CHAPTER 44

Test pilots have a gruff saying which they like to use sometimes when they see a buddy going out to wring out a new airplane. 'Go blow up,' you tell him. It sounds cruel, but not to the other test pilot. He knows he may blow up anyway, and you're just using it as a little joke to help him relax. It usually works. On the morning when Al Shepard was going, and I was with him all the time, I had it in the back of my mind to say this to Al -- just as he went up the elevator to crawl into the capsule. I knew he would have laughed, and it might have helped chase away the butterflies. But when the time came, I had a few butterflies myself. I couldn't say it.
-- Virgil I. Grissom
We Seven

8 August

The four helicopters -- one from the sheriff's department, one from Edwards AFB, and two from Los Angeles news outlets -- continued to circle in an orderly fashion around the twisted remains of the Corvette. Early morning light glinted red as blood off the tortured metal and shredded Fiberglas.

Sherry Cooper, arriving with Thom Brodsky at the wheel of the company van, stared in mute shock at the remains of the car and at the yellow tarp covering the body a few dozen feet away.

The deputies were expecting her. One of them -- a grizzled veteran of desert patrol -- signaled for the van to stop. Thom set the brake and ran around to help Sherry step down into the culvert.

With few words, the deputy led Sherry over to the tarp. Brodsky held an arm around her as she identified her husband for the medical examiner.

"What we have here," the deputy said to Brodsky over the whine of the helicopters, "is a case of a high speed vehicle leaving the road at about a hundred-five. Mr. Cooper wasn't wearing his seat belt and was thrown clear but that didn't save him. This would have happened either way, I'm afraid."

Brodsky nodded. Sherry stood a few feet away, unsteady in the calm morning air, staring at the tarp and the shape described beneath it.

"Mrs. Cooper?" The medical examiner stepped up to her.

"Could you tell me what might be on this disk?" He held in his hand an evidence bag containing an optical computer disk and a fat, broken cigar.

She took it from him to examine, then shrugged listlessly. "Could have anything on it. We use them for ship design, for launch software, for manuals, journals, everything." She felt its lightness, knew the density of information it could hold. "We might need it for the launch tomorrow. May I keep it?"

"Not just yet, Mrs.--"

"Hank?" A husky deputy who was already sweating in the morning heat ran up to the medical examiner.

"Yes?"

"That second set of tracks? We found where they stopped. Ten yards beyond where the 'vette left the road. Then they make a U-turn and peel out."

Thom immediately said, "What tracks?"

The deputy said, "Long baseline car, wide track. American tires."

Sherry choked backed tears. "You think he was run off the road?"

The deputy shook his head. "No ma'am. But he was being followed, from the looks of it."

"I'll need to keep that disk, Mrs. Cooper," the medical examiner said.

"May I copy it in the van?"

He nodded agreement and Thom took her back to the van, where she slid the disk into the computer that Gerry had installed in the rear for on-site design changes. While it copied, she clicked the cursor on the file marked HEAR ME SHERRY.

Her eyes widened and she gasped as a tightness seized her chest upon hearing the digital recording of her husband's last words.

"Sherry my love, I hope you hear this in the event that anything happens to me. No time to explain. Everything Barry Gibbon just told me about tomorrow's flight is on this disk. Can't risk phoning you. Don't trust anyone but Thom and watch the range safety officer. "I love you."

She looked up at Thom, who peered over her shoulder as she erased -- irretrieveably -- the file from the original disk. "Gibbon."

"Gibbon killed him?"

She shook her head. "Gibbon told him the truth. The truth killed him."

The medical examiner knocked on the van's back door. "Mrs. Cooper?"

"Yes?"

He opened the door to say, "Did your husband own a gun? An Astra Constable three-eighty?" He held up another evidence bag with a dust-coated pistol inside. "We found this a few yards from the... from Mr. Cooper."

She nodded. "He bought several over the last few years. Here." She handed him the original disk. "It's the company's fax list. Nothing vital, but he would have wanted it for issuing a press release tomorrow if all went well."

The doctor accepted the disk.

"Are we free to go now?" Sherry asked coolly. "I have to make funeral arrangements."

"Yes, Mrs. Cooper. Thank you for your help. And I'm sorry." He eased the door shut.

She glanced outside the van toward the crash scene. "Let's get to Vandenberg."

"You're going through with the launch?"

She nodded. "Gerry had this dream of being a space pioneer. It was wild and romantic and in reality took years of hard, mundane work. He wanted to build new worlds on the Moon and in Space. How can I abandon him now? My frontier women ancestors rode the westward migration in covered wagons. Sometimes their men died on the wagon trail, but they pressed on. I can't do any less than that." She stared levelly at Brodsky. "You're going to help me."

He nodded. "I know."

***

First, she pushed back the launch one week, but not for the reason anyone suspected. As the days passed, the guards and the launch pad personnel at Vandenberg grew accustomed to her coming and going at all permissible hours. With Brodsky's instruction, she grew fluent in all the necessary terminology of a rocket launch. Having worked closely with her husband, she already knew and understood the science, but those final few days of cramming allowed her the chance to learn more of what she needed to pull off her plan.

The pair ran launch simulations at the pad and further practice sessions at her hotel room in Casmalia. Brodsky doubted the chances of success and said so more than once.

"Can you think," she told him during their rehearsal, "of any other way to guarantee Aurora's safety short of hauling it off of military land and building our own launch site? We're committed to using Vandenberg if only because we've reached the point where we can't afford to change plans."

"Can we afford to be shot?"

She dismissed the possibility with a wave of her hand. "Won't happen. GSN will be conducting a live feed to news bureaus around the world. Killing us would raise too many nasty questions, especially since this"-- she held up a computer disk --"will be running onboard."

She gazed at him quietly and he saw in her eyes a steel-edged determination, tempered in the fire of her personal tragedy, that would risk disgrace and death to fulfill her husband's last and only dream.

9 August

If Larry Poubelle had a dream, it was that his mechanical arm would work flawlessly throughout the entire flight. RF insulation wrapped around it like a woolen sleeve. He tested it inside the cockpit with all instruments on and transmitting and the glitch failed to reappear.

He and Chemar ran hundreds of simulations of the proposed flight until they learned to handle every foreseeable contingency. The 747 mothership crew also worked in their own simulator, connected to the Nomad simulator, so that coordinated practice flights ran in real time. The crew's minds and muscles stored every step of the flight from launch at Mojave to landing at Edwards Air Force Base.

Poubelle grinned with delight every time he flew the simulator out of high-key over Edwards. Despite the best efforts of Senator Woolsey, the base commander granted permission to land on the dry lake bed. The billionaire discovered that he and the general shared a common trait: both had left a body part in Southeast Asia -- the general, his right leg up to the thigh. They spent a good hour swapping cigars and war stories and showing off the abilities of their respective prosthetics. The general showed him a bizarre memento: the skeleton of his severed leg from the knee down, which an acid-stoned medic had boiled, picked clean, and presented to him as a souvenir of his stay. The general had mounted it on a plaque in his office with the slogan "Fortes Fortuna Juvat" engraved below it.

After a few rounds traded of stories about the peccadilloes of national politicians, the general offered Poubelle the use of the same strip of dirt used by shuttle orbiters for their landings. "Hell," he said, puffing on one of Poubelle's cigar, "I know that NASA won't be using it for years, and I doubt that Atlantis will launch out of Vandenberg any sooner."

With that approval in hand, Poubelle prepared to announce Nomad's launch date. When he heard about Cooper's death, however, he visited the nearby hangar and found only a skeleton crew. Nearly everyone followed the Starblazer to Vandenberg, nursing Aurora through her final few days before her unmanned test flight.

"There's a widow who knows how to grieve," Chemar said as they walked back to the Dædalus hangar.

"You'd do that for me, wouldn't you?" Poubelle asked her.

She smiled inscrutably. "Before or after I put on my dancing shoes?"

***

The announcement came that afternoon, in front of the assembled crew and volunteers plus a sizable turnout of newspeople. At least a dozen news teams arrived, including broadcast and satellite networks, local TV, and some newspapers. Many came to Mojave to cover the mysterious death of the lesser-known rocketman and welcomed the opportunity to form a companion piece with Poubelle's press conference.

Poubelle stood in front of Nomad's blunt nose with D'Asaro at his side, she wearing the now-world-renowned flight suit (as seen in publicity photos and on the October page of the Dædalus Project Calendar). He made certain that he waved with his arm extended forward slightly for the benefit of the several 3-D HDTV cameras in the crowd.

"I'd like to take this opportunity," he said, "to thank our hard-working flight crew and volunteer team who have dedicated themselves these many months to preparing for this exciting adventure. And all of you out there who contributed to the Dædalus Project, here is the result." He patted the carbon-carbon nose ball of the spaceplane and said, "I'd also like to acknowledge the inadvertent inspiration given to this effort by Senator Woolsey and by the United Nations. Here is America's answer to the Interplanetary Treaty and to those who desire to extend their idea of one world government into Space. I, and the millions who support us, know that Space is too vast -- hell, Earth is too vast -- to be ruled by even the boldest imperialist, let alone the consensus-chasers in New York. I--"

A subtle elbow to his ribs served as Chemar's "shift rhetoric now!" signal.

"I therefore would like to announce that the maiden flight of Nomad will occur on September twenty-first, the last full day of summer and the birthday of H. G. Wells, which I think is entirely appropriate. We'll launch at dawn, orbit for a full twenty-four hours, then land at Edwards Air Force base on the Twenty-Second. Since no one else has announced a manned flight before then, I think my half-billion is going to stay where it belongs." He patted his thigh pocket. "Don't worry, though, since -- in memory of our fallen colleague -- I am endowing a Gerald Cooper School of Free Space Science and Philosophy at the University of Southern California, effective this fall semester."

Chemar stared at him. It was another impulsive act on his part, entirely unmentioned up to that instant. She wagered that even USC did not know about this.

"With this flight and that endowment, I throw down the gauntlet at the Interplanetary Treaty and UNITO!"

***

Watching the live satellite feed in his Senate office, the elder Ludlow Woolsey smiled and said, "If you want to throw down the gauntlet, prepare to run the gantlet."

***

At the same moment in Kismayu -- under cover of darkness -- Chad Haley directed the movement of tanker trucks marked as "fuel oil," containing (in actuality) liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. The local government officials, pleased to see such an advanced housing project in their nation, accepted with gracious equanimity the bribes that permitted the tanks to arrive without inspection.

Likewise for the crate marked "Lighting Fixtures" that really held something quite different.

"Stand back, everyone," Grant told the onlooking graveyard-shift workers. "This is going to be great!" He opened a side of the coffin-sized crate to withdraw a control box. In response to his manipulations, out stepped a machine that looked like a globe atop a cylinder sprouting six spidery legs; the legs, tucked in for travel, extended to a more stable position and walked it three legs at a time toward the toroid.

"Have to have a robot on a space station," Grant said in response to Tammy Reis's frown, maneuvering the machine via the control box. "It'll play well on the news and bring us a fortune in ancillary merchandising."

Tammy broke into the first unforced laugh she had experienced on her spy mission. She realized with sudden surprise and shame that it is her first genuine laughter in years. There was something right about these people, about this mission. Not just Paul and his rediscovered enthusiasm, but in every technician, engineer, and worker who lived, breathed, and ate Space. Some of the older ones, long retired from NASA, told her that this recalled the agency's very beginnings: immense vision, rampant optimism, utter dedication, and total faith.

Yet everything she knew about the contemporary world told her that this was wrong, that Paul and the entire project faced doom. Even if it was a feasible path to Space, it would not be permitted by those who ruled the skies.

Chad Haley -- unaware of Reis's fears, or of her mission -- certainly thought otherwise. He spent twenty-hour days reviewing every aspect of the project with anyone he could corral. Though flabbergasted by the mind-numbing size of the project, he had no doubt that they could pull it off if only he invested just a little more effort.

He gazed at Grant, boyishly maneuvering the robot into the crane to be lifted to the cargo area of Pod Eight, overseeing every aspect of construction in the hangers, taking brief times-out to run what remained of his world affairs via encrypted, scrambled computer uplinks. The man exuded total confidence in the scheme, even when faced with the complexities of running an enterprise as massive as any legitimate business.

There he went with that word again, legitimate. As much as he understood the theory and practice of counter-economics and parallel markets, he still held the impression -- indoctrinated since childhood, and only forcibly altered by rigorously logical examination -- that secrecy in and of itself denoted unsavory activity and that a secret business, hidden from the eyes of governments, could not possibly grow so huge without detection. Haley eyed the five of the sixteen giant intersecting spheres in his field of view and marveled.

He had watched with interest the way in which Grant and Donahue used government's paperwork as misdirection, either showing movement on paper while goods remained in one place or showing on paper that goods stood still while they actually traveled halfway around the world. It was nothing new or innovative on Grant's part -- oil companies did the same thing to circumvent boycotts, embargoes, tariffs, and taxes. Manufacturers of all stripes -- above-ground, perfectly "legitimate" producers of cars, computers, clothing, food -- all engaged in various degrees of subterfuge in order to conduct their business and provide their wares in a world in which everything that was not mandatory was forbidden.

Marcus Grant offered a way out of all that as an unintended consequence of his quest for greater profits.

Only if the flying doughnut worked, though. Will it orbit? Will the thousands of tiny combustion chambers provide enough thrust to carry the structure upward? Will the welds hold? Will they pass Max-Q without breaking apart or encountering overpowering drag?

Haley constantly sought to assure himself that the computer simulations indicated the possibility -- the slimmest chance -- of achieving orbit with little or no fuel to spare. Once there, though, what?

Grant grew vague and evasive on that point, usually pointing to the publicity they would receive, sales of the memorabilia, the half-billion-dollar prize that Larry Poubelle might hand them, and some demonstrations of zero-G manufacturing on a somewhat larger scale than NASA had ever deigned to engage in. Most of the items on the manifest, though, consisted of material for research and experiments, not outright mass-scale manufacturing. Yet several large crates bore the non-descriptive designation "Misc. Machinery." What did Grant really plan to do with a space station and a score of crew members once they made it up there?

On that subject, Marcus Grant remained uncharacteristically mute.

***

"Did you hear that?" Bernadette shouted. "Poubelle's going to launch in six weeks!"

"And Gerry Cooper's dead!" Sam added.

Davy put down the computer equipment and walked over to the TV set in shock. "What?"

"Cooper crashed in the desert last night. Poubelle says he's going to launch on September Twenty-First and turn over the prize money to USC."

Crockett turned his gaze toward the spacecraft in the center of the warehouse. It stood, nearly completed, like a great, gleaming white monument to the spirit of the man. The cross made by its Iconel-wrapped graphite fiber blades added to the image.

"He won't see his rocket go up," was all Davy said; something in his throat choked off any further words.

Bernadette put an arm around his waist.

"I don't think I'd feel this bad," he said, "if I'd just learned my own dad had died."

"Everyone else will see it go up, though," she said. "His widow plans to run a test flight of the rocket next week. Unmanned. What better legacy could he have left the world?"

"And we'll send this one," Friedman added, joining the pair. "This one is our legacy."

Crockett looked at them both. In his eyes glowed a sudden inspiration. "They might slip someone aboard Aurora, though. They could do it with that design. We've got to jump the gun. We've got to launch next week, too. But before they do! Sam"--he seized Friedman's arm--"what about the fuel?"

"The kerosene's arriving today. We can have the LOX delivered anytime."

Davy shifted his grip to Bernadette. "Crew?"

"We're all psyched and primed."

"Everyone listen up!" Crockett shouted. "There's been a slight change of plans. We launch this baby next week! I want final closeout no later than next Friday for a Saturday morning launch. You've done a great job so far and we can wrap this up in nine days!"

A cheer rose up from the crowd. For more than a year they labored in secrecy, scrounged equipment, begged money, and invested every spare minute of their own time and their parents' college funds in building the rocket, and now the culmination of their efforts approached. The cheer simmered down, followed by a profound silence as one by one they realized that their lives would soon change and change radically. Not just because their work on the spacecopter would cease, but because launching it would change history.

"Whoa!" Penny Giannini said when it hit her. "Mind blast!"

"All right!" Crockett said with a wave of his arm that set his the rawhide fringe on his sleeve whipping. "Let's git crackin'!"

The final few days passed in a storm of activity inside the factory. The hours blurred by for Bernadette, soldering iron in hand, installing the last of the electronics. Hacker uploaded the navigational information to the onboard computers.

Seemingly everyone at NYU pitched in, though this may have been an optical illusion caused by the hundred or so students actually involved trying to be in dozens of places at once. Burly male athletes sat at sewing machines under Natasha's guidance, stitching mission patches on the space suits and making final alterations. A Home Ec student cooked meals that a chem grad freeze-dried in his lab equipment and sealed in vacuum-pack bags.

Crockett oversaw the loading of supplies, using 3-D packing instructions devised by a math student who worked in fourth- and fifth-dimensional virtual space to guarantee that every piece of equipment fit into the lockers with minimal voids.

Natasha -- also responsible for life-support -- checked out the lithium hydroxide atmosphere scrubber using a gas spectrometer "borrowed" (as was nearly everything) from the university. Penny welded and welded and welded until -- after five straight days and nights of the accelerated schedule -- her lithe muscular arms felt just about ready to fall off.

13 August

Someone installed a large red digital clock next to the spacecopter. It read T-minus four days, seven hours, twenty-three minutes.

Crockett sat inside the spacecraft in the middle of the three seats installed side-by-side, in the style of the old Apollo command module, flipping through the pages of his namesake's Autobiography of Davy Crockett. Bernadette sat a few inches away from him in her own narrow, uncushioned acceleration seat to his left. They both took the brief break to accustom themselves to the feel of the spacecraft. Their simulator had consisted of a computer at a desk, so their time in the cockpit was not quite idle time, nor was their conversation mere idle chatter.

"Suppose we make it to orbit," he said, book down and hands behind his head. "Suppose we win the prize money. Then what?"

"Who knows?" she said, arms folded. Her hair, dyed jet black once again and clipped into a coquettish French gamin style for the flight, matched her tight black Spandex pressure suit. She wore it constantly, claiming a need to get used to its fit. Davy suspected that she simply liked the way it looked on her. So did he, for that matter. "I thought we were going into Space just to prove it could be done. Just for the fun. The challenge. The fame. The money."

"We have to do more." Crockett's eyes gazed out the window to see beyond the rickety warehouse ceiling toward distant vistas. "We orbit Earth for a day and come back and what are we? Heroes? Or just crazy kids pinwheeling in and out of Space on a joyride? It's illegal to launch a spacecraft without a permit from the Department of Transportation. I looked it up. We'll be fugitives if they don't shoot us down first. We have to do more than just make the trip. We have to make ourselves immune to prosecution. Making jackasses of the world's only superpower isn't likely to help our case. We not only have to show how cheap and easy it is to use a rotorocket to achieve orbit, we have to be the ones to prove that there's a reason to go into Space. That we're not just screwballs. We've got to show that there's something in Space that Earth hasn't got--"

"Hard vacuum? Deadly solar winds? Meteors?"

"--something that will make ordinary people want to build spacecopters and Nomads and Auroras to join us up there. Something that makes what we do so unambiguously momentous that we'd have to be hailed as heroes when we return."

Bernadette gazed at him intently. "Why return at all?"

Crockett paused for a long moment. "What?"

"Why do we have to return to Earth? What if we could live in Space indefinitely? Why don't we just stay there?"

"You mean live there for the rest of our lives?"

She nodded, her jewelry chiming emphatically, pulling a dog-eared hard copy of The Orbital Settlers' Guide from the bag stowed beneath her seat. "This thing offers all sorts of ideas. We could convert the ship into a mini space station once we're in orbit. Power it with the solar panels and settle there. We could sell TV transmissions to networks on Earth showing our progress. No one could afford to come out just to arrest us or anything -- and even if they tried, the public would be outraged. Attacking peaceful settlers and so on."

Listening to her, Crockett realized that Bernadette considered herself more than merely a co-conspirator in a hugely elaborate college prank. She shared with him a vision as overarching as his own.

There was reality to consider, though. "This thing's not built for long term potential. We have to come back in a few days. It's reusable, though. If there were a space station in orbit that we could service..." He shook his head. "We need fame right now. Notoriety. We've got to do this in such a way that anyone who denounces us also attacks American values. Maybe if we--"

"How," she asked, "could anyone denounce the great-great-great-great grandnephew of Davy Crockett for trying to tame a new wilderness?" Her eyes widened as she glanced at the book Davy was holding. "Play on that. That's our protection! You're not crazy. You're Davy Crockett -- King of the High Frontier!"

A deep voice echoed inside the cabin. "And I thought you were building something innocuous, such as a drug lab."

Professor Barry Gibbon climbed unsteadily headfirst into the cockpit, staring at the pair with an unfathomable gaze. He seemed haggard and worn, showing every minute of his eighty-plus years. Something even darker lurked behind his eyes. Something, Bernadette judged, that lay beyond displeasure, beyond anger, beyond even hatred.

"I'd almost believe you could pull this madness off. Too bad you'll never know."

Bernadette began to speak but was cut off by Gibbon. "No, little lady. This is a bigger problem than you can imagine. Everett Stevens told me about his suspicions. I listened to some of the scuttlebutt among the grad students and asked around until I found someone timid enough to squeal."

"We can do it, Dr. Gibb--"

"Shut your mouth, boy! I offered you a chance to join up with the real program, but you thought you could steal your way to the stars. That won't happen. That will never happen. We're locking your kind out. If the American experience has taught us anything, it's that humans will ruin every ecosystem they invade, and I won't see you damaging the ecology of outer space with unregulated little tinpot vessels that you cobble togeth--"

"Space has no ecosystem," Crockett said, "except what we bring with us."

"Sure! Bring your air and your water, then start filling the universe up with your excrement and your babies and your mine tailings and your haphazard cities! It won't happen! I've spent my life keeping your kind earthbound, and I won't --ow!"

Gibbon fell suddenly quiet, silenced in mid-tirade by a sharp pain in his backside. Turning around to discover its cause, he saw Sam Friedman standing behind him in the hatchway, plunging the contents of a hypodermic syringe into Gibbon's wizened rump.

"I thought we'd probably need a full medical kit on the ship," Sam said, hefting a shaving-kit-sized bag onto the flight deck past Gibbon's wobbling legs. Smiling at the professor, he said, "Sleep well, doc."

Gibbon's eyelids drooped. "And to your list of crimes you may add kidna--"

"Great," Crockett said, seizing the professor's limp body before it fell out of the capsule. "What do we do with him?"

"Keep him out of circulation for a few days," Friedman said, heaving Gibbon out to the scaffolding with Davy's assistance. "No one will miss him. Have the guys release him after we've launched."

"No." Crockett stared at Gibbon's still form. "He'd have them arrested after he's released. I've got a better idea."

***

Barry Gibbon awakened in a dorm room on a mattress set indecorously upon the floor and gazed drowsily around. The window and door had been bricked shut to hold him in complete isolation. The room contained only the mattress, a lamp, a TV set the size of a pack of cigarettes, a week's worth of water and freeze-dried food, a compact camp toilet lacking its legs, and a telephone handset.

Enduring a pounding headache from the drug, he groggily sat up to reach for the phone. A note taped to the handset read:

Dear Prof. Gibbon:
No one but we three know that you're in here. No one else is responsible. This phone will be activated at the outside junction box by a relay triggered at radio confirmation of our launch. You may call for help then. Enjoy your rest and watch the news for disproof of your theory.
Hugs & Kisses,
Bernadette, Sam, and Davy.

Gibbon tried the phone. It was indeed dead.

"Hello!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Help!" With what strength he could muster, he pounded at the walls, ceiling, and floor. No one responded. He listened for any sounds of outside activity. Many of the rooms stood empty during summer.

"And I'm sure," Gibbon hollered, "you've picked one surrounded by empty rooms on all six sides!"

He patted at his jacket. Of course, they had deprived him of his celphone. And he knew nothing about electronics that might have helped him convert the phone or the TV into some sort of miraculous transmitter. Rather than devoting years to studying the intricacies of human technology, he had spent his entire life learning how to short-circuit the human soul. He sat on the mattress and switched on the TV, determined not to spend any time pondering the wisdom of his career choice.


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