Doctor Who_ Father Time - Lance Parkin [104]
‘How can you be so calm?’ she whispered.
He just grinned and held his finger up to shush her.
All they could do now was wait.
For nearly two and a half hours.
A long time to wait as, above them, they could hear the astronauts making pre-flight checks. All around was the creaking and clanking of gantries being retracted, fuel being loaded. It wasn’t long before Debbie wished she’d brought a book. After about an hour Debbie realised she’d nodded off for a moment. She admonished herself for not being as nervous or excited as she should be, but this was a bit like wearing a seat belt while being stuck in the waiting room at Stockport station.
The Doctor looked serene, which was astonishing in itself. Usually he was a fidgety, awkward passenger.
After a very long time there were some very final-sounding clanks from outside.
‘Here we go,’ the Doctor whispered.
The astronauts were talking again; little warning bleeps were going off all over the place up there. It was warm, a little dark. It was noisy, too – fans and pumps, like on an aircraft, but with no concession to the comfort of civilian passengers.
Debbie thought she heard someone upstairs say, ‘T minus four.’
‘That’s the fuel purge,’ the Doctor said under his breath. ‘They’ve not found any malfunctions. Step by step, control of the shuttle is switching over to us instead of the ground.’
He was a little more tense now.
Then there was a bang, a long way away.
Debbie turned to the Doctor, who shook his head. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he said. ‘Just the opposite, in fact.’
The cabin was shuddering, just ever so slightly.
Activity upstairs, astronauts with raised voices.
Ignition.
Debbie felt the exact moment.
Then a sense of power, a sense of movement. She was pushed back into her seat, but not violently. They were moving. The shuttle was launching.
The cabin was starting to shake.
The noise.
It filled the room like choking smog. It prevented thoughts from forming, it...
She closed her eyes, lost in the moment. There was nothing else. To die like this... it didn’t seem wrong. She felt safe, more safe than most of her time on Earth.
It sounded like bits of gravel or something were cascading down the outside of the shuttle. But that was nothing compared with the sound of the engines. The roar of the engines.
She was suddenly anxious again.
The Doctor was counting under his breath.
‘Eight,’ he said.
Eight? Eight seconds? Was that all? It felt like she had been here as long as she’d been married to Barry.
The whole shuttle lurched and rolled, like the Corkscrew at Alton Towers.
The Doctor was still calmly counting, ‘Twelve.’
They were upside down.
They cruised for long seconds, hanging in their chairs as if they’d been strung up.
‘Just about to break the sound barrier,’ said the Doctor. Somewhere, possibly, there was a sonic boom.
‘This is the dangerous bit,’ the Doctor said matter-of‐factly. ‘They’re going for throttle up.’
Now even he was looking pale.
She was pushed back in her seat as there was another burst of speed. Just as she thought they couldn’t go any faster, the speed increased again, incrementally.
There was a moment where she thought they’d died. Just for a second, as the Doctor’s countdown, or countup, was somewhere in the one hundred and twenties, the rockets seemed to have died.
Then there was a crump, and the ride became much smoother.
‘There go the SRBs,’ the Doctor said, visibly relaxing. ‘Mach four.’
Debbie tried to picture what had happened. The two ‘little’ side rockets (forty-five metres long, four metres in diameter) had been jettisoned. The big rocket was still there, powering them up into space.
It was a smooth climb. There was still a roar, but even that was dying away a little (as the air outside thinned? she wondered). She felt relaxed now. Not in control of the situation, not by any means, but she knew now that Florida policemen couldn’t drag them away, that the engines weren’t going to explode.
And she was in outer space.
* * *
Commander Fairchild ran through the procedures, not