They’re going to blow the track, Voorhees told himself, knowing that the margin of error between successful launch and total destruction would probably be measured in tenths of seconds.
As Voorhees prepared to “light the candle,” he watched Wolff sprint past the starboard side. He gave a passing thought to the possibility that the colonel, his mission now complete, was simply getting out of the sled’s blast range; but a sudden commotion on the port side told him otherwise. Someone dressed in a filthy Allied uniform dropped an empty backpack and was running away from the track. He fired at Wolff and anything else that moved. Something about the running man’s movements—was it confidence?—made him suspect that this guy had just jammed the contents of his backpack very close to where he currently sat, strapped in and helpless.
“Go! Go! GO!” Voorhees screamed to himself, punching the red ignition button. And as the sled engines flared to life with a deafening roar, his head was yanked backward against the protective cushion.
Once again his eyes were drawn to the port-side window, where he caught a glimpse of the running man, who had changed course and was now aiming a pistol at his rocket. The filth-covered shooter looked more like a wanderarbeiter—a hobo than a soldier. He imagined the hobo emptying his pistol at the Silverbird but then the ship had disappeared into a wall of smoke and flame.
As the sled-propelled space-plane raced down the track, Voorhees’s own body mass all but paralyzed him. That quickly, the g-forces had turned the front of the rocket—though the ship was still traveling horizontally along the rail—into what he perceived as “up.” Those same forces were now pressing his back into the “floor” with an apparent weight gain of a quarter ton or more.
Voorhees was terrified, but it had nothing to do with the stresses the launch had placed upon his body. He feared that, at any given second, a bomb attached to the rail or to the sled itself would detonate, sending the ship careening broadside and at bullet velocity into the trees. The image and its meaning—instantaneous nonexistence—reawakened memories of standing in a bomb crater, clutching a single warm shoe.
In bullet-time, close calls came and went without realization as his space-plane and its rocket sled accelerated down the monorail with reptilian indifference. The shock wave of the first bomb had been no obstacle to the Silverbird, for it detonated more than half a second after the ship passed over it, along the rail. Another blast was far enough behind that vibrations from the shattering rebar and wood never reached the pilot at all. The third device blew a hole in the rail a full two seconds after the sled had climbed the ramp and become airborne.
Lastly, the bomb that had been planted onto the sled itself by the camouflage-clad man detonated, turning the core of the sled’s engine cluster into flaming shrapnel that shredded its nose cone; but by then the sled had been used up and jettisoned, and was already following its own trajectory, groundward and into the forest.
The Silverbird II was safely away, still accelerating and climbing higher.
Roughly two minutes after Voorhees had punched the ignition button, his “bottle rockets” peeled away and spun earthward, followed by the empty hypergolic fuel pods. With the ship accelerating toward the ionosphere, powered now only by its internal fuel tanks, the atoms through which the hull passed vibrated redder and brighter with each notch upward on the vehicle’s speedometer. Inside the cockpit, the engineer shielded his eyes against the glare, but as the atmospheric gases rarefied to near extinction, the glow grew weaker and then went out.
Voorhees checked his stopwatch, counting down until he had arrived at the appointed moment. Then he reached down and eased back on the throttle. Immediately he felt a wonderful sensation of buoyancy—the first manifestation of free fall.
The freshly minted astronaut allowed himself the hint of a smile. “I’ve made it,” he said, his voice breaking with emotion. “I’ve made it.” The violence on the ground had been left far behind.
Directly ahead, the stars blazed forth so brightly that, even through tears, he could resolve Mars and Jupiter as actual disks, and not just points in the sky. Far to the port side, the lights of Caracas shimmered faintly, like a delicate, phosphorescent cobweb draped over the land. To starboard, the Atlantic spread before him, revealed in its immensity by the first predawn rays of the sun. Then, within seconds, the new day illuminated land and ocean alike, as if someone had switched on a floodlamp.
The wonder of it all held him spellbound for another minute, until the fiery glow of hydrogen and ozone returned, and the space-plane’s nose began to swing earthward.