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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Powersat (The Grand Tour)
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D
an had never seen Kinsky so worked up.
He had driven from the blockhouse back to Hangar A in the beat-up Chevy and rushed upstairs to his office, intent on calling Lynn Van Buren at the Caracas airport. But he saw from the expression on April’s face that trouble was brewing.
Before he could ask, she said in an urgent whisper, “Len’s in your office.”
“Right,” Dan said, remembering that he had told the public relations director to wait for him. “I’ll handle it.”
April gave him an
I hope so
expression as he opened the door and stepped into his office.
Kinsky was at the window, his shirt rumpled, his hair disheveled, his face blotchy red with anger. He whirled to face Dan.
“You launched it! Without telling me!”
Dan went to his desk but remained standing. “I didn’t tell anybody except the launch crew.”
“That’s the dumbest goddamned thing I ever heard of!”
“Len, don’t take it personally. I wanted to keep this as tight as possible so nobody from the government could step in and stop me.”
“They’re going to step in now, you crazy bastard.”
“I might be crazy,” Dan said calmly, trying to lighten up the mood, “but my parents had been married for years before I arrived.”
Kinsky was not placated. “This is a fucking disaster! You can’t go firing rockets off whenever you want to!”
Dan sat in his desk chair and tilted back slightly. “Len, you’re my P.R. director, not my boss.”
“What happens when the plane cracks up? You’ll be finished! Wiped out!”
“It’s not going to crack up. And there’s nobody in the plane. She’s flying on automatic.”
“How are you going to land it, then?”
“On automatic. If we need to, we can control her remotely for the landing.”
Kinsky paced across the office, shaking his head.
“She’s not landing here,” Dan said. “We won’t have any trouble with the FAA about clearing airspace, if that’s what’s worrying you.”
“You should have told me, Dan. I’m supposed to know these things.”
“I didn’t tell anybody except the launch team,” Dan repeated. “Hell, even the service crew didn’t know we were going to launch her. I told them this would be a static test.”
“I should’ve been told,” Kinsky muttered, still pacing. “How’s it look, your P.R. director being kept in the dark. Nobody will believe that. They won’t believe I didn’t know.”
“Len, it’s on my head, not yours.”
“The hell it is! They’re going to lean on me. People expect me to know, Dan! I get paid to know!”
“You get paid to handle public relations for Astro Manufacturing Corporation.” Dan tried to smile. “I think I’ve just handed you the juiciest news story of your career, Len. You’ll have the media crawling all over you in a couple of hours.”
“The hell I will,” Kinsky growled. He stopped his pacing and glared at Dan. “I quit! I’m getting out of here.”
Stunned, Dan heard himself say, “You can’t quit. I need you more than—”
“I quit!” Kinsky shouted. “I’m out of here!”
“You’re going back to New York?”
“No! It’s none of your business where I’m going.”
He banged the door open and practically ran out of Dan’s office and past April’s desk. Sitting with his mouth hanging open, Dan could hear the clanging of his footsteps echoing off the hangar walls out there.
April appeared in the doorway, looking apprehensive.
“What in the nine billion names of god got into him?” Dan asked, puzzled.
April shrugged. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, sure,” Dan said, still bewildered at Kinsky’s rage. With a shake of his head, he thought that Len would probably come back once he’d cooled off.
“I’ve got to talk to Van Buren in Caracas,” he said to April, returning to business. “No interruptions while I’m on the horn with her.”
April nodded and returned to her desk. She saw Dan’s private phone line light up on the desktop phone console. Picking up her own phone, she quick-dialed her home number, hoping that Kelly hadn’t gone out.
 
 
K
elly Eamons was sitting on the unmade sofabed in the living room of April’s apartment, arguing with her partner Chavez on her cell phone.
“You’ve got to get back here, Kelly. The brass upstairs wants you back in the office, pronto.”
“We’re getting close to a break, Nacho. I can feel it.”
Chavez’s image in the tiny cell phone screen looked like a darkening thundercloud, though his voice was quietly intense. “You know what I’m feeling? I’m feeling the hot breath from all the way upstairs right on the back of my neck.”
“Hold them off for a few more days.”
“We don’t have a few more days. Upstairs wants you back here in the office. They say there’s no budget for field work on this case.”
“Nacho, there’s something going on here. Really there is.”
“You’ve got to get back here, Kelly. No fooling, kid.”
“Give me two more days.”
“I can’t give you anything.”
“Tomorrow, then.”
“Today. I need to see your smiling face here in the office before close of business today.
Comprende?
”
The apartment phone rang. Saved by the bell, Eamons thought. “I’ve got to run, Nacho.”
“You damned well better be running back here, partner. You’re making me look bad, you know.”
“Right. See ya.” Eamons clicked the cell phone off with her thumb and picked up the phone from the table beside the sofabed.
“Kelly?” April’s voice. She swiftly told the FBI agent of Kinsky’s nearly hysterical shouting at Dan.
“He said he’s leaving. Quitting the company.”
Eamons thought a moment, then asked, “How deep do you want to get into this?”
“What do you mean?” April asked.
Shifting the phone to her other ear, Eamons replied, “Are you willing to call Kinsky? Are you willing to go over to his apartment?”
 
 
R
oberto saw that some kid had scrawled WASH ME across the dust-covered back doors of the panel truck he was using. With a sullen growl, he pulled the checkered bandana from the back pocket of his coveralls and erased the graffito. Better to have a clean spot. Somebody might remember a WASH ME message, identify the truck maybe.
Inconspicuous. Roberto tried to stay as inconspicuous as possible. His size worked against him, but he wore a workman’s frayed coveralls and drove an ordinary pickup truck. Just another Hispanic working man, as far as anyone could tell. The region was full of Latinos, greasers, spics, darkskinned men with moustaches and sad brown eyes, old before their time because they had to do the shit jobs that the Anglos wouldn’t touch. Roberto seethed with anger as he drove southwest out of Houston. The multilane expressway petered into U.S. 59, a dual-lane highway as far as Victoria, where he would turn off onto route 77.
He kept to the speed limit. No sense getting picked up by some Texas Highway Patrolman who’d like nothing better than to run in a Latino ex-con. Cars, busses, even semi rigs roared past him. Roberto snarled inwardly at the rich guys in their fancy convertibles and sports coups. A blonde woman
in a silver BMW zipped past him, chattering away on the cell phone she had plastered to her ear. Bitch! Roberto thought. I’ve stolen better cars than yours.
The cell phone was a good idea, though, he had to admit. He pulled his own out of the breast pocket of his coveralls and called Kinsky’s office. He got Kinsky’s voice mail: “I’m either out of the office or on another line at the moment. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
Roberto didn’t leave his name or number. Not then, and not the next two times he called, either. He simply said, “It’s me. I’m comin’ down to see you. Be at your place eight o’clock.”
By late afternoon, with the lowering sun lancing through the trees blurring by, Roberto began to think Kinsky wouldn’t be in his office all day. I better go straight to his apartment, Roberto thought, before I check in at a fuckin’ motel.
E
xcept for the toilet facilities, it wasn’t so bad living at the airport overnight, Van Buren thought. The Venezuelan soldiers patrolling around the area were stiffly polite; their captain—the only one who spoke English—was friendly and as helpful as possible. Two portable toilets had been wheeled up on the back of an army truck; one whiff of them and Van Buren avoided them as much as she physically could. She and her crew slept in the Citation’s cabin: not all that comfortable but not bad once the army rolled up a portable generator to keep the plane’s air conditioner going.
Van Buren talked with Dan Randolph every hour or so and was in constant touch with her launch crew back in Texas. She and her team worked from laptop computers networked
to the command and control equipment stowed in the plane’s cargo hold. Using the laptops, they could follow the spaceplane’s flight as it orbited serenely three hundred miles up, circling the Earth every ninety-six minutes. That’s the theory, Van Buren said to herself. We’ll see if it works in the real world. Everything was happening in such a rush, they had to check out the laptops’ links with the command system while in flight from Texas.
It’ll work, Van Buren silently reassured herself. Then she added, God looks out for fools and drunks.
The plan was to bring the plane down on its sixth orbit, nine hours after its launch, which meant Van Buren’s people would have to send a signal to the spaceplane’s control system, ordering it to make a maneuver that would alter its orbit so that it would be aligned properly for a landing at Caracas.
Van Buren sat in a seat in the rear of the Citation’s cabin studying the display screen of the laptop wedged behind the chair in front of her. Its keyboard rested on her lap and she had a headset clamped over her short mouse-brown hair.
Everything’s going fine, she saw, peering at the readouts from the spaceplane’s internal sensors. They could get data from the bird only when it was within range of Matagorda or Caracas; Dan had refused to ask NASA to allow them to use the agency’s TDRS satellites to relay the plane’s telemetry signals.
As the signal from the spaceplane faded out over the horizon, Van Buren looked up at her cohorts, each of them bent uncomfortably over a laptop just as she was.
“One more go-round,” she called out, “and we bring her home.”
They responded with a faint smattering of approval. “Yahoo,” was the strongest term she heard, and that sounded sarcastic, tired.
The incoming message light in the corner of her screen began to flash yellow. Van Buren touched a key and saw HQ: DAN RANDOLPH scroll across the bottom of the screen.
She clicked on his name and Dan’s image appeared on the
screen. He looked tired, too. He hasn’t slept any more than I have, Van Buren realized.
“How’s it going?” Dan asked.
“Fine,” she replied. “Except for the Porta Potties. I don’t think they’ll last another whole day.”
He grinned at her. “Bring the bird in and you can spend the night in the finest hotel in Caracas.”
“On the company?”
“Sure. What’s a little more red ink?”
 
 
I
n Washington, Senator Thornton awoke from a troubled sleep. She vaguely remembered a dream, something about Dan being in space, soaring weightlessly away from her while she watched from the ground, helpless, her feet mired in mud or cement or something; it took all her energy to take a single step while Dan floated like a child’s balloon farther and farther away from her.
She sat up in bed, reached for the TV remote control unit on the night table, and turned on one of the twenty-four-hour news channels.
More bombing in Israel. She saw a shattered building, bloody bodies sprawled in the street. Smoke and the chilling wail of ambulance sirens. Not waiting to find out who did what to whom, she clicked through a dozen channels. Local news, children’s cartoons, a cooking show, a pair of political analysts discussing the approaching season of primary elections. As if they know anything about it, Jane groused silently.
Nothing about the spaceplane. Nothing about Dan.
She went back to Fox News, turned up the volume, and went into the bathroom. Half an hour later she was showered, combed, dressed in a light blue skirted suit with a pale lavender silk blouse. Still not a word about Dan’s spaceplane.
Out of sight, out of mind, Jane thought. Dan launched without telling anyone so the news media are snubbing him. Certainly NASA’s not holding news conferences about a private space operation. Not this one, at least.
But that’s going to end, Jane knew. The top item on her agenda this morning was to start the machinery rolling for a Senate investigation of Astro Manufacturing Corporation’s unauthorized launch. She wasn’t on the science committee but Bob Quill was, and he had agreed to call for the investigation.
The nerve of the man! Jane felt all the old anger rising within her. The unmitigated insolence. To launch that rocket without telling anyone, without informing the proper authorities. The gall. That iron-clad ego of his.
Yet, as she checked her lipstick in the mirror by the apartment’s front door, she saw she was smiling. That’s Dan, she told herself, her anger melting away. If only he’d let me help him. If only he’d play by the rules.
She frowned at her image in the mirror and shook her head. If he played by the rules he wouldn’t be Dan Randolph. And you wouldn’t still be in love with him.
“Idiot!” Jane snapped at the face in the mirror. Then she left her apartment, heading for a day’s work in the Senate. As she went down in the elevator a new thought struck her. Dan’s got to land the spaceplane sooner or later. The news media will be all over him then.
 
 
T
here were more than a dozen phone messages on Dan’s computer screen that morning, most of them from news reporters. And April hadn’t shown up for work. That’s not like her, Dan thought. The kid’s been ultrareliable. Then he remembered that she had left early yesterday afternoon. He considered calling her apartment, but the upcoming landing of the spaceplane drove that idea out of his mind almost before he had thought of it.
Still, it bothered him. With his computer Dan could run his office pretty well without her, and he could even get his own coffee down at the machine on the hangar floor. Instead, he decided to drive down to the blockhouse and follow the landing on the big screen there.
Before he could get up from his desk chair, though, Claude Passeau barged into the office with two other men
right behind him, both of them wearing gray business suits, both looking like high school principals trying to seem tough. A pair of government bureaucrats, Dan realized: Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
“You betrayed me!” Passeau said without preamble. “You launched your rocket without permission. You did it behind my back!”
Dan realized the FAA administrator was speaking for the guys behind him. He smiled pleasantly as he got to his feet.
“I didn’t need your permission, Mr. Passeau,” Dan said. “I have all the permissions that are required for a launch, all signed on the dotted line by the various local, state, and federal agencies involved.”
Passeau pointed a finger at him. “But you’ll need FAA approval for landing that aircraft.”
“And you won’t get it,” said Tweedledum, on Passeau’s left.
“You’re in deep trouble, Mr. Randolph,” said Tweedledee.
Raising his hands placatingly, Dan said, “Gentlemen, you’re assuming that the plane is coming down in U.S. airspace.”
All three men stared at him.
“It’s not.”
“It’s not? How can you—”
Stepping around his desk, Dan said, “Come with me, boys. I was just going over to the blockhouse to watch the landing from there.”
 
 
L
ynn Van Buren was thinking, We’re coming up to the point in the reentry trajectory where the 01 vehicle failed. If we’re going to have a problem, it’ll be in the next few minutes.
“Reentry sequence initiated,” called one of her team, sitting in the seat across the aisle from her.
Van Buren realized she was sweating in the plane’s cramped cabin, even though the air conditioning was turned up full blast. It was a cloudy morning outside; tropical thunderheads were already building up over the mountains that blocked their view of the sea.
Good thing we’re bringing her in now, Van Buren said to
herself. Another hour or so and we’ll have thunderstorms drenching the area.
“Reentry initiated.”
She saw the readings for the temperature sensors on the plane’s nose, underbelly, and the leading edges of the wings begin to climb steeply. The rising curves were all well under the red curve that marked maximum allowable temperature, though. So far so good, she thought
“Pitch-up maneuver in ten seconds.”
This is it, Van Buren told herself, her pulse quickening. This is where 01 failed.
“Confirm pitch-up maneuver.”
On Van Buren’s laptop screen the little icon representing the plane was smack on the curve that displayed the nominal reentry trajectory. No problems, she saw. Then she silently added. So far.
“Max heating.”
“Max aerodynamic stress.”
She held her breath. The plane was on automatic, guided entirely by its onboard computer. Van Buren knew she could override the onboard system if she had to, but she dearly wanted to avoid that. Let the bird come in on its own, she repeated over and over, like a mantra.
Something flashed. Van Buren winced and glanced out the plane’s window. A deep roll of thunder grumbled out there. No! she screamed silently. Hold off! Let me bring the bird back to the ground first!
“Initiating bleed-off turns,” said the woman in the seat in front of her. The spaceplane was starting a series of three wide turns to slow itself down enough for the landing.
“Mach eight and dropping.”
“Turn one completed.”
The Mach numbers were spiraling down. The worst is over, Van Buren thought as she stared at her screen. She’s through reentry. No problems.
“Turn two completed.”
Another flash of lightning. “Dammit, hold off!” Van Buren grumbled in a whisper. More thunder.
“Turn three completed.”
A louder, sharper crack.
“That wasn’t thunder,” somebody sang out Sonic boom, Van Buren knew.
“Can you see her?”
They had mounted a camera atop the Citation’s fuselage and slaved it to the airport’s radar. Van Buren clicked on the camera view.
“There she is!” she shouted. The plane was racing across the clouds, a double vapor trail streaking off its wing tips.
“Come on home, baby,” someone said in a fervent prayer.
“Landing gear down.”
“Speed two-ten … two-oh-two … one-ninety-six …”
Van Buren shoved her laptop under the chair in front of her, jumped to her feet, and rushed to the plane’s hatch. It was slightly ajar. She pushed it all the way open and raced down the metal steps, ducked beneath the Citation’s wing just in time to see the sleek silvery spaceplane touch its wheels to the runway with a screech and a puff of rubber.
The rest of the team piled out of the Citation as the spaceplane rolled to a stop well short of the end of the runway.
“Yahoo!” This time the cheer was heartfelt.
Rain began to spatter down. Big fat drops splashed all over them. The Venezuelan soldiers around the perimeter of their area stood in amazement as they watched this gang of loco gringos dancing in the downpour.

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