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.”

  “Just keep on, Steve.”

  “Wait a minute.”

  “What is it, Jeff? As if I can’t guess what you’re goin’ to say.”

  “Bastard right, Hilton. I want to be connected to my paper right now.”

  Jim sighed, looking over his shoulder at the flushed, angry face of the journalist. “I know the West American paid an arm and two legs for you to be with us on this mission, Jeff. Can’t say I liked the idea, but our lords and masters say ‘jump’ and we just ask them how high. But I know you’re not a stupid man. If we can’t raise our own mission control, then how you figure we can get your newspaper? Right? So just keep it quiet and start thinking about the story you’ll have. About being on board the first shuttle ever to come through safely with an old-fashioned pilot operating manual controls.”

  It was an unusually long speech for the taciturn captain of the Aquila, and it even reduced Jeff Thomas to silence.

  “Aquila. This is Alpha Quebec Uniform Indian Lima Alpha. Aquila. USSV Aquila. Anyone out there hearing us? Come in.”

  There was only the hissing of the speakers, all through the vessel. Then the hissing was broken by a faint, crackling voice.

  “…on…ee…een.”

  “Say again. Say again. This is Aquila. Getting broken-up message on seventeen two five. Say again.” Steve was fiddling with the controls, trying to strengthen the frail signal.

  “What did he say?” asked Marcey. “Anyone catch what he said?”

  “Thought he said something ‘me’ and ‘see,’ and then it sounded like ‘green.’ But I’m not sure.” Ryan O’Keefe shrugged. “Hell, I’m not sure.”

  “Aquila. Say again.”

  From out of the hissing the voice cleared for a minute.

  “Aquila’s the Latin for eagle, ain’t it? Read that some…” There was a burst of atmospheric static, followed by “… sixteen.”

  “Again. Try it again and give us some station identification, please. Over.”

  “Said that John 3:16 was what it was all about. Over.”

  Carrie called out. “Reference from the Bible, Captain. John’s Gospel. Third chapter, sixteenth verse. Used to see banners being held up at sporting events until they stopped the religious crazies a few years back. That’s what he means.”

  “Think he’s a religious freak?” Jim pointed to Steve. “Try him again.”

  “Read you better now. Give identification. Who are you?”

  “John 3:16. Over.”

  “What’s the quote? You know, Carrie?”

  “Funny. I looked it up once and it stuck. Something about God so loving the world that he gave his only begotten son. Who believes in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life.”

  “Tell the guy we understand his reference, Steve. Ask him where he is.”

  “We’re currently over the western part of the United States,” said Kyle. “Damn near right overhead mission control. How come we can pick up this lunatic radio freak and not them?”

  “Aquila hearing you. We know the quote. Please tell us who you are and where?”

  “Jeremiah. Voice in the wilderness. Lone voice crying in the desert.”

  “Where, Jeremiah? Please help us. We’ve been away from Earth for two years. Got radio problems. Tell us, Jeremiah. Over.”

  Cackling laughter swooped and fell like a windblown gull. “You got a problem, mister eagle. You and…” More breaking up. “I’m out close to Barstow. You all come see me. Have a nice day. Signing off. Things to… water… get me… coyotes.”

  “Jeremiah! Don’t break contact.”

  The high, reedy voice said something that they all agreed sounded like “Earthblood,” and then vanished from the airwaves.

  “Earthblood?” said Jim Hilton. “I don’t get it. What’s it mean?”

  It was less than ten minutes later that Carrie Princip broke away from the others and entered the forward observation chamber. The heat shields and arma-shutters had been removed from the windows, and she had an uninterrupted view of Earth.

  Marcey, suddenly noticing that the other woman member of the crew was missing, followed her.

  “How’s the old place looking?” she called. But there was no reply. “Carrie? Carrie, are you in there? What’re you doing?”

  “Come in, Marcey. I was… It doesn’t look right to me.”

  “Doesn’t look right! What the shit does that mean, Carrie?”

  “Earth.”

  Marcey squeezed forward into the cramped space, kneeling down beside the slim blond second navigator.

  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.

  They were currently over the Pacific Ocean, the sea invisible through endless layers of thin cumulostratus cloud.

  The vessel lurched to port and dropped vertically, as though someone had pulled the plug. Jim’s hands gripped the stick to pull her back onto an even keel. Behind them he was vaguely aware of a low moaning sob coming from Jeff Thomas. He caught Marcey Cortling grinning at him from the adjacent second-officer’s seat and managed a thin, tense rictus of amusement back at her.

  Pete Turner was doing his usual job as captain’s backup, checking the input flight data that was still available from the master consoles. “Last orbit, Skipper,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  The Aquila was gradually losing altitude, dropping back toward its home planet, struggling and bucking every foot of the way. Jim was literally fighting the controls, sweat beading his forehead.

  “Hold steady, you bitch!”

  The clock was clicking down toward the estimated landing time. At the radio Romero was still going through the motions of trying to raise Stevenson Air Base, finding every channel was still dead. Some offered the whispering of open-line static, but the others were silent as a grave.

  “Clear-air turbulence, Skip,” warned Carrie Princip from her scanning radar screen. “Fifteen, twenty miles ahead.”

  “Terrific.”

  “DOESN’T TIME GO real quick when you’re having fun, Jim?”

  Henderson McGill was the only crew member, apart from Jim Hilton himself and Marcey Cortling, who hadn’t given into the lure of the pale purple, opaque plastic sick bags.

  Each sported a neatly printed label: Oral-Excretion Container. Use And Dispose.

  The touchdown clock had jammed at twenty-four minutes and eighteen seconds, though the tenths of seconds still whirled around in a ceaseless cascade of blurred white numerals.

  It crossed Jim Hilton’s mind, as he wrestled to hold the clumsy vessel on an even keel, that the whole ship was breaking up around him. At school he remembered leading the story of the wonderful hundred-year dray that lasted without a single problem for precisely a century, and then totally disintegrated on the very next day.

  Mike Man, his face like stretched parchment, called through on the intercom. “Ground clock’s showing Pacific time, fifteen forty-one, Captain.”

  Altitude was still a little over nine and a half thousand feet.

  They were close enough to see the distant jagged line of the high Sierras, the white splash of Death Valley and even pick out, very faintly, the ruler-straight lines of the freeways.

  “Nothing showing up on air-traffic warnings, Skipper.”

  “Thanks, Carrie.”

  “Look at the red color daubed on the sides of the mountains to the west.” Marcey pointed through the side observation window. “Should be dark green conifers there.”

  “I don’t have the time to look. Don’t even have time to breathe.” He half turned so that his copilot could wipe the slick beads of perspiration away from his eyes.

  “Won’t get down on this approach,” she said quietly. “Too high.”

  “Yeah. Would’ve been… Whoa!”

  “Got her?”

  “Yeah. Wanted to go off to port all on her own. Would’ve been good to get down in one. At least we got plenty of fuel… maybe too much fuel if we come down hard,” he said, peering at the dials. Raising his voice so everyone would hear him clearly, he added, “Case you didn’t catch all of that, we’re going to do a wide, sweeping circuit. Try to lose some height and also use up more fuel. Reckon we should be touching down in around half an hour from now.”

  “WIND SPEED ten miles per hour. Wind direction north northeast, veering easterly, gusting to fifteen miles per hour.” Carrie Princip’s voice was calm, unflustered. “Cloud cover below one-tenth, high. Visibility is ten-tenths. Outside temperature now seventy-eight degrees. No precipitation. Can’t see any potential problems.”

  Jim acknowledged the information with a curt nod. His wrists were aching from the long battle with the recalcitrant shuttle, holding her steady and on the course coordinates that Kyle Lynch was chanting out to him, with Marcey calling any variations on bearing, speed or altitude.

  They were approaching this time from the southwest, heading into whatever wind there was. Without instructions from the absent ground control, Jim was simply picking up what was the main runway at Stevenson Air Base.

  “This is it, guys. Once I commit, there won’t be any second guessing. We’re going to be beyond broke on it.”

  Then there it was. The expanse of sunbaked concrete, smeared with the black rubber trails of thousands of landings, stretched ahead of the Aquila, perspective diminishing it to a shrinking ribbon vanishing into the desert beyond.

  “Ace on the line,” said Marcey. “Everything’s looking good.”

  Altitude was seven hundred and fifty feet, the shuttle rock steady.

  A light flashed on the control board. “Landing abort point in ten seconds.”

  “Still looking perfect, Jim.”

  The flashing light stopped, and a loud buzzer began to sound. Then Mom’s voice made a final appearance, businesslike, brisk and insistent. “Must land. Repeat, must land. Past abort point. Vessel must now land.”

  THE VIBRATION WAS so bad as they came in on their final approach that Jim Hilton was finding it incredibly difficult to see anything. His whole skull was shaking, making him feel as if his brain was swilling around inside.

  The instrumentation was unreadable, and he was forced into making a judgment landing, watching the strip of runway as it came swooping in below the nose of the Aquila.

  “Can’t see any sign of life, Captain.” Steve Romero’s voice was distorted by the juddering of the ship.

  Jim couldn’t have cared less at that moment. His sole intent was to hold the stubby wings level and stop the bow from digging a fiery furrow along the yellow centerline of the runway.

  “Undercarriage down and locked,” shouted Marcey.

  Out of the corner of his eye Jim caught a flash of charred and twisted metal. A wing-tip and a silver, folded tail plane. It was on the edge of the runway, half on the scorched and blackened grass.

  It was unthinkable that a wrecked fighter would have been just left there, partly obstructing the main operating runway of one of the bigger air bases in the country.

  Unthinkable.

  Most of the captain’s mind was focused on the immediate flying problem of getting down, but a small section of Jim’s mind was chilled and horrified at what was happening.

  His guess put them about fifty feet up, traveling around one hundred and seventy miles per hour. Still too fast, but if he tried to drop the speed the Aquila could come down stern first.

  He saw the pile of tangled wires and hawsers in the centre of the runway. Saw the rusting, jagged cables, clear across his landing path.