Yeah, that jibed with Jeff s experience with his great-great-grandmother in 1964. A small thing—still wonderful, and hurtful, to think about. He had asked her to convey word of their brief meeting to her grandson, Jeff’s grandfather, in the hope that he would in turn pass that word on to Jeff. And his great-great grandmother did, and his grandfather had, giving Jeff a tiny but irrefutable proof positive in his mind that he could indeed do something in this past that could alter the future.
Small things. Landry’s people had learned that two things had caused the Challenger to explode and crash into that Miami schoolhouse filled with kids in Jeffs reality—the reality that was still on cue to happen now in less than 24 hours, unless Jeff did something to prevent it.
At T plus 0.678 seconds—0.678 of a second after takeoff—photographic evidence showed a puff of first off-white, then grey smoke spurting near the aft field joint of the shuttle’s right rocket booster. This was the first indication that the O-rings had not slipped into place. The result would be the catastrophic explosion just after T plus 73 seconds of flight. There was nothing small about that. There was no way to stop it once the O-rings failed. And there was no way to stop the O-rings from failing. Landry had been all too right about that—every warning had gone unheeded.
But a second malfunction had caused the Challenger to veer way off course, to Miami, before the explosion. Wind shears encountered at T plus 36.990 seconds—greater than any experienced on previous shuttle flights—had defeated the adjustments of the computerized navigational equipment onboard. “The most dangerous weather phenomena affecting aviation,” Ralph Nader once had written. The result would send the Challenger on its deadly course to Miami.
Landry was betting that that errant path, the result of powerful winds and impotent automated guidance, was something that human intervention at just the right moment might avoid.
A small course correction, made by a human pilot at just the right time, forewarned and forearmed. Was it small enough to escape the Universe’s unblinking attention?
Small things worked. Whispers to great-great-grandmothers. Not murders.
What Jeff still wasn’t sure about was suicide…
“Jeff Harris, Western Coordinating Sciences Institute, good to meet you.” Jeff extended his hand to an attractive brunette, whose press pass fixed just above her bosom said Cleveland Plain Dealer. She had taken the last remaining seat next to him, at the end of a long cafeteria table.
“Mary O’Brien,” she said and smiled. “Western Coordinating… I don’t think I’ve heard of them. A new news service?”
“Sort of,” Jeff replied. He sipped his tea and silently cursed the taste of styrofoam for the thousandth or more time since he’d left his century. “It’s a new online service—a private operation for chief executives and other important people who have personal computers and modems.”
“Online? Ah, you mean like The Source? I was talking to someone here last month who said he sends all his stories in that way—his editor has an account on the system.”
“Exactly,” Jeff said.
Mary nodded. “His paper got so disgusted with all the Columbia’s delays that they brought him home, ruined his Florida fun. God, there were so many problems with that one that people began calling it ‘Mission Impossible’. NASA was none too pleased.”
“They’re under a lot of pressure,” Jeff said. “Hard to operate on the strangulation budget Nixon left ’em.”
“Yeah,” Mary said. “At least Reagan seems more gung-ho. Well, let’s hope they get this one off the ground soon—those poor astronauts must have pains in all kinds of places lying out there on their butts for four hours.”
Jeff didn’t reply. He knew it wasn’t going to happen today.
The announcement came over the loudspeakers a few minutes later, at 12:35 P.M. Today’s launch was cancelled—crosswinds above the runway were clocked at more than 10 feet per second above the highest allowable speed.
“Jeez,” Mary said, and got up with dozens of other reporters from nearby tables. “Well, they’re right to be careful about those wind shears, though. Brought down that Delta in Dallas last August, remember? Killed 135. And the Pan Am in New Orleans in 1982? Winds slammed into it, tossed it around like a toy. Only 9 survived that one—153 died. I covered both those stories. Jeez, one of the nice things about doing the Shuttle is we don’t have to worry about those kinds of things, right?”
Jeff looked away.
“Well, good talking with you,” Mary said. “Let’s hope for better luck tomorrow. Maybe we’ll run into each other again.” She smiled.
“Sure,” Jeff said, and smiled back. But he knew that wasn’t going to happen either.
“Mission Impossible”… the press’s sarcastic name for the seven-times delayed Columbia 61-C flight, the last shuttle mission before the Challenger, which indeed had finally flown a successful mission in January, though its delays had pushed back the Challenger’s original launch date of December 23, 1985. Jeff wondered if the combination of that and the original TV series, or the later movies and mirrorims, had given Landry and his colleagues the idea for the plan that now was Jeff’s to implement.
The plumbers and what they had done to Nixon with Watergate were after all classic Mission Impossible. Jeff had read up on all the pertinent new history in the several weeks that he’d been here. Impressive. He had to give Landry credit. And Landry had assured Jeff that his people would take care of all the relevant details for the Challenger.
Except, of course, the most important one.
Jeff looked in the mirror.
The use of masks to make the MI operatives look like other people had been a fundamental mechanism in all of the show’s incarnations. Of course, in the early TV shows and even the first series of movies, the mask technology was more science fiction than reality. But by Jeff’s time, skin weaves from DNA banks with huge varieties of features were commonplace. And Landry’s technology was even better. Construction of an utterly lifelike face-mask that looked like someone else was no problem.
Landry’s team had indeed covered the other details. Jeff had studied the conversation logs of the Challenger’s astronauts on this fateful day, and had memorized all of his lines. The medical records would show that the voice of the astronaut he was impersonating had had a slight cough and a sore throat on this day, and that would account for any perceived difference in voice quality. Tiny puterwafers inserted in appropriate places in Jeffs skin would generate false readings consistent with the general medical data of this astronaut. Jeff was already the same height, and the age was right. They were both about 40.
There was no way of stopping this mission. Jeff had no choice but to believe that now.
He had failed to prevent the assassination of JFK, he had failed to kill Nixon, and he had been unable to stop this mission—the specific circumstances were different in each case, but all had hit the same unfathomable brick wall. He had spent months and months after that first meeting with Landry in La Jolla, trying in vain to get NASA, Thiokol, anyone to listen about his warnings about the O-rings. Most of his calls, his memos, his letters, never seemed to get through. And when they did, they seemed to have no effect at all. The Shuttle continued on its inexorable trajectory to tragedy.
In a few hours, Thiokol’s engineers would recommend that the launch not proceed due to the very O-ring problem in the cold that would cause it to explode. Made no difference—the managers outvoted the engineers anyway. Jeff was certain that had he been there with a videotape of the explosion, those plumes in the sky, that burning school-house in Miami, it would have made no difference either. Somehow the launch would have proceeded anyway.