In the radio shack, the sergeant on duty at the shortwave wireless hastily typed the last words of a report. He ripped the page from the typewriter roller and shoved it into the hands of a nearby private. “Get this to Doctor G! Move!”
The private didn’t bother to salute but instead sprinted through the door. As he dashed across the compound, he barely managed to dodge a small van coming the other way. The MP driving it swore at him, then hit the brake and twisted the wheel, fishtailing to a halt in front of a Quonset hut marked PRIVATE—SECURE QUARTERS. The uniformed lieutenant in the passenger seat—a tall, skinny black man in his midtwenties—leaped from the van before it came to a full stop. Another MP standing guard outside held open the door for him as he ran inside.
“Skid!” he shouted. “It’s on the way!”
“Yup. Kinda figured that out.” With the assistance of two technicians who shared quarters with him, Lt. Rudy “Skid” Sloman was pulling on his pressure suit, an inflatable one-piece outfit with an aluminum midsection and tubular segments for its arms and legs. “Grab my helmet, willya, Jack?” he asked, as calm as if he were doing nothing more than getting ready for a game of touch football. “I could use my gloves, too.”
“Oh, for the love of…!” Lt. J. Jackson Jackson—sometimes known as Jack Cube—snatched the padded rubber gloves from the nearby suit locker and tossed them to one of the suit techs, then carefully removed a bubblelike glass helmet from the top shelf. “Get your ass in gear! We’ve got the van waiting outside!”
“Why the hurry?” There was mischief in the test pilot’s dark brown eyes as he stood up to let a technician close the back of the suit. “Linda’s not going nowhere without me.”
Jack Cube was about to answer when he was cut short by a voice booming through loudspeakers outside: “Attention all personnel! This is not a drill! Report to firing stations immediately! Repeat, this is not a drill…!”
Tank trucks and utility vehicles barreled across the desert, kicking up sand as they raced toward a distant structure: an enormous steel tower, shaped like an upside-down U and painted bright red, enclosing something that looked like a giant dart poised on an elevated ring above a concrete trench. Soldiers had already opened the gates of the chain-link fence surrounding the launchpad; they stood aside and watched as the vehicles rushed toward the gantry.
The trucks pulled to a halt beside the tower. Their doors banged open, disgorging a crew of technicians in white jumpsuits and hooded silver garments. Wasting no time, the fuel men hauled insulated hoses from the tanker and dragged them toward the winged craft nestled within the gantry. Within minutes, the launchpad was shrouded by a haze of fumes, cold and clammy in the desert’s early-morning warmth.
Other technicians boarded an open-cage elevator that carried them to the catwalk leading to the cockpit, located midway up the vehicle’s sleek white hull. Sliding open its canopy, they began preparing the spacecraft for immediate takeoff. Another team began checking the six solid-fuel rockets clustered around the spacecraft’s base aft of its swept-back wings. Everyone’s actions were coordinated and rehearsed; they’d spent weeks practicing for this event. Each second counted, and they knew they had just one chance to do this right.
The fuel men were still pumping liquid oxygen, nitrogen, and gasoline into the spacecraft when the van glided to a stop in front of the tower. The MP and another Army soldier jumped out and ran around back. They opened the rear door and pulled down a loading ramp, and a couple of seconds later, Skid Sloman and Jack Cube emerged from the vehicle.
Lieutenant Sloman was wearing his pressure suit, his head completely encased within the bubble helmet. Lieutenant Jackson carried the portable air conditioner that temporarily fed the suit with a low-pressure oxygen-nitrogen mix. Rudy walked slowly down the ramp. The suit made it difficult for him to move, and as he and Jack Cube stepped off the ramp and turned toward the gantry, the MP who driven them to the pad snapped to attention and gave them a rigid salute.
Rudy responded as best as he could with a half-raised hand. He was clearly amused. When they were out of earshot, he gave Jack Cube a conspiratorial wink.
“Who’da thunk it?” he said, his voice muffled by the glass helmet. “A goy saluting a Negro and a Jew.”
Jack Cube wanted to laugh at this, but he couldn’t. They stopped at the bottom of the tower to wait for the elevator to come back down. As the cage descended—slowly, much too slowly—his gaze traveled up the side of the craft standing before them. He knew every inch of its seventy-five-foot frame, from the six strap-on boosters to the radar array crammed into its pointed nose. The last sixteen months of his life had been completely devoted to the design and construction of this fuming, groaning beast; there wasn’t a single rivet of its steel hide that was a stranger to him. And yet, in this moment of truth, he was scared of his own creation… not just the consequences of its failure but the fact that it could kill a man he’d come to respect.
“Rudy…” he started to say.
“Willya look at that?” Skid wasn’t paying attention to him. Instead, he leaned back to peer up at the spacecraft. Just forward of the cockpit, on the port side of the fuselage, was a hand-painted picture: a bare-breasted woman sitting astride a rocket, lusty smile across her face as she clutched a ten-gallon hat against her long, dark hair. Beneath the rocket was a scrolclass="underline" Lucky Linda.
Despite himself, Jack Cube grinned. “Think your girlfriend would appreciate it?”
“Yeah… yeah, I guess she would,” Skid muttered. “Oh, man… the things a guy’s gotta do to impress a woman.”
A second later, the elevator reached the bottom of the tower. As the pad tech operating it opened the door, Jack touched Rudy’s arm. “C’mon. We don’t have much time.”
“Yep. Let’s get it on the road.”
A half mile away from the launchpad, a voice blared from a loudspeaker outside a sun-bleached concrete igloo: “X minus fifteen minutes and counting… repeat, X minus fifteen and counting…”
Within the blockhouse, nine men had gathered to shepherd Lucky Linda to her destiny. Six were seated at consoles arranged in a semicircle around the blockhouse’s windowless walls. Their view of the pad came from fuzzy, flickering images displayed on cathode-tube televisions above their stations, but for the moment they ignored the screens and instead focused their attention on the dials and meters arrayed before them. Loose-leaf notebooks lay open before them; every now and then, someone picked up a slide rule and double-checked the numbers on his console. They murmured to one another, speaking an arcane dialect of technicalia only they could understand. No one knew more about the distant spacecraft than these men, and for good reason: They’d designed and built it.
An Army Air Force officer in full uniform quietly stood at the back of the room, arms folded across his chest, eyes regarding the men from beneath the bill of his cap. Colonel Omar Bliss had been Blue Horizon’s project director from the very beginning; for the last year and a half, his every waking moment had been spent bringing this scenario to reality. Though normally accustomed to leadership, he knew better than to interfere with what was going on around him. Events were now beyond his control; all he could do was watch, wait, and pray.
Bliss’s gaze shifted to the center of the room, where a tall, thin man with a balding head and a trim grey mustache stood before a submarine-style periscope, peering at the distant pad. Although the most senior man in the room, he had a frail vulnerability that made him seem even older than sixty-two. Bliss had a sudden urge to walk over and stand beside him, if only to offer support, but he restrained himself. Just then, the distraction would be unwelcome.