Yay, NASA, Opal Girl and Discovery! Congratulations on a wonderful landing! DarkHelmet, you were right about TB6, almost. I changed the plane just a bit, but the rest of your guesses are pretty close to spot-on. Thanks to all for the reviews, especially Tikatu, Agent Five, Varda and Barb...
47
Tracy Island-
Brains had a personal aircraft, a rebuilt P-51 Mustang that they'd all jokingly taken to calling 'Thunderbird 6'. She had a monster engine, six machine guns, a full Shadowbot conversion package, and had even taken part in an aerial rescue, a few years back. Scott and John both enjoyed flying her, and Gordon had been learning how... until the kidnap, anyway. But that was another matter, one Hackenbacker had no idea how to classify, or deal with.
His plane was enough of a fixture, at any rate, that it seemed odd to number anything else '6'. So, the deep-space rescue ship was accordingly christened 'Thunderbird 7', and painted a satiny, business-like black.
Profoundly concerned for his absent friend, Hackenbacker cut corners and rushed development, blowing up a double handful of prototype engines in his quest for speed and power.
(Just getting to Mars wasn't good enough, after all, if they arrived too late to help John.)
Several test-firing accidents later, Brains realized that what he actually needed wasn't a faster engine, but a shortcut through space; a 'by-pass'. And thus, what was then probably the most powerful mind on Earth bent itself to the task of warping the fabric of the cosmos.
The Office-
TinTin, meanwhile, worked with Virgil in a fog of bliss and confusion. Even after John finally made contact, the pair continued checking Five's Earthly components for outside contamination, not really certain what to look for.
Many times, watching lines of code slip past until her eyes burned and her mind grew doughy, TinTin tried to reveal what she was pretty sure were her feelings, but Virgil, as Gordon had pointed out, was quite blind when it came to women. The young artist was too firmly lodged in his own head to see much more than a rarely updated 'mental snap-shot' of those around him. Only when he sat down to draw somebody, did he take the time to really look... and he wasn't drawing TinTin. Never had.
One rainy afternoon at the office, when her father had finally left off prowling about to cook dinner, and Grandma had fallen asleep in her cushioned seat, TinTin gathered her courage together in a bright, tenuous soap-bubble, and scooted her rolling chair closer to Virgil's.
She had chosen her outfit very carefully that morning, trying hard to look older than her sixteen years. She wore a peach silk shift (casual, yet sophisticated) and her long, black hair was piled atop her head in a complicated up-do. Very becoming...
Except that Virgil Tracy, wearing jeans and a plaid work shirt, seemed not to have noticed.
"Hey," he said, suddenly, eyes riveted to his comm screen, "that could be a... No. Just another zombie. Damn!"
The big, handsome pilot leaned back in his creaking chair, closing tired brown eyes and stretching.
"I can't... believe... John gets... into this...!"
The slow words were drawn out and distorted by a series of long yawns. Another engine blew up on the test pad, but Brains signaled the all-clear over the house comm, so Virgil and TinTin sat down, again. As the wind blew, and rain pattered and swept against the window panes in silvery, blurring sheets, the young man went on.
"Anyway... that about does it for WorldGov's mainframe. Nothing weirder in there than a few role-playing sites and some smutty email. How's InterBanc looking?"
"Oh...!" TinTin stopped staring long enough to hit a few keys, saying brightly, "Merely spam, and the usual 'phishermen', Virgil. Nothing which seems truly alien. It... would feel like wasted time, I think, if I did not so... enjoy working with you."
And then, very daring, she placed a light hand on his muscular forearm.
"Huh?" Virgil glanced over, really seeing her, this time. Then he laughed a little, reached over, and mussed the carefully pinned hair at the top of her head with a friendly hand.
"Yeah... The company's great. You're a nice kid, TinTin. It's the job that's got me tied in knots. I need to get outside, in the worst way."
Shaking his head, the middle Tracy added in lower tones,
"No wonder John's so weird. Soon as he gets back, I'm gonna drag his ass camping; at gun-point, if I have to. Maybe then, he'll..."
But TinTin had stopped listening. 'Kid'. She was a 'nice kid', barely six months older than the deeply immature Alan, and therefore, in Virgil's eyes, no more than a child. Like a neon sign glowing bright and warm through the distortion of her crude blocks, his 'big-brother' feelings were plain.
Tears stung her dark eyes, which burned now with girlish, barely concealed grief. The Hood, her uncle, would have advocated forcing the matter, but for TinTin, there was no such option. She would not become the terrible thing that her father feared too much to speak of.
All she could do was struggle to her feet and flee the room, wishing for Gordon, her sudden retreat followed by two pairs of eyes, the first baffled, the second sad and knowing.
Endurance, Mars Base, the medlab-
To supply him with enough paper, they'd had to cannibalize three separate procedural manuals, tearing them swiftly, unthinkingly apart. John's subsequent behavior confused both doctors, for it at first struck them as perfectly potty.
Rather than talking to them, or writing upon just one sheet, he stacked a ream and a half on the work bench before him, and began flipping through it, making seemingly random marks, one leaf of paper at a time. Gradually, Dr. Kim realized what he was doing. In bright red marker, from top to bottom of the ragged stack, John Tracy was drawing a 3-D image of... something.
Interior and exterior views emerged in three colors (Linda provided a 'honey-brown' Mary Kay eye-pencil and a yellow highlighter, with which he began circling letters). When he reached the final sheet, John stared for an instant, then shook his blond head.
"No... that's not it..."
Turning to Bennett, the pilot asked,
"Doctor, can I borrow a scalpel?"
"Which one?" Linda inquired. She had several, one a high tech laser knife, the others diamond-edged, micro-sharpened steel.
"Laser." He was in a hurry.
The requisite tool was handed over, and John began cutting a small, twisting hollow through the stacked paper. Faint, thready smoke rose, accompanied by a spattering crackle, and the smell of burning paper. John ignored it and worked on, utterly absorbed. Except at the controls of the ship, they'd never seen him this way. It was rather fascinating.
Bennett forgot herself enough to set down the tranquilizer, draw close and steady the pile for him, while Cho murmured to a recording device in soft, sing-song Korean. Then, he needed paper clips, twelve of them. These were bent into odd shapes and positioned just so within the still-glowing hollow.
Finally, marginally less dissatisfied, the pilot said,
"Run it through the scanner, and have the sensors set to pick up the marker, clips and make-up, then tip it 15 degrees to forward left and reset for just circled capital 'A' s. Repeat process 30 degrees further forward left, and scan for highlighted lower case 'q' s. You'll get an image."
He looked up again, at first Kim, then Linda.
"I'm not very creative, but I can reproduce what I've memorized." (Virgil was the artist of the family.)
Wildly curious, they complied, and before long had a three-dimensional hologram rotating in the air above the bench, projected by Linda's PET scanner. In glowing hues of green, red and yellow, it seemed to pulse and change form, sometimes writhing nearly inside-out. The three humans looked long and silently at something not even remotely terrestrial.
Then, Pete strode in, ducking through the hatch with a brisk command on his lips that died in mid-sentence. Stopping short, he stared at the protean hologram.
"Our 'friends'?" He hazarded, at last, recovering slightly. The sandy-haired mission commander was about as timid as he was elegant. When John nodded, Pete responded sourly,
"Ugly sonuvabitch..." Then, "Got anything for me besides pictures?"
Actually, yes; far more than he could express at one sitting. John felt like someone who'd hauled himself from the clutch of a vivid nightmare, anxious to get the details out of his head, and safely away. Some of the visuals were interesting, others incomprehensible, or deeply worrisome.
Where to begin?
"I think it's shut down... but there's a physical location..." (coordinates tumbled from him, only partly in English, and extending well beyond the usual three reference points; Valles Marineris, in a deep and ancient cavern) "...that needs to be checked out, if we want to be certain. But, they,"
A swift, impatient gesture, back at the hovering image,
"...aren't here. Their tool is, or was. I don't think that its creators could operate long at this... 'flat' a level."
For just an instant, he saw himself as something like an image printed on a sheet of paper, viewed from above. Very strange, and unsettling. Like he was just a shadow, flickering blithely across wall and grass and sidewalk, thinking all along that he was doing his own will. But maybe that was true of everyone? That they were all just shadows, cast by something more substantial higher up, illuminated from God-knows-where? Question was, which Earthly 'shadow' corresponded to the rotating image, if any?
It was hard to visualize, and harder still to express, so he switched to safe, simple physics.
"You know string theory?" John asked, suddenly.
Cho nodded, as did Roger, who by this time had come back to check on the others.
"It's correct, sort of," the pilot continued hurriedly. "Aspects of it, anyway. Like if..."
Inspired, John made a sudden, partly hidden move.
"Ever held hands with someone, under the table?"
Everybody nodded but Linda, who looked rather surprised. Then he stroked his thumb across her palm, causing the outraged doctor to jerk her hand back. John hardly noticed.
"You may not see exactly what's going on, but you can tell there's communication of some sort, because of the reaction. Well, on our level, forces and particles interact like that, linked outside our framework... 'under the table'."
Pete looked over at Linda, who was glaring at Tracy. There, at least, was one particle that was becoming pretty deeply entangled, he thought. As the physician was too upset to respond, the commander switched his glance to Kim Cho, who answered his questioning look with a reassuring nod. In her opinion, Tracy was bursting with alien viewpoints, but basically sound. That he also represented an enormous leap in technology, possibly the future of the space program... or International Rescue... didn't escape McCord's attention. John Tracy had just become the most valuable thing on the ship.
"Sorry to cut the session short, doctors, but we've got plans to make. At first light, tomorrow, we're going after those supply cylinders, all of us. What we find when we get there will dictate the remainder of the mission, whether we search for that 'physical location', or cut for home. Second point... I got through to Houston, plus Phil at IMS, and Irina Poriskova, in Kuiper. They're aware of the situation, and the president's being informed. Next on the agenda's a teleconference, to reassure the public and news media. Everyone appears on camera, but watch what you say. No-one outside the loop needs to know what really happened. Got it?"
There were nods all around. Or, almost all.
"Tracy?"
John hesitated. Clearly, McCord knew all about his connection to IR, and wanted the two spheres kept well separate. For some reason (and why in hell the question picked now to burst out, he had no idea), John asked,
"Pete, did you..." ('Trust', he'd been about to say) "...like my father?"
The mission commander looked surprised, but put the oddly timed question down to exhaustion and pain medication. The ship's main air pump cut on again, providing a moment's distraction. Then, he responded, speaking rather slowly.
"We were pretty tight, for awhile. Yeah, I liked the old Jeff Tracy; the pilot and explorer. But, then, he quit the space program for the world of 'high finance', and drifted away. Our wives kept in touch, until Lucy... until your mother passed. After that, we had no more to say to each other, for a long, long time."
Until Jeff's son had turned up as a youthful intern, against all odds... immediately attracting Pete McCord's attention, and unsubtle guidance.
"You, uh... remind me of the Jeff I thought I knew, not the Wall Street Journal centerfold."
The sudden image of his father, posing for a spread in the Journal, with a stack of credit chips and a staple covering his 'strategic area', gave John a full body shiver.
"Thanks, Pete. I appreciate the imagery. Really."
McCord grinned.
"Any time, Tracy. My door is always open... and the mike will be, too, in about five minutes. Everybody up front, and remember... we had a temporary comm breakdown, but everything's fine; one big, happy-family road trip. Tracy..."
The commander tapped at the side of his own, unshaven face,
"... you fell, and cut yourself up a little. Nothing more, to anyone. Understood?"
For reasons of his own (mostly having to do with NASA not being made to look helpless, or missing out on critical new technology) McCord wanted no IR involvement. As far as the commander was concerned, they could handle the situation 'in house', perhaps even completing their mission. After all, they hadn't come this far, survived sabotage, attack, low supplies and alien takeover attempts, just to back down and scream for help, now.
John (who cared for his family, but had no desire to be 'rescued' by them, not if there was any way to avoid it) agreed. He coulddeal withthis... as long as Five had come through all right.
"Understood, Pete."
Planning contingencies with a sore and cluttered mind, John got to his feet and followed Roger and Cho into the mid-deck, preparing to help put out a media firestorm.
Pete waved them on past, stopping Bennett at the hatch for a swift consult.
"Well, Doctor?" The commander asked her, his blue eyes very direct.
Linda shrugged, scowling down through the slatted metal deck at bundled wiring.
"He'll be fine, is my guess. A little disoriented, but it's been an eventful day. I'll make sure he doesn't say anything too strange, on camera."
Pete shook his head.
"I was talking about you, actually. You were pissed as hell, back there, and I wanted to find out if Thorpe and I need to give Tracy a little 'wall-to-wall sensitivity training'."
Linda thawed enough to smile at him. Good ol' Pete, worried about all the wrong things...
"No," she told him, blushing. "He's okay. I just... wasn't really expecting that hand business. It didn't mean anything. Not really."
Yet, she couldn't quite meet McCord's x-ray gaze, leading him to a quick and accurate conclusion.
"Okay. So, you want him. I'll..."
"No!" Bennett stabbed a forefinger at the commander's hard-suited chest. "Pete, don't you dare pencil it into his checklist! Let's see..."
She mimed consulting a cuff pad, her voice suddenly gone bright and artificial,
"...consume red flight day luncheon... police galley area... initiate docking maneuvers with Doctor Bennett (refer to manual 23, subsection 2.5.1-B for detailed schematics...). Hell, no! Back off, McCord, I'll get over it!"
"Sure, you will," Pete replied. "After a lot of emotional 'smoky whifferdills'. Handle it your way, Doctor, but remember; the red pencil's always ready, and I have access to the checklist. I'm there for you."
"What a guy." Once more, leaning forward, "No!"
Pete shrugged resignedly, and waved her through the hatch. Peering in at the assembled crew, the commander folded his arms across his chest with a sharp, metallic rattle, then shook his head.
...And it was only August...