Orbit

by John J. Nance

  “And if you were to bet?” Richard asks.

  “I wouldn’t. Not on this.”

  KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA,

  5:05 P.M. PACIFIC/8:05 P.M. EASTERN

  There are times, Griggs Hopewell thinks, when he can almost recapture that old feeling of NASA invulnerability, those heady days when there was nothing they couldn’t do.

  It is night again at the Cape, the night before the launch, the frenetic preparations beginning to pay off, despite the delays. John Kent has gone to sleep for a few hours, but even he’s feeling better about the prospects, and the crew is anxious to go, as most of them always are.

  Griggs stands in the heavy night air, swatting at an occasional mosquito as he looks at the shuttle lit up so spectacularly a mile away. The morning he knows will be a challenge. He’s aware that Miss Dorothy from D.C. has not given up, and thwarting her will take a masterful effort, the main thrust of which is just about to begin.

  On schedule his cell phone rings and he answers with a quick flipping motion of his right hand.

  “Yes?”

  “Okay, we’ve got what we came for.”

  “Anything overt?”

  “Not yet. If she’s got a specific plan, it’s buried in what we found, but there are some very interesting names in the database on her laptop.”

  “I’ll meet you in ten minutes as planned.”

  He closes the phone, disgusted that he has to play cat and mouse the evening before a launch, just to be able to launch. But if Dorothy Sheehan makes the mistake he expects, she’ll be facing criminal charges—the one element of leverage that may get Shear into another line of work.

  Chapter 33

  ABOARD INTREPID, MAY 20, 6:00 P.M. PACIFIC

  Kip sniffs the air again, fearful of confirming what his senses perceive.

  And yes, it is there. Faint, but there, and where there is some smelly evidence of the process of decomposition, there will be more.

  He’s stopped typing, aware that his fanciful life story rewrite has wobbled too far afield. It’s not even a good fantasy, and it feels so narcissistic. No, he decides, he should be writing about something else, maybe how he wishes the world was, rather than how rich or famous he’d like to be.

  Well, not famous. That’s never turned him on, though now he supposes he’ll be a tiny footnote in space history: “First contest-winning space tourist dies in orbit.”

  With the odor, he can’t get Bill out of his mind. Of course he’s going to run out of breathable air anyway, but why hurry the moment?

  Now, for some incomprehensible reason, he’s compelled to turn around and actually look at the bagged corpse as it floats Velcroed to the back wall.

  What, he might have gone out for a stroll? Kip chides himself. How dumb that he has to actually look. But he had to.

  Okay, there’s the space suit idea. Put him in it and seal it, but now it’s far too late for that.

  He’s read about the hatch and the airlock now, and knows what he didn’t understand before: This isn’t like a Hollywood movie where the hero can pull a handle and blow anything in the airlock into space. Someone live has to be inside the airlock to work the outer door. So that leaves him getting into Campbell’s space suit, completely depressurizing the ship, opening both doors and floating Bill out, since there isn’t room for two of them in the lock. He’s tried to calculate how many hours of air would be lost, but he can’t find the formula. At least he’d have the air pack on the suit, but when that ran out, he might have nothing.

  So, I sit here and die with a stench, or just die faster in clean air. Wonderful choice.

  So far it isn’t that bad, though, he thinks. He has just a little over twenty-four hours anyway, according to his best calculation. So perhaps it won’t matter.

  To be on the safe side, he carefully hauls the sealed space-suit pack out of the side locker along with the helmet and opens it up, spreading it out and trying to remember the steps they’d been taught on what to don first.

  Just in case, he thinks, putting the suit aside and returning to the keyboard. Just in case.

  For minutes he sits quietly, listening to the hiss of the air recirculation system that is now less than a day from betraying him, and thinking about the idealized “life” he’s constructed in words. He’s tried to make it work in his mind as well. Bianca, his Brazilian wife who never was, not only loved him and couldn’t wait for him to come home, she was the woman who was at his side in everything, personal and professional, willing to advise him and even counter him when he headed down the wrong track, but as loving and as caring for him as he was for her.

  I think so many men forget, or maybe never know, the basics of how a woman’s mind works, which begins and often ends with the simple desire to be loved and cherished and not taken for granted. Expressions of love, tenderness, caring, attention, and appreciation are things we men want, so why do we forget that our ladies do, too? Yes, it’s true that as a rule women give sex to get love, while men give love to get sex, but once the contract is struck, it should be kept, even if it’s that basic.

  He stops, thinking about Sharon, recognizing that the failures were not all hers, that he could have done so much better, even when he realized how self-absorbed and high maintenance she was.

  Too bad, he thinks, I’ll never have the chance to put what I’ve learned into action.

  He leans into the keyboard again.

  Anyway, with Bianca, I had never even imagined that kind of relationship, where you just long to be with each other.

  Okay, look…I have a confession to make, future reader. I did have a previous life, but I deleted it. There was no Bianca. It’s all my confused dream, my ideal, of what I would have liked my life to be like. I erased the real one because I wanted something better and more exciting, something filled with accomplishment, and I don’t want to go back now and remember—except for my kids, whom I love. My real kids. Jerrod, my firstborn, Julie, and my twins, Carly and Carrie. More than anything else about my life, I miss them the most. All of them.

  True, I did make myself a well-known artist. But why did I stop there? I could have decided to make myself a king or a dictator or a Bill Gates billionaire—someone else rich and spectacular. But suddenly I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever I decide to be, I’m still me, regardless of the trappings, the money, the position, and all the education in the world. I think who we are remains the same, and I think inside each one of us is a little child who won’t tell the adult in us what’s wrong. I’m sure there’s a little girl in every woman and a little boy in every man. And very often that little child is still very upset over something that happened so far back he can’t recall the details, only the hurt. So I think in this “new” life of mine, what I tried to palm off on you had everything to do with that little boy in me and what he’s upset about, not Sharon, or even Lucy’s loss.

  No, I think in the time I have remaining, which isn’t much now, if I could, I’d call my only sibling, my younger sister, and just tell her I love her. She’s down there, and I can almost see her with every pass, doing that ear tugging thing she’s done since childhood. But I can’t reach her now. It’s too late, and life’s been happening for two years without contact, and even the last time I talked with her, we were still so very much at arm’s length and…Dadlike. No “I love you’s.” My father never used the phrase. Phrases like that embarrassed him.

  When I was born, Dad was forty-one. So many years later, here he was an infirm eighty-something, couldn’t take care of himself, and Mom was gone, so I had to act. I found a good retirement facility; I knew he hated it but he went quietly and I sold the house. I was very efficient and took a month off to get everything done. I thought he’d appreciate that—the efficiency. And once I’d made sure everything was okay, I said good-bye. With a handshake, the way he always dealt with me. I was just south in Tucson and I intended to come by at least every month—he was just a couple of hours up the road in Phoenix. But something always
came up, and when I’d try to call too late at night, I’d get a small lecture from the night nurse. I didn’t like that, so I used it as a license to stop calling. So life slipped by and one night when I was lamenting the lack of open expressions of love in my family, I decided to go see him and tell him I loved him, words that had never been spoken between us. The decision made me feel good. I was going to take the time because I could never seem to find the right moment to call, and because he was getting very old and frail. I started looking for the right opportunity—which really means that I started making excuses why I didn’t have the time. I was still playing that game when word came that he’d died. Alone. Just up the road.

  Every time this spacecraft soars over Phoenix I think about him. All those years, and I could never just call and say, “Hey, Dad, you know what? You don’t have to say anything, but I love you.”

  TERRA-NET CORPORATION, NORTH AMERICAN NETWORK

  CONTROL CENTER, PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA,

  7:45 P.M. PACIFIC/10:45 P.M. EASTERN

  The unique three-dimensional display in the middle of the circular command center is beginning to change, but only one technician sees it. The colored lines representing ground, tower, satellite, and fiber-optic connections across a quarter of the globe are shifting from green, the color of routine voice traffic, to yellow, orange, red, the colors of increased bandwidth utilization, the telltale indication that perhaps as many as a million people more than normal suddenly picked up their phones for a long distance call.

  The technician keeps his eyes on the plasma display as he flails his right hand for the attention of the shift supervisor, whose eyes also go to the display. Both men stand in puzzled silence as a third checks with another major telephonic network, discovering the same sudden jump in activity there.

  “Globecomm reports the same increase, including overseas traffic, and three of the cellular networks report the same. In fact, there are indications this is happening worldwide.”

  More of the personnel in the control center join the head-scratching as they monitor the automatic rerouting of call overloads. Landlines that are normally standby-only have snapped into use, some routing through the old, almost decommissioned, AT&T land-based microwave system that first telephonically united the country in the nineteen fifties.

  A young woman with pulled back hair and thick glasses leaves her position several tiers back and comes up quietly behind the supervisor, a laptop computer in her hands.

  “I know what’s causing this. I just called my mother, too.”

  “’Scuse me?” the supervisor says. “Everyone’s calling your mother?”

  “No. Everyone’s calling someone they should have called long ago. It’s Kip Dawson, and what he just said.” She turns the laptop around so the team can read the words on the screen—as ten more trunk lines go red and a routing overload alarm sounds off somewhere in the command center.

  Chapter 34

  KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA, MAY 21,

  5:00 A.M. PACIFIC/8:00 A.M. EASTERN

  Once the “Enter” key is pressed, she knows there will be no going back.

  Dorothy Sheehan thinks over the steps again, restraining herself from sending the benign bit of computer code into the system until she’s as certain as she can be that all bases are covered. The entire assignment has been an exhilarating contest of wills, a shadow fight between Griggs Hopewell and herself, but she’s thinking ahead to the good life to follow in the Beltway, with only an office job and real weekends to herself. Of course maybe she won’t be happy unless she’s walking a tightrope somewhere. Her years with the CIA were terrifying and wonderful at the same time, mainly wonderful because she never ended up caught or compromised.

  Okay. Here goes.

  Amazing, she thinks, how the tiny click of a key can be the beginning of a causal chain that blocks a billion-dollar launch. She waits for the tiny string of computer code to add itself to the appropriate program and gets the return message before signing off and shutting down. If it works as planned, the minute alteration will disrupt things just long enough to scrub the launch, the code alteration then disappearing.

  At least, in theory that’s the way it should go. And if it does, Geoff Shear will have to follow through on his promises.

  Dorothy carefully wipes off the keyboard and anything she’s touched before moving back to the door of the empty office, one she selected some days before on learning the normal occupant was out of town.

  She thinks back to the close call last night and the wisdom of always figuring out from the outside of a hotel which is her window and checking for lights when she comes back. Otherwise she would have walked right in on whomever Hopewell had sent to search her laptop. There was nothing to find, of course, and she hadn’t planned to use it for a mainframe insertion, anyway. Much too risky, and for the past forty-eight hours she’s hoped that one or more of the legitimate problems she’s found can be accelerated into an aborted launch.

  But she’s found that Griggs Hopewell comes by his can-do reputation honestly, and item by item, problem by problem, he’s kept working his magic and driving his team, four hours before liftoff, with everything still a go.

  She waits with the office door cracked slightly until she’s sure the hallway is clear, then slips out. Her temporary office in an adjacent building is sufficient for monitoring what’s happening, but its computer terminal absolutely can’t be used outside the boundaries.

  Dorothy chuckles at the thought of the people waiting right now to catch her computer’s numeric signature entering the mainframe. They’ll be waiting in vain, of course, but their trap was cleverly laid, and when she got bored enough to go look for it on the mainframe, she almost didn’t find it.

  She checks her watch—8:12 A.M. Eastern. The slightly delayed Chinese launch should be happening right now. She knows Shear will be calling the President for permission to scrub the second someone else achieves orbit, and if so, the little adjustment she made may never even make an appearance before it evaporates.

  The possibility that Hopewell and company might somehow defeat her, or worse, catch her in the act, is unfortunately part of the game. And she fears that if she gets in trouble, Shear will turn on her completely and play mister innocent while she twists in the wind.

  But that’s not going to happen, Dorothy thinks. All my bases are covered. And besides, I’m not forcing anyone to make a no-go launch decision. I’m just helping them with their rationale, and saving the nation one hell of a lot of money in the process.

  ABOARD INTREPID, 6:03 A.M. PACIFIC

  For perhaps the first time since his voyage began, Kip wakes up without falling.

  He is falling, of course—continuously around the planet—his Newtonian tendency to travel in a straight line continuously warped into an orbital curve by the centripetal force of gravity pulling him down at the same rate inertia tries to take him straight on into space.

  Kip rubs his eyes, aware he’s getting comfortable with his weightlessness, this feeling of floating. He lets some of the explanations from high school physics replay until he’s jarred back to reality.

  Oh my God, this is day five, isn’t it?

  According to the scrubber charts—and he’s checked them dozens of times—there can’t be a day six.

  The panic buzzing in his head is almost overwhelming and he closes his eyes, trying to fight back hysteria. The fifth day is no longer an inestimable series of sunrises and sunsets in the future. It’s today. Sometime in the next twenty-four hours it ends.

  And so does he.

  I’m going to die today, Kip tells himself, but the words in his head aren’t believable enough, so he speaks them out loud, having to clear his throat to finish.

  “I’m going to…I’m going to die today. So, what do I think about that?”

  Reality sucks, is what I think! But there’s no humor in a line that usually makes him chuckle.

  I thought I was resigned to this. I thought I was ready.

>   But if so, why are his hands shaking? He’s known for four days he wasn’t going to make it, but facing it now overwhelms him.

  He forces a deep breath, suddenly remembering he should carefully sample the air first. But either the odor from Bill’s decomposing remains has abated or he’s become used to it. In any event he thinks he can last the day now without a spacewalk. After all, he thinks, a spacewalk would be a very dangerous thing to try.

  Wait a minute! Dangerous? Jesus!

  He’s actually embarrassed that he’s sitting here with hours left to live and worrying that a spacewalk might be an unsafe thing to do.

  So what if it’s dangerous? I could play with matches today, run with scissors, insult a serial killer, or rat on the mafia with complete impunity!

  At least he’s coaxed a chuckle out of himself.

  He’s read that death row inmates, no matter how brazen and sociopathic, lose their bravado just before execution, and he sees why. It’s not hypothetical anymore. Leaving this life and this body is about to be his new reality. Every human’s fear of what lies on the other side drowns all the neat Biblical assurances in a tsunami of doubt.

  Kip works to control his breathing, which has become fast and shallow. He feels his heart rate declining.

  This is my last chance to say whatever I want to say, he thinks. He’s typed so much—hundreds of pages if he includes what he erased—he needs to go back and read it. But there’s no time.

  What happens, he wonders, when scrubbers saturate? Will he just suddenly feel light-headed? Will he keel over? Or will it be long and agonizing?

  He catches sight of the unfolded emergency space suit floating near Bill’s bagged remains and wonders why the idea of putting it on and going outside is tugging at him. Should he do it to die out there? Would it be any easier?

  No, something else, some reason that he almost recalls from a dream and can’t put his finger on.