The Glass Lady

by Douglas Savage

  “Runnin’ in direct, Flight,” Enright called as he switched first to SHOULDER-YAW.

  Enright steered the upper arm which slowly moved from its shoulder joint affixed to Shuttle in the direction of the far diagonal end of the cargo bay on the starboard side. Parker at Enright’s left watched the drooping wrist move outside his aft window.

  “Two feet per second, Flight.”

  “We see it, Jack. Super view down here of the thermal blankets from the wrist camera.”

  “EEU at X0 equals 941 inches,” Enright radioed as the parameter dial confirmed that the end effector was at the center point of the bay’s length.

  Switching to ELBOW, Enright flicked the toggle switch which commanded the forearm of the RMS to reach toward the bay’s far end. As Endeavor sped over eastern Australia in pre-dawn darkness, the 278-inch-long forearm slowly maneuvered toward the aft bay area outside Parker’s window.

  When a tail thruster automatically thumped once to hold Shuttle’s attitude, the arm oscillated very slightly. The joint motors in their safing mode momentarily locked the arm in place until the vibration through the arm stopped.

  With the upper arm and forearm nearly horizontal, Enright switched to WRIST-PITCH and the toggle switch sent the EEU reaching for the bay’s far corner.

  A yellow SINGULARITY caution light flashed on the control panel. The arm could reach no further.

  “Okay, Flight,” Enright radioed. “We’re at reach envelope. The EEU is stopped at X0 equals plus 1,159 inches, Y0 at plus 82 point 5, and Z0 is at plus 444 inches. Good clearance around the OSS pallet back there.”

  “We see it, Jack. We’re looking via the wrist camera right into the eye of the aft bulkhead TV camera. Get on to approaching the PDP package. Forget about keel Two. We’re only with you another minute.”

  “Rog. Goin’ to manual backup.”

  The fifth and final RMS steering mode is the totally manual, eyeballs-only mechanism. The arm is flown by an entirely separate hard wire system isolated from all other arm circuits. There is no computer help, not even from the digital position meters. It is a pilot’s job.

  “Backup engaged,” Enright advised as he used his left hand to control the joint-selector knob and the command toggle switch. Although the other semi-manual modes all use the same joint-selector knob and command toggle switch, manual backup operation has its own of both, totally separate from any other RMS circuitry. The isolated controls are at the lower left corner of the chest-high Canadian console.

  Steering the arm one joint at a time, Enright guided it toward the payload package in the rear third of the bay. He steered the arm toward the Office of Space Science (OSS) pallet bolted to the bay’s floor as Parker spotted for him out his starboard window. “Up . . . Up . . . Easy, Jack . . . Wrist left . . . Elbow down . . . Easy.” As the command pilot called out the steering commands, Enright’s busy hands complied. His eyes darted from window to television to window.

  “You’re about over the edge, guys, at 02 plus 37. Next contact in 18 minutes via Hawaii. Sunrise in 10. Good . . .”

  “Copy, Australia” the taller airman drawled. “Peace and quiet at last, Number One,” he sighed into the voice-activated intercom.

  “With you on that one, Skipper. Goin’ to manual-augmented . . . Let Mother help.”

  “Okay, Jack.”

  Endeavor, Soyuz ever silent, and LACE rolling peacefully in the glare of the lights from Soyuz, all crossed the Australian eastern coastline at Brisbane for the dark South Pacific. “Looky there, Skip,” Enright called with excitement as he pointed out his window toward Endeavor’s tail. “Think I saw the glow. Let’s kill the bay floods, just for a second.”

  “Think so? Okay, Jack.”

  Enright’s left hand threw the six switches which extinguished the bay’s floodlights. The payload bay went black, the perfect moist blackness of the nighttime South Pacific. The RMS arm was parked a foot above the OSS pallet.

  “Gawd,” Parker breathed. “Good eye, Jack. Incredible.”

  The fliers were transfixed at their aft windows.

  Outside, Endeavor’s tail and the bulbous protrusions of the OMS pods glowed orange. A fluorescent orange glow, like a neon sign flashing “eat” bathed Shuttle’s back end. The strange glow was first reported by Shuttle Three in April 1982. On Shuttle’s body, high altitude atoms of oxygen struck the ship in the nearly perfect vacuum of near-Earth space. At Shuttle’s velocity of 17,500 miles per hour, the occasional stray atoms of oxygen 130 nautical miles aloft hit the vehicle so hard that their energy caused the ionic orange glow visible only in darkness. The tail shimmered in the eerie and ghostly glow. A crusty old sailor before the mast would have called it St. Elmo’s Fire.

  “Amazing, Number One. But let’s hit the floods and get the PDP out. Wanna see what LACE is sweating out.”

  Enright nodded and revived the bay’s arc lights one at a time. The arm still hung motionless where it had been parked.

  As Endeavor sped over the dark South Pacific toward the New Hebrides Islands 1,200 miles and four flying minutes away, Colonel Parker floated at Enright’s left side. The AC’s left boot was anchored to a foot restraint on the flightdeck floor. His right foot was cocked behind his left ankle. With his weightless legs flexed at the knees, Parker had assumed the resting position of horses. Without thought, Parker stroked his painful and throbbing right leg. The knee pain radiated upward into his thigh across his groin and into his right hip. His sigh of anguish rode sufficient breath to trigger his voice-activated microphone at his lips.

  “You okay, Will?” Enright queried with both of his hands full of RMS controls.

  “Huh? . . . Right and tight, Number One . . . While you fly the arm to the plasma package, I’m goin’ to visit the biffy.”

  “Don’t fall in, Will. It’s a long way down! . . . And don’t flush until the train leaves the station.” Enright grinned behind his closed visor toward the tall pilot’s back. The AC had already pulled his plugs and floated toward the forward cockpit.

  Drifting slowly, the command pilot floated horizontally toward the six dark front windows of the cockpit. With a push from his hand upon the back of his empty front seat, Parker did a half somersault and sank headfirst down the hatchway in the floor behind his left seat.

  The weightless airman entered the dark mid-deck. He did a momentary handstand before twisting rightside up with a gentle kick on the ceiling by the square hole through which he had just floated headfirst.

  Parker steadied himself with his fingers gripping a handhold on the mid-deck wall. The glare of the flightdeck lights topside of the access hole bathed him in white light. He hovered beside the locked and sealed, side doorway of the mid-deck. Through that circular hatch, Enright and Parker had entered Endeavor three and one-half hours earlier.

  At Will Parker’s side, the hatch’s 12-inch-wide, triplepane round window was dark behind its sun filter. He braced his back against the mid-deck airlock, a floor-to-ceiling cylinder five feet wide. The airlock filled the rear section of the mid-deck. Beyond the airlock wide enough to hold two pilots was the payload bay’s lethal vacuum.

  The AC reached over his head to the instrument panel on the ceiling by the access hole. On mid-deck, Overhead Panel-M013Q, Parker flipped eight toggle switches which filled the cramped lower deck with floodlights.

  Pushing off from the airlock, Parker floated to the front end of Shuttle’s basement. On the flightdeck above, Jacob Enright still worked the RMS arm.

  At the front of the mid-deck, the AC stopped his weightless flight at the floor-to-ceiling stacks of small lockers resembling a wall of large post office boxes. He opened his personal box and peered in at floating combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and a safety razor. He retrieved a small brown bag before he closed the locker box.

  Twisting his pressure-suited body, he turned toward the rear airlock and pushed off the wall of lockers. He floated back toward the portside hatch and the ceiling hole above.

  At the portside, rea
r corner of the mid-deck, wedged tightly between the cylindrical airlock and the wall, is the waste collection system compartment—the zero gravity latrine.

  The zero-gravity biffy resembles a tiny stall from a bus station washroom.

  Parker opened the narrow metal door which revealed the unisex commode. From the open door of the small stall, Parker could have unraveled the privacy curtain which stretches from the vertical edge of the open biffy door to the galley which faces the latrine. The curtain encloses the area of the side hatch. Another curtain can be pulled from the top edge of the open stall door to be stretched overhead to block out the view from the flightdeck into the biffy from the gaping access hole in the ceiling. What the hell, Parker thought.

  Parker backed into the stall and forced his floating body down onto the commode’s saddle. He pulled a lap belt across his waist. His feet found the foot restraints which secured his boots to the floor. With Parker wearing his bulky pressure suit, the fit in the stall was tight.

  The Colonel opened the small paper sack which he had retrieved from his personal locker. A finger-size plastic hypodermic syringe floated out beside a small amber vial of fluid. He pulled off the guard cap from an inch-long, 20-gauge needle.

  Parker caught the syringe before it could float with the cabin air currents up through the ceiling hole toward the flightdeck. The sitting pilot pulled the syringe plunger out, almost to the end of the plastic syringe. With the plunger retracted, he thrust the needle into the vial’s rubber stopper. After depressing the plunger to fill the vial with air, he withdrew into the syringe an equal volume of fluid. The needle squeaked as he pulled it from the vial. He read the vial before he returned it to the crumpled sack: “Carbocaine 2% Mepivacaine HCL, veterinary equine use only.”

  Looking at the syringe, the tall airman smiled. Many times, he had trusted his life and comfort to an old, sweating horse. Now he would again. A man should ride a tall horse, he mused. Good old salt.

  After unzipping the suit’s horizontal belly zipper, he forced his hand into the bulky suit until it touched his right thigh as far as the suit would let him reach. Even through his long woolies, he could feel the heat which throbbed through his right leg from the shin upward through his groin. With his eyes closed, Parker pulled out his hand and he returned it to his thigh with the syringe.

  Parker grimaced as the needle penetrated his long johns and his thigh. He slowly injected the horse painkiller into his body.

  The sitting pilot capped the needle and returned the emptied hypo and the vial to the little sack which he stuffed into his suit pocket.

  Parker sat quietly, fully suited, secured by his seat belt to a multimillion-dollar toilet which hurtled through space at a velocity of 300 miles per minute. He removed his stuffy helmet which he parked in midair before his face.

  Slowly, the grinding pain in Parker’s right leg drew away from the airman who slouched at his post in the stall. His eyes closed lightly and the synaptic distance between the tall man and his inflamed leg grew. In a minute, his long legs were gone and his hip was gone and his lower back was gone. The lower half of the flier had gone to sleep seduced by his injection. Without thought, he hugged the handrails on either side of his hips to keep from flying away with his numb legs left behind.

  Without his helmet, the command pilot could now listen to his ship.

  As Shuttle lives, so does she breathe. The warm, dry air from liquid oxygen bottles carried the low hum of cabin fans and ducts. Hot black boxes in floors, bulkheads, and equipment bays hummed softly. From his painless and cozy metal corner, the drowsy airman imagined himself in a submarine, an iron lady sheltering his fragile manform with her warm metal heart.

  A dazzling ring of piercing white light burst around the circular frame of the hatchway’s window shade just beyond the biffy’s open door. Nine minutes and 3,000 miles past Australia’s midnight darkness, Endeavor was coasting into sunrise high above the Tokelau Islands in a dawn South Pacific. Within the starship where everything floated without weight, there was utterly no sense of motion.

  With wisps of daylight from the shaded hatch touching his numb legs, Parker opened his eyes. He looked into the sweat-stained interior of his helmet, which floated a foot from his face. He licked his strangely dry mouth and his lips which faintly tingled from the horse medicine flowing in his veins with narcotic tranquility.

  Parker locked his helmet to his suit’s neckring before he unstrapped himself from the seat which he could not feel. He pushed his weightless body from the tiny stall and he closed the metal door behind him.

  With his legs free from heat and pain, but useless, he placed his fingers on the sill of the ceiling hole and lifted himself toward the flightdeck. His left hand hit the eight switches on the mid-deck ceiling as he flew up through the hatchway. With the lights exinguished, the mid-deck was illuminated by the ring of blinding daylight leaking around the edges of the sunshade secured to the porthole in the side door.

  The faceplate on Parker’s helmet was open for breathing when he floated up into the harsh daylight of morning on the upstairs flightdeck. His legs trailed limply behind him as he slowly flew to Enright’s side at the rear of the cockpit. In zero gravity, he did not need his legs anyway.

  The copilot was busy with his manipulator controls when the AC reached his side. Enright did not notice that his captain had to crouch and use his hands to steer his feet into the floor’s foot restraints. Parker rose, connected his two air hoses to his suit, and plugged into the aft station intercom. When the AC felt the suit’s air supply against his face from the neckring vents, he closed his faceplate and visor to breathe air laced with the scent of rubber hoses and sweat.

  “About ready to send out the dogs for you, Skipper,” Enright said without moving his face from the large rear window now filled with morning daylight, LACE glinting in the ferocious sunshine, and the bulbous Soyuz.

  “Feel much better, Jack. Ready to deploy the PDP?”

  The AC glanced at the mission clock between the two square windows in the aft bulkhead adjacent the payload bay. It read “Day 00: 02 Hours: 47 Minutes: 30 Seconds, Mission Elapsed Time.”

  “Got the end effector secured to the grapple probe on the plasma package. About ready.”

  “Super, Jack.”

  Parker glanced over Enright’s right shoulder at the twin television monitors. The top screen was full of the grapple rod at the top of the package which was locked to the floor of the bay within its protective pallet.

  “Ready to deploy the PDP, Will.”

  “It’s your baby, Number One.”

  Enright rechecked the RMS panel before his chest. The small lighted windows at the upper right corner confirmed the secure capture by the end effector of the grapple handle atop the plasma diagnostics package.

  With his left hand, Enright turned the RMS mode knob to auto sequence Three and the AUTO-3 light illuminated white. The AC threw a switch to release the hold-down clamps at the base of the PDP housing. Enright flicked the spring-loaded, proceed toggle switch and Mother slowly flew the RMS arm upward.

  The 353-pound, 26-inch-long, 42-inch-diameter cylinder, built by the University of Iowa, slowly lifted out of the OSS pallet which held it. The PDP stopped at the arm’s first, automatic pause point five feet above the bay floor.

  “Looks real clean, Jack.”

  “And Mother likes it . . . Let’s fly with it, Skip. Goin’ to manual-augmented.”

  As Endeavor dashed in daylight across the Equator northeastward to begin Revolution Three at 02 hours, 51 minutes out, Enright powered up the translational hand controller for his left hand and the rotational hand controller for his right hand.

  The Aircraft Commander busied himself with the aft console for the digital autopilot making certain that the RCS thrusters held Shuttle’s trim with the nose pointing northward, perpendicular to their ground track, and with Endeavor’s belly facing east toward the rising sun. The DAP held the ship’s left wing pointed straight down toward the br
illiant sea.

  Enright, with Mother’s help, steered the end effector with the PDP attached at the far end of the 50-foot-long RMS arm. The computer raised the PDP over the bay’s left side toward LACE which rolled slowly in the blinding sunlight 30 yards away. With the RMS mode selector in manual-augmented-orbiter-loaded, the RMS gently steered the PDP toward LACE.

  “Zero point two feet per second,” Enright called as his hands worked with Mother’s silicon brain to fly the plasma-sensing package toward LACE where the PDP would sniff for LACE’s wake of radiation and electrical fields.

  The arm hoisted the plasma sensor 40 feet above the open bay. The two pilots could only watch it through the two overhead windows above their rear work station. When the arm stopped at a pause point, Enright commanded the EEU to maneuver slowly outboard until the package had been waved in the direction of the end of Shuttle’s port wingtip. From there, the arm would ferry the package over the open bay doors toward the opposite wingtip. Outside their windows and on the television screen, the pilots watched the PDP canister.

  “Endeavor, Endeavor: Colorado with you by Hawaii at 02 hours, 53 minutes. With you four minutes. Your temperatures are Go. And we’re looking at PDP data coming downlink.”

  “Mornin’, Hawaii,” the tall flier called. “What do you see from the PDP?”

  “Backroom says you’re plowing through a wall of electromagnetic garbage . . . Drop your visors immediately if they’re up.”

  The two airmen looked at each other through their laser-proof visors.

  “Garbage, Flight?” Enright inquired, pressing his mike button.

  “Like boating down the Cuyahoga in Cleveland, buddy,” the radio crackled.

  10

  “What about a magnetic wake? Why is that serious, as problems go?”

  “The best we had hoped for, Colonel, was a simple mechanical failure with LACE.” Admiral Hauch’s large frame was rumpled and exhausted. Behind him, the clock on the wall of the basement bunker read 53 minutes past noon Washington time. Beside it, a second clock face read 02:53. Beneath that clock hung the words “MISSION ELAPSED TIME, SHUTTLE.”