Orbit

by John J. Nance

  But there is none. The astronaut looks gone, a lot of blood leaking from the exit wound in the back of his head. He’s beyond hope. What Kip felt on the back of his own neck is apparently Bill’s blood.

  Kip feels himself recoil in pure panic, as if he’s preparing to run.

  Oh my God! Oh God! What happened?

  Somewhere inside he already knows the answer. Something—a tiny space rock, a discarded piece of space junk—something has smashed into and through Intrepid at an incredibly high speed and passed like a bullet through Bill’s cranium, killing him instantly. Keeping a small hit from exploding the craft or leaking out all the air was a major engineering challenge they were told about in training. That was the very reason the spacecraft was built with self-sealing walls.

  But he never took the threat seriously. No one has ever been killed by a space rock before, especially not inside a warm capsule. Have they? What are the chances?

  Kip floats himself back toward his seat shaking with confusion.

  This simply can’t be happening!

  He grabs the mouthpiece on his headset and begins calling for help in a higher-pitched voice than his own, before recalling that he has to press something to transmit outside the spacecraft. A switch, a button, something he was never supposed to need. Where the hell is it? He scrambles around the side of his armrest and finds it, stabbing at it and calling again.

  “Mission Control, ah, Intrepid. Emergency! Mayday! Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! I have a big problem!”

  A big problem? What a pitiful understatement, he thinks, as he waits for the response. A big problem would be an astronaut with an upset stomach.

  “Mission Control…ASA Mojave…somebody…please come in. This is Intrepid. We have a big fucking problem up here!”

  Nice touch, he thinks, adding a guilty feeling to his growing résumé of horrors. My first communication from space and it’s the “F” word.

  Between checking to make sure he’s really pushing the transmit button and boosting the volume control to hear the response that isn’t coming, a small lifetime passes—accompanied by the mental buzz of what has to be his sky-high blood pressure pounding through his brain.

  He looks out the window, recognizing the Arabian desert moving by smartly beneath, realizing he’s as isolated now as if he was sitting without a radio or water in some trackless sand dune three hundred ten miles below. No, he isn’t working the radios wrong. The radios just aren’t working.

  So now what?

  The frantic calls stop and Kip forces himself away from his seat and backward to the far right-hand corner of the tiny compartment, as if a wider angle view will illuminate the big picture at last, showing him the passage back to the place he was before.

  Which was newly on orbit. Happy as hell! Privileged.

  The luckiest guy in the world! he recalls thinking, mocking his own words of minutes before. From a lifelong dream to the worst nightmare in record time. The irony is almost funny.

  There’s a handhold near the corner of the compartment where he’s hovering and he grips it tightly now, his eyes on his deceased companion, his mind still slogging through the beginnings of a deep denial that’s already being challenged by something vaguely remembered from the previous two weeks in training. Something about emergencies. Something about going to the laminated checklist.

  Yes! Get the checklist!

  But which one? He can’t recall any checklist labeled IN CASE YOUR ASTRONAUT/PILOT IS KILLED BY A SPACE ROCK!

  The checklists and detailed procedures, they’d been taught, are all contained in the master computer screen in front of the pilot. But there are physical versions—laminated duplicates—stored in a side compartment and Kip launches his body in that direction, coming in too fast again and thudding into the sidewall. He works the latch and yanks out the bound stack of pages, rifling through them far too rapidly, his thoughts near hysterical and his hands shaking too much to focus on what he’s looking for.

  Calm down! he tells himself, the command having little effect. Somewhere in these pages is a solution. He can feel it. But where?

  He finds procedures for dealing with loss of oxygen pressure, failures of this or that instrument, and flight-control-system problems, and he finally seizes on one dealing with radio failure, ripping the pages back and forth as he tries to focus and deal with the information a step at a time.

  No, dammit! Not the right one!

  More page turning. He’s aware that Saudi Arabia has slipped away and he’s approaching the Indian subcontinent, flying over the Persian Gulf. Geography has always been a love, but there’s no time now to do anything but take note. Whatever he has to do to get help…

  For the first time since whatever object it was smashed through his world, Kip stops himself. His hands are still shaking, his heart racing, but his thoughts turn to a very obvious reality. There is no help! Even if he gets the radios working, physically no one can come up here and bring him home, because it’s been made very clear that none of the governmental space agencies will lift a finger for a private space adventure.

  Even NASA will ignore him.

  No, he decides, he knows what he’s got to look for now. If he can’t reestablish contact with the ground, then it’s up to him to do the same things Bill would do—throw the same switches he would throw—drop them out of orbit at the appointed time. And there has to be at least some time to figure it out. They haven’t even completed one orbit.

  We’re supposed to come down after four orbits. A bit less than six hours from now.

  He’s breathing rapidly and he wonders if he’ll deplete all the oxygen if he keeps it up.

  But Bill isn’t breathing at all anymore, so he’s got double whatever they’d have had together. In any event there should be enough for six hours.

  Also, he thinks, the electrical circuits are still on. The panel’s still functioning. Lights and a heater are keeping him warm.

  He looks forward, searching for the point of entry and finds it at last, just below the command window frame and forward, one of the few places something could have come through without exploding the glass and plastic forward window. Whatever it was blew out through the back wall and into the equipment bay behind them, where it either stopped or left the spacecraft. And the automatic layer of sticky sealant has obviously worked. He can hear no hissing, no obvious loss of air pressure.

  He worries for just a moment about any other unseen, undetected damage back there, back where the engine and fuel tanks are located. But if there was damage to the fuel, wouldn’t he be dead now? Wouldn’t there at least be flashing red alerts all over the elaborate liquid crystal displays?

  They show nothing, and he finds the fuel status selection and does his best to read the fact that as predicted, half the fuel remains and is safe a few feet behind him.

  Once again he starts pawing through the checklists, selecting the ones on communication failure and reading carefully down each category, checking circuit breakers when he can find them and changing settings, each time expecting to hear the comforting voice of the controller back in Mojave.

  But the headset remains silent.

  He’s ignoring the floating remnants of Bill’s spilled blood he hasn’t been able to mop up with a series of tissues—just as he’s forcing himself not to think about having to cover the astronaut’s leaking head with a thin silver, mylar blanket before pulling his body out of the command chair. What was Bill Campbell is now a macabre hooded form tied to the back wall of the small cabin while the capsule’s only living occupant sits in front of the panel searching desperately for a way to talk to the planet below.

  And with Sri Lanka and the east coast of India sliding by beneath him, Kip finally exhales and sits back in the assaulted command chair, letting the checklists float listlessly in front of him as he struggles through the cobwebs of his panic and pulls the last curtain of denial aside.

  Dear God, I am alone up here. And I’ve got five hours to learn how to get myself ba
ck.

  Chapter 6

  ASA MISSION CONTROL, MOJAVE INTERNATIONAL

  AEROSPACE PORT, MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA, MAY 17, 8:53 A.M. PACIFIC

  The whine of jet engines filters into the stunned silence of the soundinsulated control room. Smoking has never been permitted here, but several occupants are wishing for an exemption. The level of tension is palpable.

  Outside on the ramp, the Lockheed 1011 named Deliverance is returning to her parking spot, one hundred and fifty thousand pounds lighter—her missing appendage now halfway around the planet.

  Video and audio feeds carry what’s happening inside the computer-rich mission control room, but the TV images are going only to the Internet and a bank of digital recorders, since no news organizations have requested them. With few exceptions, the world is neither watching nor listening.

  Here the response to what at first seemed a momentary communications glitch has become disordered, adrift, the assembled professionals milling around like a troop of actors who’ve run off the end of their script. They stand and look back and forth, consulting their monitors and each other for answers to questions they’re having trouble even phrasing. Ultimately, all eyes migrate to one man.

  Arleigh Kerr stands at the flight director’s console, searching the faces of the eighteen men and women arrayed before him for signs of deliverance. A veteran of the same sort of control room at NASA in Houston, his thinning hair and angular features on a six-foot frame are well known in spaceflight circles. An admirer of NASA’s unflappable Deke Slayton, Kerr is working hard now to find a way to stay the calm leader, the man with the answers—but he, too, is floundering.

  Intrepid achieved exactly the orbit planned for it, and they all know exactly where the ship is at the moment. What they don’t know is why virtually every communications circuit in the ship could have failed simultaneously.

  It’s like someone yanked a plug from the wall up there, he thinks to himself, embarrassed at the simplicity of the simile.

  “Arleigh, we’re cued up on the rerun of the last thirty seconds of telemetry,” one of his engineers is saying in his ear.

  “You have something?”

  “Not sure. You want to punch it up on your monitor?”

  He nods before remembering to reply.

  “Yeah. Channel Twelve. Got it.”

  “Okay, Arleigh, watch parameters forty-eight and ninety-six. I’ve highlighted them. Forty-eight is capsule atmospheric pressure. Ninety-six is internal structure vibration monitor.”

  The graphed lines crawl across the screen in routine manner until one second before the communication link ends.

  “There, Arleigh. See that? Pressure drop at the same moment we’ve got a loud vibration, like a noise in a multiple of frequencies.”

  “I see it,” he says. “But what does it mean?”

  “Stand by. We’re coming to you,” the engineer replies, and in a few seconds, four of them are arrayed around the flight director, their faces ashen.

  “What? What?” Arleigh demands.

  “We think we may have lost a pressure seal. Explosively. Pressure drop, vibration—probably a loud noise—then nothing.”

  “But why no radios? Why no telemetry?” Arleigh asks, his irritation leaking into his resolve of steady leadership. “Even if we’ve lost Bill and his passenger, how can a blown seal have knocked out all communications? They don’t need to be…alive…for the telemetry to keep working.”

  Glances are exchanged before their eyes return to him.

  “The other possibility, Arleigh, is that we collided with something.”

  The thought had haunted him.

  “Collided with what? We did all the usual NORAD checks before launch and we’re live online with them right now for any space junk updates. There’s nothing out there.”

  “That they know about,” one of the men corrects, looking sheepish and bracing for the defensive retort he expects.

  But Arleigh feels already defeated. They’ve voiced the ultimate heresy: no routine or noncatastrophic explanation for losing all the comm circuits at once. The lump in his throat is growing.

  “We have a handheld Iridium phone up there, right?” Arleigh asks. “We’ve checked it? We’ve called it?”

  The Iridium satellite phone has its own battery. For a spacecraft, it’s a low-tech backup that should have worked if Bill Campbell had lost all other means of communicating.

  “Yes, we called it,” is the reply. “And we checked with Iridium’s control center. There’s zero indication Bill has pulled it out. Which…may indicate he can’t.”

  Arleigh Kerr surveys their faces, seeing they all share the same horrific vision. He turns to Ian McIver, another NASA veteran.

  “See if you can get one of NASA’s high-powered cameras to look at him during the Australian transit. Let’s see if we can confirm Intrepid is intact.”

  “I’ll have to scramble,” Ian says, already doing just that.

  “And the rest of you rerun the tapes and see if there’s any indication of anything out of the ordinary before that last second. Some parameter going south we didn’t catch.”

  “We’re getting NORAD involved to look at their debris tracks just before signal loss, too.”

  “Good.”

  “Arleigh, you are going to call general quarters, aren’t you? Bring in Mr. DiFazio?”

  Arleigh is already nodding, the act of alerting the company’s chairman a painful call he made less than ten minutes ago.

  “He’s out of bed and on the way.”

  No point in discussing Intrepid’s inability to automatically take itself out of orbit. From the first they’ve taught their passengers in ground school how to do the deorbiting job themselves in the event an astronaut dies, but it was complicated and never supposed to be necessary, since all the commands can be sent by remote and Intrepid can even be flown down to a safe landing remotely. The arguments they’ve had over the terrible things that could go wrong with a civilian at the controls still haunt them, disasters like spinning off into deep space or thrusting into an immediately incinerated reentry, or managing to slow and descend only to crash on landing from lack of pilot skills. The argument for a minimum of two astronauts on each flight had even worried the Federal Aviation Administration—until Congress swatted the FAA and decided that the word “aviation” did not include the word “space.”

  So the ability to remote-control everything aboard Intrepid was their ace in the hole, but an ability that depended on the communications links working. The idea that they could all go down at once is one nightmare they’d never fully faced.

  And now?

  Arleigh picks up the phone and punches in the cell number of ASA’s chairman and CEO, who is racing north from Lancaster in his car.

  “Any change, Arleigh?” Richard DiFazio asks.

  “No, sir. The bottom line is, we have zero communication, no ability to remote control, and no knowledge of whether either of our two people up there is conscious…or even alive.”

  “Keep the lid on this. I’m ten minutes out.”

  “We do need to ask NASA for help. I…already gave the order to do so.”

  “Oh God! That will go straight to Geoff Shear.”

  “Sir…”

  “I know, I know. It’s okay. Do what you have to do.”

  OFFICE OF THE ADMINISTRATOR, NASA HEADQUARTERS,

  WASHINGTON, D.C., 9:10 A.M. PACIFIC/12:10 P.M. EASTERN

  When the administrator of NASA calls an emergency meeting of his senior staff with outlying members suddenly yanked from their offices and piped in by video teleconference, the entire neural network of NASA begins to vibrate.

  That pleases Geoff Shear.

  He enters the conference room next to his office and sits surveying the faces around the table and those on screen from Houston and the Cape. There are several large liquid crystal screens on the far wall, each bearing the NASA logo, which now dissolve into various images.

  “So ASA wants us to l
ook at their spacecraft,” he begins. “Why? Are they in trouble?” Geoff is working to control his expression, keep it serious and concerned, but no one carrying a NASA badge in the Beltway is unaware of the personal war of Geoffrey Shear, and Providence has just handed him a gift he dare not acknowledge.

  One of the managers at Johnson in Houston answers.

  “Yes, sir. They’ve lost all their communications.”

  “Telemetry, too?” Geoff asks.

  “We can’t pick it up if anything’s coming down. All their comm links went dark as soon as they arrived on orbit.”

  “Have we visually looked at them?”

  Heads nod and there’s a sudden switch to a videotape of the spacecraft in flight, a fuzzy, indistinct image shot with an incredibly long lens from a ground station in western Australia.

  “So what am I seeing?” Geoff asks, leaning forward.

  “The craft appears intact, and we’re reading livable heat on the other side of the windows. That could be just the window heaters we’re detecting, but most likely she’s still pressurized and survivable. We don’t see any visible damage, but…there’s this.”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “Ed Rogers from Houston.”

  The picture changes to a composite of black and white imagery and what appears to be a digital radar display.

  “What am I looking at?” Shear demands.

  The same voice responds.

  “This is from NORAD’s array, just as ASA’s ship reached orbit. This is about a minute and a half after engine cutout. I’m going to go frame by frame here, because we have just two radar hits on what appears to be a very small object approaching very, very rapidly from in front of the craft, then one single radar hit of it on the backside, in a slightly different trajectory. At the same point, on the visual image, there’s a small burst of light that might indicate ejected debris aft of the capsule corresponding with the backside trajectory.”

  “And in English, Dr. Rogers?”

  “We think they got nailed by something NORAD wasn’t tracking.”

  “And that’s where the radios went?”