“And fuel cells One, Two, and Three, all set my side, Will.”
“Endeavor, Endeavor: AOS by IOS at 10 hours 16 minutes. With you for three.”
“Morning, Indian Ocean Ship,” Parker drawled. Outside, the sea was now daylight and dazzling.
“Will, Okinawa weather remains clear. Your temperatures and pressures are all Go. We see right OMS inerted. Ready with your inbound pad?”
“Ready to copy, Flight.”
“Okay… Entry Interface at 10 hours 17 minutes 01 second at Mach 24 point 6. Thermal control until EI plus 02 minutes 41 seconds; elevons on-line at EI plus 03 minutes. Deactivate RCS roll jets at EI plus 04 minutes 40 seconds at Mach 24, altitude 280,000 feet. First roll reversal at 4 pounds dynamic pressure. You are guidance internal at 263,000 feet. And you come out of S-Band communications blackout at EI plus 18 minutes 47 seconds. Wheels-on at 10 hours 47 minutes 43 seconds. Your ground track is still off a tad but well within the descent envelope.”
“Roger, Colorado. Got it. We’re right and tight in the sky and ready for a few steaks and taters — don’t forget to set a place for Alexi.”
“Copy, AC. And, Will… backroom says you are Go for PTI-7. Repeat: Go for PTI-7. Acknowledge.”
Parker and Enright traded glances.
“Ah, Flight, we’re single-aft RCS up here. Not to mention tile damage aft portside. We bent our metal a bit. You sure on the PDPU maneuver?”
“Affirmative, Endeavor. Go for PTI-7.”
“Alright, Colorado.”
“Be LOS momentarily. Next contact at Kadena field by UHF on approach. Chase planes are now airborne for intercept at 40,000 feet when you’re Mach zero point 8 at 22 miles range-to-go… Will, Jack, Major Karpov: Keep your feet dry, my friends. Configure…”
“See ya, Flight.”
Endeavor left her last network station behind over the dozen small islands of the Chagos Archipelago which glistened in the early-morning sunlight 90 miles beneath the descending starship.
“Coming up on one, Skipper… mark! One minute to Entry Interface.”
“Yeh… About PTI-7, Jack.”
“I know.”
Mother’s re-entry plot showed 4,700 nautical miles to Okinawa still invisible 3,800 nautical miles on the far side of the hazy, blue horizon ahead.
Endeavor cruised closer to the upper, feathery wisps of the blue planet’s breath. At Entry Interface, the starship would plow into the atmosphere at her velocity 24 times the speed of sound and eight times faster than the muzzle velocity of a .30–06 rifle bullet. One minute after that, Shuttle would cross the Equator for the fourteenth time in ten hours aloft to begin Revolution Eight.
The friction of hitting the wall of air at that speed would heat Endeavor’s 34,000 pure glass tiles until they glow cherry red at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat of re-entry is twice as hot as the melting temperature of Shuttle’s aluminum skin behind the one-inch-to five-inch-thick glass tiles.
“Fifty seconds to EI, Skipper. About PTI-7?”
On the computer keyboard above the AC’s swollen and throbbing right knee, the EXEC pushbutton blinked, awaiting the touch which would execute the program for the Push-down Pull-up, Programmed Test Input Number Seven.
William McKinley Parker floated against his lap belt. His deeply lined face looked out the window beside his left shoulder. Behind his gray pilot’s eyes, he was somewhere better. The exhausted Aircraft Commander was home.
In Houston by the bay, all the clocks on all the walls read 17 minutes past 7 o’clock on a crisp, clear evening. Inside the tall airman’s home close to the cold sea, no light shined. The last of evening twilight waned in the western sky beyond the dark windows.
Exquisite paintings and photographs of lighthouses hung in a neat row along the dark walls. Each stone tower beneath its solitary light stood alone upon a rocky shore.
The pilot in command was there. His long, tired body floated against his lap belt. But under his stocking feet he could feel the floor, his floor in his home on his Earth.
Will Parker could see the lighthouses standing mutely to warm the hearts of hard men unseen, who braced their salty bodies upon pitching decks.
“Thirty seconds, Will.” Enright’s voice sounded like a question.
The AC blinked at his window filled with black sky, morning sunshine, and glaring sea beyond the tinted sunshades.
Enright was surprised to see Parker’s large right hand open above the center console between their seats. The thin pilot with the bandaged, burned face reached over with both of his hands to grasp his captain’s hand firmly.
“I am proud to have flown with you today, Jacob. You did good.”
The AC smiled and the deep lines in his face cracked. Jacob Enright blinked behind his gauze eyeholes.
Will Parker pulled his hand from Enright’s and he placed his hand above the small keyboard of the computers.
On Mother’s green face, digital numerics ticked down through 12 seconds to the searing Entry Interface, the wall.
“We are pilots, Jack.” The Mission Commander spoke quietly but firmly. His fingers were poised above the execute key on the computer keyboard which flashed EXEC, EXEC, EXEC.
“That we are, Will. And the icemen, too.”
The Aircraft Commander nodded as he pressed the pushbutton near his right knee. Mother’s green face blinked “PTI-7 PROCEED.”
Parker wrapped his right hand around the control stick between his legs. His left hand held the T-shaped handle of the speedbrake controller on the left side of the cockpit. The speed brakes would open the long flanks of the vertical tail fin to slow the ship by air drag a little further inbound.
Together as one voice, the two airmen called out the countdown flashing on their television monitors. On the far side of the numbers was re-entry’s wall of fire. And 4,390 nautical miles and thirty minutes beyond Entry Interface was a tiny green island with a ribbon of concrete pointing into the wind beneath blazing Pacific sunshine.
“Four, Three, Two, One… Interface!”
18
The little boat pitched in rough gray seas. A brilliant sun low in the west made the old boat’s white hull glisten in the salt spray which stuck coldly to the faces of the two boatmen. The sailor at the wheel in the open cockpit cuddy was as old and weathered as his boat, the Rebekah Sara. On the lobster boat’s open stern, hardly thirty feet from the rolling bow, the younger of the two men stood awkwardly braced against the heaving sea.
The captain pointed the boat’s bow northward into the mouth of Frenchman’s Bay on the far eastern shore of rocky Maine. In the bay of Downeast Maine, the boat stood dead in the water between Mount Desert Island and its Bar Harbor resort to the west and Schoodic Point, just south of Winter Harbor, to the east. To keep from being dragged out to sea by the retreating tide, the boatman at the helm kept his old diesel engine chugging softly against the tide to hold his position just off the lighthouse on Egg Rock Island in the bay. The two cold sailors had waved to the great Blue Nose ferry minutes earlier as the fine old ship plowed the heavy sea on her daily run from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.
On the Rebekah Sara’s stern of peeling green paint, Jacob Enright gulped back nausea as the foaming water challenged his 18 years in his country’s Navy. Only Jack Enright knew that he had taken up flying from the decks of aircraft carriers just to get his feet off the pitching ships which made him sick. But today, he would lose his lunch rather than abandon his mission in Frenchman’s Bay. He had gone to sea to keep a promise to a friend.
The Shuttle Endeavor was wrapped in a plasma bubble of white-hot gas. The seething heat generated by the 100-ton glider plowing 23 times faster than the speed of sound into the atmosphere had boiled the upper wisps of the blue Earth’s air. In the inferno hot enough to melt steel, the ionized vapors engulfed the Shuttle in a blanket of electrically charged fire so tightly that fragile radio waves could neither exit nor enter. The traditional “black out” of re-entry sinks every returning shuttle into 16 minutes of absolute radio silence. Once the ship slides out of orbit and down to 400,000 feet above the ground, the pilots on board could not be more isolated from ground control if they were on the back side of the Moon.