Back to the Moon - Couverture souple

Hickam, Homer

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0440235383 ISBN 13 : 9780440235385

Editeur : Island Books, 2000

Synopsis

Book by Hickam Homer

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Decimation

This I have known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Pity Me Not"
LAUNCH MINUS 5 MONTHS, 13 DAYS, 14 HOURS, AND COUNTING . . . Prometheus MEC Clean Room, Hangar 1-D, Cedar Key, Florida

"NASA is and always has been a subversive organization. Anything else you hear is a public relations lie," Jack Medaris said.

Dr. Isaac Perlman looked at the ceiling of the big hangar and wagged his head from side to side, an indication of his doubt at his companion's comment. "Subversive? Why, Jack, there's never been a more conservative bureaucracy on this planet. It takes polls to see what it should do next. It lets politicians decide technical matters. You forget I went there first for my moon dirt. NASA just laughed at me. That's why I hired you!"

Medaris and Perlman, dressed in clean-room regalia--white one-piece coveralls, puffy plastic hats, and latex gloves--were watching a dozen other similarly clothed men and women ministering to what looked to be a giant robot, two gangly arms akimbo, mounted on a go-cart. The doleful strains of Barber's Adagio for Strings accompanied the technicians as they moved slowly and reverently around the machine's oddly shaped pyramid of spheres, rods, and cables. Antennae protruded from each level of the machine. Its "arms" were actually two extendable and jointed booms. At the end of one of the booms was a digger, a rakelike device. The other arm had a grasping claw.

"I'll grant you NASA as a bureaucracy is timid," Jack said. "But what I'm talking about is its charter. NASA is supposed to develop the means to allow American citizens to leave the planet. Leave, Doc! What could be more seditious than that? If NASA ever does what it's supposed to do, Americans are going to be flying all over the solar system. Where there's Americans, there's trouble. It's in our nature to cause trouble, challenge authority, kick up our heels, and be ornery. You think it's going to be any different in space? Just you wait. It'll be a sight to behold!"

Perlman kept shaking his head. "No, no, no, Jack." He laughed. "Nothing of the kind will ever be done. You're talking about Americans the way they used to be. We're too fat and happy now. No American is going to get in a rocket ship and take off into the wild blue yonder. Why, they'd miss Monday Night Football!"

Jack grinned. He enjoyed debating with Perlman. None of it was serious, just lighthearted philosophizing to offset the boredom of watching his engineers prepare for the final flight-readiness test of the robotic moon miner--Prometheus, as it was called. Jack owned the company that had built it, the Medaris Engineering Company, MEC for short. After the accident that had killed his wife, and the investigation that had resulted in his banishment from NASA, MEC had become the most important thing in Jack Medaris's life. An invention of his called the sling pump, used in almost every liquid rocket tankage system in the world, had made Jack wealthy and MEC a very prosperous company. His people were paid accordingly. WE HAPPY FEW, read a banner over the entrance to the clean room. It reflected the fierce camaraderie of the company and the loyalty of its people to its founder.

As the test neared its critical phase, Perlman became visibly nervous, not surprising since he had paid Jack and MEC over thirty-one million dollars to build Prometheus. "Is it looking good?" Perlman worried.

"Very good, Doc," Jack said, concentrating on the sensor data scrolling down a computer screen.

"It's got to work," Perlman breathed, his fingers covering his lips as if he was afraid to let his voice fall on the precious spacecraft.

"Everything is fine," Jack said distractedly. And it was too. Jack and MEC's thirty engineers had spent a year carefully constructing Prometheus, borrowing liberally from the proven design of the old Soviet Union's Lunakhod series of moon-sample return spacecraft.

"I feel like WET's coming at me like an unstoppable locomotive," Perlman remarked with a groan. Every so often, it seemed, Perlman had to voice a little misery.

Jack ignored the comment. He didn't want to get off into a discussion of WET. The acronym stood for the World Energy Treaty, a United Nations agreement that had been drafted after the breeder reactor disaster in Sorkiyov, Russia. Hundreds of Russians had died, thousands more were going to get cancer, livestock devastated by the score, trees, grass, everything contaminated and dying. An antinuclear frenzy had swept the planet. WET banned all "power plants utilizing fissile and radioactive materials." The treaty had been ratified by every country in the world except France and the United States. President Edwards had signed WET but the Senate, as yet, hadn't approved it.

Jack had known Perlman for five years. The physicist had just turned up on Cedar Key one day, introduced himself in Jack's office, and tried to start an argument. "Do you know what the most important product of our civilization is?" he had demanded.

"No, Dr. Perlman," Jack had replied, amused, "what is the most important product?"

Perlman had raised his finger, his habit when he pontificated. "It's not cars, not television sets, not even computers. It's energy! Without energy Western civilization would not exist. A good portion of the earth--the so-called Third World--struggles in misery and degradation. Those poor people think what they need is money, or a different political or economic system, to rise up out of their poverty, but what they really need is energy!"

To Perlman's disappointment Jack had not seen fit to argue. "Okay, Doc. Energy. What does that have to do with me?"

Perlman had looked out Jack's office window, to the ocean tide that lapped the nearby shore. "Mr. Medaris, did you know that in a gallon of seawater there is the equivalent energy content of three hundred gallons of gasoline? That's because ordinary water contains deuterium--heavy hydrogen. If deuterium is fused with an isotope known as helium-3, the result is nearly limitless energy. Did you know that?"

Jack remembered Perlman spreading his hands in that effusive way he would come to know so well. "I have come up with a way to use inertial confinement of a quantity of deuterium and helium-3, subject it to the heat and pressure of a rather large laser beam, and release all that energy. Fusion, Jack. Energy from fusion is within my grasp."

Energy from fusion: the commercial application of the same physics as the sun and the hydrogen bomb. It had been the dream of scientists, engineers, and researchers for six decades. The little man had leaned forward. "But I need help, Jack. You are my only hope!"

Sally Littleton caught Jack's eye, releasing him from his reflections. Her eyebrows were raised. She was ready to complete the final test. Jack nodded and his lead Prometheus engineer began to call out the next steps.

"If it fails . . ." Perlman worried.

"It's not going to fail."

"There's so little time."

"There's plenty of time. Everything I read says the Senate won't pass WET until July. That's six months away. When we finish tonight, we'll disassemble Prometheus, ship him off to Shiharakota. The Indians have already mounted our dog engine to their Shiva launcher. Once this payload is stacked, we launch. We'll have your dirt back to you in three weeks."

"It isn't dirt," Perlman grunted, ever sensitive. He could call it that but he didn't like anybody else doing it.

Jack nodded. "Fire beads, then."

"And it's not quite true that I will have it three weeks after launch." Perlman clucked. "It'll still be on a ship."

Jack had explained it to the physicist a half-dozen times. "We could speed things up if we had the freighter dock in Hawaii, lease a jet there. Probably save you a week."

"I'll ask my benefactors," Perlman said doubtfully.

Jack shrugged. It was ever thus, even with a group of heavy-hitting investors like the January Group. Jack assumed at least one of the members of the organization was a bean counter, worrying about spending thousands when they'd already spent millions--hundreds of millions, in fact--to build Perlman's pilot fusion plant in Montana. "Penny wise and pound foolish, eh, Doc?" Jack gently gibed.

"The men and women of the January Group are cautious with their money in their own audacious way," Perlman answered stiffly. "Thank the good Lord for them or I'd not be as far as I am. You wouldn't either."

"Do you even know who they are, Isaac? I know you work through their attorney."

"I do not," he said primly. "It is none of my business. But I've been told they are the movers and shakers in this country."

Jack looked Perlman over. "You haven't told them about me, have you?"

"You asked me not to."

"You didn't answer my question."

Perlman changed the subject, not fooling Jack for a moment. "I still can't believe WET will make fusion energy a crime. It will all be done in the name of the children, of course--what reckless activity in the last decade hasn't? And what is the world going to do for energy? Keep burning fossil fuel! Oil and coal, Jack! Can you imagine the pollution? The degradation to the environment? My technology is clean, cheap, and limitless!"
Sally gave Jack a thumbs-up on the sensor readings, and also a pert smile. She was a handsome woman, that Sally. Perlman was still rattling on, extolling the advantages of his technology. "Doc, everybody's going to see that," Jack interrupted. "We've still got time. You'll get your dirt--fire beads--in a month or so and you'll be able to fire up your plant, show it to the media, demonstrate how safe it is too. After that I guarantee you they'll make an exception in WET for fusion."

Perlman shook his head. "I don't want that damned treaty modified. I want it killed. If we approve it, we might as well pack it in. In fifty years, maybe less, this tired old polluted planet is going to go dark."

"We're doing the best we can, Doc."

Perlman was into it. He stabbed his index finger at the roof. "I don't care about fission energy, Jack. They can shut down every nuclear reactor in the world and I wouldn't give a flying fig. But fusion is not fission."

Jack took a deep breath. "You told them about me, didn't you?"

Perlman slowly lowered his hand. "I had to. The January Group wasn't going to give me seventy million dollars to hire someone they didn't know."

Jack looked at Perlman. "What did they say? I'm sure they dug up everything they could find on me."

"Nothing." When he saw Jack's doubtful expression, he added: "I swear, Jack. They cut the check within two weeks after I told them your plan."

Sally had rolled a computer up to Prometheus, plugged it into an interface panel. A graphic display, a thick red horizontal line on a blue background, formed on the monitor. "Ascent stage sim, plus ten," she announced, keying in the parameters of the final stage of the mission.

"Reentry activation, nominal readout," Virgil Judd said, watching the numbers come up on the computer. Judd had been a Cape Ape, laid off by the decimation of the workforce there over the last two years. He was a big, gentle man with a lovely wife and a very sick daughter suffering from the advanced stages of cystic fibrosis. Jack had done everything he could to help Virgil, including arranging for tests at the Mayo Clinic. We happy few.

"Vector all balls, deceleration nominal," Virgil said. Then, "Bingo deceleration. Switching to reentry mode."

A few minutes later another layer of numbers slid across the computer screen. "Simulating reentry, checking azimuth, bingo envelope," Sally said. "Readouts on volume." The music, provided by a CD player outside and piped in through speakers in the four corners of the bay, switched to Orff's Carmine Burana, placing a triumphant caste on the already exciting moment. "Nominal targeting. Prometheus has landed," she concluded, peering at the screen. She looked over at Medaris, her eyes twinkling with excitement. "On the money, Jack. Prometheus is ready to rocket and roll!"

Jack joined in the spontaneous applause of the engineers, muffled by their latex gloves. He approached the moon miner, looked over the numbers still running down the computer screen. "Let's pack him up, children. Our boy is ready to go to India." His people crowded in, clapping him and each other on the back. Virgil picked a protesting Perlman up bodily and waltzed him around the room. The CD switched to "Jailhouse Rock." The dozen engineers in the room joined them in an impromptu shag. Prometheus seemed to be thoughtfully watching.

It was several hours later, well past midnight, when Jack finally got to his office to catch up on some paperwork. Virgil was the only other person still in the plant, detailed to finish the inventory of Prometheus components, and to initial out the procedures manuals. Since there were only thirty full-time employees at MEC, everyone pulled double, even triple, duty. Jack scanned his desk, determined to make a dent in the piled-up documents, mostly purchase orders for the myriad of hardware required to build such an exacting machine as Prometheus. He walked over to the interior window in his office that looked down into the clean room and admired the robotic spacecraft, resting in a cone of light from an overhead lamp. He especially admired the arm with the claw. That had been his addition to the spec. Perlman had asked him about it and Jack had explained that Prometheus might need to move a few rocks to get at the fire beads at Shorty Crater. It was an explanation that could be defended but it wasn't its real purpose. That purpose he kept to himself.

Virgil spotted Jack and walked to the squawk box. "Hey, boss, I'm nearly finished down here. How about you?"

Jack looked over his shoulder at the purchase orders and gave in to his fatigue. They could wait until the morning. "Yeah, Virg. I'm ready to pull the plug too. Go ahead. I'll lock up." Virgil, Jack knew, wanted to know who was going to be the last out of the building. The MEC burglar alarm system was cranky, requiring a complicated code to be entered into a box at the exterior door and again at the parking lot gate. It was a time consuming process and about half the time it didn't take and had to be reset and reentered. Everybody hated it. The system had been installed, the cheapest available, when MEC first moved into the facility. Jack depended, more than anything, on the remoteness of the site to protect the company. Trooper Buck, the Cedar Key constable, made routine swing-bys during the few hours the plant was unoccupied at night. Still, having a burglar alarm that might not even work was foolish and Jack knew it. One of the purchase orders on his desk was for a new security system, but there had just been so much to do.

"See you tomorrow, boss," Virgil called.

"Okay, Virg. I'm right behind you."

Jack took a moment to savor Prometheus, but memories of his wife flooded him as they often did when he was tired. Looking out over the moon miner reminded him of the time when he had found Kate in their mountain-home sunroom, pensively gazing down on the city of Huntsville and, on the distant horizon, the big rocket test stands of Ma...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

The shuttle is hijacked. Now the countdown to adventure begins....

In his #1 New York Times bestselling memoir, October Sky, real-life NASA engineer Homer Hickam captured the excitement of America's first space ventures. Now, in this no-holds-barred joyride of a thriller, he straps us into the cockpit of the space shuttle Columbia as a renegade rocket man hijacks the shuttle—and blasts off on a Mach-speed chase into space....

Jack Medaris is a man haunted by his past and driven by a dream: He's risking everything to "borrow" the Columbia—and pilot it to the moon. He didn't plan on an unexpected passenger, beautiful celebrity daredevil and scientist Penny High Eagle. To Penny, this hijacking will test every bit of her mettle as an adventurer—and as a woman. To Jack, the mission is a personal quest—to return to the moon and bring back what America left behind, something so explosive, it could change the future of the world. Now, as the U.S. government scrambles to the chase, and as deadly forces are deployed from earth to stop them, a man and a woman find their fates inextricably entwined. And in the savage emptiness of deep space, their only hope is to join forces to reach the lunar surface. Then comes the hard part. Getting home alive.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Island Books
• Date d'édition: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0440235383
• ISBN 13: 9780440235385
• Reliure: Poche
• Nombre de pages: 512