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

by Gerald Brennan

  “I hope.” Over and above everything, I do not want to fuck anything up. “All right, throwing bag 1.”

  With a stiff double-handed shove, I push the jettison bag up towards Venus. Not that it will get there, of course; orbital mechanics being what they are, it will follow us all the way around the sun and back to Earth, and burn up after we reenter. But this way we’ll get some distance from it, and maybe make a quick posigrade maneuver to get a little more. Kerwin passes up a second bag, and I toss that one as well.

  “All right. Coming the rest of the way out now.” I pull myself out and turn to grab the handrail. (People usually imagine us floating away from the spacecraft, dangling free at the end of the umbilical cord. But it’s hard to work that way, hard to move, even. We’ve planned this out meticulously; I’ll be holding on to handrails the whole time.) With a gentle pull, I’m clear of the hatchway. Everything’s easy and familiar, not all that different from Gemini XII all those years ago; with a pivot of the wrist, I can swing my whole body around.

  “Coming out with the camera,” Shepard says; I turn back and see his head and shoulders popping out, and the lens aimed upwards. “Buzz! You threw trash on Venus!”

  I look up and sure enough, there it is, my second jettison bag just floating up there, partly blocking our view of the planet. “Whoops.”

  “All right, hopefully it’ll drift off so we can get some video. Turn around and we’ll get a shot of you.”

  “OK, just a sec.” I float around to face the hatch; I force a smile for the cameras, although I know no one can see it.

  I’m about to start talking when Shepard launches into his own narration: “We’re a half day away from planet Venus, leaving the relative safety of the spacecraft to conduct the most distant spacewalk ever attempted by man. We are inspecting the craft, retrieving several experiments meant to measure solar wind and micrometeorites, and collecting film from our telescopic observations of the sun.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” I say, not entirely pleased.

  Shepard pans the camera upwards; I’m hoping the jettison bag has drifted off a bit; I want everyone on Earth to see Venus as we can. I want them to see something, at least, although I know how impossible it is to really convey all of this vastness. (It’s impossible because we can’t present it as it is, all-encompassing. How can you reduce that to a magazine cover, or a rectangular television screen? You can’t. It’s like trying to capture the Earth on a globe and then flatten the globe into a map and cut a piece of the map and put it in a book: the person who only sees the book can never understand. But even I cannot see it all; after all, I have the spacecraft in front of me, I have to work with the sun visor down, I have this spacesuit wrapped around me like a cloth cocoon.)

  “We have quite the scene here,” I say. “And it’s clearer than ever just how small we are in all of this. As man ventures farther and farther from Earth, flying to Mars and beyond, it’s a scene we’ll have to get used to. But we can’t pay too much attention. The work is too important to let yourself be distracted. It’s OK to dream, but not to daydream.” This comes out sounding wrong. Do I want to try and find the right words? My body floats easy but my tongue feels tied, the only part of me that’s not free. I turn away from the camera. “All right, I’m going to move on down to the SIM bay.”

  Hand over hand I go, with the silvery spacecraft a foot from my helmeted face. It does call to mind scuba diving; I’m in a sea of blackness, alongside a gleaming metal beast. But the beast isn’t moving. Or it’s moving in fact, but not according to my senses.

  Down the handrails I go, further down along the service module, every movement slow and deliberate. The spacecraft no longer looks fresh and new; it’s still silvery and bright, but near the thruster quads, the paint is blistered and scorched. “Little wear and tear around the quads,” I say. “The paint’s bubbled up quite a bit more than I expected. There’s maybe a four-inch section adjacent to each nozzle where it’s chipping. I don’t think we can do anything about it, but the engineers might want to take it into account. I’m moving over to the SIM bay.”

  With a few more moves I’m there. It’s a recessed rectangular area with extra cameras, infrared and ultraviolet; they’ve been snapping pictures for the duration of the flyby, storing them up in metal canisters that I now have to bring back inside. There are foot restraints to keep me in place so I can use both hands as I work; I guide myself into them and get down to business.

  “All camera covers have fully retracted. We should have a good set of prints,” I report. I take a sip from my drink bag and start to work on the latches and covers that hold the canisters in place. It takes a bit of effort, but we planned the work well, and simulated it regularly in the months before the mission, so soon the movements are coming back to me.

  Soon I have the ultraviolet canister in hand, tethered to me for safety. I move myself one-armed back along the railing to Shepard so I can hand it off, then go back for the infrared. When my feet are back in the restraints, I take a sip from the drink bag. The second canister takes a bit more effort, but soon it yields.

  I’m nearly back to Shepard when I feel something cold and wet near my neck.

  For a moment I wonder if it’s sweat, but no, it’s colder. It’s not a comfortable feeling, but I can still work, so I don’t report it. I still have to collect the micrometeorite package and, most importantly, I have to get the telescope mount film, all the pictures we’ve taken of the sun, of the flares and loops and prominences and granules, the fruit of four months of hard work.

  Again, we replace my tether clip with Shepard’s; while he brings the infrared canister inside, I pull myself around the hatchway to the manned module, and then use the handrails on the roof to get my head and arms up over the side. There is a piece of exposed metal sheeting attached to a flat area there. This is the micrometeorite package, a simple way for engineers to determine how often we’re striking miniscule debris in interplanetary space. After I loosen the clips, I turn and hand it to Shepard. He ducks inside with it, then comes back with a fresh film canister, the replacement for the telescope mount.

  “Houston, Explorer,” Shepard announces. “We’ve retrieved both flyby film canisters and the micrometeorite package. Buzz is moving on to manned module inspection and telescope film replacement.”

  I clip the new canister to my tether and grab its handle. With my free hand, I pull myself back up the handrail to the side of the manned module. Once up there, I survey all the metal and Mylar and the solar panels stretching wide like wings, the minus-z one right in front of me now, all this unknown territory that’s been inches from us for months, unseen.

  “Solar arrays are looking good,” I report. “The sun shade is in decent shape. There’s some evidence of micrometeorite impacts, but no real damage. Moving on to the solar t…”

  Something down by the drink bag lets loose. I feel a lot of water down there. With all of my willpower, I silently urge it to stay put, to stay in place so I can finish my job.

  “Repeat your last, Buzz,” Shepard says.

  “Moving on to telescope film retrieval.”

  Our main telescopes are separate from the body of the manned module; because they need to rotate independently of the spacecraft, they’re attached to a telescope mount, which is why we need to go outside to get the film. We’ve rotated the mount so I can access the rear service panel. I slide my feet into the restraints, clip the new film canister to the handrail, retrieve my torqueless screwdriver, and remove the service panel. Then I start unlatching the canister, the massive white metal box containing every picture we’ve taken during all our solar science over the past four months. I pull it towards me.

  The motion disrupts the water near my neck. A massive glob of it drifts into my field of view, too close to see clearly.

  I take a breath.

  There is no point panicking.

  “I’m…uhh…getting some water in my helmet here,” I say flatly. And as I talk,
it moves the water around, and now there is still more, and I’m not sure how to stop it.

  “Uhh, Explorer, Houston, we copy you have retrieved both canisters and are proceeding to manned module inspection and telescope film retrieval, over.” They sound distant and disconnected, lost in the peace of a few minutes ago. “Make sure you’re providing us some detailed feedback on the sun shield’s condition. The engineers are looking to…”

  I am still holding the old film canister, the one with everything. I still haven’t clipped it in. I try to, but with the water I can’t look down, so I fail. I move it down by my side and grip it tight.

  “Buzz, I copy you have water in your helmet.” Shepard at least is here in the present, but the message from Houston is still coming, something about more inspection tasks, and it’s disorienting and chaotic, the last thing we need. “Joe, turn that off. Put us internal,” Shepard interrupts. “We’ll need some quiet until this is resolved.”

  I hear the click of us switching comm channels, and with that, we’re on our own.

  “Buzz, I copy water in your helmet,” Shepard repeats. “How much?”

  “There’s a few ounces right in front of my face, but I feel more down by my neck.” I breathe in gently. My strategy now is to drink the bit in front of me, then return to the command module with the old canister, then come back to replace the new one. “I think the drink bag sprung a leak.”

  “Can you do anything about it?”

  “I might be able to drink this bit,” I say. And I draw in a little air, trying to suck it towards me, but something tickles in my throat, and I let out a little snort, and the globule shivers and makes contact with my forehead and eyebrows and nose, and now it’s in my eyes. My handrail hand come up towards my face by reflex, although of course there’s nothing they can do about the water while I’m helmeted and gloved, and from the mass near my neck I can feel that still more water is coming in to the helmet now, and all of it has no reason to go anywhere, no gravity to make it drip down, so it just clings to my face, and there’s more joining it now, still more in my eyes, and I can feel myself drifting away from the spacecraft now, and I can’t see anything, just shapes.

  Cautious and semi-blind, I grope around until I find the handrail. When I finally grasp it, I pause and think.

  I am out here at the far limit of it all, and I can’t see.

  I try to blink away the water, but nothing happens. I feel the tickle of still more, down near my mouth and the bottom of my nose.

  I breathe very carefully, through my mouth only now, but I can still feel the mass of water quivering with every breath, and now it’s seeping into my nose.

  It occurs to me that I still haven’t clipped in the old film canister.

  Then it occurs to me that I could drown out here.

  But I stop and think. There is no point panicking.

  An animal panics when it doesn’t understand its situation; it thrashes blindly and makes the situation worse. In the lifesaving classes at summer camp, we learned that drowning victims don’t always flail about, but they grab on to whatever’s in front of them and try to hold it down so they can float, and by doing so, they sometimes drown their rescuers as well. In a panic, people revert to their animal state, and throw away their greatest asset, their ability to think their way out of problems.

  So I must think.

  My feet are in the restraints, and I’m still holding the old canister, and I know I shouldn’t move around wildly. I am still close to the minus-z solar array, and if I damage that, we’ll all be in a lot of trouble even if I do make it back inside. Plus there are sharp edges on it, and the last thing I need is a suit puncture when I can’t move around easily. So I stay there for a second. My eyes are uncomfortable and useless; I can only see silvery watery shapes. I close them and the blackness is complete.

  It occurs to me that, as a last resort, I can try closing my mouth and opening the side valve on the helmet really quickly. I do not know what would happen. Or I do know what could happen, but not in what sequence: the water in my helmet would evaporate instantly once the pressure dropped, or it would spray out through the valve and evaporate outside, or my eyeballs would freeze, or the nitrogen in my blood would un-dissolve and my blood would froth like a shaken-up soda and I’d get the bends…

  “Buzz, what is your status?” Shepard asks.

  I am not sure I can talk without making my situation worse. But I know I need to say something. He’s too far away to come get me. Carefully I ease out the words. “There’s…more water now.”

  More comes into my nose, my sinuses. My lungs are empty and I cannot just exhale it out. I try to inhale but can’t. Every cell in my body is telling me I need to, soon. It is getting hard to think.

  “Buzz, you’re going to need to move back along the handrail,” Shepard says.

  I slide my feet out of the restraints and back up, slowly and methodically, legs first through the blackness, one-armed, still clenching the film canister. My lungs are burning. Thanks to the snoopy headset over my ears, I can still hear everything, but I can feel the moisture starting to seep in…

  I hear Shepard distantly: “Doing good, Buzz. I can see your feet now. You are almost there. All you have to do is...”

  My headset shorts out.

  Every cell is yelling now, screaming at me to breathe. I risk a shallow inhalation. I get a very small bit, and then there is water.

  I try to swallow it.

  It is very hard to think now.

  My lungs are burning and I know I don’t have much time.

  Gently I bring my right leg forward.

  My knee is against the side of the spacecraft, but my toes are unimpeded.

  My lungs are ready to burst.

  Quickly I move myself back a couple more feet and swing my legs forward again.

  Then things fade and I breathe and there is water.

  It’s the last thing I feel.

  •••

  When I open my eyes, my face is blissfully dry.

  My lungs feel like lava.

  I am still on the Venus mission. My helmet is off and the hatch is closed and the spacecraft is pressurized, and Shepard and Kerwin are floating on either side, eyeing me with looks of great concern that give way to grins, even as I start coughing violently, so hard my head hits the instrument panel.

  “There he is,” Shepard says. “Attaboy, tiger.”

  “Gave us quite a scare there, Buzz,” Kerwin adds.

  I blink. Everything feels thick and slow.

  “That settles it,” Shepard says. “This is a ship, that we’re on. If you go overboard and you drown, it’s a ship.”

  “What happened?” I croak.

  “You drowned.”

  “Well…” Kerwin says.

  He turns the radio back on. “..plorer, Houston, we have received no comms for several minutes. What is your status, over?” Another man on the Capcom console, Henize.

  “Houston, Explorer,” Shepard says. “EVA is complete. We are closed and repressurized and everyone is safe. We retrieved the flyby film and the micrometeorite package but lost the telescope film. We had to turn off the comms momentarily. Stand by for a more detailed report. Over.”

  “You must’ve blacked out right after you made it off the manned module,” Shepard says.

  “There was…water. A lot of water. I think my drink bag sprung a leak somehow. My whole helmet was full.”

  “Explorer, Houston, we have received no comms for several minutes. What is your status, over?” Henize sounds as clipped and professional as possible. Our relief hasn’t caught up with their uncertainty.

  Everything feels slow. “What else happened?”

  “Well…” Kerwin starts.

  “What do you think happened? We got you in!” Shepard exults.

  “I mean, how long did it take?”

  “Faster than you ever would have thought possible,” Kerwin chuckles.

  “We had to cut a few corners,” Shepard co
ncedes.

  “What did you do?”

  “Explorer, Houston, we have received no comms for several minutes. What is your status, over?” Despite my foggy mind, I give a dead little chuckle: again the same message, without even a change in wording. It’s like a phone call with my father. Or one of those jokes someone tells until it isn’t funny, then keeps telling until it’s funny again.

  “Your whole goldfish bowl was full of water. We had to crack the valve and evaporate it all,” Shepard says. “It just…flashed to cold steam before our eyes. Damndest thing I ever saw.”

  “Christ,” I reply. “Really?”

  “Well…” Kerwin says.

  “I was thinking of doing that,” I say. “Up there on the manned module. I wasn’t sure I could make it back. But I was worried about the bends. And I wasn’t sure I could close the valve after…” I shake my head and look back at Shepard. They say decompression sickness hits in your joints first; I move mine tentatively, trying to decide if they’re hurting. “Christ. Really?”

  “Actually, we had to close the hatch fast and repress,” Shepard says. “We unlocked your visor when it was about two psi. And all that water…”

  Now I’m envisioning it, them pulling off the helmet bowl, and the mass of water still not having a reason to fall to the floor, but instead shimmering there around my head like a crystal blob. “What did you do with the water?”

  “Well, I had a couple straws.” Shepard starts out serious, but as usual, he can’t keep a straight face. “I figured, hell, let’s drink it off!”

  “Well…” Kerwin adds.

  “Did you…this is kind of an awkward question, but…did you have to give me mouth-to-mouth?”

  Both of them laugh, and Shepard shakes his head. “Don’t ask questions you don’t want the answers to, Buzz.”

  “Explorer, Houston, we have received no comms for several…uhh, stand by.” Our words are reaching them at last. “Explorer, Houston, we copy your last. Understand you were unable to retrieve the telescope film. Standing by for a full update, over.”

  “The telescope film…” I echo.

  Shepard: “We lost it.”