Jerry Olton - Abandon in Place

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First Appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

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 passed it along like scouts telling ghost stories around a

campfire, but nobody 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 spacesuit 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 damned 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 damned space 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 space, 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 pass 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

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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 massive

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 assault that sent him

staggering back against the catwalk's inner railing, his hands over his ears.

The gantry shook like a skyscraper 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 hell was that?"

Rick shook his head. "Damned 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

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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 apron 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 apron, 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-altitude 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. Nobody 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 assembly 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 hell 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.

"God, 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 assembly building--and the launch control center at its base. "I wonder

if it's sending back telemetry?"

It took a while to find out. Nobody remembered what frequencies the Apollo

spacecraft 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

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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 spacecraft stubbornly refused to disappear. Radar tracked it through one

complete orbit and part of another, when its altitude 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--passenger 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; nobody 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

space center to keep it from being overrun by curious mystics, but that merely

fueled speculation that they were developing a new super-secret space 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 spacecraft 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 hell 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.

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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 spacecraft. 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

pronounced 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 space truck into orbit.

It was Rick's first time in space. 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 button for

them with one of their felt pens.

He was being unfair. The Hubble telescope repair had taken some real ingenuity,

and the spacelab 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

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now. He was in space 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 ass 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 amusement 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 embarrassment."

Rick sized up the meeting in an instant. NASA saw these ghost rockets as a

threat, and wanted them stopped.

"Why don't we just put astronauts in them instead?" he asked. "There's time

enough to ride up the gantry and climb inside before launch."

Jackson squinted down the table at him. "In a completely unknown and untested

vehicle? No way."

"It's not unknown or untested," said Tessa. "It's a Saturn Five."

"It's a goddamned mystery," Jackson said, "and there's no valid reason to risk

anyone's life on one, either on the ground or in space."

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"What do you propose to do, then?" the range safety officer asked. "Shoot them

down?"

Nervous laughter broke out around the table, but quickly died out. Jackson shook

his head. "I propose we let them go. Assuming there are any more. They aren't

harming anything except our image."

Warren Altman, latest in a string of five new administrators in the last two

years, said, "Yes, precisely. Our image. We're in enough trouble as it is

without Congress thinking things are out of control down here." He paused to

take off his glasses, and used one of the earpieces for a pointer as he

continued, "No, Dale, we can't afford to do nothing. No matter how bizarre this

situation is, we've got to take control of it, show Congress that we're handling

it, or we'll lose even more credibility than we already have. That means

decommissioning the damned things, and if we can't do it on the ground then

we'll just have to do it in orbit."

"How?" asked Jackson.

"Just as Rick suggested. Put an astronaut in one, and let him interrupt the

mission once it reaches Earth orbit. We'll already have a shuttle up there next

month; it can rendezvous with the Apollo and our astronaut can return on the

shuttle."

"Leaving the third stage and the rest of the spacecraft in orbit," Jackson

pointed out.

"Better there than on the pad," Altman replied. "Besides, maybe we can figure

out a use for it. Skylab was just an empty Saturn third stage." He laughed.

"Hell, if this continues for a few months, we could have all the habitat modules

we need to build a real space station."

"And what if they disappear on us just like the last one?"

Altman's eyes narrowed. He hadn't thought of that. But he just shrugged and

said, "We'll worry about that later. Chances are the damned things will fade out

as soon as we interfere anyway. That's what usually happens with ghosts." He

pointed his glasses at Rick. "It's your idea; do you want to volunteer?"

"Of course I do!" Rick said.

"You lucky bastard," Tessa whispered.

He thought so too, until the training started. For the next month, Jackson kept

him on sixteen-hour days in the simulators, training for a mission that hadn't

even been considered in over two decades. He learned every switch and dial in

the Apollo command module until he could operate the ship with his eyes closed,

and he practiced every contingency that the flight engineers could come up with,

including a lunar flyby and slingshot back to Earth in case the rocket wouldn't

let him shut it down before translunar injection. They had plenty of data

already for that kind of abort: Apollo 13 had done a slingshot return when an

oxygen tank had blown on the way to the Moon.

Rick even argued them into letting him train in a mockup lunar module, reasoning

that he might be able to use it as a lifeboat in case of a similar emergency.

They also let him practice using the descent and ascent engines for emergency

thrust, and after he wheedled with them for a few days they even let him

practice landing.

"Only because it'll help you get a feel for the controls," Jackson told him.

"You couldn't actually land even if you wanted to, because if you separate the

lunar module from the command module, you're dead. Rendezvous and docking is

done from the command module, and you won't have a pilot."

Rick wondered about that. They didn't know who or what might inhabit the capsule

atop the enormous rocket. It might be anything from Armstrong's preserved corpse

to the Ghost of Christmas Future. The only thing NASA knew for sure was that

they weren't going to risk more than one person on this flight.

So Rick found himself standing alone at the base of the concrete pedestal during

the hour before dawn on the morning of the next launch window. He wore a shuttle

spacesuit modified to allow him to lie in an Apollo couch--the best they could

come up with in only a month, since the few remaining Apollo suits in the

Smithsonian and other museums were over thirty years old and wouldn't hold air

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without major refurbishing. He also wore a parachute strapped to his back. The

parachute was Jackson's idea, in case the whole Saturn V, gantry and all, faded

away when Rick tried to enter the capsule 350 feet off the ground.

Pad 34 was spooky in the pre-dawn twilight. Little gusts of wind rattled the

bushes that grew out of the cracks in the concrete, and Rick felt eyes watching

him. Most of those belonged to the NASA personnel who waited in the blockhouse

nearly a thousand feet away, but the tingling at the back of his neck made Rick

wonder if other eyes were watching him as well, and maybe judging him. What

would they make of him? He'd been barely ten years old when the Eagle landed,

was never a military pilot like the first astronauts, never even a soldier. Just

a kid who'd always dreamed of becoming an astronaut. And now here he stood with

his spacesuit on, holding his suitcase-sized portable ventilator like a banker

with his briefcase waiting at a subway stop, while the empty launch pad mocked

his every breath.

Even the pads to the north were empty. Discovery had already lifted off three

days ago, taking Tessa and five others into orbit with the Spacelab, where they

were to study the effects of free fall on fruit fly mating habits--and also to

await Rick's arrival. They had put themselves in the most likely orbit for the

Apollo to take, but it was still a gamble and everyone knew it. If they had

guessed wrong, Rick would have to go to plan B: re-entry using the Apollo

capsule.

There would be no rescue if that didn't work. None of the other shuttles were

even close to being ready for launch; Atlantis was still at Edwards, waiting for

a ride home that might never come because the 747 carrier plane had developed

cracks in the wing struts, and Columbia and Endeavor were both in the vehicle

assembly building with their supposedly reusable engines scattered across acres

of service bay while the technicians tried to match enough parts to get one

complete set to work.

At least Rick was there. His heart was pounding, but he was there and ready to

fly. He squared his shoulders and checked his watch. Any time now.

Suddenly, silently, the rocket appeared. Spotlight glare blinded Rick until he

lowered his sun visor, then he turned once around to orient himself. The gantry

was right where he'd expected it to be, and the Saturn V...Rick tilted his head

back and felt his heart skip a beat. It was colossal. From right there at the

base of it, the thing looked like it already reached to the Moon.

He didn't have time to gawk. He ran awkwardly for the elevator, his boots

slapping the concrete, then climbed inside the elevator cage and rode it all the

way to the top, nervously watching the ground drop farther and farther away.

Two-thirds of the way up, he crossed into sunlight.

The metal structure squeaked and groaned around him, just like the shuttle

gantry did. The grating underfoot scuffed against his boots as he crossed over

on the swing arm bridge to the white room and the capsule. The hatch was open,

as if waiting for him. Normally a crew of technicians would be there to help him

into his seat, but he was completely alone. Nobody waited inside the capsule,

either. Quickly, lest the rocket launch with him on the gantry, he climbed in,

unplugged his ventilator and tossed it back out the hatch, and plugged one of

the ship's three umbilicals into his suit. He jounced up and down on the seat a

time or two. Banged on the hatch frame with his gloved hand. Solid. Satisfied,

he tossed the parachute out after the ventilator, pulled the hatch closed,

sealed it, and sank back into the center couch.

The instrument panel was a forest of switches and knobs before him,

uncomfortably close to his face. He scanned the readouts, looking for anomalies,

while he took a deep breath and smelled the cool, metallic scent of pressurized

air. His suit umbilical was working, then. He should have a radio link now, too.

He spoke into his suit's microphone. "Control, this is Apollo, do you read?"

"Loud and clear," Jackson's voice said.

"Ready for liftoff," Rick told him.

"Good. Estimated time to launch...uh, call it two minutes."

"Roger." Rick's pulse rate was sky high. He tried to calm himself down, but the

lack of a real countdown somehow underscored how crazy this whole thing was. He

was sitting on top of a ghost!

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He forced himself to concentrate on the instruments in front of him. Main power

bus, green. Cabin temperature, nominal. Fuel pressure--

Amber lights blinked on, and a low rumble vibrated the walls.

"Ignition sequence starting," Jackson said.

"Roger. I feel it."

"All engines running."

Through the hatch window Rick saw the swing arm glide away, and the cabin seemed

to sway slightly to the right.

"Liftoff. We have liftoff."

The rumble grew louder, and now Rick felt the acceleration begin to build. The

launch tower slid downward out of sight, and then all he could see was blue

morning sky. He had expected the G's to slam him back into the seat, but they

built gently as the booster burned its fuel and the rocket grew lighter. When

the second stage ignited there was a lurch and the G's grew stronger, but still

bearable.

This time Houston had gotten in on the act. Mission Control took over the flight

now, and Laura Turner, the capsule communicator, said, "You're looking good,

Apollo. Escape tower jettison in twenty seconds."

Rick felt the thump right on schedule, and now that the tower and its boost

protection cover were gone he could see out the side windows as well. Florida

was a long ways down already, and receding fast.

The third stage ignited a few minutes later, propelling the spaceship on into

orbit. "Right on target," Laura said. "We track you one hundred miles uprange of

Discovery and closing."

"Roger."

And now it was time for Rick to earn his ride. He didn't have to do much; NASA

wouldn't let him fly the Apollo toward the shuttle. It was his job to disarm the

engines and let Tessa bring the shuttle to him. Holding his breath, he reached

out to the too-close instrument panel with his gloved index finger. Would the

ship let him take over now, or would it hold him prisoner all the way to the

Moon? Or would it vanish in a puff of smoke the moment he touched the controls?

Only one way to tell. The switches clicked home with a satisfying thunk, and the

indicator lights showed those circuits dead. The rest of the instruments, and

the capsule itself, remained undisturbed. Rick took a breath, then reported,

"Engines disarmed. Apollo is now safe for rendezvous."

"Roger, Apollo. Sit back and enjoy the ride, Rick."

He unstrapped himself and drifted free of the acceleration couch. The Apollo

capsule might be cramped compared to the shuttle, but with only one person in it

he had enough room to float from window to window and look at the blue and white

Earth below.

And at the Moon, once again in its crescent phase. It beckoned to him stronger

now than ever, for here he sat in a spaceship that could take him there. Take

him there and land, if only he had two more astronauts to fly with him.

The shuttle was a bright speck against the solid black of space, drawing

steadily closer. Rick watched until it resolved into the familiar stubby-winged

orbiter.

"Apollo, this is Discovery," Tessa said over the radio. "Do you read?" Her voice

sounded excited, as well it might. Not every day did she get the chance to

rendezvous with a ghost.

Rick smiled at the sound of her voice. He had always wanted to fly a mission

with her. He had always assumed when it happened he would be the low man on the

duty roster, cleaning rat droppings out of cages on a Spacelab flight or

something, but here he was commander of his own ship, making space history.

He said, "Discovery, this is Apollo. I read you loud and clear. Good to see you,

Tessa."

"Are you ready for EVA?"

EVA. Extra-vehicular activity. They couldn't actually dock the Apollo and the

shuttle; Rick would have to transfer across on his own, leaving the Apollo to

coast onward alone, its engines silenced, its mission--whatever that might

be--unfulfilled.

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But if NASA really turned it into another Skylab, that might mollify whoever or

whatever was behind these launches. Then maybe it wouldn't go to waste.

Rick shook his head. Who was he kidding? NASA would never use this ship for

anything. He'd known it ever since he saw the look on Altman's face when Jackson

asked what they would do if it faded away. Altman just wanted to show

Congress--and the power behind the new Apollo--that NASA was still in control.

He expected this to be the last of the mystery ships, now that Rick had

deactivated it.

"Apollo, do you copy?" Tessa asked.

Rick swallowed. If he screwed with the flight plan, it would be the last time he

ever flew. Worse, the spaceship could turn into gossamer and cobwebs at any

moment, stranding him in cislunar space with nothing but a pressure suit, slowly

suffocating as his air supply ran out. Or it could wait until he reached the

Moon before fading out, just as the last two had done, the first over Copernicus

and the second over the Aristarchus plateau. But if he didn't at least try it,

could he live with himself for the rest of his life, knowing that he'd once had

the opportunity to go to the Moon but had turned it down?

He had always wanted to explore the unknown; well this was certainly his

opportunity for it. He had no idea whose ghost this was or what its purpose

might be, but it was his ship now, by right of conquest if nothing else. So what

was he going to do with it?

Tessa called again. "Hello Apollo, are you ready for EVA?"

He took a deep breath. "Negative," he said. "Negative. In fact, I think I'm

going to need a little help over here."

"What sort of help, Apollo?"

Looking out at the brilliant white crescent, he said, "I need someone to ride

with me to the Moon. Preferably two someones. You know anybody who wants to go?"

Tessa's shriek was inarticulate, a primal whoop of surprise or relief or

laughter, but before Rick could ask her which it was Laura, in Houston, said,

"Don't even think it, Rick. You do not have authorization for an extended

mission. Is that clear?"

Rick sighed. But he could already hear the roar of bridges burning. "Clear as

space itself, Laura, but I'm going. And if I can take a full crew with me, then

I'm going to land when I get there. There's nothing you can do to stop me."

"Negative, Rick. You need ground control. Now that you've disarmed the engines,

you have no assurance that any aspect of the mission will proceed normally.

You'll have to re-arm and fire the engines yourself, but without us you won't

know when to do that. Even after you're on your way, you'll need our radar for

tracking, and you'll need our computers to calculate course corrections, and--"

"I get the point, Capcom." By the quickness of her response, Laura had obviously

considered all this beforehand, but it didn't matter. "You're bluffing," Rick

told her. "You wouldn't let us die out here if you could prevent it."

She didn't answer. Rick took that as answer enough. Tessa evidently did too; she

said, "We're coming over."

A new voice, Dale Jackson's, said, "You're staying right there. Rick, Tessa, we

will not provide tracking for a Lunar flight. I don't care if you drift straight

out of the Solar system, we will not jeopardize the entire space program just to

satisfy your curiosity."

"What space program?" Tessa asked. "We're breeding fruit flies over here." That

wasn't exactly fair; one of the payload specialists was an astronomer who was

running a free-flying instrument platform--but she was from Japan.

"I'm not going to argue with you. Tessa, if you leave Discovery, you will be

charged with dereliction of duty and reckless endangerment of the rest of the

crew. And I'm not bluffing; if you attempt to leave Earth orbit in that Apollo,

you'll be on your own."

Rick looked at the empty seats on either side of him. In a cramped alcove behind

them was the navigation equipment--a telescope and sextant and a primitive

guidance computer--that could theoretically provide him with enough measurements

and computing ability to stay on course. But he hadn't trained to use them, and

he bet neither Tessa nor whoever was coming with her knew how to calculate their

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Jerry Olton - Abandon in Place

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