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

by Gerald Brennan

  Two days before the flyby, there’s time for one more session with the spring contraption. They’ve radioed up a modification to our schedule, though: they want Kerwin to give me a checkout before and during the workout. We’ve already done one this week. So this could be it: an opportunity for them to come up with a medical excuse to keep me inside. Still, what choice do I have? I submit to the stethoscope and the inflatable arm cuff device. (They’ve trained all of us to use these, puffing up the cuff until the artery collapses, then letting the air out of it while listening with the stethoscope for the whoosh as the blood starts flowing, and the point when the noises stop. So we can all take readings if needed; someone has to doctor the doctor, after all. But somehow I’ve forgotten the name of the arm device, and it’s bugging me.)

  “Resting heart rate...60,” Kerwin floats next to me, fingers on my carotid artery. “And we’ll do blood pressure…”

  “What the hell is this thing called again? I can never remember.” I ask as he puts the device around my arm and pumps it up.

  “Just a sec.” He puts on his stethoscope and lets the air out and listens. “122 over 85. This? The sphygmomanometer?”

  “Sphyg-mo-man-o-met-er. That always sounds like too many syllabalales.”

  Kerwin doesn’t quite laugh, which is cause for concern. “Sphygmos. Greek for ‘pulse.’ And of course, a manometer is a pressure gauge. It is a lot of ‘m’s,” he concedes. “Didn’t we cover this in training?”

  “We did. I heard it once and forgot. I didn’t want to ask again.”

  Now he chuckles a little, at least. “All the flight physicals you’ve done, you’ve only heard it once?”

  “I’m like any other pilot at the doctor’s. Get in, get out, say as little as possible, and pray they don’t ground you.”

  Kerwin chuckles again.

  “I guess I should pay more attention,” I continue. “‘Know your enemy,’ huh?”

  “Hmmmph.” He takes a look in my ears.

  “Everything OK?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He gives me another look; I’m not sure what it means. “Quite a beard you’ve got now.”

  “Oh…yeah.” I stroke my whiskered chin. “I figured it’d be a fun project for the outward voyage. Explorers have beards, right?”

  “You’re gonna shave it before Sunday?” Meaning before the EVA.

  “Of course.” I know I should take my advice and not say too much, but the silence and the sense of judgment are killing me. “They give a reason for this extra physical?”

  “Oh, you know,” he says. “The usual.”

  “Nothing about anything we’re doing is usual, Joe.”

  “Well, exactly. They just want an extra validation. Some warm fuzzy feelings before they send you out into the cold. Obviously nobody’s ever been up here this long. The physiological changes we’re going through, nobody’s done this before. And the psychological…”

  “Psychological?” I’m sure I give him a look. I’m worried about what they were thinking when Shepard and I had the little to-do about the retrograde burn. I’ve been feeling a little…off. I was wondering if they’d noticed, and apparently they have. Still, it’s surprising to hear these things out loud.

  “It’s…well, nobody’s able to work at 110% for four months straight. But they want to make sure everyone’s staying fit, staying motivated…”

  For a few seconds I say nothing. Then: “When we were heading to the moon, there were people who thought we were in danger, that the moon dust would be combustible. Like how they have explosions in grain silos, particles in the air and what-not. So after we got back in the lander, I put a little handful of moon dust out in the open, just to humor them, to see if it…caught fire or something when we repressurized. And sure enough, nothing. No smoke, no fire. But that’s the thing. The naysayers are always looking for reasons why something won’t work. Planning disasters in their head, waiting to say ‘I told you so.’”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “Well, it seems like they’re being…overly fussy.”

  He sighs. “I’m just the doctor, Buzz.”

  I work out for a good twenty minutes, doing butterfly arm spreads, leg extensions with my foot in the spring strap, and mountain climbers with a waist harness to hold me close to the floor. Maybe it’s the conversation beforehand, the implied insult of the extra scrutiny, but my blood’s up and I push myself hard.

  Near the end, I feel a little off: heart pounding, vision dimming, a very slight sense of something that might be called dizziness. I don’t particularly want to mention it.

  But I think Kerwin’s noticed anyway. “You all right, Buzz?” he asks.

  “Yeah. Fine.” I pant the words.

  “You look a little…” He puts fingers on my neck, counts. “Huh. Pulse is really up there. That was about 190.”

  “Huh.” I take a deep breath.

  “Let’s have a listen.” He puts stethoscope to chest.

  “Everything’s.” Breath. “O.K.” This is perplexing: I pride myself on my fitness; I was quite the gymnast at the Academy, and I’ve kept it up far more than most men my age.

  He gives me a look. “Are you?” he asks, like he doesn’t believe my answer’s correct, and he’s giving me a chance to fix it.

  “Yeah.” I breathe deeply. “I am.” I feel normal again. Or my normal, at least.

  He smiles: a partial, incredulous smile. “I’m not the enemy, Buzz.”

  It’s Shepard’s turn to prepare dinner, so I have a little time off. I spend it in the bathroom area, hacking away at my beard: first with scissors and the vacuum hose, trying to catch all the stray floating bristles before they float off, and then with my razor, which I haven’t used in months. At the end of it all, I’m late for dinner, and my face is speckled with blood.

  “Jesus, Buzz, you look like a lunatic,” Shepard says when I finally float in.

  “Jesus Christ,” I shake my head. I’ve been trying to bite my tongue and keep my frustrations in check, but enough’s enough. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  “You all right?” Kerwin asks again.

  “It’s…it’s always the same with this guy.” I force a smile. “He’s always gotta take you down a notch, for no reason whatsoever. It’s like the laws of thermodynamics. You can’t win, you can’t break even.”

  And now I feel I’ve said too much; I wonder if this little outburst will, at last, give them an excuse to keep me inside. It felt good to get it off my chest, but I can’t say it was worth it. Maybe there’s another universe with a version of me that hasn’t fucked anything up.

  We settle in to a stiff silence.

  As we’re finishing up, the radio cuts in. “Explorer, Houston. You should be just about done eating. Standing by for your daily report.”

  Shepard says: “Would you two mind heading downstairs for a bit?”

  It’s the absolute last thing I want to hear. I float down there, heart heavy, like a man heading to the gallows. Kerwin follows close behind. We don’t say anything.

  I root around in my sleeping area as if I’ve got tidying up to do. My mind’s on the conversation upstairs, working as hard as my body did earlier; I can’t hear anything, but I’m spinning through probability matrixes, all the permutations and combinations of phrases, forecasting horrible things.

  Then the curtain opens. Shepard’s face fills the hatchway: “Joe, I need you up here for a minute.”

  And with that I’m alone, imagining.

  Distractedly I root around for my Bible, but I’m not feeling it, so I pull out the Bradbury collection. I start reading, or scanning my eyes over the pages at least: none of it’s sinking in. I force myself to concentrate. The next story, “All Summer in a Day,” opens with a group of schoolchildren on Venus. On this version of the planet, they endure relentless and non-stop rain, except for a one-hour break in the weather every seven years. Most of the kids can’t remember seeing the sun, but there’s one girl who’s a more recent
arrival, who grew up in Ohio before moving to the new planet. And they lock her in the closet right before the break in the weather; they lock her in, and she misses her chance to go outside…

  When the curtain opens again, I wait for Shepard to summon me and give me the bad news. I wait, but he says nothing.

  •••

  The next day, the last before the flyby, everything proceeds normally.

  It’s a little unsettling.

  It’s so easy to imagine them replacing me that I feel the need to bring it up obliquely.

  “You know, come to think of it, I might have been a touch dehydrated yesterday,” I tell Kerwin.

  And he smiles: “That’s what I thought, too. We’ll stay on top of it during the EVA, it should be fine. Maybe swap out the drink bags, give you a larger one.”

  So it seems like I’m still on, but I find myself wondering if Shepard will have something else to say. And soon we’re in the command module, working ourselves into our spacesuits. It’s a dress rehearsal for the getting-dressed part of our upcoming one-day-only extravaganza.

  I’m anxious to do well, and I analyze every action, making a point to do everything very deliberately and not make any stupid mistakes. On the descent to the moon, we had to wear a fecal containment garment, basically a grown-up diaper. I’d already made it through my three-day Gemini mission without having a bowel movement, so I knew that 30 hours on Apollo were doable as well; I made it a point not to take a dump on the moon. Here I’ll only be outside for an hour, so I’ve considered going without it…then again, the consequences of error would be substantial. So I put it on, and then the liquid cooling garment: a coverall interwoven with water tubing to keep us from overheating while working, something that had been an issue for Gene Cernan on Gemini. Then, my spacesuit itself: a single-piece white monstrosity, headless and handless, that you have to enter through the back. And at last, the black-and-white snoopy cap headsets.

  We take turns: Kerwin, then Shepard, then myself. They have to go through the whole rigamarole too, of course, because the entire command module will be vented into space before we open the hatch. (Shepard will at least get his head and shoulders out and get a look around, but Kerwin has to endure the hassle without even a change of scenery.) The whole process has been carefully choreographed so as to keep the chaos to a minimum: we unstow everything in the proper sequence so we can either put it on immediately, or easily reach it later. But we’re out of practice, and it takes the better part of a half hour.

  “Houston, Explorer,” Shepard transmits at last. “We’re all suited up and ready to start connecting the rest of the hoses. No major hiccups. Switching to VOX to test the individual comm loops.” He turns a switch on the panel. “Commander testing now. Here we are.” He nods to me.

  “CMP, testing one, two, three,” I say, then look at Joe.

  “Science Pilot here. Testing. Give us a reading when you get this. Over.”

  While we wait for their answer, we proceed with the remainder of the hose connectors. For Shepard and me, there’s one with water that feeds the garment, and another for the oxygen/nitrogen mix. Shepard’s and Kerwin’s hoses connect directly to the environmental control system, while mine feed through a connector plate on my abdomen and into an umbilical cord on my left hip.

  At last the ground gives their feedback on the voice test. “Explorer, Houston, we copy your com loop check. Try turning the sensitivity up a notch. Over.”

  Shepard stops connecting hoses and reaches up to the panel. One by one, we speak into the microphones, then get back to the checklist. Once the hoses are connected, each one needs to be locked into place so they won’t come out and start spraying air into space; I do everything cautiously and double-check every connector.

  “Pressure alarm. Repress valve is off,” Shepard says; we need to turn off the flow of air until we have our gloves and helmets on.

  “Explorer, Houston. We copy your second com loop check.” Again we have to go back to where the ground was three-and-a-half minutes ago, which is where we were three-and-a-half minutes before that. It’s like chasing your tail, but through time rather than space. “You guys are all five by five. Over.”

  “Houston, Explorer, we copy five by five on the comms. We are finishing with the hose connectors. Repress valve is off.”

  “Let me see about the umbilical,” Joe says. Something happens below my field of vision, and the cord starts filling the space in front of me: a sterile white snake, unwieldy and chaotic.

  “Whoops,” Shepard says.

  “Yeah, I may want to do this differently tomorrow,” Kerwin says.

  “Yeah, it’s definitely in the way, this way,” I reply, trying to gather the umbilical in my arms and pass it down to him.

  “Maybe if I float kinda crossways, down by your feet. I can kinda keep it under control and feed it up.”

  “Yeah, let’s do that,” Shepard adds. “And I’ll just stay up here, watching it at the hatch.”

  “OK,” Kerwin says from down by my feet; bit by bit he’s getting the cord under control. “How’s that?”

  Now I have a much clearer view of the control panel. “Wonderful.”

  “All connectors locked,” Shepard says.

  “Connectors locked,” we echo.

  Next, helmets, then gloves. There are neck locks and wrist locks on those, too, to keep them from shooting off once the suit’s pressurized.

  “Suit circuit return valve to closed,” Shepard says.

  “Yes, sir, turn it to closed,” I reply. “Direct O2/N2 closed?”

  “Direct O2/N2 is closed. I’m going to open up the equalization valve a little.”

  Now that we’re all suited up, we are bleeding off a little cabin pressure. This way, when we do our integrity checks; we can make sure the suits are staying pressurized at a higher level, so we’ll know there are no leaks anywhere.

  “Flow is normal, suit pressure is fine,” I say. “Moving on to suit circuit integrity check. Suit test valve to PRESS.”

  “OK, it’s there,” Shepard says after turning the control.

  “All right. Direct O2/N2 flow is OPEN.” I announce. “Suits are going to start pressurizing now.”

  “It’s dropping a little. 0.2 delta-p,” Shepard says.

  “Yes, it will,” I say, eager to show them I know. “They regulate to about 4.5 psi.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. I should bleed off more from the cabin, then,” Shepard says. “We’ll drop it to about 4 psi.” Again he turns the equalization valve and there it goes, a little more of our atmosphere out into space. But the O2/N2 flow in our suits stays normal, and the suit pressure’s where it’s supposed to be, and everything is looking good.

  I take a few deep breaths. It’s been a stressful couple of days. But I’ve been a good team player; I’ve handled everything well and professionally, and they don’t have cause to keep me inside tomorrow.

  “Explorer, Houston. Everything is looking good from our end. You’ve probably moved on to the suit integrity check now, so please give a status when that’s done. Over.”

  “Houston, Explorer, we are good on the suit checks. O2/N2 flow is normal, pressure is steady,” Shepard says, and I know they’re going to respond with a GO when it’s all said and done.

  In the meantime, we read through our lines for tomorrow, the sequence of events for the spacewalk itself. We practiced it all back in the pool before the mission started, floating in neutral buoyancy alongside submerged mockups of the spacecraft, but that was months ago now. We need to refresh our memory, and mission control needs to pass along a few last-minute changes.

  But it is all happening, at least. And that is a relief.

  I glance above our heads, at the window in the center of the hatch, and the emptiness beyond. I’ll be going out there soon, at last.

  •••

  We set up the telescope for automatic operation, so it can take pictures of Venus throughout our approach, storing up the film I’ll be retrievin
g during the spacewalk. Then comes a late, tired dinner. And at last I’m up on the manned module main deck, alone for my last communications window before the big day.

  But the time rolls around, and past, and: nothing.

  “Houston, Explorer, CMP standing by for personal communications window. Over.” I try to sound as nonchalant as possible, even though this is a big deal. Joan knows we’re coming up on the high point of the mission, and if she’s going to do this again, on this, of all days…

  I watch my watch, and wish: hopefully it’s nothing. It could be a simple comms issue, or a matter of timing: maybe they assembled a couple minutes late, but they’re talking now, telling me all their happy little mundane news; their words are already in transit, and just about to get here.

  But I hear nothing. And nothing. And nothing.

  I grab a washcloth and putter around the module, cleaning things I’ve already cleaned. I try not to check my watch again. Passivity is not in my nature.

  Still, I don’t hear anything until seven minutes after my message, which means, of course, that everything isn’t set, and they’re just trying to tide me over. “Explorer, Houston, your kids are on their way and should be in shortly. We’re estimating another five to ten minutes. Over.”

  My kids? No Joan? I’m perplexed. Maybe I shouldn’t be: this is it, this is the way things have been going.

  Then as I float past the hallway entrance, I glance over beneath the pantry cabinets and see a smudge of something white. It seems to be leaking out from inside. Is it…food?

  My mind accelerates until suddenly the issue with Joan has been left far, far behind. We have enough meal packages for the mission, plus a few days: very little extra. Given the mass constraints on the manned module, everything has been calculated precisely, our trajectory and our caloric needs, with enough margin of error to be comfortable in our routines, but not enough to be sloppy. We have no refrigerator; everything’s been freeze-dried or irradiated so as to be fine at room temperature for a year without spoiling. And the packets are stacked with metal dividers every ten meals or so; they’re attached to the magazine spring mechanism so as to keep the meals separated, so they won’t press against each other and rupture. But if something mechanical happened to the magazine, or if we’ve screwed up our temperature control regime for the spacecraft, or if there’s a heating or a cooling leak down there, or if there was some defective sealing machine at the factory and the packets are all bursting somehow…