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

by Gerald Brennan

  There are two burst packets in the entire inventory. That’s it. We’re in no danger of running out of food. I should feel relieved, but I don’t.

  I report the results to Shepard. He doesn’t say anything.

  •••

  After dinner, we are winding down. I’m still waiting for Shepard to make some comment about the incident, all of it, my unwanted efforts at independent thinking.

  But his mind is elsewhere. Here and there, I try to make eye contact, but his are distant and calm now, as if he’s hiding a pleasant secret.

  Once the day’s trash is in the airlock, he floats down to the sleeping chambers and comes back with something wrapped in plastic and tape, something lumpy and misshapen, but just about the right size to be…a bottle. “Gentlemen, it’s celebration time,” he says.

  “What’s that?” I ask, even though I already know; my mind’s twisting into strange knots of apprehension and excitement.

  “What do you think it is? Scotch.”

  “On a flight?” I’m absolutely incredulous. Nothing like this has ever happened before.

  Shepard laughs. “This from the man who flew communion wine to the moon.”

  “That was a very small vial in my personal preference kit. Not nearly enough to cause anybody any…headaches.”

  Shepard looks from the wrapped bundle to me. “So you’re saying you don’t want any, then.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say that.” I float on over.

  “Joe?”

  “I’m good. Somebody’s gotta keep an eye on things.”

  “This is one bottle!” I’m amused and annoyed by his reluctance. There’s that odd combination of calculations: a momentary suspicion that I’m being judged by someone who’s abstaining, trumped by an awareness that I don’t mind, because I’ll get more. “Right, Al? One bottle? Don’t tell me you’ve stocked the cellar.”

  He laughs. “No such luck. One bottle. Even I have my limits.”

  “As do I.” To Kerwin I nod: “And one bottle should keep us pretty far from them.” Then, back to Shepard, curious and admirous: “Should I ask how you described this little package on the sheet for your Personal Preference Kit?”

  “You should not.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” Kerwin says. “All you service academy grads seem to have a keen appreciation for rules and policies, and how to…artfully dance around them, should the need arise.”

  Shepard and I float together, huddling over the bundle; he unwraps it as delicately as if it were the core of a booby-trapped nuclear weapon. I’m impressed by the engineering of his packaging: a thick outer plastic bag, a sensible amount of tightly-wadded newspaper taped together to prevent settling, another inner plastic bag, and a thick cardboard tube with the bottle snugly inside, and still more wadded paper in the empty space between the inner wall and the bottle neck.

  I help with the final extraction. “Cutty Sark.”

  “There’s a ship on the label,” he deadpans. “Is that OK?”

  “I guess we’ll allow it, in the interest of…interservice cooperation.” There’s even an impromptu handmade wax seal over the bottle cap. “Taking no chances, huh? You didn’t want Maker’s Mark?”

  Kerwin: “The bottle geometry might’ve been…”

  “All right, enough critique,” Shepard interrupts him. Then, to me: “Make yourself useful and get some glasses,” although obviously it’ll be plastic containers with straws.

  “Coming right up.” I turn to the kitchen area.

  “No arguments today, huh, Buzz?”

  I chuckle. For once, I don’t mind the imperial attitude: I hadn’t thought anything like this would be a possibility for quite some time, and it does seem like the right way to clear the air between us, to dispel all this tension and bad feeling and start fresh. And Lord knows I’ve earned it…

  In short order we have our two containers at the ready. I leave one floating and unscrew the top of the other. Shepard loosens the wax, holding it up near the air filter intake so as to not have any loose shavings floating around. Then, ever so carefully, he unscrews the cap. With a magician’s flair, he releases a small globule of glistening amber liquid. It looks delightfully alive; it shivers and shudders and quivers like…well, like a man who’s taken a shot of it. I trap it cleanly in the first container. Once that’s done, we repeat the process.

  “All right.” Shepard caps the bottle tightly, then plucks his container from the air, and raises it to offer a toast. “We’ve…”

  “Shouldn’t we drink to the president?” I ask.

  He gives me a dirty look. “We’ve gone where no man has gone before. We’ve stared Death in the eye sockets and pissed all over his bony face. We’ve pissed each other off, too, but more importantly, we’ve done something that’s never been done. And now it’s time to kick back for a bit.”

  “Indeed.” We touch containers and I drink gratefully; I expect the usual, a wonderful comet of fire shooting down my throat, but there’s a laziness to it up here, a slower burn, no gravity or urgency. I’m not complaining.

  We drink in silence.

  “This is good,” I say at last. “This was a good idea.”

  Shepard doesn’t say anything.

  “It’s been a busy few months,” I continue on. “A lot of pressure, for all of us. Nice to release a little of it.”

  “Let’s just relax and enjoy our drinks, Buzz.”

  “Yeah.”

  More silence. I take long sips at short intervals. The cabin smells wonderful and smoky now. Kerwin floats downstairs, leaving us to our devices. Outside the windows: infinity. And inside there is warmth.

  “We should drink to the president,” I repeat.

  “All right. To the president,” Shepard toasts. “Sometimes you have to be an S.O.B. to get the job done.”

  Again, silence. There are so many ways to interpret this sentence, and my mind spins through all of them.

  “I was a little worried,” I say at last. “The other day, with the food. I mean, I want to do a good job, you know that. I want a successful mission. That’s all I want, to come home and be able to hold my head up high.”

  “That’s all any of us wants, Buzz.”

  “I know. You didn’t say anything earlier, so…”

  “Leadership isn’t a conversation, Buzz. It’s not a negotiation. You should know this. You can’t get your panties in a twist about whether or not people like you. So I don’t. You should know this by now.”

  I nod, contemplating.

  “If someone’s done what they need to do, fine, if not, once you’ve made it clear what needs to happen, they need to do it. At that point, talk doesn’t matter. If a subordinate is…making you justify yourself, you’re not in charge any more. In fact, you only really know you’re in charge when you shut up. In that silence. That’s when it either happens or doesn’t happen.”

  Kerwin emerges from the sleeping chamber passage; his eyes dart warily. Somehow it reminds me of a soldier emerging from a foxhole, ready to duck for cover at the first sound of shelling.

  “Come on up, Joe! Hang out for a bit. I was just about to hit the head.” Shepard floats off.

  Kerwin watches him go and waits until he’s behind the curtain; we know the sounds don’t travel well, but even so, he lowers his voice a register. “Everything good with you two?”

  “I guess.” I shrug.

  “Just out of curiosity, have you…thanked him for saving your life?”

  It occurs to me only just now that perhaps I haven’t, and I let out a nervous chuckle. “Well, I thought it would go without saying.”

  “You have to say these things, Buzz.”

  I shrug. Maybe he’s right.

  When Shepard comes back, Kerwin takes his turn in the latrine.

  “I don’t think I said this yesterday, but thank you. You did a hell of a job. Thank you for saving my life.”

  He says nothing.

  I wait for the click. I wait for it to kick i
n.

  I drink more: longer sips at shorter intervals.

  Time passes faster, and somewhere in there it starts to skip around. It is hard to tell if I’m getting drunk; it’s not an outrageous amount of booze, but this is the end of the longest dry spell I’ve had in…a while. I don’t even remember. And floating changes everything, too.

  The next thing I know I’m heading to the toilet, an awful feeling in my stomach, heading there on pure instinct, because nothing goes down the toilet here, not without help, but I figure if I can get the fans on in time…

  I’m not quite there when I convulse and heave and spew awful foulness into the air. Somewhere behind me I hear Shepard say, “Jesus, Buzz.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t think…” I can’t even finish the sentence before I’m vomiting again.

  I’ve never had nausea on a spaceflight before. I’ve never even had any odd feelings until the beginning of this flight, and that still came out the other end. I’ve always looked down a little on those like Rusty Schweickart whose stomachs just couldn’t handle it. And now here I am. At least I can blame the booze. But then again, I can’t, really, or at least not to anyone outside this spacecraft: another thing you learn at the Academy is that there are certain things you will never ever ever repeat to another human being who isn’t equally culpable, certain events you all must keep your mouth shut about, for the sake of all concerned. Because if someone asks about it, you have to tell the truth, but if nobody knows, nobody can ask. And…well, it occurs to me I’ve already said too much.

  •••

  Morning.

  Morning is awful.

  I am back floating suspended in the sleeping chamber. I don’t want to go into details about my physical condition. But there is that awful shudder, that morning panic when it all comes flooding back.

  I hang there, full of hate.

  I want to be mad at the others, but I am the one who put myself in this condition. Shepard’s words from later last night are now echoing in my head in a repeating loop: “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  I wish I knew.

  Nature is calling, so I know I must at least head upstairs and take care of that, even though I don’t really want to, don’t really want to do a damn thing except maybe skip ahead in time, twenty-four hours or eight months or forever.

  Upstairs, I bump into Kerwin. He gives me a look. Shepard does, too, but it’s the one from Kerwin that hurts.

  I remember things, from after I threw up. I do not remember everything. The others might. I know better than to ask.

  In the bathroom, I catch my eyes in the mirror and shake my head in disgust. Again the voice: “What the hell is wrong with you?” I have got to stop doing this.

  Back on the main deck, they’ve already started heating up the morning meal trays. The news is a welcome distraction: they’re discussing the first day of the Humphrey administration, and the plans for Johnson’s funeral. He’ll be the second president in a row to get one while in office. I have a hard time really concentrating, though.

  It feels like they’re avoiding me, like they’d leave the room if they could.

  It’s only when the Mercury observation program starts that they say anything to me, and it’s strictly professional, the normal clipped banter of telescope operations.

  We’re not actually much closer to Mercury than Earth is when it’s at its closest; the only reason it makes sense to even do these observations is because we have a better angle, and we’re not staring directly into the sun. (And, frankly, we need something to do…although I suppose we’ll have plenty of makeup work on the telescope now that we’ve lost everything from the first four months of the mission.) So we can’t see much: dim and distant outlines of surface features. We already know it’s a lot like the moon, but somehow more depressing. For the moon is visible to everyone. No leader needs to explain it; it’s a place that already captures the imagination of the lowliest human. Meanwhile Mercury’s hard to even see from Earth. And what’s worse, the energy budget required to get there and into orbit and back means it will never be a great candidate for human exploration. Because its orbit is inside ours, we’ll be getting closer over the next few weeks, but at the closest, we’ll be about .4 au away, still. So our observations feel pointless: sterile glimpses of another dead world.

  The other two film a short movie to beam back to Earth, something about Mercury, for the kids. Shepard stays behind the camera while Kerwin prattles on. I remain uninvolved, absent from the credits. They don’t ask for my help, and I don’t offer.

  •••

  Meanwhile, back in the Venusian atmosphere, the floaters have been gathering information. Hanging suspended under hydrogen balloons, drawing power from radiothermal generators for a growth and metabolism experiment that’s using spectroscopes and a gas chromatograph to try and determine if there’s anything in the atmosphere, anything at all, that’s turning light and CO2 and water into chemical energy. Aerosolized plantlike cells, bacteria, protozoa: we don’t care. We’re curious to see something. Anything.

  “Explorer, Houston.” Crippen’s distant voice comes over the radio later, breaking the silence of an unpleasant afternoon. “We’re analyzing the preliminary data from the floaters. It’s a little early in the process, but we’re not seeing any evidence of metabolic processes. We’re not seeing any organic chemicals, even.”

  No signs of life.

  •••

  When the alarm goes off the next morning and the others start stirring, I close my eyes and fall back asleep.

  I wake to Kerwin tapping on my shoulder. “Come on, Buzz. Up and at ‘em.”

  “I’m not feeling well.” And indeed there is a heaviness in my heart that seems entirely out of place in space. I can’t think of a single thing I’m looking forward to in the next eight months. And even then…

  “Come on. There’s a lot to do today. More Mercury observations, mass measurements…”

  “You can make do without me. I’m really not feeling well.”

  I hang there, floating loosely in my sleeping bag, a warm cocoon. Everything I might think about hurts to think about. It is better to just sit there and float, and try to avoid all the sharp edges.

  Kerwin looks over his shoulder to Shepard. “He says he’s not feeling well.”

  I am waiting to see what Shepard will say. I cannot avoid all my unpleasant thoughts, and there is the knowledge that I should be forcing myself out and about, dragging myself through the routine, and that makes it worse in some ways, but not enough to prod me out of bed. It all just feels like so much masochism…

  I wait for a tongue-lashing from Shepard; I close my eyes in anticipation. But he doesn’t say anything.

  INTERLUDE:

  SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA

  It is March of 1967. I’m out in California with Ed White.

  Apollo is off track. Ed and Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee should have launched already on the first mission of the program. But during an unmanned pressurization test of the spacecraft, something happened: a spark, a fire. Sharp and short, but so intense it burnt everything and burst the pressure hull. The prime crew was in there days before, and backup crew was supposed to be in there the next day. Nobody wants to think about what might’ve happened if it’d been a manned test.

  So a few of us are at the North American plant in Downey, cleaning up the mess. The accident was a retrospectively obvious consequence of focusing too much on speed and taking quality for granted. And now the entire Block I iteration of the spacecraft, the initial version without many of the features we’ll later need for lunar rendezvous, is being passed over; we’re overseeing various redesigns of the Block II version to ensure it will be a truly spaceworthy craft.

  To top it off, there’s been bad blood in the press: sniping, anonymously sourced stories, talks of congressional inquiries. Somebody far higher than Deke got seriously pissed off. The upshot being that they’ve broken up Ed’s crew.

  It’s patently unfa
ir, and morale in the astronaut corps has been shot to hell, but I haven’t heard Ed say anything about it. In fact, he’s working his ass off to help get everything back on track. (Every West Pointer I’ve known has learned to operate at a level of activity that a normal person would probably describe as “manic.” But Ed’s one of the select few who can make it all seem effortless.) He asked for my help, so they’ve reassigned me, and we’ve flown out here together a few weeks in a row. We’ve spent many nights at the plant, observing tests, offering feedback on various arrangements of equipment. But we’ve just concluded a systems test that stretched on for over 26 hours. Despite a few catnaps in there, we’re at a point of diminishing returns, productivity-wise, so they told us to head out early (which, by space program standards, means 5:30 or so rather than 9:00 or 10:00) and rest up.

  And now we’re eating burgers outside on the patio of some roadside joint. Night’s falling; it’s that time of day when the cars all start to look the same, dim metal and glass shapes barely visible behind headlights and taillights. Ed seems content to just sit there and take it all in. My mind, of course, is still back at work, foggy and cranky.

  “Pretty aggravating, huh?” I ask.

  “How do you mean?”

  “The fire. The crew shuffle. None of it was your fault. Now…Schirra and Cunningham and Eisle get your turn.”

  “I guess we should’ve said more before the fire. Before all this stuff hit the papers,” he says simply.

  “What could you have done? Nobody wants to speak up in these situations. Gus was about as vocal as he could have been without losing the flight. And now he’s lost it anyway.”

  He shrugs. “Buzz, there is nothing to complain about here.”

  “What do you mean, nothing to complain about? None of this is how it should be. If you had raised a stink, and stirred all the shit up that needed to be stirred up, they would have found someone else to tell them their shit doesn’t stink.”