Exo: A Novel

by Steven Gould

  He took a deep breath. “We’re going to do the donning checklist there, right?”

  “Right, but I should put the suit on here. Don’t want to get sand in the mesh.”

  He nodded his head. “Right, we don’t want that.”

  I was wearing my wool coat over my underwear, base layers, socks, and a pair of Merrill Moab Mid Ventilator ankle-high lightweight hiking boots one size too big for my feet. I kicked these off and hung the coat while Cory relaxed the suit.

  I took off the oxygen briefly and held my breath, for the transition.

  I was in the suit immediately, and even though I had to put the oxygen back on and Cory took his time tightening the suit back over my body, I was disconnected from the power supply in under two minutes. I put the hiking boots back on over the suit feet, and laced them up, stepping forward and back, then bouncing in place. Good fit over the thickened suit.

  “Ready, Cory?” I said, strapping the aviation GPS onto my left wrist.

  He sighed. “I guess.”

  I checked the clock. Local time was five minutes until seven. Five minutes until nine at my destination.

  * * *

  First I took a tarp.

  Mom and Dad were there, sitting on folding lawn chairs, a cooler between them.

  I pointed at the cooler and raised my eyebrows.

  There were staring and I realized I must look pretty odd between the oxygen face mask and the suit. Absently Dad said, “Water. What’s with the mask?”

  “I know,” said Mom. “She’s prebreathing oxygen to outgas nitrogen from her bloodstream.”

  Dad nodded. “Right. Bends. Got it.” He shook his head. “Knew that. Forgot about it. Glad you guys are on top of it.”

  Mom said, “Cent was doing that from the beginning.” She touched the suit fabric. “That doesn’t seem like very much protection.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  Dad helped me spread the tarp on the ground and anchor it with rocks against the slight breeze.

  “Back in a sec,” I said through the mask.

  I ferried extra oxygen, the helmet, and attached backpack to the tarp, and then finally, Cory and his clipboard of checklists.

  Cory staggered, but recovered quicker than he had his last jump. He looked from Mom and Dad to me and then back again, focusing finally on Mom.

  “These are your parents.”

  Ah, well, the resemblance is there, of course.

  They stood and shook Cory’s hand. “I’m David. This is Millie. Pleased to meet you, Dr. Matoska.”

  “Call me Cory,” he said, automatically. “You understand what Cent is trying to do?”

  “Return to the mother ship?” said Dad.

  If he weren’t out of reach I would have kicked him.

  Mom said, “Behave!”

  Dad smiled. “She wants to conduct activities in low Earth orbit. More importantly, she wants to survive activities in low Earth orbit. Is that pretty much what she’s told you?”

  Cory nodded. “Amounts to the same thing. She said she was building her own space program.”

  Mom looked at me over her sunglasses. “Indeed.”

  I blushed and turned to Cory, pointing at the checklist.

  He lifted the clipboard and looked at it, almost as if he was surprised it was there. “Ah. Checklist. Yes.” He looked back at me. “Hydration.”

  I took a bottle of water out of the ice chest and, temporarily lifting the mask, chugged it. Before breathing in again, I purged the mask. “Right. Next?”

  He looked at his watch. “When did you start prebreathing?”

  “Six fifteen, Pacific.”

  He scribbled on his clipboard. “We’ll do another twenty minutes and do the last bit of flushing in the suit.”

  Dad took a bag from beneath his chair.

  “Here,” he said. “I talked to someone.”

  He took out a clear-plastic box about two inches by three, and an inch thick. Inside I could see a nine-volt battery and a double stack of circuit boards. The top board had a surface mount, multiline LED display. The bottom of the box had four thumbscrews clamping it shut on a black rubber gasket and the same lockdown posts passed through brass grommets on a Velcroed wrist strap.

  It was already turned on and I compared its readings to the aviation GPS on my wrist.

  The longitude and latitude differed by less than a tenth of a second, but the altitude was completely different. “Ah, metric?” I compared them. “And in kilometers. Great!”

  Dad had been listening carefully, his head tilted, and he understood me. “And it won’t stop working above eighteen kilometers or at speeds faster than half a kilometers per second.”

  “How’d they get around the ITAR regulations?”

  “The manufacturers limit it in the firmware. This one uses open-source hardware and software so, even though they also have the limits, you can overwrite them. The GPS module has an integrated antennae. It handles data logging and display using an Arduino processor.”

  It didn’t do map displays but it had the information I needed: altitude, bearing, horizontal and vertical speed, longitude and latitude, and time.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  He smiled. “How do you guys communicate while you’re up there?”

  “We don’t.”

  “What if you need help?”

  “Well, I’ll come back and get some. It’s not as if anyone can come to my aid.”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed and Dad’s jaw did that thing where it juts forward, and he tapped himself on the chest.

  “Only one suit,” I said. “Maybe later. Don’t worry. Something happens, I’m back on the ground like that.” I tried to snap my finger but it didn’t work with the suit fabric on my hands.

  Dad looked unhappy but he didn’t say anything. Good thing, because I was doing this, with or without his permission.

  Cory had been watching the back and forth intently, wondering, I think, if my parents were going to halt the proceedings. But when neither Mom or Dad said anything, he checked his watch again.

  “Fans.” He read out the procedures while I did them—unlatching, removing the hatch from the rebreather chamber, switching on both ventilation fans, and sealing it back up.

  “Check,” I said.

  “Don life-support harness.”

  He handed Dad the clipboard for this next part. While I slung the backpack on and fastened buckles and snugged up straps, Cory held the helmet up, keeping the armored hoses out of the way. I moved my shoulders around and twisted my waist back and forth. Secure and comfortable. “Check.”

  “Remove prebreathe mask.”

  I held my breath again. While it took two hours to get rid of the nitrogen, a few full breaths of regular air would put dangerous amounts back into my bloodstream.

  “Don helmet and latch.”

  He lowered the helmet over my head, and I took it, guiding it into the flange fifteen degrees off center to engage the threads. I then rotated it to the locked position, and latched the safety clamp. I held up my fingers and thumb in the okay sign and he checked off the next line.

  “Turn on main oxygen.”

  I reached back with my right arm and felt for the main oxygen valve. I eased it on and the feed valve hissed, pressurizing the helmet, and my ears popped. The hissing stopped as pressure reached the valve’s set point. “Check” I said, and my voice bounced oddly in the helmet.

  “Test purge valve,” he said. His voice sounded distant through the helmet, but still easy to understand.

  I bumped the purge button and it hissed, oxygen jetting into the weave of the suit over my fingers. Immediately the hissing switched to the feed valve, then stopped again when the pressure was back up. I took deep breaths and held up my forefinger and thumb.

  “Turn off main oxygen.”

  I reached back and twisted the valve in the other direction. “Check.”

  “Turn on backup oxygen.”

  “Check.”

  “Test backup feed v
alve by purging helmet.”

  I bumped the purge valve and the backup oxygen-feed valve repressurized the helmet immediately. “Check.”

  “Turn off backup O2.”

  “Check.”

  “Turn on main O2.”

  “Check.”

  He nodded. “Right. Let’s say you end up someplace else, where I’m not there to read the checklist. What’s the shutdown procedure?”

  “I turn off all oxygen, then I slowly vent the helmet with the purge valve, and then I can breach the helmet seal.” I saw him start to open his mouth and said, “Yes, I know. Exactly in that order so I don’t pull off the pressurized helmet and blow an eardrum.”

  “If I’m here, though, wait for the checklist.”

  I held my thumb up.

  He turned a page on his clipboard and then said, “Okay. You want to swap the GPS out?”

  I looked at the two units. “Let’s do the first test with both.” I strapped the one Dad gave me onto my left forearm, next to the off-the-shelf unit.

  “Altitude above sea level?”

  “At three thousand seven hundred fifty-three feet and—” I tapped the new unit. “—approximately one point forty-four kilometers.”

  “Okay. Starting life support log at nine-thirteen.” More formally Cory said, “You are cleared to forty-five thousand feet.”

  I could’ve jumped directly there, but I guess I wanted to wow them. I left the ground at about two hundred miles an hour, more speed than I’d normally add in the atmosphere, but I wanted to make some noise that they could hear. When the altimeter passed two kilometers above sea level, I jumped another five kilometers up, exhaling sharply. My ears popped and the purge valve dropped the helmet pressure, but my breathing was still effortless. The old GPS read twenty-three thousand feet. And it still worked when I jumped to thirty-five thousand feet, then forty-five thousand.

  The sky above was black but it was blue at the horizon.

  It was cold.

  I checked the new GPS: 13.7 kilometers up.

  The problem was that there was still enough mass in the air at this altitude for thermal transfer, so the thin but very cold air was leaching away my body’s heat. I didn’t want any more frostbite.

  I turned face down and fell, feeling the air shrieking past, then jumped all the way back to the tarp on the ground, my jaw working and my mouth open.

  My ears adjusted without a problem.

  “Why are you sitting like that?”

  Cory was off the edge of the tarp, sprawled in the sand.

  Mom said, “He was surprised, when you took off like that. I think we all were. He fell down. I just expected you to jump straight to altitude.”

  I couldn’t help grinning. “First time and all that.”

  Dad rolled his eyes. “You wanted an audience.”

  “I wanted a launch,” I said, still grinning.

  I held my hand out to Cory and helped him stand.

  “You weren’t up there very long,” Cory said. “Was there a problem?”

  “Cold,” I said. “Breathing was fine. I just didn’t want any more frostbite.”

  Mom said, “And you want to go higher? Won’t it be colder?”

  Cory explained to her about thermal transfer in a vacuum. “Just like a thermos,” he said. “Once we get out of the atmosphere, it will cease to be a problem.”

  That’s right, I thought. We’ll have a whole different set of problems.

  But no need to tell Mom that. Not yet.

  Cory turned back to me. “Are you ready?”

  I nodded inside the helmet. He checked the time and recorded it.

  I waved at my parents. “Five minutes.”

  Dad asked, “What about five minutes?”

  “Back in five,” I said.

  He stood up. “Where are you going?”

  “The Kármán line.”

  He held out his hand, palm out. “One hundred kilometers? Space? Don’t you thin—”

  I was gone.

  I cleared my ears at twenty-five thousand feet, then forty-five thousand, then added velocity, hitting the two hundred miles per hour the first time—eighty-nine meters per second—and increasing the velocity each time I coasted to a stop.

  As Dad had warned, the civilian aviation GPS went from fifty-nine thousand feet to an “Invalid Data” message as I passed eighteen kilometers.

  By the time I passed twenty-five kilometers my upward velocity was over 244 meters per second. Though my ears popped slightly, the air around me was so thin that significant pressure changes took longer and longer.

  The display on the civilian GPS flickered and then died completely at fifty kilometers. At seventy-five kilometers I stopped feeling cold. I didn’t know if I was going so fast (six hundred meters per second) that I was getting friction warming, or if the air had finally thinned enough that it wasn’t carrying away my body heat. I wasn’t hearing the rush of air past the suit, like I had in lower altitudes.

  My eyes were glued to the display and when I passed one hundred kilometers I was coasting upward at seven hundred meters per second. The only thing I could hear was the whir of the circulation fans, my own breathing, and the thudding of my heart.

  I looked away from the GPS and down.

  My god.

  When you cry in free fall, the water does not run down your cheeks. It doesn’t even leave your eyes. I had to blink hard and shake my head to clear my vision. Forty-five thousand feet had been impressive but it was nothing compared to this.

  I floated.

  I’d plummeted before, but it was always in the atmosphere, quickly pushing against an almost solid wall of air, a dragging, noisy beast that plucks at your clothing and screams in your ears.

  A glance at the GPS showed I was still coasting up, but it was utterly silent and I felt nothing pulling at me. The GPS showed me when I passed 102 kilometers, but I couldn’t really feel the motion.

  I wiggled my fingers and moved my arms and legs. The suit was still comfortable. My breathing was still easy.

  Per the GPS, my upward trajectory was slowing, slowing, and shortly, it would reverse. If I jumped again, but added velocity sideways, building up to 7,840 meters per second parallel to the surface of the earth, I would be in a circular orbit, but it wouldn’t last long.

  Though I couldn’t hear it rushing past, there was still enough atmosphere at this altitude to generate drag, to decay the most circular of orbits.

  Earth still made up most of my field of vision but at the edges it was curving away, clearly a globe, a sphere, a “big blue marble.” The weather below, in West Texas, was clear, but up in the panhandle a front was coming through, knife sharp, crystal clear to the south and brilliant white clouds to the north. I twisted my head to the right and flinched. It was just the briefest glimpse of the sun but I was seeing violet spots.

  For a second I was seriously worried about my eyesight. Could I jump if I couldn’t see? Is that all it would take, a glimpse of the unfiltered sun, to maroon me up here?

  Well, not maroon. I was at the upper end of a ballistic trajectory that was about to change direction. One way or another, I would return to the world below me.

  I held my eyes shut until the spots faded. When I opened them back up, I had trouble focusing and then I realized it was the tears again, water balling up on the surface of my eyes. Blink, shake, blink, shake.

  Below, the snaking progress of the Rio Grande cut through rough terrain thrown into sharp relief by the shadows cast by the midmorning sun. I looked at the GPS. My upward velocity was slowing, slowing, and I’d just passed 104 kilometers.

  As of yesterday, when I’d looked it up online, the total number of humans who’d traveled into space was 623.

  Not anymore.

  My upward velocity finally slowed to zero and the GPS seemed to hang there for a second before it registered movement back toward the planet. Careful not to look at the sun again, I changed my orientation, jumping in place with no change in velocity, so
that I was looking away from the bright globe, out into the black.

  I could see stars, though not as many as I thought I’d see. Sunlight was entering the helmet from the side and bouncing around. I held up one hand, trying to block it, which helped a bit. Then I saw movement to the south, a bright pinprick movement, moving away—really moving—and then it seemed to swell as it became much brighter, and then faded back to its original pinprick.

  Ha. I’d seen one of these before, though from the ground. It was an Iridium flare, a reflection from the main mission antennae of an Iridium Communications satellite. They were in polar orbits 780 kilometers above the earth, nearly 700 kilometers higher than I was. I watched it until it passed the terminator of Earth’s shadow and blinked out.

  I wanted to chase it.

  Five minutes.

  Right. Maybe next trip.

  I returned in three jumps, brief pauses to let my ears equalize at twenty kilometers above sea level and then ten and then—

  All three of them were standing. Mom and Dad were looking at the tarp and Cory had his head tilted up.

  I staggered sideways, but regained my balance before they reached me. I held up my hand, forefinger to thumb, okay. I guess even four minutes of microgravity could make normal gravity seem odd.

  Cory raised his eyebrows. “Well?”

  I spoke up, to be heard outside the helmet, “One hundred and four kilometers.”

  Mom’s lips were moving, then she said aloud, “Sixty-four miles?”

  Dad said, “Close enough.”

  “Were you cold?” she asked.

  “No. Not a bit. Maybe I should try for orbit, Cory.”

  He glared at me. “We had a deal.”

  I sighed. “All right.” I started to reach for the main oxygen valve and stopped myself. “Checklist.”

  It took only a minute to depressurize the helmet and get it off by the numbers.

  “Your right cheekbone is sunburned,” Mom said, as she handed me a fresh bottle of water.

  I touched the cheek with my suited hand. “Yep. Sure is. Sun was on that side.”

  Cory leaned in and peered at it. “Damn. Polycarbonate is supposed to cut out most of the UV. Could be near-UV, I guess. We’ll need a protective visor.”

  “Not sunglasses?” I said.