Abandon In Place Part 1

ABANDON IN PLACE.

by Jerry Oltion.

Six hours after Deke Slayton, the astronaut, died of cancer, his racing airplane took off from a California airport and never came down. The pilot didn't respond to the control tower, and the plane vanished from radar shortly after takeoff, but witnesses clearly identified it as Slayton's. Which was impossible, because that same airplane was in a museum in Nevada at the time.

The story made the rounds at the Cape. Engineers and administrators and astronauts all pa.s.sed it along like scouts telling ghost stories around a campfire, but n.o.body took it seriously. It was too easy to mistake one plane for another, and everyone knew how fast rumors could get started. They had heard plenty of them over the years, from the guy who'd claimed to be run off the road by Grissom's Corvette after the Apollo 1 fire to the Australian who'd supposedly found a piece of Yuri Gagarin's s.p.a.cesuit in the debris that rained over the outback when Skylab came down. This was just one more strange bit of folklore tacked onto the Apollo era, which was itself fast fading into legend.

Then Neil Armstrong died, and a Saturn V launched itself from pad 34.

Rick Spencer was there the morning it went up. He had flown his T-38 down from Arlington right after the funeral, grabbed a few hours of sleep right there at the Cape, then driven over to the shuttle complex before dawn to watch the ground crew load a communications satellite into the Atlantis. The ungainly marriage of airplane and rocket on pad 39A would be his ticket to orbit in another week if they ever got the d.a.m.ned thing off the ground, but one of the technicians forgot to mark a step off his checklist and the whole procedure shut down while the foreman tried to decide whether to back up and verify the job or take the tech at his word when he said he'd done it. Rick was getting tired of waiting for somebody to make a decision, so he went outside the sealed payload mating bay for a breath of fresh air.

The sun had just peeked over the horizon. The wire catwalk beneath his feet and the network of steel girders all around him glowed reddish gold in the dawn light. The hammerhead crane overhead seemed like a dragon's long, slender neck and head leaning out to sniff curiously at the enormous winged orbiter that stood there sweating with dew beneath its gaze. The ground, nearly two hundred feet below, was still inky black. Sunlight hadn't reached it yet, wouldn't for a few more minutes. The ocean was dark, too, except near the horizon where the brilliant crescent of sun reflected off the water.

From his high catwalk Rick looked down the long line of launch pads to the south, the tops of their gantries projecting up into the light as well. Except for pads 34 and 37. Those two had been decommissioned after the Apollo program, and now all that remained were the concrete bunkers and blast deflectors that couldn't be removed, low gray shapes still languishing in the shadow of early dawn. Just like the whole d.a.m.ned s.p.a.ce program, Rick thought. Neil had been given a hero's burial, and the President's speech had been full of promise for renewed support of manned exploration in s.p.a.ce, but it was all a lot of hot air and everyone knew it. The aging shuttle fleet was all America had, and all it was likely to get for the foreseeable future. Even if NASA could shake off the bureaucratic stupor it had fallen into and propose a new program, Congress would never pa.s.s an appropriations bill for the hardware.

Rick looked away, but a flicker of motion drew his attention back to pad 34, where brilliant floodlights now lit a gleaming white rocket and its orange support tower. Rick blinked, but it didn't go away. He stepped closer to the railing and squinted. Where had that come from? Over half of it rose above the dawn line; Rick looked over the edge of the Atlantis's gantry and made a quick guess based on his own height. That rocket had to be over three hundred feet tall.

Three hundred and sixty-three, to be exact. Rick couldn't measure it that exactly, but he didn't need to. He recognized the black-striped Saturn V instantly, and he knew its stats by heart. He had memorized them when he was a kid, sitting in front of his parents' black-and-white tv set while he waited for the liftoffs. Three hundred sixty-three feet high, weighing over three thousand tons when fueled, the five F-1 engines in its first stage producing seven and a half million pounds of thrust--it was the biggest rocket ever built.

And it had also been over thirty years since the last of them flew. Rick closed his eyes and rubbed them with his left hand. Evidently Neil's death had affected him more than he thought. But when he looked to the south again he still saw the brilliant white spike standing there in its spotlight glare, mist swirling down its side as the liquid oxygen in its tanks chilled the air around the ma.s.sive rocket.

Rick was alone on the gantry. Everyone else was inside, arguing about the payload insertion procedure. He considered going in and asking someone to come out and tell him if he was crazy or not, but he abandoned that thought immediately. One week before his first flight, he wasn't about to confess to hallucinations.

It sure looked real. Rick watched the dawn line creep down the Saturn's flank, sliding over the ever-widening stages until it reached the long cylinder of the main body. The spectacle was absolutely silent. The only sound came from closer by: the squeak and groan of the shuttle gantry expanding as it began to warm under the light.

Then, without warning, a billowing cloud of reddish white smoke erupted from the base of the rocket. The eye-searing brightness of RP-1 and oxygen flame lit up the cloud from within, and more exhaust blasted sideways out of the flame deflectors.

Rick felt the gantry vibrate beneath him, but there was still no sound. The exhaust plume rose nearly as high as the nose cone, roiling like a mushroom cloud over an atomic blast, then slowly the rocket began to lift. Bright white flame sprayed the entire launch pad as the thundering booster, gulping thousands of gallons of fuel per second, rose into the sky. Only when the five bell-shaped nozzles cleared the gantry--nearly ten seconds after liftoff--did the solid beam of flame grow ragged at the edges. A few final tongues of it licked the ground, then the rocket lifted completely into the air.

The shuttle gantry beneath Rick's feet shook harder. He grabbed for support just as the sound reached him: a thunderous, crackling a.s.sault that sent him staggering back against the catwalk's inner railing, his hands over his ears.

The gantry shook like a skysc.r.a.per in an earthquake, knocking him to his knees on the non-skid grating. He didn't try to rise again, just stared upward in awe as the Saturn V dwindled rapidly now and the roar of its engines tapered off with distance.

The glare left afterimages when he blinked. He didn't care. He watched the rocket arc over and begin its long downrange run, picking up orbital velocity now that it had cleared the thickest part of the atmosphere.

The door behind him burst open and a flood of white-jacketed technicians scrambled out. The first few stopped when they saw the enormous plume of exhaust rising into the sky, and the ones behind them piled into their backs, forcing them forward until everyone was packed near the railing. Molly, the payload foreman, gave Rick a hand up, and bent close to his ear to shout over the roar of the rocket and the babble of voices, "What the h.e.l.l was that?"

Rick shook his head. "d.a.m.ned if I know."

"There wasn't supposed to be a launch today," she said.

Rick looked up at the dwindling rocket, now just a bright spark aiming for the sun, and said, "Something tells me Control was just as surprised as we were." He pointed toward the base of the exhaust plume, where the cloud had spread out enough to reveal the gantry again.

"What?" Molly asked, squinting to see through the billowing steam. Then she realized what he was pointing at. "Isn't that pad thirty-four?"

Molly and her payload crew reluctantly trooped back into the mating bay to see if the shaking had damaged their satellite, but since Rick was on his own time he rode the cage elevator down to the ground, climbed into his pickup, and joined the line of cars streaming toward the launch site.

The scrub oak and palmetto that lined the service road prevented anyone from seeing the pad until they had nearly reached it. Rick thought he should have been able to see the 400-foot gantry, at least, but when he arrived at the pad he realized why he hadn't. It had vanished just as mysteriously as it had arrived, leaving not a trace.

Rick drove across the vast concrete ap.r.o.n to the base of the old launch pedestal. It looked like an enormous concrete footstool: four squat legs holding a ten-foot-thick platform forty feet in the air, with a thirty-foot-wide hole in the platform for the rocket exhaust to pour through. Off to the side stood the foundation and the thick blast protection wall of the building that had once housed propellant pumps and service equipment. Now both structures looked old and weathered. Rust streaks ran down their gray sides, and stenciled on the pitted concrete, the paint itself fading now, were the words, "ABANDON IN PLACE.".

Weeds grew out of cracks in the ap.r.o.n, still green and vigorous even right up next to the pedestal. Rick was beginning to doubt what he'd seen, because obviously nothing had launched from this pad for at least a decade.

But the contrail still arched overhead, high-alt.i.tude winds snaking it left and right, and when Rick opened the door and stepped out of his pickup he smelled the unmistakable mixture of RP-1 smoke and steam and scorched cement that came with a launch.

Doors slammed as more people got out of their cars. Dozens of them were there already, and more arrived every minute, but what should have been an unruly mob was strangely quiet. n.o.body wanted to admit what they'd seen, especially in the face of so much conflicting evidence.

Rick recognized Tessa McClain, an experienced astronaut whom he'd dated a few times in the last couple of months, climbing out of the back of a white van along with half a dozen other people from the vehicle a.s.sembly building. When she saw him she jogged across the concrete to his side and said, "Did you see it?" Her face glowed with excitement.

"Yeah," Rick said. "I was up on the gantry at thirty-nine."

She looked up at the contrail overhead, her straight blonde hair falling back over her shoulders. "Wow. That must have been a h.e.l.l of a sight. I felt it shake the ground, but I didn't get outside until it was already quite a ways up." She looked back down at him. "It was a Saturn Five, wasn't it?"

"That's what it looked like," he admitted.

"G.o.d, this is incredible." She turned once around, taking in the entire launch pad. "A moon rocket! I never expected to see anything like it ever again."

"Me either," Rick said. He struggled to find the words to express what he was thinking. "But how could we possibly have seen anything? There's no tower here, no fuel tanks, nothing. And the launch pedestal is too small for a fully fueled Saturn V. This complex was for the S-1B's."

She grinned like a child at Christmas. "I'm sure whoever --or whatever--staged this little demonstration was able to make all the support hardware they needed.

And take it away again when they were done with it."

Rick shook his head. "But that's impossible."

Tessa laughed. "We all saw it." She pointed upward. "And the contrail's still there." Suddenly her eyes grew even wider.

"What?" Rick asked.

She looked across the rolling hummocks of palmetto toward the fifty-story-high vehicle a.s.sembly building--and the launch control center at its base. "I wonder if it's sending back telemetry?"

It took a while to find out. n.o.body remembered what frequencies the Apollo s.p.a.cecraft broadcast on or what protocols the data streams used, and the ground controllers had to dig through archived manuals to find out. It took still more time to set up the receivers to accept the signals, but when the technicians eventually tuned into the right frequencies they found a steady information flow. They couldn't decode most of it, since the software to do that had been written for the old RCA computer system, but they did at least establish that the rocket had not vanished along with its ground support structures.

Rick and Tessa were in the launch control center now, watching the overhead monitors while programmers in the central instrumentation building frantically attempted to adapt the old programs to the new machines. What they saw was mostly a lot of numbers, but every few minutes one of the programmers would patch in another section of translated code and another display would wink into place on the screen. They had already figured out cabin temperature and pressure, fuel level in the upper stage tanks, and a few of the other simple systems.

By this point in a normal flight the whole project would rightfully belong to Mission Control in Houston, but there was nothing normal about this launch. When the Houston flight director heard what the Kennedy team was doing, he wanted nothing to do with it anyway. He intended to keep his own neck well out of the way when heads started rolling after this crazy debacle was over.

But the s.p.a.cecraft stubbornly refused to disappear. Radar tracked it through one complete orbit and part of another, when its alt.i.tude and velocity began to rise. At the same time, the fuel levels in the third stage tanks began to drop.

That could mean only one thing: The booster was firing again.

"Translunar injection," Tessa whispered. "They're going for the Moon."

"Who's 'they'?" Rick asked. So far none of the telemetry indicated a live--or even a ghostly--pa.s.senger in the command module.

"It's got to be Neil," Tessa said. "And who knows who else is going with him."

"Neil is in a box in Arlington cemetery," Rick said. "I saw them put him there."

"And you saw the launch this morning," Tessa reminded him. "Neil being on board it is no more impossible than the rocket itself."

"Good point." Rick shrugged. Every dead astronaut from Gagarin on could be in the mystery Apollo capsule for all he knew. This bizarre manifestation was completely new territory; n.o.body knew the rules yet.

Enough people claimed to, of course. Psychics seemed to crawl out of the woodwork over the next few days, each with their own interpretation of the event. NASA had to close the gates and post guards around the perimeter of the s.p.a.ce center to keep it from being overrun by curious mystics, but that merely fueled speculation that they were developing a new super-secret s.p.a.ce vehicle at the taxpayers' expense.

The administration tried the silent approach at first, but when that charge was levelled they reluctantly admitted that for once the fruitcakes were closer to the truth than the whistleblowers. In a carefully worded press release, NASA's public relations spokesman said, "What appeared to be a Saturn Five moon rocket seemed to launch from the deserted complex thirty-four. This alleged launch was not authorized by NASA, nor was it part of any program of which NASA is aware. A complete investigation of the incident is being made, and our findings will be made public as soon as we learn what actually occurred."

That was Bureauspeak for, "We don't have a clue either." Rick spent days with the investigation team, going over his story again and again--careful to say "appeared to" and "looked like" at all the appropriate spots--until he could recite it in his sleep, but no one was the wiser afterward. They examined the launch pad, which revealed no sign of a liftoff. All they could do was listen to the telemetry coming from the s.p.a.cecraft and speculate.

Three days after its launch, the ghost Apollo entered lunar orbit. A few hours after that, the lunar module separated from the command module and made a powered descent toward the surface. It wasn't headed for the Sea of Tranquility.

It appeared to be landing at Copernicus, one of the sites proposed for further Apollo missions before the last three had been cancelled. But when it reached 500 feet, the telemetry suddenly stopped.

"What the h.e.l.l happened?" demanded Dale Jackson, the impromptu flight director for the mission. He stood beside one of the consoles on the lowest of the terraced rows, looking around at the dozens of technicians who were scrambling to reacquire the signal.

Tessa and Rick were watching from farther up, sitting side by side at unused consoles and holding hands like teenagers on a date at the best movie of all time. When the telemetry stopped, Tessa flinched as if a monster had just jumped out of a closet.

"What happened?" Rick asked. "Did it blow up?"

Tessa shook her head. "Everything stopped," she said. "The command module too, and it was still in orbit."

"Five hundred feet," Rick said. Something about that figure nagged at him. What happened at five hundred feet in a normal lunar descent? "Got it!" he said, loudly enough that everyone in the room looked back up at the screens. When they saw no data there, they turned to him.

"Five hundred feet was 'low gate,' when the pilot was supposed to take over from the descent computer and actually land the LEM," he told them. "The computer couldn't take it all the way to the surface. It wasn't sophisticated enough to choose a landing site."

Jackson asked, "So, what, you think it crashed? It was still five hundred feet up."

Rick hesitated. He'd been biting his tongue for days now, afraid of knocking himself off the Atlantis mission with a poorly chosen phrase, but he had grown tired of being timid. He cleared his throat and said, "I think when the time came for a human to take over, it went back to wherever it came from."

"Sure it did." Jackson turned to the technicians. "Get me that signal."

They tried, but it quickly became apparent that there simply wasn't a signal any longer. Not even radar could find any sign of the s.p.a.cecraft. The mysterious Apollo had vanished without a trace.

NASA held back Rick's Atlantis mission an extra week while the ground crew checked the ship for damage from the shaking it had received, but at last they p.r.o.nounced it ready to fly. On the morning of the launch, Rick and four other astronauts rode the elevator up the gantry, climbed in through the hatch in the side of the orbiter, and strapped themselves into their acceleration chairs.

After a countdown that was only interrupted twice due to a defective pressure sensor in a fuel line, they finally lit the three main engines and the two solid rocket boosters and rode America's s.p.a.ce truck into orbit.

It was Rick's first time in s.p.a.ce. He had expected to be excited, and he was, but somehow not so excited as he had imagined. Instead of watching the Earth slide past beneath him, he spent most of his free time watching the Moon, now just past full. It had been lunar dawn at the landing site when the Apollo had lifted off, just the way it had been for the real flights over a quarter of a century earlier. That was to give the crew the best lighting angle for landing, and to make sure they had plenty of daylight to explore in. And to make emergency repairs if anything went wrong.

What a wild time that must have been, he thought as he floated between the pilot's and copilot's chairs and looked out the forward windows at the white disk a quarter million miles away. Flying by the seat of your pants, your life right at your fingertips and the entire world watching over your shoulder to see if you had the wits to keep yourself alive. Aldrin had accidentally snapped off the pin of the ascent engine arming switch with his backpack, and he'd had to poke a felt pen into the hole to arm the engines before he and Armstrong could leave the Moon. A felt pen! If something like that happened on the shuttle, ground control would probably order the crew to conserve power and wait for a rescue--except they still couldn't launch a second shuttle within a month of the first one. Maybe they could get the Russians to come up and push the b.u.t.ton for them with one of their felt pens.

He was being unfair. The Hubble telescope repair had taken some real ingenuity, and the s.p.a.celab scientists were always fixing broken equipment. But none of that had the same dazzle as flying to the Moon. Nowadays the shuttle astronauts seemed more like appliance repairmen than intrepid explorers. Rick had convinced himself that the shuttle was doing some valuable science, but now, after seeing a Saturn V launch only two weeks earlier, he realized that science wasn't what had thrilled him when he'd watched them as a kid, and it wasn't why he was here now. He was in s.p.a.ce because he wanted to explore it, and this--barely two hundred miles off the ground--was the farthest into it he could get.

He wished Tessa were on his flight. She would know what he was feeling. On their dates, they had talked a lot about their reasons for becoming astronauts, and she had admitted to the same motives as him. But she had been scheduled for Discovery's next launch in a month and a half.

He heard a shout from the mid-deck. "Merde!" A moment later, Pierre Renaud, the Canadian payload specialist whose company had paid for his ticket, floated through the hatchway onto the flight deck.

"What's the matter?" Rick asked when he saw the look of dismay on Pierre's face.

"The toilet has broken," Pierre said.

Rick was on post-flight vacation in Key West when the next one went up. The phone woke him from a sound sleep just after dawn, and when he fumbled the receiver to his ear and answered it, Dale Jackson's gravelly voice said, "There's been another Saturn launch. Get your a.s.s up here so we can compare notes with the last time."

Rick came instantly awake. Less than an hour later he was in the air headed north. By the time he crossed Lake Okeechobee he could see the ragged remains of the contrail, and when he arrived at the Cape the place looked like an anthill that had just been kicked. Cars zoomed up and down the service roads, and the public highways outside the gates were packed in all directions.

Two wide-eyed Air Force cadets escorted him from the airport to a meeting room in the headquarters building, where NASA's administrator, flight director, range safety officer, and at least a dozen other high-ranking officials were already deep in discussion over the incident. Rick noted with amus.e.m.e.nt that the flight surgeon was also present, and presumably taking notes. Jackson, the flight director, was talking about the difficulty of decommissioning a fully fueled Saturn V on the pad, should another one appear.

"We don't even have facilities there to store the fuel anymore, much less pump it," he was saying. "Especially not in the fifteen minutes or so that these things stick around. That's barely time enough to hook up the couplings."

Tessa was there as well, and she smiled wide and waved when she saw Rick. He edged around the conference table and pulled up a chair beside her. "What are you doing here?" he whispered.

"Getting the third degree," Tessa answered. "I was at the pad when this one lifted off."

"Which pad?"

"Thirty-four."

"You're kidding. You'd be toast if you were that close to the launch."

"I was in the blockhouse."

Rick supposed that would offer some protection. And besides, even that might not be necessary. The weeds hadn't been charred or blown away in the first launch.

"Why were you there?" he asked. "How did you know it would happen again?"

She grinned, obviously proud of herself. "Because ghosts usually repeat themselves until they get whatever they came for, and today was the next launch window."

At the head of the table, Jackson was still talking. "...Nor do we have crawler capability to remove the rocket even if we could pump it dry. We'd have to completely rebuild the access road, and in the meantime we'd be left with a thirty-six-story embarra.s.sment."

Rick sized up the meeting in an instant. NASA saw these ghost rockets as a threat, and wanted them stopped.