Warp speed ws-1

by Travis S. Taylor

  That is what I thought, anyway. Then, six months later I tried to put a full-scale mockup together in the full EVA gear in the neutral buoyancy tank at NASA Johnson Space Center. Tabitha ended up having to help me. It was a two-man, uh two-person, job for certain. She would be the only other astronaut on board not already tasked to the max for other jobs and who was "read onto the DOD/NASA program need to know list." Unless you consider flying the Space Shuttle a job. I hadn't known it, but Tabitha had continued to fly more than fifteen hours a month all this time to maintain her currency. I had to start flying with her at least four hours a month. I say that like it was a chore. I love to fly. I got my instrument rating by the time I finished undergraduate school and had been to more fly-ins than you could shake a stick at. But this was really flying!

  We would get our hours by flying back and forth between Houston, Texas or Cape Kennedy, Florida and Huntsville, Alabama. Fly out to Houston to do some more training. Fly back to Huntsville to keep the construction, testing, and integration of the spacecraft components in order. Then back to Houston. Then back to Huntsville. Then to Kennedy for payload integration meetings and training. Every now and then there would be a flight out to Pasadena, California to JPL or to Baltimore-Washington International to Goddard, HQ, or other government entity buildings. We were burning the candle from both ends, the middle, and from several other places.

  Things were rather chaotic during that time. Tabitha and I tried to run or do Kardio Kickboxing type workouts together as often as we could. I got on the road bike and went to karate every chance I got, which wasn't often. Mountain biking and fighting were completely out of the question now though. No way I was going to risk an injury that would scrub me off the spaceflight mission.

  Between Jim, Rebecca, and myself we were able to cover my classes at the university, but we did have to schedule quite a few make-up sessions. The chairman of the physics department saw what was happening and suggested that I take a leave from teaching until after the mission. That was a load off my mind. He assured me that my job would be there as long as I wanted it. Why not? What university wouldn't want to boast having an astronaut on the faculty?

  The first ECC was completed by June. To celebrate, Jim and Rebecca got married! They had asked Tabitha and me about it beforehand.

  "We don't have a lot of money for it and neither of us has any family to speak of," Jim was saying. "Think we ought to do a small church thing or just elope or what?" 'Becca wasn't too keen on the elope idea for some reason.

  "I don't know. Its y'all's wedding," I responded, helpfully.

  "'Becca, what do you want?" Tabitha asked.

  "I just want something to remember," she said.

  "If you had a formal kind of thing, who would you really want to invite?" Tabitha asked. We had some ideas of our own. But we hadn't spoken a word of it to the kids.

  "Really, just Sara, Al, Johnny, Jim's folks—but they won't come—a handful of people from the dojo, you would be a bridesmaid, and I was hoping Anson would give me away." 'Becca looked sheepishly at me.

  Jim chimed in, "He can't give you away and be the best man, too!"

  "Sure he can," 'Becca said giving Jim a look that he better start getting used to.

  "I would be honored," I said to both of them. Then I asked them, "Are you sure that is all you wanted to invite? Can you give me a number?"

  She counted on her hands for a second and said, "I don't know—fifteen or so?" She shrugged her shoulders and looked at Jim.

  "Tim. Don't forget Tim," Jim replied.

  "Okay," I said, "Let's assume twenty." I looked at Tabitha. "Colonel, you have any bright ideas?"

  "Don't colonel me!" she started. "Look at this." She handed them brochures from a cruise line. "The big dolt there and I did some checking. If we have a party of fifteen to twenty-five go on one of these three-night-four day things it would only run us about two hundred seventy-nine dollars per person. Then you two would swap boats when it returned to port and then do another four-night five-day cruise for your honeymoon."

  "Yeah and they have wedding services either on the boat or on one of the islands. They take care of everything." I added.

  'Becca was almost in tears. She grabbed her inhaler and took a puff. She had hardly used that thing in months.

  She wiped her eyes and said, "That's beautiful but we can't afford that." Jim said the same.

  "I'm sorry, did I forget to mention that it's on us? We already talked it over and we want to do this for you. Bob and Alisa said they would pay their own way and so did some of the other karate folks. And I have some money just lying around collecting dust anyway," I joked.

  Tabitha smiled, "Goofball! I do have one request. I would like to bring my daughter along."

  'Becca was crying full flow now. "I would love to meet her. In fact she can be a bridesmaid, too!"

  Jim punched me on the shoulder. "When you get back from outer space, I'm kicking your ass!" He laughed.

  That's pretty much how the wedding went. Almost everybody but Sara paid his or her own way and we got a good deal on the price of the cruise. Tabitha and I covered all the other stuff. We ended up splitting about seven grand between the two of us and most of that was the open bar! Jim and 'Becca seemed happier than I had ever seen them. As a second wedding gift, I gave them each a bonus and a new pay scale. After all, the company was doing a lot more business now, mostly because of them. I had planned on giving them raises earlier for graduation presents, but we had been so busy that administrative details were falling behind. The bonuses were the retroactive raises plus a little. We were all very emotional and 'Becca had to take a hit of albuterol. The ocean air seemed to help 'Becca's respiratory condition and she didn't use her inhaler but that once during the whole cruise.

  We all had a great time. When we stopped at Key West, I made a point to visit a certain restaurant and tip the bartenders well. We all needed the short break, anyway. My mind was fried from the round-the-clock hours we had been putting in. I could tell Tabitha's was also and she looked even more beautiful in a bathing suit and smile, although I'm not upset with the way she looks in her colonel's outfit or her astronaut gear.

  I didn't mention her daughter, did I? If you can imagine Tabitha twenty years younger, there you go. Same bright red hair, same big brown anime eyes, and the temper and spunk to match. Instead of the Texas accent that her mother sports, Anne Marie grew up in Florida where Tabitha's parents had moved for retirement and to be close to Tabitha when she launched. I fell in love with her from the moment I laid eyes on her. Although Tabitha and her parents had done a bang-up job raising her, you could tell that she didn't have a father or big brother figure in her life. Maybe that's why we got along so well.

  At one point I showed her how to get out of a chokehold; she wanted to see more. So, I gave her a plastic butter knife and told her to stab me in the stomach with it. After she said, "Uncle!" I helped her up off the deck of the promenade and asked her if she wanted the knife back. Jim told me to quit showing off. Anne Marie stuck her tongue out at him and held onto my arm.

  She kept asking me, "Could you whup that guy? What about that guy? Him?" I told her that that wasn't why I learned karate. Then she pointed at Bob and asked if I could beat him. "He don't look that tough," she said. I laughed and so did 'Becca, who was eavesdropping in on our conversation.

  I reassured her that I and three or four other guys couldn't "whup" Bob in a million years. Jim and I have tried several times. We always went home rubbing our knots, bruises, and bumps wondering just what in the hell were we thinking.

  "You ever heard the expression, I'll put knots on your head faster than you can rub 'em?" I asked Anne Marie. "Well, believe me, he can."

  After kissing the bride "so long" and shaking the groom's hand, Tabitha, Anne Marie, and I left the Port of Miami and I drove up to Titusville near the Cape to see Tabitha's parents. We stayed at her parents' for another two days, Tabitha took care of some business at NASA, and then we flew f
rom the Cape back to Huntsville. A few times Tabitha let me fly the trainer. Pretty cool! It wouldn't be long before I would have enough hours in the trainers to be rated to fly it since Tabitha is a certified instructor.

  We altered our flight plan a little and flew to an unrestricted airspace where I practiced maneuvers. Tabitha took me through some stalls and slow flight. Then she had me do some S turns and some three-sixties and seven-twenties. After a while she showed me how to do a simple barrel roll and a few other neat tricks that you can't do in a Cessna. Then it was back homeward.

  Tabitha took over coming into Huntsville International. It was socked in with rain and we had to land under ILS (instrument landing system). I have an instrument rating and I know how to do that in a Cessna 172 prop job but not in a T-38 jet. I was glad to have her at the controls.

  When we got back to my house we were exhausted. Friday meowed at me for being gone so long. Tabitha stroked her on the head.

  "Hello kitty. That's a pretty kitty," she told Friday.

  We watched the idiot box a bit and got real friendly with each other on the couch. Finally, Tabitha and I went to bed and didn't budge until near lunch the next day. Why is it that you're usually more tired after vacation than you were before you went? Isn't the point of the vacation to rest and relax? Oh well, we had to get back to work tomorrow and from herein there would be no more resting. There was only ten months left before our scheduled launch date.

  The line in Aliens where Sergeant Apone grunts, "Okay, Marines, you know the drill. Assholes and elbows lets move it!" rang in my head as I drifted off, a big smile on my face.

  CHAPTER 7

  They came and woke us up about four thirty. I was dreaming about my whiteboard again. Somewhere in the dream, Jim came in the study and began erasing the board.

  "You just don't get it. There are other things that are more important," he said.

  Then good old Albert Einstein looked at us both and said, "Mathematics sucks!" He finished the beer he was drinking and threw it at the fireplace. Then he morphed into a large purple emu and ran off trying to fly the whole time.

  Jim looked at me and said, "Hey man, it's your dream." Then he shrugged his shoulders and finished cleaning the whiteboard.

  Of course, I was thoroughly sore at him for erasing my life's work from the slate of my life. But then, Tabitha's voice came through the haze of the dream and I saw not the clean whiteboard that Jim had left me, rather it was a different one. One that contained many solutions, which were underlined.

  I woke up.

  "Anson! Wake up! You're having a nightmare again," she said as she shook me.

  "Yeah, uh, I guess so." I blinked furiously and woke up a little shaky. She helped pull me out of bed.

  "Did you sleep much at all?" she looked concerned.

  "I slept enough to get me through today," I assured her. There was a knock on the door and a voice telling us that we were running a little late. We quickly showered and were down the hall for our final flight checkups. This took about twenty minutes.

  For breakfast I had insisted that I would have steak and eggs just like the Mercury guys did.

  "We don't do that anymore," Tabitha ribbed me, but that didn't matter to me. I was having steak and eggs, just like I had planned it since I was eight years old.

  At about T-minus five hours and fifty minutes, out on the pad, the Space Shuttle OMS propellant tank had been repressurized and the solid rocket booster nozzle flex bearing and nozzle-to-case seals joint temperature requirements were checked off by the prep crew, while I was trying hard not to fall back to sleep in my eggs. Once, Tabitha gave me a swift elbow in the ribs to bolster my alertness.

  For the past three weeks I had probably slept about forty-five hours. Something had gotten my old graduate school insomnia back full fling. Tabitha promised to help me keep it a secret, although I could tell it gave her serious ethical issues, her being the mission commander and all.

  The trigger for the insomnia must have been all of the intense studying that I'd been doing. The past six months was nothing but study, study, study, then practice, practice, practice, and then study, study, study, some more. A lot like graduate school in many ways, but mostly in that there is no time for sleeping. It was probably like riding a bike; my body just remembered how to stay awake for long periods of time.

  I tried every trick I knew to combat the problem. Two nights previously Tabitha wore me out on the basketball court, then on the track, and then in (ahem) bed, and she gave me twice the normal dosage of diphenhydramine hydrochloride, which usually knocks me right out. While she dozed off I reread Feynman's QED and then L. Sprague De Camp's The Ancient Engineers.

  When that didn't work, I turned to one of the more credible alien conspiracy investigative books I've found. It's good for entertainment. All of those cattle mutilation pictures in that book confused me. Why is it that alien conspiracy folks believe that extraterrestrials would travel billions of miles just to kill cows, make neat patterns in fields, and leave pink bismuth stains on people? I've never really fallen for the whole UFO conspiracy thing myself. However, the thing that has always bothered me most is, who, what, and how is all of this stuff getting done? Are there that many nuts who need attention out there or is there more to this thing? I don't know.

  And how did all the UFO stuff impact religious beliefs? I mean, aliens or gods? I had asked Tabitha what she thought about it the next morning. She looked at me with a sour look on her face.

  "Anson, don't you have flight hardware manuals that you should be studying?" she said.

  "Really, I need to know," I asked her.

  "You're asking about what I believe. Well, I'll tell you." She paused and placed her hands on her hips.

  "I believe that nobody has a clue what really happens after you die. Not the pope, not the preacher at my folk's church, not some Tibetan monk who has meditated and pondered all his life—no one! I believe that religion is personal and is for every individual to decide for his or herself. Mostly it's none of anybody's business what I believe. I believe that public prayer is for show. It should be done in private and kept between you and your supreme deity, whoever or whatever it may be. I believe that maybe one day we might find some of these answers through scientific experimentation and observation." She paused for air.

  "But, most importantly, and as your mission commander, you better hear me now. I believe that you have spent most of your life trying to get an experiment flown in space and to ride along with that experiment. And finally, I believe that you had better get back to studying your preflight, flight, and postflight checklists before you get the biggest chance of your life to really, and I mean really, screw the pooch!"

  That was the last we talked about religion for a long time.

  That was two nights ago. The following night I had taken her advice and studied my spaceflight hardware parameters. By the time the sun rose, I was going over the mission plans, chronology, and EVA requirements. I had pretty much memorized them in the past few weeks. Studying never hurts. At six-thirty I got back in bed and was able to get about an hour of sleep while Tabitha was getting ready.

  This was pretty much my routine for last night as well. Except last night, after studying the mission, I did a little recreational reading again. Mission commander be damned. This time I started with the King James version of the Holy Bible. Actually, I only read my favorite part. You know the part where the space fighter craft powered by four rocket-based combined cycle engines comes down to Earth and the pilot sitting in the cockpit uses the spacecraft's loudspeakers to tell the primitive Earthling that he must go enlist the devotion of all these various countries. When the poor primitive admits that he cannot speak all of the languages in those countries, the alien inside the spacecraft solves this problem real easy.

  "No problem eat this," the alien tells him.

  A little robot hand comes out of the spacecraft and gives the guy a scroll with a nanotechnology spread. Once he eats the scroll and t
he nanotechnology reworks the primitive's brain, "lo and behold" he could speak the various tongues of these nations. Then the alien pilot spins up the turbojets in the engines making the great rushing sound and then flies off on a pillar of flame from the rocket engines. Cool!

  I never studied the literary history of the theological texts, but those guys could sure give Heinlein a run for his money. I finally got bored with reading and found myself at the desk in our quarters scribbling notes.

  By the time I had solved the entropy equations for a spinning neutron star and got to the part where there is some mass/energy missing due to gravity shielding by the degenerate matter of its interior, a ray of light peaked through the curtains. I realized that I had better go to bed. Then an hour and fifty minutes later Tabitha was waking me up from my Einstein/whiteboard nightmare.

  At about T-minus three hours the complete crew complement, including yours truly, was having a weather briefing inflicted upon us, while a whole bunch of smart guys were busy outside making sure that the SRB tracking systems were being powered up. It had taken me forty-four years to get here. I figured I could wait an hour or two more. On the other hand, I wasn't quite sure I could make it through this boring weather briefing without falling to sleep again.

  Finally, the countdown was resumed and we left the O and C building for the launch pad. I still don't know what O and C stands for—I assumed it was operations and checkout, but I wasn't sure. I know it was in the tons of material I was supposed to have memorized, but I didn't think it would matter what they call that damn building once I was in space.

  The six of us astronauts began the ingress into the flight crew seats. Tabitha took her place in the front right seat beside Major Rayford Donald, the pilot. After that were Carla Yeats and Roald Sveld. She is a Canadian and he is a Norse astronaut both headed for the ISS for a few months. Lieutenant Terence Fines and I sat in the very back. He was a payload specialist also. He had plans of doing some microgravity experiment involving radar pointing and tracking state-of-the-art for the next generation national missile defense system. Most of his stuff was classified like mine.