There was little artificial light. The room was flooded with a glow from the circular ob window that seemed to be almost filled with their home planet. The clouds that had appeared to be obscuring it had vanished, and it was now startlingly clear.
“What’s wrong with it? Looks… Hey, it looks the wrong color.”
“Yeah. Oceans look more or less the same. But not the—” Carrie stopped.
“The land. All the parts that should be green… they’re kind of red.”
“Earthblood,” whispered Carrie.
Chapter Seven
“Yeah, yeah! For Christ’s sake, stop this bastard noise!” Jim looked around at the others, fists tight with anger. “We’ve all seen it. And we all agree on what we’ve seen.”
“The forests and grasslands, Captain,” insisted Mike Man. “Asia and America and the heartland of Europe. All turned red.”
“Maybe that has something to do with our problems, Mike, and maybe it doesn’t. But will you look at the clock there. What’s it say? It says that in a little over two hours I’m supposed to be bringing the Aquila in to land in Nevada. Now, let’s get that done, then we can worry about a color change in the fucking grass. Pardon my language.”
The bizarre incident of Jeremiah’s splintered radio broadcast had touched every single person on board the Aquila.
First there’d been the ghastly discovery of Bob Rogers’s death. Then the horrific number of mechanical and electrical failures that mission control should have monitored and repaired, as well as the faulty cameras and erased tapes.
Finally Jeremiah and the changed face of their home planet.
The clock was showing one hour and fifty-seven minutes to landing, but the main repeater that had been revealing the total elapsed time of their mission had mysteriously gone blank.
Like generations of space shuttles, the Aquila hadn’t really been designed to handle easily in Earth’s dense atmosphere. An early-mission official had once memorably compared controlling one of them to flying an iron frying pan through an ocean of molasses.
As they orbited lower and lower, Jim Hilton was beginning to have a lot of sympathy with that man’s viewpoint.
There was a tendency for the craft to yaw away as it encountered some of the high-altitude jet streams that raged across the high, thin air. The speed, miles above Earth’s surface, showed up on the recording device on the control panel at well over three hundred miles per hour.
The simulator that Jim had used in training was much lighter on the responses than the real thing, particularly in the comp controls for the right and left rudder.
The artificial-horizon monitor had blinked off, having shown the ship barrel-rolling through three hundred and sixty degrees. Jim Hilton felt a little happier without it. If the weather was clear over Stevenson base, he didn’t anticipate any difficulties in locating the true horizon.
The vibration that they’d all been aware of during the long reentry through the atmosphere was still there, making it hard to focus on the mass of instrumentation. The green-and-yellow numbers and the arrows and dials were in a constant state of flux.
“Movement quotient’s into the top orange, Captain. Climbing.”
“Thanks, Marcey. Going to have our shotgun reporter sitting in a pool of puke when we get down.”
Everyone had earphones on, plugged in through the ship’s intercom. They were still in the glide mode, but the time was racing toward them when Jim was going to have to fire the booming retro-rockets.
Jim’s secret fear, which he hadn’t mentioned even to Marcey or to Mac, was that the powerful engines would refuse ignition sequences and the Aquila would simply plummet tens of thousands of feet to the barren lands below them.
He’d even been doing some idle mental arithmetic, trying to figure how long it would take them from fifty thousand feet. Thirty-two feet per second acceleration. But he’d gotten confused when he tried to recall what terminal velocity was for that sort of altitude.
“How we doing for Stevenson, Kyle? Keep giving me status updates.”
“On course. Difficult with you on manual. The comps don’t seem to want to recognize your changes of angle and direction at all.”
“Yeah.”
The rear starboard vid camera had cut out on reentry, but all the others were transmitting their pictures through to the bank of screens at the head of the main cabin, repeated above the captain’s head in miniature.