Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3)

by Gerald Brennan

  “Sure thing, Buzz.”

  I step in and close the door. “I wanted to clarify something from our conversation the other week. This Venus mission…” (Somehow everything feels all awkward and wrong.) “…what I’m saying is, I think I should be in command.”

  “I’m not offering you command, Buzz.” Deke speaks flatly. “I had someone else in mind that’d be better for the job, I think.”

  “Someone else?”

  “Shepard.”

  “He just got back from the moon.”

  Deke shrugs. “He wants this. I think he’s the best man for the job.”

  The best friend for the job. (I think this, but I know enough not to say it.) Instead: “Well, I think I should have a shot. You’re not worried about the ear thing flaring back up?”

  Deke purses his lips. “I’m well familiar with how skittish doctors can get when it comes to medical issues.”

  I nod.

  “Anyway,” Deke continues, “he hasn’t had any problems since the surgery. None. We threw him on the centrifuges before that, he did fine. And Apollo 13? Nothing. He’ll be fine.”

  “But I…” I protest meekly, even as I know what he’ll say next.

  “If you don’t like it, I’d be happy to switch places with you.”

  This is his trump card; he plays it every time anyone drags out a conversation about assignments, just because he can. (When you’re an astronaut and you’re getting to fly, you don’t have grounds to complain to one who’s been grounded without a flight.) So I keep my mouth shut.

  “Besides, I’ve got something better for you,” he continues. “Man’s first deep-space EVA.”

  Now he has my attention. Now I’m not thinking about command.

  “We have something similar planned for the J-missions. A little excursion by the command module pilot, to retrieve film, and so forth. But that’s still within earshot of Earth. This…you’ll be on your own. If things don’t go according to plan, the conversation lag won’t let you ask us for advice and wait for an answer. You’ll need to figure it out on your own.”

  “Sign me up,” I smile.

  •••

  “Pretty active observation day on the telescope tomorrow,” Kerwin observes.

  “Uh-huh,” I say.

  We’re in the mess area, eating dinner at last around a tiny triangular table. Or rather, the other two are eating while I pick at my tray.

  “You’re probably more excited for the main event, huh?” Kerwin says.

  “Can you blame me?” I grin. “Getting out of this thing and getting a look around when we’ve just flown past another planet? Looking down and seeing the Venerean atmosphere, right there?” I glance over at Shepard; I know how much he hates that word.

  “Venusian,” he corrects me, as usual, then adds: “Venerean sounds like…something you’d pick up from a hooker in Titusville.”

  I laugh, despite myself. Then I feel bad, something far down in me. “Yeah, I caught the Venerean disease. That’s why I’m up here.”

  “Wife put you out, huh?” Shepard chuckles.

  Again, a twinge in my bowels. I’m usually stopped up in space. But not tonight. “Excuse me, gentlemen. I think I need to hit the latrine.”

  “You mean the head.” Shepard grins: Navy lingo, as usual, but I don’t correct him; I’m already half-gone, floating down the hallway.

  I make it just in time. There’s some unpleasantness, but nothing I can’t handle with a little bit of cleaning and the suction hose. I stay in there for a few minutes, alone with my thoughts about Joan and the kids and all the angst and brittleness of the past three years. It doesn’t make me feel better, thinking of all that.

  I force myself to stop. Shut it all down. They never explained it at the Academy, not in so many words, but that was the point of it all, bracing with chin tucked in and eyes straight forward while upperclassmen yelled in your face so close their nose would brush against your cheek, doing left- and right- and about-faces towards whomever was lighting you up at that particular moment, reciting passages memorized from your Bugle Notes, “Scott’s Fixed Opinion” or “The Definition of Leather,” or maybe handling table duties at the mess hall, cutting the pie when three of the upperclassmen insisted they didn’t want any and you didn’t have a nice evenly divisible number but instead had seven slices, calculating the exact angle for each (51.42857⁰) with the precision of a draftsman even while your classmates at nearby tables were being yelled at to within an inch of their life, then slicing into it with every ounce of concentration you could muster even despite the absurdity of it all, like you were a surgeon and the butter knife was your scalpel. They never explained the purpose of it all, not in so many words, or maybe they yelled it in one or two words. “Do something!” or even just “Function!” Because that was it. You had to function. You had to do something, regardless of how you felt at that particular moment. You had to ignore everything that wasn’t essential to the task at hand, and shut down your feelings, and just DO.

  Soon, I feel better. Not good, but better.

  I undo the latches and float back.

  “All right?” Shepard asks.

  “I’ll manage.”

  •••

  In the middle of the large part of the main deck, there’s a curtained circular passage leading down into the sleeping chambers.

  In a rare example of governmental willingness to admit that we have private lives, the mission planners have scheduled private communications windows throughout the mission for each of us to talk to our wives and families. Now that the big early stuff’s over and we’re settling into our routine, we’re having the first one. By a vote of two-to-one, it’s been allocated to Joe Kerwin, so Shepard and I pull ourselves down into the smaller area to give him some privacy. It’s a much narrower space; it almost feels like an afterthought, or maybe a cellar or a crawlspace; there are lights, but no windows.

  “He probably can’t hear us, huh?” I ask as we rearrange ourselves.

  “Probably not,” Shepard says. Then: “Joe? Joe?”

  The curtain stays closed.

  “It’s funny,” I observe. “The guy with the best marriage gets the first chance to work on his. Gotta reinforce success, I guess.”

  Shepard gives me a look. “Don’t knock Kerwin. He’s probably the only truly decent guy on this mission. And I do include myself in that assessment.”

  I’m sure I give him a look right back, one that says: I include you, too.

  •••

  4 APR 1972

  TVI today. There is no going back.

  We have shut down the CSM as planned. For better or worse it felt like a spacecraft, a mode of transport, something to take you from one place to another. Something with controls that you could at least fly. But the manned module feels like something else. A house or a prison.

  Some unpleasantness tonight. Not sure why I’m not feeling quite right.

  •••

  “Feeling better?” Joe asks as we peel open our breakfast trays.

  “Not bad.”

  “Nausea?”

  “I’ve never had nausea in space. Even on the Vomit Comet, I only had it once, and that was from one too many martinis the night before. No, it was…I dunno. Something in my bowels.”

  “Well, hope it’s done.”

  “You’re a cheerful one today, huh? Morning Joe.”

  He shrugs.

  “Good talk last night? Everything OK on the home front?”

  “Can’t complain,” he says. “It was really nice to hear them. You can hear the pauses getting a little longer, but it was still a nice conversation. You’ve got yours tonight, right?”

  “Yep. Looking forward to it.”

  But first, of course, the workday: there is far more to our mission than talking to our families as we wait to fly past Venus.

  Our voyage is officially the Inner Solar System Exploration Mission, colloquially shortened to “ISSEM” on planning documents and “ISM” in conve
rsations. Everything, every window and bulkhead and packet of food and gyroscope and instrument, has been carefully designed to keep the total mass of the system reasonably low, just as was the case on the moon missions. Back then, our objectives were simple: getting as much equipment as possible onto the surface of the moon (laser reflectors, seismometers, etc.) and then taking as much of the moon as possible (dust, rocks, hand-drilled core samples, etc.) home to Earth. But here, we have a couple priorities. Obviously, we’re looking to vastly expand our knowledge about Venus; we’ll be releasing a mix of orbital and descent probes once we’re close to the planet. But we’d also like to have full and productive workdays on the long journey. So after all the heavy engineering work, the mass reduction, the paring of bulkheads and the shrinking of windows, we’re carrying an observation package that includes a telescope for visible and hydrogen-alpha observation, an x-ray telescope, a coronagraph, and an extreme ultraviolet spectroheliograph. The scientists hope we’ll revolutionize man’s understanding of the sun every bit as much as the lunar landings did for the moon.

  Soon, Kerwin’s behind the console and Shepard is at the computer, and Houston is on the radio, guiding us through the checklists to open up the telescopes and start observation. I follow along mechanically.

  “…and H-alpha AUTO to OFF, DOOR to OPEN,” they say at last.

  Kerwin reaches up to the console to flip the last switches.

  “H-alpha AUTO switch to OFF. H-alpha DOOR switch to OPEN. Talkback is white…and now gray.”

  The six-inch CRT screen comes to life, a small TV image of a grainy red sun.

  “And we’re in business,” Shepard says. “Wow. That is really neat!”

  I look over to see Joe’s reaction. Shepard sometimes acts like a dumb pilot who doesn’t really care about the science stuff but memorizes just enough to get by; even after months of training, I can’t tell if it’s the truth, or just a role he plays to get Joe going.

  “We’ve seen this in training already,” Kerwin smiles. “The 656 nanometer wavelength, the light from the chromosphere, this stuff all makes it through the atmosphere.”

  “Oh, yeah, of course. This is all from electrons falling from the third to second orbit, right?”

  “Well, they’re not really in orbit,” Kerwin says. “They use the word ‘orbitals,’ but it’s really a probability cloud at each level. All that weird modern physics stuff where you don’t know exactly where something is, where you get particles tunneling through classically forbidden regions, starting out in one spot, ending up somewhere else where they’re not supposed to be…” His voice trails off, enchanted by the telescope, motions on the surface of the sun.

  As the science pilot, Kerwin has the bulk of the telescope time, but for the next few hours we help him out, recording observations, making calculations and counting camera frames. (Kerwin’s a doctor by training; he’s up here, in part, to help keep us healthy, and deal with any medical emergencies. Still, by now we’ve all been through enough astronomy instruction that we’d probably be eligible for advanced degrees.) It makes for a long workday: not physically tiring, of course, but the mental effort is taxing.

  Then before dinner, medical experiments. First we take tape measurements, baseline marks for muscle mass. There is also a spring contraption that allows us to get some semblance of a workout, stretching and pulling and curling until each of us is coated in a glistening film of sweat that of course refuses to drip off or go anywhere but must instead be wiped off with a washcloth.

  At the appointed hour, I’m up on the main deck in my communications headset, alone.

  In theory it’s the early evening, but the sameness of the sky makes it easy to forget all of that. (On Earth, there’s an unspoken agreement of sorts between you and the sun: you work a full day, and at the end of it, win or lose, the world resets itself and the heavens get dark. But on this mission, nothing changes; the sun’s still up, like it’s expecting you to keep working, too. It’s like a breach of contract.)

  “Houston, Explorer here. This is the Command Module Pilot, checking in for my personal communications window.” I take a deep breath. I am actually looking forward to talking to Joan. I do need to vent a little about Shepard, and it’ll be nice to talk with the kids…

  “Explorer, Houston.” Ken Mattingly’s on the other end. “We’re…ahhh…just stand by for a minute.” Normally Ken’s all clipped and professional, but here there’s uncertainty and lost words.

  I float over to the window and rotate so my feet are near the so-called ceiling; I place my forehead on the glass and try to look back. I can just barely see two of the receiver dishes on the high-gain antenna sticking out from the side of our dormant service module. Earth and moon are somewhere back there; we’ll soon be farther away than any humans have ever been. But despite my best efforts, I can’t see what we’re leaving behind.

  “Houston, Explorer. CMP standing by.”

  I pull down the shade. There’s no real point to having it up, anyhow. The scenery’s stopped changing. We’re never in shadow, so we can’t even see that many stars.

  “Explorer, Houston. I apologize, Buzz. We are trying to determine your wife’s whereabouts.”

  There is a twinge in my gut and I force myself to take a deep breath. The walls of the manned module are mute witnesses to my frustration, sterile and metal and gray. “Houston, Explorer. Is she in the building, at least?”

  The pause feels interminable.

  “We are trying to figure that out, Buzz.”

  “Roger, Ken. Maybe call the gate, see if she’s cleared that at least.”

  Then: “We tried that, Buzz. They haven’t seen her yet.”

  Again, I breathe. I have to remind myself there is no point getting worked up. There is nothing I can do. Or maybe… “Call my house, Ken.”

  I wait for his reaction.

  “Buzz, I don’t know if…”

  “I’ll give you the number if you need it, but I know you guys have it down there in a binder somewhere. Find it and give Joan a call.”

  I wait.

  “OK, Buzz. Stand by.”

  I wait. I wait. I wait. I wait some more.

  I want to climb the walls. I want to do something. This is the frustrating thing about zero gravity: you can’t even pace back and forth. I’m reduced to rubbing my headset, frustrated.

  “Explorer, Houston. I’m sorry, Buzz. There’s no answer.”

  “OK, maybe she’s left already.” The words sound hollow as I speak them; I know they’re untrue, the false hopes that burn like lies.

  “Roger, Explorer. How long do you want to wait?”

  I’m reluctant to give a number. “We’ll give it a few, Houston.”

  “Explorer, Houston, understood.”

  I float. Now I cannot blame the conversational pause on transmission delays, or on anything but my own awkwardness. How to fill the void? The eternal question. Small talk: always a big deal for me. “How’s the weather down there, Ken?”

  “Starting to get warm. I had to turn the air conditioner on last night for the first time.”

  I chuckle. “We’ve been running ours nonstop up here.”

  I breathe.

  “I bet,” he says.

  “Well, the sun is relentless.”

  I wait, and at last: “Yeah, worse than a Houston summer, right? At least it’s not as humid. And you’ve got someone else paying the bills.”

  “Yeah, there is that…” I trail off.

  Again, silence. Awkwardness.

  “I’m sure something came up, Buzz. We’ll get a message to you as soon as we know something.”

  “Houston, Explorer. Understood. We can close the window.”

  I open the curtain to the sleeping chamber. Kerwin floats up.

  “Everything OK?” he asks. He knows it’s early.

  “Yeah, fine,” I say.

  •••

  5 APR 1972

  Long workday on the telescope. Unknown communications issue with
home.

  In the night I see the flicker-flashes.

  I do not tell the others.

  •••

  “…and the XUV monitor is on downlink. You should be able to get it on your TV feed.”

  It’s morning of our second day of observations. We’re sending the imagery from our ultraviolet instruments down to Houston so we can coordinate with earthbound astronomers.

  “Explorer, Houston, we are picking it up.” Then: “Before I forget, we do have a quick message from your wife. She apologized for missing the window last night. Everything’s fine, and she’ll fill you in during your next PCW.”

  “Understood, Houston.” I don’t want to think about it. In some strange way, I was hoping for an emergency. Maybe a car accident where it was the other driver’s fault and nobody was injured but the car was totaled and they couldn’t make it to Mission Control. Nothing too too serious, but something understandable, at least. Given our trajectory and the growing distances, it’ll soon be impossible to have a real conversation. “Thank you.”

  Kerwin floats up behind me, returning from the bathroom. “All right, ready to take over, Buzz.”

  “Actually…I think I’ll take the first block. Get a little time behind the telescope.”

  “Sure thing.”

  We get started on the day’s observation program, and soon my worry dissolves in a frenzy of work.

  Now that I’m truly paying attention, the sun is actually quite fascinating. Under the hydrogen-alpha, the sun’s no longer a bland white disk, but instead a mottled red orb; we can see a tremendous amount of detail: not just sunspots, but huge granules of hydrogen plasma a thousand kilometers wide that bubble to the surface and then disappear in a matter of minutes, and larger supergranules that linger long enough for us to track their slow movement across its face. Through the extreme ultraviolet and x-ray instruments, it becomes even more compelling: a churning and boiling cauldron of plasma. And because Earth’s atmosphere blocks those wavelengths, we can study the sun like it’s never been studied in all of human history.

  “Look at the edges of those granules on the limb,” Kerwin points to the detail screen.

  “Yeah, they’re not perpendicular to the surface. Angled. And the edges of the active regions, those loops…it does look like a lot of magnetic activity.”