Y.

[33] A three-by-three window opened and I saw the head and shoulders of a very, very fat man about my mother’s age. He had to weigh in at five hundred pounds. SpaceScuttlebutt.com was as close as he’d ever get to space and he knew it. He lived his spacegoing fantasies online, and his knowledge was encyclopedic. I had no idea where he lived or what his real name was, but his handle was Piginspace. A man with no illusions. I was lucky to have run into him.

“Broussard-san heap big bad medicine, Spacemanny,” he said through the tiny built-in speaker on my antique laptop. “Bad juju. Say his name at Kennedy, you must leave the room, spin around twice, and spit.”

He talked like that sometimes. He enjoyed having information someone else was looking for, and sometimes made you jump through hoops to get it. But not this time.

“I see he got a medal for an emergency landing. What do you know about that?”

“Everything, my lad, the Pig knows everything. Knows all, tells… well, whatever he feels young minds can safely handle. Short version… it was early days in the second generation of the VStar program. The Mark II had just received its spaceworthiness certificate from NASA. Some of the jockeys felt there were a few bugs still to be worked out, but the mandarins decreed it should be pressed into service most tickety-boo.”

The VStar II California was less than an hour away from its de-orbit burn when there was an explosion followed by a fire. The cabin began to fill with smoke. Much of the cockpit electronics went down.

Travis, working from what NASA called “hard copies”-tech manuals and maps-and with only minimal help from his crashing computers, fired the de-orbit engines within three minutes of the explosion.

There were three airfields designated by NASA as “trans-Atlantic abort” sites, at Moron, Spain; Banjul, The Gambia; and Ben Guenir, Morocco. None of them had ever been used, and in fact there was nothing to recommend them other than a runway long enough for the old Shuttle’s landing rollout. For that purpose, Cairo would have been [34] a better choice, and Travis looked at it briefly, but it was too far north of his path.

Moron, Banjul, and Ben Guenir were already almost beneath him. Impossible to turn and glide back with the VStar’s steep angle of descent.

Johannesburg was too far south. Nairobi was too far east.

He came out of the fireball hoping to make Entebbe in Uganda… but he couldn’t see anything. The ship was filled with dense smoke. They all would have been unconscious or dead without the emergency oxygen masks. He had to find a way to clear the smoke from the cabin.

“He brought it down to about forty thousand and had another problem. How do you make a hole to the outside, when the whole vehicle is designed to prevent that? Can’t open the door against the cabin pressure. Can’t even use the emergency explosive hatch bolts without disarming a safety system, which was no longer disarmable because of all four computers going down.

“But he did punch a hole in a window, and the smoke got sucked out. So there he was, twenty thousand feet over the jungles of central Africa. Nothing but green, far as the eye could see. No hope of making it to Entebbe. Very little maneuverability in the VStar, even when things are going right. There were enough hydraulics surviving to steer the beast, a little, and that was about all he had going to him.

“So he rocked it to the left, looked out the window, and put the damn thing through a three-sixty roll, which no one had ever tested in a wind tunnel but anybody in his right mind would have said couldn’t be done. While he was upside down he spotted a line of red earth through the trees, almost directly below him. Might be a runway, might not. He put the ship into a turn twice as tight as the manufacturer recommended, pulled about seventeen gees for a few seconds, blacked out along with everybody else… and when he came to, lined the ship up toward the red line.

“Turns out it was a runway, bulldozed out of the jungle and used by bush doctors, ivory smugglers, and such. And about half the length needed for a VStar rollout.

“Reconstructing it, later, the tire marks began just about ten feet [35] from one end of the runway. There were branches and leaves stuck in the landing gear. The chutes and the brakes stopped the ship with its nose gear twenty feet past the other end of the runway. Hitting a water buffalo with the nose gear probably slowed it down a bit, too.”

Travis had brought the California down at dusk. There were no lights at the field, so the first Americans didn’t get there until the next morning. It was the ambassador to Congo and some of his staff, and a small contingent of U.S. Marine embassy guards. There had been no radio contact, so no one knew what to expect.

“The ambassador stepped out of his helicopter and into the remains of a fine African barbecue. The crew had raised enough money among them to pay for the water buffalo, and they had cooked it and danced and drank long into the night. The farmers and herdsmen from the area all had souvenirs of some kind. Space suits, crew seat cushions, packets of Tang, bits and pieces of the instrument panel…

“So they killed another water buffalo, and the embassy staff, the marines, the California crew and passengers feasted all day and toasted everything they could think of in buffalo blood mixed with vodka. And she sits there still.”

“You’re kidding.”

“You doubt the Pig?”

“No. But I don’t get it. NASA gave him a medal… but they made a much bigger deal out of other ships that almost crashed.”

“Going all the way back to Apollo 13,” Pig confirmed. “Not much they can do if the mission really goes balls-up. Three astronauts burned to death on the pad in Apollo One. Challenger blew up on live television. No way to soft-pedal those.

“The California wasn’t much of a news story for a lot of reasons. It was over before the media even heard of it. It was remote. Nothing to show but that big old whale sitting in the dirt. NASA found the image embarrassing. Everybody was okay, so what’s the big deal? Give him a medal and move on. Nobody’s career would be advanced by making a big deal, except Broussard’s… and nobody quite knew what to do about him.”

“Why not? He sounds like a hero to me.”

[36] “Oh, he was. Maybe the biggest hero NASA ever had. One hell of a bit of flying, and they still drink toasts to him in astronaut bars… quietly.

“You didn’t ask me how he made the hole in the spacecraft. The one that sucked the smoke out and let him see. The hole that saved the California and crew.”

“I was going to.”

“It was hushed up. No one on the crew wanted to talk about it, and neither did anyone higher up in the bureaucracy. But these things leak. The Pig learned of it years ago, and because of his great respect for Colonel Broussard, seldom tells it. But I sense you mean Broussard no harm.”

“Of course not. None of my business.”

“Quite so. Broussard made the hole with a nonstandard piece of astronaut equipment known as a Colt.45 automatic.”

We both just let that one hang there for a minute. A pistol? For what, protection from space aliens?

“He might have got away with it if he hadn’t told the inquiry board himself. Not one of the passengers or crew said a word about it in their debriefing. They knew they were alive because of the gun and Broussard’s piloting skills.

“I have it from one of the inquiry board members that Broussard told the debriefers he just ‘felt naked’ without a piece of some sort. So he’d carried the weapon on all his previous flights.”

Travis became the sort of problem bureaucrats hate. There were those who wanted to kick his redneck ass out of the astronaut corps, a few who would like to send him a bill for the California. But he had saved a lot of lives, and those he saved promised a really ugly fight in the media if Broussard was punished in any way.