Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition

by B. C. CHASE

  I’ve decided space is a lot like an amusement park: a lot of wait for a few seconds of fun.

  Finally, Commander Tomlinson rotates a crank lever on the hatch (in the front of our capsule behind the screens) and pulls inward. He passes through first, followed by Tim, then Nari, then Shiro, then Shelby, and finally me.

  Four

  So-called “NASA Administrator John Hogarth” never asked for my bank account number. After he hung up, I was just starting to doze off when the helicopter arrived. But it was so loud outside my truck that anybody who was in the parking lot could not possibly have slept through it. I quickly pulled on my jeans and slipped into a plaid shirt before jumping outside. There, with lights blinking and rotors spinning, blasting the pavement with wind and making the puddles shimmer, was a big helicopter. Don’t ask me what kind it was because I don’t know, but that it had come from the military was obvious, because it was large and green, like a big, fat bullfrog. A bunch of other truckers had sleepily emerged and were staring at the copter as if an alien spaceship had just landed. Little did I realize then that, in a way, one had.

  I approached. Two soldiers jumped out and one of them asked me, “What is your name?”

  “Jim Perkins.”

  “Come with us.”

  ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

  I float through a narrow tunnel between two hatches and emerge into a brightly lit area about the size of a big, square room.

  But it isn’t anything like a room.

  I am underneath a whole group of people whose sock-covered feet are right above my head. The “room” is very disorienting because on all sides (up, down, right, left, forward, backward) there are either square, gray hatches with little round windows or square openings with rounded corners on all sides. The hatches that have been opened do not swing on hinges, but slide along grooves that tuck them neatly against the white walls.

  The crew are greeting and hugging a surprisingly large number of people who are already on the station. I recognize a couple of them. One is Commander Eric Sykes, fifty-seven, from Boston. He is in charge of the Atlantis shuttle that docked before our Dragon capsule did. They are dropping off the last shipment of material for one of the Horticulture Modules and will be taking a spacewalk to fix a jammed solar array that cannot be retracted. He is a famous astronaut, a veteran of the shuttle program who was called out of retirement. During my very brief training, he came in on several occasions to give us some experiential pointers. He is bald, has narrow-set eyes, wide jaws, and broad shoulders. He’s a pretty serious character. Doesn’t smile much except when the press or NASA are pointing cameras at him and he has no choice, and even then his smile isn’t very pleasant. But he’s sharp, he’s fair, and he knows what he’s doing. I like him.

  Commander Sykes spots me and floats down to shake my hand, “Jim, welcome to the ISS. Are you ready?”

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I say. “Sure you don’t want to join us?”

  He gets a far-off look in his eyes as he says, “In a way, believe it or not, I do.” He shakes his head. “But no. I’ve missed my family too much already.”

  “You hold the record for the American longest in space, don’t you?”

  He nods.

  Jokingly, I say, “Well I’m glad they tested it out on the amateurs before the real astronauts like me came up.” That gets a little grin out of him.

  Swooping down to hug me is a young woman with large, green eyes and long, blonde hair that has been gathered into a top knot, “Welcome, Jimmy!” she exclaims. A trip to deep space wouldn’t be complete without at least one cosmonaut, and she is ours: Katia Pavlova. She has already been on the station for a week (she came up on a Soyuz spacecraft), but unlike the rest of the station crew, she will be joining us to Pluto. We briefly trained together and during that time she kind of adopted me as a substitute father. In addition to being the youngest member of the crew, she is probably also the smartest. At only twenty-four, she already has two Ph.D.s, one in astrophysics and the other in mathematics. Much of her education took place in the United States. As a result, she speaks fluent English with an American accent. From what I’ve seen, she has all the best qualities of youth: energy, daring, and optimism, but little of the swagger or stupidity.

  “The station is so big! I’m so excited!” she exclaims with a broad smile.

  Commander Sykes introduces me to the other members of his shuttle crew. Three of them I have already met during my training at NASA. Sanjiv Patel, a chipper, thick-haired technical specialist from India, and Maria Vasquez, a middle-aged technical specialist from Mexico, are helping to do some last-minute work on the station to make it ready for flight. Both are experienced astronauts. Sarah Foreman, a gray-haired botanist who looks like she cares much more for plants than her own hairdo, is with them to make sure everything in the Horticulture Modules is ready for our long journey. Kurt Drexel I have not met. He is the shuttle pilot from Germany. I will spend the next two days with them as the station is prepared to launch from LEO—that’s a little lingo I picked up: low Earth orbit.

  The Station Commander is Viktor Filipchenko. He has bright, optimistic eyes and greets me warmly as if welcoming me to his home. I guess that shouldn’t seem unusual since this has been his home for the last six months.

  Having shaken everybody’s hands, I ask Katia, “Where’s the bathroom on this thing?”

  “Didn’t you use the simulator with me at training?” she giggles.

  “Yeah, I didn’t know where I was in that thing, either.”

  “First, you need to know the basic directions. Zenith is up, nadir is down, starboard is the right side of the ship, port is the left side. Now follow me. The bathroom is this way—aft and to port.”

  Like a diver through water, she launches herself aft-ward. She says, “This module is called Node 2. We have workbenches in here, stowage, and the launch seats.” We pass two metallic, blue tables that are folded against the wall. An assortment of the types of tools that would be found in any garage tool chest, pens, and duct tape are attached above the tables. Past these on all four sides are odd-looking blue seats with restraints and minimal padding. They look a bit like something you’d strap a person to before performing excruciating dental work on him.

  We pass through a square entrance with round corners that leads to another module. In here the walls and ceiling are lined with all kinds of technical equipment: circular things, gray things with switches, wires running everywhere, metallic arms that hold laptops, displays with lists of numbers, tubes, two stations with joysticks, and an exercise bike. The floor is comprised of what appear to be stowage lockers. “This is the American Lab,” she explains. “In here we have avionics computers, science material, 3-D printers[2], and also this bike for exercise.”

  “3-D printers?” I ask.

  “Yes. If we don’t have a tool or something that we need, we can search through the digital library NASA sent with us and manufacture it here. We can make plastics, metals, pretty much anything you could manufacture on Earth.”

  “So if I wanted to make myself a Remington 870 shotgun for target practice…”

  “I’ll let you ask Commander Tomlinson about that.”

  I am surprised to see how chaotic and downright unkempt the place looks. The mockup space station on the ground where we did some of our training didn’t look like this at all. To propel herself along, Katia uses blue rails that are affixed to the walls. I follow her example. She takes me through another entrance and into an area like the first one I entered with hatches and entrances on all sides. We float over a big cavity full of large, white parcels and bags to an area full of stained storage units in the walls and a red table. “This is Node 1. It’s a nice place to prepare snacks, on this table. You can stick forks and things on here.” She demonstrates how to use straps and Velcro pads on the table. She smiles, “But we have a bigger galley in the Habitation Module, now. If you want to know where the best food is hidden, ask me when you get hungry.” Point
ing to a hatch in the ceiling, she says, “That’s where the Pluto Lander is. 562 days from now, we’ll open that hatch.”

  She angles her body to turn to the right, where she passes through an entrance into another module. “Here is Node 3.” She points to what looks like a conveyer belt recessed in the wall with a big bar. “The treadmill. You have to exercise at least two-and-a-half hours every day.” Finally, much to my relief, she floats to a little enclosed space where, inside, I can see what is obviously a toilet, though it has a very tiny lid and, instead of porcelain, has a round, metal bottom. She loosens a strap to free a long tube with a yellow funnel at the end, topped by a cap. “You pee in this. It has suction. For the bigger stuff, take one of these baggies and stretch it over the toilet seat.” She pulls a clear, plastic bag with elastic out from a holder on the wall. “When you’re finished, wrap it up and push it down into the can.” She shows me how to pull the screen closed so I can have privacy, and she leaves.

  Of course they had a mockup bathroom like this during training, but they just pointed to it and said, “That’s the bathroom.” Nobody actually showed me how to work it because the process is so different in zero-g that it was pointless to try , so I’m mildly apprehensive about it.

  I quickly discover there is nothing to be worried about. Peeing is peeing, space or otherwise. In fact, I wouldn’t mind having a tube like this at home. Less chance of spraying in the wrong place. When a man is intimately acquainting himself with this kind of new equipment, his mind tends to wander. Mine wanders back to my first visit to JPL.

  ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

  After a transfer from the helicopter to a small jet on an airstrip in the middle of nowhere, I found myself riding in a van to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. I was brought to the Deep Space Network Control Room, which I found to be dark with rows of workstations in front of a large display. Quiet and rather peaceful, it was just the kind of place you would expect to be used for communicating with all of our farthest-reaching space probes.

  John Hogarth introduced himself. He was a tall man wearing a dress shirt, tie, and blue-patterned suit pants. Bald, he wore thin wire-framed glasses. He reached out to shake my hand, “Welcome to NASA.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How was your flight?”

  “Very nice plane,” I said, recalling the Gulfstream’s plush leather chairs and the ample beverages that the gorgeous flight attendant served. “I could get used to that.”

  “I’m sure you could,” he said, seriously, “but it’s mine.”

  I raised my eyebrows, “Is the girl yours, too?”

  He ignored my comment, saying, “You’re probably wondering why you’re here.”

  “Hey, as long as you keep up the good treatment, I won’t ask any questions.”

  “Have you heard of the Voyager space probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2?”

  “You mean from Star Trek?”

  “No,” he said. “Not from Star Trek.” He clears his throat, “Mr. Perkins, everything I’m about to tell you must not leave this room. For now, this information is so sensitive that only the President, the Vice President, the Chief of Staff, and a handful of other people at NASA know about it. The President will stop at nothing to make sure this stays confidential.”

  “Pretty serious stuff, then?”

  “Do you value your life, Mr. Perkins?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “If you do, you’ll keep this to yourself.”

  “Is this something I really want to know?”

  “You have no choice, I’m afraid. None of us do.”

  “Got it. My lips are sealed.”

  He pensively surveyed me as if he was having second thoughts. Then he proceeded to tell me a about the history of Voyager 1. It was launched September 5th, 1977, on a mission to Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan—a fitting name for Saturn’s biggest moon—and then off to the far reaches of our galaxy. Screwed onto the side was a “golden record” with a pulsar star map showing the solar system’s location in the galaxy. Within the record were greetings in fifty languages, samples of music, pictures of Earthlings, and two letters inviting any aliens to visit our humble planet: one from President Jimmy Carter and one from U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim. Of course, the golden record was, in many people’s minds, just a publicity grab by NASA to help ensure a steady stream of funding. Few of the people there actually thought that aliens would ever discover it (with Carl Sagan being the notable exception).

  On August 25th, 2012, Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space. After that time, Voyager was merely sending measurements from the sensors that had not been switched off to conserve power: a low energy charged particle instrument, a cosmic ray system, a plasma wave system, a triaxial fluxgate magnetometer, and so forth. (I still don’t know what any of those are).

  Hogarth leaned over one of the workstations and told the person sitting there, “Charlie, can you please bring up the readout from March 2013?”

  Charlie, a guy with a mustache and glasses, said, “Sure, Mr. Hogarth.” After a couple clicks, white text on a black screen appears:

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 072101108108111046 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  The text changes:

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 087101 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  And changes repeatedly:

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 114101099101105118101100 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 121111117114 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 114101099111114100046 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 076101116039115 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  Finally, it stays static:

  MTIS VGR-I R/T FLT 077101101116046 34907.16

  #RBG-FLI KL FL344 BLMS 22.0

  WOZ 49 0 9 30 4 4 19 128

  CMR WA FLTR GR FMA= 34/75

  GACK# LQ>EXP 480 FMA=50/72

  MDE ZM-7 352 FMA=17/42

  Administrator Hogarth says, “This is Voyager 1’s information readout. We receive this data directly from the spacecraft. What you are seeing is exactly what we saw in a repeating series starting on March 15th, 2013. It was sending us numbers which, according to what we expected, were meaningless. But we detected a pattern. And those numbers, it turned out, were ASCII decimal codes.” Administrator Hogarth leaned forward, “When we deciphered it, we realized that we were receiving a message.” He said, “Charley, can you show him the translation, please.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  A single line of white numbers that changed to white words on a black background were displayed:

  072101108108111046 087101 114101099101105118101100 121111117114 114101099111114100046 076101116039115 077101101116046

  Hello. We received your record. Let’s meet.

  Five

  Having learned some lessons about what not to do while taking care of the necessities in space, I open the accordion scree
n and exit the bathroom. I try to orient myself. I see the treadmill belt on the wall to the left and I hear voices coming from that direction, so I know which way to go. Before I leave the module, though, I notice a lot of bright light coming from a big entranceway in the floor. I dive down and find myself in a kind of a hexagon bubble with seven windows. The view to of the Earth is breathtaking.

  Commander Tomlinson startles me from above. “Jim, what are you doing?”

  The question irks me. Can’t he see what I’m doing? I sarcastically reply, “I’m trying to phone home.”

  “We have work to do. Come up out of there.”

  I push myself up and out of the “cupola,” as I know it is called. Commander Tomlinson directs my attention to the outhouse, “You know what your job will be in this station, right?”

  I don’t know why he’s asking this. He knows that I know what I will be doing. I suspect he’s just trying to rub it in. “Yeah, I think so.” Although I joined the team at the last minute, they had at least enough time to tell me what I would be doing, though not to explain much of how it was to be done.

  “You’ll be our housekeeper. I’ll need you to keep all the bathrooms clean and stocked. You need to check these cans to see if they’re full. Every six to eight weeks, they will be, and you’ll need to seal them and take them to the Horticulture Modules.”

  “Ten-four, boss.”

  “I prefer ‘yes, sir.’ Come with me.”

  Commander Tomlinson leads me out of Node 3 to Node 1 where a food prep table, a food warmer, and food packets are stored. He says, “You’ll need to keep this and all the other galleys clean. Every time somebody opens something in here, a little bit of it is probably going to splatter on the walls. If you see it, clean it.”