Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  On the other screen, I see a promising bright spot. Using the controller, I steer the telescopes towards it.

  “It looks like we’ve got a subflare in active region 37.” We’re hoping to photograph a solar flare in multiple wavelengths throughout its lifecycle, from the early stages of eruption, through its full ascent and then its fall back to normalcy. We don’t know when the opportunity will present itself, but this could be our chance. “I’ll start the JOP.”

  “Explorer, Houston, we copy. We’ll keep our fingers crossed.”

  Nobody on the training mission was able to capture one; I’m hoping to be the first. I work through the checklist: point H-alpha telescope at bright point, roll slit for uniform emission, maximize detector 1, repeat the process for a second bright spot. I use the console to take hopeful pictures through the H-alpha telescope, then turn the dial so I can take still more with the X-ray one, and then the extreme ultraviolet device.

  “Keep an eye on the frame count, Buzz,” Shepard says, as the digital counter ticks down.

  “Flare’s still rising.”

  But the spot peters out.

  “Waste of film,” I mutter.

  “And now back to our regularly scheduled programming,” Kerwin adds.

  We return to the routines. For a while, I’m kicking myself about the flare failure, but I work a little harder and those thoughts fade away. The scheduled tasks are still simple ones today, meant to get us used to working on the telescope and coordinating with the observation teams back on Earth. So we’re mostly verifying the work of past astrophysicists: tracking supergranules as they appear and disappear, writing down numbers in observation logbooks, estimating rotation times for the chromosphere at various solar latitudes.

  The next thing I know, we’re floating around the dinner table. (We have no need for chairs, and no desire; our bodies tend to float in a default space posture, arms a little forward, hips and knees slightly bent, so forcing yourself into a chair position feels completely unnecessary.)

  “Quite a day on the telescope,” Joe says.

  “It is interesting,” I admit. “You tend to take the sun for granted, but there’s a lot to it.”

  “If you say so,” Shepard says.

  “No, really,” I tell him. “It’s funny, you take a good long curious look at anything, and really pay attention, it becomes…fascinating. Like how the sun rotates. You could probably ask most people about that, and they wouldn’t have a clue.”

  “The sun rotates?” Shepard smirks. “Sonofabitch. This changes everything.”

  Now he’s got me wondering. “Weren’t you paying attention in training?”

  Shepard just grins.

  “It does change everything,” Kerwin says. “Everyone treats the sun as a constant, but when you start to see it as a dynamic, changing thing, with variable weather patterns and cycles...”

  “I’m just here for the ride,” Shepard says. “See the sights, fly to places nobody’s flown before.”

  “This is crucial to that,” Kerwin says. “Outside the magnetosphere, obviously we’re absorbing a lot more solar radiation than we’d get on Earth. We all know we’re taking some unknown risk. But if we can understand the patterns and cycles, we can start planning and forecasting, and mitigate that risk.”

  “Just like you’d forecast the weather on Earth,” I chime in.

  “Exactly! Before these things were known…” (He looks at Shepard, who’s turned himself upside-down relative to us and is eating with his feet on the ceiling, just because he can.) “…well, you’re a Navy man, you know how it is. Ships used to get…stuck in the doldrums crossing the Equator, or locked in ice trying to navigate the Northwest Passage. But now we can plan. It’s the difference between hazardous exploration and reliable travel. Tourism and commerce and what-not. We need to know this stuff if we’re ever going to make travel around the Solar System a routine, regular thing.”

  “I’ll leave all that for you guys,” Shepard says. “I plan when I have to, but I prefer to fly by the seat of my pants.”

  “Always a good way to lose your ass,” I smirk. Somehow when it comes out, it’s not as funny as I thought.

  Shepard shrugs. We eat for a minute in silence.

  “Talking to Louise tonight, huh?” Kerwin asks.

  “Yeah. Looking forward to it,” Shepard says.

  A thought pops up: Speaking of losing your ass. “How’s everything holding up with her?” (I’m half-expecting some tale of woe, a disastrous epic of imminent divorce that will at least put everything in perspective for me.)

  But he just says: “Great.”

  After everything’s stowed and put away, Kerwin and I pull ourselves down into the sleeping chamber so Shepard can have his communications window.

  “Can you believe him?” I ask Kerwin when we’re alone.

  “How do you mean?”

  “All that he-man macho superpilot thing. Fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants bullshit...”

  Kerwin shrugs.

  “None of this…” (I gesture around, meaning the ship, space travel, everything.) “…none of this will ever be reliable and routine with men like him around.”

  “It will be eventually, though.”

  “Still, it seems like it…bugs him that anyone would ever want to…plan and actually make things safer.”

  “And this bothers you?”

  “Well, yeah,” I sputter. “It’s like…there are two kinds of astronauts. The ones who want everyone else to have the experience too, someday, and the ones who are just…riding on pure ego, determined to be unique. And I think we all know where he fits.”

  “That’s a bit harsh,” Kerwin says. “I don’t think he cares who comes after him, so long as he’s first. Do you think Christopher Columbus would mind that people are crossing the Atlantic every day now?”

  “So Shepard’s Columbus?” I smirk. “I coulda been Columbus.”

  “They’re not gonna forget your name, Buzz! There’ll be room in the books for all of us!”

  This stops me short. “I’m not worked up about that…it’s just…that guy…I just…” Somehow I’m getting more irritable, just talking about it. “And now…calling home like he’s some…model husband. The way he chases tail…”

  Kerwin shrugs. “This job is tough on marriages.”

  Once more, it takes me a while to formulate a response: “Yeah. You can say that again.”

  “How are you guys holding up, by the way?”

  “Great.”

  Kerwin looks at me like: what’s your real answer?

  “I mean, I’ll admit, we have our issues.” (There is a certain…resistance in the astronaut corps to having marital problems. These things can have a detrimental impact on one’s career and flight status.) “We’re working on it, though.”

  “I’m sure they are too,” he says.

  “It does seem…easier being up here, sometimes,” I admit. “There’s…manuals and procedures for everything.” (I consider telling him about the missed communication window. “Consider” being the operative word.) “You know what buttons you’re pushing.”

  “It is nice, having some control,” Kerwin says.

  “Down there you’re just a…cog in the…family machine. Here you get to fly a machine, at least. Although that feels a little lacking up here, too,” I allow. “But I guess I’m getting used to it. Getting into the swing of things.”

  “I have to admit, I was a little worried about you the other day.”

  “How so?”

  “It just seemed like you were having second thoughts about the mission.”

  “And you were like, ‘Uh-oh, I don’t wanna hear this guy complaining for a year…’”

  He laughs. “The thought did cross my mind.”

  And somehow now a few things cross my mind. There was a strange spell after Gemini XII where I couldn’t seem to get myself out of bed. And then after coming back from the moon, I felt…slack. Of course, I told Deke and everyone else how much
I hated the publicity tour, the grind, the constant strain of overscheduled appearances, the need to always be “on.” But once we were “off,” I felt slow again, lethargic and heavy. “Sometimes I…” I stop.

  “Sometimes you…what?” he asks.

  “Do you still consider yourself a doctor?”

  He laughs. “You have some medical issues you want to talk about, Buzz?”

  “Well, I…” Something in me says it’s OK, I can talk, Kerwin isn’t the type of guy to repeat something he heard in confidence. And he’s one of us, anyway, as good of a pilot as anyone in the astronaut corps. But again I stop.

  He continues: “I know everyone’s reluctant to talk to doctors. You know. That whole macho he-man pilot thing…”

  “Well, you know how it is. There’s only two ways a pilot can come out of the doctor’s office. ‘Fine’ and ‘Grounded.’”

  “I’ve got news for you, Buzz,” he says with a grin. “Even if this were a doctor’s office, it’s not in anyone’s power to ground you right now. I don’t think the laws of physics will allow it. At least not for the next year.”

  But I think of the rest of the mission. I think of the EVA. I know they could, even now, change their minds, give it to Shepard. “It’s all right. I’m fine.”

  Shepard pulls back the curtain. “All done,” he says brightly.

  “Finally,” I say, as I float back up to the main deck. “Man’s gotta take a leak. Everything OK?”

  He grins: “Yeah, fine!”

  I have the sense that the sonafabitch actually means it; still, I give him a skeptical look.

  “Louise’s really glad I’m up here,” Shepard adds.

  “Really?”

  He cracks a smile: “I think this is my first trip in a long time where she doesn’t have to worry that I’m up to no good.”

  Against my better judgment, I laugh.

  Joe asks: “What about Apollo 13?”

  Shepard’s grin gets wider and more toothy. “Well, there is something you don’t know about Ed Mitchell and I…”

  Again, I laugh. He can, after all, be a charming sonofabitch when he wants to.

  •••

  6 APR 1972

  Plenty of discoveries today on the telescope. The sun is even more complicated than I realized. I’m learning I’ve been taking many things for granted.

  •••

  “…we have a new active region 39 at 260 degrees, 0.3 solar radii. It’s showing some signs of activity, and we would like you to keep an eye on it.”

  “Will do, Houston.” Kerwin’s back on the telescope today. It wasn’t my decision.

  There is still a lot to do backing him up, so I do my best to keep on top of that. We’re starting to understand more about the magnetic activity on the sun, how the active regions interact with each other. We learned a lot in training about flares and prominences and magnetic field lines, but now that we’re doing it here, it’s all starting to make sense on a fundamental level. These magnetic field lines sometimes cross and throw material off the sun, giant looping prominences of charged particles; we’re tracking these so we can correlate them with auroras back on Earth, and see how fast it takes material from the sun to get to Earth.

  “All right, we’re getting a high PMEC count,” Kerwin says in the middle of it all. “I’m going to start the JOP.”

  He turns the dial and presses the button; the frame counter counts down.

  “Wow. This one’s about a factor of 10 brighter than what we saw yesterday.”

  For the next 18 minutes or so, he works the console like a maestro.

  “Houston, Explorer,” he says at last. “I’m very pleased to inform you that we are the proud parents of our very first full flare. Pictures to come.”

  Everyone congratulates him. My mind keeps wandering elsewhere.

  •••

  At the end of it all, Joan is on the line, right on time this time.

  “What happened the other night?” I ask, and anxiously await her response.

  And after the five-plus seconds of round-trip light-speed communications time, plus the pause in the middle for her to choose her words, at last I hear: “So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh? No ‘Hello, how are you?’ Can’t you just say you’re glad to talk to me?”

  “I am glad to talk to you,” I say. “I wanted to talk to you the other night. What the hell happened?”

  I hold my breath waiting for the answer, which takes even longer than physics makes necessary.

  “We had to take Andy to the hospital.”

  In a flash, my blood’s boiling, and the lid’s about to come off the pot. “Jesus Christ, you said everything was fine at home!”

  The long pause.

  “Would you rather it was because we just ignored you?”

  I say nothing.

  “It is fine, Buzz. It’s being taken care of. It’s not like you could have done anything about it, there was no point telling you.”

  “Put him on, would you?”

  I await the end of the delay.

  “He’s not here.”

  Again, I’m angry. I wish I could stop this. “What do you mean he’s not there?”

  Five seconds, plus a few more.

  “Mike had a play at school. They wanted to show up for him. It’s not like you talk to them when you are home…”

  I don’t even wait for her to finish; her words of course have already been spoken; there’s no way for me to stop or interrupt them, but I don’t want to hear any more. “Jesus Christ, is this necessary? Right now, is this necessary?”

  Silence. It occurs to me that we’ll have to go to normal radio communications protocol soon, even with our wives, saying “Over” after every transmission, and so forth. So much distance…

  “I’m sorry. It’s been a stressful week.”

  “Still, I’m…I’m up here. I can’t fix what’s down there.”

  Pause.

  “I’m sorry. I know. I should be used to all of this by now.”

  I take a deep breath. “All right. What happened?”

  I have time for another long breath before the answer.

  Then: “He fell off his bike, heading home before we went to go talk to you. There was a gash on his hand. We had to take him to the emergency room to get stitched up.”

  “You couldn’t let the control room know what was going on?” As usual, I have a few brief moments to wonder whether this was the best thing to say, but only after I’ve said it.

  Then: “Buzz, I was rounding the kids up and going to the hospital! By the time things settled down, we’d missed your window! And I didn’t have the number to call and tell them anyway because I was at the hospital! You have a room full of people watching you all the time, taking care of you. I’m on my own down here!”

  Again, I take a breath. I look around at the empty main deck of the spacecraft, silent and sterile and forbidding. “Well I guess it figures. If somebody’s gonna have an accident, it’s gonna be him.”

  There’s the long pause, then a chuckle. “God, Buzz, I knew you’d say that. You are so predictable sometimes. I love it and I hate it, but you are so predictable.”

  “It’s true though!”

  I wait to see how she’ll take this. Then: “It is true.”

  “Broken bone, Andy. Eye surgery, Andy. Everything, Andy.”

  Again, I wait. “It’s true,” she says. “You’re right.”

  “Yep. Keep that in mind. I’m right.”

  I wait to see how she’ll take that one.

  Then: “You’re pushing my buttons.”

  “That’s what I do. That’s why I’m up here. It’s what I’m good at.”

  I take a breath.

  Finally: “Don’t I know it. My predictable, reliable button-pusher.” At last there is something like love in her tone, at least.

  “That’s how it has to be. There’s no point spending billions of dollars on spacecraft and making all the parts work perfectly if you’re not gonna hire
reliable people to push the buttons.”

  There’s a pause. Then: a sigh, perhaps? “I know, Buzz.”

  •••

  7 APR 1972

  It sometimes seems like all I do is try to avoid catastrophes.

  I wake in the middle of the night. The others slumber in the dimmed light. I float upstairs and relieve myself, but when I return, I find I’m feeling more awake than I should be. Restless.

  I try to make out the dim corners of the little chamber. I listen to the whir of pumps, water and air and coolant cycling through the system.

  I see them again, like light that registers deep in your brain, deeper than your eyes somehow: flicker flashes. I still haven’t heard the others mention them, so I, too, have kept quiet.

  I am wondering if there’s something wrong with the machinery.

  •••

  Besides the telescope work, we’re keeping eyes on ourselves; there’s a full program of medical experimentation and observation. The main goal’s to see how well we’re surviving up here, if we’re staying strong or slowly wasting away.

  Rather than weighing ourselves, we have to calculate our mass. (It’s a distinction most people don’t get. On Earth, when I was suited up in the moon suit, I weighed 360 pounds; on the moon, it would have been about 60. Here, suited or not, I’m weightless. But we still have the same amount of matter in us, the same mass.) But how to measure it here, floating free in space? You can’t simply step on a bathroom scale.

  One of the many clever people at NASA, a former doctor named Bill Thornton, came up with the answer. It required a piece of spring steel with a known spring constant and damping ratio. He designed a weight measurement device around it, with the spring attached to a fixed point at one end, and the other end floating free, like a platform on top of a pogo stick. We tuck ourselves in on the platform, set ourselves in motion (what would be up and down on Earth), and measure the period of the oscillations. Given this information and some calculus skills, it’s a simple matter to run some differential equations and calculate mass. And by measuring it on successive days, we can track how the body adapts to extended periods in space.

  The device is stowed away under the floor when not in use. While the other two are unfolding it, I have to break away so I can add water to the meals and get them in the heating compartment so they’ll have time to warm up before we eat. The trays are stored in the lockers in spring-loaded stacks, like bullets in a magazine; we pull out one and the next one pops up. By virtue of our cramped confines, the lockers are pretty close to the latrine. I’m over there, caught up in my routine, when I notice something new: a taped card in Shepard’s handwriting that says HEAD. I float back to the mess area, add the water and load up the heater, and I see another one that says WARDROOM.