“Orders? Me? You’re the pilot, Ralph.”
“Don’t you fucking forget it.” And he went stalking off for the wake.
Phil Stone came strolling up to her, dressed in a light blue coverall, his hands in his pockets. “Don’t take it personally.”
“I don’t.” York shrugged, and began to pull off her gloves. “Pretty soon he’ll be bawling out the techs. And then the SimSup. And then you, and… Bawling his way up the chain of command. I was just the first one to hand, the place to start. He hates to fail.”
“He didn’t fail,” Stone said. “That failure wasn’t recoverable.”
“That hypersonic spin—”
“I wrote the book about hypersonic spins,” he said, and she suspected he had a war story behind that somewhere. “I know about the spin. But even before that point, you couldn’t have gotten out of it.”
“What happened?”
“You don’t want to wait for the wake?” The wake was the long, harrowing official debrief.
“Just give me the headline.”
“Your nose RCS thrusters started firing. Just as you went into that fourth roll reversal. The aerosurface couldn’t handle the additional torque.”
She thought about that. “But that firing didn’t show up in the instruments. And besides, it’s impossible for the RCS to fire at that point. We’d dumped the fuel.”
“You thought you had.” He grinned. “Just one damn thing after another, huh?”
“Christ.” She shoved her gloves into her helmet. “Sometimes I think these guys want us to fail.”
“No. But you have to fail, a hundred times maybe, so you can succeed the one time when you need to. Besides, this is the place to do it. Nobody ever got killed in a sim. Anyhow, this was primarily a proving flight for the biconic design, not for the pilots.”
That was true, York reflected. The biconic sim was so unpopular, in fact, that only real sim hounds, people desperate to rack up some sim time, any sim time, in order to get a better seat in the crew rotation, would consider working on it.
People like Natalie York and Ralph Gershon.
Stone said, “And I don’t think this thing is ever going to fly. There’s too damn many things to go wrong. The percentage of biconic crashes we get in the sims is a joke…”
“It’s just a shame Ralph doesn’t have that perspective.”
“He may be the best we’ve got,” Stone said quietly.
She was surprised to hear Stone say that.
Stone went on, “He kept on trying. Everything he had, trying to pull her out of that spin. He came closer to saving the MEM than I thought anybody could get.
“By the way,” he said. “You did pretty well in there yourself. Calling for abort when you did was the second best option.”
“What was the best?”
“What Ralph did. Come on.” He slapped her on the back, the pressure of his hand heavy through the layers of her pressure suit. “I’ll buy you a coffee before the wake.”
They walked out of the training building.
Wednesday, August 12, 1981
They flew into Newport News the night before the presentations: Lee and Morgan and Xu and Rowen and Lye and all the others — even Art Cane, who had decided to open and close Lee’s presentation himself, to show that the corporation was committed to the bid.
They checked into the Chamberlain Hotel at Old Point Comfort, near Langley, where the presentations were to be held. Morgan beat a path to the bar, where he started drinking rum: Lemon Hart, 150 proof.
But Lee went to his room with his boxes of slides.
He’d had a final run-through in front of Cane the day before and he was horrified to find that he still overran, by nearly twenty minutes. So he opened the boxes and began sorting the slides, trying to find something he could cut.
At about 3:30 A.M. Jack Morgan came to the door, thoroughly oiled. He took a flash photo of Lee, with his slides spread out all over the hotel room’s polished desk. “For Christ’s sake, JK, put that crap down and go to bed. If you don’t know the pitch now, you never will.”
Lee gave in. He cleared up the slides and got into bed. He even turned the light out and lay there in the dark.
But he could see the slides more clearly than when they were physically in front of him.
After maybe thirty minutes of this he got out of bed, had a shower and a shave, and started working again.
His wake-up call came, and when he looked out of the window he found the planet had rotated again, and it had become light.
Thirty minutes before the Columbia pitch was due to start he went down to reception to meet the others. Bob Rowen was carrying a fat PC. The computer contained the whole Columbia case, split into little chunks and indexed so that in response to questions Lee could get at any point of it quickly.
Lee glad-handed the others, trying to radiate confidence and surety.
But suddenly his stomach clenched up, and he knew he was going to be ill.
Jack Morgan had been watching him, and he dragged Lee off to a bathroom, away from the others, where he threw up violently: a thin, brown, stinging liquid, nothing but coffee.
Morgan didn’t say anything, but Lee knew what he was thinking. He’d been running on adrenaline and coffee and no sleep and little food for ten weeks.
Morgan made him pull down his pants, and gave him a shot in the cheeks from a needle full of something, vitamin B-12 and other crap. But it worked; it got Lee back together again.
And in a couple of minutes he was able to walk out of there, smart and spruce and neat and feeling just fine.
They arrived at the ballroom where the presentations were to be made.
The MEM Evaluation Board members were sitting in rows before the stage: seventy-five of NASA’s most senior people.
Lee knew many of the members by sight. There was Hans Udet from Marshall and Gregory Dana from Langley — famous enemies, sitting stiffly side by side — and he spotted Ralph Gershon, skulking at the back of the room. Gershon nodded to Lee and grinned.
Joe Muldoon was sitting front and center, chairing the session; Muldoon might have become a power in the hierarchy, Lee thought, but he still didn’t look like he fitted the blue pinstripe he had tucked himself into.
Tension hung in the room like ozone.
As the Columbia team set up, the team that preceded them was coming out. It was McDonnell, whose invitation for a joint pitch Lee had famously rejected. And among their subcontractor partners was Hughes, who had rejected Columbia’s approach.
The contrast between the two groups struck Lee strongly. The McDonnell/Hughes cadre was sleek, weighty-looking, all middle-aged white men with slicked-back hair and comfortable guts. There was Gene Tyson from Hughes, for instance, still stinking of cologne and tobacco, looking as if he had stepped off the cover of Fortune. By contrast, Lee was carrying his own slide projector, for Christ’s sake, and all he had to back him up was with this bunch of college kids and a hungover doctor.
Lee had actually seen a copy of McDonnell’s final report, the result of millions of dollars worth of study. It called for a biconic approach, a variant of the theme Rockwell would be developing. The study was damned clever stuff, and so vast that nobody at Columbia had had time to read it.
Tyson came over to Lee. “Well, JK. I’m surprised to see you here.”
“Oh, we were passing,” Lee said. “So we thought we’d throw something together, and see how it hangs.”
Tyson laughed, quite good-natured, and he clapped Lee on the shoulder and walked off.