Pillar to the Sky

by William R. Forstchen

  “I need to see clearly,” she snapped. Victoria floated behind her, watching the cam link. Reel number three had completely seized up. Data readouts were showing there was still slack in the ribbon, as had been programmed in—another lesson based on the first wire deployment—but it would start to tense up within the hour as the downward pull of the thruster continued. A few hurried words with Kiribati and Houston. They vetoed shutting down the downward thruster: the complexity of the calculations regarding its final descent were based upon regular burns, and it would be a nightmare to try to recalculate it all if deployment stopped at this crucial stage, and might even throw the entire mission off. If their team could cut reel three free and replace it with the backup reel, they could continue as planned.

  Sanders and Malady were already out the upper hatch, and Jenna, disobeying procedures, went out as well. Hurt was already on the emergency backup reel, struggling to maneuver it into position, hook it to the wire that secured the station and the entire upper half of what had been the old tower in place, shouting for Sanders to be ready to cut reel three free and just push the damn thing out of the way while he and Malady stapled the backup reel into place and started it spinning.

  They were five minutes into the crisis when Sanders announced that the third reel was free.

  It was proof yet again that no matter how many billions might be spent on robotics, when a crisis came, nothing counted more than an astronaut on hand to take control of the situation and see it through when quite literally seconds counted.

  Victoria struggled with two entirely contradictory thoughts, wanting to cry out to the three of them that their safety came first, but knowing enough to leave this to Singh and the team outside. If reel three was cut away but the backup reel of ribbon was not securely stapled onto what had already been deployed, the entire mission would be a failure. If that happened, how could she ever go back down to earth and appeal for another year of mission time, tens of billions of dollars for replacement ribbon, and tens of billions more for future launches at a quarter of a million dollars per kilo to haul it all up to try again? The dream would die, and not even the political power of a pro-space president could overcome such a disaster when the likes of Garlin and even the lame duck Proxley were in the wings.

  And yet she wanted to scream for them to know that the clock was running and tens of billions—in fact, the entire dream for the future—was at stake. She raged inwardly that she was not out there, properly trained to put her life on the line, rather than just be in the way. Part of the ribbon could lash back, the reel itself could tear apart, and after months aloft with them, they were as dear to her as any friends she had ever had in her life.

  “God be with you and be careful,” she finally whispered over the chatter of voices as the three, with Jenna floating half inside the airlock as backup, struggled with the problem.

  “OK. I got the first staple from the backup secured,” Hurt announced, breathing hard. “Sanders, give me that damn machine. Kevin, I need a little more slack on the backup line.”

  “Rog that,” both said, and she saw on the cam unit that Sanders was handing over the automated stapler, Malady working frantically to laminate the backup reel onto the ribbon that had been deployed out.

  There was one more crew member on board, Fredericks, but within days of their arrival he had indeed gone “spacey,” and she looked over at him angrily. He was supposed to be the system maintenance expert for the station, a communications and computer expert, and a backup medic. He could be out there as well lending a hand, but instead he had just been told to stay out of the way. How he had ever become a finalist for this mission was beyond her. When he did speak to the rest of the crew prior to this crisis, it was about how many days left before he could go home.

  She wanted to shout at him get out there and help, but knew his presence would be far more of a hindrance than a help, and turned her attention away from where he simply floated near Singh, trying to look as if he were somehow helping her.

  “Getting it,” Malady announced. “Getting it. OK, cut the dead reel free. We’re getting a good connection. Hurt, just keep it steady. I need clean openings between the perforations.”

  “Doing the best I can,” Hurt gasped. “Fogging up a bit here.”

  “Just get it done.”

  “Station One”—it was Kiribati—“we’re getting a fairly good radar read. You got a bit of a backlash, a mild harmonic coming up the line from the sudden stop of deployment. Be ready for it.”

  “How we doing, Sanders?” Malady cried.

  “Ready to cut free when you are.”

  “Cut it!”

  Sanders was using nanotube-coated clippers—the sharpest tool to be found on earth or in space—and began snipping through the jammed ribbon. After several seconds of struggling, he clipped it free.

  Only seconds later the harmonic wave from the jam hit, a whiplike movement racing up the ribbon.

  The shifting ribbon just severed by Sanders cut across Hurt’s leg and, with the ever-so-dangerous ease of a filament of carbon nanotubing shifting sideways, easily slipped through his EVA suit at mid-thigh, laying it wide open, then cutting clean across the even more fragile flesh of his leg, amputating it just above the knee, then across the rest of the suit. He looked down at his severed leg tumbling off with absolute disbelief. He felt no real pain, which in those last few seconds actually surprised him. There had been gallows humor among those training to work the tower that to be cut in half by a fiber, a thousand times sharper than a razor, there would be no real pain for a moment, and by the time it did start to register you would be spaced anyhow.

  He tumbled free from the ribbon, a moment of watching in fascination as the blood pulsing from his femoral artery hit the vacuum and temperature of space, appeared to freeze into globules of red, and then “boiled” away into mist. The air of his suit rushed out—the cut was above the knee pressure cuff that had purchased precious seconds for Singh—as he drifted farther away from the ribbon, the moisture that had started to coat his faceplate freezing, then evaporating, then the air within his lungs being sucked out. There was barely time for him to gasp out, “Hey, Dad, got higher than you”—his father had been a Royal Air Force pilot—and then unconsciousness mercifully hit.

  He never saw Sanders falling away from the ribbon as well, hand gone, sliced clean away as Hurt’s leg had been. Sanders at least had enough time for a few less eloquent and far more graphic expletives.

  Between the two of them, the reel was spinning clear and free. Jenna floated up, nearly getting caught by the separated ribbon, missing it by just inches, Singh screaming a warning to her. She grabbed hold of Sanders, emergency patch already out. In those few seconds she had been forced to make a terrible decision: even though Hurt was closer, when it came to deciding whether to slam a patch onto a torn suit the diameter at mid-thigh versus Sanders losing a hand, she knew where she had some hope of doing something right.

  The patch over Sanders’s suit mushroomed outward from the pressure within. She kept a hand over it.

  “Kevin, get us the hell in!”

  Kevin carefully maneuvered, avoiding the ribbon from the replacement reel, which was spinning outward in a blur, grabbed Jenna by a leg, and pulled her across. Singh shouted another warning, but they were clear of the ribbon.

  Victoria, fully suited up, had broken the hatch open to the upper level the moment Singh announced depressurization was complete and had her own helmet on; Fredericks, stirring from his lethargy, following her. She wasn’t sure what to do next; she had never trained for this but knew enough to reach up and hold on to Sanders’s legs as he drifted down to the airlock opening, pulling him in before guiding in Jenna and then Malady.

  “Hatch closed!” Victoria shouted. “Give us pressure!”

  “Where’s Hurt?” Singh cried.

  “He’s gone” was all Jenna could say. “Now give us pressure, damn it!”

  Victoria could feel the rush of air flood
ing the upper deck, Jenna hovering over Sanders, who was cursing at just how damn stupid he was. Once near equalized, Victoria helped Jenna pull off Sanders’s helmet, then the mangled upper half of his EVA suit. Blood spilled out in a torrent, floating about. Jenna snatched an emergency first aid kit from the wall near the hatchway.

  She wrapped a tourniquet around the lower arm, clamping it down, then checked a vial of morphine. The first aid kit was designed to always be sealed and pressurized, but after more than three years, were the medications within still viable? She didn’t waste time debating, jamming the syrette into Sanders’s upper arm. Seconds later he started to relax, thank God.

  “Stupid damn mistake” was all he could say; then he looked around and asked, “Where’s Maury?”

  No one spoke, and as the morphine and shock hit, he began to drift.

  “Get him down to the lower bay,” Jenna said. “Singh is trained in this; she should be able to get the artery tied off.”

  She didn’t even bother to mention Fredericks. Singh knew what to do.

  Then she lowered her voice.

  “I pray he didn’t rupture his lungs with the rapid depressurization. We got to get him below now.”

  Checking that the lower bay was again pressurized, they gently guided him through the now open airlock, Singh angling him over to her bunk. Victoria following.

  “We got to get him back down to earth now,” Jenna said.

  “Even at maximum trajectory, that is still more than a day off,” Singh replied, not even bothering to look up at Victoria as she opened up the full emergency surgical pack and asked Victoria to hold Sanders’s arm steady, whispering reassurances to him as he floated in and out of consciousness.

  She leaned close to his face, running a finger into his mouth, asking him to breathe deeply, a look of relief, no blood indicating a rupture of his lungs … so far.

  “We get him down as quick as possible,” Victoria repeated.

  Singh looked up at Victoria.

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  A moment of silence.

  “We still need to lock that fourth reel in place.”

  My God, Victoria thought. They are looking at me to give the order to keep this mission going after what just happened. To add to the horror of it all, as she looked past Singh to the porthole in her bunk, she caught a glimpse of Hurt—fortunately for him, now dead—slowly tumbling away, end over end. She prayed that no cam unit about the ship was recording that, and if so, for the sake of common decency to his family, that someone on the ground was erasing the feed.

  No one spoke, but all eyes were on her except Singh’s; she was hunched over Sanders, trying with shaky hands to reach for the severed main artery in order to clamp it off.

  Victoria, wide-eyed, watched her at work, spared a quick glance at the partial boot that covered Singh’s foot, a victim as well of this same tower. And yet here she was still.

  “Suit up,” Malady said, breaking the silence. “Look, Victoria, I like you; you’re a helluva leader. All I ask up here, though, is that we get along, and right now you listen damn carefully to me. Singh is in command here now and I’m taking charge of the EVA. We’re hooking up the next reel, then we can stand down.”

  Fredericks, after totally freezing up on his first EVA and having to be nearly carried in by Kevin, had become increasingly withdrawn. The death of Hurt and the near death of Sanders had totally unnerved him, and Singh ordered him off the deck and back into the capsule that had brought them aloft, but even as he went up and into that unit, she carefully punched in overrides to prevent him from doing anything stupid, such as just unlatching the capsule and heading back down to earth on his own.

  Singh had to resume her post after performing emergency surgery that successfully clamped off the main and secondary arteries, and all agreed that Jenna should stay with Sanders.

  And so, under Kevin’s direction, Victoria—while her mother, Franklin, and hundreds of millions of others on the ground who looked at her more as the CEO or scientist type held their breath—was walked through the paces of becoming an EVA astronaut on the most dangerous mission ever attempted in space.

  Without a three-man team, there was no room for rotation or the least bit of rest.

  Victoria learned a surprising truth in the hours ahead. Working in zero gravity—as in the famous mission where a lone astronaut had manhandled the massive bulk of the entire Hubble Space Telescope about as if it was a toy—had looked all so easy, but it was not. Though objects might appear weightless in space, they still had mass which resisted movement. It was hard and laborious to find a stable platform to anchor oneself to while trying to staple a ribbon from one reel onto the ribbon of another. And all the while, all she had to do was look to one side and see the body of a friend slowly drifting off and Malady would openly curse at her to stay focused and get this job done.

  The first time Malady left her alone to go in and resupply on air, fuel for his small backpack, and water to keep hydrated, she did have a moment of terror. Only a few meters away, the reel was spinning out ribbon at blinding speed. The background chatter of Kiribati Control, which had taken over primary command of the final descent, kept running off the figures of descent rate and deviation from target, then suddenly, in a heart-skipping moment, reported that some space debris of unknown origin had passed within twenty meters of the ribbon.

  She cautiously held the two ribbons together as Malady stapled them. It was all strange; she had a flashback memory to the day her father was humiliated by Proxley, calling it all an absurd dream; then, only days later, they were off to Kiribati: Did I actually get airsick on a lousy helicopter ride? she wondered. She tried to force the thoughts away, to stay focused on the mission. Hours passed, the only breaks the rotations when one went back inside to replenish oxygen, get more water for hydration, eat a tasteless energy bar for food, then come back out again. The recycling and climate control unit of her EVA suit had long since overloaded; she was drenched with sweat one moment, but then if she stayed in the shadow of the space station for too long, she felt a shivering chill.

  The dreams of her parents; the years in which it was an abstraction; as she matured, went to college, learned to fly; the first internship with Franklin, which had firmly hooked her into the dream; the final words her father said to her, and then his last words to the world far below, stayed with her, and pushed her on, in spite of exhaustion beyond anything she had known before, while Kevin, indeed now a superman in her eyes, ordered her about like a roustabout on a construction crew, and she never once objected. The wisdom of keeping him up here aloft was now so clearly evident.

  And now it was coming down to this. Stapling together strips of ribbon made of carbon-60 nanotubing, then securing the other end of that last reel of ribbon to the remnants of the first tower, the long strand of wire and discarded equipment which would act as a counterweight as the ribbon, moving with the earth in its orbit, would become a rigid pathway to the stars.

  “Hold it steady, damn it,” Malady whispered, and she obeyed without question, but she did smile at such a total reversal of roles between the two of them, and respected and loved him for it.

  “Last stitch,” he finally announced. “That’s done. Now we secure the other end of the ribbon to the old wire.”

  She floated nearby, a few meters away, as he sharply cautioned her to stay well clear of the wire, which was a damn sight more dangerous. He was the one who had devised the scheme of actually weaving the wire through the perforations on the last strand of the ribbon, crosshatching it back and forth for a dozen meters, muttering to himself about his grandmother and how he never dreamed he would become a seamstress, while in the next breath explaining to Victoria what he was doing in case something went wrong as he worked the stitching—meaning that if he punctured his EVA suit, she was to take over while he made it back to the airlock because there wasn’t time to screw around with taking care of him while the ribbon was still spinning out.<
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  He finally reached the last stitching, taking the handheld unit from Victoria to “staple” a final seal across the ribbon.

  It was amazing to her even now. They were working with what her parents first dreamed of before this project existed and even now, on earth, would fetch thousands of dollars per pound, a fraction of the weight of tungsten steel or titanium alloys, and yet magnitudes stronger. The very tools they used to manipulate it had to be of the same material, otherwise it would be like trying to use a knife made of butter to cut a wire of steel. Without her father and mother, Erich and the team at NASA that nurtured them and then Franklin, would any of this exist now? She knew the answer, and knew her life was on the line at this moment if she made a mistake. And even if she did make a mistake that cost her her life, as long as the ribbon kept spinning out to its final destination … it was worth it.

  She thanked God for all of them, and for NASA as well, that in the end, resurgent, had come through for this moment, at times her comm channel whispering with some sage advice from an old astronaut, one who had worked on Hubble, of simple reassurance that she was doing just fine and to keep at it. His words were like a dream, a generation of former dreams encouraging the next, and she thanked God for it. She hoped that someday she would have the chance to shake his hand and thank him for his calming words at a moment when she did have to struggle not to panic.

  “That does it,” Kevin finally said, and then carefully reached across to grasp her hand.

  “Time to head in?” she gasped, hovering on the true edge of exhaustion.

  “Not yet. Your oxygen supply?”

  She looked at the heads-up display projected onto her faceplate.

  “Two hours ten minutes.”

  “OK, with reserve time, that still gives us an hour and forty minutes. Hand off the stapler to Jenna.”