just too many contingencies that had to be taken into account every step of the way.

Behind her the door opened, and she turned to see two men walk in. One she knew: Paul Marinos, captain of Wing Section Six. The other, a thirtyish young man in a three-piece suit, she'd never seen before. But she knew instantly who he was.

"Betsy," Marinos said, "this is Peter Whitney, of McDonnell Douglas."

—

Whitney had been daydreaming in his lounge chair, enjoying the unique Skyport atmosphere, when the violent bump jerked him back to full alertness. He shot a rapid glance around the room, half expecting to see the walls caving in around him. But everything looked normal. Up ahead, he could hear muttered curses from the dining room—prompted, no doubt, by spilled coffee and the like—while from the lounge itself came a heightened buzz of conversation. Whitney closed his ears to it all as best he could, straining instead to listen for some clue as to what had happened. An explosive misfire in one of the engines was his first gut-level guess; but the dull background rumble seemed unchanged. A hydraulic or fuel line that had broken with that much force might still be leaking audibly; again, he could hear nothing that sounded like that. Had there been that bogey of the '70s and early '80s, a mid-air collision? But even small planes these days were supposed to be equipped with the Bendix-Honeywell transponder system—and how could any pilot fail to see the Skyport in the first place?

The minutes dragged by, and conversational levels gradually returned to normal as the other passengers apparently decided that nothing serious had happened. Whitney suspected differently, and to him the loudspeaker's silence was increasingly ominous. Something serious had happened, and the captain was either afraid to tell the passengers what it was or the crew was just too damn busy fighting the problem to talk. Neither possibility was a pleasant one.

A flash of royal blue caught the corner of his eye, and he turned to see a chunky man in a Skyport-crew jumpsuit step from the dining area into the lounge. The flight attendant who'd served Whitney's breakfast was with him, and Whitney watched curiously as her gaze swept the room. It wasn't until she pointed in his direction and the two started toward him that it occurred to Whitney that they might be looking for him. Even then uncertainty kept him in his seat until there was no doubt as to their target, and he had barely enough time to stand up before they reached him.

"Mr. Whitney?" the jumpsuited man asked. His expression was worried, his tone was politeness laminated on urgency. The girl looked worried, too.

Whitney nodded, noticing for the first time the gold wings-in-a-circle pins on his chest and shoulderboards. A wing captain, not just a random crew member. Whitney's first hopeful thought, that this was somehow related to the tour he'd asked for, vanished like tax money in Washington.

"I'm Captain Paul Marinos," the other introduced himself. "We have a problem, Mr. Whitney, that we hope you can help us with. Is it true that you work with computer systems for McDonnell Douglas?"

Whitney nodded, feeling strangely tongue-tied, but finally getting his brain into gear. They were almost certainly not interested in just general computer knowledge; his nodded affirmative needed a qualifier added to it. "I know only a little about current Skyport programming, though," he told them. "I mostly work with second-generation research."

Marinos's expression didn't change, but his next words were almost a whisper. "What we need is a malfunction check on our shuttle approach and guidance equipment. Can you do that?"

The pieces clicked almost audibly into place in Whitney's mind. It had been a crash, and one that all the Bendix-Honeywell collision-proofing in the world couldn't prevent. "I don't know, but I can try. Where do I find a terminal?"

"On Seven," was the cryptic response. "Come with me, please."

Marinos led the way across the lounge and back into the dining room. A door in the right-hand wall brought them into one of the module's food preparation and storage areas. The blonde flight attendant left them at that point; moving forward through the galley, Marinos and Whitney arrived at an elevator. One deck up was a somewhat cramped hallway lined with doors—crew quarters, Whitney assumed. In the opposite direction a heavy, positive-sealing door stood across their path. Marinos unlocked it and swung it open; and to Whitney's mild surprise an identical door, hung the opposite way, faced them. The captain opened this one, too, and gestured Whitney through, sealing both doors again behind them. "We're on Wing Section Seven now," he told Whitney, leading the way down a hall that mirror-imaged the one they'd just left. "The wing captain here is Betsy Kyser. You'll be working with her and her crew."

Beyond the hallway was a small lounge; passing through it, they entered what appeared to be a ready-room sort of place with a half-dozen jumpsuited men and women listening intently to an intercom speaker; and finally, they reached the flight deck.

"We appreciate your coming up here," Captain Kyser said as Marinos concluded the introductions. "I hope you can help us."

"So do I," Whitney said. "Anything at all you can tell me about your malfunction? It might help my search."

"All we know is that it's somewhere in the equipment or programming that guides shuttles into the docking bay." In a few terse sentences she told him what was known about the shuttle crash, including the craft's current orientation in the bay. "My indicator said its approach velocity was too high, if that's significant," she concluded. "But I don't know if that was just my indicator or if the whole system was confused."

"The shuttle's radar is independent of your equipment, though, isn't it? Maybe the pilot can corroborate your readings."

"Maybe—but if he'd seen anything wrong he'd almost certainly have yelled. But I'll ask him. First, though, I want to get you started. Paul, will you monitor the shuttle?"

Marinos, who had already quietly seated himself in the copilot's seat, nodded and put on a headset. Kyser removed her own and led Whitney to a console built snugly into the flight desk's left rear corner. Motioning him into the chair in front of it, she leaned over him and tapped at the keys. "Here's the sign-on... access code... and program file." A series of names and numbers appeared on the screen. "Any of those look familiar?"

"Quite a few, if the programming division's keeping its nomenclature consistent." Whitney scanned the list, experimentally keyed in a number.

"That's the standard equipment-check program," Kyser told him. "We've already run that one and come up dry."

"No errors? Then the problem probably isn't in the computer system."

She shook her head. " 'Probably' isn't good enough. Aren't there more complete test programs that can be run?"

"You're talking about the full-blown diagnostic monsters that ground maintenance uses." Whitney hesitated, trying to remember what little he knew about such programs. "It seems to me that the program should be stored somewhere in your system, probably on one of the duplicate-copy disks. The catch is that the thing takes up almost all of your accessible memory space, so anything that normally uses that space will have to be temporarily shut down while it's running."

Kyser looked over at the flight engineer. "Rick?"

"Jibes with what I've heard," he agreed. "Most of the programs that take a lot of space are connected with navigation, radar monitoring, and mechanical flight systems and cargo deck stuff. We're not using any of those at the moment, anyway, so that's no problem. I can also switch a lot of the passenger-deck functions from automatic to manual control." He craned his neck to look at Whitney, sitting directly behind him. "Will that free up enough memory?"

"I don't know—I don't know how much room it'll need. But there's another problem, Captain. Since it is such a big program, there'll almost undoubtedly be safeguards to keep someone from accidentally loading it and losing everything else in the memory."

"A password?"

"Of some kind." Whitney had been searching the program list and had already checked the descriptions of two or three of the entries. Another of them caught his eye and he keyed it in. "You may need to check with ground control to even find the name... hold it. Never mind, I've found it. DCHECK. Let's see...." He advanced the description another page, skimmed it. "Here it is. We need something called the Sasquatch-3L package to load it."

"Will Dallas ground control have it?" Henson asked.

"I would think so—if not, they can probably get it by phone from one of the Skyport maintenance areas." Whitney hesitated. "But it's not clear whether or not that'll do you any good."

"Why not?"

"Well, remember that the whole reason you don't have the loading code in the first place is that they don't want you accidentally plugging in the program and wiping out something the autopilot's doing. So they may not legally be able to release the code to a Skyport crew, especially one that's in flight."

"That's stupid!"

"That's bureaucratic thinking," Captain Kyser corrected—or agreed; Whitney couldn't figure out which. Leaning over Whitney's shoulder again, she spoke toward a small grille next to the display screen. "Carl? Did you get all that?"

"Yes," the intercom answered, "and I suspect Mr. Whitney's basically right. But there have to be emergency procedures for something like this—else why have the program stored aboard in the first place? It should simply be a matter of getting an adequately prominent official to give an okay. I'll get the tower on it right away."

"And hope your prominent official can move his tail this early in the morning," she muttered under her breath.

Whitney had been thinking along a separate track. "There's one other thing we can try," he said. "Can you patch me into the regular phone system from up here?"

"Trivially. Why?"

"I'd like to call my former supervisor back in Houston. He might be able to get the package, either from his own office or from someone in L.A."

"You just said it was illegal to release the code," Henson objected.

"To you, yes; but maybe not to me. I work for the company, after all."

Henson started to growl something vituperative, but Kyser cut him off. "We'll complain to the FAA later. For now, let's take whatever loopholes we can get our hands on. Put on that half-headset, Mr. Whitney, and I'll fix you up with Ma Bell."

The call, once the connection was finally made, was a remarkably short one. Dr. Mills, seldom at his best in the early morning, nevertheless came fully awake as Whitney gave him a thumbnail sketch of the crisis. He took down the names of both the diagnostic program and the loading code, extracted from Captain Kyser—via Whitney—the instructions for placing a return call to the Skyport, and promised to have the package for him in fifteen minutes.

"Well, that's it, I guess," Whitney remarked after signing off. "Nothing to do now but wait."

"Yeah. Damn."

Whitney looked up at her as she stared through the computer console, concentration drawing her eyebrows together. She had been something of a surprise to him, and he still found it hard to believe a Skyport wing captain could be so young. Marinos, he estimated, was in his early fifties, and Henson wasn't much younger. But if Betsy Kyser was anything past her early forties she was the best-preserved woman he'd ever seen. Which meant either United was hard up for Skyport personnel or Captain Kyser was one very fine pilot. He fixed the thought firmly in his mind; it was one of the few things about all this that was even remotely comforting. "Uh... Captain?" he spoke up.

She focused on him, the frown lingering for a second before she seemed to notice it and eased it a bit. "Call me Betsy," she told him. "This isn't much of a place for formalities."

"I'm Peter, then. May I ask why you need to know about the electronics right now? I would think the shuttle's safety would be the thing you need to concentrate on."

"It is, but we can't do anything about that until we're sure more shuttles can dock safely." He must have looked blank, because the corner of her mouth twitched and she continued, "Look. Whatever we wind up doing to the shuttle, odds are we don't already have the necessary equipment on board. That means—"

"That means you'll have to bring it up via shuttle," Whitney nodded, catching on at last. "So you need to find the glitch in your docking program and make sure it hasn't also affected the other modules' equipment."

"Right. After that the next job'll be to either get the passengers out or secure the shuttle into the bay, whichever is faster and safer."

Whitney nodded again. In his mind's eye he could see the damaged shuttle hanging precariously out the back of the Skyport, holding on by the barest of threads. The picture reawakened the half-forgotten vertigo of his first—and last—rollercoaster ride twenty years ago, and he discovered he was gripping the arms of his chair a shade more tightly than necessary. Firmly, he forced his emotions down out of the way. "There's going to be a fair amount of drag on the shuttle from the Skyport's slipstream," he commented, thinking aloud as a further distraction from discomfiting images. "That means a lot of stress on the docking collar. Would it help any if the shuttle dumped its fuel, to make itself lighter?"

"Just the opposite; the eng—" She paused, a strange look flickering across her face. Behind her, Whitney saw peripherally, Marinos had swiveled around, his attention presumably attracted by Betsy's abrupt silence. "Paul," she said without turning, "run a calculation for me. At its present rate of burn, how much fuel has the shuttle got left?"

"What diff—?" Marinos stopped, too, the same look settling onto his own features. Turning back, he began punching calculator buttons.

"Right," Betsy muttered tartly. "We've gotten too used to the easy transfer of fuel between shuttle and Skyport... or I have, anyway." Whitney had figured out what was going on, but Betsy spelled it out for him anyway. "You see, Peter, the shuttle's currently firing its engines, at about medium power, to counteract the drag you mentioned. I guess I was subconsciously assuming we could feed it all the fuel it needed from the Skyport's reserves."

"But the connections are out of line?"

"Almost certainly. The fuel line's on the starboard side, too, which means there's not likely to be enough room to even get in and connect them manually. Probably no access panels close enough, either, but I guess we'll have to check on that." She grimaced. "Something else to do. I hope someone's keeping a list."

"Got it, Betsy," Marinos said, looking up once more. "At current usage, he'll run dry in a little over seven hours."

"Seven hours." She pursed her lips. "And that assumes neither of his main pumps was rattled loose by the impact. Carl?"

"I heard, Betsy," the intercom grille said. "That's not a lot of time."

"No kidding. How much fuel has the whole Skyport got; for our own flying, I mean?"

"At our current speed, a good ten hours. All the tanks were pretty full."

"Okay. Thanks."

"Still no word from ground control on your program," he added. "They're trying to look up the regs and track down the guy who's got the actual package, and doing both of them badly."

"Betsy?" Marinos again. "Sorry to interrupt, but it's Eric Rayburn on the shuttle. He wants to talk to you."

Whitney started to reach for the earphone he was wearing, but Betsy shook her head, stepping back to her chair and picking up her own set. "This is Kyser," she said into the slender mike.

"Liz, what the hell's going on up there?" a harsh voice said into Whitney's left ear.

With the kind of crisis they were all facing up here, Whitney wouldn't have believed the tension on the flight deck could possibly increase. But it did. He could feel it in the uncomfortable shifting of Henson in his chair, and in Marinos' furtive glance sideways, and in Betsy's tightly controlled response. "We're trying to figure out how to get you and your passengers out of there alive," she said.

"Well, it's taking a damn sight too long. Or have you forgotten that John's in bad shape?"

"No, we haven't forgotten. If you've got any suggestions let's hear them."

"Sure. Just open this damn collar and let me fly my plane back to Dallas."

Betsy and Marinos exchanged glances; Whitney couldn't see Betsy's face, but Marinos's looked flabbergasted. "That's out of the question. You don't even know if the shuttle will fly any more."

"Sure it will! I've still got control of the engines and control surfaces. What else do I need?"

"How about electronics, for starters? You apparently don't even have enough nav equipment left to know where you are. For your information, you wouldn't be flying 'back' to Dallas, because we haven't left—we're circling the area at fifteen thousand feet and about two-seventy knots."

"All the better. I won't need any directional gear to find the airport."

Betsy's snort was a brief snake's hiss in Whitney's ear. "Eric, did you turn your oxygen off or something? Neither you nor the shuttle is in any shape to fly. Period." Rayburn started to object, but she raised her voice and cut him off. "We know you're worried about your first officer, but once we make sure it's safe to dock again we can have doctors and emergency medical equipment brought aboard to take care of him."

"And then what? Try to land with me still hanging out your rear? Don't be absurd. Like it or not, you're eventually going to have to let me go. Let's do it now and get it over with."

"No," Betsy said, and Whitney could hear a tightness in her voice. "There are a minimum number of tests we'll have to run before we can even consider the idea. You can help by starting a standard pre-flight check on your instruments and systems and figuring out what's still working. Other than that, you'll just have to sit back and wait like the rest of us."

"Wait!" He made the word an obscenity.

"Skyport out." Betsy reached over and flipped a switch, then pushed her mike off to one side. Whitney couldn't see much more than the back of her head, but it was very obvious that she was angry. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair, wishing he were somewhere else. There'd been elements about the whole exchange that had felt like a private feud, and he felt obscurely embarrassed that he'd been listening in.

"Don't let him get to you, Betsy," Henson advised quietly. "He's not worth getting upset about."

"Thanks." Already she seemed to be getting her composure back. "Unfortunately, he did hit one problem very squarely on the head."

"The landing problem?" Marinos asked.

Betsy nodded. "I don't know how we're going to handle that one."

"I don't understand," Whitney spoke up hesitantly. "You would just be separating off this module and landing it with the shuttle, wouldn't you?" A horrible thought struck him. "I mean you aren't thinking about landing the whole Skyport... are you?"

Betsy did something to her chair and swiveled halfway around to look at him. "No, of course not. There isn't a runway in the world that could take an entire Skyport, although the space shuttle landing area at Rogers Dry Lake might be possible in a real emergency."

"Then what's the problem? The modules are supposed to be able to land on an eighteen-thousand-foot runway, and Dallas has to have at least one that's that long."

"The eighteen thousand is for a wing sections by itself, Peter," Marinos said patiently. He held up a hand and began ticking off fingers. "First: with the extra weight and—more importantly the extra drag—we'd have to put down at something above our listed one-sixty-five-knot landing speed. That'll add runway distance right off the bat. Second: one of the weight savings on the wing sections is not having thrust reversers on our engines to help us slow down. We rely on landing wheel brakes and drogue chutes that pop out the back. With the shuttle adding weight out the back—and its gear will be at least a couple of feet off the ground when ours touches down, so there'll be a lot of weight—our balance will change. That means a little less weight on the front landing gear, which means a little less braking ability for those six sets of wheels. Maybe significantly less, maybe not; I don't know. And third, and probably most important: the drogue chutes come out the center and ends of our trailing edge—and we won't be able to use any of the center ones while the shuttle's in the way." He shook his head. "I wouldn't even attempt to land on anything shorter than twenty-five thousand under conditions like this."

"I'd hold out for thirty, myself," Betsy agreed grimly. "We just don't know how much extra room we'd need. And don't bother suggesting we put down on a cotton field or straddling both lanes of Interstate 20. One of the other ways you save weight on a Skyport is in the landing gear, and landing on something too soft would tear it to shreds."

An idea was taking shape in the back of Whitney's mind... but he wanted to think about it before saying anything to the others. "So that leaves, what, the Skyport maintenance facility outside L.A.?" he asked instead.

"Or the one in New Jersey," Betsy said. "L.A.'s closer." She looked at her watch—the fourth time, by Whitney's count, that she had done so in the last ten minutes. "Damn it all, what's holding up ground control?"

As if in answer, the intercom suddenly crackled. "Bets, this is Aaron," a voice said. "We're ready here to start on down."

—

"Roger, Aaron; keep your line open," Betsy's voice said, too loudly, in Greenburg's ear. He resisted the impulse to turn down the volume on his portable half-headset; in a moment there would be another aluminum-alloy deck between them that should take care of the problem.

"Right. We're opening the access hatch now." As Lewis looked on, Greenburg undid the three clasps securing the surprisingly light disk and levered it up, making sure it locked solidly into its wall latch. Feeling around the underside of the hatch rim, he located the light switch and turned it on. The blackness below blazed with light, and with a quick glance to make sure he wouldn't be landing on unstable footing he grasped the rungs welded to the hatch and started down the narrow metal ladder, tool belt banging against his thigh. The lowest of the Skyport's three decks was devoted to passenger luggage and general cargo and to the equipment necessary to move it from shuttle to Skyport, between wing sections where necessary, and back to shuttle again. The hatch the two men had chosen led to one edge of the cargo area, and most of the equipment in Greenburg's immediate area seemed to be motors and electronic overseers for the intricate network of conveyor belts and electric trams that sorted incoming luggage by destination and carted it to the proper storage area. All without human supervision, of course—and, despite that, it generally worked pretty well.

"The bay is straight back that way." Lewis had appeared beside him, clutching a sheaf of computer paper. "I think around that pillar thing would be the best approach."

They set off. Greenburg had been on a Skyport cargo deck only once, back in his training days, and was vaguely surprised at the amount of dirt and grease around the machinery they passed. Within a dozen steps his blue jumpsuit had collected a number of greasy smears and he found himself wishing he'd had the extra minute it would have taken to change into something more appropriate for this job. But even a minute could make a lot of difference... and Bets was counting on them.

They reached the curved wall that was the lower half of the docking bay within a few minutes, arriving just forward of a wide ring bristling with hydraulic struts that Greenburg knew marked the position of the emergency docking collar. He glanced back at it as they headed forward under the wall's curve, wondering why the backup system hadn't worked. It should have kicked in as soon as the main collar's supports gave way.

"Watch your step," Lewis said sharply, and Greenburg paused in midstep, focusing for the first time on the dark-red puddle edging onto the path in front of him. Peering along the base of the wall, he could see more of the liquid, more or less collected in a narrow trough there. He squatted, touched it tentatively with a fingertip. It felt thick and oily. "Hydraulic fluid?" Lewis asked.

"Yeah. From the emergency collar, probably." Greenburg straightened and, with only a slight hesitation, rubbed the fluid off on his jumpsuit. Stepping carefully around the puddle in his path, he continued on.

The panel they'd decided on was precisely where the blueprints had said it would be: some two meters around the port wall from the heavy forward clamp machinery at the docking bay's forward tip. About forty centimeters by seventy, the panel sat chest-high in the wall and was, for a wonder, not even partially blocked by any of the conveyor equipment. Selecting a wrench from his belt, Greenburg began loosening the nuts.

"I hope there's nothing in here that can't take low air pressure," Lewis remarked as he untangled the two oxygen sets he was carrying and clipped one of the tanks onto the back of Greenburg's belt. "You want me to put the mask on you?"

"I'll put it on when I get this open," Greenburg grunted as he strained against a particularly well tightened nut. "I don't like stuff hanging from my face while I'm working. Distracts me."

"Put it on before you lose pressure in there, Aaron," Betsy's voice came in his ear.

"Aw, come on—Bets," he said, the last word a burst of air as the nut finally yielded. "We're only a thousand feet or so higher than Pikes Peak, and I've been climbing around up there since I was ten. I'm not going to black out up here for lack of air."

"Well... all right. But I want it on you as soon as you've finished with the panel."

"Sure."

It took only a couple of minutes to loosen all the nuts and, with Lewis's help, remove them and force the panel out of its rubber seating. For a minute there was a minor gale at their backs as the pressure inside the cargo deck equalized with that in the bay, and Greenburg realized belatedly he'd forgotten to check whether or not Lewis had remembered to close the hatch behind him. If he hadn't this windstorm was going to keep going for quite a while... but even as he finished adjusting his oxygen mask over his nose and mouth the rush of air began to subside and finally stilled completely. "Here goes," Greenburg muttered as, stooping slightly, he eased his head through the opening, blinking as a cold breeze swept his face.

It was an impressive sight. Even twisted too far toward the bay's starboard wall, the shuttle's nose still seemed almost close enough for him to touch as it loomed over him, vibrating noticeably in the incomplete grip the broken collar provided. To his left and only slightly below him, he could see that the shuttle's front landing gear had descended just as it was supposed to, and was hanging tantalizingly close to the extended forward clamp. Moving his mike right up against his oxygen mask—it was noisier in the bay than he'd expected—he said, "Okay. First of all, I can't see anything that could be interfering with the clamp or arm. Rick, do the telltales read the arm as fully extended?"

A short pause, then Henson's voice. "Sure do. It's still got lateral and vertical play, though. Want me to swing it around any?"

"Waste of time, as long as it's too short. Someone's going to have to go down there and take a look at it, I guess."

"That's not your job, though," Betsy spoke up. "Carl's lining up a mechanical crew to come up from the airport as soon as it's safe. They can do all the work that's needed in the bay."

"I'm sure they'll be thrilled at the prospect—and don't worry, I wasn't volunteering." Greenburg twisted his head around the other direction. "Now, as to the shuttle door... hell. I can't be certain, but it looks like the edge of the collar is overlapping it—the shuttle must have slid back and then shot forward and starboard as the collar was engaging. What the hell kind of guidance system error could have caused that?"

"We should know in ten or fifteen minutes," an unfamiliar voice put in.

"Who's that?" Greenburg asked.

"Sorry—maybe I shouldn't have butted in. I'm Peter Whitney; I'm helping to run the diagnostic program that will hopefully locate the problem."

"Peter Whitney?—ah, the McDonnell Douglas computer expert Paul Marinos had said he was bringing in. Have you got the program running yet?"

"Yes; a friend just radioed us the loading code."

"Well ahead of ground control's efforts, I might add," Betsy said. "We'll let you know when we identify the glitch. For now, let's get back to the shuttle door, okay? We think the sensors indicate hydraulic pressure problems in the emergency collar. Is there any chance we could fix that and get it to lock onto the shuttle? Then we could release the main collar and get the shuttle door open."

Greenburg shifted position again and peered at the top of the shuttle, wishing all the floodlights hadn't gone when the craft hit. "I don't think there's any chance at all," he said slowly. "As a matter of fact, it looks very much like the emergency collar's responsible for most of the cockpit damage. It seems to have come out of the wall just in time for the shuttle to ram into it. If that kind of impact didn't do anything more than rupture a hydraulic line or two, I'll be very much surprised."

Betsy said something under her breath that Greenburg didn't catch. "You sure about that?" she asked. "I can't see any of that on the monitor."

"As sure as I can be on this side of the bay. I can go to the starboard side if you'd like and check through the panel there. Probably have to go over there to find out exactly where this fluid came from, anyway."

"Maybe later. Any other good news for us from there, first?"

"Actually, this is good news. Somehow, while the shuttle was rattling around the bay, it completely missed the Skyport passenger and cargo tunnels. If we can get everybody out of the shuttle, we can get them into the Skyport."

"Well, that's something. Any suggestions on how we go about carrying out that first step?"

Greenburg frowned. Something about the shuttle was stroking the warning bells in his brain... but he couldn't seem to put his finger on the problem.

"Aaron?"

"Uh... yes." His eyes still probing the vibrating fuselage, Greenburg replayed his mental tape of Betsy's last question. "The, uh, side window of the cockpit seems undamaged. It should be big enough for most of the passengers to squeeze through. Of course, it's a four-meter drop or thereabouts, so we'd need to rig up some way to either get them down and then back up to the tunnel door or else to get them across to it directly. Maybe rig something up to the ski lift mechanism in the tunnel..."

His voice trailed off as the warning bells abruptly went off full force. The nosewheel was slightly closer to him!

"Bets, the shuttle's sliding backwards!" he shouted into the mike. "The collar must be slipping!"

For a few seconds all he could hear was the muffled, indistinct sound of frantic conversation. Eyes still glued to the slowly moving nosewheel, he jammed his earphone tighter against his ear. "Bets, did you copy? I said—"

"We copied," Paul Marinos's voice told him. "Betsy's getting the shuttle to boost its thrust. Stand by, okay?"

Pursing his lips tightly under his oxygen mask, Greenburg shifted his gaze back along the shuttle to its main passenger door. If the collar was slipping he should be able to see the door slowly sliding further and further beneath the huge ring.... He still hadn't decided if it was moving when Betsy's voice made him start.

"Aaron? Is the shuttle still moving?"

"Uh... I'm not sure. I don't think so, but all the vibration makes it hard to tell."

"Yeah." A short pause. "Aaron, Tom, you've both done some shuttle flying, haven't you? What are the chances Rayburn could bring this one down safely, damaged as it is?"

Something very cold slid down the center of Greenburg's back. Betsy knew the answer to that one already—they all did. The fact that she was asking at all implied things he wasn't sure he liked. Surely things weren't desperate enough yet to be grasping at that kind of straw... were they?

Lewis, after a short pause, gave the only answer there was. "Chances are poor to nonexistent—you know that, Betsy. He'd have to leave here at a speed of at least a hundred sixty-five knots, and with one or more windows gone in the cockpit he'd have an instant hurricane in there. He sure as hell won't be able to fly in that, and I personally wouldn't trust any autopilot that's gone through what his has."

"You can't slow down past a hundred sixty-five knots?" Whitney, the computer man, asked.

"That's our minimum flight speed," Lewis told him shortly.

"I know that. What I meant was whether you could try something like a stall or some other fancy maneuver that would pull your speed temporarily lower."

"Wouldn't gain us enough, I'm afraid," Betsy said, sounding thoughtful. "Besides which, wing sections aren't designed for fancy maneuvers." She seemed to sigh. "We've got a new problem, folks. The shuttle's backwards drift, Aaron, was not the collar slipping. It was the last two supports bending, apparently under slightly unequal thrusts from the shuttle's engines."

Lewis growled an obscenity Greenburg had never heard him use. "What happens if they break? Does the collar fall off the shuttle?"

"The book says yes—but exactly when it goes depends on how fast the hydraulic fluid drains out. My guess is it would hold on long enough to turn the shuttle nose down before dropping off and crashing somewhere in the greater Fort Worth area."

"Followed immediately by the shuttle," Greenburg growled. His next task was clear—too clear. "All right, say no more. Tom, there should be a supply locker just forward of here. See if there's any rope or cable in it, would you?"

"What do you want that for?" Betsy asked, her tone edging toward suspicious.

"A safety harness. I'm going to go inside the bay and see if there's any way to get that forward clamp connected. Tom?"

"Yeah, there's some rope here. Just a second—I have to untangle it."

"Hold it, Tom," Betsy said. "Aaron, you're not going in there. You're a pilot, not a mechanic, remember? We'll wait for some professionals from the ground to handle this."

"Wait how long?" he shot back, apprehension putting snap into his tone. "Rayburn can't keep firing his engines all day; and even if he could you have no guarantee the thrusts from all three turbofans would stay properly balanced. Do you?"

There was a short silence, during which Greenburg was startled by something snaking abruptly across his chest. It was Lewis, perhaps sensing the outcome of the argument, starting to tie Greenburg's safety line around him. "No," Betsy finally answered his question. "Rayburn's on-board can't give us those numbers any more, and the support stress indicators aren't really sensitive enough."

"Which means chances are good the shuttle's going to continue putting stresses on the clamps—variable stresses, yet. They're bound to fatigue eventually under that kind of treatment."

"Mr. Greenburg—Aaron—look, the program's almost finished running." Whitney, putting in his two cents again. "Once it's done we can have people up here in fifteen minutes—"

"No; only once we've found the problem and made sure the other wing sections don't have it. Who knows how long that'll take?" A tug on the rope coming off the chest of the makeshift harness Lewis had tied around him and a slap on the back told him it was time. Gripping the edges of the opening, he raised a foot, seeking purchase on the curved wall. Lewis's cupped hands caught the foot, steadied it. Greenburg started to shift his weight... and paused. He was still, after all, under Betsy's authority. "Bets? Do I have permission to go?"

"All right. But listen: you've got one shot at the clamp, and whether it reaches or not you're coming straight out afterward. Understand? No one's ever been in a docking bay during flight before, and you're not equipped for unexpected problems."

"Gotcha. Here goes."

Greenburg had spent the past couple of minutes studying the curving bay wall, planning just how he was going to do this maneuver. Now, as he shifted his weight and pushed off of Lewis's hands, he discovered he hadn't planned things quite well enough. Pushing himself more or less vertically through the narrow opening, he twisted his body around as his torso cleared, coming down in a sitting position with his back to the shuttle. But he'd forgotten about the oxygen tank on the back of his belt, and the extra weight was enough to ruin his precarious balance and to send him sliding gracelessly down the curving metal on his butt.

He didn't slide far; Lewis, belaying the line, made sure of that. Getting his legs back around underneath him, Greenburg checked his footing and nodded back toward the opening. "Okay, I'm essentially down. Let me have some slack." Moving carefully, he stepped down into the teardrop-shaped well under the shuttle and walked to the nosewheel.

The forward clamp was designed to slide out of the wall as the landing gear was lowered, locating the tow bar by means of two short-range transponders installed in the gear. Earlier, up on the flight deck, Greenburg had confirmed the clamp operation had been begun but not completed; now, on closer study, the problem looked like it might be obvious.

"The shuttle's not only angled into the bay wrong, but it's also rotated a few degrees on its axis," he reported to the others. "I think maybe that the clamp's wrist rotated as far as it could to try and match, and when it couldn't get lined up apparently decided to quit and wait for instructions."

"The telltales say it is fully extended, though," Henson insisted.

"Well... maybe it's the sensors that got scrambled."

"Assume you're right," Betsy said. "Any way to fix it?"

"I don't know." Greenburg studied the clamp and landing gear, acutely aware of the vibrating shuttle above him—and of the vast distances beyond it. But even if the shuttle fell out and my rope broke I'd be all right, he told himself firmly. Standing in the cutout well that gave the shuttle's nosewheel room to descend, he was a good two meters below the rim of the bay's outer opening. There was a fair amount of eddy-generated wind turbulence plucking at his jumpsuit and adding a wind-chill to the frigid air—but it would take a lot of turbulence to force him up that slope and out. At least, he thought so.... "Why don't you try backing the clamp arm up and letting it take another run at the tow bar?"

"We'll have to wait for Peter's program to finish," Henson said. "The computer handles that."

"Oh... right." Greenburg hadn't thought of that. "How much longer?"

"It's almost—it's done," Whitney said.

"Where's the problem?" Betsy asked. Even with the turbofan engines droning in his ears Greenburg could hear the twin emotions of anticipation and dread in her voice.

"There doesn't seem to be one."

"That's ridiculous," Greenburg said. "Something made the shuttle crash."

"Well, the program can't find it. Look, it seems to me I felt the Skyport bounce a little just before the crash—"

"Clear air turbulence," Betsy said. "That shouldn't have been a problem; the guidance program is supposed to be able to handle small perturbations like that."

"Let's forget about the 'how' of it for now," a new voice broke in—Carl Young's, Greenburg tentatively identified it through the noise. "The point is that we can start bringing shuttles back up again. Greenburg, is there anything you can suggest we bring up from the ground to secure the shuttle with?"

"Uh... hell, I don't know. Something to use to get the passengers off would certainly be handy. And if this clamp arm won't rotate any further we might need an interfacing of some kind—maybe an extra clamp-and-wrist piece to extend our clamp's rotational range."

"I've already ordered some spare ski lift track from the ground—it should be coming up aboard the first shuttle, along with men to handle it. The clamp-and-wrist section we may be able to remove from one of the other bays; other people will be coming up to try that. What I meant was, can you see anything from there that we didn't already know about?"

"Not really." Greenburg was starting to feel a little foolish as his brave descent into the bay began to look more and more unnecessary. With the guidance system coming up clean, shuttleloads of experts would be here in minutes. So much for the value of impulsive heroics, he thought acridly; but at least it hadn't wasted too much time. He'd always been much better as a team player, anyway. "Hold on tight, Tom; I'm coming up," he called, getting a grip on his safety line.

"Just a second, Aaron," Henson said. "I've got the computer back now. Why don't you stay put while I try the clamp again like you suggested."

"All right. But make it snappy—it's freezing in here."

There was a heavy click, and the clamp arm telescoped smoothly back into itself, rotating to the horizontal as it did so. It paused for a second when fully retracted and then reversed direction, angling toward the landing gear like some rigid metallic snake attacking its prey in slow motion. It stopped, again a meter short, and with a sinking feeling Greenburg saw his mistake. "It's not just the angle the nosewheel's at," he informed the others. "The clamp rotates a little as each segment telescopes out, not all at once at the end of the extension. It's not quitting because it doesn't know how to proceed—it's quitting because it's run out of length."

"That's impossible," Betsy retorted. "I've checked the stats—the arm's got to be long enough to reach."

"Then it's been damaged somehow," Greenburg said irritably. If they had to replace the whole arm, and not just the clamp... He shivered as a newly sharpened sense of the shuttle's vulnerability hit him like a wet rag.

For a moment the drone of the turbofans was all he could hear. Then Carl Young said, "We'll have the ground people check it out when they get here. Greenburg, you might as well come out of there. You'll need to put the access panel back in place temporarily so we can repressurize the deck."

"Understood." Turning back to the curving wall, his hands numb with cold, Greenburg began to climb.

—

"The shuttle will dock in Six in about four minutes," the Skyport captain's voice came over the intercom.

"Okay, Carl," Betsy said. "Six, do you have someone at the bay to meet it?"

"Not yet," was the response. "We wanted to have all the stations up here manned during docking, to watch for any trouble. We could call in somebody off-duty, if you want."

"Don't bother," Paul Marinos said, unbuckling his seat belt and getting to his feet. "I'll go down and meet the shuttle. You won't need me before Tom gets back, will you?" he added looking at Betsy.

She shook her head. "Go ahead. As a matter of fact, you can probably escort Mr. Whitney back down on your way. Mr. Whitney, we very much appreciate your help here this morning."

"Uh, yeah. You're welcome."

Unlocking her chair, Betsy swiveled around. Whitney was hunched forward in his own seat, frowning intently at the computer display screen. "Anything wrong?" she asked, her mouth beginning to feel dry again. That shuttle would be trying to dock in a half-handful of minutes....

Whitney shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving the screen. "I'm just rechecking the readout, trying to see if there's anything that looks funny but somehow didn't register as a problem." He keyed for the next page; only then did he look up. "If it's not too much trouble, though, I'd really like to stay up here for a while. I can be an extra hand with the computer, and there's another project I want to discuss with you."

"Passengers usually aren't permitted up here at all," Marinos said with a frown.

Whitney shrugged. "On the other hand, I am already here."

"All right," Betsy said, making a quick decision. Even if Whitney's primary motivation was nothing more than simple curiosity, he'd already been a big help to them. It was an inexpensive way to pay back the favor. "But you'll have to stay out from underfoot. For starters—" she pointed at the display—"you'll need to finish that up quickly, because Tom Lewis's on his way up to make some more blueprints."

"Yes, I know. I'll be finished." He turned back to the console. Nodding to her, Marinos left the flight deck.

Swiveling back forward, Betsy squeezed her eyes shut briefly and took a long, deep breath. The tension was beginning to get to her. She could feel her strength of will slowly leaking away; could feel her decision-making center seizing up—and this only some eighty minutes into the crisis.

The strength of her reaction was more than a little disturbing. True, the lives of a hundred-sixty people were hanging precariously in the balance back there... but she'd been holding people's lives in her hands since her first flight for the Navy back in 1980. She'd had her share of crises, too, probably the worst of them being the 747 that had lost power in all four engines halfway from Seattle to Honolulu. She'd had to put the monster into a five-thousand-foot dive to get the balky turbofans restarted—and she hadn't felt anything like the nervousness she was feeling now. Was it just the length of this crisis that was getting to her, the pumping of adrenaline for more than five minutes at a time? If so, she was going to be a wreck by the time this whole thing was resolved. Or—

Or was it the people—be honest, Betsy; the person—involved? Could being forced to deal with Eric Rayburn again really hit her this hard? "Excuse me, Captain; is it all right if I sit here?" She opened her eyes to see Whitney standing beside her, indicating the copilot's seat. Craning her neck, she saw that Lewis had returned and had taken over the computer terminal again. "Yeah, sure," she told Whitney, thankful for the interruption. "Just don't touch anything. Tom, you need any help?"

"No, thanks; just getting the schematics for the clamp arm mechanism, the emergency collar, and whatever I can find on the Skyport door and tunnel." Paper was beginning to come from the printer slot; Lewis glanced at it and then looked at Betsy. "Anything new from the shuttle?"

"Rayburn's still checking out his instruments. So far the altimeter, Collins nav system, and at least one of the vertical gyros seem to be out; the compass and collisionproofing are intact; the autopilot is a big question mark."

"I met Paul Marinos on the way up here. He said it was Rayburn who came up with that half-assed idea of letting the shuttle fly home alone."

"That's right," Betsy confirmed. "He's still making noises in that direction, too."

"Good. Aaron and I thought you'd thought it up, and we were getting a little worried."

She snorted. "Thanks for your confidence. You staying with Aaron after you deliver the schematics?"

"Depends on whether they need me or not," he said, pulling the last sheet from the printer slot and flipping the "off" switch. "Talk to you later."

He got up and left, and as he did so the intercom crackled. "This is Marinos. The shuttle has docked. Textbook smooth, I might add."

Betsy turned to the intercom grille, feeling a minor bit of the weight lift from her shoulders. "Aaron, you copy that? Prepare for company down there."

"Got it. Paul, let me know when you're all down, so I can start taking this panel off again."

"Will do."

The intercom fell silent, and Betsy leaned back in her seat again. Staring out the window at the blue sky, she tried to organize her thoughts.

"Captain? Are you all right?"

She glanced at Whitney, favoring him with a half smile. "I thought I told you we all went informal up here," she chided mildly. "My name's Betsy."

"Oh... well... you called me 'Mr. Whitney' a while back, so I thought maybe that had changed." He looked a little embarrassed.

"Force of habit, I guess. Anyone wearing a three-piece suit looks like management to me. And as to your question, yes, I'm fine."

"You look tired. How long have you been flying?"

A chuckle made it halfway up her throat. "About twenty-six years, all told. This session, though, less than an hour and a half. I came on duty just before the shuttle crashed."

"Oh." His tone said he wasn't thoroughly convinced.

She looked at him again. "Really," she insisted. "What you're calling tiredness is just tension, pure and simple."

The corner of his mouth quirked. "Okay. I always was a lousy detective." The quirk vanished and he sobered. "What do you think their chances are? Honestly."

"It all depends on how fast we can get the shuttle secured—or how fast we find out we can't do it."

Whitney frowned. "I don't follow. Are you talking about the—" he glanced at his watch—"six hours of fuel the shuttle's got left?"

"Basically—except that it's only about five and a half now; we nudged his thrust up a notch in two of his engines a while ago." She turned to face forward again, lips compressing into a thin line. "We're in a very neat box here, Peter. You know the Skyport clockwise circuit, don't you?"

"Sure: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, New Orleans, Houston, Dallas, L.A., San Francisco, Denver, Kansas City, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Washington, then back up the pike to Boston." He rattled off the names easily, as someone who'd learned them without deliberate effort. "A twelve-hour run, all told."

"Right. Now note that once we secure the shuttle, there are exactly two places we can land with it: the Skyport maintenance facilities at Mirage Lake, near L.A., and the Keansburg Extension of New Jersey; and L.A.'s probably a half hour closer. But—" she paused for emphasis—"between here and L.A. there are no Skyport cities. Which means no shuttles. Which means any equipment we want to bring aboard to work with has to come from here. Which means we have to stay here until we're sure we've got everything we're going to need."

"Wumph." Whitney's breath came out in a rush, and for a moment he was silent. "But couldn't you head toward L.A. right away, circling there until you have the clamp fixed? Oh, never mind; you'll probably need the transit time to work. But wait a second—you could head back east now, toward New Jersey. Any extra stuff you needed could be brought up from Atlanta, or even Washington; you'd pass close enough to both cities on the way."

She'd had the same brilliant idea nearly twenty minutes ago, and had been just as excited by it as he was. It was a shame to have to pop his bubble. "The fly in that particular soup in John Meredith, the injured shuttle copilot. If we stay here and then manage to get him and the other passengers out within an hour, say, we can get him to a hospital a lot faster than if we had to wait till we reached Atlanta. That time could be life or death for him—and it's the uncertain nature of his injuries, by the way, that gives our box its other walls. Besides," she added grimly, "if we wind up losing the shuttle completely, I'd rather try and find an empty spot in Arizona than in Pennsylvania to drop it into."

"Damn," he muttered. "You've thought through the whole thing, haven't you?"

"I hope not," she countered fervently. "Things don't look too good in my analysis. If I haven't missed something we're probably going to lose either an expensive shuttle or at least one irreplaceable life." She snorted. "Damn the FAA, anyway. We've been on their tail for at least two years now to push for a few more wing section-sized runways scattered among the major airports."

"Yeah, I've always thought it was a bad idea to leave thrust reversers off Skyport engines. The way things are now, you could lift a module off from a ridiculous number of runways that you couldn't put it down on in the first place."

"It's called economy. No one wants to build extra-big runways until they're sure the Skyports are going to catch on." She shook her head. "Enough self-pity. What's this project you mentioned?"

"Right. You said earlier that no one knew what sort of landing distance a wing section-shuttle combo would require. Well, I've done some figuring, and if I can use the combined computer facilities of two modules I think I can get you a rough estimate."

She blinked in surprise. "How?"

"My work for McDonnell Douglas has been on computer simulations for second-generation Skyport design. Most of it involves adjusting profile, mass, and laminar flow parameters and then testing for lift and drag and so on. I remember the equations I'd need and enough about module and shuttle shapes to get by. And it's not that complicated a program."

"What about the brakes and drogue chutes?" she asked doubtfully.

"I can put them in as extra drag effects."

Betsy frowned, thinking. There was no way the runways at Dallas would be long enough—of that she was certain. But... the figures would be nice to have. "Okay, if we can get two of the other wing sections to agree. You can't use Seven's computer; we'll need to leave it clear for the work down below."

"That's okay—I can link to the other systems and run everything from here."

Betsy turned toward the intercom. "Carl? What do you think?"

"It's worth trying. Two, Three—you've just volunteered your computers to Mr. Whitney's use."

It took Betsy a few minutes to show Whitney how to set up the two-system link, but once he got started he did seem to know what he was doing. She watched over his shoulder for a minute before returning to her seat. It was indeed a good idea, but she had to wonder why he hadn't simply called back his friend in Houston and had him run the program. With the—undoubtedly—larger machine there and the proper program already in place, they could surely have had the answer faster than Whitney could get it here. It was looking very much like he did indeed want an excuse to stay on the flight deck and observe the proceedings. She grimaced. The report he was presumably going to be making to McDonnell Douglas wasn't likely to be a flattering one.

She shook her head to clear away the cobwebs. There were plenty of unpleasant thoughts to occupy her; she didn't need to generate any extra ones. And, speaking of unpleasantries... Steeling herself, she pulled her half-headset mike to her lips and switched it on. "Skyport to Shuttle. Status report, please."

"Oh, there's nothing much new here, Liz—just sitting around watching my copilot dying."

She'd been unprepared for the sheer virulence of Rayburn's tone, and the words hit her with almost physical force. Unclenching her jaw with a conscious effort, she asked, "Is he getting worse? Dr. Emerson?"

"He sure as hell isn't getting any better," Rayburn snapped before the doctor could answer.

Betsy held her ground. "Doctor?" she repeated.

"It's hard to tell," Dr. Emerson spoke up hesitantly. "He's still unconscious and his breathing is starting to become labored, but his pulse is still good."

"Well, we should at least have him out from under all that metal soon," Betsy told him. "The ground crew's aboard now, and they'll be bringing a torch aboard to cut the chair free."

"Yeah, I can see them climbing in down there," Rayburn said. "How do they expect to get up here?"

"Through your side window; I presume they brought a rope ladder or something with them. You'd better open up and be ready to catch the end when they toss it up."

"Hell of a lot of good it's going to do," the shuttle pilot growled. "How're they going to get him back out—tie a rope around him and lower him like a sack of grass seed?"

"If he's not too badly injured, yes," Betsy said, feeling her patience beginning to bend dangerously. "If not, we'll figure out something else. We're going to try and rig up a ski lift track from your window to the Skyport door to get the passengers out; maybe we can bring Meredith out that way on some kind of stretcher."

"A ski lift track? Oh, for—Liz, that's the dumbest idea I've ever heard. It could take hours to put something like that together!"

The tension that had been building up again within Betsy suddenly broke free. "You have a better idea, spit it out!" she barked.

"You've already heard it," he snapped back. "Let me take this damn bird down now, and to hell with ski tracks and nosewheel clamps. All you're doing is wasting time."

"You really think you can fly a plane with its nose smashed in, do you?" she said acidly. "What're you going to use for altimeter, autopilot, and gyros?"

"Skill. I've flown planes in worse shape than this one."

"Maybe. But not with a sprained wrist, and not with a hundred-sixty passengers aboard. And not while under my command."

"Oh, right, I forgot—Liz Kyser's the big boss here." Rayburn's voice dripped with sarcasm. "Well, let me just remind you, Your Highness, that I don't need your permission to leave your flying kingdom. All it would take is a simple push on the throttle."

Betsy's anger vanished in a single heartbeat. "Eric, what are you saying?" she asked cautiously.

"Don't go into your dumb blonde act—you know what I'm talking about. All I have to do is cut power and snap those last two collar supports and you can yell about authority all you want."

"Yes—and you'll either fall nosedown with the collar still around you or drop it onto someone on the ground." Betsy forced her voice to remain quiet and reasonable. "You can't risk innocent people's lives like that, Eric."

"Oh, relax—I'm not going to do anything that crazy unless I absolutely have to. I'm just pointing out that you don't have absolute veto power over me. Keep that in mind while you figure out how to get John to a hospital."

"Don't worry. We want him safe as much as you do." Especially now. "We'll keep you posted." Reaching over, Betsy turned off the mike.

For a moment she just sat there, her mind spinning like wheels on an icy runway. The flight deck suddenly felt cold, and she noticed with curious detachment that the hands resting on the edge of her control board were trembling slightly. Rayburn's threat, and the implied state of mind accompanying it, had shocked her clear down to the marrow. He'd always been loyal to the crews he flew with—it had been one of the qualities that had first attracted her to him—but this was bordering on monomania. Bleakly, she wondered if the accident had damaged more than Rayburn's wrist.

There was a footstep beside her. Whitney, looking sandbagged. "Betsy, is he—uh—?" He ran out of words, and just pointed mutely toward her half-headset.

"You heard, huh?" She felt a flash of embarrassed annoyance that he, an outsider, had listened in on private Skyport trouble.

Whitney, apparently too shaken to be bothered by his action, nodded. "Is he all right back there? I mean, he sounds... overwrought."

"He does indeed," she acknowledged grimly. "He's under a lot of pressure—we all are."

"Yeah, but you're not threatening to do something criminally stupid." He gestured at the intercom. "And why didn't Captain Young at least back you up?"

"He probably wasn't listening in—the radio doesn't feed directly into the intercom." She took another look at his expression and forced a smile she didn't feel. "Hey, relax. Eric hasn't gone off the deep end; he was just blowing off some steam."

"Hmm." He seemed unconvinced. "And how about you?"

The question caught her unprepared, and Betsy could feel the blood coloring her face. "I got a little loud there myself, didn't I?" she admitted. "I guess I'm not used to this kind of protracted crisis. Usual airplane emergencies last only as long as it takes you to find the nearest stretch of flat ground and put down on it."

"I suppose so. Anything I can do?"

"Yes—you can haul yourself back to the computer and finish that program."

Surprisingly, something in her tone seemed to relieve whatever fears he had about her, because the frown lines left his forehead and he even smiled slightly. "Aye, aye, Captain," he said and headed aft again.

Well, that's him convinced. Now if only she could persuade herself as to Rayburn's self-control. Pushing the half-headset mike away almost savagely, she leaned toward the intercom. "Aaron, Paul—what's holding things up down there?"

—

The rolled-up end of thin rope smacked against the top of the window as it came in through the opening. Startled a bit by the sudden noise, Dr. Emerson turned his head—the only part of his body he could conveniently turn in the cramped cockpit—in time to see Captain Rayburn field the rope and begin pulling it in. Tied to the other end, its rungs clanking against the side of the shuttle, was a collapsible ladder, of the sort Emerson made his kids keep under their bunk bed at their Grand Prairie condo. He watched as Rayburn set the outsized hooks over the lower edge of the window and then turned back to his patient with a silent sigh of relief. At least the waiting was over. Now all he had to do was worry that Meredith was healthy enough to satisfy Rayburn—and that, he reflected darkly, was definitely a major worry. Rayburn's last stormy conversation with the Skyport had completely shattered Emerson's comfortable and long-held stereotype of the unflappable airline pilot and had left him with a good deal of concern. Searching the unconscious copilot's half-hidden face, Emerson wondered what it was about this man that had caused Rayburn to react so violently. Was he a good friend? Or was it something more subtle—did he remind Rayburn of a deceased brother, for instance? Emerson didn't know, and so far he hadn't had the nerve to ask.

"Okay, Doc, here they come." Rayburn, who'd been leaning his head partly out the window, began unsnapping his safety harness. "Let's get out of here and give them room to come in."

Emerson rose from his crouch, grimacing as his legs registered their complaint. Trying to look all directions at once, he backed carefully out of the tiny space, and made it out the cockpit door without collecting any new bruises. Rayburn was out of his seat already, standing in the spot Emerson had just vacated, shouting instructions toward the window. "Okay—easy—just keep it away from the instruments—okay, I've got it." Two small gas tanks, wrapped together by metal bands and festooned with hoses, appeared in his hands and were immediately tucked under his right arm. The second package was, for Emerson, far more recognizable: the big red cross on the suitcase-sized box was hard to miss. A moment later he had to take a long step toward the shuttle's exit door as Rayburn backed out of the cockpit. "Watch the controls!" he shouted once more as he set down his burden and reached back with a helping hand.

It took only a few minutes for them to all come aboard. There were three: two mechanic-types who set to work immediately turning the gas tank apparatus into an acetylene torch; and an older man who caught Emerson's eye through the small crowd and headed back toward the passenger section. Emerson took the cue and followed.

"I'm Dr. Forrest Campbell," the newcomer introduced himself when the two men reached the pocket of relative quiet at the forward end of the passenger compartment.

"Larry Emerson. Glad to have you here. You work for the airline?"

"Temporarily co-opted only—and as the man said, if it weren't for the honor I'd rather walk." He nodded down the rows of ski lift seats. "First things first. Are the passengers in need of anything?"

"Nothing immediate. There are some bruises and one or two possible sprains. Mostly, everyone's just scared and cold."

"I can believe that," Campbell agreed, shivering. "I'm told the Skyport's come down to eight thousand feet, but it still feels like winter in here. I hope the next shuttle up thinks to bring some blankets. All right, now let's hear the bad news. How's the copilot?"

"Not good." Emerson gave all the facts he had on Meredith's condition, plus a few tentative conclusions he hadn't wanted to mention in Rayburn's earshot. "We'll have to wait for a more thorough examination, of course, but I'm pretty sure we're not going to be able to risk lowering him out that window at the end of a rope."

"Yes... and I doubt that a stretcher would really fit. Well, if we can get him stable enough he can stay here until the shuttle can be landed again."

"I guess he'll have to." A sharp pop came from the cockpit, and looking past Campbell he saw the room aglow with blue light. "I hope they're not going to fry him just getting him out," he muttered uneasily.

"They'll have attached a Vahldiek conductor cable between the part of the chair stem they're cutting and the fuselage, to drain off the heat," Campbell assured him. "Let's go back in; this shouldn't take long."

It didn't. They had barely reentered the exit door area—now noticeably warmer—and opened the big medical kit when the torch's hiss cut off. Rayburn stepped back from the doorway, muttering cautionary instructions as the unconscious copilot, still strapped into his seat, was carried carefully out of the cockpit.

"For now, just leave him in the chair," Campbell said as they set down the seat and disconnected the thin high-conduction line. Stethoscope at the ready, he knelt down and got to work.

Emerson stepped over to Rayburn. "Shouldn't you be getting back to the cockpit, Captain?" he suggested quietly.

Rayburn took a deep breath. "Yeah. Take care of him, Doc, and tell me as soon as you know anything."

"We will."

Stepping carefully around the figures on the floor, Rayburn went forward, and Emerson breathed a sigh of relief. At least the shuttle had a pilot again, should something go wrong with what was left of the docking collar. Now if only that pilot could be persuaded not to do anything hasty... He shivered, wondering if Rayburn would really rip the shuttle from its unstable perch... wondering if the Skyport's holding pattern was taking them over Grand Prairie and his family.

Pushing such thoughts back into the corners of his mind, he squatted down next to Dr. Campbell and prepared to assist.

—

"All right, let it out again—real easy," the gravelly voice of Al Carson said in Greenburg's ear. Mentally crossing his fingers, Greenburg kept his full attention on the clamp arm as, up on the flight deck, Henson gave it the command to extend.

But neither Greenburg's wishes nor Carson's quarter-hour of work had made any appreciable change in the arm's behavior. As near as Greenburg could tell from his viewpoint by the access panel, the arm followed exactly the same path he'd seen it take earlier. It certainly came up just as short.

Carson swore under his breath. Once again he took the sheaf of blueprints from his assistant, and once again Greenburg gritted his teeth in frustration. Neither Carson nor the rest of his crew were experts on Skyport equipment—such experts were currently located only on the east and west coasts—but even so they'd identified the basic problem in short order: one of the four telescoping segments of the arm apparently was not working. That much Carson had learned almost immediately from the blueprints (and Greenburg still felt a hot chagrin that he hadn't caught it himself); but all the lubricating, hammering, and other mechanical cajolery since then had failed to unfreeze it. And they were running low on time.

"Hey, you—Greenburg." Carson gestured up at him. "C'mere and give us a hand, will you?"

"Sure." Gripping the line coming from his safety harness—a real safety harness; the ground crew had brought along some spares—he stepped up on the box they'd placed beneath the opening and wriggled his way through. He was most of the way into the bay before he remembered to check the space above him for falling debris, but Lady Luck was kind: none of the rest of the crew was working directly overhead. He gave their operation a quick once-over as the motorized safety line lowered him smoothly down the bay wall, and was impressed in spite of himself. The Skyport tunnel had been run out as far to the side as possible and locked in place pointing toward the open cockpit window, and already the first part of the ski lift framework had been welded between the tunnel and shuttle fuselage. A second brace was being set in place; two more, and the track itself could be laid down. It wouldn't take long; six men—fully half the group that had come up—were working on that part of the project alone. In Greenburg's own opinion more emphasis should have been placed on getting the clamp attached, but he knew it would be futile to argue the point. The crew took their orders from the airline, and the airline clearly had its own priorities.

He reached bottom and, squeezing the manual release to generate some slack in his line, ducked under the shuttle and headed over to where Carson and his assistant waited. "All right," the boss said, indicating a place on the clamp arm. "Greenburg, you and Frank are going to pull here this time. Henson? Back it up about halfway."

The arm slid back. Greenburg and Frank gripped the metal and braced themselves as Carson armed himself with a large screwdriver and hammer. On his signal Henson started the arm out again, and as the other two pulled, Carson set the tip of the screwdriver at the edge of the segment and rapped it smartly with the hammer.

It didn't work. "Damn," Carson growled. "Well, okay, if it was the catch that was sticking that should have been taken care of it. The electrical connections seem okay—the control lines aren't shorted. That leaves the hydraulics," He picked up the blueprints and started leafing through them. "Okay. We got separate lines for each segment, but they all run off the same reservoir. So it's gotta be in the line. You got any pressure indicators on these things up there?"

"We're supposed to," Henson replied. "But we seem to have lost them when the emergency collar went—"

"Wait a second," Greenburg cut in as his brain suddenly made a connection. "The hydraulic lines for the arm run by the emergency collar?"

"Yeah, I think so," Carson said. "Why?"

Lewis, listening from outside the bay, swore abruptly. "The broken hydraulic lines!"

"Broken lines?" Carson asked sharply. "Where?"

"Back there, by the emergency collar." Even as he said it Greenburg remembered that the ground crew had been brought into the cargo deck further forward, that they hadn't seen the pool of hydraulic fluid that he and Lewis had had to step over earlier. "There's leakage on both sides of the bay. Most of it's from the collar itself, we think, but some of it could be from the line that handles this segment. Couldn't it?"

"Sure could." Carson didn't look very happy as he found the schematic he wanted and glared silently at it for a moment. "Yeah. All the arm segment lines run separately all the way to the reservoir, it looks like, so that if one gives you've still got all the rest. They all run along the starboard side of the bay, right where the shuttle hit. Ten'll get you a hundred that's the trouble."

"Rick? How about it?" Greenburg called.

"Probably." Henson sounded disgusted. "I think the sensors are located in that same general area. You could probably track the line back visually and confirm it's broken."

"For the moment don't bother; its not worth the effort," Betsy's voice came in for the first time in many minutes. "Mr. Carson, can it be fixed or will we have to replace the whole arm?"

"I don't know. Frankly, I'm not sure either one can be done outside a hangar. Leastwise, not by me."

"I see." There was a pause—an ominously long pause, to Greenburg's way of thinking. "I'd like you to look at the arm, anyway, if you would, and see how much work replacing it would take. Aaron, would you come to the flight deck, please? We need to have a consultation."

"Sure, Bets." He made the words sound as casual as possible, even as his stomach curled into a little knot inside him. Whatever she wanted to discuss, it was something she didn't want the whole intercom net to hear... and that could only be bad news.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he headed back under the access panel and, kicking in his harness's motor, began to climb the wall.

—

It was, to the best of Betsy's knowledge, the first time the closed intercom system had ever been used aboard a Skyport, and she found her finger hesitating slightly as it pressed the button that would cut Seven's flight deck off from everyone except Carl Young on Four. But she both understood and agreed with the Skyport captain's insistence that this discussion be held privately. "All set here, Carl," she said into the grille.

"All right," the other's voice came back. "I'm sure I don't have to remind either of you what time it's getting to be."

"No, sir." The instrument panel clock directly in front of her read 10:02:35 EST, with the seconds ticking off like footsteps toward an unavoidable crossroads. "At just about fourteen twenty-five the shuttle runs out of fuel. If we're going to reach Mirage Lake before that happens, we're got to leave Dallas right now."

"Or in twenty minutes, if we wind up running right to the wire," Greenburg muttered from the copilot's chair. A shiver ran visibly through his body; but whether it was an aftereffect of the cold air down below or a reaction to the same horrible image that was intruding in Betsy's own mind's eye, she had no way of knowing.

"True; but we don't dare cut things that fine," Young said. "We don't know how long those two collar supports will hold under a full strain. How is the forward clamp?"

"It's shot," Greenburg said succinctly. "One of the segments has a broken hydraulic line, we think."

"Replaceable?"

Greenburg hesitated. "I don't know. The ground crew boss doesn't think so."

"What about the escape system for getting the passengers out?"

"Proceeding pretty well. If no new problems crop up I'd say they'll be ready with the thing in half an hour or so."

"Well, that's something, anyway. Betsy, what's the latest on Meredith's condition?"

Betsy took a deep breath. "It's not good, I'm afraid. The doctors say he's got at least a couple of broken ribs, a possible mild concussion, and slow but definite internal bleeding. They've got him laid out on cushions in the shuttle's aisle and have asked for some whole blood to be sent up. I've already radioed the ground; it'll be brought by the next shuttle up."

Greenburg gave a low whistle. "That doesn't sound good at all."

"It's not," she admitted. "There's also evidence that some of the blood may be getting into one of his lungs. Even if it's not, putting new blood into him's a temporary solution at best."

"How long before he has to get to a hospital?" Greenburg asked bluntly, his eyes boring into Betsy's.

"The doctors don't know. At the moment he's relatively stable. But if the bleeding increases—" She left the sentence unfinished.

"Four hours to L.A. at this speed. That's a long time between hospital facilities," Young mused, and Betsy felt a stab of envy at the control in his voice. Ultimately, it was really Carl, not her, who was supposed to be responsible for the safety of the Skyport and its passengers. What right did he have to be so calm when she was sweating buckets over this thing?

"Wait a second," Greenburg spoke up suddenly. "It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. We could dock a shuttle in, say, Six and carry it with us to L.A. Then if Meredith got worse we could land him at any of the airports along the way."

"You're missing the point," Betsy snapped. The sharpness of her tone startled her almost as much as it did Greenburg, judging from his expression, and she felt a rush of shame at lashing out at him. "The problem," she said in a more subdued voice, "is that stuffing Meredith out that cockpit window and into a ski lift chair could kill him before we could get him down and to a hospital. The doctors didn't actually come out and say that they wouldn't allow it, but that was the impression I got. Given Rayburn's state of mind, I didn't want to press the point with him on the circuit."

"So what you're saying is that Meredith is stuck on the shuttle until it can be landed," Young said.

"Yeah, I guess that's basically what it boils down to," Betsy admitted. "Unless he takes a turn for the worse, in which case we'll probably have to go ahead and take the chance."

"Uh-huh." Young was silent for a moment. "All right, here's how things look from where I sit. I've been in contact with United, and they have absolutely insisted that getting the passengers out of the shuttle be our top priority—higher even than Meredith's life, if it should come to that. A second crew will be coming up with that shuttle you mentioned to help with the off-loading. The airline chiefs say they want—and I quote—'everyone safely aboard the Skyport with complimentary cocktails in their fists within an hour.' " For the first time, Young's voice strayed from the purely professional as a note of bitterness edged in. Somehow, it made Betsy feel a little better. "What happens to Meredith and the shuttle is apparently our problem until then, when presumably they'll be willing to lend more of a hand."

"So what do we do?" Greenburg asked after a short pause. "Get everything aboard that we'll need for the ski lift track and hightail it for L.A.?"

"We also need to fasten the shuttle more securely before we go," Betsy said. "Rayburn wants Meredith in a hospital immediately if not sooner, and if we try telling him he's going to have to wait another four hours he may try taking Meredith's safety into his own hands."

Greenburg frowned at her. "What do you mean?"

"Oh, that's right—you didn't hear that little gem of a conversation." In a half-dozen sentences Betsy summarized Rayburn's earlier outburst. Greenburg's eyes were wide with shocked disbelief by the time she finished. "Carl, we've got to get him out of that cockpit before he flips completely," he said, his left hand tracing restless patterns on the armrest.

"On what grounds? He hasn't actually tried to do anything dangerous. He could claim he was just blowing off steam."

"But—"

"No buts." The Skyport captain was firm. "We can't justify it—and besides, how do you think he'd react to an order like that?"

Greenburg clamped his lips together, and Betsy thought she saw some of the color go out of his face. "That's a little unfair," she said. "We don't know that he'd react irrationally." It felt strange to be defending Rayburn; quickly, she changed the subject. "Anyway, we're getting off the point. The immediate issue here is whether or not we head west in the next fifteen minutes. Carl, I guess this is your basic command decision."

Young's sigh was clearly audible. "I'm afraid I don't see any real alternative. We're just going to have to gamble with Mr. Meredith's life. All of the ski lift track and auxiliary equipment we're using only exists at fields that handle Skyport shuttles. If the crew putting the escape system together runs short of anything halfway to L.A. they'll have no way to get extra material quickly. We have to stay here at least until all of that's completed."

Betsy nodded; she'd more or less expected that would be the way the decision would break. The airline was clearly going to keep up the pressure, and the ski lift track system was the only way to get that many passengers off with anything like the speed and safety United would be demanding.

"And after they're off?" Greenburg asked quietly.

"We'll head toward L.A. and hope we've either secured the shuttle by then or that the last two collar supports are stronger than they look."

"Yeah." Shaking his head, Greenburg got to his feet. "I hope to hell we're doing the right thing, Carl. I'm not convinced, myself."

"Me, neither," Young acknowledged frankly. "But I don't see what else we can do. If we should somehow lose the shuttle with the passengers still aboard... it's not something I want to think about."

Greenburg nodded, shifting his gaze to Betsy. "I'm going back down and lend a hand, unless you need me here."

"No, go ahead. And Aaron—sorry I snapped at you earlier."

"Forget it. We're all tense." His hand touched her shoulder briefly and then he was gone.

"Betsy?" a tentative voice asked from behind her as she switched the intercom back to normal and the buzz of low-level conversation abruptly came back.

"Yes, Peter, what is it?" she asked, turning her head.

"I've got the first results of my program now, if you're interested."

She'd almost forgotten about Whitney; he'd been so quiet back there. "Sure. Let's hear the bad news."

"Well... it could be off ten percent or so either way, understand; but the number I get is seven point eight kilometers."

She did a rough conversion in her head, nodded heavily. "About twenty-five thousand four hundred feet."

"Close enough," he agreed. "I can probably get a more refined version to run before the shuttle passengers are off."

She shook her head. "Not worth it. The longest runway at Dallas is twenty thousand feet, and even if your numbers are fifteen percent high we still would never make it."

"Yeah." Whitney hesitated, a half-dozen expressions flickering across his face. "You know, Betsy, this really isn't any of my business... but I get the impression you're upset with yourself for not being—oh, as cool and calm as maybe you think you should be. Is that true?"

Betsy's first and immediate reaction was one of annoyance that he should bring up such a personal subject. Her second was that he was absolutely right, which annoyed her all the more. "How I feel about myself is irrelevant," she said, a bit tartly. "I'm in command here; that requires me to be competent at what I do. Pressure like this isn't new to me, you know—I've been in crisis situations before."

"But they haven't been like this one, I'll bet, because you're not really in command here—not entirely, anyway. That's where the trouble is." There was an odd earnestness in his face, as if it were very important for some reason that he get his point across to her. "You see, if you were flying a normal airplane, you would be in complete control—I mean as far as human control ever goes—because all the buttons and switches would be under your hands alone. But here—" he gestured aft, toward the shuttle—"here, even though you're still claiming all the responsibility for what happens, half of the control is back there, with Captain Rayburn. He's got a mind and will of his own; you can't force him to do what you want, like you can your engines or ailerons. Of course you're going to be under extra pressure—you're never had to persuade part of your plane to cooperate with you before! It's normal, Betsy—you can't let it throw you." He stopped abruptly, as if suddenly embarrassed by the vehemence of his unsolicited counsel. "I'll shut up now," he muttered. "But think about it, okay?" Without another word he slipped back to the computer console.

Betsy leaned back in her seat, her thoughts doing a sort of slow-motion tumble. The last thing in the world she had time for right now was introspection... but the more she thought about Whitney's words, the more sense they made. Certainly Rayburn was only nominally under her control—his threats had made that abundantly clear—while it was equally certain that diplomacy and persuasive powers had never been among her major talents. Was that really the underlying source of her tension, the fact that she wasn't properly equipped for that aspect of the crisis?

Oddly enough, the idea made her feel better. She wasn't, in fact, getting old or losing her nerve. She was simply facing a brand-new problem—and new problems were supposed to be stressful.

For the first time since the shuttle crash, Betsy felt the tightness in her stomach vanish completely as all her unnamed fears, now robbed of their anonymity, scurried back into the darkness. If controlling Rayburn was what was required, then that was what she would do, pure and simple. All it took was strength and self-confidence—and both were already returning to her. She would have to thank Whitney later for his well-timed brashness. Right now, however, she had work to do. "Greenburg?" she called into the intercom grille. "I've got a couple of suggestions on how you might fix that clamp."

—

Seen through the distorted view of a fisheye camera, the escape system apparatus resembled nothing more dignified than a jury-rigged carnival ride—but it worked, and it worked well, and that was what counted. Even as Betsy returned her attention to the monitor, a pair of legs poked out the cockpit window and, above them, a line and hook were handed up to the man leaning vertically along the windshield. Eye-level to him was the newly built ski lift track; into it he dropped the end of the hook. The hook immediately moved toward the passenger tunnel, and as the line tightened, the dangling legs bounced forward and out and become a business-suited man seated securely in a breeches-buoy type of sling. Even as he traveled toward the tunnel, an empty sling passed him going the other direction, and another set of legs poked tentatively out the cockpit window. Total elapsed time per passenger: about fifteen seconds. For all one hundred sixty of them... Betsy glanced at the clock and did the calculation. Maybe three or four left aboard now. And once they were off, a new confrontation with Rayburn was practically inevitable. Her throat ached with new tension as she tried to plan what she would say to him.

All too soon, the familiar voice crackled in her ear. "This is Rayburn. Everyone's off now except John and the two doctors. What's next?"

His harsh, clipped tone made the words a challenge, and Betsy felt the self-confidence of ninety minutes ago drain completely away. "We're leaving for L. A. in a few more minutes," she told him. "With the cable on your tow bar and the extra support of the escape system framework, the docking collar should hang on even after you run out of fuel."

"Who are you trying to kid, Liz?" The bitterly patronizing tone struck her like a slap in the face, and she felt her back stiffen in reaction. He continued, "I saw that so-called cable when they brought it in—it wouldn't hold for two minutes. And you're drunk if you think a little spot-welding along the fuselage is going to do any good at all."

Betsy opened her mouth, but no words came out. In smaller quantities, she shared his own doubts about the cable looped around the nosewheel and the end of the clamp; they'd done the best they could, but the clamp simply wasn't designed to handle a line of any real diameter. Heavier cables were available, but there weren't any good places to attach them, either on the shuttle or the inner bay wall. "There are other things we can try on the way," she said, getting her voice working at last. "A stronger line, perhaps run through the access panels we've been using." Though where the ends would be anchored she had no idea.

But Rayburn didn't even bother to raise that point. "Swell. And what about John—or don't you care if he bleeds into his gut for another four hours? What're you going to do, just keep pumping blood into him and hope the leaks don't get worse? Or maybe you're going to stuff an operating room in through the window?"

"And what do you think the shock of landing will do to him?" Betsy countered.

"He's got to land sometime. Better now than later, when he'll probably be weaker." Rayburn paused, as if waiting for an argument. But Betsy remained silent. "So okay, I'm going to take him down. I'll give you fifteen minutes to get rid of that cable and junk pile by my window; otherwise I'll just have to pull them out when I leave."

Betsy swallowed. She had no doubt that he could indeed tear off the cable if he really worked at it—and the chances were excellent he'd damage his front landing gear in the process. And that would essentially be signing his death warrant, because even if he somehow managed to keep the crippled plane from diving nose-first into the ground, there was no chance whatsoever that he could control it accurately enough to safely belly-land on a crash-foamed runway. He had to know that; he couldn't be that far gone. But she didn't have the nerve to call his bluff. "Eric, if you disobey orders like this you'll never fly again for any airline," she pointed out, trying to keep her voice reasonable. "You know that, don't you?"

"I don't give a damn about the airlines or your tin-god orders—you should know me better than that by now. All I care about any more is John's life. Fifteen minutes, Liz."

Stall, was all she could think of. "We have to get Dr. Emerson off the shuttle first," she told him, "You can't risk his life on this."

Rayburn snorted impatience. "All right. Doc! No, you—Doc Emerson. You're to get your things and leave; Skyport orders. Sorry, no... but, look, thanks for everything."

The earphone went silent. Betsy pushed the mike away from her with a trembling hand. Whitney's earlier words echoed through her mind—but it did no good to recognize on an intellectual level that once Rayburn defied her instructions she was absolved from all responsibility for the shuttle's safety. Emotionally, she still felt the crushing weight of failure poised above her shoulders.

Because, down deep, she finally knew what the real problem was. Not theoretical concepts like command and responsibility; not even Rayburn's open rebellion.

The problem was her. Leadership is what command is all about, she thought, a sour taste seeping into her mouth. A captain needs to act; but all I can do with Eric is react. She should have seen it long ago, and recognized it as the one remaining legacy of their long-since-broken relationship. Then, for reasons that had seemed adequate at the time, she had allowed his overpowering personality to take charge, submitting to his lead in all things, until in its subtle and leisurely way a pattern had been set for all their future interactions. He acted, she reacted; a simple, straightforward, and unbreakable rule... and men would probably die today because of it. And even as she contemplated that consequence of her failure, a second, more brutally personal one drove itself into her consciousness like a thorn under a fingernail: for a year and a half Rayburn's name, face, and voice had been instant triggers of guilt-tinged pain to her... and if he died now, under these circumstances, he would haunt her from his grave for the rest of her life. "No!" she hissed aloud, beating gently on the edge of her instrument panel with a tightly curled fist. The pattern could be broken; had to be broken. She couldn't afford to accept his assumption that no alternative solutions existed. Their lives, and her future sanity, could depend on her proving him wrong.

Gritting her teeth tightly together, she stared at the monitor screen, her eyes dancing over the broken shuttle, the inside of the bay, the inadequate cable. Somewhere in all of that there was an answer.... Dr. Emerson's legs appeared through the cockpit window, his hand groping upward with the hook until the man on the windshield took it from him and set it in place. The line tightened and the doctor popped out of the window, flailing somewhat with his carry-on bag as he swung in midair.

And Betsy had the answer. Maybe.

"Peter!" she called, spinning around in her chair. "Did you finish that second landing-distance analysis yet?"

Whitney looked up at her. "Yes—it came out a little better this time: about seven point seven one kilometers, plus or minus five percent, maybe."

"How much worse would it be on a foamed runway?"

He blinked. "Uh, I really don't know—"

"Never mind. Warm up the machine again; I need some fast numbers from you." She flicked on her mike again. "Eric? Hold the ceremonies; I've got an idea."

"Save your breath. Whatever you've come up with, I'm going anyway."

"I know," she said, smiling coldly to herself. "But you're not going alone. We're going to hand-deliver you."

—

The sky had been a perfectly cloudless blue when the Skyport first approached Dallas earlier that morning. Now, five hours later, it looked exactly the same, giving Betsy a momentary feeling of d?j? vu. But the sensation faded quickly. The airport that was just coming into view through the flight deck windows was to the north of them this time, instead of to the west, and even at this distance the heavily foamed runway was clearly visible in the noonday sun. And the throbbing roar of the engines behind her was a powerful reminder that this time the silver giant that was Wing Section Seven was fully awake.

"Range, twenty miles," Greenburg said from the copilot's seat. "Sky's clear for at least five miles around us."

She nodded receipt of the information, her eyes tracing a circuit between the windows, the computerized approach monitor, and the engine and other instrument readings. They were barely six minutes from touchdown now, and the pressure was beginning to mount. For a moment she wished she'd accepted Lewis's offer to do the actual landing, which would have left her with Henson's task of coordinating operations with the shuttle. But Lewis had already put in a full shift when the accident occurred, and whether he would admit it or not he was bound to be getting tired. Besides, this gamble was Betsy's idea alone. If something went wrong, she didn't want anyone else to share in the blame. Or in the physical danger, for that matter—but there she'd met with somewhat less success. Ordering Lewis and the rest of Seven's off-duty flight crews to join the passengers in moving across to Five and Six had resulted in a quiet but firm mutiny. They'd helped the flight attendants get the passengers moved out, but had then returned en masse to the lounge, where most of them had spent the rest of the morning anyway, out of the way of the on-duty crew but close by if needed. Betsy had groused some about it, but not too loudly; though she couldn't imagine what help they could possibly be, their presence was somehow reassuring.

And reassurance was definitely something she could use more of. "Eric, we're about four minutes away. Are you ready?"

"As ready as I'm going to be." Even half buried in the rumble of Seven's engines, Rayburn's voice sounded nervous, and Betsy felt a flash of sympathy for him. The shoe that had been pinching her all morning was now squarely on his foot. Not only was his plane going to be brought down by someone else while he himself had to sit passively by, but he was going to be essentially blind during the entire operation. "You just be sure to hold a nice steady deceleration once we hit the runway."

"Don't worry." Betsy stole a quick glance at the bay monitor. The escape system had been dismantled before Seven broke off from the rest of the Skyport, and the passenger tunnel retracted into the bay wall; the front landing gear, freed from the tethering cable, had been similarly retracted into its well. Betsy's jaw tightened and she winced at the thought of the shuttle hitting that foamed runway belly-first at a hundred-twenty knots. Rayburn would have a massive job on his hands at that point, trying to maintain control of his skid while bringing the shuttle to a stop. But there was no way around it—the shuttle couldn't leave the docking bay with its nosewheel extended, and with less than a six-foot drop from its docked position to the ground there would be nowhere near enough time to get the landing gear in position once the shuttle was out. She hoped to hell the airport people had been generous with the foam.

"Seven miles to go," Greenburg murmured. "Final clearance has been given. Speed at one-seven-five."

One hundred seventy-five knots—one statute mile every eighteen seconds; a good fifty knots higher than the shuttle's own landing speed—and even at that Seven was barely staying aloft. Betsy's mouth felt dry as she made a slight correction in their approach path. Not only did she need to put Seven down on the very end of the runway if they were going to have any chance of pulling this off, but the runway itself was only two hundred feet wide, barely thirty feet wider than Seven's wheel track. She needed to hit it dead center, and stay there... and all of its markings were hidden by the foam.

"Betsy!" Henson's voice crackled with urgency. "Rayburn's lowered his main landing gear!"

"What?" Both her hands were busy, but Greenburg was already leaning over to switch the TV to Seven's outside monitor... and Henson was right. "Rayburn!" she all but bellowed into her mike. "What in hell's name do you think you're doing?"

"Trying to make this landing a little easier," he said, his voice taut.

"How?—by skidding into Dallas on your nose?"

"No—listen—all I have to do is control my exit from the bay so that my nosewheel is clear before I'm completely out."

"And then what—dangle by your nose until the wheel is down?" Betsy snorted. "Forget it. If you don't make it you could go completely out of control when you hit. Retract that gear, now."

"I can do it, Betsy—really. Please let me try."

For Betsy it was the final irony of the whole crisis; that Rayburn, having resisted her authority all morning, should be reduced to wheedling to get his way, even to the point of discarding the use of her hated nickname. But she felt no satisfaction or sense of triumph—only contempt that he would stoop to such shabby tactics, and bitter disappointment that he thought her fool enough to fall for something that transparent. And with sudden clarity she realized the reason for his new submissiveness: with Seven flying at such a low altitude Rayburn couldn't risk the unilateral action he'd hinted at earlier, because there was no way to guess whether or not the collar, once torn loose, would fall off fast enough for him to regain flying trim.

But it wasn't going to work. She was finally in command here, and nothing he could say or do was going to change that. If he didn't retract his gear as ordered she would simply pull out of her approach and circle the field until he did. This would be done her way or not at all.

Beside her, Greenburg shifted in his seat. "It's your decision, Betsy," he murmured, just loud enough for her to hear over the engines. "What do you think?"

She opened her mouth to repeat her order to Rayburn... and suddenly realized what she was doing.

She was still reacting to him.

It's your decision, Betsy. For the first time in years she really paused to consider what the words decision and command required of her. Among other things, they required that she dispassionately consider Rayburn's idea on its own merits, that she weigh his known piloting skill higher than his abrasive personality. And for perhaps the first time ever, she realized that accepting a good suggestion from him was not a sign of weakness. Perhaps even the opposite...

The airport filled the entire window, the foamed runway pointing at her like a sawed-off spear less than a mile away. "All right," she said into her mike. "But you damn well better pull this off, Eric. And do not jump the gun."

"Got it. And... thanks."

The individual undulations in the foam were visible now as the edges of the runway disappeared from her field of view. Betsy eased back on the throttle, remembering to compensate for the fact that the shuttle's extra length limited the attack angle she could use to kill airspeed just before touching down. The leading edge of the foam flashed past—and with a jolt the wing section was down.

"Chutes!" she snapped at Greenburg, tightening her grip on the wheel as she braced for the shock. A moment later it came, throwing her roughly against her shoulder straps as the two drogue chutes on each end of the wing burst from their pods and bit into the air. Grimly, she held on, riding out the transient as she fought to keep Seven's wheels on the slippery runway. Within seconds the shaking had subsided from dangerous to merely uncomfortable, and Betsy could risk splitting her attention long enough to ease in the brakes. The straps dug a little deeper into her skin as the wheels found some traction. But it wasn't nearly enough, and she knew at that moment that Whitney's numbers had indeed been right: there was no possible way for Seven to stop on this runway. She could only hope the other numbers he'd worked out for her were equally accurate.

Through the vibrational din she could hear Greenburg shouting into his mike: "One-sixty... one-fifty-five... one-fifty..." Seven's speed, decreasing much too slowly. Betsy gritted her teeth and concentrated on her steering, trying to ignore the trick of perspective that made the end of the runway look closer than it really was. There were no shortcuts that could be taken here; if Seven was moving fester than a hundred-twenty knots when they released the shuttle, the smaller aircraft would become airborne, with the disastrous results she was risking Seven's crew precisely to avoid. "...one-forty... one-thirty-five—get ready—" A sudden thought occurred to Betsy. "Eric!" she shouted, interrupting Greenburg's countdown. "Just before we release the collar we'll cut all braking here—that'll give you a constant speed to work against instead of a deceleration. You copy that, too, Rick?"

"Roger. Cue me, will you?"

"Right. Aaron, drop the chutes at one-twenty exactly."

"Roger. One-twenty-five... three, two, one, mark!"

There was no jerk this time, just a sudden drop in shoulder-strap pressure as one of the discarded drogues flashed briefly across the outside monitor screen. Simultaneously, Betsy released the brakes, and Seven was once again rolling free. "One-nineteen," Greenburg sang out.

"Collar!" Betsy snapped to Henson—and for the first time since touchdown gave her full visual attention to the monitor screen.

It was probably the finest display of engine and brake control that she had ever witnessed. Released abruptly from all constraints, the shuttle's tail dropped the short distance to the runway, landing on its main gear with a bump and splash of foam that made Betsy wince. At the same time the shuttle slid backward across the screen, as the extra air drag on its less aerodynamic shape tried to pull it out of the bay. But almost before the sliding began it was abruptly halted as Rayburn, with a touch even more skillful than Betsy had expected, nudged his engines up just exactly enough to compensate. She watched, fascinated, as the shuttle drifted back another few feet and again halted. There it sat, balanced precariously by its battered nose on the docking bay rim, its wheels and engines kicking up foam like mad, while its nosewheel—finally clear of the bay's confines—descended and locked in place.

And then, with one final lurch, the shuttle vanished from the screen.

"He's free!" Henson shouted unnecessarily. A tower controller, his voice a bare whisper in Betsy's ear, confirmed it, adding something about the shuttle being under good control as it braked... but Betsy wasn't really listening to him. Ahead, barely a mile of runway was left to them—just thirty seconds away at their current speed... and there was no way on Earth for them to stop before they reached it.

But Betsy had no intention of stopping. Instead, she opened the throttle all the way, and with a thunderous roar that drowned out even the rumble of landing gear on tarmac, the giant plane leaped forward, pushing Betsy deeply back into the cushions of her seat. Beside her, Greenburg would be calling off the speed increments; but she couldn't hear him, and she didn't dare take her eyes from the window to check the numbers for herself. She could see the end of the runway rushing toward her, and unconsciously she braced herself for the terrible crash that would signify that her gamble had failed. The edge of the foam swung at her like a guillotine blade—passed beneath her—

And the crash didn't come. Instead, the barren ground at the end of the runway flashed by, visibly receding below.

They'd done it!

—

Betsy let Lewis and Greenburg handle the routine business of flying Seven back to link up again with the rest of the Skyport. The two had insisted, and Betsy's hands were shaking so much from delayed reaction that doing it herself would have been difficult. Besides, a sort of celebration had erupted spontaneously in Seven's crew lounge, at which the wing captain's presence was being demanded.

What with the flurry of congratulatory hugs and handshakes and the general babble of tension-releasing conversation, Betsy missed the exact moment when the link-up occurred; her first real indication that Seven was back with the Skyport was the two grinning figures that strode unexpectedly into the lounge.

"Hey, Carl!" the first person to spot them shouted, waving a dangerously full glass. "Join the celebration!"

"Sorry—I can't spare the time," the Skyport captain said, speaking just loudly enough to penetrate the racket. "I just came by to congratulate Betsy in person. Mr. Whitney seems to think he's earned the right to do likewise."

"Thanks," Betsy called, handing her glass of fruit juice—she was on duty, after all—to the nearest bystander and making her way through the crowd. "Hang on a second—I want to talk to both of you."

She led them out into the hallway, where normal conversational levels would be possible. Once outside the din she turned to Young; but he'd already anticipated her first question. "I just talked to the tower," he said, "which had been in contact with the hospital. The landing did some extra damage to Meredith's internal bleeding problems, but with the ambulance and emergency room personnel standing by they think they got him in time. I'm also told, though very unofficially, that he probably wouldn't have made it if we'd tried to take him to L.A. instead."

Betsy let out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. They really had done it; they'd gambled Seven, the shuttle, and a lot of lives, and had won back all of it.

Young was still talking. "We're moving your passengers back in for the moment, though of course they'll have to leave again before we reach L.A. I've talked to McDonnell Douglas and United, and they'll have another wing section ready to replace you when we arrive. This one was due to go in for routine maintenance next month, anyway; you'll just be a little early." He harrumphed. "The United man I talked to seemed a bit concerned that you'd be landing with your corner drogues missing. I told him that anyone who can do a touch-and-go with a flying football field wasn't someone he needed to worry about."

She smiled. "That's for sure. After today, landing at Mirage Lake will feel like aiming to hit Utah. No problem."

"Well, at least you've got your confidence back," Young said, smiling in return. "I had been wondering about that earlier."

"Me, too," she admitted. "Which reminds me... Peter, I owe you a vote of thanks for that pep talk on command and responsibility you gave me a few hours ago. I don't know if it really made sense to me at the time, but it was just what I needed to break up the gloom and panic I was digging myself into."

Whitney actually blushed. "Yeah, well... I felt a little strange playing psychiatrist but... well, I had to say something. I was getting pretty worried about Captain Rayburn, and, frankly, I was scared to death you were going to go off the same end of the pool—no offense."

"No offense," Betsy assured him. "I can't honestly say that I wasn't a little worried about it myself." She shook her head, turning serious. "I still can't believe Eric went so badly to pieces. I know he was worried about Meredith's safety, but he was getting practically obsessive about it. He'll be very lucky if United doesn't boot him out for insubordination."

Young cleared his throat self-consciously. "Actually, Betsy, I suspect his flying career is over anyway. I haven't got any proof yet, of course, but I'll wager any sum of money that when the shuttle's flight recorder is played back it'll show that Rayburn had his automatic approach system off and was flying manually when the crash occurred. He's docked like that before, I'm pretty sure, and if we hadn't hit that patch of turbulence he might have gotten away with it this time, too."

Betsy felt her eyes widen in disbelief... but even as she opened her mouth to argue, all the puzzling parts of the incident suddenly made sense, and she knew he was right.

"But isn't that dangerous, not to mention illegal?" Whitney asked.

"Highly," Young told him, answering both parts of the question. "Even with an empty shuttle, which is how I gather he usually does it. Whatever possessed him to try it with a full passenger load I'll never know."

Betsy's lip curled, ever so slightly; but she held her peace. A figurative rape, perhaps? Or just an overwhelming desire to prove in her presence that he was a superior pilot? It didn't really matter; either way, it told her something about Eric Rayburn that she had never suspected.

"Anyway, as long as that's just my unsupported opinion, I'd appreciate it if you'd both keep it to yourselves," Young was saying. "Betsy, I've got to get below now, help ease any ruffled feathers among the passengers. Congratulations again on your fine job here." With a nod to Whitney, the Skyport captain headed off down the hall.

Betsy watched him go, but without really seeing him. So it comes full circle, she thought bemusedly. I fight to quit reacting to Eric, and find out he's been reacting just as blindly and irrationally to me. She shook her head minutely. Puppets, all of us—even all the ones who think they're mavericks. Puppets pulling on each others' strings.

"I suppose I should go back down, too," Whitney said, breaking into her thoughts. "It was really a privilege to watch you in action, Betsy—thanks for letting me be part of it."

"Just a minute, Peter," she said as he turned to go, pushing the growing bitterness determinedly from her mind. After all, she was only forty-five—far too young to become a cynic. "I seem to recall you were interested earlier in a tour of the Skyport topdeck. That still true?"

"Uh, yes," he said, an uncertain smile playing around his lips. "If it's not too much trouble."

"No trouble at all." And besides, reacting with cynicism would just be giving Rayburn one final victory over her. "Come on, we'll start with the crew lounge. Drinks are on the house—and I understand the fruit juice is excellent today."