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have video conferencing facilities and background fax?'
Honicker glanced at the tiny TV camera set into the top
of Christine's monitor but, to be certain, he relayed the
question to her.
'Yes,' she replied. 'But I've never set it up.'
Morgan heard her reply and spoke quickly. 'We're going
to establish a full link right now but stay on this line until
it's established. When our ID comes up on your screen you'll
have to give us authorisation for full control over your
terminal.'
The terminal screen lit up before Honicker had a chance
to reply.
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Jez's attention kept switching between the flight information
screen and his window.
Forty thousand feet . . . 60,000 feet . . . 80,000 feet. . .
Harsh glare off the wing - no clouds above us now nothing
but blackness. Space! Nearly there! Pull blind down
a bit. Yes! Yes! I can see it! The curvature of the earth!
Sudden whining noise. What's that? The canards, of course.
We're going into ramjet mode. Three thousand knots - what
was that in kilometres per hour? Give up - too excited to
think straight and the display would change soon anyway
. . . 3500 knots . . . 4000 knots . . . neck muscles hurting like
hell from fighting the increasing acceleration in order to
look out of the window.
On the flight deck Nick Rowe received the flight management
system go-ahead to change to rocket mode. He
glanced up at the wide-angle closed-circuit screen that
showed the passengers straining to look out of the windows.
All was well. He flipped the safety guards clear and touched
the fuel change-over controls. The four motorised regulators
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whined and liquid oxygen and hydrogen flowed into the
combustion chambers, causing the engine note to change to
a deeper roar. The warning screens in front of both pilots
remained blank. All was going smoothly as Sabre 005 began
the final phase of her climb into space.
Altitude 125 kilometres. Speed 21,000 kph.
Jez wriggled in excitement when the data appeared on the
flight information screen. They were nearly in orbit!
Paul and Sophia were sitting two rows in front of Jez.
Paul was forgotten as Sophia drank in the wondrous
spectacle of the earth's atmosphere shining like an iridescent
halo in the sun's raw, untempered glare. Passing under the
wing's leading edge was a huge circular storm system,
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throwing out glowing trails of diffuse light at its edges like
a monstrous Catherine wheel. Like so many others on their
first venture into space, she suddenly experienced a strange
and unsettling insight into the stupendous forces that ruled
the universe. She could almost feel the colossal flow of
energy from the sun to the earth - she felt at one with the
great forces that not only powered the earth's mighty
weather engine and the awesome movements of its oceanic
currents, but provided the essential warmth and light to sustain
life. Physicists had reduced the eternal miracle to sets of
formulae to explain the unexplainable, but she now realised
that this was something more than that - something more
than a mechanism that had been activated at the instant of
the Creation. This was something that needed the constant
and untiring will of God to sustain it.
It was a profound, magical moment of revelation that
wrought a change in Sophia and brought a strange peace
and an end to her years of doubt and questioning. A tenuous
belief took on significant form and was suddenly and
wonderfully set in concrete. She turned to Paul and drew his
head close to her lips. 'I love you, Paul. Not only for what
you are, but for what you've done.'
He smiled and stroked her hand. 'And what have I done?'
'You've shown me God.'
It sounded so trite. She wished that she had a better
command of language and yet those four simple but heartfelt
words spoke a fundamental truth that could not be
expressed in any other way. She turned her attention back to
the window, regretting her admission and expecting Paul to
tease her. But he took her hand, pressed it to his lips and said
nothing. No further communication passed between them
other than warmth and understanding.
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David Morgan's training and experience had prepared him
well for this awful eventuality, but giving rational consideration
to the information from Triton Exploration and the
need to give a fast but correct decision with the lives of 154
souls at stake were two seemingly irreconcilable requirements.
The litany of exchanges between Len Allenby and Nick
Rowe playing in his earphone, plus the telemetry data on the TO BASOR wall
display, told him that 005 was four minutes
from orbital injection and engine close-down. They were
already in rocket mode, so the fake regulator, if there was
one on board, was behaving as a genuine regulator. Recalling
005 was out of the question. She was no longer an aircraft [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]