Oh, I want this. So badly.
Even if I have to get there with Ralph Gershon, she thought.
“A hundred and thirty thousand feet. Coming up to aerosurface control initiation.”
“Yo,” Gershon said. He began to work his stick and pedals.
The biconic was deep enough into the atmosphere, on this computer-generated dive, for the pressure to have rendered the forward attitude rockets useless. And the atmosphere would be almost thick enough for the biconic’s control surfaces to start biting into the air.
York realized that the biconic was a peculiar, unprecedented mix of spacecraft and aircraft.
“Dynamic pressure twenty pounds per square foot,” York said. “One hundred twenty thousand feet.”
“I got it,” Gershon said.
Then the last thrusters were switched off. The craft had become a glider, with only its aerodynamic control surfaces to maintain its attitude and trajectory.
The glow outside her window reached its peak, racking up through pink and yellow and blue-white. Actually the colors changed in visible clunks, as the computer changed over its filters.
Gershon worked at his stick and pedals, the biconic’s oddly old-fashioned aerodynamic control system. “The response seems sluggish to me.” He pushed the stick forward. “I’m trying to descend. The elevons have gone down, the rear has come up. I don’t feel a damn thing. Fucker. There we go. I overshot. Okay, bringing her up. Arresting my sink rate. Back on the stick. Elevons up, lift dumped, back end dropping down. Shit. Where’s the response… Oh. Here it is. I’m wallowing like a hog in mud.”
The biconic would be slow, clumsy, heavy to handle by comparison with most Earthbound aircraft, York knew. Flying the biconic was more like guiding a boat; you just had to rearrange your control surfaces and wait while the new configuration bit at the stream of thin air, and slowly changed your momentum.
“One hundred and three thousand feet,” she called.
“Here we go,” Gershon said. “First roll reversal coming up.”
In the electronic imagination of the computer, the biconic banked through eighty degrees to the right. York watched the tilting landscape; the plaster of paris appeared to quiver as some fault in the TV camera’s control mechanism made the tracking shudder.
The biconic was designed to go through a series of S-shaped turns in the upper atmosphere of Mars. The flight path was a question of budgeting: the craft had to shed all of its orbital energy by the time it reached its landing site, but on the other hand, at any point in its trajectory, the craft needed to maintain enough energy to reach that landing point. So the craft had to manage the lift generated by its biconic shape, together with the kinetic energy of its descent, to shed heat and reach its target…
“Overshot,” Gershon muttered. “Eighty-five degrees. Eighty-six. Banking left to compensate. Come on, SimSup. Is this where you hit us? Banking left. Okay. Here we go. Okay. First roll complete. Here we go. Second roll reversal.” Gershon’s voice was tense, his movements fast, mechanical.
He takes these games too seriously, York thought.
At this point the biconic would be traveling at many times the local speed of sound. Still glowing, it would streak across the Martian sky, scrawling a wake of vapor across unmarked skies, shedding great crashing waves of acoustical energy across the dead, empty landscape, a land that had lain undisturbed for half a billion years.
This sure would be a spectacular phase of the mission, she conceded. A pilot’s dream.
Maybe, York thought wistfully, the aborted Space Shuttle might have felt something like this. To fly down from orbit in huge graceful curves over the high desert would have been a hell of a difference from falling into the sea ass-backwards in an Apollo. We lost a lot of beauty when we killed the Shuttle.
“Sixty-one thousand feet,” she read off.
“Rager. Reducing air brake to 65 percent. Take air data.”
“Rog.” York flicked a dummy switch. On a real biconic a series of pitot-static probes would thrust out of the craft’s surface then to confirm measurements of dynamic pressure and airspeed.
“Looking good,” Gershon said. “Coming out of the third roll.” He grinned at York. “Hey, maybe we’re going to get through this fucker.”
“Maybe. Fifty thousand feet.”
“Banking for fourth roll.”
The plaster of paris plain, unobscured by the fake plasma glow, tipped over again.
“Okay, coming out of the roll. Coming out… come on, baby… coming out of the roll… Shit.”
Here it comes, York thought. Every sim, they were out to get you somewhere. Her stomach contracted.
The attitude indicator was tumbling. Gershon worked his controls and snapped through emergency checklists. “The aerosurfaces are biting. But just not enough. Fuck. What’s going on?”
York glanced out of her window. Gershon couldn’t get out of the roll, and the landscape had tilted up through more than ninety degrees; the biconic, in the imagination of the computer, had tipped over almost completely.
“Recommend you abort,” the SimSup said calmly, breaking his radio silence.
“Screw you,” Gershon said. He kept working through his lists, checking instruments, snapping switches.
This is what pilots do, at times like this, York realized. Work through the book. Keep it logical, but move fast. Try A. If it doesn’t work, try B. If it doesn’t work, try C…
But the plaster landscape was upside-down completely, the fake craters and canyons like a crimson roof above them.
York was shocked to find that only seconds had elapsed since the first sign of the problem. That was all you were granted: seconds, to figure out the underlying cause of what could be a complex, multiple failure.
There was virtually no chance of succeeding.
If anything went wrong, you had to get out of there, more or less immediately. Or you’d die. The equation was as simple, as finely balanced, as that.
“Ralph, we have to hit abort.”
Gershon didn’t even bother to reply; he just kept working feverishly.
The landscape tilted farther, visibly coming closer. The biconic was starting to go into a hypersonic spin.
“Hit abort,” she told Gershon again. “Christ, Ralph, once we go into a spin we’re through.”
The light in the cabin flickered as the fake Martian sky hurtled past the window. She had a sudden, comical image of a little TV camera on its robot arm spinning around over a plaster-of-paris floor.
If this were for real, my head would be shaking now, battering against the helmet, my inner ears coming apart from Coriolis forces. If this were for real, the craft would start to break up, maybe before I lost consciousness.
“MEM, we recommend you abort. We recommend—”
“Ralph! Jesus Christ! Ralph!”
There was a shudder, a crunch, a puff of white powder.
The landscape froze in place.
“Welcome to Mars,” the SimSup said drily. “We’re just figuring out the size of the crater you made.”
“Fuck,” Gershon said. He pulled off his helmet and threw it across the fake cabin.
The two of them clambered out of the back of the simulator. From outside it looked like the nose of a small light aircraft, a cockpit section roughly sheared off, with wires and umbilical cables dangling from the gaping rear.
The technicians were grinning at them. “Hey, Ralph, You busted our camera. Flew it right on down into the plaster of paris. How about that.”
Gershon wasn’t laughing. He confronted York. He pointed a gloved finger at her face. “Don’t you ever give me orders when we’re flying.”
She was amused rather than disquieted; she’d seen such tantrums before. Most of the time she was able to cope with Gershon, and he seemed prepared, in his rough way, to accept her as an equal in exercises like this. Even though he’d lectured to her, back when she was an ascan. Then, every so often, he would blow his stack like this.