Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [103]
‘You look more nervous that I do,’ Mather joked. ‘Anyone would think it was you going into space.’
‘Anything goes wrong,’ she said, in a British accent, ‘and it’s me that gets in trouble.’
‘I’ve been training two years for this,’ he said. ‘This is my big moment.’
‘Two years?’
‘Sure, that’s just the standard training period.’
The other member of the pad team, a man with long light-brown hair poking out of his cap, emerged and ushered the pilot and flight engineer aboard.
All around them were clanking, whooshing noises. The liquid-hydrogen fuel being pumped into the fuel tanks.
A couple of minutes later, the man re-emerged. ‘Last but not least,’ he said, leading Mather inside.
‘Everyone around here’s British,’ Mather noted.
* * *
Five minutes after he’d led the mission specialist aboard, the Doctor came out and told Debbie the astronauts were all safely strapped in up on the flight deck, and the trapdoor hatch to the lower deck had been closed and locked down.
Debbie attached a gizmo the Doctor had built over breakfast to the elevator control. The Doctor recovered the sonic suitcase and the travel bag from where they had concealed them.
‘What if someone finds that cupboard in the visitors’ centre where we locked the real pad technicians?’
‘Then they’ll abort the launch and we’ll be found and arrested,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Here we go,’ the Doctor said.
He bowed, sweeping his arm around like the owner of a fairground ride. ‘Step aboard.’
Debbie did as she was told.
The hatch looked a bit like the door on Concorde. Past it was cramped, functional – what she was expecting, really. Again, it looked like an airliner’s galley. It looked a bit old-fashioned, to be honest – a bit seventies. Everything was battened down for launch. And everything was at a ninety-degree angle, of course, as the orbiter had its nose pointed up at the sky. The ship was designed for zero gravity, so there wasn’t the rigid distinction between up and down that there was in every other aircraft ever built. They pulled themselves in using the handrails attached to every surface. The Doctor, with some difficulty, managed to shut the hatch and used the sonic suitcase to lock it, a task impossible from the inside without the device.
Debbie clambered towards the spare seats. On other missions, the mission specialists and scientists would sit here, strapped in for launch. This was only a four-man mission, and all the crew were upstairs. The ladder to the flight deck was dead ahead, reminding her she couldn’t make too much noise. The astronauts wouldn’t get out of their seats now, not unless there was an emergency, but they were in radio contact with mission control, and could easily call security.
‘The external hatch is sealed,’ the Doctor told his radio.
‘Roger that. Exit White Room, pad team.’
The Doctor wiggled his eyebrows to prompt Debbie. She squeezed the remote control. Outside, she could hear the elevator start its descent.
The Doctor checked his pocket watch, eventually reporting that they were clear of the gantry.
‘Roger that.’ The woman at Mission Control sounded a little confused – she hadn’t seen them come out of the tower, but the instruments were telling her the hatch was dosed, and they couldn’t have locked themselves in.
The Doctor and Debbie grinned at each other. It wasn’t over yet, but they were aboard, and, so far, no one had stopped them. The Doctor strapped Debbie into one of the spare seats. Underneath her technician’s one-piece suit was another one – a simple pressure suit, like those that fighter pilots wore, bought by the Doctor over the phone at Heathrow, and waiting for them in Titusville. They wouldn’t have helmets. If there was an emergency after launch, a loss of cabin pressure, anything like that, then they would be in serious trouble. There were, the Doctor claimed, ways to evacuate if necessary but he didn’t elaborate.
The Doctor strapped himself