Zach Hughes - Pressure Man

The big boom came on a Sunday morning. It came in the form of a small freighter which had been Earthside for repairs. The incident demonstrated the most frightening penetration to date, for the small nuclear bomb aboard the freighter must have been placed there at Canaveral base.

The ship approached the lunar base on schedule, in contact with control, and veered off at the last minute to accelerate into a suicidal collision course with the Kennedy as she orbited, huge and vulnerable. A missile from the surface got the freighter while she was still far enough away so that the explosion did no damage to Kennedy . The flash lit the surface of the moon and blinded a few workers who happened to be watching the freighter.

The near miss inspired Dom. He knew that it was going to give J.J. a bad moment, for he did not want to risk compromising his plan through communications which could be intercepted. He stopped all flights from the moon to Earth and sent down the news that radical terrorists had destroyed an experimental ship, the John F. Kennedy . The news was greeted with public cheers and private gloom on Earth, and it brought J.J. on the next ship. He looked ten years older.

“How bad is it?” he asked, when Dom met him at the landing pad.

“J.J., I hated to do it to you,” Dom said. “She’s all right and untouched.”

J.J. used choice parts of a vocabulary built from years of service and, having let off steam, took a drink and whooped in relief. He had to admit that it was a good idea. Now there would be no further attempts on the Kennedy from Earthside and they merely had to control the underground members on the moon. He delayed sending down a one-man courier ship to give the correct story to top DOSE brass.

No calls were allowed to go out to Earth. Travel was frozen. Marine guards stood watch over all communications facilities, their individual members shifted in random patterns.

A ship carrying the two remaining crew members was allowed to land. Dom’s first choices had checked out. The engineer, Paul Jensen, was short, dark, a silent man in his fifties. Ellen Overman, life-systems specialist, was in her thirties, a tiny woman, small in every respect, but perfectly proportioned, dark-haired, brown eyes, a beautiful woman; she was talkative and thrilled at being a part of the project.

J.J. sent down word that the Firsters had destroyed the moon’s water supplies, built up over a period of many years and constantly recycled. A fleet of tankers began to arrive, supposedly to replenish the moon’s water supply, but actually to fill the Kennedy’s hold with water. It was against all common sense to take an untested ship into space with a full cargo, but as Dom continued to point out, she would work or she wouldn’t, and if she couldn’t carry a load of water she couldn’t go down into Jupiter’s atmosphere. The water would be a valuable bonus in the operation. Taking it to Mars would add only a few days to the trip, since the planets were in the proper configuration, and it would be a boon to dry Mars. The Kennedy’s cargo would represent a year’s supply of water for the planet.

Neil Walters pronounced the Kennedy as ready as she’d ever be without extensive in-flight testing. He, too, disliked carrying a full cargo, but he shrugged and said, “What the hell?” If she could fly at all the weight of the water was insignificant. She had enough power to lift a hundred times the weight without strain. If she failed, it would not be for lack of power.

J.J. called a briefing in his quarters. He was in field uniform. He had two comets on his collar.

Dom saw the new insignia. “Congratulations, admiral.”

“Just a belated recognition of ability, Flash,” J.J. said. “When we bring home the bacon I’m going to see to it that you get one of these little doodads.” He tapped a comet insignia.

“You’re all heart,” Dom said, remembering that it was J.J. who had refused his last chance at promotion because he’d happened to take a swing at a stupid and inefficient one-comet admiral.

“Meantime, you’re promoted to captain,” J.J. said. “You deserve it and the Kennedy deserves it. I wouldn’t want her to be commanded by a mere commander.”

The others arrived one by one. J.J. went through the chain of command aboard ship, although all were familiar with it already. Dom was in overall command. Neil was flying captain. J.J. was third in command, second to Neil in flying matters, to Dom in matters of ship’s operation and safety. When the briefing was completed, J.J. made a little speech. He concluded by saying that things looked good.

“We’ll announce the truth when we’re in space,” he said. “Right now the rads think their lousy suicides blew up the Kennedy . We’ve announced major cutbacks in the space program to give them another victory and, we hope, keep them quiet until we get back. We turned a billion and a half dollars back into the general fund. That made a big splash.”

“So we’re burning our bridges behind us,” Doris said.

“Exactly,” J.J. said grimly. “We bring home the bacon or we forget the space program. If we come back without it we’ll be cut down to the Mars fertilizer run, and that won’t last long before we’ll be forced to pull all the ships home and close down the Mars base. But it had to be done. We think they were on the verge of armed revolt, and we weren’t sure we could win. Now we’ve poured some oil on the troubled waters. They’ll think they have unlimited time now. And well come back with something which will knock them on their asses and have the whole world on our side.”

“I wish I could be as confident as you,” Dom said.

“I have to be confident, Flash,” J. J. said. “If I didn’t feel that way I’d strap on as much plastique as I could carry and walk into an Earthfirster rally and pull the pin.”

A million and one things can go wrong with a collection of complicated components, and the Kennedy was the most complex ship ever constructed. Every system aboard had been tested time and time again, but never in flight with all of them operating to move a huge mass of metal and a cargo of water.

Just in case, the entire backside of the moon was evacuated. Dom said a silent prayer, and he was sure that each of the others aboard were doing the same as Neil, buckled into the pilot’s chair, finished the last preflight checklist and looked over at J.J. and winked. Neil’s blue eyes were squinted and his mouth twisted into a grin which was not amusement, but his way of showing tension.

There was no dramatic countdown. When all systems were ready and all the thousands of little things checked out, J.J. gave a thumbs-up sign and Neil pressed a switch which ignited the preheater. Down in the engineroom Paul Jensen saw the light go on and ran a visual of the automatics. The sound of the preheater was a muffled rumble in Jensen’s ears. There was a tiny vibration which only a trained man would notice. It came up to his senses through the soles of his feet.

“All right, baby,” Neil said. “Do it for old Neil.” When the awesome power began to build there was no loud noise, only a small hum. The sensation of power was there, however, and something in the closed atmosphere of the ship seemed to absorb it, to become alive with it. There was a charge in the air, a tingling which went beyond skin-deep to become a part of the entire sensory system.

Slowly power overcame inertia. Slowly the heavily laden monster of a ship moved, the force which powers the stars building, building, as crew members checked and reported, and it was “Go. Go. Go.”

Dom’s eyes flashed back and forth among an array of instruments which read stress and loading on hull and internal components. Inertial strain registered and was noted, but she had been built well, built with pride and loving care by men who felt that she might be the last of her breed, the last ship they’d ever build.