“Great.”
The makeshift crew vehicle pulled up at the ferry pad.
Well, it wasn’t really any different from a night insertion by helicopter; you couldn’t see a damned thing, you couldn’t change a thing either, and you had to trust not only the hardware but the skills of the man in control of it. On the plus side, nobody’d be shooting at him on this leg of the operation; lift-off would occur while Earth eclipsed Fortress from El Paso. The battle station was not a reconnaissance satellite, but there was no point in risking disclosure because some Nazi glanced at southwest Texas and wondered what the bright flash was.
Desmond opened the door of the van. This one had been modified by the removal of the three seats across the middle to provide more room for a man wrapped in the bulk of a space suit with breathing apparatus in place. “I’m sorry,” said the physicist, “you’ll have to walk the remainder of the way. We don’t have proper equipment for this.”
Kelly ducked to look out the door at the monocle ferry, over which waited a castered framework meant for the maintenance crews. There were no crew accommodations here; all the testing was ground controlled, as this flight would be as well. “Guess I can make twenty yards,” he said, and, when Desmond did not precede him, he stepped past the physicist onto the ground.
The pad was hexagonal, for no particular reason, and four feet above the surrounding soil, in higher than most of the dust stinging along on the constant wind. A tank truck preceded by dust and steaming with the blow-off of its remaining load of liquid hydrogen drove away, downwind.
Kelly led the scientist to the pad’s steps, realizing as he walked that his center of balance was farther back than he was used to. Desmond, who carried the helmet, was simply making sure that he was in position to support the veteran if he stumbled backward. The ferry looked larger at each of the six upward steps. That was reassuring. Though Kelly had been close to the Frisbee-shaped vehicle before, his mental image throughout the planning was of a tiny disk beneath his seat in the helicopter, preparing to disintegrate as an even tinier speck above him.
“How will you arrange for transfer?” Desmond asked as Kelly reached the top of the pad. Several men in coveralls stood beside the ferry, but they were service crew rather than a send-off committee. The brass was all in the control bunker; there were no choppers orbiting today.
Kelly tried to glance over his shoulder, but the suit got in the way and his balance wasn’t that good anyway. “Honest to god, I don’t know,” he called against the force of the breeze. He had no idea of how much the physicist had been told. From the fact that Desmond had scrupulously avoided comment on the attempt, whose risks he knew and for whose failure he would feel responsible, Kelly assumed that the man must know a great deal.
“Right up here, sir,” said a technician, steadying the tube and steel mesh service bridge with one hand and gesturing toward the nearer flight of steps with the other. “Please don’t touch the mirrored surfaces when you step into the cockpit.”
The bridge was two flights of metal steps supporting an angle-iron walkway that skimmed the upper surface of the cockpit, either closed or clam-shelled open as now. The railing appeared to be one-inch ID waterpipe, and the whole ensemble had clearly been built in a base workshop. It was sturdy, functional, and almost certainly superior to anything General Dynamics would have achieved with a $350,000 sole-source Space Command contract to the same end. There were advantages to being the poor relation.
The upper surfaces of the ferry were dazzling, the structural members even more so than the sapphire hexagons that accepted the laser beams. Kelly had expected the windows to be bluish, but the segments had only the color of what they chanced to be reflecting – the bridge, the pale sky, or the sun like the point of a blazing dagger.
“We’d better lock this down,” Desmond said, offering the helmet to Kelly.