Baxter, Stephen - SS - Prospero One.pdf
(
140 KB
)
Pobierz
166287408 UNPDF
B
B
The Baxterium
Prospero One
©Stephen Baxter and Simon Bradshaw 1996
Originally published in
Interzone
116, October 1996
Annotated by Simon Bradshaw
In the minutes before launch, Doctor Geoff Lighthill heard the whine of the
elevator gantry leaning away from the booster stack, and the clatter of power
and propellant umbilicals popping out of their sockets in the
Blue Streak
's
metal flanks.
The pressure cabin of the Prospero was an aluminium box the size of a small
car. There was barely room, in this little cone, for the two of them - Lighthill
and his commander,
Roly Gough
- lying side by side in their contoured
couches, cocooned in their bulky white pressure suits.
The walls around Lighthill were coated with switches, circuit breakers and
dials. In his months of training at
Stevenage
, heâd come to learn the meaning
and function of every one of those switches. And he knew every step of the
mission ahead of him. He felt as if he was a cog in some immense machine,
that would work through its predestined sequence of steps, regardless of the
spark of consciousness cradled inside his skull...
It was Friday, April 26th, 1974; today, Britain was launching its first
astronauts to orbit.
And its last.
Flight director Josh Morris stood at his workstation, scanning the Operations
Room.
Morrisâs controllers were working smoothly through their countdown
procedures. There were 20 of them, all in ties and shirtsleeves. Their accents -
cultured British, or crisp Australian from the de Havilland contractors who
had built the launch facilities - permeated this stuffy box, here in the middle
of the Australian desert.
B
Compared to the jargon-ridden verbal pyrotechnics that typified US launch
procedures, this was typically British, he thought.
B
Big TV monitors showed the public feeds. The BBC coverage was reaching
its climax; in a lashed-up studio elsewhere in the Woomera complex,
James
Burke
,
Patrick Moore
,
Arthur C Clarke
and
Joe Muldoon
, the Apollo
Moonwalker; were staring intently at monitors. The Brits looked a little
absurd in their light tropical-style suits. Another live feed showed a small
band of Aboriginal protesters, at the security gate of the complex. The
military police faced the protesters now, a calm, solid line; the Aborigines
werenât a problem for today, and anyhow, they would get their land back
once Woomera was dismantled, after this mission.
Right now, Josh Morris found it hard to care about the plight of Aborigines.
Restless, he looked out, over the heads of his controllers, through the big
picture window at the side of the Operations Room.
Launch Complex 6D stood on an escarpment overlooking a dry lake, all of
three miles away, isolated save for the gleaming shells of lox tanks. The
Woomera facilities were still crude compared to Canaveral, where heâd
trained with the Americans for this mission; the launch stand was not much
more than a metal platform, with a single gaunt gantry rising alongside the
booster itself.
The
Black Prince III
, exposed, looked like a complex toy set against the huge
tan expanse of the desert.
The Blue Streak boosters were five squat, silvery cylinders, four of them
strapped together around a stretched core stage; he could see the flaring
nozzles of each boosterâs twin Rolls Royce RZ-2 rocket engines, and the
shine of ice coating the lox tanks. The boosters bright, striped paintwork was
vivid. Above the lower stages rose the Black Knight IV - the squat,
kerosene-
and-peroxide
powered upper stage - and then the cylinder-cone shape of
Prospero itself, with the stubby launch escape tower above that.
Around the launch stand stretched the red-brown surface of the South
Australian desert. The gibber stone - sun-baked earth covered in sharp, slate-
like rocks - was flat, brown, lifeless save for salt bushes and clumps of dark
green, spiny grass. It was, Morris thought, like a slab of the surface of Venus,
transposed beneath the huge blue sky of Earth.
Lox vapour swirled around the Blue Streaks, dispersing quickly.
In a few weeks, when the flight was done, his assignment here would be over.
He was on sabbatical from the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough;
he would have to pack up and go home, leaving behind all this - the pure
light, the elemental landscape, the electric blue sky - for the stultifying green
of Hampshire.
B
The last time heâd gone home had been the middle of winter. Britain had
been on a three-day week, because of striking miners; the whole country
seemed huddled, cramped and cold. Going back would be claustrophobic,
hard to take. But Britain wasnât going anywhere else in space; there was
nothing else for him to do.
B
The countdown, orderly and controlled, reached its final minute.
In 1945, Roly Gough had been 19 years old. He had missed out on the war;
because he was born too late.
He had built up a career as a test pilot, but that had almost been scuppered in
1964 when he had worked as the lead pilot on the
TSR-2
, which got itself
cancelled by Harold Wilson.
Space had beckoned. But as Britainâs aerospace programme had limped
through the 1960s, suffering endless cuts and delays, it had started to look to
Gough as if he had been born too bloody
early
.
But now, unlikely as it seemed, here he was, with this one chance to reach
orbit. And as far as Gough was concerned, as soon as the blue touch paper
had been lit on this firework under him, nothing was going to stand in his
way.
The clock reached ten, nine, eight...
Wing Commander Roly Gough closed his eyes.
Four, three.
Morris felt his heart thump, hard.
Two seconds before launch, eight main engines ignited. There was a flare of
brilliant white light. Smoke, white but tinged with red Australian dust,
billowed out to left and right of the booster stack, blasting out into a ravine
towards the Lake Hart Saltbed. In this desert, there could be no fancy water-
cooling system of the type employed at Kennedy; instead, the flame buckets
were lined with big fire-bricks, bolted down beneath that massive blast.
So it had begun.
At least, Morris thought with a surge of savage anger; I got this far. At least
they can't take this away.
Today, there would be fire across the desert. And Morris would control it.
B
The count reached zero.
B
When the hold-down bolts exploded, Lighthill felt the ship jerk under him. At
first there was vibration but no acceleration; he knew that the rocket had left
the ground and was in momentary stasis, burning kerosene and peroxide,
balanced on its thrust.
Already, he had left Earth.
Itâs happening, Lighthill thought, exultant. The Yanks have been to the Moon
and back, and now theyâre heading for Mars. But so what? Right here, right
now, Britain is finally putting men into space.
And Iâm one of them.
He could hear the Operations Room speaking to them, but could make out no
words.
Now the rocketsâ roar engulfed him. Acceleration settled on his chest,
mounting rapidly.
He felt the booster pitch over as it climbed. Prospero One was arcing slowly
over to the north-east, tilting into the trajectory for its
53-degree orbit
.
Inclined enough to permit the all-important Sunday supplement pictures of
Britain from space...
He tried to stop analysing. He wanted simply to exist, to be in the mouth of
this extraordinary moment, this huge outpouring of energy.
The cabin shook around him, loose equipment rattling.
T plus a hundred and forty seconds. Core ignition, called Woomera; there
was another tremor as the core Blue Streak shuddered into life, and the
acceleration piled higher.
Then came a clatter of explosive bolts, a dip in the acceleration. Staging: the
four strap-on liquid rocket boosters had been discarded.
Roly Gough was already more than 30 miles high, already in space.
Now the main core of the Black Prince burned under him, and as the mass of
the ship decreased the acceleration built up. The acceleration felt savage; the
Blue Streak heart of the launcher had, after all, been designed as an ICBM,
not as a man-rated booster, and even the weight of its payload seemed barely
to hold it back.
B
The cabin started to rattle, juddering back and forth. Some minor flaw in the
core stage was feeding in fuel or oxidiser incorrectly; the booster was
chugging and popping.
B
Testing fighters, he had pulled more G than this before-and that had been
sitting up, not lying in a contoured couch. But that had been for a few
seconds, not minutes on end.
Lighthill, next to him, was muttering: "Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody
hell..."
The chugging smoothed away, leaving a steady pressure on his chest.
Then came a loud bang, right outside the cabin's hull, as the escape tower
streaked away, hauling the protective shroud with it. The blue light of Earth
flooded the cabin. He could see fragments of ice, shaken free of the hull of
the booster; they glittered briefly.
The pressure mounted still further as the core Blue Streak burned the last of
its propellant. Then there was a jerk forward, a sudden surge of
weightlessness; Gough was hurled forward against his restraints. He heard
rattles as the main booster core was discarded, and the clatter of the Siskins,
the solid propellant separation rockets, which kicked the final apogee stage
forward, settling the propellants in their tanks.
At last he felt the crisp surge of the apogee stage's six
Gamma 304s
, cutting
in for the final and relatively gentle push into orbit. He was thrust back into
his seat. The acceleration was light and smooth: good Hawker Siddeley
engineering, he thought.
Through the small triangle of tough silica glass before him, he could see the
skin of Earth, spread out like a glowing carpet: there was the wrinkled,
unmistakeable profile of New Guinea, and the sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria
was as bright as a tropical sky.
Then, right on cue, the apogee stage cut out.
"Bugger," whispered Roly Gough.
Guy Briggs followed the launch on TV, in Bill Maclaurin's office at
Stevenage.
In the heart of the screen, blurred and excessively magnified, the Black
Prince was finally lost against the glare of cobalt-blue Aussie sky. The BBC
cut away to their Woomera studio, where Burke, Moore and Clarke were
gushing excitedly. They seemed to be talking an awful lot about the British
Interplanetary Society.
Raymond Baxter
joined them now, intoning well-
rehearsed words about the antique days when he'd known Roly Gough as a
Plik z chomika:
przemosta
Inne pliki z tego folderu:
Baxter, Stephen - Destiny's Children 04 - Resplendent (SS Coll).epub
(531 KB)
Baxter, Stephen - Xeelee 00 -Timeline.epub
(49 KB)
Baxter, Stephen - Xeelee 02 -Timelike Infinity.epub
(224 KB)
Baxter, Stephen - Xeelee 03 - Flux.epub
(357 KB)
Baxter, Stephen - Xeelee 04 - Ring.epub
(411 KB)
Inne foldery tego chomika:
Ben Bova
Clive Barker
David Brin
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Greg Bear
Zgłoś jeśli
naruszono regulamin