“Surely they’d have found some way to let us all know?”
“Yeah, I just… Look, talk’s cheap and action costs. Best get ready for reentry. If we’re going to have to take over on manual, then I guess I’d best get in some reading on the controls. Been a long old time, you know.”
McGill nodded. “Sure. Remember one thing, won’t you, Jim?”
“What?”
“Port is left and starboard is right.”
“EVERYONE BELTED IN SAFE? I got around five minutes showing.”
“Assuming the clock’s working, Captain,” said Marcey Cortling, “and that it won’t go the way of Mom.” Steve Romero had finally switched off Mom, with the help of Mike Man.
The computer control had been deteriorating with increasing speed, leading to the motherly Kansas voice gibbering out streams of numbers and abstruse mathematical formulae in high-pitched, fluting tones.
Kyle Lynch’s voice came through the intercom. “Checked the data on reentry comp control, and it all looks like an ace on the line. Can’t find anything wrong.”
Jim Hilton laughed. “Comes under the category of famous last words, Kyle.”
As the Aquila encountered the top surface of the atmosphere, it was beginning to vibrate. The outside sensors were already inching up the temp scale, out of the green and into the pale yellow section of the repeater dials, but still way short of the crimson segment.
“Least we might be able to get a better view of Earth once we break through.” Kyle was gripping the arms of his seat with white-knuckled fists. “Cameras and deep-focus lenses all show a blur. Could be cloud cover, but you wouldn’t expect the whole planet to be shrouded like that.”
The shaking was building up, and the interior of the ship was filled with a piercing humming noise.
The temperature was out of the yellow and sliding fast toward orange.
“Hang on, everybody,” said Jim Hilton, calm as if he were taking the twins for an afternoon drive into the Hollywood Hills. “Here we go.”
Chapter Six
“Jeff’s puked in his lap.”
“Shut your mouth, McGill, or…”
There was laughter from everyone on board as they slipped off the restraining harnesses and stood up again, all of them conscious of the control-induced increase in the ship’s gravitational field.
“Or what, squid?”
The journalist was wiping at the splattered mess across the front of his dark blue coveralls. “Shouldn’t have eaten two portions of that recon mush crap stew shit.”
Jim stretched, rubbing the muscles at the nape of his neck. “Well, that’s about as good a burn-through as I’ve known. Thanks a lot, mission control. You done us good.”
Everyone in the crew, except for Jeff Thomas, had a precisely programmed set of tasks to do once they’d cleared reentry.
While he tried to get himself clean, the rest went to their stations.
The clock was showing three hours and eighteen minutes to estimated landing time.
ONCE AGAIN Steve Romero set about trying to establish some sort of contact with the ground crews far below them in the heart of the Nevada desert.
“Aquila coming home. Aquila coming home. Do you read?”
Jim had asked him to patch the link through the ship’s intercom so everyone on board knew what was happening.
“This is USSV Aquila returning after two-year deep-space mission. Hello, control, can you read me? Can you read?”
As he waited, they could hear the faint hiss of clear air.
“Can’t get a thing on any wavelength, Skip,” he called. “I’ve set it to automatic search. Should pick up any broadcast. Normally it’d be going crazy by now. Thousands and fucking thousands for it to pick from. But it’s going all the way up and down and finding nothing.”
“You mean all channels are dead?”
Steve answered Mike Man’s question. “Course not. Don’t be stupid! Means we got some sort of horrendous equipment failure. And that means…”
“Means I’m going to have to bring her in with a hands-on landing,” said Jim quietly.
“I’ll keep trying. Could be they can hear us and we can’t hear them. If they know we have a serious problem, they might be able to scramble a high-alt bomber and link something through that way. But the readings all show normal.”