by Tom Abrahams
Both of them floated lifelessly near the interior port array. Their long tethers snaked from their waists to the trusses. Both men looked like they were awaiting hugs with their arms floating wide.
Clayton hoped they were unconscious and not dead. Regardless, it didn’t change his mission. He shifted back to put the arm at his left hip. The arm was bent at a slight angle, but it was close enough to straight that Clayton could navigate a clean shot back to the ISS structure.
The SSRMS arm—the Space Station Remote Manipulator System—was based on the much smaller version housed inside the now decommissioned Space Shuttle. Unlike that shuttle version, the one permanently affixed to the station wasn’t limited by its length. The tracks along the trusses allowed the arm to move and reach virtually every part of the station. Clayton admired its engineering, its simple complexity. The Canadarm2 had much of the flexibility of a human arm. It had seven degrees of freedom. There were three shoulder joints, one at the elbow, and three more at the wrist. One of the joints stayed locked. The other six of them could rotate an astonishing five hundred and forty degrees, which was greater flexibility than the most advanced yogi.
Clayton slid the tether and carefully moved along the SSRMS, using one hand to gently propel himself toward his goal. More cautious than he was before his near-death experience, he deliberately navigated the fifty-seven feet back to the main structure with his gloved hands. When he reached the elbow, he noticed two of the arm’s four cameras. He looked into the one closest to him and started talking to it.
“I’ve never thought much of Canada,” he said. “It’s not that I have anything against Canadians. I’ve known a few. Nice people, grounded, good hearts. I’ve just never thought about their country.”
He glided past the camera but kept talking to himself as he worked. “When I do think of Canada, I think of Dudley Do-Right from the old Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons. I think of John Candy. Ryan Reynolds.”
He moved robotically, an inch at a time, and kept his mind focused on the absurd. “Candy was hilarious. Everything he touched was gold. And Reynolds. I didn’t really like Green Lantern, but the dude killed it in Deadpool.
“Aside from that,” he said, his voice hollow in his helmet, “there’s syrup and Canadian bacon, which is, like, ham. There’s ice hockey. The oil sands. Not much else. Canada is the kid from high school you forget about until you crack open your yearbook years later, right?”
Clayton was three-quarters of the way back to the station. He moved with an unconsciously confident rhythm.
“That has all changed now,” he said. “For the rest of my life I am praising Canada first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. I am rooting for the Canucks or Canadiens. Hell, I’ll even pull for the Raptors as long as they’re not playing the Rockets. I’ll fill my iPad with movies only starring Canadians. I’ll stop ordering the Sausage McMuffin and stick with the original, the one with the Canadian bacon. I’ll even listen to Nickelback.”
He chuckled as he reached the base of the arm, which was connected to the Mobile Servicing System. The MSS was the mechanism that rolled back and forth along the tracks. He unhooked the elongated safety tethers and drew the loop around the SSRMS. He disconnected them and hooked one tether to the MSS, then pushed himself back to the S0 truss and grabbed with both hands.
“Yeah,” he said. “On second thought, no Nickelback. I won’t go that far.”
Clayton turned to face the port side of the ISS. He’d wasted a lot of time with his miscalculations. He checked the display on the computer at his chest. There were no error messages, but he knew the Orlan could only process his breathable air for seven hours. The mechanism that removed, or scrubbed, carbon dioxide from his air would slowly fill, and he’d suffocate.
“All right,” he said. “Shallow breaths. In and out. No more mistakes.”
Clayton translated along the truss toward the array, drawing closer to his crewmates. Both were friends. Both were good men. Both had families awaiting them back home.
He used his tether method to move outward along the side of the ISS, making compact movements rather than larger, risky ones. The farther out he moved, the farther away he was from the life-saving Canadarm2.
His thoughts shifted from Boris’s and Ben’s families to his own. He knew from the missing yellow spider webs of light that North America was without power. The density of those lights represented large cities, big populations. He loved looking at them from the Cupola. He and the others would try to identify the cities by those lights. It was an impossible task now.
The dark Earth was as frightening to Clayton as what he was facing, translating the edge of the ISS without communication or backup. He knew Jackie was strong. She’d always been the foundation of their family. She was smarter, funnier, and a better parent than him. He loved that about her. He loved her toughness, her grit, her blunt no-holds-barred approach to life.
While she’d not liked the idea of his applying to the astronaut corps, once he was a part of it she’d pushed him to play the political game it took to get a good mission.
“If this is what you want, then you need to sing your praises,” she’d repeatedly told him. “Nobody else will.”
However, strength and chutzpah were one thing. Surviving the apocalypse was something else altogether. Clayton clipped a hook and looked down at the planet below. For the first time he noticed the red aurora dancing in the atmosphere. How had he not seen it before?
Tunnel vision was both a blessing and a curse, as Jackie often reminded him.
He tried to recall everything he’d learned about the sun during his college astronomy and physics classes. It wasn’t much, at least not as far as what the experts at NASA knew.
Then again, they’d known so much they’d discounted the abnormal readings as an anomaly, as faulty data. What he knew could fit into a thimble by comparison. That was a good thing. Clayton picked his mind, the obvious facts surfacing first.
The sun was at the center of the solar system. It was the largest object and contained more than ninety-nine percent of the solar system’s mass. A million Earths could fit inside the sun. The outer part of the star reached temperatures of ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. The core could be as hot as twenty-seven million degrees. Clayton couldn’t fathom either number.
He recalled the nuclear energy the sun generated was like a hundred billion tons of dynamite. It was a young star, one of one hundred billion or so in the galaxy.
It was positioned perfectly for life on Earth, or vice versa. Clayton’s home planet traveled in what scientists called the Goldilocks Zone, a small area at just the right distance from the star to enable liquid water. Water was the foundation of all life.
Without the sun, the Earth would be a lifeless, frozen orb. With it, life teemed. But the sun was also close enough to cause problems.
Coronal mass ejections were among those issues. Balloon-shaped bursts of solar wind that expanded out from the sun’s corona. The plasma trapped inside was heated, broke free of the sun, and could travel mind-numbingly fast. Most of them didn’t affect Earth. Sometimes they did.
As man became increasingly reliant on technology, the damage from a CME aimed at Earth became increasingly acute. Nothing had ever approached what hit them hours earlier. This was an end-of-days type magnetic storm; the kind of event Clayton feared could knock mankind back into the Dark Ages.
From satellites traveling in orbit to energy pipelines, power grids and anything plugged into them, the CME could force a surge of magnetic energy into those systems and kill them.
Cars, phones, computers, GPS systems, gasoline pumps, even water filtration and treatment were at risk. Clayton shuddered, thinking about how bad it could be at home.
Worst of all, he couldn’t communicate with Jackie. He couldn’t tell her he was okay, that he was working on a plan to get back home. He hated worrying her. Then again, as he drew within a few feet of the first crewmate, he thought it better she didn’t know he
was risking his life to save two men who might already be dead.
He hooked the orange tether as far to the right as he could reach. He unhooked the white tether and floated free of the structure, pushing himself to Boris Voin.
Voin’s name was on his helmet and on his suit. He floated at the end of his tether like a helium balloon leaking air.
Clayton eyed the name patch and sighed. It was nothing against Voin. Boris was a fine man who’d become a good friend. But Ben Greenwood was a mentor and a hero of sorts for Clayton. He’d hoped to reach Ben first.
A wave of guilt washed over him. “You shouldn’t think that way,” he mumbled.
He drifted to him and reached out to grab Voin’s tether, slowing his speed. He reached the cosmonaut and tackled him in what felt like slow motion. Immediately, he knew Boris was dead.
The systems on his chest were flashing with errors. The flashes were weak and intermittent, not as they should be. The EMU was a death suit.
He inched his hands up Voin’s suit and placed his gloves on either side of his friend’s helmet. Voin’s sun visor reflected Clayton’s own warped image with a fish-eye effect until he pulled a lever on the helmet’s left side, which lifted the visor like an eyelid.
Clayton flinched at the face staring back at him. He gasped and momentarily lost his grip. Boris’s eyes were open, the fear frozen in his tiny pupils. He was slack jawed, his tongue hanging over his lower lip. He looked as if something had scared the life out of him.
Regaining his composure, Clayton said a silent prayer on behalf of his Russian crewmate, apologized for having wished he were Ben, and raised the reflective visor to hide Boris’s death stare. He reached down to Boris’s waist and found the connector for his tether, took his own free tether, and connected it to Boris.
Clayton then used Boris’s tether to pull himself backward to the ISS structure. Once there, he disconnected Boris, hooked it to himself, and disconnected the one he’d originally attached at Boris’s waist.
“There’s gotta be a better way to do this,” he muttered.
His stomach ached, his chest felt tight, and a wave of nausea washed over him. It was the kind of feeling he’d not experienced since pulling all-nighters during his final months of graduate school at the University of Florida. It was the overwhelming exhaustion that accompanied stress, a lack of sleep, and the knowledge there was so much left to do.
The display at his chest told him he was running short on time. He’d need to speed up the process. With Boris floating behind him, Clayton maneuvered his way to Ben Greenwood. Hand over hand he traversed the underside of the array structure until he’d reached the astronaut. Before he reached for Greenwood, he turned around and used one hand to grab the tether connecting Boris to his waist. The cosmonaut’s momentum carried him forward after Clayton had stopped. Clayton worked the tether like a whip and tried to guide Boris’s body around his own to avoid a direct hit. It didn’t work. Boris’s body moved closer and closer. Clayton tried to shift himself away from the impact, but he miscalculated Boris’s speed and distance.
Boris’s body tackled him, knocking him from his position underneath the array. Both men floated past Greenwood until Clayton’s tether snapped taut and reversed his direction. He had only seconds to grab onto something to hold himself in place; otherwise, Boris’s tether would pull tight and yank him backward again. He was low on air. He couldn’t continue the zero-gravity seesaw he’d created.
He felt the frustration of a golfer who kept missing a short putt from one side of the hole to the other. He clenched his jaw. He was nearing the end of the breathable oxygen. He knew the CO2 scrubber had to be getting full.
Clayton drifted to the edge of the truss and extended his fingers as far as they would stretch. With the tips of the gloves he managed to cling to one of the triangular pieces that, together, formed the structure. No sooner had his fingertips curled around the piece than he felt the strong tug of Boris’s body. Thankfully the pull was a few degrees to the side of his free hand. That enabled him to bring that hand closer to the truss and grab it.
He held his position for a moment and then used one of his hands to shorten the length of Boris’s tether. He wrapped it around his elbow, drawing in the increasing slack. It was the only way he knew to stop the endless swing.
To his right, Ben Greenwood pirouetted slowly, like a music box ballerina in need of a key wind. With most of the tether now wrapped around one arm, Clayton pulled himself free of the truss and aimed for the spot where Ben’s tether connected with the ISS.
“Should have done this with Boris,” he said. It would lessen the momentum shifts if he drew Ben to himself and rolled up the tether slack as he floated to him.
Clayton was learning as he went. He was a quick study. Always had been. Space, though, was unrelenting. Even without gravity, the curve was steep and arduous. Mistakes, as he’d learned already, were unforgiving in a vacuum.
He looked at his chest. Time was short. He resisted the urge to suck in a deep breath of exasperation and focused on reaching the hooked tether in his sights.
If only I could cut a hole in my glove like Matt Damon, he thought. Then I’d be able to speed this up.
Clayton wondered for a moment if Damon was Canadian. No, he remembered. He was from New England. Coping with the stress, his mind played a game of free association as he inched closer to the hook.
Damon. The Departure. Boston. Harvard. JFK. The speech at Rice that sparked the race to the moon.
That speech was burned into Clayton’s mind. He’d memorized it as a kid for a school project. It was always on the tip of his tongue.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.
But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too…
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”
Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Hazardous. Dangerous. Adventure.
That speech had never meant more, its words never clearer in their meanings, than they were as Clayton reached the clip connected to the first American astronaut to die in space.
Ben Greenwood had suffocated in his suit. Clayton suspected as much when he’d seen the pain painted onto Boris’s face. He confirmed it when he reeled in his friend and turned the lever on the visor. He flipped the lever back immediately. He couldn’t bear to look at Ben. Not like that.
Clayton clipped Ben’s tether to Boris’s waist and prepped himself to lead a convoy back to the Russian airlock. The first error message appeared on his chest.
The trip back to the airlock was faster than the journey away from it. Well, at first it was faster. The closer he got to the airlock, the less room he had to maneuver, the more he worried about the remaining oxygen in his suit, and the slower he moved.
Counterintuitively he became more deliberate and less sure of himself as he reached the lock. He slowed significantly when he reached the Russian module, fearful of the momentum gathered by the two men trailing him.
A second error message flashed on his ches
t when he opened the hatch and climbed inside. Once in the airlock, with the hatch still open, he loosened Boris’s tether to allow for as much slack as it could take. Then he started gathering it, hand over hand, pulling the men closer to the hatch.
It was a fisherman’s job, and Clayton’s back and neck and legs strained as he worked to brace himself inside the hatch while reeling in Boris and Ben.
It worked. Clayton closed the hatch and began the depressurizing process with just enough breathable air remaining. He would be okay. The two crewmates floating in the hatch next to him would not be.
Clayton floated silently in the cramped airlock, unable to free himself completely of the heavy bodies of his friends. He closed his eyes and ran through a checklist of what needed to happen next.
He had a lot to do and not a lot of time to do it.
CHAPTER 5
FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 2020, 11:38 PM CST
CLEAR LAKE, TEXAS
Marie and Jackie stood holding hands, watching the flames burn the remnants of Reggie and Lana’s house.
“When do you think the fire department will get here?” Marie asked.
Jackie shook her head. “I don’t think they’re coming,” she said softly. “There’s no power, there are no working phones, our cars won’t start. There’s no way the fire department knows there’s a fire here. And if they did, I don’t know how they’d get here.”
“It was like that plane just fell out of the sky, Mom. I mean, it was silent, like its engines just died.”
“Yeah, it did seem that way.” She let go of Marie’s hand and draped her arm over her daughter’s shoulder. She pulled her closer and scanned the smoldering houses across the street that had long run out of sufficient kindling. The outlines of the char were backlit with the orange glow of the fires still burning one street over.
“Whole families are gone,” Marie said quietly. “Parents, little kids…and that’s not counting the people on the plane.” She shuddered and hugged her mother tightly, pressed her face into her mother’s neck and softly sobbed.
