Exo: A Novel

by Steven Gould

  “I’m going to remediate some more junk—you have any other problem debris?”

  “Uh, I’m not at the office, but I don’t recall any pressing issues this week. You have something in mind?”

  “Yes. A chunk of Cosmos 1375, if it doesn’t turn out to be too big.”

  I heard him typing on his computer. “Ah. That one. We will watch your operation with interest.”

  “Toodles.”

  I disconnected.

  Cosmos 1375 was put up just to be destroyed as part of a Soviet antisatellite test. According to my research there were fifty-six major pieces of it still in orbit. I caught up with mine as it passed 903 kilometers over the Aegean Sea.

  It was like a dishwasher if a dishwasher were tumbling slowly and egg-shaped, with flattened tubing and twisted structural elements projecting at odd intervals. It was spinning slowly, perhaps once every three seconds. One hemisphere was blackened with carbon scoring while the other side was covered with torn sheets of gold foil. I think it was a fuel or oxidizer tank.

  The first piece I grabbed, a section of tubing that extended out furthest, bent, twisted, and then snapped off in my hand. The tank tumbled on, only now with a slight wobble.

  The next bracket I grabbed was firmly attached. The tank slowed down and I began rotating with it, or, more exactly, we started orbiting around a midpoint that corresponded with my elbow. This made me think the debris massed as much as I did, suit and all.

  A bit larger than your fifty-kilo limit.

  I thought I could jump it, but I didn’t want to go all the way back to the lab with it. What if it fell on me?

  I looked at the GPS readout and concentrated.

  The earth was suddenly noticeably bigger, nearer, and darker. I flipped up the visor. I was back in eclipse over the Marshall Islands and headed for Hawaii. My altitude was one hundred kilometers but my speed hadn’t changed: still 7.417 kilometers per second.

  I let go and jumped to the southwest rim of Diamond Head crater, to the observation deck on top of the fire control station. The sky was brightening in the east but the state monument’s parking lot in the crater floor was still in deep shadow. The lights of Waikiki were blazing, of course.

  It was going by gut. I hadn’t done any calculations, but I’d placed it five hundred meters per second too slow to maintain orbit. So I figured that between atmospheric drag and its trajectory, it would enter the atmosphere some—

  The streak started low in the west and blazed halfway to the eastern horizon before it faded into the dawn.

  Even if it wasn’t burned completely to plasma, it would drop into the ocean long before it reached California.

  * * *

  Cory pulled the dosimeter from the coveralls’ outer pocket while Tara and Joe were still going through the suit-depressurization checklist. As soon as the backpack and helmet came off he said, “Less exposure than your full orbit lower down. I still want to beef up the coveralls’ shielding so the exposure at epidermis—” He checked the helmet dosimeter. “—is at least as good as it is in the helmet.”

  Joe’s eyes got a bit wide, but he said, “Do you know Professor Seck?”

  Cory shook his head. “I heard the name. Material sciences, yes?”

  Joe nodded. “The TA I had in statics is one of her grad students. She was just funded for her work on hydrogen-rich polymeric nanocomposites for radiation shielding.”

  Cory said, “Nice catch.” He scribbled the name and a note on the white board, circled it, and added the phrase, “lunch or something.”

  When Cory relaxed the suit, I said, “Back in five” and jumped directly to the Eyrie, where I changed into street clothes rather than hang around the lab in my long underwear … in front of Joe.

  Dad and Tara were gone when I returned and Cory was doing something to the front of the shrunken suit as it hung in its stand. Joe leaned against the bench, watching.

  Without turning his head Joe said, “Your dad gave Tara a lift back to Krakatoa. Could you make it part of the flange assembly going forward? Maybe an interlock with the helmet?”

  I realized the questions were for Cory. I stepped forward to see better.

  Cory held a piece of circuit protoboard with a large slide switch, a rheostat with an oversized knob, a cluster of resistors, capacitors, and IC chips, and a flat, rectangular lithium ion cell. A short cable ran from a connector on the edge of the board to the connector on the helmet flange.

  “What’s your thinking on the interlock?” Cory said.

  Joe said, “Well, if the helmet is still on, you wouldn’t want to relax it, right? You could still be in orbit. It would be another safety beyond the vacuum sensor.”

  Realization hit. I said, “Oh, is that the portable unit?”

  Cory grinned, flipped the switch and twisted the rheostat. The suit expanded to full floppy mode. “Conservatively, we’ve got ten minutes of extension per charge cycle. If you expand it right before donning, and contract it immediately, I’d say you could go through ten don-and-doff cycles before you had to charge it.” He patted the old shoebox-sized unit on the bench, “Though we’ll always have this for backup.”

  “How do you charge it?” I asked.

  He twisted the board to show the other connector.

  “Ah, USB, nice.”

  “At least a two-amp charger, though.”

  “Vacuum hardened?”

  “Designed and specced for. Hasn’t been tested but all of those components are good for vacuum and derated below fifty percent.”

  I frowned. “Derated? What does that mean?”

  Joe blinked. “You don’t know that?”

  I snapped, “We aren’t all able to go to Stanford University, Joe!”

  Cory’s eyebrows went up but he said, “When a component is going to operate in an environment that will stress it—high temperature swings, extreme vibration and acceleration—you derate its capacity.” He tapped one of the black rectangles on the board mounted on a multifinned heat sink. “This voyage regulator can handle up to ten amps, but for this application, we’ll never pull more than five. The heat sink is oversized, too, since it can’t count on air convection for cooling, only radiation. It’s like building a bridge to handle fifty tons but never allowing a truck bigger than twenty-five tons to use it.”

  Joe held up his hands. “I was just surprised. You know so much more than me about this—” He gestured at the suit and at the life-support pack, ending with a gesture that took in the ceiling, and, I guess, the sky. “I wasn’t trying to insult you. I only learned it myself last month in my intro-to-aerospace class.”

  My ears turned red and I had to look away. “You have this opportunity that I’ll never have,” I said. “I barely got six months of high school before they took that away.”

  Cory looked at me, puzzled. “Then where did you do your undergrad?”

  I turned my back to him but it wasn’t enough, I had to jump away.

  I fell to my knees in the Eyrie. It was worse than crying, it was those wracking sobs, three of them in succession, and then I was yelling at myself. “Shut UP. Stop feeling sorry for yourself!” I wanted to smash something.

  I jumped to ten thousand feet and let myself drop, twisting deliberately, turning it into a tumbling flailing plummet, cold air stabbing through my clothes and yanking at my hair.

  The ground rushed toward me and then I was crouched in the sandy wash panting, but at least the tears had stopped.

  Back in the Eyrie I washed my face. The water from the kitchen cistern was cold and that helped too, but when I looked in the mirror my eyes were puffy. I didn’t like that person.

  I felt guilty for misleading Cory. I felt guilty for feeling sorry for myself. Sure, Joe got to go to Stanford but he wasn’t able to go as far afield as I had. Forget Australia, Asia, Europe—I’d been to space.

  * * *

  I was wearing sunglasses when I jumped back. Joe was standing at the bench with the helmet over his head, one hand bracing the fl
ange, the other sliding the reflective visor up and down.

  “Doesn’t feel right unless you’ve got it locked into the suit,” I said.

  He jerked and I heard his head bang against the polycarbonate. He was biting his lip when he lifted it off his head. “Just wanted to see—”

  “Of course you wanted to. Who wouldn’t?”

  He set the helmet back on the bench, resettling the armored hoses and the backpack. “Cory had to go to a thing. I told him we’d make sure the lab was locked.”

  I nodded.

  He gestured at the helmet. “Bigger than I expected—not as claustrophobic.”

  He hadn’t tried it with the headset and the neck gasket. The sensation of being slowly strangled might have changed his mind, but I just nodded again.

  The camera was sitting on the workbench, case open, the memory card beside it. I gestured at it.

  Joe said, “Tara grabbed the video from today. She wants to cut some clips for the website.” He kept looking at the camera, then said, “She wants me to do some more voice-over work on that, if it’s okay with you.”

  I shrugged. “Certainly. Uh, you guys did a great job on the audio loop.”

  “Well, that was Tara. Hard taskmaster.”

  “Uh, the spots were, what, thirty seconds? How long did it take you?”

  He grimaced. “She kept me in front of the mic until two in the morning. We must’ve done twenty-five takes on the ‘Space Girl’ jingle alone. I gave up and went home after about the tenth take on the Diné spot and she still wasn’t satisfied. I don’t know how much sleep she got.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded.

  He changed the subject. “Cory was surprised to learn you hadn’t any formal university-undergrad time.”

  I winced. “I should’ve told him.”

  “I don’t know. He said you never told him you had. He just assumed you were at least a third-year undergrad from your level of comprehension and maturity.”

  I blushed. “I didn’t mean to mislead him.”

  Joe shook his head. “If anything, he was more impressed knowing you’ve done what you’ve done with homeschooling and self-study. Then insulted you and we had words before he had to leave.”

  “He insulted me?”

  “He said you were the most impressive autodidact he’d ever met. Not fair. I told him sure, you could be a bit didactic—well a lot didactic—but there was nothing automatic about it. When you’re doing that you’re being deliberately annoying.”

  My mouth twitched and, dammit, he saw that.

  He said, “I should be careful before you go all autodidact on my ass.” Then he sobered. “I know you wanted to go to college, Cent. But I thought it was because you wanted to be with me.” His mouth turned down. “Self-centered?” He made a checkmark in the air. “Achievement unlocked.”

  I said, “I did want to be with you, too.” Still do.

  His face twisted and it was his turn to look away. “You were just so good at everything. Like you didn’t need to study or work. I was able to keep up this semester because I busted my ass. I had to do that in high school, too.”

  I’d seen his graduation ceremony from the back of the mezzanine. “You were a straight-A student!”

  “Because I worked at it. I was a D student in middle school. I skateboarded. I smoked pot. I tried to get laid. That was it. When I went into high school I didn’t have the habits and I didn’t have the material and that was obvious to me the first week of school.”

  “I know how smart you are,” I said. “Getting Ds had to take some work.”

  Joe raised his eyebrows. “Well, yeah. You have to not do the work and skip the tests and alienate your teachers. It was exhausting.”

  “You could’ve coasted through high school without much work. Why not do that?”

  “My last year of eighth grade, a second cousin of mine dropped out of his high school, got mixed up with a gang, and went to prison.

  “His mother fell apart. I mean, she couldn’t hold it together, lost her job. My parents ended up taking her in. I got to listen to her talk about it for an entire summer. I had to go with her to visit her son.”

  “You thought you would go to prison if you didn’t get good grades?”

  “Well, I didn’t think that would happen—Matt was pretty much a jerk all his life—but I wasn’t ruling out some other spectacular failure. It wasn’t what happened to Matt that scared me—it was what it did to his mother. I didn’t … I couldn’t do something like that to my mom.”

  I’d never heard this before. We’d talked a lot about our childhoods, but not this.

  “I never had that choice,” I said.

  “Huh?”

  “I wasn’t in elementary or middle school. My parents both knew exactly how I was doing on my school work. I had a formal study schedule when I was four. Distracted by friends? Smoke pot? Get in trouble with boys? Ha! You and I both have good study habits, but it wasn’t like I decided. You got to make that choice.”

  Then I smacked myself on the forehead and started laughing.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Our first-world tragedies. ‘Oh, no, I must work hard because I am attending a world-class university. Oh, no, I’m able to travel all over the world and I have multiple homes.’” I squeezed my eyes shut. “There are kids who will die today because they don’t have clean water. Try and convince them of my troubles.”

  “Stupid comparison. Maybe we’re luckier than ninety percent of the people on the planet, but no matter how expensive the shoe, it still pinches when it doesn’t fit.”

  Okay, every time Dad tried that Eat your dinner, there are kids starving in Bangladesh, I’d shoved the plate toward him and said Then give it to them. Joe was right. Misery isn’t a bloody competition.

  Joe was chewing on his lower lip.

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Say it.”

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m supposed to be home for dinner tonight. What the hell am I going to do if you hear what I want to say and then bug out, leaving me twelve hundred miles from home?”

  Now that set my heart to pounding. What hurtful thing did he have to say that would make me do that to him? “Oh, I don’t know. That might be the least of your troubles.” I wondered how he’d like to try a flailing plummet from ten thousand feet.

  “Bring it,” he said.

  I sighed. “Get your coat.”

  * * *

  “Where the hell are we?” Joe said.

  It was bitter cold and we scrambled through crusted snow to get across the parking lot and into the closest door. The one that said, Employees Entrance.

  We were in a hallway, a time clock and a rack full of cards mounted to the right by a series of workplace safety posters. There was a sign that said, Reception at the East Entrance.

  “We’re in Franklin, Wisconsin. We’re going to talk to a guy about a blimp. Well, sort of. BlimpWerks makes remote-control scale-model blimps that can be flown around stadiums with advertiser signs on them. They create special shapes, too.” I pointed at a framed photo on the wall. It showed an SUV-shaped blimp floating above a crowd at a basketball game. The next photo showed a burger-shaped blimp for one of the national fast-food chains dropping leaflets on a crowd at a hockey game. Several more photos showed classic zeppelin-shaped blimps with logos painted or hung on the sides. “But they also have some prototypes I’m interested in.”

  Joe looked at his watch and I said, “I’ll have you home for dinner. I promise.”

  We found receptionist at the other end of the hallway and I asked her for Mr. Papadopolis, the sales engineer.

  Mr. Papadopolis was not as tall as Joe, but muscular—not just a weight lifter but a body builder. He took one look at the way I was hunched over my crossed arms and offered us something hot to drink in the employee break room. Joe had coffee, I had tea.

  Mr. Papadopolis had a distressing tendency to want to
talk to Joe, but Joe, bless his heart, just pointed at me. “I’m just along to look pretty. She’s the buyer.”

  Mr. Papadopolis adjusted quickly enough. “Right. What kind of blimp do you need? Is this a school branding for stadium games?”

  I shook my head. “I was talking to your Ms. Wilde in R and D about your new fabric and she mentioned the test spheres.”

  “Oh! I don’t know what you’d do with them. They were really just an assembly-and-performance test. We needed to make sure the new fabric heat welded properly and held pressure at least as well as our standard envelope. They’d make awful blimps.”

  I nodded. “Yes, wrong shape, not a problem for our application. Could you give me and my, um, colleague the details on your new fabric?”

  Joe glared at me.

  “Well, it’s a tougher version of our standard three point two-ounce helium-tight envelope. Our proprietary material is a treated three-ply ripstop nylon that will hold its helium long term. Our competition uses polyurethane and has to have helium added midperformance to keep buoyancy. But not our stuff. We can save you thousands on your annual helium costs.”

  He looked in danger of going all-in on his sales spiel so I said quickly, “So what’s different about this fabric? Ms. Wilde said something about incorporating Kevlar now?”

  “Yes. The middle layer is now Kevlar for decreased pressure deformation, and we added an aluminized Mylar layer on the outside for UV protection. Some of our clients have experimental designs that need higher pressures. They’re working toward lifting body rigidity, for slightly-heavier-than-air vehicles, you know. They want to achieve lift below three knots of airspeed, so they needed something scuff-resistance for takeoffs and landings.”

  Joe asked, “How much heavier is this fabric than your standard envelope?”

  “A slight increase, just a half an ounce for twice the strength and hardly any deformation.”

  Joe frowned and Papadopolis added, “That’s per square yard.”

  I said, “Ah. So this is three point seven ounces per square yard? Could we see the prototypes?”

  “Right.”