Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

Dave: Negative, Portland. Busy right now. Over.

Controller: Roger, Delta Eagle. Please be advised . . . ah . . . be advised that your current altitude reads seven-five-two-zero and that there are ridges in your flight path up to five thousand feet. Repeat, ridges to five triple zero. Over.

Dave: Roger. Dropping through seven thousand feet now. Copy bumps ahead to five triple zero feet. Thank you, PC.

Sixteen seconds before the crash. Dave: Coming out of clouds at sixty-two hundred now, Portland Center. See some lights to the right. Okay, now . . .

Then nothing.

Baedecker listened to the tape three times and on the third he heard the final 'Okay, now ' differently. There was triumph under the drawl. Something had begun to go right for Dave in those last few seconds.

The voice recording reminded Baedecker of another time, another flight. He thought of the date on the old newspaper the morning of Dave's funeral — October 21, 1971. It could have been. It would have been in late October, not long before the mission.

They were flying home to Houston from the Cape in a T-38, Baedecker in the front seat. They were over the Gulf, but the only sea visible was the sea of clouds three thousand feet below them, glowing milk white from horizon to horizon in the light from the not-quite-full moon. They had been flying in silence for some time when Dave came on the intercom. 'We're going up there in a couple of months, amigo.'

'Not unless you get the Pings high-gate sequence right in the simulator next time,' said Baedecker.

'We're going, ' said Dave. 'And things ain't never gonna be the same.'

'Why not?' asked Baedecker, glancing up. The light prismed on the canopy, distorting the moon's shape.

'Because, Richard,' came the slow reply, ' we're not going to be the same. People who tred on sacred ground come away changed, my friend.'

'Sacred ground?' said Baedecker. 'What the hell are we talking about?'

'Trust me,' said Dave.

Baedecker had been silent a minute, letting the steady pulse of the engines and oxygen flow surround him. Then he had said, 'I do trust you.'

'Good,' said Dave. Then, 'Give me the stick, please.'

'You've got it.' Dave pitched the T-38 into a steep climb, adding throttle as they climbed, until Baedecker was on his back staring straight at the moon as they clawed skyward. The Marius Hills region would be perfectly illuminated in the lunar sunrise. Dave held the climb until the straining aircraft was twelve miles high — six thousand feet above its official ceiling capability — and then, instead of leveling off, he pulled back on the stick until they hung there vertically, unable to gain more altitude, unwilling to fall, the T-38 hanging by its nose between space and the sea of clouds 55,000 feet below, gravity not defied but nullified, all forces in the universe equalized and harmonized. It could not last. An instant before the aircraft stalled into a spin, Dave kicked off with hard left rudder and the little trainer shuddered once like an animal pulled back on its leash, and then they tumbled over into a forty-five mile fall that would end in Houston and home.

Baedecker reaches Lonerock a half an hour before sunset, but the gray day is already drained of light. He drives to Kink's ranch, parks the Toyota, and carries the barking puppy into the house. He feeds it milk, sets the box by the still-warm stove in the kitchen, and is satisfied that the house will stay warm enough for the dog until he returns.

Outside, Baedecker pulls off the tie-down wires, gets the clipboard from the cockpit, and does an external preflight inspection on the Huey as the cold wind blows in from the north. It takes him three times longer than when he and Dave had done it, and when he is down on his knees trying to find the fuel-drain valve, his left hand begins to throb with cold and pain. Three fingers there are swollen to twice their normal size. Baedecker sits on the frozen ground and wonders if any of the fingers are broken. He remembers once when he was about twelve, coming home to the apartment on Kildare Street after a schoolyard fight. His father had looked at his bruised hand, shaken his head, and said only, 'If you absolutely have to fight and if you insist on hitting someone in the face, don't hit them with an empty hand.' Finished with the exterior checks, Baedecker begins to enter by the left door, stops, and goes around to the right side. He steps up on the skid, reaches across to grab the far edge of the seat, and pulls himself in. It is cold in the helicopter. The machine has a heater and defrosters, but he cannot waste battery power on them before the turbine starts. If it starts.

Baedecker straps himself in, releases the inertial reel lock so that he can lean forward, and does the check of console switches and circuit breakers. When he is finished, he leans back and his head taps the flight helmet set atop the shoulder harness bracket. He pulls the helmet on, setting the earphones in place. He has no intention of using the radio, but the headset warms his ears.

Baedecker sits back in the heavy chair, wiggles the cyclic stick between his legs, and grips the collective pitch lever with his left hand. The hand will not quite close on it, but he decides that the grip is adequate. He practices using his finger and thumb to manage the throttle.

He lets out a deep breath. The truth is, he realizes, that he has not flown a powered aircraft in more than three years and he is glad that telemetry is not sending his heart rate back to a bank of doctors; they would diagnose tachycardia after one look at the monitors. Baedecker opens the throttle with his throbbing left hand and squeezes the trigger switch with his good finger. There is a loud whine, the turbine fires up with a loud hiss like the pilot light on a huge hot-water heater catching, and the exhaust-gas temperature gauge shoots into the red while the rotors begin to turn. In five seconds the turbine is humming smoothly, and the rotors are only a blur and a half-sensed pressure overhead.

'Okay, good,' Baedecker mutters into his dead microphone. 'Now what?' He turns on the heating fan and defroster, waits thirty seconds for the windshield to clear, and pulls up lightly on the collective control stick. Even that slight pull — it reminds Baedecker of the finicky parking brake on Joan's old Volvo — increases the pitch angle sufficiently to raise the Huey six feet off its skids.

A hover would be nice, Baedecker thinks. He gives it more throttle to compensate for the increased pitch angle, his left hand protesting with pain at being asked to do two things at once. He slacks off at ten feet, planning to hold the Huey there for a minute, his windshield on level with the open hayloft door of Kink's barn fifty feet away. Immediately the torque tries to spin the machine counterclockwise on its axis. Baedecker gives it some right pedal, overcompensates, and causes the tail rotor to push the Huey around the opposite direction. He brings the rotation to a stop 180 degrees from where he started, but in the meantime the reduced pitch angle has dropped the ship five feet, now eight, and Baedecker is tugging the cyclic stick back too far, leveling off three inches above the ground only to hop fifteen feet into the air as the controls respond.

Baedecker lets it sink back to ten feet, feverishly working throttle, cyclic, pitch control, and pedals in an effort to achieve a simple hover. Just as he thinks he has achieved it, he glances left and sees that he is sideslipping smoothly, as if on frictionless glass rails ten feet above the cold ground, headed directly and implacably for Kink's barn.

He kicks the pedal hard enough to bring the heavy machine around in a yawing, wallowing turn, tucks the stick forward and then quickly back, and flares the Huey into an inelegant, molar-grinding excuse for a landing that sends it skipping twice in four-foot hops before it settles shakily on its skids in the center of the barnyard.