Back to the Moon by Homer Hickam Page A

or we’re dead!”
    FSS, LC 39-B
    Jack tucked the pistol in his belt and made for the crew access arm, hauling Cassidy with him. He’d lost all track of time. It might already be too late. He pressed the hydraulic actuator, and stumbled down the catwalk, Cassidy leaning heavily against him. The swinging, swaying arm, 150 feet off the ground, started to move.
Columbia
came into view at the end of the arm and Jack saw the open hatch, Virgil inside urging him on.
    Then something happened. Not used to being slammed wide open, the hydraulics jammed and the arm stopped, frozen in place. There was a yard of empty space between the catwalk and the hatch.
    Cassidy was coughing. “Jack?” He looked up into Jack’s face. “I’m sorry, Jack.”
    â€œNot your fault, Hoppy.” He looked up, saw Virgil at the hatch. “Help me with him, Virgil!”
    Virgil reached out, grasped Cassidy beneath his arms, and dragged the pilot aboard. Cassidy screwed up his face in pain. A little blood was staining the right thigh of his coveralls. It had to be a flesh wound, Jack thought. It was only a ricochet. There was a medical kit aboard—antibiotics, sutures, everything. He could fix his pilot, he was certain of it. He also had no choice. There was no time to get Cassidy off the pad.
Columbia
was the only refuge left.
    LCC
    Incredulous, still not quite grasping the enormity of what might be happening, Bilstein turned to look out the viewing windows at pad 39-B. He knew that if
Columbia
was continuing her automatic internal countdown, the solid rocket motors were already punched up, their control systems fully activated. The solids were unstoppable once lit. But the solids wouldn’t go until the main engines were turned on and no matter what the shuttle’s internal computers were doing, the mains could not ignite without a command from the LCC. That was Bilstein’s ace in the hole. No matter what happened out there, without an order from the LCC,
Columbia
was going nowhere.
    Cedar Key, Northwest Florida
    No one on the little island in the Gulf of Mexico took note of the eighteen-wheeler pulling out of the otherwise empty parking lot at the MEC facility at the airport. Inside the truck packed with electronics, Sally Littleton pressed the return button on a desktop computer and the disk inside started its program. “Godspeed, you guys,” she mumbled. “Amen,” someone else in the trailer automatically added. A red light on the console confirmed the connection with
Columbia.
The screen blurred with a column of numbers and then stopped. GO FOR SSME START, the screen blinked. GO FOR SSME START. A wild cheer erupted inside the trailer.
    Crew access arm catwalk, FSS, LC 39-B
    Jack heard
Columbia
’s pumps start to whine and knew she was about to come alive. The sound of the pad’s massive deluge system hit him first, a roar from the great waterfall of water sweeping beneath
Columbia
’s tail. Then the shuttle began to shake and a burst of fire and billowing exhaust suddenly erupted from her mains.
Columbia
’s engines were being fed by turbo pumps capable of emptying an Olympic-sized swimming pool in seconds, each of her SSMEs producing nearly a half-million pounds of thrust. That thrust pushed up against the shuttle stack. The external tank took the brutish strain, absorbing the energy, shooting it throughout the structure, storing it in minute twists and strains.
Columbia
had turned into a coiled, monstrous spring.
    From the end of the access arm Jack reached for Virgil’s hand just as the sonic blast created by the shuttle mains struck him. Knocked off balance, all he could do was jump, aiming for the hatch. He hit it, bounced off, grabbed air, and then fell away. Virgil, in a desperate lunge, caught his coveralls. Jack reached up and grabbed his savior’s big arms to pull himself inside, both men falling on the curved plate of the airlock.
    Virgil got to his