Orbit

Chapter 35

“What now?” Chris Risen asks, glancing at the chief master sergeant and noting his sudden shift of attention to the commercial television feed being displayed on his console.

“The Secretary of State, sir. They were just interviewing him coming out of the White House. Kip set off another controversy by recommending a type of death penalty for countries that don’t cooperate with the civilized world.”

“And the Secretary has to respond.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where are we on the countdowns, Chief?”

“At the Cape they’re at T minus eighteen minutes. At Baikonaur, T minus nine.”

In the old days of the Soviet Union the idea of a live video feed from the Russian spaceport would have been James Bondish, a fantasy. But now, Chris thinks, we’re sitting here watching that very video feed live and in color, as are the Russian people.

He can see the liquid oxygen venting from the Russian proton booster assembly, the gantry now moved out of the way, the scene looking very similar to the video feed coming in from the Cape.

“Chief, do we have a pool going on whether NASA will cancel if the Russians lift off?”

The chief is grinning. “A pool, sir? You mean, as in gambling? As in a chief master sergeant informing the commander of NORAD that his people are violating regulations?”

“Sorry. Of course I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put me down for twenty that we scrub.”

“Yes, sir. But for the record, I know nothing.”

“Out of limits means out of limits, Griggs!” The launch director is standing now, hands on hips, one of his people standing beside him, the computer screen showing the excessive temperature readings displayed on his master console.

“Stand by, Cully. Do not declare a hold yet.”

“Look at the count, Griggs! How long do you need?”

Griggs has a receiver to his ear and a prepositioned computer team on the other end, physically stationed at a hastily constructed war room one building away.

“Two minutes.”

“You’ve got forty seconds.”

Cully Jones shakes his head and turns back to the screen, rolling his eyes at the engineer waiting for direction on what to do with the temperature indication climbing in a tank that could theoretically explode if it, in fact, was to heat up another twenty-five degrees.

“Watch it like a hawk. If it tops redline plus thirty, we open the vent and hold the countdown.”

“Got it.”

Cully turns back to Griggs, aware of what he’s doing but equally aware that a high reading can’t be easily written off as just another artificial computer-generated anomaly. Like a pilot’s guiding philosophy of instrument flight, safety demands belief in your gauges, until you have solid, almost irrefutable evidence they’re lying.

Cully can feel his blood pressure inching up, something he can usually control, but the series of bad readings and interrupted communications that have marked the last ten minutes are either evidence of a serious, systemic computer glitch—as Griggs insists without much evidence—or a launch sliding toward disaster. This does not feel right.

Griggs turns back to him.

“Okay! Cully, check it now. We’re reading raw pickup data and bypassing the distribution processor that’s been causing so many bad readings.”

The display blinks and the high temperature suddenly drops thirty critical degrees into the green.

“Jesus Christ!” Cully snarls, his eyes on the reading lest it rise again. He turns to Griggs. “That’s real? I can trust it?”

“You bet. This is just more of the nonsense we’ve been fighting all morning. The basic distribution processing program is apparently corrupted and we have no time to reboot the system.”

Another engineer is in his ear on the intercom, and Cully closes his eyes to concentrate on what he’s saying.

“Talk to me.”

“I have a complete data dropout on the SRBs. Total.”

“Stand by!” Once more Cully Jones turns to Hopewell, who is still hanging on to the receiver with his emergency computer team on the other end.

"Griggs?"

“I heard, goddammit! Hang on.”

“I’m declaring a hold.”

The countdown is descending through T minus sixteen minutes, the tension in the control room increasing exponentially.