Holdout

by Jeffrey Kluger

  “How fast is the leak?”

  “I’ve seen faster, but only in sims. No joy here, flight.”

  Hampton silently cursed. The ammonia network, which cooled the station, worked via two sets of piping, one of which carried ammonia and one of which carried water. The water picked up excess heat within the station and transferred it to the ammonia, which radiated it into space. Much of that transfer took place inside the IFHX—or the interface heat exchanger—a piece of machinery about the size of a large steamer trunk. If an ammonia pump had broken, it would contaminate the IFHX, which would in turn contaminate the atmosphere of the station.

  The problem was not insoluble. The ammonia system was complex enough that the station’s designers knew they needed backup hardware on board in case of a malfunction. For that reason, there was a replacement IFHX that could be swapped in for the broken one. But both of the units were located on what was known as the P6 truss on the outside of the station, part of the scaffolding that held the solar panels—and it was a distant part of that scaffolding. If the panels were the wings of the butterfly, and the Russian segment where Beckwith had sheltered was near the butterfly’s head, the pump was located at the end of the right wing. Making the repair would require an EVA, or extravehicular activity—or spacewalk. Beckwith had never taken a spacewalk. Hampton, the flight director, keyed his mic back open, still excluding Beckwith from the loop.

  “What are our options, EECOM?” he asked. “Can you shut down the pump?”

  “It already shut itself down. Doesn’t fix the leak.”

  “Can you seal the IFHX?”

  “Too late for that.”

  “So what else have we got?” Hampton asked.

  Lagrange, the rookie Capcom—the eager Capcom—jumped in. “She has to go EVA,” he said. “It’s what the book says.”

  “The book doesn’t have a seat in this room,” Hampton said.

  “It’s the only way to fix the problem.”

  “Beckwith’s not trained for EVA.”

  “She can learn,” Lagrange answered.

  “That ain’t how it works, son,” Hampton said. Hampton almost never used “ain’t.” When he did use it, it was in situations exactly like this, and what he was really saying was, Do you have any idea what you’re talking about? And never before had anyone heard him tack a “son” to it. Lagrange fell silent and Hampton went on.

  “EECOM,” he called, “how long till saturation?”

  “At the current rate of leak, ten hours,” the EECOM responded.

  If the EECOM had had no joy to report before, he had even less now. Saturation was the point at which enough ammonia would have soaked into every crack, socket, and porous surface inside the American segment that no amount of atmospheric venting would ever clear it. That half of the station would forever be uninhabitable. Before Hampton could respond, Beckwith called down.

  “Houston, station,” she said.

  “Copy, station,” Lagrange answered.

  “Confirm ammonia?”

  “Yes, confirmed.”

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “What’s the saturation number?”

  “Ten hours.”

  “That’s certain?” she asked.

  “That’s certain,” the EECOM, who was listening in, said on the loop to the Capcom.

  “That’s certain,” Lagrange radioed up to space.

  “Well, that’s it, then,” Beckwith responded.

  “Say again, station?”

  “That’s it. I go EVA, right? I go, or we lose the station.”

  Lagrange the rookie did what no one in Mission Control was ever supposed to do when a veteran flight director like Hampton had been shown up: He turned around in his seat to look at him. Hampton glared back.

  “Fine,” he said on the closed loop to the controllers. “She stole it, now she can save it.” He keyed open the link to the station. “Copy, Walli, you go EVA.” Then he toggled open his line to his counterpart in Moscow. “Station to full power,” he said, then added: “Please.”

  “As you wish,” the Russian flight director answered, sounding very much as if he’d have preferred that circumstances did not require him to do as NASA wished.

  Five minutes later, the Russian modules on the station came back online. At the front of Moscow Mission Control, the grayed-out image of Beckwith flashed brightly back to life.

  * * *

  • • •

  The news broke wide and fast that more than ten weeks after climbing aboard the International Space Station and three weeks after seizing control of it Walli Beckwith was going to go outside. The tabloids loved it. The fact that the walk would have to begin within hours meant it would all be over before the morning editions came out, but the editors did what they could online.

  “WALLI WILL WALK!” read the headline on the New York Daily News site. The paper would have used two-hundred-point type on its front page, so it did the same on the site. That meant scrolling far down before reaching the actual story—which was perfectly fine. The paper had made a business out of writing headlines that could make news all by themselves.

  The Boston Herald went further, opting for straight drama, no ice, free-poured: “LIFE OR DEATH FOR STATION—AND BECKWITH.” By morning, newspapers around the world would be able to run physical headlines on physical paper, reporting which of those two binary outcomes had in fact occurred.

  The TV networks made their own contributions, immediately running countdown clocks to the time the EVA would begin, which was just over two and a half hours after it became clear that one would have to take place. On college campuses and in volunteer offices across the country where the September 18 movement was being coordinated, televisions were turned to the news and left on, with people stopping their work every time there was a fresh development in the unfolding story.

  At the Mercado hospital in the Bolivian jungle, the news came late. There was yet another glitch with the satellite uplink trucks, rendering the smartphones around the camp temporarily silent—cut off from the world beyond the jungle. Sonia was sitting at a table in the dining tent scouring census lists from the four camps that had already been downloaded and saved, looking for any description of any internee who might sound even more like Oli than the one she had. She was all but certain that she had the right person, but actually certain would be better.

  It wasn’t until ninety minutes before the EVA was set to begin that the satellite signal flickered back to life and her phone, lying on the table next to her computer, buzzed and lit. The words “Beckwith to Take Spacewalk” filled the screen. She snatched up the phone and read the first story in scanned chunks of paragraph. She looked at her phone log. Beckwith had tried to call her three times in the past hour—all when there was no signal in the camp. Now it would be too late. The news sites were reporting that by now, she would be preparing to climb into her suit. She would surely not have her computer with its phone app near her.

  Sonia opened her email, and there was a single message from Beckwith: “You may have heard that I have to go outside and run an errand. Do NOT worry. I’ll call as soon as I get back. Love.”

  Sonia jumped to her feet and ran to the infirmary building that had the only TV in the camp. A handful of doctors and workers whose phones had lit up with the same news were clustered around it, watching the live feeds from NASA. When they saw Sonia, they parted and made room for her. She nodded her thanks and took a position in front of the screen, standing silently with her arms folded.

  At the White House, the president had his seventy-inch flat-screen TV in the dining room adjacent to the Oval Office turned on and was standing before it with a fixed expression and folded arms, unknowingly mimicking Sonia’s pose. He had summoned Connie Polk to join him, along with Carl Bart, his chief political strategist. Joe Star had been in Huntsville, Alabama
, for his annual administrator’s roundtable with the employees at the NASA facility there, and was now en route by air to Houston so that he could be in Mission Control in time for the EVA to begin. He was being piped in to the White House by conference call, and the crackling of the connection from the government plane was evocative of the air-to-ground link from space.

  “What’s her status, Joe?” the president called out to the phone, his eyes not moving from the screen.

  “Status, sir?” the voice of Star asked through the speaker.

  “This leak . . .”

  “The ammonia.”

  “Yes, the ammonia. How serious is it?”

  “It’s very serious,” Star answered. “The newspeople are telling it right.”

  “Could it kill her?” The president asked the question baldly, with his eyes still on the TV. Polk and Bart turned to look at him, but he did not react.

  “Ammonia is poisonous, and spacewalking is very dangerous,” Star answered. “It’s more dangerous than people know, and Beckwith is not well trained for it. She is in peril no matter what.”

  “And what if she dies?” the president asked. Star said nothing—either because he had no answer to such a question or because he somehow intuited that it wasn’t meant for him. It wasn’t. “Connie,” the president now specified. “What if she dies?”

  Polk kept her voice emotionless. “I imagine we will bury her at Arlington National Cemetery, sir, assuming we can recover the body,” she responded. “She is a naval officer.”

  The president turned away from the screen, his eyes betraying the flicker of irritation Polk ever and always raised in him.

  “I mean if she dies and the station is permanently poisoned from all of the ammonia,” he said. “Do we abandon it? Are we on the hook to the other countries for making the whole thing uninhabitable?” Polk looked at him disbelievingly, and he seemed to feel an unaccustomed need to explain himself. “I’m sorry, Connie,” he said. “These are things I need to know.”

  “I have not looked into the question of liability,” Polk said. “But I imagine that yes, the partner nations might seek some kind of restitution.”

  “How much would that be, Joe?” the president asked. “What did the whole thing cost?”

  “Well, sir,” the administrator’s voice answered, “nobody knows.”

  “Nobody knows? How is that possible?”

  “We say $100 billion, including the cost of all the shuttle flights that shipped the parts. But it’s been six administrations since it all started. No one ever kept track. Either way, that’s only the American share. If the thing is wrecked, expect the partners to come to us for up to another $100 billion.”

  “Carl,” the president now said, turning to Bart and adopting the tone a superior uses to a true employee, not to government officials like Polk and Star whom he may have appointed to their jobs but who pledged their oaths only to the government.

  “Sir,” Bart responded with a corresponding tone indicating that he knew his place precisely.

  “If she dies, what happens to this business she started?”

  “The intervention thing?”

  “Yes, the intervention thing.”

  “It becomes unstoppable, I’m afraid. She’s a nuisance alive; she’s a legend dead.”

  The president nodded. “All right,” he said, “then let’s make sure she fixes our station and comes home safely.”

  “Which was always our plan,” Polk said with a tone that was both declaration and incredulous question.

  “Which was always our plan,” the president repeated.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Joe Star was not kidding that Beckwith wasn’t well trained to walk in space, which wasn’t quite the same as saying that she wasn’t at all trained—but close. Like all astronauts, she had logged plenty of hours in a facility NASA called the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, which was just a fussy way of saying something very simple. In this case, the simple thing was nothing more or less than a gigantic swimming pool—202 feet long and 40 feet deep, filled with 6.2 million gallons of water. Sunk at the bottom of it were exact replicas of every module that made up the station, which astronauts, sealed inside NASA spacewalking suits and equipped with breathing gear, could use to learn the basics of EVA work.

  Beckwith hated everything about the training—it was slow and exhausting and did a lousy job of replicating the true friction-free, zero-g environment of space. What’s more, with competition fierce for what were relatively infrequent spacewalks, she had never yet been assigned to one and had thus not had the more intensive training that would have truly equipped her for the work. For all of the aggravation of the swimming pool work, she still had come away without the adequate skills.

  Now NASA had no choice. If they wanted to save their space station, they’d have to send Beckwith—ill-trained or not. The moment after Glynn Hampton grudgingly approved the walk and Beckwith signed off with Houston, she drifted from the Zvezda to the upward-facing Poisk module, where she’d refused to let the Soyuz dock. Cosmonauts beginning spacewalks typically exited from the downward-facing Pirs, but the Pirs was wrecked and would never be of use again. That left only the Poisk—and that was a problem. For one thing, the hatch of the Poisk was smaller than the Pirs’s, meaning a tighter squeeze in an already bulky suit. Worse, while there were two very new EVA suits stored in the off-limits Pirs, there was only one, an older one used as a backup, in the Poisk.

  Beckwith floated into the module, sealed the inner hatch behind her, and regarded the exhausted-looking suit. It was appallingly dirty—smudged with grease and gone half gray from constant handling. And now that she examined it with the unforgiving eye of someone who was going to be depending on it for her life, she noticed that the thing was frayed at some seams. That didn’t mean the three-layer garment would spring a leak. It was the innermost layer that was meant to be airtight. Still, the suit didn’t inspire confidence. It also smelled truly, hideously awful. Spacewalking was a hot, exhausting business, and a lot of sweat had been lost in that suit over the years.

  On the ground, Houston and Moscow were now fully online and fully engaged with each other, with all of the consoles—especially the EECOMs’—swapping data from one side of the world to the other. The Russian EECOM noticed changes in pressure and airflow in the Poisk and radioed that information to his flight director, who passed it on to Houston. It was clear where Beckwith was and what she was doing.

  “Station, Houston,” the call went up from the Capcom. Lagrange should have had a few more minutes on-shift, but having run afoul of the flight director, and with his rotation almost up anyway, the rookie had surrendered the console early—to Jasper.

  “Copy you, Jasper,” Beckwith answered.

  “Checking out your formal wear?”

  “Affirm,” she answered. “Smells like dog.”

  “Don’t blame me. I only wear American-made.”

  “Station, Moscow,” a voice interrupted.

  It was Zhirov. Beckwith smiled. I’ve got both my boys! she thought, but didn’t want to say it out loud. Then she decided she very much did want to say it.

  “I’ve got both my boys!” she radioed down.

  “Here to serve, ma’am,” Jasper said.

  Zhirov cut back in. He was in no mood for play.

  “Station, we’re counting eighty-seven minutes till egress,” he said.

  “That’s eighty-seven—eight seven?” Beckwith asked.

  “Affirm,” Zhirov answered.

  She was surprised. Eighty-seven minutes was far sooner than she had anticipated. “What does the book allow for IFHX swap-out?” she asked.

  “Once you’re outside, four hours,” Jasper answered.

  “And we’ve got ten till saturation,” Beckwith said. “Figured that meant two and a half hours for suit-up and egress.”

  “Roger
that, Walli Bee,” Jasper answered. “Thinking here is that you’ll need more time for the actual swap-out.”

  Beckwith frowned. “I can do this work,” she said.

  “Affirm, but you haven’t been trained for this work.”

  Beckwith knew he was right, but she didn’t much care for the low expectations. “Understood,” she answered. “I’ll be ready.”

  For the next hour, Houston and Moscow tag-teamed with the station, alternately coaching and quizzing Beckwith on what she’d need to know to get outside, do the work she had to do, and come back alive. The time she’d spent in the Houston pool did leave her reasonably confident she could navigate her way around the exterior of the station, even to as remote a spot as the P6 truss on the end of the butterfly’s right wing. If she lost her way—which was possible in an environment in which there was no up or down and she was creeping along so huge a machine—there was the equivalent of street signs to help her: arrows and labels on the exterior of the station pointing the way to various modules.

  Beckwith was also adept at manipulating the kinds of tools that were necessary in zero-g. In space there’s no such thing as turning a bolt in the ordinary way, since a hard twist to the right would simply turn the astronaut’s body to the left. Instead, the tools worked with squeeze handles that didn’t produce any action-reaction problems.

  Of greater concern to Beckwith was the IFHX itself. She knew the units were big and unwieldy, and she knew that before she wrestled the new one into place on the station, she’d have to wrestle the old one off and back to a berthing spot so it could be anchored safely out of the way. Jasper had trained with an IFHX mockup in the Houston pool, and he walked her through what she’d need to know. He was frank with her about how hard she would find the work.

  “You’re going to hate that big, ugly box,” he said.

  The bigger challenge, in many ways, would be the spacesuit. Beckwith had practiced only in NASA EVA suits, and there were three of them stored in a docking node in the American segment of the station. But the American segment was contaminated, and even if Beckwith ventured down there with a gas mask, the suit would be unmanageable. It was a multipart garment, which had to be put on one piece at a time and required at least one other person to assist.