“Why would it be my fault?” I asked. I was thinking of the disaster. But then I thought of my mother, that maybe he meant her leaving, that I might blame myself for that. And, of course, I could.
Delia popped her door open, and in the sudden light of the car, my father patted my knee and gave me an uncomfortable smile.
“Goodnight,” he said, and kissed us both. We got out of the car and watched him drive away.
“You shouldn’t have said that,” Delia told me once we were alone.
“Shouldn’t have said what?” I asked.
“About Mom,” Delia said. “That just makes him feel bad.”
“I think he could do more than he does,” I said. “That’s all.”
“He does everything he can,” Delia said. She spoke in a fake grown-up tone, like something she had heard on TV.
I read all the articles about the disaster from the newspaper. One long piece was about the possibility of terrorism: each shuttle was equipped with explosives that could be activated from the ground; this signal was protected by a restricted frequency, but the code could have been stolen by the Iranians, the Libyans, the Soviets.
Another article wondered whether unseasonable cold could affect the performance of the External Tank; it also raised the possibility that the failure of a Solid Rocket Booster might have pierced the tank, causing it to explode.
Another article described my father’s favorite theory, the problems with the Main Engines that had persisted since the development of the shuttle. The engineers and technicians quoted were convinced that one of the Main Engine’s turbine blades had cracked, starting an explosion from within. Another detailed the possibility of pilot error—it was conceivable, an engineer said, that the pilot or commander could have pressed the button to detach the External Tank a full minute too early. If he had, the fuel still in the severed lines would have ignited, causing an explosion like the one we saw.
It seemed there was no end to the things that could have gone wrong. Already, I looked back with contempt at my younger self, when I had believed the space shuttle to be indestructible, when I had dreamt of flying on it and assumed that everything would work when I flipped the switch. Now it seemed like one big mechanical flaw, barely held together by explosive bolts. Now I knew they’d just gotten lucky all along.
20.
EVERY DAY THAT WEEK, NEW PICTURES OF THE SMOKE TRAILS appeared, new angles of that Y in the sky. I cut them out, though by that time I already had dozens. Each one was slightly different—a different angle, different lengths of time elapsed from the explosion, and I rearranged them over and over. I developed a ritualistic way of examining each new photo, starting from the top, the branches of the Y, each tip capped with a puff of smoke showing where the Solid Rocket Boosters had detonated. Follow the branches down, to the point where they meet the thicker root, the point where all the pieces had diverged. A larger ball of smoke there, marking where the External Tank exploded and took the Orbiter with it. And below that, most fascinating of all, the seam between disaster and the time when things were normal, nominal, operational, the column of smoke that marked where all had been one, all had been on course, the astronauts living, and Challenger had been on a perfect mathematical trajectory, unknowing of what lay just ahead.
Saturday afternoon, I was flipping between channels and saw a new image: an extreme close-up of the rising Launch Vehicle, thirteen seconds before the explosion, showing a plume of fire emerging from the right Solid Rocket Booster. “A plume of fire” was how the newscaster described it, but to me, squinting at the screen, it wasn’t exactly a plume, just a finger of brighter pixels emerging from the side of the rocket, getting bigger and bigger frame by frame until the whole thing was engulfed in flame. I called my father over to see it. He looked gravely at the TV, and I studied his face for any change. There was none.
“Why did it take so long for this to come out?” I wondered aloud.
“It’s only been four days,” my father said.
“That’s the right SRB,” I said. “At about the level of the aft field joint.”
“It is,” my father agreed evenly. “But if the joint failed, we wouldn’t see the problem for the first time a minute into the flight.”
“It would have blown up on the launchpad, right?”
My father winced and nodded.
“At any rate,” he said a few minutes later, “that picture doesn’t prove anything.”
After only four days, I had so many articles and notes in my notebook that I had to divide it into sections. My dividers were labeled: COLD/ICE, MAIN ENGINES, EXTERNAL TANK, SOLID ROCKET BOOSTERS, REAGAN/STATE OF THE UNION, TERRORISM, ASTRONAUT ERROR, and MISCELLANEOUS. The thicker my notebook grew, the more carefully I hid it. I didn’t want my father to find it and ask questions. What’s this you’ve got here? I could imagine him asking as he paged through it.
I cut out all of the articles I could find. I knew the theories already, but it was the details I wanted to save, the exact language, for future reference. Exact times and exact temperatures. Names and quotes. I read these articles obsessively, hoping to find a definite answer about what had happened, while at the same time mentally correcting everything I read. Most of the so-called experts on the space shuttle knew less than I did. This was even more true on the TV news: somehow, the networks continued to scrape up new speculations, side notes, irrelevancies. They hyped each piece of trivia to sound like breaking news, like a revelation. I was drawn in every time, shushing Delia and turning up the volume to hear whatever it was they had dragged out. Every time, they told me only things I already knew.
A few times we saw Mr. Biersdorfer squinting into a camera. He always spoke vaguely. “We will get to the bottom of this accident,” he said. “A full investigation is being conducted.” I searched Mr. Biersdorfer’s face for some resemblance to Eric, some echo of him, but there was nothing.
On Monday, six days after the disaster, Chiarra and I skipped class together. She was skipping math; I was supposed to be in English. After a quick head check for teachers, we slipped into an unused classroom full of broken furniture and scrambled under a desk. A few older girls were already crouched in a corner, chatting and doing their nails. They looked up briefly and said, “Hey,” as we found our own corner.
We still talked about Challenger in the hallways between classes, but most of our teachers were trying to return us to a normal schedule. I’d thought by now I would be ready to go back to afternoon classes, but the chapters we’d been studying last Monday, before any of this had happened, seemed so far away as to be theoretical, no more familiar or urgent than the things I had studied in sixth grade. When the bell rang again, I told Chiarra I planned to skip French as well.
“Dolores, I’m already on the verge of failing half these classes, but you’re a really good student. You should go.”
“I’m not a really good student,” I sneered, looking at the girls in the corner to see whether they had heard. “No one will miss me. I’ll go to everything Tuesday or Wednesday.”
It seemed like a logical enough plan—the week of the disaster, I figured, none of us was really expected to concentrate on our schoolwork. I would make a fresh start once a full week had gone by.
Soon after the next bell rang, a new batch of upperclassmen snuck into the skipping room, which was now full to capacity; nearly every desk had a kid or two under it. There were so many of us I didn’t notice right away that Josh had come in with Doug from my physics class; the two of them hunkered under a desk a few feet away from me. Josh wore a bright green polo shirt with the collar up—a style that Tina and Chiarra and I generally mocked—but it seemed to me that Josh wore his collar this way ironically, that he meant it as a joke. He had let his hair grow since the summer, and now it was a shaggy surfer mop that I found appealing. Though he wasn’t as tan as he had been during the summer, I thought he still looked heart-stoppingly cute in that nonchalant way he had, as if he were assuming both that everyone was wat
ching him and that no one paid him any attention, that it didn’t matter what he did.
“Hey,” Chiarra hissed at Doug. “What are you losers doing?”
Doug introduced us casually (“Chiarra, Dolores, you know Josh?”), then asked Chiarra something about the class the two of them were skipping that hour. I felt Josh looking at me.
“Dolores, right?” he said. I nodded, trying not to blush.
“What class are you skipping now?”
“French.”
“With Madame Davis? Ugh. You made the right choice.”
I had claimed to Elizabeth Talbot that Josh was my boyfriend, and I feared that now he would somehow sense this lie, smell it on me. I couldn’t tell whether he remembered me from the pool the previous summer, and I wasn’t sure I wanted him to. It seemed I had been a kid then, and he had seen me as a kid. But he seemed to take me seriously enough now.
Soon Josh and I were crouched under the same desk whispering to each other—Josh, the boy I had been admiring since I first laid eyes on him at the pool, alone with me, talking to me. At first I had trouble focusing on what he was saying; he was talking about the disaster, but in the closeness of his face, even the smell of his shampoo, my own crippling self-consciousness about how I must look and smell, I could barely follow what he said.
“Did you hear that the President appointed a commission to report on the accident?” Doug asked from under an adjacent table.
“When did that happen?” I asked, annoyed that he knew this before I did.
“It was just announced. I heard it in Spanish.”
“What do you mean, a commission?” Chiarra asked. “What does that mean exactly?”
“To figure out what went wrong, I guess,” Doug said.
“NASA already has an investigation board working on the accident,” I pointed out. “Why do they need a commission too?”
Doug shrugged slowly, clearly enjoying the attention. I wanted to be hearing this from some official source, someone who would use the right terminology and adequately reflect the import of this event. I thought of my notebook at home and longed to be alone with it, flipping between the channels for news coverage and taking notes on what I learned.
“My dad might have to testify for the investigation,” Josh added.
“Really?” I asked, impressed. “Was he involved somehow?”
“I guess,” he said.
“What exactly does he do for NASA?”
“I have absolutely no idea. Every time he tries to tell me I, like, fall asleep. It has to do with getting money from the government or something like that. Why, like, what does your dad do?”
“He’s a physicist,” I said. I’d gotten so used to this lie that I no longer felt I was lying at all. “He works on the Solid Rocket Boosters. He had nothing to do with Challenger.”
“Well, he’s safe, then, right? Besides, they’d never fire my dad, anyway,” Josh said with a note of false modesty. “He’s, like, too high up.”
I didn’t say anything, but even then I knew that his logic was wrong. Being high up was no protection; in fact, quite the opposite. When a disaster happened, everyone wanted to see the leaders fall, top men, the higher the better. I thought again of Mr. Biersdorfer. If he were fired, what would happen to Eric? And would that mean my mother would come home?
“My dad says ice,” Josh said. “There was ice all over the Mobile Launch Platform. That’s what did it for sure.”
“It wasn’t the ice,” I said. I hadn’t expected to hear my own voice sounding so confident, and I immediately felt conscious of having contradicted Josh.
“Why couldn’t it have been the ice?” he asked after a minute.
“Well, with ice,” I said, “the danger isn’t during the launch. If ice had damaged the tiles, the shuttle would have launched fine, but then it would have burnt up coming back into the atmosphere.”
“Why, what do you think caused the accident?” Josh asked.
“It could have been a lot of things,” I answered. “The ice just doesn’t make any sense.”
“Right, but what do you think it was?” There was a new note of deference in his voice. I paused for a moment before speaking, but I already knew what I was going to say. I was so glad to have Josh’s attention, I would have said anything to keep it.
“It could have been the Solid Rocket Boosters,” I said. “There’s been a problem with them for a long time.”
Doug hunched in closer. “What kind of problem?”
“The joints between the pieces,” I said. “They don’t seal right. Sometimes hot gas gets through.” I wished that I could be smoking during this conversation, that I could blow a plume of smoke for punctuation the way my mother did. If Josh could see me smoking, I felt sure, he would know that I wasn’t a child.
“Wouldn’t that have meant it would blow up on the launchpad?” Doug pointed out. He was clearly well versed in the leading theories.
“Well, yeah,” I admitted. “That would have been more likely.”
“How do you know all this?” Josh asked me. He was looking at me with something like awe.
“My father,” I said. “My father works on the Solid Rocket Boosters.”
The article appeared on Tuesday, exactly one week after the disaster. Reagan had appointed an independent commission to investigate the causes of the accident. The chairman would be William P. Rogers, former Secretary of State. The commission would be made up of scientists, engineers, generals, and two astronauts: Neil Armstrong and Sally Ride. I was glad to see the astronauts’ names on the list; they would get to the bottom of this, and if in the end they felt it was safe to fly, I would trust them. I clipped the article carefully.
“Not a good sign,” my father said.
I knew what he meant: the message was that NASA couldn’t be trusted to investigate itself.
“What does this mean about the SRBs?” I asked.
He looked at me quizzically. “What do you mean?” he asked.
“What does this mean for you?”
“Nothing,” he answered. “It doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”
My notebook grew so fat with articles about the disaster it wouldn’t close properly. I set it under weights overnight—a heavy dictionary, the leg of my bed. In the morning, the binding sprang open again, the edges of its ugly facts peeking out. I knew every technical detail of the explosion, every call and response from ship to ground, how many nautical miles downrange, wind at how many knots, from moment to moment. I still clipped stories about cracked turbine blades, about remote destruct malfunction, about astronaut error, but more and more the articles were focusing on the Solid Rocket Boosters. There were many possible problems with them: flawed casings, badly fitted seams, improperly packed fuel.
“Is that for school?” Delia asked one afternoon as I took notes from a newspaper article.
“Not exactly,” I said. Delia had asked about my space notebook a few times, both before and after the disaster, but she had always accepted the vague explanations I gave her.
“Well, what is it, then? You’re always writing in it.”
“It’s an investigation notebook,” I said.
“And you’re investigating the Challenger?”
“That’s right.”
Delia thought about that for a minute. “Why are you writing everything down?”
“It’s the only way to understand what happened.”
“So now you understand what happened?” she asked.
“Well…no. But before you can understand you have to have all the information.” Delia nodded, and I thought she might be satisfied, but then she spoke again.
“Mom said we can never understand.”
I felt a flash of anger at my mother again for the way she’d spoken to Delia that night, for the clichés of hope she had given her. She couldn’t know how Delia carried them around, how they confused her.
“Delia, she meant we can never understand why people die. We can never understand that
. But we can understand what went wrong with the space shuttle. We can figure that out.”
“Oh,” Delia said, nodding. She went back to her snack. I knew she didn’t understand why anyone would want to know what went wrong just for the sake of knowing. If it wouldn’t bring back the people, then what was the point?
Late at night, after my father put us to bed, I slipped out to the darkened living room and picked up the phone as quietly as I could. I heard my mother’s voice.
“I’ve been following things on the news,” she said in a low voice.
“Oh yeah?” My father spoke enthusiastically, as though she had paid him a compliment. “Well, this commission is just getting started, but I can tell you that they’re going to be very thorough.”
I couldn’t imagine how he would know such a thing, but my mother murmured, “Oh, I see.”
“They’ve been all over the country,” he said. “Houston, Marshall, Utah—they’re going around getting a solid foundation on how the whole system works before they start to make any judgments. Of course, they’ve spent a fair amount of time in my department,” he added modestly.
“So they’re checking out the whole thing? Do they have any idea yet what it might have been?”
“Well, there have been plenty of issues with those SRB joints,” he said. “I mean, among other possibilities. They seem to be most interested in that segment we used on 51-L that was out of round,” he told her. “They’re interested in the way we fixed it. I’ve had quite a few interviews on that topic.”
“You did that booster,” she pointed out, her voice tensing. “Your thing? Do they think that’s what it was?”
“Oh, we didn’t do anything wrong in assembling it,” my father tried to assure her. “We followed specifications down to the letter. We didn’t do anything wrong at all.”
“But the rockets, those segments, are your thing,” she insisted. I could hear the way her throat was tightening, the growing worry that could lead to anger.
The Time It Takes to Fall Page 24
