Brown, Dale - Independent 01 (9 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

           
She was so
caught up in conflicting emotions that she didn’t notice the air force security
police jeep drive up alongside her. It was the heavy breathing of a huge
Doberman pinscher that pulled her back.

           
“This is a
restricted area,” one patrolman said as he approached, shining a flashlight
into Ann’s face, his M-16 automatic rifle at port arms. “Identification. Now.”

           
She
absently reached into a right thigh flight-suit pocket to retrieve her ID card.
It wasn’t until she had unzipped that the guard recognized her.

           
“Dr. Page?”
He took the ID card from her, scanned it, handed it back. “Saw your picture in
the paper. You’re going on this morning’s
flight           ”

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

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

           
“Yes. I was
just a little impatient to get to the pad so I decided to walk....”

           
“From the
main base?”

           
“I... I
ended up jogging. It felt good, peaceful....”

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

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

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

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

           
As her
attention drifted back to the security guard, she heard him saying he’d always
wanted to go up on the shuttle but didn’t have any specialized degree beyond a
B.S. Besides he was only an enlisted man...

           
“All you
need is a technical degree and you can be any rank. Doesn’t matter. Hey, I
don’t have any rank. I’m a civilian. They need technical degrees and volunteers
willing to dedicate themselves to the program. Back in the seventies and
eighties they wanted experienced flyers and senior officers. Now, they need
crewmembers for a whole range of jobs....”

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

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

 
 
         
SPACE
SHUTTLE
ENTERPRISE

 
          
Three hours later the crew of the
Space Shuttle
Enterprise
stepped into the elevator in the service tower and rode it to the orbiter entry
level. They walked across the service arm and into the “white room,” where
white-suited, surgical-masked technicians used vacuum cleaners to remove any
bits of dirt and gravel off their boots and uniforms that could accumulate in
the crew compartment during microgravity flight. Then, one at a time, they
walked toward the circular side hatch into the shuttle.

           
When it was
her turn, Ann stopped and shook hands with one of the techs.

           
“Thanks,”
she said quietly. They barely knew each other, but the emotions were the same.
No more words were necessary.

           
Originally,
Enterprise
had been built for landing tests. In 1977 it had been released off the back of
a modified Boeing 747 carrier plane to test its ability to glide to a landing
with no power. It was never intended that
Enterprise
ever
be launched into space.

           
The
Challenger
accident in 1986 had changed
that. It had been far less expensive to refit
Enterprise
for
space flight than to build a new orbiter, so the refitting process began late
in 1987.
Enterprise
inherited much of the new 1980s technology in space shuttle design. The first
difference was obvious as Ann stepped towards the entrance hatch—the absence of
the thermal protection system’s insulation tiles. Instead, the shuttle used a
smooth fabric blanket made of carbon-carbon—lighter, stronger and less
expensive than the silica tiles on
Columbia
and
Atlantis.
Earlier, only the shuttle’s nosecap and wing leading
edges had the extreme high-heat protection of carbon- carbon alloys—now the
entire surface had it. Whereas the old exterior had looked rough and scaly,
like a lizard’s skin, the new exterior was pure white, smooth and glassy.

           
Ann was
helped through the entry hatch and into the middeck area of
Enterprise
's
crew compartment, where she looked
down at the storage compartments, personal hygiene station, and airlock hatch.
“Weird,” she said, “I’m standing on the wall, like Spider Woman.”

           
Captain
Marty Schultz, the
Enterprise
's
payload specialist, was just stepping
up the ladder to the upper flight deck. “Wait till you get into orbit on
Silver
Tower
,” he said.
“Walls,
ceiling, up, down—all gone.
Silver
Tower
is another world.”

           
She crawled
up the ladder behind Schultz, who was now standing beside three seats on the
flight deck, and looking high “above”
herself
, saw Air
Force Colonel Jerrod Will, the mission commander, and Marine Colonel Richard
Sontag, the
Enterprise
's
pilot, in their seats. They looked
“down” as she crawled into the flight deck and pulled herself up.

           
“Crawl
across the seats and take the right side,” Schultz said. She maneuvered herself
across the flight deck and onto the right-hand mission-specialist seat. A
technician walking on marked areas on the payload control panel in the back of
the flight deck helped her strap in and handed her a “Snoopy’s hat”
communications headset, which looked like an old college football helmet with
wide ear cups.

           
“Your
portable oxygen system is on your right here,” the tech told her as Ann
strapped herself in. He talked her through a preflight of the portable oxygen
system, POS, and her comm panel while Schultz and Kevin Baker, the gray-haired
designer of the Silver Tower Thor interceptor missile system, crawled into
their seats. Ann felt more normal after she was strapped in, but the sight of
technicians standing sideways on the walls while she was seated facing up was
still disorienting.

           
“I can see
why some people get airsick on the ground,” Baker said.

           
Marty
Schultz gave the older man a reassuring look. “As I just told Ann, once they
close the hatch we’re in a new world. The first time I rode the shuttle the
transition from earth-normal to space-normal was really bizarre. 1 felt like I
was sitting on my back two hundred feet above ground.”

           
Ann could
feel her toes grip the front of her seat as Schultz went on. “But you get over
it. Now I look forward to the switch. Everything’s a lot freer in microgravity,
including your imagination.”

           
Colonel
Sontag glanced over his shoulder at the three mission specialists. “All
strapped in back here?” he asked over interphone. All three said they were.

           
Sontag gave
them a thumbs-up. A moment later: “
Enterprise
,
this is Vandenburg Launch Control, radio check on a/g channel
two.
Over.”

           
Colonel
Will: “Good morning, Control. Loud and clear, channel two.” The radio check was
repeated several times on a variety of frequencies.

           
“
Enterprise
,
we are T-minus eight-zero minutes,
mark. Launch advisory check.”

           
Over Will’s
right shoulder Ann could see a large red light marked “ABORT” snap on, grow
dim,
blink
off. “Abort check OK, out.”