Project Rescue

by Mark Kelly

  Scott couldn’t believe his brother. “You are a knucklehead, you know that? The cabin’s depressurized, right? So the pressure in here is the same as it is out there. It’s like if you submerge a jar totally full of water in a bucket full of water and open the jar—the water in the jar doesn’t get sucked out. The pressure’s the same both places.”

  “Or a jar full of air in a bucket full of air,” Mark said.

  “You got it,” said Scott.

  Mark nodded. “Okay, okay. Just double-checking. You can go ahead now.”

  Again, Scott reached up. Again, Mark said, “No—wait. One more thing.”

  Scott sighed. “Okay, what? You know we don’t have forever, right? We’ll be back in darkness in forty-five minutes, and we’d like to get this done while it’s still light.”

  “I just have one more question,” Mark said. “While I’m floating around outside, you, that is Crazy 9, you won’t get ahead of me, right? I don’t want to have to swim to catch up. Crazy 9 is traveling faster than a bullet leaving a gun.”

  Scott was getting impatient. His brother understood all this, didn’t he? But then Scott figured something out: His brother was nervous!

  Well, of course he was!

  And it was the least Scott could do—as a good commander—to allay the fears of his crew, even if those fears made no sense.

  “Crazy 9 is traveling something like ten times faster than a bullet, but so are you,” he said patiently. “And remember Mr. Newton”—he meant Isaac Newton, the great English scientist who lived in the seventeenth century—“and his three laws of motion.”

  Mark was confused. “You mean action–reaction?”

  “No, not that one,” Scott said. “The first one. An object in motion—you—stays in motion unless some external force interferes. Right now you’re in motion, traveling at 18,000 miles per hour. You just don’t feel it because we’re all moving together and so is the Salyut. We might as well be standing in New Jersey and all rotating together on Earth’s surface. Earth rotates at around 900 miles per hour, depending on your latitude, but you don’t have to run forward to keep up with it, do you?”

  “No,” Mark said, “but how about after I leave the ship . . . ?”

  “You are also an object in motion,” said Scott. “So according to Mr. Newton, you’re going to keep traveling at 18,000 miles per hour. Just don’t crash into any external forces, like the Salyut space station.”

  The truth was that Mark’s brain did know this, but it was a lot different to know it when you were sitting at a library table reading a physics book than when you were about to pop out of the hatch of a spacecraft.

  “You feel okay, right?” Scott said. “You’re not dizzy anymore?”

  “Sure. Uh, kind of. Why?” Mark said.

  “Because if you puke, it’s not just a blinding mess in your helmet, it’ll probably kill you.” Scott’s hand moved toward the unlatching mechanism on the hatch again.

  “Wait a second,” Mark said. “What do you mean?”

  “The throw-up will clog your oxygen line. You’ll suffocate,” Scott said matter-of-factly. “Or you could drown in your own vomit. Are you ready to go now?”

  Mark thought for a moment about all the things that were going to kill him in space. It was a long list. But of all of them, this would be absolutely the most embarrassing.

  What would it say on his tombstone? “Here lies Mark Kelly, a brave astronaut, killed by his own vomit.”

  This, Mark decided, could not happen. So he swallowed hard. “I am fine,” he said, and he willed his stomach to follow orders. “Okay, Commander Scott. Let’s go. What are you waiting for, anyway?”

  Chapter 32

  * * *

  “Greenwood Lake,” Mark radioed to Earth. “I am now going for a walk.”

  The view through the window of Crazy 9 had been the most awe-inspiring spectacle Mark Kelly ever saw or expected to see.

  And it was nothing compared to the view when he floated out of the hatch.

  He gasped.

  He said, “Oh my gosh,” which was stupid but also as good as any other words a person might use when confronted with the grandeur of the entire universe coming at him from every direction.

  Astronaut Gene Cernan had told the press that spacewalking was like being inside a kaleidoscope, and that was the best description Mark could come up with himself. Everywhere he looked, the colors of the universe glowed and sparkled, shapeshifted and spun. For a dead and empty vacuum, space sure did seem alive.

  Because Mark and Crazy 9 were speeding onward at ten times the speed of a bullet—Mark remembered what Scott had said—the dawn came fast, changing the dark from gray to blue to gold till at last the sun appeared, white and fiery, to light Earth. Mark recognized the distinctive shape of Baja California jutting into the blue Pacific, then the golden desert sand of the southwestern United States.

  In contrast, the view of space beyond was now utterly black, the stars blanked out by the sun’s illumination.

  Mark knew that ten years before, when the first American astronauts had space-walked, psychiatrists had worried they might suffer from something called space delirium. The view might make them crazy, in other words. Mark was pretty sure he wasn’t crazy. Instead, for the first time in his life, he really understood the meaning of the word “awe.”

  Outside, the view was beautiful . . . and, more than that, strange.

  All the episodes of Star Trek and Lost in Space, all the TV pictures of NASA missions to the moon—none had prepared him. Was this really the same universe that also contained New Jersey, where Mark had awakened that morning, that contained his parents, his school, his friends?

  He was grateful his brother was nearby in a spacecraft that seemed so solid.

  Mark could have enjoyed the view for hours. An EVA really took the word sightseeing to new levels. But he had only about forty-five minutes to accomplish the rescue before night fell. In darkness, everything would be just that much harder.

  The first spacewalkers had been connected to the spaceship by a cord containing electricity, oxygen, and communications wiring. In weightlessness, the cord became as unpredictable and dangerous as a writhing snake. So Mark would move around using only the AMU on his back. Scott had tethered the rescue ball to a D-ring on the back of his suit, and it trailed him like a round, awkward tail.

  “Hey, Mark—what’s it like?” Scott asked over the intercom.

  “It’s like . . . it’s like . . . well, there’s colors, bright colors, uh . . . and Earth looks like Grandpa’s globe, only in the sun it’s bright, lit up.”

  “Don’t look at the sun!” Scott ordered.

  “Aye aye, Commander.”

  “Hey, cool, but you’ve got work to do!”

  “Yeah, okay. Uh . . . be right back.”

  The checklist for the AMU was twenty pages long. Mark had already understood the general idea, but he had had time for only a quick review before he’d strapped it to his back. If you cut through the details, the operation was straightforward. There were controllers by each hand that powered tiny nitrogen thrusters. You pushed the left control for forward and back, and twisted the right one for up and down, left and right.

  The Salyut station was only a few feet away. He set out by pushing gently against the side of the Apollo CSM and—whoosh!—popped straight up at a terrifying rate. “Wait, that’s not what I wanted”—he twisted the right controller to correct and suddenly was heading for his feet, and beyond them the Grand Canyon, which was in the opposite direction. If he wasn’t careful, he was going to crash into his own spacecraft—splat!

  After a few seconds, Mark realized that if he moved any part of him even a little, he would move the other way. With very little in the way of friction or gravity to complicate matters, Newton’s third law of motion was fully in charge: Every action yields an equal and opposite reaction.

  Clearly, he had to use a lighter touch. Scott had been watching him out the window. “Stop foolin
g around!” he ordered.

  “I’m not!” Mark felt irritated with his brother, who couldn’t possibly understand. He was safe in the cocoon of the ship. Something else irritated him too. Mark was breathing hard. It was an effort to fight the awkward oversize space suit, now pumped up to 3.7 pounds per square inch of pressure. The suit might not be made of silver metal like a suit of armor in the old days, but it was so stiff it made Mark think of what it must have been like to be a knight. Even bending an arm or a leg was hard work. And it was made for an adult, so he didn’t exactly have the best fit.

  At last, calling on patience and fine motor skills he didn’t know he had, Mark managed to propel himself over to the hatch of the Salyut, arriving with only a gentle bump rather than the resounding crash he had feared. There was just one problem. The hatch had disappeared.

  “Greenwood Lake, this is Spaceman Mark. Do you read? Egg, can you patch me through to Barry?”

  “Moscow Control here, Spaceman,” Barry replied. “Egg already did the patch. Are you inside yet? How’s Major Ilyushin?”

  “That’s a negative, Barry. Uh . . . where’s the door?”

  “Try the shade side,” Barry replied. “The primary crew module is set to rotate for passive thermal control.”

  The Soviet Union had helpfully placed handrails on the outside of its space station. Mark took full advantage of these, climbing hand over hand until he came to the hatch. Next to the handle for the unlatching mechanism was a label. Some of the print was red and boldface, a warning about something.

  Mark hoped it didn’t say AMERICAN ASTRONAUTS, KEEP OUT.

  Using his fist, hardened by its all-protective space glove, Mark knocked on the hull of the space station, using the “secret code” Barry had given him. Now he was glad it wasn’t some complicated sequence. With all that he had on his mind at this moment, he never would have remembered it.

  If there was a response, Mark didn’t hear it. The only sounds were the hiss of the oxygen in his suit and the crackle of the communications link. Anyway, in space there was no air to carry sound waves and therefore no sound. Inside, though, the metal hull of the ship would carry the vibration of his knocking so the cosmonaut could hear it.

  That is, if the cosmonaut was alive to hear it.

  Time passed. Mark realized he was holding his breath. What if he and his brother had come this far—if Barry had gone all the way to Moscow—and it was all for nothing? Any one of a million things could have gone wrong on the space station. Maybe it wasn’t just a communications problem at all. Maybe it was something much worse.

  Chapter 33

  * * *

  Third time’s the charm, Mark thought, and he knocked out the secret code—shave-and-a-haircut—once more.

  Again moments passed, and now Mark was worried about minutes ticking away. He had plenty of air to breathe. That wasn’t the problem. Light was the problem. The rescue operation needed to be completed in daylight. It wouldn’t be long now before he would have to return to Crazy 9—with or without the stranded cosmonaut. He hated to admit failure, but he was on the brink of doing so when he realized that the hairline crack between the hatch’s edge and the space station had begun to widen.

  Then, at last, with excruciating slowness, the hatch began to rise.

  There was something disturbing about this that Mark hadn’t expected. He felt like he was watching the front door of a haunted house open slowly on Halloween night. He had a crazy urge to turn tail and power back to his brother and his own familiar Crazy 9.

  Was Major Ilyushin even alive?

  What if it was his ghost that was opening the hatch?

  What if it was a scary space alien?

  Mark took a deep breath and told himself to settle down. Maybe there wasn’t enough air in this space suit after all. What else would account for these crazy thoughts?

  I know very well there’s no such thing as ghosts, he reminded himself. And as for space aliens, maybe there are some on some planet somewhere, but why would they show up right here right now?

  The only reasonable explanation for the hatch opening was that Major Ilyushin, a human just like himself, was opening it.

  The only reasonable explanation, he repeated to himself. The only reasonable explanation.

  Within a few seconds, the opening between the hull of the ship and the hatch widened enough for Mark to slip inside. Using the handholds, he bent at the waist, positioned his feet, then, and with much trouble and many contortions, he push-pulled himself from brilliant reflected sunlight into gloomy darkness.

  “Hello?” he said, knowing this was a waste of breath. He had his helmet on, and even if Major Ilyushin had been right there in front of him he couldn’t have heard. Still, it would have been too weird to enter someone’s house without calling a greeting.

  “Greenwood Control, this is Spaceman; come in, please. Can you patch through to Moscow to tell Major Ilyushin I’m here? Do the communications work yet?”

  “I’ll try, Spaceman,” said Egg. “Are you inside? Is he okay? And how are the animals? What’s it like there?”

  “Sheesh, Egg—how should I know what it’s like? I can’t even see anything. I can’t even move.”

  “Sorry,” said Egg in a small voice.

  Mark guessed he had to be in the airlock module, tight quarters, and he couldn’t move his bulky suit backed with the AMU without bumping into something.

  “Spaceman,” Egg said, “Moscow says the crank for the hatch is behind and above you. If you reach up, you’ll find it. After it’s closed, Major Ilyushin can re-press the airlock.”

  “Wait, so Major Ilyushin knows I’m here?” Mark asked.

  “I can’t get a straight answer at this time,” said Egg. “But either way, you’ve got to close the airlock.”

  “Roger that.” Mark found the crank and turned it. The hatch came down slowly. He wasn’t claustrophobic, but this was ridiculous. He was now in a tight space (his suit) within a tight space (the airlock) within another tight space (the Russian space station). Every fiber of his being had developed itches that he could not possibly scratch. Besides that, he could barely see.

  “Okay, I’ve got it,” he said. “Now could you ask pretty please if Major Ilyushin could let me out of—aaaaaaaaiiii!”

  “Spaceman? Spaceman? Do you read?” Egg’s voice was no longer small, it was loud and frantic. “Come in, Spaceman? Oh, Mark, oh no—are you okay?”

  Scott’s voice was next up. “Mark? Come in, Mark Kelly! Look, I take back all the bad things I ever said, only please—”

  Scott’s radio transmission was interrupted by a loud thonk. Then there was a crackle of static followed by the all-too-human sound of someone breathing hard and fast.

  “Mark?” Egg repeated, her voice an anxious whisper.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay.” Mark sounded breathless.

  “What happened?” Egg asked.

  “The interior hatch opened all of a sudden, and the light practically blinded me. The power’s on, that’s for sure, and—aaaaaaaii!” Mark squealed again, but this time he recovered more quickly. “Uh, hi? Hello? You must be Major Ilyushin. Am I right?”

  Chapter 34

  * * *

  The brilliant light caused Mark’s vision to blur for a few moments. When at last the view came into focus, he realized first that he was in the crew compartment of the Salyut, second that a man was suspended in front of him, and third that the expression on the man’s face was such a wild-eyed combination of surprise and terror that it would have been comical in other circumstances.

  As it was, Mark figured his own expression was probably about the same.

  As quickly as he could, Mark undid the fastenings and removed his helmet.

  “Ilya?” he said . . . stupidly, because who else could it be?

  A little of the terror left Major Ilyushin’s face, but none of the surprise. “You are American?” he said, eyeing the American flag on the sleeve of the space suit. “You are a small boy?”
>
  This was not the greeting Mark had looked forward to. “I am not small,” he said. Then he held out his hand and said politely, “It is a pleasure to meet you, Ilya.”

  The cosmonaut took Mark’s hand but raised his caterpillar-fat black eyebrows. “You may call me Major Ilyushin. In the United States, it is also correct for a child to use the honorific when he addresses an adult. Is that not true?”

  Mark didn’t know the word “honorific,” but he got the idea. “Sure. Major Ilyushin. Sorry. You can feel free to call me Mark, though. I’ve, uh . . . heard a lot about you.”

  Most conversations in the Apollo command module took place when you were strapped into a seat. There wasn’t space for hanging around. But here in the Salyut, there was. Now, both he and Major Ilyushin were suspended weightless in the middle of the comparatively large compartment. It was strange and awkward trying to hold a conversation with someone who was floating, and Mark grabbed a handgrip on the ceiling—or was it the floor?—to prevent his unintentionally drifting one way or the other.

  “In contrast, I have not heard about you,” said the cosmonaut. “Here in the space station are electrical anomalies that have affected communications with Moscow. Do they know about you in Moscow? How is it that you are here?”

  Mark flashed back to playing “Save the Dog” with Major Nelson on the living room rug. Major Ilyushin didn’t seem to want rescue any more than Nelson had.

  “I guess I can see why you’re surprised,” Mark said. Since this wasn’t a good time to discuss politics or Scoop Jackson or NASA, he explained as best he could. “I was the only one available, I guess, that is, my brother and me and the crew at Greenwood Lake. See, we don’t have school. It’s Easter vacation in New Jersey.”

  Major Ilyushin’s reply was a curt nod.

  “Uh, is there Easter vacation in the Soviet Union?” Mark tried to make conversation.

  “Nyet,” said Major Ilyushin.