Liftoff!
In this exclusive excerpt from Stephen Harrigan’s new novel, Challenger Park, an astronaut prepares to blast into space for the FIrst time. But her mind keeps drifting toward more worldly concerns.
(Page 3 of 3)
“Endeavour,” Lucy heard the GLS voice say over the loop, “countdown clock will resume on my mark. Five … four … three … two … one … mark … T minus nine minutes and counting.”
“Roger,” Surly answered, with a delighted bounce to his voice. “We see the clock running.”
Buddy reached over and gave Lucy a congratulatory punch on the shoulder.
“On our way, Lucy Goosey,” he said. Through the open visor of his helmet, she could see the disbelieving smile on his face and just a hint of the terror that lurked beneath it. She meant to reply in the same awestruck tone, but when she opened her mouth, she found that she was incapable of forming any words at all. She took a long sip of water. It helped a little, enough to allow her to utter a reply, but almost immediately the tissues of her mouth felt numb and dry again. When she tried to swallow, her throat constricted in a parched spasm. She could feel the fear leaching all the moisture out of her body.
In a few moments the cockpit would begin vibrating as the three main engines at the base of the orbiter began to gimbal into their launch positions. At T minus two minutes they closed their visors, and the cool oxygen that circulated around Lucy’s face momentarily distracted her from the suffocating dread that threatened to claim her. But after that things began moving too fast for any emotion, much less any purposeful thought, to linger more than an instant. She saw the data flowing across the computer screens; she heard Surly’s voice acknowledging the closing of the oxygen vents and the retraction of the oxygen vent hood; she felt the whole ship lurch and sway as the computers made one last check of the steering controls.
She thought she had prepared for everything, but the pitiless swiftness of the countdown clock caught her by surprise. Someone seemed to be tossing each of those irrecoverable seconds, perhaps the remaining seconds of her life, indifferently away. Then, all at once, time was up, the main engines were igniting, and something more powerful and savage than she could have ever believed existed took control of her life. It was not just the liquid hydrogen burning in the external tank, not just the powdered aluminum in the solid rocket boosters reacting to an instantaneous dart of flame, that propelled the shuttle off the pad. It was something with a determinative force and will, some being on its own errand, no more concerned with her existence than it was with the scattering shorebirds or the tortoise she had seen that was surely now quaking in its burrow.
The roar as they cleared the tower blanketed every sound except for the steady, tinny voices she heard through her headset, bulletins from the ground about the trim of the engines and the upcoming roll maneuver. The vibrations that assaulted them were so strong, so much stronger than she could have imagined, that for an instant or two she thought the orbiter might be coming apart. She looked at the computer screens, but the effort of trying to focus on the jittery data they displayed gave her an acute sense of vertigo, and she closed her eyes for a moment to dispel it.
It took a conscious effort, with the monstrous g-forces that were bearing down on them, for Lucy to even open her eyes again. This time she glanced at the pocket mirror she had strapped to her knee so that she could see through the orbiter’s overhead windows. Endeavour was just beginning the backward roll that would help throw it into a high eastward arc, and through the little window, she caught a blink’s-length impression of whitecaps slouching onto the beach where she and Brian had walked the night before, and then almost before the image had formed on her retina, it was gone, replaced by a scatter of white as the shuttle blasted through a cloud deck.
The ship rattled even more as it bored past the sound barrier and traveled along in its rough envelope of supersonic air. The g’s mashed her back into her steel seat, holding her in place with the steady, malevolent intent of a strangler. Straining to breathe against this phantom assailant, she thought about her son and his asthmatic struggles, understanding for the first time how he must have seen the disease not as an affliction but as an active enemy.
This empathetic thought had barely formed before Endeavour lurched violently and she heard a tremendous cannonlike boom as tendrils of yellow flame streaked across the cockpit windows. It was SRB sep, the empty solid rocket boosters blowing themselves away from the orbiter as it continued to climb with the remaining fuel in the liquid tank. Surly had warned them not to mistake this violent event for the shuttle itself blowing up, but the jolt was ragged and cataclysmic enough for Buddy to reach out and grab Lucy’s arm and not loosen his grip until the jagged ride turned suddenly silken and the oddest silence Lucy had ever known visited the cockpit. The view through the windshield, through the overhead windows projected in her pocket mirror, was of a deepening spectrum field, a shading to seductive black. They were high now, almost into space, in a realm where the air was too thin for sound to carry. The three engines at the base of the orbiter were still roaring, but Lucy and the crew couldn’t hear them anymore. The sound of Endeavour forcing its way through the thick atmosphere had stilled as well, though they continued to climb, more insistently than ever. The gravitational pressure holding her in her seat continued to be intense, but in the silence and stillness it had changed from a malevolent force to a protective one, a firm and gentle hand, almost maternal, holding her down until she could be released without harm.
“Houston,” she heard Surly calling to Mission Control, his voice intimate in her headset. “Roger. Press to MECO.”
MECO: main engine cutoff. This was the milestone Lucy had been praying to reach, the moment when they could detach themselves from the external tank and its lethal explosive potential. Challenger had blown apart long before it reached MECO, with the children and families of the crew watching, but Endeavour was now far out of sight. If something went wrong now, at least Davis and Bethie would not have to witness it.
“MECO on time,” Surly called out to Mission Control. The hand that had been pressing down on Lucy’s chest gently withdrew. She noticed that her arms were now hanging suspended above her lap, and the cords that had tethered the checklists in the cockpit were floating tendrils. A mosquito that had boarded the shuttle before the hatches were closed was now more than two hundred miles above the earth. Lucy watched it turning frenzied loops in front of her visor, doing its bewildered best to fly in weightlessness.
One last violent spasm rocked the orbiter, as the empty fuel tank was blown away, and then there was the thrust of the orbital maneuvering system engines driving the craft the rest of the way into orbit. The OMS boost provided a final reminder of gravity, shoving Lucy back into her seat again and sending the mosquito tumbling downward. When the burn was over, it was quiet again, except for the laughter and congratulations of the crew. It was only then, when the incredible g-forces had vanished, that Lucy realized she could lift her head and look out the orbiter’s overhead windows. They were flying upside down, but in the weightlessness of space, in the unframed infinitude to which they now belonged, up and down had ceased to be relevant. The windows were filled with a scrolling panorama of cloud and sea and glimpses of rumpled landforms and sharply defined continental edges. All of this coasted toward a horizon constantly renewing itself with prismatic light, and beyond the horizon a biblical darkness, deep and total. This was the earth she had left only eight minutes ago, but which was now a lifetime away.
Click here to read an interview with contributing editor Stephen Harrigan, the author of Challenger Park.
My Library
