“Let’s go into an orbit,” I said to Betty. “East to west.” She bobbed her head down over the console and began punching figures in. “I want to make a few passes over New York and Los Angeles while I decide where to set down.”
Don’t ever trim your beard in free fall. While we were getting into orbit I grabbed a pair of scissors and tried it. It was like leveling a table by sawing the legs: I wound up with a lopsided effect, but stopped in time.
We circled at a hundred twenty miles up; it was nighttime in North America, and although there was little cloud cover it was shocking how few lights there were to see, compared with the photographs taken fifty years ago from the weapons carriers and spacelabs that used to coast around up there. You could barely make out New York, Chicago and Los Angeles; they looked like small towns. Well, they were on their way to being small towns.
I sat at one of the tables on the bridge puffing a cigar and watching a dark North America go by, saw the penumbra of dawn over the Pacific and then morning and then noon over Australia and South China. What a lovely blue ball that Earth is! You can’t beat it for a place to live. Even with all those bastards down there trying to do me in.
After our fourth orbit I made my decision. “Betty,” I said, “can you find Washington and bring us down there?”
She didn’t look up from the console. “Washington, D.C.?”
“Yes.”
“Certainly, Captain. On the White House lawn?”
“We don’t want that kind of attention. How bad a hole would the Isabel make in a football field?”
“Pretty bad. More crater than hole.”
I thought about that for a minute. “If there’s anybody there—a night football game or something—can you change your mind and pull back up into orbit?”
She turned her rice-paper face up to me and said, “Are you out of your mind, Captain?”
“I was afraid of that.” I looked at my watch. August 23, a little past midnight. Well, there wouldn’t be any ball games. “Get out your Washington map and bring us down in Aynsley Field. How long will it take?”
“One hour twenty-three minutes after we leave orbit.”
She was very sharp. “How many G’s?”
“Twelve at maximum, for thirty seconds.”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s do it after one more time around. I’ve got some things to pack.”
“Yes sir, Captain.”
Bill put Washington into the course console and brought a map of the city onto the screen. He turned lacquered knobs. The two coordinate lines appeared and jiggled a bit and then settled on a black rectangle not far from the Congressional Shelter Complex. Then he pushed a lever in slowly and the map expanded until the rectangles filled the screen and the outlines of Aynsley Field were recognizable. You could see the grid lines of the football field, and the end zones. He gripped a handle and a clear black dot appeared on the screen; he twisted the handle, pushed it forward and the dot found the center of the field. Then he threw the “Lock” switch and the dot locked itself in place. “All set, Betty,” he said.
Betty threw a couple of switches and said, “We have our trajectory, Captain, and our atmosphere entry point.”
I really loved all this. Like Ruth, I’d watched spaceship shows on TV as a kid. Even though the actual doing of it-determining a point to drop out of orbit and a trajectory to ride down on—was no more difficult than getting a manicure, there was panache to it. Especially with our bright-red Chinese equipment.
I flipped on the intercom. “This is the Captain. We’ll drop out of orbit next time around, in about two hours. Tie everything down for twelve G’s.” Then I drew a breath. “I’ll be the first person off the ship, and I’m going to run for it. You people are all still citizens and they won’t give you too hard a time. I’m the one they want. I’ll get you your salaries and bonuses as soon as I’m able. For God’s sake don’t tell anyone we’ve been to Aminidab. The important thing is to get the uranium out of here. We’ll all be rich. I’ll be in touch.”
The endolin packets were still in Mimi’s gym bag in my stateroom. The gym had a first-aid cabinet; I got a handful of big stretch-Synlon bandages out and, winding them around myself, managed to tape about eight pounds of concentrated endolin to my chest and two or three pounds to each arm. Enough for all the hangovers in Los Angeles. I left my legs free, for running.
Surprise was clearly the thing. They would be expecting me, but they’d be expecting a middle-aged, potbellied billionaire like one of those Texas fatties. Hell, past middle age; I turned fifty-three the day before we landed.
They’d know I was there and they’d have a half hour to be ready. Their radar would have picked up the Isabel even before we entered our orbit, but they had no way of knowing where I’d try to set down. Once we left orbit, it would take about three minutes for them to get a fix on our trajectory and conclude I was coming down over Washington; that was the scary part for me, since Washington sure had the wherewithal to blow the Isabel out of the sky as if she were an ICBM hot from Aberdeen. That was unlikely, though, since they weren’t dumb enough to think I’d attack the United States. What they would do, in the half hour they had after they’d figured we’d come down at Aynsley Field, would be to surround the ship with military police, wait for the landing area to cool, and arrest me. Then into the Chateau d’lf with me, while Baynes and his cronies figured out what to do with my uranium.
Thinking all this out calmed my spirit immensely. With a few minutes left before touchdown, the G forces had leveled off. I got out of my landing seat, grabbed the scissors and finished trimming my beard, steady as a rock this time. By then the touchdown counter had started and a red light was blinking over the mirror in the head where I’d been doing this barbering. I set the scissors down, got back into my chair and belted myself in with about three seconds to spare before the Isabel burned herself into Aynsley’s midfield. I could see nothing through the porthole; rippling heat from our retros crimped the outside air. Suddenly the shudder of the landing began to massage my spine like a demon chiropractor, yet the effect was soothing. I literally felt the Isabel burn her way twenty feet into topsoil and bedrock like a white-hot coin dropped onto butter. She trembled, gave a sigh, settled in, and came to rest back on the planet where she was made—where we were all made.
I undid my belt and lit a cigar. I looked out the stateroom window and son of a bitch if I didn’t see a goalpost! Judging by the distance, Betty must have brought us down right on the fifty-yard line. What an encouraging thing for a first sight on Earth in nine months! What an emblem for my plans! Ben Belson, broken-field runner. I bent over and retied my shoes. Outside, the ground was smoking; there were spotlights bearing down on us and smoke rose foggily into the beams.
The Isabel has two exit hatches. On Belson and Juno, where low gravity and a hard surface had made for less devastating setdowns, we could merely walk out the bottom one, and down a short stairway to the terrain. But for landings like this there was a hatchway thirty feet up, just off the mess hall. And the Isabel, being Chinese, had a special gimmick; I was counting on it to add to the surprise. I’d studied spaceships before buying this one and knew that a U.S. or Russian craft might have to wait eight hours for the ground to cool after Betty’s hot-pilot landing, before anybody tried getting out and walking. But the Isabel had a foldout, magnesium-alloy footbridge that could arch its way over the hot circle of earth the engines had made; it could be sent out thirty feet away from the upper hatch. The only thing was I’d never tested it. On the blueprints it looked flimsy. And I’m no compact Chinese astronaut.