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

by Gerald Brennan

  Shepard floats back up from the bathroom.

  “You all right, Al?” Kerwin asks.

  Our commander’s looking a little downcast. Still, I’m expecting something incorrect and innocuous, like: fine, never better.

  “I think I am…uh…having some symptoms,” he says at last. “Definitely some nausea.”

  He doubles over, but before we can rush to his aid, the radio comes back on.

  “Explorer, Houston…” (Static.) “…got a PAD for you for an SPS burn. Based on…” (More static.) “…pler shift, some discrepancy in your delta-v. We’ll give you a minute to get yourselves collected, and we’ll read you the numbers.”

  We still haven’t figured out why their signal is cutting out every few seconds. I scan the instruments and see the strength dipping, and the pitch and yaw needles moving. We’ll have to figure it out. “Make sure the DSE is recording,” I tell Kerwin. Then to Earth: “Houston, Explorer, we copy PAD on the way. Standing by to receive. Mission commander experiencing some nausea, but we’ll do what we have to. Over.” Although of course it doesn’t matter what we transmit right now; their next words are already on their way, and ours will cross paths with them somewhere in the void.

  “DSE is recording,” Kerwin says.

  I need to get ready: I pat myself down for paper and pencil, but no luck. My stomach twists, with worry and more. Where is the pencil?

  “Explorer, Houston. Here we go…”

  Kerwin taps me on the shoulder and hands me what I need, not a second too soon.

  “…orrection. SPS/G&N 87202 plus 0.72, minus 0.13.” (Despite the distance I can recognize Paul Weitz’s voice. He’s reading very slowly and deliberately. I’m praying for a smooth transmission.) “HDT ignition 20:03:01.92, plus 0011.8, minus 0000.4, plus 0023.7.” (I copy the numbers in the blanks on the PAD worksheet; Kerwin watches as I write.) “Roll 283…” (A splotch of static renders the next words unintelligible.) “…44 Block is N/A; Delta-v T 0022.2, 00:2, 0017.2; Sextant star 30…” (More static.) “…rest of the PAD is N/A. GDC align, Vega and Deneb. Roll align 003, 143, 373. No ullage.”

  I stare down at the missing number blanks, anxious: we can’t fire the engine if the worksheet’s incomplete. And I’m sure the recorder didn’t pick up everything we missed.

  Then the radio comes on again: “We will read through a second time in case you missed anything. SPS/G&N 87202…”

  I’m relieved; I copy fervently and intently. But when they get to the middle of the PAD, again there is static. We’re still missing numbers.

  Weitz continues, oblivious: “…Roll align 003, 143, 373. No ullage. We’ve built in time for a readback. Over.”

  They have given us time to confirm the parameters of the burn. But if there’s nothing on the tape, it will take us 12 minutes to fill in the missing blanks. And there’s always a chance that transmission will be garbled. And Shepard’s sick, and I don’t know how much time we have. My stomach feels like it’s about to let go.

  “You get any of those numbers?” I point to the empty spots. Kerwin shakes his head no. I key the mic: “Houston, Explorer. We did not copy the numbers for roll and sextant star. The rest of the PAD is as follows…” I regurgitate the columns of numbers. “We will play back the DSE and see if we got anything. Over.” At the end of the transmission, I check my watch: 19:40, Houston time. I force myself to breathe. Even if there’s nothing on the DSE, we should still have time for them to retransmit the missing numbers.

  “Reception’s getting worse,” Kerwin says.

  “Yeah. Take a look at the S-Band, will you? We need to see why we’re getting those gaps.”

  He studies the indicators for the radio and the high-gain antenna. I float down to the Digital Storage Equipment and play back the last transmission from Earth, staring back at my worksheet. Sure enough, the recording’s garbled in the same place the transmission was. We need the next one to come through clearly.

  “The needles are moving,” he says. “It’s like it’s not tracking properly. I’m going to cycle the breakers and see if that does anything.” The old standby: turn it off, and turn it back on.

  In the meantime, it’s time to take stock. Shepard is doubled over. Beads of sweat are clinging to his forehead. Our uneaten food packets are floating about the cabin.

  “You all right, Al?”

  He grumbles something like: Not a happy camper right now.

  “We got this.” I hope it’s true.

  Again I look at the time: 19:49.

  I pluck the food packets out of the air. There are a few stray bits drifting towards the air vents, so I grab those as well and then gather everything up so we can put it in the airlock whenever we’re allowed back downstairs. The smell of the uneaten food offends my nose and that, in turn, turns my stomach. I swallow hard.

  19:51.

  Do I have time to go to the bathroom? No, best not to risk it. I police up my workbook and pencil and float back to the console and wait. My insides are rumbling now, a volcano ready to blow. I imagine the citizens of Pompeii gazing up at the smoking mountain; 11-year-old me chuckles a little at the absurd analogy, and 42-year-old me shakes his head in judgment.

  At last, the radio crackles on in our headsets: “Explorer, Houston, understand you did not copy part of the PAD. Your transmission was garbled…” (Static.) “…know what you missed. We are going to read through twice more so we can make the burn time we…” (Garbled.) “…ll give you a minute to prepare. Over.”

  “Jesus, we don’t need all the numbers.” My blood’s now rising along with the bile. “It’s ten minutes to the burn. We just need roll and sextant star.”

  And Kerwin says: “I think we’re coming through garbled to them, too.”

  It chills me to realize he’s right. Nausea grabs at me again; bile rises and I choke it down. “All right. Get the DSE back recording.”

  “I think we need to switch the tracking to…”

  He pushes his headset aside and vomits: ugly brownish acid-smelling globules that reverberate as they float towards the side of the command module.

  I drop pencil and workbook and try to head off the mess before it hits the console.

  “No…the PAD,” Kerwin sputters. “I’ll get it.” He feebly moves his hands up to capture the foulness, and I retrieve my airborne writing implements, and he heaves and shakes again.

  And the radio revives, and I place pencil to paper because Kerwin didn’t get the recorder reset and I need to get it right this time, and all the numbers are coming, unstoppable: “Explorer, Houston. SPS/G&N 87202…”

  I vomit, a long convulsion.

  It happens fast, and I try to move my arms and my headset so most of it misses, and I try to pay attention to the radio, but what’s happening is all-consuming. I do it again and again and again and again, my insides feeling like they want to come out, bitter acid mouth taste everywhere, harsh against my teeth, and I’ve never been so disgusted and frustrated with my own body.

  By the time it’s over, I’ve missed the rest of the numbers.

  •••

  For the next few hours, we take turns getting sick in the tunnel and getting sick in the manned module hallway and getting sick in the bathroom. No one wants the extra radiation dose from being down there, but we also don’t want to foul up the command module any more than it already is. In short order, the tunnel and the hallway are disgusting. And we’re having other symptoms, too.

  “Goddamn,” I moan from the tunnel. “I wish we had a regular bathroom.”

  “Or even two of these bathrooms,” Kerwin adds weakly as he pulls down the curtain.

  “A bathtub,” Shepard says from the hallway, where he’s waiting his turn. “That was the…” He pauses and convulses: dry heaves now. “…oh, God. Sorry. I didn’t think there was anything left.”

  “Me neither. My stomach just hasn’t gotten the memo yet.”

  “The first thing I learned,” Shepard continues wearily. “Back in my rookie drinking
days. If you’ve…if you’ve got it coming out both ends, shit in the toilet, puke in the tub.”

  “Even a sink,” Kerwin says. “Man, the things you take for granted.” He looks down at the dosimeter. “We really should get back upstairs.”

  I frown. “You want to leave this kind of mess up there?”

  “We don’t have a choice. And we can put on the fecal containment garments, at least.”

  I make another face: astronaut diapers.

  “That’s not a terrible idea,” Shepard admits.

  I try to allow my mind to float back and analyze this objectively, as an engineering problem of sorts. With one end of the digestive tract covered, and the other running out of material to expel, things should be more manageable. I float back upstairs and retrieve the garments from the equipment bin.

  “Didn’t think I’d need these for another few years,” Shepard says.

  “Yeah. Shoulda been at least another…four or five, right, old man?”

  He gives me a dirty look, but then he smiles, just a little.

  We settle back in to the command module, our shelter from the radiation storm. We still feel awful, and there are periods of incapacitation, but during the interludes we can do a little work. So we clean as best we can, wearily and reluctantly, finding patches of foulness floating in air and clinging to the bare metal surfaces of the tunnel and seeping into junctions behind panels. We wipe it all down in slow and miserable fashion and throw the cloths and tissues into a jettison bag. But even then, the smell is abhorrent. We know we haven’t found all the filth.

  “What else, doc?” Shepard asks.

  “Well, we need to stay hydrated,” Kerwin says.

  “I don’t know if that’s an option right now,” I point out.

  “Let’s see what we can do.”

  I choke down a little water. It comes right back up. I’m somewhat concerned. I did not need another mess to clean. I almost want to cry from frustration. Instead I unscrew the top of the water bottle and corral it all back inside. I will sort it out later.

  “I’ll tell you,” Shepard says, bone-tired. “I’ve been wiped out by a sunburn before, but this is ridiculous.”

  “It’s not exactly a sunburn,” Kerwin says, and Shepard gives him a look like: I know.

  “Explorer, Houston. Copy your comms and health issues. Please stay in the command module tonight. We’re going to…” (Crackle.) “…the course correction for at least another day…” (More crackle.) “…should be time to get it done once this round of symptoms passes. Over.”

  “And before the next round hits,” Kerwin mutters.

  Houston and the PRDs are both saying the same thing: the storm of charged particles hasn’t abated, and we’re best off staying in the command module indefinitely, taking advantage of its greater mass shielding to avoid the worst of the radiation. I eye the indicators for the hydrogen and oxygen tanks. These power the fuel cells, and so determine how long we can stay up here. “Houston, Explorer. Give us a reading on the tanks when you can, over.”

  “We’re going to be tight?” Shepard asks.

  It is iffy, so I say what we all already know. “We can’t stay up here forever.”

  •••

  We settle in for the night, Kerwin and I on the side couches, Shepard curled up in the lower equipment bay.

  Once all else is done, I write:

  6 SEP 1972

  CME today. Dosimeters now a little over 200 rads. No way to calc absorbed dose. Some comms difficulties. Could not perform course correction. Symptoms of ARS.

  My mind races: high-energy thoughts bouncing around all clear and crisp and sharply defined, ricocheting off one another and careening through the mind so violently that one imagines them doing damage to the soft tissue. I am eager for them to decay, to collide in new patterns that will cause them to destabilize, fragments of consciousness spinning off and disintegrating like particles in a cloud chamber.

  •••

  The radio comes on, the headset attached to the Velcro area on the side of the cabin.

  Houston’s telling us about another CME.

  For some reason we are able to get the telescope operating in time to observe it. It’s even larger than the first one.

  We pull out the PRDs and stare in horror. They read: 99999.

  •••

  In the morning we get going wearily. We don’t quite know what to do with ourselves. No one much wants to deal with the normal rigamarole of heating up food packets if we’re going to end up not eating again.

  “Explorer, Houston, we should let you know that news of your situation has broken...” (Crackle.) “…will arrange a comms window with your families as soon as…” (More crackle.) “…the meantime, just know that the whole world’s praying for your safe return. It’s not how you wanted to make the papers, I’m sure, but you’ve got a lot of…” (Static.) “…for you. Tentative plan for the day is to let you rest and recuperate, try and fix the comms, execute the course correction tomorrow, and power down the command module as soon as practical, whenever the radiation abates.” (Static again.) “…take it day by day from there. Your health is our first priority. Give us your status when you can. Over.”

  To us, Shepard speaks: “We should be good with that, right?”

  My head aches. Power down the command module as soon as practical…there is a fuzziness to the words, an imprecision at odds with the exacting specifications used to build the machinery. But we do have enough hydrogen and oxygen to power the fuel cells for a few more days. So it’s not my preference, but it is doable. “I guess we have to be.”

  “OK. Joe, you want to give ‘em a report?”

  “Houston, Explorer,” Kerwin transmits. “Appreciate your giving us a sick day. We’re still a little under the weather. I guess we forgot there is still weather up here. Gastro-intestinal symptoms seem to be tapering off. Priority for the day is getting cleaned up and rehydrated. We should be a go to retry the course correction tomorrow. Over.”

  I’m pretty sure what I’m nursing is a dehydration headache, a hangover of sorts. Tentatively I put the water container straw to my lips. I take a sip and taste absolute foulness.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” I shake my head, absolutely disgusted. I’ve forgotten about the mess from last night, the water I upchucked and then collected back up. The acid taste won’t go away. My face puckers and squirms like it’s an animal, not part of me, trying to get away.

  “What’s wrong?” Kerwin asks.

  “That…wasn’t entirely water.”

  Shepard gives a tired little laugh. “Probably didn’t age well either, did it?”

  At this, I have to laugh a little, at last. “No. No, it did not.”

  After that, it’s time to vacuum out the offensive mess, to turn the valves that connect the hose to space so we can suck the foulness out into oblivion.

  “Hey, the vacuum still works,” I observe drily.

  “How about that,” Kerwin smiles.

  I rinse my container, soap it up, then rinse it again. Then I rinse it again. And again, for good measure. And one more time. And another more time. And then once more. And again, just to be safe. And then once more. At last I fill it and drink some water. It sloshes around in my stomach like it’s not a part of me, like coffee in a thermos, or propellant in a fuel tank. But this time it stays down.

  We clean more thoroughly now, wetting rags and wiping everything.

  For lunch, we nibble on packets of butter cookies, one of the few dry crumb-type foods we have up here. They sit well enough.

  We do want to resolve the intermittent signal from Earth before we attempt the course correction again. It does look like the indicator needles are showing some slewing on the antenna, and we can’t tell why. So we experiment, switching amplifiers and beam widths, changing it from automatic to manual tracking; when the beam’s on its widest setting and we’ve manually steered the antenna towards Earth, the signal gets better.

  I allow mys
elf to believe the crisis has passed.

  •••

  We’re up in the command module for another night. The dosimeters are still slowly ticking upwards, but it seems the rate of change has tapered off quite a bit.

  7 SEP 1972

  Cleanup and recuperation. Quite a headache. Ready for the end of it.

  We have no way of knowing when it will be safe to reoccupy our home.

  I sleep fitfully.

  On Earth, one tosses and turns; here there is no heaviness to it, but the end result is the same: futile attempts to get comfortable, and an exaggerated sense of the pressure on one’s bladder. I have to move far too frequently to empty it. When I do, I can see Kerwin stirring in the electric glow of the console, and here and there I hear a harrumph from Shepard, over in the dark recesses behind the launch couches.

  I’m annoyed by the fact that they’re annoyed by me. But I’m annoyed by me, too.

  •••

  The next afternoon, we’re still in the command module, ready at last to retry the course correction. My stomach has settled down, but I’m still tired and disgusted. Houston has walked us through the preliminaries for the alignment and course correction. They’ve built a tremendously fat amount of time into the leadup for the burn, in case we have the same comms issues.

  “Houston, Explorer. Program 23 is complete and I have clear LOS to Venus. Will be taking sightings on Rigel, Arcturus and Deneb. Over.” Methodically I work, measuring the shaft and trunnion angles and writing them down on the worksheet, then entering them into the guidance computer. When that’s done, I grab a few tired sips of water. I’m waiting for acknowledgment. I check the time: 15:03.

  Right then, the spacecraft jostles ever so slightly, and there is a blink in the instruments, a brief electric hiccup, like in prison movies when they’re executing someone in the chair and the lights all dim for a second. And in that moment I see the flicker-flashes, a lot of them all at once.

  “What was that?” Shepard asks.

  “Looks like a power surge of some sort.”