Starclimber (29 page)

“It must point straight as arrow,” Dr. Turgenev told Tobias. “We need true course. You can do this, Mr. Blanchard?”

“Yeah. I’ll need help, though.”

“I’ll lend a hand,” I said, starting to feel truly hopeful.

“Um, forgive me,” said Sir Hugh with a bitter chuckle. “Even assuming we can reenter earth’s atmosphere, what then? We’ll just plummet to our deaths in a giant tin can!”

“Don’t worry, Sir Hugh,” said the captain. “We had two emergency hydrium balloons built into the bow, just in case the rollers gave out on descent.”

“The big boys think of everything after all,” said Miss Karr.

“Actually I was against plan,” said Dr. Turgenev. “I thought it needless. Mr. Lunardi overruled me.”

“And we’re very glad of it,” said Miss Karr.

“Once we’re back in the sky, we can inflate the balloons,” the captain said, “and they should slow our fall.”

“Enough to give us a soft landing?” Sir Hugh asked.

“Soft enough,” said the Russian scientist. “Now I must do mathematics, please.”

“Dr. Turgenev, we don’t have a great deal of time,” the captain said gently.

“I know, I know. I work swiftly.”

The
Starclimber
seemed almost unbearably small and lonely, as Tobias and I made our way through space to the bow. No cable ran through the ship’s center, guiding her home. Below us turned the earth, but it moved slowly compared to us. Cut loose from Ground Station, we hurtled around the planet in our fatal orbit.

Earlier on the voyage, I’d grown tired of seeing the same view of the Pacificus from our fixed spot. I’d wished we could swoop around earth like some cosmic bird. I was getting my wish now, at a terrible price. Asia was below us, Japan just coming into view over the eastern horizon. The music of the spheres played faintly in my head, but I couldn’t help feeling it had a mocking tone now.

Without Shepherd, it fell to Captain Walken to spot us from the air lock. Dr. Turgenev manned the bridge, watching us through the glass dome. Drifting behind us on tethers was all the equipment we’d need for the job ahead: the oxygen canister, Tobias’s bulky arc-welding gear, and an additional pouch of tools.

“You’re not to get all giddy and fly off to the moon,” I said to Tobias over the radio.

I heard his chuckle. “Promise.”

We’d already made a separate trip to the ship’s stern, to weld a cover onto the crow’s nest porthole. I hoped it was enough. I thought of the immense heat the ship would have to endure when we reentered.

We reached the dome’s summit. We positioned ourselves securely and then started to maneuver the equipment into place. Tobias was surprisingly deft despite his bulky gloves. Inside the
Starclimber
he’d fixed a thick metal collar around the oxygen tank—our rocket—so he could weld it more securely to the outside hull.

I did my best to hold the tank steady for him. From the corner of my eye I saw the spark of intense blue light from Tobias’s torch as he set to work. It took all my attention and strength to keep the tank straight. It was to be our one and only engine, and if it wasn’t properly fixed, it wouldn’t send us on a true path home.

“Let’s trade places,” Tobias said. “I need to weld the other side.”

When he finished, I inspected his handiwork. The tank looked as if it had been designed to fit atop the
Starclimber
’s dome.

“That’s a fine job,” I said.

“Should hold it.”

I looked at the tank’s valve. When it was time, a good turn would release a jet of compressed oxygen that would rocket our ship earthward. Back home. Back to the sky.

“We’re coming back in,” I told the captain over my headset. “The
Starclimber
now has rocket power.”

Fluttering all around us on the bridge were Dr. Turgenev’s sheets of paper, each of them covered with a bewildering swirl of equations and diagrams. He’d suddenly flail about, snatch one, check something, and then go back to scribbling on his notepad and looking along his astrolabe.

I’d learned enough celestial navigation at the Academy to know what he was doing. He was finding reference points in the heavens, so he could calculate our current trajectory around the planet. And from that he’d figure out the angle, speed, and distance of our reentry. I shuddered at the task. We were asking a great deal of him. There was no room for even one wrong calculation. A decimal point could mean the difference between life and death.

“Very complicated,” he muttered to himself. “Very complex, everything moving. We move. Earth moves. Earth rotates. Earth revolves…”

My face felt feverish, even though the heaters were turned to their lowest setting. Captain Walken, Tobias, and I were all on the bridge, furiously performing the calculations that Dr. Turgenev set us. There was much talking as facts and figures flew among us.

Earth, turning at one thousand forty-seven miles per hour…

The
Starclimber
, moving at fifteen thousand miles an hour in an eastward equatorial orbit that was deteriorating as we accelerated…

Earth’s gravity pulling us in, changing our trajectory, pulling us lower…

The shape of our orbit changing from circle to ellipse, slinging us around earth faster and faster with every minute…

Nothing was still, just as Dr. Turgenev said. Take too long to solve one equation, and all the numbers had already changed.

“Mr. Cruse,” the scientist said, snapping his fingers, “do you have figures I gave you?”

I handed him my piece of paper. “Please check them, Dr. Turgenev. I wouldn’t trust myself…”

His bloodshot eyes glanced over my workings. “Good, Mr. Cruse, this is very good. Thank you.”

I’d struggled with math and physics at the Academy, and never thought those wretched theorems would be of any use. I was glad now I’d forced myself to master them.

I glanced once again at the ship’s clock, ticking seconds, and felt like I was watching sand hurtle through an hourglass.

Captain Walken had unfurled a map of the world and fastened it to the chart table, making notations. We’d picked the prairies as our ideal landing site, just to the east of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. It was as flat as you could hope, and the winds would be light.

“If we deploy the hydrium balloons at forty thousand feet, here,” the captain told us, pointing with his dividers, “then we can free-balloon to earth, venting hydrium as necessary.”

It would be a tricky business, but we’d have plenty of space, and our landing was bound to be in a field of wheat or corn.

“What is all this scribbling here?” Dr. Turgenev said irritably.

We all turned to the Russian scientist, who was squinting at a sheet of paper like he’d never seen it before in his life. I leaned closer to have a peek.

“Weren’t those your final calculations, Dr. Turgenev?” I said, trying not to sound worried. I think we were all concerned that, under the stress, Dr. Turgenev might suffer a bout of astral psychosis. His was the only mind capable of getting us back home safely.

“This is complete gibberish,” he murmured, then: “Oh…yes…I see now. This is done. This is it. Good. We are finished. Look here.”

He floated closer to the map and pointed to the steppes of Mongolia. “We reenter atmosphere here, at angle of no greater than seven and a half degrees. Then we travel east over Pacificus and Rocky Mountains. And then if we have not melted—little joke, ha-ha—we come out over prairies. This is what will happen.”

Captain Walken patted him on the shoulder. “Thank you, Dr. Turgenev.”

Step by step we went through the entire reentry procedure. There were parts where I had to concentrate very hard, to stop my mind straying to the disasters that could crush us at each turn. I needed to focus only on what we must do if we had any hope of survival. It was a sequence of daring and risky events, held together by fraying cobweb.

“Are we all clear?” Captain Walken said.

There were a few little tricky bits that we went over a second time.

“We’re out of time,” I said, looking at the ship’s clock.

Tobias looked at the voltmeter. “Our batteries are near worn out,” he said.

“As long as the ventilation system keeps ticking over, that’s all we need,” I said.

“Not quite,” Tobias reminded me. “We’ll need enough power to launch the emergency balloons with the explosive bolts.”

“We must align
Starclimber
now,” Dr. Turgenev said. He made his way over to the astrolabe. “I stay here to check ship’s position against stars and earth. I will need several minutes to prepare. Captain, you stay here and relay my instructions via ship’s phone. Mr. Cruse and Mr. Blanchard, go below and get ready to flush toilets!”

When Tobias and I emerged from the bridge, Kate was waiting on A-Deck at the base of the stairs, looking furious.

“I was just about to come up and find out what’s going on!” she said.

“We’ve been hammering out the reentry plan,” I told her.

“I’m sure you have, but you’ve been up there two hours and you need to tell the rest of us what’s happening! You can’t just forget about us down here! It’s very inconsiderate!”

“I’m sorry,” I said, and truly I was. It must have been terrible for them, waiting and waiting while we made our calculations. I thought for a moment she was going to burst into tears, but then her eyes grew fierce again.

“There’s something else I want to say to you,” she said. “About me and George Sanderson.”

“James,” I said. “We’re actually in a bit of a hurry.”

“Um, should I go away?” Tobias asked.

Kate ignored him, glaring only at me. “You wanted to know why I asked him that question. About whether he’d let me do as I pleased when we got married. I did it because I was trying to scare him off! I didn’t think he’d actually
want
to be married to someone like me. I’d just embarrass him in polite society. I wanted
him
to be the one to break it off.
That’s
why I asked the question. Do you see now?”

I felt a bit sheepish, and hugely relieved, but I was hardly going to beg her forgiveness after what she’d put me through.

“Well,” I said, “too bad it didn’t work.”

“Yes, thanks to you,” Kate said. “It seems he’s quite smitten with me and my grave robbing.”

“So you’re really going to break it off with him?” I asked.

“For the hundredth time, yes!”

“If we get home alive,” Tobias said. “Sorry, just a thought I had.”

“What are our chances?” Kate asked.

“We can do it,” I said. “But right now we need to realign the ship.”

“With the toilets,” she said.

“Right. And we need your help.”

“Really?” she said, smiling.

I pointed at the ship’s phone in the corridor. “The captain’s going to be calling out his orders, and you’re to bellow them on to Tobias and me.”

She seemed disappointed. “That’s it?”

“You’ve got a good loud voice.”

“I was hoping for something a little more…dynamic. Is there a lever I could pull or something?”

“No. Tobias, you take the A-Deck toilets, I’ll do B-Deck.”

“Do you mind if I do B-Deck?” Tobias asked.

“What’s the difference?”

“I had a bad experience with the A-Deck toilet. Damn near sucked me in.”

We started laughing and had a great deal of trouble stopping. As tears streamed down our faces, Kate looked at us disapprovingly.

“This is no time for astral psychosis, gentlemen,” she said.

The ship’s phone rang, and I snatched it up. “Mr. Cruse, are you ready?” came the captain’s voice.

“Yes, sir. Miss de Vries will relay your commands.”

“Very good. We’re about to begin.”

Tobias and I went off to our respective lavatories. I left the door open so I could hear Kate, and stood by the flush lever. I let out a big breath. If we couldn’t angle the ship properly, we couldn’t make a safe reentry. A lot was riding on this. And it all came down to two toilets.

“A-Deck!” I heard Kate shout.

I pushed my lever and heard the short burst of air escaping into the vacuum of space. Only the smallest vibration ran through the ship, but there was no porthole in the lavatory, so I couldn’t see if the ship was actually revolving.

“B-Deck!” Kate bellowed, and I heard a flush from Tobias’s toilet, to counter my spin. On the bridge, I knew that Dr. Turgenev was gazing along his astrolabe, gauging our angle amid the stars, rapidly recalculating.

“A-Deck!” Kate cried, and again I flushed.

For the next five minutes, Kate shouted out Dr. Turgenev’s wishes with bewildering speed, and in ever more erratic sequences. I worried Dr. Turgenev had lost his mind. But finally I heard Kate give a triumphant shout.

“It’s done! It worked!”

I propelled myself out along the corridor and downstairs to the lounge. The view from the windows was quite different now. We were lying almost on our side relative to earth, and the planet could be seen clearly below us. We sailed over earth at a rakish angle. I could make out Italy’s boot in the blue Mediterranean.

Tobias and I laughed and grasped hands and shook fiercely. Dr. Turgenev and Captain Walken both came down from the bridge, looking mightily relieved.

“What happens now?” Kate asked me. “Please tell us, step by step.”

“We need to open the oxygen tank,” the captain said.

“Which will shoot us back toward earth,” Kate said.

“Yes. It’ll get very hot as we reenter the atmosphere, but the ship should be able to withstand it. We get down to forty thousand feet and deploy the emergency hydrium balloons, and then we just sail down to land.”

“Sounds perfectly straightforward,” said Miss Karr wryly.

“Shepherd would’ve liked this,” I said. “We’re actually flying the ship.”

Tobias chuckled. “It’s one mean streetcar ride now.”

“Where will we set down, do you think?” Sir Hugh asked.

“We’re aiming for the prairies,” Tobias said.

Kate frowned. “A bit far from Lionsgate City, isn’t it?”

“We can always push you out a bit early, Miss de Vries,” I said.