Pluto's Ghost- Encounter Edition

by B. C. CHASE

  He looks at us very sadly and shakes his head, “Valentin was my best friend, even from childhood. It was our dream to be cosmonauts. Now it seems more like a nightmare.”

  Shelby swoops over and gives him a hug, “He was a great guy. Tomorrow you should be the one to tell MCC exactly how he died. The Russian people will be so proud.”

  He feigns a grin. Then we part ways, and it is a rather sad sight to see him enter his crew quarters. It’s the size of a coffin, though it has a portal window out to the blackness of space.

  Sixteen

  When I emerge from my quarters, I am greeted by Wagner’s opera music and Shelby, whose face is stricken. She says, “Yury is gone.”

  “Gone?” I ask.

  She wipes her eyes, “He committed suicide during the night.”

  “How?” I ask in disbelief.

  “He entered the Soyuz capsule, closed himself in, and detached from the station.”

  “Can we radio the Soyuz? Maybe he’ll come back.”

  “We’ve been trying since four o’clock,” she says. “Nothing.”

  “He did look distraught,” I say.

  “Yes. First he lost Viktor. Then Valentin. He was devastated. I wish I would have gotten Valentin into the airlock with oxygen sooner.”

  “It wasn’t your fault.”

  “I should have told him he couldn’t go. It makes me wonder if I valued Commander Sykes’ life more than Valentin’s, you know?”

  “Valentin wanted to try. And Commander Tomlinson gave the order.”

  “Yes, but I could have said the compression sickness danger was too great.”

  “Shelby, don’t do that to yourself.” I get a little angry, because I think I know who is to blame for all of this and it’s definitely not Shelby. It’s Commander Tomlinson. It’s outrageous that Shelby would be blaming herself when Commander Tomlinson seems to have orchestrated everything just the way he wants it. I look around to see if anyone’s listening. Then I say, “Shelby, if anyone is to blame, it’s Commander Tomlinson.”

  “No, he is not equipped to make medical decisions.”

  I lower my voice, “No. I mean, don’t you think it’s a little strange? Commander Tomlinson wants to continue the mission, but Commander Sykes thinks we need to contact Houston and abort at Venus. We try to fix the array twice, and both times there is a disaster. Commander Sykes would have died last time, if not for Valentin. But now he’s dead, and that is one less person who might want to go back to Earth because he never agreed to go to Pluto in the first place. And Katia did the math. It was impossible, what happened on the first EVA. Three malfunctions, all at the same time.”

  “I know, she told me.”

  “She did?”

  “Yes. And I know Commander Tomlinson is not an ideal commander right now. But to accuse him of murder—because that’s what you’re saying—that’s extreme. There isn’t any evidence.”

  “But what about all the problems?”

  “Problems happen in space all the time. For mankind, space is one big gigantic problem that NASA spends billions working to overcome. But if you really want to get into specifics, how could Commander Tomlinson make the Canadarm fling Viktor into space like that? He’s not a programmer.”

  I have to admit that she is right about that. I’m not sure how he could have forced such a precise error in the Canadarm. “I guess that’s true,” I concede. “But what about the tethers, the SAFER, and Commander Sykes’ space suit? He could have done those.”

  “Yes, but there is more to this. I won’t tell you here. Commander Sykes will speak with you later. At any rate, we’re in communication with Houston now, so they’ll tell us what to do. Houston tends to leave little commanding for a commander to do.”

  ∆v∆v∆v∆v∆

  Shelby was right about one thing. Houston is a micro manager. They have already patched through new, extraordinarily detailed flight plans. They say they are still discussing whether the mission will need to abort. Despite Valentin’s and Yury’s deaths, being in touch with MCC has done wonders for morale. Even Commander Tomlinson has lightened up, probably because he no longer bears the weight of managing all the intricate details of each person’s minute-by-minute activities for those flight plans.

  One of my favorite places on the station has become the Centrifuge Module, or what I call the “big washing machine.” The module has a giant cylinder inside that spins nine times a minute to create one g-force. Inside, it is divided into several different rooms. One is a recreation room with a ping pong table, billiards, a table for playing cards or sitting with drinks, and a golf simulator. I haven’t spent any time in there at all for two reasons: my flight plan keeps me busy every waking hour, and I don’t want to embarrass my crewmates in head-to-head matchups—especially since I have a broken arm. Another room has a shower with water that actually falls. An exercise room has a bike, treadmill, and a strange machine that looks to me like a torture device. Finally, there’s what I think will be my favorite thing: a room with a mattress. Yes, a good old mattress that you can lie down on. This is here because NASA polled every astronaut who is alive and asked them what they missed most about gravity. The nearly universal answer: a bed. After a long day at work, there’s nothing like lying down, taking a deep breath, and shutting your eyes. In microgravity, that feeling cannot be matched.

  We will be starting a rotation soon in which one person will get to use the room one night every week. Well, that’s how it would have been with seven crew members. As it is, we have ten, so there will be some complication in the schedule.

  Unfortunately, I can’t stroll into the Centrifuge Module whenever I want to. If someone is using it, the digital readout on the door says 9.016445817653624. This is the number of rotations per minute (and it is this number that is required to create one g of artificial gravity.) I have to wait until that person chooses to stop it and the digital readout says 0. Then the hatch unlocks and in I go.

  Because there is only one shower, we have to take turns.

  It is ten days since we left our home—that little dot known as Earth. The moon is no longer even visible to my naked eye. Katia claims she can see it, but I think she might be pulling my leg.

  Her infatuation with Commander Tomlinson is growing stronger. I noticed that something that has not changed in the flight plans is how much time he gets to spend with her.

  So far, Sarah and Tim have done their interviews with MCC. My turn is today. I’m still a little uncertain about what to say. Should I tell Houston that our station commander is a psychopath who, I suspect, has been responsible for the deaths of three crewmates? They’d probably decide there isn’t a psychopath, but somebody (me, for example) is definitely psycho. Astronauts have a reputation for being superhumans, and with good reason. It takes a high caliber of person to subject themselves to the demands of spaceflight training. On the other hand, I know of two astronauts who are known for emphasizing their ordinariness. One is Commander Sykes. The other is Clayton Anderson. While they are doubtless being modest, they highlight the fact that it was hard work and determination which made them successful astronauts, not any special abilities or extraordinary intelligence. NASA would be hard-pressed to believe me. But I know that astronauts are human, and there have certainly been cases where they were less than ideal. Vasily Tsibliyev, a MIR commander, was unable to cope with the stresses of command under difficult circumstances, and Lisa Nowak was certifiably crazy. The fact that NASA dictates our every move for virtually all of the day tells me they know astronauts are fallible people just like everybody else.

  I want to talk with Commander Sykes, and Shelby told me he would be speaking to me, but so far I haven’t heard from him. I want to be on the same page with him should NASA ask me whether I think the mission should continue or we should abort. I don’t want to continue the mission if Commander Tomlinson is in charge. I probably do want to continue if he is out of the picture, though I don’t want to selfishly drag along those who were not expe
cting to go to Pluto. Commander Sykes, for example, told me when I came aboard that he needed to be with his family. Either way, the likelihood of NASA spontaneously determining that Commander Tomlinson is unfit and therefore must be cast away seems remote. After all, the extraterrestrials chose him, and NASA seems pretty keen on meeting their demands.

  My shower time is up. I turn off the water and reach for my micro towel.

  Seventeen

  I’m working on replacing a carbon filter in the water reclamation system in Node 3 when Commander Sykes approaches me. “Hello, Jim,” he says. “How are you?”

  “Keeping busy,” I say.

  “Do you have a minute?”

  “If I’m not done with this on time, I’ll be late for my next activity, and Commander Tomlinson might throw me in the brig.”

  Commander Sykes smiles crookedly, “Come with me. We need to talk.”

  He leads me to the Japanese Experiment Module where a storage module is affixed above. To my surprise, he takes me up into the storage module where we are surrounded by white fabric boxes. Unlike most of the rest of the station, it is quiet in here. It’s also a little dark, and private. He says, “You’re having your interview with Houston today, right?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “There are some things you should be aware of before you speak with them. I know you have been feeling the same way I have about Commander Tomlinson. I have been doing a lot of investigating. To tell you the truth, I haven’t had much sleep since we came out here. The thing that got me the most was the robotic arm. It seemed impossible that it would malfunction in that way. But, before he died, I was working with Yury on checking out the programming for the Canadarm.”

  “Yury?”

  “Yes, he was a programmer.”

  “What if—" I say, then stop.

  “What?”

  “What if he didn’t commit suicide?”

  “The Soyuz hatch can only be closed from the inside. He deliberately went into the Soyuz, closed the Poisk Module hatch and then closed the Soyuz hatch, and undocked Soyuz. Even if he didn’t commit suicide, for some reason he went into that spacecraft alone and pulled away from the ISS. He couldn’t possibly have thought that he could make it back to Earth with the Soyuz. No, he knew he would die. The deaths of Viktor and Valentin must have been too much. At any rate, when he looked at the Canadarm programming, he found that there is a change log for alterations to the program. There is no indication that a change was made.”

  “Can the log be changed?”

  “It is not a single log. Each time a change is made, a new log is written. The log is set to ‘Read Only’ and cannot be altered or removed. Yury had backup files of all the programs that run the station. He kept them on his encrypted personal drive. He compared his backup to the current Canadarm code and found them to be identical.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means the system has not been tampered with. Nobody could have deliberately caused that arm to do what it did except the person who was operating it. But Katia obviously didn’t do that, she wasn’t even touching the controls part of the time it went nuts.”

  “So it was just a freak accident?”

  “It looks that way. Very bad luck. And it means that the Canadarm is not safe until we can find out where in the code it went wrong.”

  “What about Viktor’s tethers and SAFER?”

  “We watched the video of when the robotic arm problem went haywire. Sadly, Viktor’s tethers were not attached to his waist. It appears he forgot to clip them. As for the SAFER, there are three possibilities: either he forgot to use it; he used it but did not push the button that automatically aligns you with the station; or it malfunctioned. We have no way of knowing which of those possibilities it was.”

  “And your spacesuit leak?”

  “Kurt and I took apart my suit and did some forensics. I had the same problem that an Italian astronaut named Luca Parmitano had years ago. Water seeped into his helmet after a filter became clogged by contaminants. The water was able to move up around a fan, something the engineers had not foreseen happening in a microgravity environment. In my suit, you would expect that the same problem had occurred: that the filter was clogged. That would have been extraordinary because they are carefully checked now. But, no, my filter was just fine.”

  “Then what caused the leak?”

  “We ran the suit for hours and were unable to reproduce the problem.”

  “What about the antenna array wire?”

  “MCC had a team look into that. They found that the original design specs were right, but by the time the supplier received the order from the company contracted to manufacture the array, a typo had been made and the wrong kind of wire was received and assembled into the array.”

  “What about Commander Tomlinson?”

  “I think we keep a close eye on him. We have not actually seen him do anything truly questionable. His leadership skills need work, there’s no doubt about that. But on the whole, you could say he is just doing the best he can with a bad situation that only seems to be getting worse. He was way off on his decision to keep us all in the station during the unexpected launch, and you paid the price for that. But I’m letting that slide because it was in the heat of the moment. If his decisions continue to put us in harm’s way unnecessarily, my opinion will change. At that time, I’ll be talking with you again.”

  I approach the computer in the Russian Service Module for my interview with Houston. I wish I could talk to them over the radio, but apparently given our limited bandwidth, that won’t work. That being the case, I intend to show NASA I’m the fastest pointer-finger typist they ever sent to space.

  Their first message comes through.

  MCC: Is this Jim?

  I start to type “the one and only,” but realize it’s best to keep things brief so I don’t wear my finger out. I already have a broken arm. Can’t afford to lose a finger, too.

  MCC: YES

  MCC: This is Alexandra Iara. I’m a psychiatrist. How are you feeling, Jim?

  ISS: GOOD

  MCC: How has the mission gone so far?

  ISS: OK

  MCC: We hear you broke your arm. How is that making you feel?

  ISS: ITS OK

  MCC: Is there anything you want to tell us?

  ISS: YES

  MCC: Go ahead.

  MCC: Are you still there, Jim?

  ISS: CMDR TOMLINSON IS BAD MAN. SYKES GOOD GUY. TOO MANY DIE. ABORT AT VENUS. FIX STATION AT EARTH.

  MCC: You don’t like Commander Tomlinson?

  ISS: NO

  MCC: Why not?

  ISS: INCOMTINENT

  MCC: He is having bowel trouble?

  ISS: NO! INCOMPTENT.

  MCC: I see.

  ISS: INCONPITENT?

  MCC: Incompetent.

  ISS: BINGO

  MCC: What has he done to make you feel that way?

  ISS: HE IS EGO MANIAC. MANIPULATR. MAKES BAD WORSE. MICRO MANAGER

  MCC: Thanks for telling us that. But you like Commander Sykes?

  ISS: YES

  MCC: What do you like about Commander Sykes?

  ISS: BUSTS BUTT. EVENHANDED. DOES RIGHT

  MCC: Thank you for sharing that. Are the crew casualties upsetting you?

  ISS: YES

  MCC: We are upset, too. But we hope to put those tragedies behind us. If you need to talk, reach out to Shiro and Shelby. They can tell you about the different stages of grieving. It might help you out.

  ISS: TOO MANY DEATHS TOO FAST

  MCC: It is very sad, yes.

  ISS: NOT RIGHT

  MCC: It isn’t right that they died, no.

  ISS: NOT FAIR. EVERYONE DYING FROM EXTRA CREW

  MCC: Among the unplanned crew members, three have died. It is not fair. Two were engaged in hazardous EVAs. One was overcome by grief. It isn’t fair that they died. But do not allow your grief to overwhelm you. They knew the risks when they became cosmonauts. They died doin
g what they love.

  ISS: THEY DID NOT WANT TO GO TO PLUTO

  MCC: We know. Now they don’t have to. Spaceflight is dangerous. Try to look at the positive, Jimmy. It will help you feel better.

  Eighteen

  I float as quickly as I can through the station trying to find Commander Sykes. I finally locate him in the European Lab. I say, “You need to see what Houston just told me.”

  He follows me through the Station back to the Service Module. I point to the screen.

  ISS: THEY DID NOT WANT TO GO TO PLUTO

  MCC: We know. Now they don’t have to. Spaceflight is dangerous. But try to look at the positive, Jim. It will help you feel better.

  MCC: Did you have anything else you wanted to talk about, Jim?

  “That’s odd,” I say. “That isn’t what it said before.”

  “What did it say?”

  “It said, ‘We know. Now they don’t have to. Try to see the positive, Jimmy. It will help you feel better.’”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Yes, that’s what it said. But my question is, how could they have known that the cosmonauts didn’t want to go to Pluto?”

  “I told them. I said that Commander Tomlinson asked everyone who didn’t want to go to Pluto to raise his hand, and Viktor, Valentin, and Yury raised their hands.”