Starfire

by Unknown

  “Go ahead, Houston,” Spin looked up, relieved. “Give you something to do down there besides watch, eh Linwood?”

  Linwood hummed thoughtfully. “Mmm, I shall be eternally—”

  “Okay, step three there,” Capcom began, “where you…Say again, Starfire?”

  “—grateful,” Linwood finished.

  “Proceed, Houston,” said Spin.

  For a quarter of a minute everybody waited for everyone else. Then Capcom resumed. “Okay, fellows, at step three, where you check that the one-twenty MS tank ISOLs-two are open, delete that, and in place of it…”

  The list was long, but for Linwood it held no surprises. He was finishing entering the changes on his checkpad when, from the corridor, the glass snout of a handheld video camera intruded into his cramped workstation.

  “And how’s the little creeper-peeper doing this morning?” asked its operator, indentifiable only by her curls.

  Linwood stared at it, momentarily nonplussed. “Are you addressing me?”

  She wasn’t. The Capcom, delayed, replied to Melinda’s question from the speakers. “That’s a very good likeness of Linwood doing his famous Basil Rathbone imitation.”

  “Roger.” Only now did Melinda speak to Linwood, but without raising her right eye from her vidcam. “Since this is for the record, I’ll demand an explanation of what’s going on here in propulsion control. Take it away, Linwood. The whole world is watching.”

  It was the sort of remark calculated to give him acute stage fright. He thought for a long moment before he began. “Essentially, as you know, a safety pressure valve in the one-twenty reaction control system—that is, the fuel supply to the steering verniers positioned at the one-hundred-and-twenty-degree position on the—”

  “Speed it up, Linwood, they’re all going to sleep.”

  “Mm, yes, certainly.” Linwood was sweating with the effort to make his explanation both succinct and accurate, but he refused to alter his deliberate pace. “The maneuvering system fuel lines are to be repatched to circumvent the failed valve, according to standard procedures developed in training in advance. When time permits, the valve can be removed and inspected, perhaps even repaired. Meanwhile, there is no deleterious effect on system operation.” He allowed himself to smile. “Indeed, it is almost comforting when this manageable sort of glitch occurs.”

  “Some comfort,” said Melinda from behind her camera.

  Linwood’s eyebrows lifted at her impropriety, but he said nothing. The world was watching.

  Melinda started to giggle. Twelve seconds later, Capcom’s chuckle came over the speakers. “That should do fine for the portable video test, Melinda.”

  Melinda let the vidcam drift away. “Don’t worry, Linwood, I’ll warn you when it’s really real.”

  As she swam away up the corridor, he shrugged and went back to work. He wasn’t bothered. Linwood had his own sense of humor, although he always had been the sort who had to have other people’s jokes explained to him. Maybe that’s why they had so much fun pulling his leg.

  Tired, but determined not to show it, Taylor Stith studied the sober faces of the tiger team assembled around his conference table. The mood in the room was mixed: an I-told you-so smirk was pasted to the faces of half of those assembled, while the others betrayed varying degrees of apprehension and resentment as they stared wearily into the depths of their Styrofoam coffee cups. The trouble had been defined, but the blame was yet to be handed out.

  On this first morning of the mission Taylor was feeling a peculiarly inverted sort of political pressure, peculiar because it was wholly self-induced. Rosie had evidently decided he was in no hurry to retire from NASA’s top spot after all, and had vehemently denied rumors to that effect, which indeed had subsided in months past. Senator Fassio had hastened to reassure Taylor that this was proof in itself of Rosie’s desire to leave, but that matters might be delayed a bit because the man was protecting his flanks against suggestions that he was being forced out. All of which left Taylor in limbo. He had to do his job as cautiously as he could—Rosie was looking over his shoulder. But he also had to do it as boldly as he dared, because Fassio was looking over his other shoulder. Wearily, Taylor reflected that keeping your ear to the ground sometimes gets you nothing but an earful of mud.

  “We’ve had all night to work on this,” he said, suppressing a yawn. “Let’s have a progress report.”

  The head of the team was a dour, gawky Minnesota Swede from the Starfire flight control planning team. He glared at Taylor from under eyebrows stiff as straw. “The majority feel it’s definitely hardware. We’ve duplicated the system, made it fail, torn it apart, rebuilt it, made it fail again.” He held up a high-pressure valve and actuator assembly, sections of its metal housing cut neatly away to reveal its inner workings. He poked into it with the tip of his pen. “This actuator has now several times failed in the open position after extended vibration at high gees. Huntsville was already alerted to this possibility following the initial flight test, and they had done some redesign, which previously tested fine.”

  “Not fine enough, apparently,” said Taylor, twisting the screws a little, for the record.

  “We might not have had this problem occur when it did, except the eight-minute high-gee initial burn in the original mission plan was extended to almost twelve.”

  “Come on, Starfire’s rated for worse punishment, Bob. Why is a crucial actuator a piece of junk?”

  “Possibly it’s more temperamental than it should be, however it’s not junk.” The engineer was miffed. “And while I don’t expect Arthur to agree with me on this”—the Swede’s eyebrows twitched in the direction of a beefy, shirt-sleeved man immediately across the table from him—“my office thinks we can document an unauthorized design change in the actuator sensors.”

  “Damn right I object to that statement,” said the man, his veined face turning the color of liver. He was the valve manufacturer’s delegate to NASA. “That part is to Marshall’s last specs. We made every requested change and no others, and I can prove it.”

  “All that comes later,” said Taylor. “I want to reach a decision before we leave this room. Do we go for repairs? Or do we scrub right now?”

  “We don’t have perfect consensus on this, but the majority don’t see any reason to abort,” said the Swede. “It’s easy to fix the stuck valve and do a little preventive maintenance on the others. The majority feel the problem will not recur. For one thing, there are no more long eighty-percent burns in the flight profile.”

  “What’s it take to do the fix?”

  “A short IVA. Pending your approval, we’ve got the procedure written up and ready to send.”

  “In a minute. I want to hear the dissents. Speak up, people.”

  “I guess I’m a dissenter,” said a woman, a bony redhead who was a hired consultant in systems analysis. “The continued failure of these particular valve types suggests a systemic etiology.”

  “Say again?”

  “A disease, if you will. Mr. Langschuld suggests we fix the valve and get on with it. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But I suspect the repeated failure has to do with more than simple vibration.”

  “Okay, what do you think it is?”

  The woman said, “I don’t know. In a system this complex, there are combinatorial possibilities. This is like having a disease where you don’t even know if it’s caused by a virus and still trying to develop a vaccine.”

  Taylor looked at her wearily. “Okay, most of them think it’s a bad valve, you think it’s…a disease, or whatever. Any other dissenters?”

  Jimmy Giles spoke into the uncomfortable silence. “I agree with Dr. Cruz, Taylor. This could happen again.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “If I had to vote, I would not say hardware is the real villain, I’d say software,” Jimmy said. “Some of us hypothesize the flow sensor is getting phony reset signals, but we haven’t been able to trace the bug. It’s in work. But I’m mo
re concerned about the significant RCS fuel loss we’ve already incurred.”

  Taylor pulled at his neck flesh. “Okay. Dale, you want to answer that for Consumables?”

  The planning flight team’s controller for consumables was still rattling his hard copies and clearing his throat when Jimmy interrupted him. “Excuse me, I already know the numbers, and agreed, they’re marginally within rated parameters. That’s not my point.”

  “So what’s your point?” Taylor was edgy now, letting his impatience show to warn the others that whatever their opinions, they’d better be prepared to spit them out succinctly, dammit.

  “Starfire’s got no significant reserve,” said Jimmy. “I mean if anything else goes wrong. They wasted too much RCS propellant, which is of course also shared with the main MS system.”

  “The maneuvering system is not really where it’s at, Colonel,” the Swede put in. “The main engine is functioning perfectly. The gyros and reaction wheels are functioning perfectly. MS propellant is chiefly going to be consumed in operations at the asteroid rendezvous.”

  Jimmy pounced on it. “Now that is my point.”

  “You’re suggesting we don’t let Professor Hill get out on his rock?” Taylor smiled as he said it, but nobody laughed.

  “One thing goes wrong, Starfire’s okay. Two things go wrong…”

  “You were eager to be on that mission, Jimmy.” Taylor wasn’t smiling now, but he was still affable—the thing to do, he figured, was to be serious yet sympathetic. “I would have been, too. In your position.”

  “This is not a personal matter, sir. I think we ought to maintain the asteroid EVA on a contingency opportunity status.”

  “You’re on the other side now, but if you were down there with them you’d be begging us to let you take this type of minor risk.”

  Jimmy expelled quick breath—not so much a sigh as an irritated whiffle. “You’re right, Taylor. Sir. Maybe. But if I did that, I would have been mistaken. We on the ground have a mandated responsibility—”

  “Your responsibility is mandated by me, Colonel.” Well, hell, Taylor had lost it; his buttons had been pushed. His face glowed. “My responsibility is mandated by my superiors and by the Congress and administration of the United States.”

  Taylor on his high horse—which pushed Jimmy’s buttons. “We are all well aware of Professor Hill’s congressional affiliations—”

  And that, for Taylor, was too much to bear. “Not a personal matter, Colonel Giles?” he screamed. “Bullshit! You want to rewrite the mission plan? Present evidence, not your festering resent—”

  “When did you ever before let goddamn politics come between you and the safety of a crew?” Giles shouted back at him.

  Everybody else at the conference table, all eight of them, were now unanimous in their ponderous, disapproving expressions, wearing the fixed stares of people who fervently wanted to be somewhere else.

  Taylor stared back at them, raking his gaze around the table. Those who happened to be looking at him suddenly found the wall more interesting.

  Jimmy, his tie loose about his soiled collar, had the haggard look of a man fighting a battle nobody wanted to join. “Simply urging the point, despite the gung-ho attitude here, that even with the system fixed, the mission is down on MS propellant.”

  “Yes. You made that point well.” Taylor turned away from him. “Okay, we’re all tired. Tempers…and so forth. Okay. We’ve got disagreement. With no imputation of merit, we’re putting asteroid EVA on contingency status. Pending reassessment when they match orbits. Now let’s look at this repair procedure.”

  “Mission control, Houston. This afternoon we are looking at an attempt to repair the malfunctioning vent in the one-twenty maneuvering rocket system and do a little preventive maintenance on the other vents in the system. The repair exercise will require an IVA, an ‘internal EVA’ entry to the service module, that module not being pressurized, and so the astronaut will have to suit up, but the astronaut will not go outside the hull. Commander Braide has specified propulsion specialist Linwood Deveraux for the IVA.”

  The repair message was sent to Starfire as text, with accompanying diagrams. Robin and Linwood huddled in front of a glowing schematic on Linwood’s screen in PROP.

  “Dick Crease ran it in the water this morning and he says there’s plenty of room to maneuver if you don’t try to turn around in there,” she said.

  “It seems straightforward. I’ll commence at once.”

  “Straightforward, yeah.” Robin grinned. “Don’t forget your monkey wrench.”

  The text of the repair message read:

  1. Diagram accompanying is detail of MSVFO valve and actuator assembly. Location RCS 120 pressure system is shown in MS schematics file, diagram 143.4, location M6.

  2. Code (*) indicates six bolt heads on flange of actuator/valve juntion. Code (+) indicates target bolt head.

  3. Diagnostic procedures have indicated piston hangups can be freed by mechanically shocking the piston housing.

  4. Recommended procedure is to strike the MSVFO housing at the point (+) indicated in the diagram. Tests indicate that you cannot hit the MSVFO hard enough to damage it.

  Translation: try banging on the pipes.

  Some time later, the PAO conveyed Starfire’s report: “Mission control, Houston. Today at mission elapsed time one day nine hours twenty-seven minutes, Linwood Deveraux completed repairs on the MS system and spacecraft reports system test bursts nominal, system nominal…”

  Translation: it worked. Some things go routinely, even in space.

  Aboard Starfire, dinner was at eight. Hardly a formal affair: the flight plan allowed but did not mandate time for everyone to eat together, a privilege mission control would readily have trespassed upon had not Commander Braide fiercely guarded it.

  Melinda, the first to arrive this evening, was already sucking on a plastic bag of vichyssoise when Travis entered the wardroom. He nodded a friendly nod and set about assembling his own dinner tray from the pantry, conscious of her close but silent attention. Tonight’s choice of entrées was veal piccata or smoked turkey, with assorted vegetables. In a spirit of detached curiosity bordering on optimism, Travis took plastic envelopes of veal, broccoli au gratin, creamed corn. He pulled the package tabs for instant heating, then floated to a different corner of the room.

  Spin flew in from the ceiling and headed straight for the pantry. Melinda brightened at the sight of him. “Finally build up an appetite, sport?”

  “Yeah. Futzing with the high gain for two hours. Thought that was your job category.”

  “Oh, they only call on me when it has to be right the first time.”

  Spin never won these verbal exchanges with Melinda, so he busied himself with smoked turkey and a handful of condiment packages. He reluctantly added corn because he knew regulations, and Robin said he had to eat his vegetables.

  “How come you don’t like corn, Spin? Your ancestors invented it, didn’t they?” Melinda seemed intent on needling him; the rosy glow of her skin underneath her freckles was evidence of her high excitement.

  “You’re as much Indian as I am,” Spin grumbled. “So you say.”

  “Come on,” she sneered. “Half the people in America claim a Cherokee great-grandmother—mine’s a myth, I bet. But you’re an honest-to-God Mohawk, right? A U.S. government-certified one-quarter Indian.”

  Spin addressed himself to his turkey and corn.

  “You’re a Mohawk?” Travis asked him, surprised and curious. “The ones that build bridges?”

  “Some of ’em used to,” Spin muttered.

  “His mother’s father was in high steel,” Melinda said brightly. “He told me his grandfather worked on the World Trade Center.”

  “Tallest buildings in the world, in those days,” Travis said. Spin didn’t answer. “Maybe that’s why you’re not afraid of high places,” Travis mumbled, masticating his broccoli.

  “Exactly what my mom used to say.”

&nb
sp; Travis looked up and was surprised to find Spin glaring at him in naked anger. Travis shrugged. “Hey, I didn’t—”

  “Forget it,” Spin said.

  Travis was glad to.

  Linwood entered the room. A few seconds later, Robin joined them. Waiting for Linwood to assemble his dinner, which he was doing silently and deliberately, Robin turned to Travis. “Looked to me like you got in some good observation runs today.”

  “Oh, we’ll drown ’em down there in tonight’s data dump.”

  Melinda peered at him. “I’ve been studying the spectra associated with the two hemispheres of the asteroid,” she said, too casually. “Which as you’ve frequently briefed us is one of its problematic features. I was wondering if you have an explanation yet, Professor?”

  Travis cocked an eyebrow. Most of his instrument readings could be monitored from the bridge and from NAVCOM, but he didn’t know Melinda was tuned in. “Kinda soon to pick one explanation.”

  “Impact ejecta,” she said firmly. “Looks pretty obvious.”

  “Well, that’s certainly a good possibility.”

  “Want to bet on it?” I-can-do-anything-better-than-you-can, said her smirk, including your job.

  “If you’ll handicap me,” Travis said.

  “What?”

  “Define your terms. Are you really betting that the color difference is due solely to matter from a foreign object distributed over the surface?”

  “Sure. Except for the one pole, we’re looking at a classic carbonaceous chondritic albedo and spectrum…”

  “One hemisphere matches the classic C1 meteorite curve,” Travis agreed. “And the other’s a little redder, more like what we see in the Trojan asteroids. Are you sure this thing is a rock? Maybe it’s a ball of ice covered with organic sludge, or a pile of loose gravel left over from a burnt-out comet. What about that odd trajectory—where did the thing come from? Is it from the inner solar system or the outer?”

  Melinda opened her mouth, but no sound came out.

  “Assume it’s an ordinary carbonaceous chondritic asteroid,” Travis continued, ticking off the possibilities. “Nobody’s ever seen the inside of one, you know. No one dug holes on Phobos and Deimos. If the red stuff isn’t from an impacting foreign body, could it be due to subsurface material distributed by the impact? Or partially to subsurface material exposed by the impact, perhaps—red ice, for example? Or to a molten flow following impact—red lava, for example? Or to outgassing of some internal substance? Some of the above? All of the above? Make a choice, you got a bet.”