by Homer Hickam
“You’re going to get in a bag in space?”
“Not a bag, a module made out of a material similar to the EMU suit—spacesuit to you, excuse me—but much lighter.”
Penny ignored his gibe. “Oh, I see. You’re going to float around in space in a balloon. You can’t be serious!”
“I am very serious.”
“I don’t believe a word of any of this.”
“What are you worried about, High Eagle? You’re innocent of everything. You just got taken along for the ride. But there’s nothing to worry about. I’ve planned for every possible contingency.”
Penny sneered. “Every contingency? Are you an idiot, Medaris, or what?”
“Is there some point you’re trying to make?”
Penny had been on a lot of adventures, seen more than a few go wrong, knew that it was the leaders and their egos that usually made the problems, caused the accidents, sent the expedition into danger. That’s when people got killed. “From my observation, Medaris,” she said, “you won’t admit problems. I’ve seen it before. It’s what I call persistent wrongheadedness.”
“I suppose you’re now going to give me some advice.”
“You could begin by simply admitting when you’re wrong. And also admitting when you need help.”
Paco, awakened by the rising voices, hopped off his perch on the top of the pilot’s seat, and ran along the cabin roof. Penny heard him coming, his claws making ticking noises in the soft material. The cat stopped over Medaris, started purring. “Yeah, well, of course I didn’t plan on losing Hoppy and maybe I didn’t plan on Virgil getting sick.” Medaris reached up and scratched the black-and-white cat’s neck at his insistent purr.
“I can’t believe my ears,” Penny said. “You’re admitting a miscalculation? Maybe there’s some hope for you after all.”
At that moment the CAPCOM came on-line over the flight deck speaker. “Columbia, Houston.”
Jack answered. “Houston, Columbia. Go ahead.”
“The demo was just a warning,” CAPCOM said gravely. “I’ve been directed to tell you to come down or you’re going to get knocked down. Copy?”
Penny keyed her headset. “We copy, Houston. Could I talk to Sam Tate?”
“Sam’s on break,” came CAPCOM’s curt reply.
“Then hear this, Houston. We’re up here trying to do science under a legitimate commercial contract and you’re not helping a bit with all these threats. I’m talking big-time lawsuit when I get back if this doesn’t stop. Now, knock it off! Do you copy?”
“Copy,” CAPCOM replied sullenly.
Penny smiled at Medaris. She’d had enough talking. She was in her expedition mode now. “I think we’d better get this show on the road.”
Medaris frowned. “What do you mean?”
“I mean let’s you and me go out and cram that big rocket up the tail of this shuttle, do this thing, and land.”
“You and me?”
“I can do anything you can do.” She held out her hand, palm up. “But I’ll be writing out my contract and I want my two million dollars.”
“Why don’t you make it a hundred million?”
“Keep arguing and I might.”
“Let’s wait and see how well you do the EVA.”
Penny squinted, caught herself at it, and opened her eyes wide. “Another thing, Medaris. How do you plan on landing this crate when you finish your tests? Seems you’re missing a pilot.”
“I’ll land her. I’m a pilot too.”
“Is there anything you can’t do?” Penny said in a more doubtful than laudatory tone.
“I can’t whistle between my teeth,” he said after a moment of thought.
Penny put two fingers to her mouth and blew with such volume that Paco leapt off the roof and dived for the deck hatch, meowing a complaint. “You mean like that?” She grinned.
“That would do it,” Jack marveled. He looked her over, as if for the first time. “Guess we might make a good pair. I’ll do the thinking, you do the whistling.”
Penny reacted. “You’ve got a lot to learn, boy, if you think all I can do is whistle.”
“Ready to prove it?” he challenged.
Penny grinned as brightly as ever she could. “Sweetheart, I was born ready!”
FIRST REPORT
The Vice President’s Residence
Shirley found the vice president putting in overtime in his office at his home at the old Naval Observatory. He used a big wooden desk that allowed him to spread out the books and charts of his latest interests. A line of old gray and green government steel files held research on everything from manatees to the mathematics of overpopulation. “Sir, if you’ve got a minute? I’ve made a little progress on Medaris.” She was hugging a folder to her chest. “I’ll leave this with you if you’re busy.”
Vanderheld directed her to a chair. “Not at all, Shirley. What’ve you got?”
Shirley sat, primly. She opened the folder, touched a finger to her tongue, and turned several pages. “Mrs. Medaris’s maiden name was Katrina Suttner, people who knew her well called her Kate. Her father was Gerhard Suttner, an assistant to Dr. Wernher von Braun.”
“I knew von Braun,” Vanderheld interrupted. “I had him before my committee several times. He was quite smooth, I’ll give him that. But a zealot too. All that man wanted to do was to explore space. Everything else was secondary. I couldn’t shake him on that determination no matter how hard I tried!”
“Gerhard Suttner died just a few months after von Braun.”
Vanderheld nodded. “It was sad how von Braun died so quickly. I recommended to President Ford that he be given the Medal of Freedom before he went. I was in his hospital room when he received it. I’m sorry, Shirley, you were saying?”
Shirley was always content to let her boss ramble. The most interesting historical tidbits often fell out when he did. She continued: “Ursula Suttner, Katrina’s mother, died a year after her husband from complications related to her chronic diabetes. The only relative left is an uncle in Huntsville, a Dr. Ernst Suttner. I gave him a call. He was quite nice. He said that he had guessed it was Jack Medaris aboard Columbia. He said Medaris had a special passion for the moon.”
The vice president leaned forward, his eyebrows raised quizzically. “The moon?”
“It’s puzzling. I think as soon as he said it, he regretted it, as if it were something personal. If it is to come out, let Jack bring it out, was what he said.”
Vanderbelt sat back. “Puzzling indeed.”
“Sir, if you’ll approve it, I’d like to fly to Huntsville. I’m not certain, but I believe Dr. Suttner would open up to me face-to-face.”
Vanderheld pondered, then shook his head. “I don’t think so, Shirley. I think we’ll have this hijacking matter cleared up soon. I just approved NASA going up to retrieve Columbia. Besides, I need you to do some other work for me concerning WET. You haven’t talked to anybody else about what this Dr. Suttner told you, have you?”
“No, sir,” said Shirley, standing.
“Good. Let’s keep it between us for now.”
When Shirley just stood there, Vanderheld looked up from his books. “Yes?”
“You said you had another assignment for me, sir? On WET?”
Vanderheld regarded her pensively. “I want to give it some more thought. I’ll be calling you, Shirley.”
Shirley closed the door on the old mansion, walked slowly down the brick steps to her car out in the main parking lot. She had just had the rug pulled out from under her and she didn’t know why. She didn’t think the vice president had leveled with her. Something she’d said had upset him. Shirley was a tenacious researcher. It went against her grain to stop. There was nothing pending on her schedule. She had a little personal leave coming. Shirley had made up her mind by the time she’d wheeled out of the parking lot. She was going to Huntsville, Alabama. Rocket City, USA.
EVA (2)
Columbia
“Do you underst
and what we’re going to do, High Eagle?” Jack asked her as he prepared the airlock.
Penny was pulling on a white spandex mesh undergarment. Translucent and orange tubes were woven into the mesh. “I look like I’m dressed for some bad Hollywood movie,” she griped. “What are all these tubes for?”
“They’re liquid cooling and ventilation tubes,” he told her for at least the third time. Jack knew Penny was nervous or she wouldn’t have kept asking. She wasn’t the only one nervous. He was beginning to wonder if she was going to be more of a hindrance than a help. “I asked you if you understood our task,” he reiterated.
Penny grunted as she pushed her arms into the clinging garment. “We’re going to remove the three main engines to make room for the big engine you’ve got attached to the arm. That about it?”
“You got it.” Jack kept working, preparing both his and Penny’s EMU suits. He wished it were going to be as easy as she made it sound but he knew it was going to be hot, busy work, and perhaps impossible without Virgil at his side. But with Virgil still sick with SAS, he and Penny were going to have to do this thing or it wasn’t going to get done. Jack tried to arrange the two suits, to make it easier for Penny to get dressed inside the airlock. He didn’t want to have her worn out before they got going. The suits were bulky and complicated, consisting of a hard upper torso and backpack, and pants with built-in boots. Then there were the gloves, a data-monitoring unit worn as a chest pack, and a bubble helmet with a cover. It took careful choreography to get dressed in the airlock, which was nothing more than a small steel cylinder. To get a little ahead before Penny came in, Jack climbed into the hard torso, his head popping through the top, his arms sliding through the side ports into the arms. He checked the wrist darns installed in the suit arms. These had been installed in the EMU suit after the glove leak that had nearly killed an astronaut during construction of the Space Station. They were designed to keep pressure in the suit even if a glove failed. They were a good idea but damned uncomfortable. He would put the gloves on last. The pants were next. He deftly stepped into them and latched them to the torso. Then Penny came in, closed the hatch behind her, and Jack pressurized the airlock. As he feared, she was still clumsy in zero g and flailed about as she tried to get into her suit. “Dammit, Medaris, you’re on my side,” she griped, one leg in her pants, the other out.
“You’re on both sides,” he pointed out.
“Well, I started on my side but you pushed me out of it.”
“Children,” Virgil soothed over the comm loop, “if you help each other, I think you’ll find things will go a lot easier.”
Penny made a face at Virgil through the hatch porthole and then laughed. “All right, all right,” she said to Jack. “Just help me get into my pants, okay?”
“Whew, I’m not touching that line.” Virgil chuckled.
Cooperation worked, and a half hour later Jack finished latching Penny inside her suit. He saw Virgil’s face at the porthole and gave him a thumbs-up. Penny looked ready, as much as she was ever likely to be. “Let’s go.”
Penny fumbled with her chest pack, trying to see the numbers on the digital readouts. “What about the checklist?”
Jack glanced at her gauges. They were all pointing in the right direction. “We don’t need a checklist. You’re all right. Let’s go.”
She balked. “I attended this class. We’re not supposed to go outside without going through the checklist.”
“Look, High Eagle, we don’t have time for this.”
“You look, Medaris,” she said, turning to reach for the plastic card Velcroed to the airlock wall. “You should never be in such a hurry you don’t have time to be safe. No checklist, no EVA. Got it?”
Jack ducked her swinging backpack. “Is it too much to ask that you not kill me while you’re being safe?”
High Eagle settled down in front of him and started calling out each item on the cue card. Jack rolled his eyes but complied, affirming each of her calls after he checked them. After she had gone down the list, she pointed at the airlock depressurization switch. “Twist that, Medaris, and we’ll be ready for egress.”
“Egress?”
“That’s NASA-speak for going outside.”
Jack grinned, despite himself, twisted the valve, waited a minute for the air to leak through it, and then pulled the lever to open the outer hatch. “I’m going to e-gress now, Dr. High Eagle,” he said, stretching out the word. He went down on his knees and stuck his helmet outside. There was a handrail bolted next to the hatch. He grabbed it and used it to pull himself the rest of the way out. All of his years of training astronauts in the huge Neutral Buoyancy Simulator in Huntsville made working in space second nature to Jack. He used other handrails to get to the port sill of the bay and then clipped his tether on the guy wire that ran down its length. He headed aft toward the bungeed “sausages.” There he unwrapped a set of tools, each secured in its own pouch, pulled out the big battery-powered wrench he’d need to pull the mains. Penny came up behind him. Pleased to see she had managed to get to him on her own, he handed the wrench to her and then released a small tether attached to her wrist. He looped one end of the tether through an eye on the power tool. Tethering everything was essential. A “dropped” tool in space was lost forever.
Penny began to flail around, fighting for stability. “Make every move slow and calculated, High Eagle,” he instructed. “Stop kicking. This isn’t a swimming pool.”
Her breathing was harsh. “This is like being wrapped up in a tent. I can’t tell where my feet are.”
“Relax and let your body settle into a neutral position and whenever you can, restrain your feet. Hook them on to something.”
“I told you I don’t know where my feet are,” Penny retorted, exasperation in her voice.
“It’ll come.”
Jack retrieved a bag out of the sausage that was filled with a variety of smaller tools—wire cutters, pliers, screwdrivers, and Allen wrenches—then withdrew another tool, a socket wrench with a mushroom-shaped device on its head. The wrench—called an Essex wrench—allowed an astronaut to turn it with one hand, an energy-saving idea. Jack unclipped the power wrench from Penny and attached it to his waist tether along with the rest of the tools. He peered through the curved surface of her bubble helmet to see her face. “Ready?”
She was squinting. “I told you I was born ready!”
Jack laughed. He couldn’t help it. She looked anything but ready to him.
“What are you laughing at?”
He thought to put her at ease by lightly flirting. “I just kind of think you’re cute when you try to be macho.”
“You trying to put the move on me?”
“No, just being friendly.”
“Yeah, right. Let’s go, Medaris.”
Jack could see he was going to get nowhere with Penny by trying to be nice. Why he had even tried was beyond him. Back to work. He had four long tethers on his waist clip. He unclipped one and attached it to Penny’s waist so she could use it to stabilize herself when they got to the work site. He started up, hand over hand, climbing Columbia ’s vertical stabilizer, her huge swept-back tail. Tools were swinging from him like pots and pans on a tinker’s cart. “Don’t let go whatever you do, High Eagle,” he called as he moved. “If you did, Virgil could move the shuttle after you but it’d be a damn hard maneuver and he’s never tried it.”
He turned to see if she was following. She was, but slowly. Above them was an immense blue-and-white dome—the Pacific Ocean. Jack watched Penny look up at it, then put her head down quickly. He guessed that she had been struck by vertigo, as often happened to spacewalking shuttle astronauts.
Jack came down the vertical stabilizer and gripped the huge bell of the outboard main engine exhaust nozzle. He turned again to check out Penny. She arrived, still kicking her legs futilely. “The first thing we’ve got to do is remove the panel that covers the engine compartment. Stop kicking, High Eagle!”
Penny im
mediately stopped kicking but her boots swung over her head. Jack steadied her, holding her backpack.
“I don’t have anything to hang on to.” She gasped, apparently drained from the exertion of climbing over the stabilizer.
Jack placed her so she could reach the rim of the nozzle. “Hold the bell with one hand to steady yourself. Then swing your boots over to the nozzle below and pinch your feet around its edge.”
She tried it. “Okay. But I don’t feel very secure.”
Jack made the remaining three waist tethers into one long line, clipped it to Penny, then worked his way down to the external tank attach struts and attached the other end there. “You’re tethered to the ET. If you let go, I’ll be able to pull you back in. You’re perfectly safe.”
Central America rolled by overhead, then a boil of huge white clouds swirling over the Caribbean. Jack saw Penny look up again and just as quickly back down. “This is hard,” she admitted. “I feel like I’m going to fall.”
“It’s supposed to be hard,” he said curtly, more so than he meant. He softened his tone. “You’re not going to fall. Sir Isaac Newton wouldn’t allow it. Do you think you can hold on and let me tether to you while I work around the nozzles?”
He heard her take a ragged breath. “I can try,” she squeaked.
“Grab hold of my feet,” he said, swinging his boots up to her free arm.
For the next thirty minutes Jack worked steadily, using the power wrench on the bolts holding the engine shroud, a flat plate that protected the guts of the engines with cutouts for the big nozzles. Penny kept her boots clamped on the lower starboard nozzle and one hand on the top nozzle. Twice, Jack had no hand- or foothold and swung against the tether. Penny had to hold him or he would have slipped off into space. She was a lot stronger than she looked, Jack thought. When the last bolt came out, he thumped the shroud with his fist, popping the edges loose. Then he peeled it away and set it adrift, exposing the workings of the monster engines.
“Look at that!” Penny blurted. That was the incredible complex of pumps, tubing, pipes, cables, and wire bundles that had been exposed.
