Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition

by B. C. CHASE

  “Yes, sir,” I say. Although I know NASA had little choice but to bring me along since I was on the ECIs’ official roster and, as such, there is little I could do to get kicked off the team, I want to be civil and respond as any of the other crew members would to an order from the commanding officer. If that means saying “yes, sir” to a kid half my age, then so be it. Still, he didn’t treat me so condescendingly in training, and I’m kind of put off by the sudden shift in attitude. I speculate to myself that maybe he’s feeling pressure to exhibit can-do leadership now that we’re here on the station, so I let it slide. President Kennedy was given his first command when he was very young, and he quickly grew to fill the shoes. Probably this kid will do okay, too.

  He leads me from here through the American Science Module with the exercise bike and the controller for one of the robotic arms. I am disoriented and can’t tell what’s up or down. Once we reach Node 2 (the place where we entered the station), he hangs a right, or starboard, into the European Science Module, (which looks quite a bit like the American Science Module to me). He reaches up into a nook in the ceiling and pulls down a bag. “This is the vacuum cleaner. I’ll let you know if I think you’re not using it enough. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” I say, a big grin plastered on my face.

  “Why are you smiling?

  “Oh, I’m just relieved I brought my French maid outfit,” I smirk. “That’s all.”

  He isn’t smiling. “Are we going to have a problem, Jim?”

  “Nope, absolutely no problem, sir. Just trying to keep things light.”

  “This station is a $350-billion-dollar piece of equipment, and this mission couldn’t be more important. Let’s exhibit the respect and decorum that it deserves.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Now come with me. Everybody went to check out the Horticulture Modules.”

  ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

  “They told us they wanted to meet on Pluto,” Hogarth said. “They told us exactly when they wanted to meet. And they sent us a list of who they wanted on our crew. You were the last person on that list.”

  Charlie brought up the list:

  Josh Tomlinson: Miami, Florida. Commander.

  Shelby Montana: Lafayette, Louisiana. Doctor.

  Timothy Manning: Dublin, Ireland. Pilot.

  Shiro Nakamura: Tokyo, Japan. Psychologist.

  Nari Park: Seoul, South Korea. Biologist.

  Katia Pavlova: St. Petersburg, Russia. Mathematician/Orbital Mechanics.

  Jim Perkins: Wichita, Kansas. Truck driver.

  Now that was a head-scratcher right there. All those young scientists, and then me, the truck driver, tacked on the bottom. Left me thinking that either the ECIs’ typist made a blunder, or they’re not too brainy.

  Hogarth said, “All of these people were already astronauts when we received the list, except you. What do you think it is about you that would make them want you to come?”

  “My natural-born charm?” I suggested.

  “Mr. Perkins, this is a serious matter.”

  “Okay. I don’t know. I’m seventy-three years old, I drive a truck for a living, I live on a couple acres with a little fishing pond, and the only family I have is one daughter. There’s nothing special about me. I’m just a nobody, Mr. Hogarth.”

  “Mr. Perkins, have you ever been contacted or been in contact with alien beings?”

  I laughed, but stopped when I saw that he was getting irritated. “No, sir,” I said.

  “Have you ever tried to contact alien beings?”

  “Nope. Well, I did talk to my mother-in-law a couple times, but I don’t know if that counts.”

  Hogarth stared me in the eye for a minute, trying to judge my sincerity, I think. Then he said, “So you really don’t know why they would choose you?”

  “Nothing rings a bell.”

  “And we have no idea, either. To be frank, on a mission of this importance, you are the last person on Earth we would want to send.”

  “I can imagine,” I said. “So why don’t you pick somebody else?”

  “They insist that if we do not follow their instructions to the letter, there will be no one to meet us when we reach Pluto. That is an unacceptable risk to the President. He believes we must take this opportunity to have some control in the manner of first contact. In other words, if they are not here already, we don’t want them here until we know as much about them as we can. Pluto is just about as far away as we could possibly get a human from Earth, given the technology we currently have.”

  “Why did they choose Pluto, though?”

  “We have no idea,” Hogarth replied. “You and Pluto are the two biggest puzzles about all of this. Pluto isn’t even considered a planet anymore.”

  “Pluto isn’t a planet, and I’m a nobody,” I grin. “A conundrum worthy of NASA’s best scientists.” I took a deep breath, and suggested, “Administrator Hogarth, if I were you, I wouldn’t go anywhere near Pluto.”

  “Why not?”

  “They sound to me like bullies.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They demand that you do everything according to their conditions. They keep to themselves while they extract more and more information from you. They want total control and if they don’t get it they threaten not to talk. Classic signs of a bully, right there. He won’t let you play on the playground unless he gets his way. I learned how to deal with bullies when I was six years old, and Billy Burman and his gang tried to take my dead granddaddy’s watch off my wrist. They said ‘give us the watch or we’ll crack these bottles over your head.’”

  “And what did you do, Mr. Perkins?”

  “I said ‘No!’”

  “And what did the gang do?”

  “They cracked bottles over my head, punched me in the gut, and gave me a black eye.”

  “And the watch?”

  “They left it.”

  “They left it? Why?”

  “Because I dropped it on the ground and stomped on it.” I shrugged my shoulders, “I didn’t care if it worked. I only wanted it because it was my granddaddy’s watch. I probably got a bigger beating than I would have, but the bullies didn’t get their way. There’s always a way to beat a bully, but it doesn’t mean you won’t get bruised up.”

  “These are no schoolyard bullies. They are interstellar beings with capabilities that far surpass our own. Unfortunately, they hold all the cards here, and I do mean all. Clearly, they know it. They have infiltrated our technology. They seem to know everything about us, but we know nothing about them. We are at their mercy. Getting a team to Pluto to find out what we can about them is going to be the biggest challenge mankind has ever undertaken. Up to this day we’ve made a $300 billion dollar bet on it. And we need you to join the crew.”

  I didn’t even have to think about how to answer his request. “Administrator Hogarth, I appreciate that you didn’t just scratch me off the list on account of my lack of, well, anything that would be of value to you. But, shoot, you’ve scared the bejeebers out of me with the helicopter and messages from aliens and $300 billion dollars and all that. I’d sooner jump in a pit of fanged snakes than go on your little excursion to Pluto.”

  He nodded, seeming relieved. “I understand.”

  “I wouldn’t mind riding your fancy airplane back to North Carolina, though.”

  ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

  The seven Horticulture Modules are shaped kind of like giant propane tanks. Inside there is 514 square feet of space (almost thirty feet long and twenty-two feet across) where six wheels of planter racks are installed, leaving a small circle in the middle for the astronauts to pass through. It is filled with pink light that is in some way soothing, but at the same time severe. There are little green sprouts emerging from the planters now. One of the modules has a large work area free of plants. That is where we are standing—er, floating.

  “So, this is where all of you will spend most of your time,” Sarah Foreman, the botanist, says. “
Really, you’re not astronauts at all. You are farmers. Remember, we expect you will be able to get eighty percent of your nutrition from the Horticulture Modules. But it’s not just an expectation; it’s a necessity. You will not have enough food with you, so if you don’t tend your gardens, you will starve. Not only that, but carbon dioxide will build up. I’m sending you with the best that Earth has to offer. These plants have the highest harvest index we can find. That means they have extremely high edible biomass ratios. You’re getting dwarf tomatoes, dwarf peppers, radishes, beans, herbs, dwarf white and sweet potatoes, corn, and everybody’s favorite: lettuce. I’m even sending you with dwarf plum trees. There’s no excuse for you not to eat.”

  I say, “I just have one question, Sarah.”

  “What’s that, Jim?” she replies. The look on her face tells me she knows I’m probably going to say something silly.

  “If we eat all these dwarf vegetables, is there any chance we’ll come back, you know, as little people?”

  “Jim, that’s inappropriate,” she shakes her head. “And, no. In fact, you’ll probably grow. When Commander Sykes stayed here for a year, he returned two inches longer.”

  “And shrunk back to size two days later,” says Commander Sykes with the hint of a grin. “I was pretty disillusioned.”

  “Well, hey,” I quip, “this trip is so much longer, you’ll probably return the size of a horse.”

  “That would be awkward,” says Commander Sykes.

  Next on the agenda is to receive our crew quarter assignments. The station has two sections that contain horticulture modules. One can be reached from the nadir Node 1 hatch. The second is underneath the Russian segment. That’s where the new habitation module is, too. We exit the horticulture area, which is in the mid-nadir section of the station, up through a tunnel into Node 1 and into the Russian Node which is full of white fabric storage bins and obstructed by conical hatches. The Russian Modules, with the exception of the Service Module, are significantly narrower than the U.S. areas. Some of them are older, too, since they had been designed with MIR 2 in mind but were repurposed for the ISS. You might think that, with all the newer components in place, the decision would have been made to do away with them because they are redundant, but it is their redundancy that caused the engineers to decide to keep them. If, for some reason, the U.S. segment or our crew quarters become uninhabitable, we will be able to evacuate to the Russian segment and seal ourselves in.

  Aside from Commander Filipchenko and Katia, there are two additional cosmonauts aboard: Valentin Gorbatko and Yury Marakov. They are making sure the Russian segment is ready for the long voyage, but they will not be joining us. They greet us warmly and give us a quick tour of the Russian Service Module. It was originally the core of the station, providing central networking, avionics, mess hall, and crew quarters. I feel like I’m seeing history because its age is very apparent, construction having been completed in 1986. The walls are covered in yellowing Velcro so that cosmonauts can stick things to them. The Velcro is splattered with the grime of decades. If I were the Russians, I think I’d stick some new, homey wallpaper on that Velcro.

  When we pass down the Russian Node into one of the major additions to the station, Commander Tomlinson hands each of us a little bag that contains our personal items we wanted to bring from home. From here there are four entrances leading to four modules as spacious as the Horticulture Modules. One contains the crew quarters, while another is a big centrifuge where we can take a shower, play games (including a golf simulator), and take a nap—all in one g gravity. One of them is pure stowage. The last contains the water reprocessing facilities for the Horticulture Modules, air regeneration equipment, our nuclear generator, and other machinery.

  The Habitation Module has a public living area that, to NASA’s credit, is very spacious, occupying one whole half of a 514 square-foot module, and has a homey look to it. One of the major hotel chains sponsored it, and their name is plastered all over the room. NASA resorted to private sponsorships to supplement the government money. Almost everything on the station has a sponsor. The toilets are sponsored by Kohler.

  Although they won’t be of much use to us in zero-gravity, it is comforting nonetheless to see that there are sofas. The sofas have seatbelts so we can pretend we are sitting on them and not drift away. Lamps have been fastened to the floor, and framed scenic vistas adorn the walls. On the right wall is a series of big windows. These provide the view I had been looking for in the cupola. A TV screen that must be at least seventy inches wide is fixed on the left wall, and I notice a Bose sound system. The far wall is a big circle twenty-two feet wide with hatches along the outer edge. The name of one of the crew members is above each hatch. The center of the wall has an opening into a cylindrical space with a galley and dining table.

  I float up to my hatch and open it to find that my space is surprisingly spacious, though I’m not sure what I will do with all the room. The tall right wall and short left wall are both curved, following the module’s circumference, while the ceiling and the floor are flat—likes spokes in a wheel. The front and back walls are also flat. There’s a round window only a little bigger than my head on the right wall. A sleeping bag hangs on the back wall, upright, while the front wall has a mirror and a hygiene kit. NASA let me send up my guitar on one of the earlier supply missions and it is strapped in the corner. A couple of lockers are built into the left wall, as well as a trash receptacle. Two laptops are anchored to the ceiling. It’s stark, but at least the walls are a pleasant sky-blue color.

  “Jim?” Commander Tomlinson’s voice says from outside my hatch. “Do you want to see them do the EVA or would you rather sleep?”

  I float over to the hatch and push it open. “I want to see the EVA, of course,” I say.

  ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

  “I’m Deputy Miller with the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Office. Is this Mister Jim Perkins?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have a daughter named Betsy?”

  “Yes.”

  “Betsy has been in a very serious accident involving a semi-truck. The radar-assisted cruise control malfunctioned on the highway. You need to come to St. Joseph’s Hospital right away.”

  “I’m in Georgia,” I said, stunned.

  “It would be a good idea to get on the first nonstop flight you can. Sometimes airlines can accommodate you in emergencies like this. The doctors say she, well, she probably won’t survive the night. I’m sorry, Mr. Perkins. Does she have any other family we need to notify?”

  I couldn’t speak. The woman on the other end of the line seemed to sense that, and just let me take a minute. I finally said, “I’m the only family she has.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  Six

  Getting into an Extravehicular Activity space suit is quite an ordeal. I know personally because they made me do it to get experience floating around in that big pool at the Johnson Space Center—just in case. Now as I watch Kurt help Sanjiv and Maria suit up, I feel a bit jealous. I bet a person can get quite a thrill from being out there free-floating above our planet. It almost seems that, since tomorrow they’re going to send me three billion miles away, they should at least let me get a good look at the Earth first. But life is full of little disappointments like this so I guess I’ll just have to suck it up.

  “I’m sorry you didn’t have time for a full campout,” says Commander Sykes. A campout is a

  “We were breathing oxygen on the shuttle the whole time. But if we get the bends, it won’t kill us,” Maria says. With the suit’s pants removed, she has crawled up inside with her head sticking out the top. Kurt is pulling the pajama bottoms (I call them that because the shoes are connected to the pants) up her legs. With the helmets fastened on, they go through all the pre-EVA checkouts they can before depressurization to make sure the suits are working properly. Everyone is in a good mood. I think that, as astronauts, this is exciting stuff for them. Nobody knows what the future holds. Nobody knows if
they will ever get a chance to spacewalk again or if this will be their last.

  When the two astronauts are all dressed, Kurt clears out of the airlock and Commander Sykes helps him to close it, sealing them in. It takes a while for the airlock to depressurize. We can see the two astronauts in the chamber through a small window in the hatch. The way they are floating around in there, it reminds me of two big fish in a much-too-small aquarium.

  The last two large solar arrays are fixed on a truss on the port side of the station. While Commander Tomlinson, Commander Sykes, and the team huddle around screens that show Sanjiv and Maria’s visor video feeds, I sneak back through the station to the cupola where I know I can get a good view of what’s going on.

  Through the windows, I see Sanjiv in his puffy, white outfit as the Canadarm2 (one of the robotic arms) moves him slowly toward the solar arrays. The arrays are massive, 240 feet long, but they won’t be of any use to us in deep space because we’ll be so far from the sun. Not only that, but at the rate of speed we will be traveling, we really don’t want to have big things sticking out that cover half the area of a football field. The smaller your profile, the less chance you have of getting hit by space debris.

  As I watch, I find that I have to fight my eyes to keep my lids open. I’m exhausted.

  Sanjiv has reached the array. I push myself back up out of the cupola and out of Node 3 into Node 1. I try to get Commander Tomlinson’s attention, but he is busy with the transfer of command from Commander Filipchenko. I get loud enough that Commander Tomlinson looks up, annoyed, to say, “What is it, Jim?”

  “Do you need me for anything? I was thinking about going down for the night.”