No point in going back inside, he figures. What a way to leave! Thank you, God, for this chance!
He can see the Gulf Coast below, along with New Orleans, and thinks fondly of the times he’s enjoyed the chicory coffee and beignets with their snowstorm of powdered sugar at Café du Monde, in spite of being ignored by the waiters.
Pensacola is visible to the east, as is Panama City, which triggers a few more memories. A line of thunderstorms is marching toward Atlanta to the north and he can see lightning flashing, noiselessly visible from space. Not as impressive as the thunderstorms he’s seen over Africa in the darkness, lightning pulsing away over a thousand miles as if the storms were communicating in bursts. But the storms near Atlanta are impressive enough.
Nothing can prepare you for the magnificence of this! he thinks, wishing he still had the laptop in front of him and the ability to share this, too, with the distant future.
He knows there’s a depressurization safety sequence to be followed in order to blow the suit when it’s time. Or he can just cut off the oxygen. But he thinks a sudden depressurization might be better and quicker. The suit has approximately an hour and a half of air, and then the options expire. So he’ll have one and a half hours to take all this in and…
Whoa, I came out here to check the tires, he recalls, pulling on the tether to rotate back toward Intrepid and move in from where he’s been floating five feet away.
He sees no indication of meteor damage near the door, so he begins pulling himself upward and over the top of the spacecraft. But there are no handholds and suddenly he’s floating up and away slowly with no choice but to pull on the tether, which starts him back toward the door.
Kip floats motionless by the open hatch, while he figures out how to get to the other side. As far as he can tell, there is no handheld thruster to propel him, and no handholds on the fuselage to hang on to. But he has a tether at least as long as the spacecraft, and the nose is only fifteen or so feet in front of the hatch.
Kip uses the open door as a launching pad for propelling himself along the fuselage toward the nose. He waits until he’s just abeam of the tip of the nose before looping the tether over the top of the fuselage and around like a rodeo cowboy throwing a rope. With the line now going over the top from the door and coming back to him under the chin of the nose, he tightens his grip and pulls, letting his shoulder bounce off the left side of the nose. Suddenly he’s floating back toward the door, and he uses the structure to stop himself and turn upside down before starting to pull himself around beneath the fuselage using the tether that’s now snaking over the top and around the bottom. Carefully, making sure to keep his speed and momentum as slow and controllable as possible, he comes around to the right side and finds what he’s been looking for.
A hole approximately three inches wide of flared metal and fiberglass sits just next to where an inspection panel has been blown away, providing access inside. The cavity is just behind the point where the pressure bulkhead divides the livable capsule inside from the service areas behind. He carefully touches one of the edges, closing his fingers around it to stop his drift. There are wires visible just inside. He can see a major wiring bundle slit in half by whatever hit them as it exited the side at a shallow angle.
No wonder the engine wouldn’t fire!
He stares at the damage, wondering whether to just go back, or try for a closer look.
The small tool kit in the leg pocket of his suit contains a knife and electrical tape, both on tethers of their own. Overcoming the momentary urge to just give up and return inside, he begins assembling what he thinks he’ll need as he floats to one side of the hole. He places the knife beside him and lets go, marveling at how it just sits there in mid-space gyrating slightly with each tug of the tether, its own tiny little satellite. He supposes if he disconnected it and batted it down toward Earth, it would eventually deorbit and burn up. But right now it’s obediently staying more or less where he wants it.
The severed wiring is chaotic, but as he looks more closely, he can count perhaps twenty actual wires completely cut and others merely grazed.
Okay, suppose I treat this like speaker wire? Is there color coding? Yes! Look at that! Red, orange, and green stripes go to whatever else has red, orange, and green stripes. I’ll probably run out of air before I can get them all, but what the hell.
He secures himself with his left hand, which is holding both the edge of the hole and the wire, working inside the hole and letting the knife blade bite into the insulation around the first cut wire, scraping it away neatly before finding the other end and doing the same. Twisting them together and taping off the result is incredibly awkward in the inflated gloves and the worry about slicing open his suit on the jagged edge of the hole is great, but he keeps each movement under tight control and slowly works through each of the wires, going faster as he gets more familiar with the bulky gloves.
There is intense heat from the sun’s unfiltered rays on his left side and he remembers to change position to keep from overwhelming the suit, which is getting warm inside.
The suit’s control panel is showing twenty minutes of air left by the time he finishes splicing every wire for which he can locate a mate. He folds and replaces the knife and the tape, before pulling himself back over the top to the open airlock door, where he stops to make a critical decision.
It would be so much more meaningful to die out here, he thinks. Just a button push. But, if I do, I’ll never know if the repairs have changed anything. Is there any chance the radios could be working now and I could reach someone?
And what if, somehow, he’s reconnected the rocket?
No! he cautions himself. Don’t rekindle all your hopes! No way the engine is going to light off. That requires a professional. The best I can hope for is that somehow I’ve bumped something the right way and restored space-ground communications. But as long as I’m floating here trolling for meteors, I’ll never know.
Five more minutes, Kip decides, drinking in the view as the terminator slips by below, just past the Red Sea, and he watches the glow from what he decides must be the Saudi Arabian desert city of Riyadh sitting like a twinkling, grounded star against the darkness of the desert to the east.
He knows by now that the retrofire point—should he need it—is just under an hour away, which means that even if he decides to test the rocket motor, he’ll have to wait for that window. Not that anything is going to happen.
But he does feel the tiniest glimmer of hope.
Okay, he decides. Let’s get back in, and once I’m sure nothing’s going to change, I’ll come back out and end it here.
Chapter 38
OFFICE OF THE ADMINISTRATOR, NASA HEADQUARTERS,
WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 21,
9:06 A.M. PACIFIC/12:06 P.M. EASTERN
The Russian rescue mission and the administrator of NASA go into motion at the same moment. In Russia the Soyuz spacecraft clears the Baikonaur launch pad while in the Beltway Geoff Shear is already speaking to the White House aide he’s had holding for ten minutes.
“Okay. Put him on. Quickly.”
Less than a minute goes by before the President picks up to hear that the Russians are underway.
“I urge you to let me scrub our launch, Mr. President. It’s unnecessary now.”
“How much time on our countdown, Geoff?”
“Coming up on eleven minutes, sir. We just came off the hold.”
“Geoff, I want our guys to do the job. You know that.”
“Yes, sir, but…”
“And I’ll take the heat for the additional funds, but this is the sort of mission the shuttle was supposed to be able to do. Even if we have to compete with a parking lot full of spacecraft up there I want Kip on our shuttle. And that way the poor guy doesn’t have to ride to the space station first and spend, what, ten days before coming back? I mean, he could be injured.”
“He’s not injured, sir. He’s mentioned nothing about being injured.”
“Yes, but, Mr. President, we’ve pushed everybody down there very hard to accomplish this emergency mission so we can comply with your directives, and frankly there have been all sorts of technical problems, and even though we’ve gotten past most of them…”
“When?”
“Today. During the countdown. And in the previous few days. We’re hanging it out.”
“Are you telling me the launch is unsafe?”
A contemplative silence lasts a moment too long.
“Geoff, are you saying on the record this is too dangerous? You have good reason to believe that?”
“I…don’t know for a fact that there’s any inordinate danger, more than usual, but whenever you push hard like this, things can go wrong.”
“What’s gone wrong?”
“Just a lot of computer problems and glitches and low readings. The countdown has been threatened over and over again. But it tells me…”
“But you can’t say definitively that you’re violating any safety parameters?”
“No.”
“Very well, then. We launch, Geoff. And that’s that. Get our guys up there and get Kip Dawson down safely. Clear enough?”
“Very well, Mr. President. Keep your fingers crossed.”
Geoff hangs up and sits for less than a minute, weighing the dangers of triggering what he considers his own “nuclear” option—his last chance to keep the shuttle grounded. It’s a no-brainer, he figures, and suddenly he’s pulling his cell phone from his pocket and punching up the screen to send a coded, numeric text message:
80086672876
He checks the TV monitor on his desk. Less than ten minutes. The display loses one minute before his phone beeps and the return message appears with a simple “OK.”
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA,
9:08 A.M. PACIFIC/12:08 P.M. EASTERN
Dorothy Sheehan stares at the cell phone display in disbelief, wondering if the number she’s been given as a code matches what she’s seeing.
She quickly checks a secure page in her PDA and feels a shiver when the number matches.
It’s the same!
If Shear had asked her to have a cyanide capsule embedded in a tooth against capture she wouldn’t be more surprised. The launch will be safely scrubbed, but she’ll be almost instantly traceable as the saboteur.
There’s no way she can use the computer in the office she’s been assigned, and there’s no time left to return to the vacant office and computer she was using. She snatches up her small briefcase and races to the door, confirming the hall is clear before entering and walking quickly to the far end of the corridor.
Why didn’t I prepare for this? she thinks, knowing the answer. What she’s already embedded can have no direct safety impact on the shuttle or the crew, but what Geoff Shear has just ordered could lead to a major computer shutdown just before liftoff. For the first time in days she feels her confidence ebbing away. Real fright is taking its place. This is her space program, too. It’s one thing to influence the scrubbing of a launch, and another entirely to do so at the very last second when the readings could confuse the launch crew.
The thought of just walking away and reporting there wasn’t time crosses her mind, but her deal with Shear depends on success. She knows him well. And Shear is the one charged with making the tough strategic decisions. She’s merely the operative, like carrying out the Company’s orders years ago. If she fails him on purpose, she’s second-guessing policy, as well as screwing up her own future. Besides, what he’s decided to do is keep everyone safely on the ground, and that can’t be bad.
Dorothy ducks into a stairwell, her heartbeat accelerating as she tries to think of a computer terminal she could reach in time that would leave no traces of her presence. Putting the commands into the master computer through the Internet is impossible. The NASA firewall is impenetrable. She has to use a computer connected to the main network and from inside. Shear thinks she’s preloaded everything and she should have. Dammit! She really should have!
God, that was arrogant to think I wouldn’t need it!
She glances at her watch. Just over seven minutes remain, and if she can’t insert it before T minus three, it’ll be too dangerous, both for the shuttle and for her.
Okay, think! If I use any office computer, they’ll have it traced in an hour, since I was in the same building and Griggs already knows my mission. I can’t get in from outside, and there’s no time to…wait a minute!
She tries the next three office doors, finding the third unlocked, and races to the most isolated computer terminal she can find. She brings out the laptop in her bag and starts it spinning up while she pulls on surgical gloves before making the entries in the office computer.
And within a minute she’s in, a connection established from inside to out through her laptop’s air modem.
So, I opened my own gate to the castle from inside.
The program she needs to load is a complicated string of computer language and she checks the connection, moving through the office computer’s now-breached firewall to the main NASA network, looping it around through a server to confuse where it came from.
Four minutes to go. That should be enough.
The code has to replicate over the course of at least a minute before inserting itself in the master program as a basic program patch. She takes a deep breath and hits the load button, then immediately shuts down the connection and races from the room, relieved to find the hallway empty. She returns to her assigned office and almost dives for her own office computer keyboard to type in a mundane search request, a routine act that will bear a date and time stamp and help prove that she was nowhere else when some “hacker” loaded the illicit code.
LAUNCH CONTROL, KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA,
9:13 A.M. PACIFIC/12:13 A.M. EASTERN
“Yes!”
The report from Griggs Hopewell is accompanied by a broad grin as he lowers the receiver and turns to the launch director, the report from his computer team still ringing victoriously in his ears. “Caught her red-handed monkeying with the program, and my guys stopped the program patch she tried to install.”
Cully Jones is nodding appreciatively but his eyes are on the countdown clock now ticking under two minutes while he presses his headset closer to his ear and motions Griggs to silence. “What? Which one?”
Cully leans into his screen as he triggers a series of entries before answering the reporting engineer somewhere in the room.
“Shit! I see it. Has it been steady up to now?”
Griggs punches into the same net and struggles his headset back on in time to hear the remainder of the response.
“…no problem I can see before, but it’s suddenly climbing into overpressure. The book says we’ve got a thirty-degree tolerance and we’re approaching it.”
“Go raw data and recheck it.”
“I can’t. This one doesn’t go through the same processor.”
“The readout is hardwired or telemetry?”
“That’s telemetry, Cully. Fifty psi to go and still climbing. I have a corresponding temperature rise and a pressure warning on the relief valve.”
Griggs flips through one of the manuals as fast as he can, conscious of the count reaching T minus one minute. A complicated wiring and transmission diagram opens before him and he goes directly to the circuit controlling the dangerous readings they’re discussing before turning to Jones.
“Cully, the readings go through a computer processor. Not the same one, but equally vulnerable.”
The auxiliary power units are already online and consuming the shuttle’s hydrazine fuel supplies, and there are mere moments left before the launch is committed. Although Jones’s voice is steady and controlled, the pressure he’s feeling is excruciating.
“I thought your guys stopped the interference?”
“They did,” Griggs says. “But something from before must have
slipped through. Or this is a phantom.”
“We don’t know that. We can’t assume that. I’m going to have to call a hold.”
“Yes, we do know that!” Griggs’s voice is rising in intensity. They’re out of time for this argument, but the launch window is too small for a hold. “Cully, it’s through the same basic switching equipment and equally vulnerable and this happens just suddenly? I don’t think so.”
T minus fifty-eight seconds is flashing on the screen. Everyone in the room is aware that once the countdown reaches thirty seconds the debate is over. The launch can’t be stopped. Cully Jones has all but frozen in position, his eyes on the distant screen at the front of the room, his mind racing before triggering his interphone.
“Systems, what’s your recommendation?” he asks.
“It’s out of limits. No fly.”
Griggs leans farther toward Cully, knowing he’s mere seconds from a decision, outraged that somehow Geoff Shear is about to succeed.
“I vote for go. This is a phantom problem, Cully.”
“Hold the count,” Cully orders.
“No, goddammit!”
Jones is turning now, his eyes flashing anger. “Two words, Griggs. Challenger, and Columbia. We stay conservative. You object?”
Griggs stares into the resolve in Jones’s face and shakes his head.
“No. No objection.”
Cully triggers the interphone channel. “The count is holding at T minus forty-two seconds. We have thirty seconds to decide to scrub or resume the countdown. Systems, where are we?”
Griggs can see the man stand and turn from his console two rows away, his face reflecting genuine fear.
“Pressure is out of limits, temperature approaching out of limits, and I have a report from the gantry shelter of heavy venting. We need to get the crew out, now! This is real!”
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