Spin (Captain Chase)

by Patricia Cornwell

“A Smart Integrated Skin,” and I don’t like it. “As in a SIS?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “So, Carme and I are both wearing a SIS?” no way I’m calling it that.

  Silence.

  “Sisters wearing SISes. Whose idea was this?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “It sounds like one of Dad’s goofy acronyms,” I decide, sitting down on the bed with a towel wrapped around me.

  I pick up the MAG, examining it closely, making sure I don’t put it on backward.

  “I’m not calling it a SIS,” it’s only fair to let ART know. “And I would think most guys will have a problem with being told to put their SISes on. Nobody’s going to like it. Can’t we change the name?”

  “Unauthorized.”

  “Well, names are important,” as I put on my NASA-issued gray underpants, a gray sports bra, size medium. “Astronaut candidates become ASCANs. And astronaut hopefuls are ASHOs. And next people who want to go into space will be SISes, which could get permuted into SISSIES, if we’re not careful.”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “I don’t either, not sure I understand much, to be honest,” I worm my way into my new skin.

  Boots, gloves and hood are connected, and I work my legs in first, then my arms, finally standing, pulling up the front plastic zipper that runs from crotch to collar. I don’t know what I was expecting but nothing happens. It’s as if I have on a very lightweight, comfortably loose-fitting dive skin.

  “Am I supposed to feel anything?” I ask ART. “I mean, what’s so special about this?”

  “It must be zipped up all the way to the neck if you want the power on,” his reply.

  “That’s the first I’ve heard about turning the power on, but okay,” and I do what he says, the skin tightening as if I’m being shrink-wrapped.

  At the same time, I hear a barely perceptible click, the plastic zipper healing like an incision before my very eyes. It looks like a seam in the fabric, barely visible, and if I break the connection by moving the zipper down the slightest bit, the skin relaxes again.

  “I don’t guess there’s an instruction book to go with this thing,” I say it in jest because of course there isn’t.

  “Negative,” ART confirms, and for the next few minutes I test pilot my skinsuit, doing push-ups, jogging in place, running hot water over my gloved hand, then cold.

  I jump up and down as high as I can, doing skip steps, dripping water on the bathroom floor to see how my boots do in slippery conditions. Then I go through the same routine again, this time while wearing my CUFF, my SPIES, but I won’t need my PEEPS in space, ART informs me.

  The launch-entry suit has a smart visor that syncs with my other devices. Those in addition to sophisticated avionics, and I should be fine, he assures me. There’s no point in bringing my phone, ART reminds me. It won’t be any good in space, and he can connect me to calls and other communications without it.

  Covering my feet with clean room booties, I’m out the door in my peculiar skinsuit, my feet whispering on carpet. Passing the dining room, the gym, I find the door to the small medical exam room open wide as I hear the sound of water running. Inside, the flight surgeon is washing his hands, an older man with wild hair and shy eyes, something about him reminding me of Dad.

  “Hi,” I knock on the open door.

  “Come in,” he turns off the water, the sleeves of his splashed denim shirt rolled up, and he’s wearing khakis and sneakers.

  “I’m Calli Chase.”

  “I know who you are,” he grabs paper towels to dry his hands. “If I didn’t, neither of us should be here. I’ve been given the scoop.”

  He looks me in the eye as if he’s peering into my mind.

  “How are we feeling?” he removes the stethoscope from around his neck. “I’m Dr. Helthe,” he says, pronounced like health with a slight tongue thrust, I decide.

  “An unusual name,” and sometimes I’m no better at small talk than my dad.

  “I frankly think it got misspelled along the way,” Dr. Helthe replies, finding a digital thermometer. “Likely it originally was Helth and an e was added, probably by whoever was taking the census at Ellis Island back in the 1880s.”

  “I don’t need to take this off, do I?” and I mean my skinsuit.

  “No,” he inserts the thermometer into my mouth. “By all accounts, you’re going to have nice weather,” as if I’m looking forward to a sailboat ride or a stroll. “But then thunderstorms will be building by late morning. You’ll be long gone by then. I understand you’re from Virginia. Never been to Langley but have visited Wallops a number of times.”

  He talks quietly, quickly, almost breathily and nonstop, sort of what Dad does when he’s nervous and ill at ease with people he doesn’t know. The thermometer beeps, and Dr. Helthe is happy to inform me my temperature is 97.9, in the normal zone, and I could have told him that.

  ART lets me know everything before the flight surgeon finds it out as he busily takes my blood pressure, taps my knees with his little rubber mallet, listens to my heart and breathing. None of it is necessary when I have an implanted network of devices downloading the data and a lot more. But no longer having a need for certain protocols in life doesn’t mean you are exempt from them.

  Even if Dr. Helthe knows about my secret SIN, he’d examine me as usual, filling in the blanks, checking off the boxes. He very well may be part of the Gemini project, and in fact, I’m getting more suspicious by the moment. Dick has his own pied-à-terre in Kennedy’s sacred astronaut crew quarters, therefore I think it’s reasonable to conclude that NASA personnel and those at Space Force are merging.

  Certainly, I sense something in Dr. Helthe’s demeanor that makes me suspect he knows darn well what’s going on, who I am and that I might not live to tell the tale. At the very least, he has to know it’s not business as usual when I show up to launch in a rocket that supposedly has nobody inside, just a weather satellite with a special knack for tracking fires.

  “We feeling up to snuff?” Dr. Helthe bends over me, moving the stethoscope around. “Your ticker’s sounding strong as a horse,” and in the past I’d be offended by the comparison.

  All my life I’ve been called strong as a horse or as healthy as one. I never saw it as a compliment, more as an insinuation that I look something less than fine, maybe common or thick.

  “Breathing’s normal,” he decides. “Anything going on I should know about before you rocket into space for the first time, young lady?”

  “I’m feeling fine,” I let him know as he holds up a finger, telling me to follow it with my eyes, moving it in an H pattern.

  Finding a tongue depressor in a glass jar, he tells me to open wide and say ahhhh.

  40

  NEXT STOP is the suit-up room with its padded brown recliner chairs, long tables and big panels of pressure valves that go back to the late ’60s.

  There’s scarcely any legend who hasn’t passed through here, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Young and Sally Ride to name a few, and also those less fortunate, the crews on the Challenger and Columbia.

  All of them made their final stop in this room, each with a suit technician who might be the last person they’ll see on Earth, depending on how things turn out. My tech is about Mom’s age, I’m guessing, all in white with a headset on. She tells me to come in, looking me up and down.

  “You’re wearing everything I left on your bed?” her eyes are bright like a bird’s, and she’s kind but no-nonsense.

  “Thank you, and yes,” I reply, imagining myself on the bathroom floor, sincerely hoping she didn’t walk in at the wrong moment.

  “You can sit down,” she indicates the recliner next to a sanitized plasti
c-covered table where my blue launch-entry suit is broken down into its components.

  The pants, the torso, gloves, boots and helmet attach with plastic zippers, and missing are the usual metal rings, the clunky metal clasps, the dreadful rubber dam around the collar, the comm cap that causes hotspots. I’ve tested all sorts of spacewear, including the Advanced Crew Escape Space Suit System (ACES), what most call a pumpkin suit because of its color.

  But it would seem that blue is the new orange, and my crash dummy Snap has tried out my new getup but I haven’t.

  “I’m Stella, by the way,” my suit tech says, and of course she’d work for NASA and have a name like that. “No more need for long johns with their 300 feet of water-cooling tubes,” removing my paper booties, she begins helping me into the bright-blue pants. “It kind of makes me sad to think.”

  “Don’t be too sad,” I reply, “I still have a diaper.”

  “It’s really not that bad unless you have to wear it very long.”

  “What’s your idea of ‘very long’?”

  “It depends on if we’re talking number one or number two,” she says as if there are no adults in the room.

  “Makes sense,” and I’m grateful Dick wouldn’t let me eat anything since my egg sandwiches early this morning, and thinking of them makes my stomach growl audibly.

  “You wouldn’t want to go as long as two days without changing your MAG, that’s for sure,” Stella takes off my clean room shoe covers, and helps me pull on my space boots. “You’ll get rashes and stuff. How are you liking your skin? And I don’t mean your real one.”

  “It feels good so far,” and it really does. “Almost energizing, and it’s definitely regulating my temperature. Otherwise I’d be sweating buckets right about now.”

  “You’ll find you get less tired sitting,” she zips my boots to my pants, “and the electrical stimulation for your muscles and bones you might feel slightly. But I actually think it’s pleasant, like a gentle tingling,” and as she says it, I’m feeling it, especially in my right index finger.

  “How many years have you been doing this?” I ask as she pulls Tyvek booties over my electric-blue spacesuited feet so I don’t get them dirty.

  “May 6, 1999, was my first crew, Space Shuttle Discovery,” she says. “Seven astronauts,” she picks up the suit’s upper torso. “Unlike you here all by your lonesome. That’s probably going to be the norm going forward, single pilots, depending on the vehicle. Or smaller crews of two or three. But to be honest, the way things are changing, I don’t know what to expect.”

  She shows me how to lean forward, entering the torso from the back, working my head up through the neck opening. I push my arms through the sleeves, keenly aware of the slight tingling Stella mentioned. It doesn’t feel bad at all, rather good I agree, and I’m perfectly comfortable in my skin but could do without the diaper. Or better said, I wish I could.

  “It’s a lot easier when you don’t have that big metal neck ring, right?” she zips me up in back. “Or that awful rubber dam that snatches the hair out of your head if you’re not careful. Of course, most of the guys don’t have much hair, but it’s a challenge for the women.”

  “To be honest, I’ve not worn one of these before,” I confess.

  “Nobody has,” she zips my torso to my pants. “It’s all been very hush-hush. No one’s actually worn one during a launch. But there’s a first time for everything.”

  “What is it called?”

  “Around here, we keep it simple and call it a BS. A Blue Suit but it’s not exactly blue, more of an iridescent blue that can go reflective like a mirror in an emergency.”

  “You mean, if I crash or end up in the ocean.”

  “It shows up like crazy if need be, and I can tell you from my own experience that it’s comfortable and not that hard to get on and off when I’m not around to help you.”

  “It sounds like you’ve tried out the merchandise,” taking off my CUFF, I tuck it into a pocket of my BS space pants.

  “Absolutely everything I’m putting on you, I’ve put on myself,” she says as I think of Mom. “It’s crazy to think of wires and sensors replacing threads. When I first started working here, most people didn’t have cell phones. Barely anybody was using the internet or any sort of social media.”

  Stella pulls up the hood of my skinsuit, and it form fits around my skull. The sensor-laden smart material firms up just enough to comfortably support the back of my neck.

  “Lucky you, not needing a comm cap,” she says. “Testing, 1-2-3 . . .”

  I give a thumbs-up, reading her loud and clear through sensors in my conductive hood with its integrated audio system.

  “1-2-3-4 . . . ,” I reply, and she nods that she’s picking me up fine in her headset. “Does this mean I have to wear the hood all the time to have radio contact?”

  “No. There are teeny-tiny mics built into the fabric of your skin, right around your collarbones,” she helps me into my space gloves. “The skin is good protection while you’re learning to float. When it senses you’re out of control, it stiffens enough to prevent injury as you bang around.”

  She tightens the palm straps, making sure that if the suit is pressurized in an emergency, the gloves still fit properly.

  “I’m not planning to bang around,” I reply.

  “You scuba dive?”

  “Yes.”

  “So, you’re good at being neutrally buoyant. You’ve probably been up in the zero-gravity plane too. The Vomit Comet,” she adds, and I nod. “You’re still going to knock into things at first, you’ll see.”

  00:00:00:00:0

  STELLA attaches an oxygen hose to a port on my left thigh, clicking it into place, and we’re getting close to showtime.

  “I wish I knew more and felt better prepared,” I may as well be honest with the last person I might ever see.

  “That’s what everybody says except for the ones we should worry about,” she zips the spacesuit’s soft helmet around my neck, pulling down the visor over my face.

  Reaching for a valve on the control panel, she chooses a pressure of almost 3.5 pounds per square inch, and I feel the suit tighten and stiffen. Bending my legs and arms, I wiggle my inflated gloved fingers, reminded of why I’ve worked so hard at getting strong. Thank goodness for all the hours I’ve killed myself with weights, doing push-ups one handed or on my fingertips, squeezing tennis balls until my hands cramp.

  Stella goes on to explain all sorts of minutiae that remind me why ART is good to have around. The oxygen flow in my helmet is controlled by the rate of my own breathing, very much like using a regulator when scuba diving. Only in this case there’s no threat of running out of air, and there’s also an antisuffocation valve, it’s good to know.

  It’s now 7:20 p.m., and a message from Dick appears in my SPIES. He’ll be downstairs waiting in 10. Stella disconnects the hose from my thigh, and opens a valve, the air hissing out like I’m wearing an inflatable mattress. She unzips my gloves and helmet, telling me they’ll be waiting inside the rocket when I get there.

  “Here’s what to expect next,” she begins taking off her Tyvek coveralls. “I’ll meet you in the white room, and then I’m going to get you strapped in, repeating the pressure check and other fun stuff, okay?”

  “Thank you,” is all I can think to say as she leaves, and ART is giving me the countdown time in my SPIES.

  T-minus 92 minutes . . .

  At half past 7, I board the elevator, bare headed and gloveless in my vivid-blue spacesuit and Tyvek booties, looking like a clueless astronaut or in my case a lost one. Dick climbs out of his Suburban as I emerge from the double metal doors, and it’s very dark back here. Moving with relative ease down the ramp, I walk toward the silver Airstream astrovan, windowless for pr
ivacy I won’t be needing.

  “Space looks good on you,” Dick gives me the once-over. “What do you think?” he slides open the van’s door.

  “I think the BS is pretty good so far,” I reply as we step inside what looks a lot like a compartment in a corporate jet.

  Four big seats face each other with a table in between, a wall-mounted flat-screen is divided into quadrants displaying the rocket on its floodlit pad, and Kennedy’s and Houston’s Mission Control rooms.

  “Ask me later,” I add as I carefully sit down. “I guess I’ll know better when my life depends on it.”

  “That’s why you get the fun job of troubleshooting,” he takes the seat across from me. “And all kidding aside, you can expect glitches. Something will go off-nominal as sure as we’re sitting here right now. With your suit, your skin, it could be the vehicles themselves, especially ones untried and untested in the environment they’re meant to operate in,” and he’s talking about the PEQUOD and the MOBE.

  “I didn’t notice any police cars,” I lengthen the shoulder harness so I can fit it over my Blue Suit. “We’re not worried about security at all? After everything else that’s happened? It’s a long dark stretch ahead,” I add.

  “If there’s so much as one car with flashing lights, it sends the signal something’s going on,” Dick says as our van pulls away.

  I can see where we’re going on the flat-screen, but don’t need security live feeds to know what I’d be looking at. During my academy days and return visits for special training, I got to know Kennedy Space Center like the back of my hand, driving around in one of our trucks or patrolling the local marshes and waterways in one of our airboats.

  It’s the ultimate selfie, watching our van on camera turning onto the NASA Parkway. To our left are buildings barely lit up, to our right the dark void of desolate scrubland where the pads are located near the water’s edge. In other quadrants of the screen NASA personnel here and at Johnson Space Center in Houston are getting ready, the digital countdown ticking off the time before launch.