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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
"What the hell was that?" Henson called as he charged full-tilt through the doorway and dropped into
his flight engineer's chair. Lewis was right behind him, skidding to a stop behind Greenburg.
"Shuttle crash," Betsy snapped. Emergency procedures finished, she now had her first chance to study
the other telltales and try to figure out the exact situation. "Looks bad. The shuttle seems to have gone in
crooked, angling upwards and starboard. Captain Rayburn, can you hear me? Captain Rayburn, report
please."
For a moment she could hear nothing through her earphone but a faint, raspy breathing. "This
is—this is Rayburn." The voice was stunned, weak, sounding nothing like the man Betsy had once
known.
"Captain, what's the situation down there?" she asked through the sudden tightness in her throat. "Are
you hurt?"
"I don't know." His voice was stronger now; he must have just been momentarily stunned. "My right wrist
hurts some. John... oh, God! John!"
"Rayburn?" Betsy snapped.
"My copilot—John Meredith—the whole side of the cockpit's caved in on him.
He's—oh, God—I think he's dead."
Betsy's left hand curled into a fist in front of her. "Rayburn, snap out of it! Turn on your intercom and find
out if your passengers are all right. Then see if there's a doctor on board to see to Meredith. If he's alive
every second could count. And use your oxygen mask—you've probably been holed and the bay's
not pressurized."
Rayburn drew a long, shuddering breath, and when he spoke again he sounded almost normal. "Right. I'll
let you know what I find."
A click signified the shuttle's intercom had been switched on. Listening to him with half an ear, Betsy
pushed the mike away from her mouth and turned back to Greenburg. "Have you got a picture yet?" she
asked.
The copilot was fiddling with the bay TV monitor controls. "Yeah, but the quality's pretty bad. He took
out the starboard fisheye when he hit, and a lot of the overhead floods, too."
Betsy peered at the screen. "Port side looks okay. I wish we could see what he's done to his starboard
nose. Top of the fuselage looks like it's taken some damage—up there, that shadow."
"Yeah. A little hard—"
"Betsy!" Henson broke in. "Take a look at the collar stress readouts. We've got big trouble."
She located the proper screen, scanned the numbers. There were six of them, one for each of the
supports securing the docking collar to the edge of the bay. Four of the six indicated no stresses at all,
while the other two were dangerously overloaded; and it took a half second for the significance of the
zero readings to register. "Oh, great," she muttered, pulling the mike back to her lips. "Rayburn?"
"Passengers are okay except for some bruises and maybe sprains." Rayburn's voice was muffled,
indicating he'd put his oxygen mask on. "We've got a doctor coming to look at John."
"Good. Now listen carefully. You're holding onto the Skyport by the skin of your teeth—four of
the collar supports have been snapped, and the drag on you is straining the last two. Start firing your
engines at about—" She paused, suddenly realizing she had no idea how much power he'd have to
use to relieve the strain on the clamps. "Just start your engines and run them up slowly. We'll tell you
when you're at the right level."
"Got you. Here goes."
It took nearly a minute for the stresses to drop to what Betsy considered the maximum acceptable levels.
"All right, hold at that level until further notice," she told him. "Is the doctor in the cockpit yet?"
"He's just coining in now."
"When he's finished his examination give him a headset and let him talk to one of us here."
"Yeah, okay."
Pulling off her half-headset, Betsy draped it around her neck and looked over at Greenburg. "Stay with
him, will you? I need to talk to Carl."
Greenburg nodded, and Betsy leaned over the intercom. "Carl? This is Kyser on Seven."
"We've been listening, Betsy," the Skyport captain's calm voice came immediately. "What's the situation?"
"Bad. We've got a damaged—possibly wrecked—shuttle with a probably dead first officer
aboard. A doctor's with him. Somehow the crash managed to tear out four of the docking collar
supports, too, and if the other two go we'll lose her completely."
"The emergency collar?"
"Hasn't engaged. I don't know why yet; the sensors in that area got jarred pretty badly and they aren't all
working."
"The front clamp didn't make it to the nosewheel, I take it?"
"No, sir." Betsy studied the TV screen. "Looks like it's at least a meter short, maybe more."
"Those clamp arms aren't supposed to run short, no matter where in the bay the shuttle winds up,"
someone spoke up from one of the other wing sections. "Maybe it's just hung up on something, and in
that case you should be able to connect it up manually from inside the bay."
"There isn't supposed to be anything in there for the arm to hang up on," Greenburg muttered, half to
himself.
Young heard him anyway. "Unless the crash jarred something loose," he pointed out. "Checking on that
should be our first priority."
"Excuse me, Carl, but it's not," Betsy said. "Our first priority is to figure out whether something aboard
Seven caused the crash."
"A board of inquiry—"
"Will be too late. All our fuel comes up via these shuttles. If a flaw's developed in Seven's electronics or
computer guidance programming we've got to find out what it is and make sure none of the other wing
sections has it. Because if something is going bad, it has to be fixed before we can allow any more
dockings. Otherwise we could wind up with two smashed shuttles."
Behind her, she heard Lewis swear under his breath and head over toward the flight deck's seldom-used
computer terminal. "You're right," Young admitted. "I hadn't thought that far. Can you run the check, or
shall I send someone over to help?"
"Tom's starting on it now, but I'm not sure what it'll prove. The computer's supposed to continually run its
own checks and let us know if there's any problem. If there's a flaw the machine missed, a standard
check isn't likely to find it, either."
"Then we'll go to the source. I'll put a call through to McDonnell Douglas and see if they can either run a
deeper check by remote control or tell us how to do one."
Betsy glanced at her watch. Six-forty St. Louis time; two hours earlier in Los Angeles. They'd have to get
the experts out of bed, a time-consuming process. She was just about to mention that fact when Paul
Marinos, Six's captain, spoke up. "Wait a second. There's a guy aboard who works for McDonnell
Douglas—Erin told me he'd asked her about a tour of the flight deck."
"Does he know anything about our electronics?" Young asked.
"I don't know, but she said he does something with computers for them."
Betsy turned around to look at Lewis, who shrugged and nodded assent. "Close enough," she told the
Skyport captain. "Can you get him up here right away?"
"I'll go get him myself," Marinos volunteered. "I'll be there in a couple of minutes."
"All right. Let's get back to the shuttle itself, then," Young said. "Betsy, you said the collar supports were
broken. Any idea how that happened?"
"I can only speculate that the collar had established a partial grip before the shuttle did its sideways veer
into the bay wall."
"In that case, the crash may have left both the outer shuttle door and the exit tunnel intact. Any chance of
getting the two connected and getting the passengers out of there?"
"I don't know." Betsy peered at the screen, made a slight adjustment in the contrast. "They're out of line, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
