The long airman resumed his vigil in the hallway where he slouched against the wall beside Trauma Room One.
He shook his head. What a day, he thought. His mind returned to an afternoon press conference an hour after Jack Enright had nearly drowned. A wire-service reporter asked the reigning Iceman how he would approach his unprecedented rapid countdown and dangerous Intelsat-6 repair mission. Colonel Parker had glanced at Jacob Enright with his hair still wet. Enright’s eyes were still red. “Get it up. Get it done. Get it down,” the Colonel had replied soberly as a NASA technocrat gasped behind him and Enright stifled a roaring laugh. I could go on the road with this act, the pilot thought with a broad grin as his back held up the hospital wall.
“A few more midnight meetings, and we’ll all become mushroom people who shrivel up in daylight.”
Admiral Hauch smiled weakly. The large man was beyond exhaustion. He was spent and used up inside, like a smoking shell coughed from its white hot breech and dumped into a pile of useless brass. Above him, beyond the glass walls, the clock on the bunker wall read 2 a.m. in the morning, Eastern Time.
“There will be no stenographer tonight. No official record. Any officer here who ever breathes a word, a syllable, of our discussion here will find himself spending the rest of his career as latrine orderly at our weather station on the Dibole Iceberg Tongue. That’s within two hundred miles of the South Pole, if anyone has need to make travel plans. You civilians who feel the need to impress some cowgirl at Gilley’s with all you know will have ample opportunity to impress the locals from our embassy at Liberville in Rio Muni, a West African country too small to be in your edition of The Statesman’s Handbook.”
As the Admiral mopped his face, six grim and tired men squirmed in the Crystal Room’s chill and tasteless air.
“What I have to say comes from upstairs… Even the President knows nothing of this meeting or its contents.”
The blurry-eyed seaman studied each face, each pair of blank eyes, until those eyes turned away from the cold wind of the Admiral’s glare.
“Brother Ivan has demanded a contingency plan in the event, God forbid, that Soyuz is fatally disabled by LACE.”
“I would hope so,” Commander Mike Rusinko offered with a voice tired and strained from fatigue.
“Be patient, Mike,” the Admiral cautioned abruptly.
“We are here to discuss the Sleep Tight alternative to destroy Shuttle in the terrible exigency of the fatal loss of Soyuz.”
The big man sighed deeply. Six sagging faces heavy with midnight examined the perspiring, round face at the head of the table.
“Gentlemen: if Soyuz is lost to LACE, Sleep Tight will be initiated — for the sacrifice of Shuttle Endeavor with extreme prejudice…”
“You cannot be serious, Admiral.”
“As I could possibly be, Dale. If Soyuz goes in, Shuttle goes in… Four men in place of everything which lives and breathes on our sorry little planet.”
“My God, Admiral.”
“I know, Dale. I know,” the Admiral said to Colonel Stermer from Cape Canaveral and the U.S. Space Command.
“But, Admiral—”
“Parker and Enright are both officers,” the big man interrupted. “Their duty includes biting the big one. That is one of the reasons their choice for this crew is so perfect.”
“And the other reasons, Admiral?”
The Admiral hesitated for an instant.
“Neither man has family, Mike. The people upstairs have thought of everything, so it would seem. Just too late.”
No one responded.
“Now, Dr. Pritchard, you have been briefed thoroughly. I understand you speak HAL/S, the program language of the shuttle’s five on-board computers.”
“Fluently,” the small, bespectacled engineer gloated. “You have analyzed your assignment, Doctor?”
“Yes. In every detail, I might add.”
“Can a termination program be implanted into Endeavor’s computer banks, Doctor, without detection?”
“Excuse me, Admiral. We are talking assassination here, murder — and of our own people!”
“Colonel, I know that!” The harried Admiral sagged in his great chair. With his elbows upon the shining table, his hands rubbed his face.
“I know that, Colonel. May I remind you that when you were a light colonel taking daily health checks on your senior officers in hopes of an opening so you could go silver, I was working and drinking with these two men, Parker and Enright. I was eating in their homes. Don’t tell me what we are about here! We are here to avert a space war, nothing less than global suicide… Let’s get on with it. Please, Doctor?”
“Thank you, Admiral. May I lay out for everyone the system we’re discussing? The shuttle’s on-board data-processing systems.”
“Can you do it without putting the rest of us into a coma?”
“I’ll try, Colonel Stermer. If I may continue…”
The thin engineer bore the pursed and sallow features behind his thick glasses of a man with too much bile circulating through his translucent skin. His hollow cheeks had a sickly yellow pallor.
“First, the nuts and bolts. The general purpose computers, or GPC, five in all, are exquisitely complex, utterly beautiful. Almost sensuous.”
As the little wizard prattled on in his engineering reverie, the five listeners with half-closed eyes squirmed in discomfort.
“Imagine: each of the five computers — four primary and one backup — has as its heart a central processing unit. This CPU can perform 450,000 functions every second. The CPU’s talk to thirty-eight Shuttle systems. The link between the CPU’s and Shuttle’s subsystems are electronic relays called multiplexer-demultiplexers, or MDM’s. The computers speak to Shuttle over the MDM’s. The CPU’s think forty times faster than the computers used in the Apollo moon-landing spacecraft!
“The four, primary shuttle computers are completely isolated from the fifth computer. This fifth GPC is reserved for the backup computer system. The four primary GPC’s compare electronic notes among themselves. They actually vote on major flight-control decisions at least once every second. They synchronize themselves with each other three hundred times every second. And, they speak their computer language at the rate of 787,000 words per second.
“Now, here is my plan: The GPC’s have an internal separate Control Application Program. This is the computer program, about 400,000 written lines of it, which flies the shuttle’s re-entry profile into the atmosphere.
“Now, the programs and the re-entry trajectories are physically stored in two tape-recorder type, mass memory units, MMU’s. Shuttle’s operations sequences programs are stored in the MMU’s. The program software is subdivided into smaller core programs called major modes. The actual re-entry into the first fringes of the atmosphere is Major Mode 304…”
“Doctor, please!” the Admiral pleaded with his face in his large hands. “Get to it.”
“Well, all I have to do is tinker with this Major Mode 304. Put in a programmed sequence of re-entry flight maneuvers — put it into both the primary and the backup flight control systems, the BFS. Such maneuvers would subject Endeavor to lethal structural loads. Break the ship’s back, as it were…”
Five men grimaced.
“You see, re-entry is profoundly delicate for Shuttle, which comes home from orbit as a 100-ton glider without main engine power. It is flown with a maximum of three G’s. A load of only 3 and three-tenths G’s will fatally overload the wings and body of the shuttle. Program in a sudden dip of the nose from the normal, forty-degree, nose-up attitude down to say twenty degrees… and it is done. We call this maneuver an ‘alpha sweep.’ Takes only a few seconds. I figure an automatic, computer-induced pitch-over to twenty degrees would take two seconds, at most. The crew takes another second or two to realize that they have a flight-control system failure. Then another two or three second pull-up manually commanded by either pilot — it will be a reflexive pilot response. The high G load in the pull-up will do the job.”