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

by Gerald Brennan

  But after the delay, we get: “Explorer, Houston. Please take whatever rest you need to ensure a speedy recovery. Your wives and children send their love, and we will set up communications windows with them as soon as practical. A lot of people are pulling for you, and it goes far beyond your work family and your NASA family. The American people, and all of us here on planet Earth, are eager for you to get back in good health and return home safely. Our thoughts and prayers are with you. Godspeed, and get well soon.”

  We tap out a thank-you, then go back to our normal attitude: sunshade back in position, solar panels flat, stealing power from the same angry sun that tried to kill us.

  •••

  Throughout the day, we rest. It is difficult to imagine working. And yet the boredom is killing me.

  We get the telescope console back up and running. It’s not so much about refusing to take sick days, as it is about keeping an eye on our nemesis. The sun looks relatively placid, but it’s safe to say none of us will look at it the same way again, even when it is peaceful. There’s a lack of trust that’s settled in all around. So we keep everything on a low magnification, the sun’s full disk in view, just so we can take a look now and then and do something if another prominence starts rising our way.

  Otherwise, we take it easy. Early in the afternoon, I pull out my nighttime reading. The Brits in Antarctica were at the vanguard of exploration; only sixty years ago, that icy continent was the far limit of the human experience, so I can’t help but feel a certain kinship across the decades with the author, a man with one of those unnecessarily pretentious English names: Apsley Cherry-Garrard. Soon, I’m underlining sentences here and there. “The really important thing is that nothing of what is gained should be lost,” the author says. And later: “Whilst we knew what we had suffered and risked better than anyone else, we also knew that science takes no account of such things; that a man is no better for having made the worst journey in the world; and that whether he returns alive or drops by the way will be all the same a hundred years hence if his records and specimens come safely to hand.”

  There are pages about a group of them wintering on a place called Inexpressible Island, living in a small ice cave lit by blubber lamps, singing the Te Deum to cheer themselves up, watering down their hot cocoa to stretch out their meager supplies, killing seals to eat and cutting them open to find fish “not too far digested to still be eatable.” It does put things in perspective: suddenly I don’t mind the monotony of the meal trays.

  Later that night, I write:

  10 SEP 1972

  Bone weary. Reading about the Brits in Antarctica. Determination to survive—and to leave full records in the event they didn’t, so others would know what they went through, and profit from their knowledge. If someone learns something, all is not lost.

  The thought flashes: a logbook of a doomed expedition. If we don’t survive, this will be like Scott’s diaries from the polar journey, the only record, something to be read after the fact by whoever’s piecing it all together. But who? I imagine: the dead spacecraft approaching Earth, no course correction, passing by and slowing down but resisting capture, flung back into solar orbit. Or ending in a loose elliptical orbit for who knows how long. Or coming down in some godforsaken jungle in Borneo or Sumatra or somewhere, men with machetes hacking their way to a charred cone of metal that somehow landed very nearly in one piece. Or: somehow miraculously on the planned trajectory, but with nobody to jettison the manned module or the service module, the whole stack tumbling on reentry, and recovery ships waiting hopefully, no comms from us but still hopeful, until they see a smear of fire across the sky…

  I don’t want to indulge in negative fantasies. But I can’t help but wonder what it will all mean, if something like that happens.

  “If this book can guide the future explorer by the light of the past,” Cherry-Garrard says, “It will not have been written in vain.”

  •••

  Over breakfast the next day, I bring this up, in an elliptical way.

  “So how far off course are we, still?” I tiredly sip my coffee, my feet anchored in the footrests. “I mean, it can’t be too bad, right?”

  The others float; they look haggard, exhausted. “They do tend to be worrywarts,” Shepard says.

  “My sense,” Kerwin adds, “is that it isn’t that bad yet. My mind was elsewhere, but I don’t think it was a long burn time on the PAD.”

  “So we’re still on track to get back to Earth, even if nobody makes the course correction?”

  Shepard gives me a look like: What’s that supposed to mean?

  “Look, we all know, they’re essentially small-c conservative,” Kerwin says. “The event happened, the docs on the ground told them we might be out of work for a few weeks, they looked at the calendar for those few weeks, the only mission-critical task was the alignment and course correction, they figured, ‘Let’s have them go ahead and do the alignment,’ and if it showed we were anything other than perfectly on course, they were gonna have us do the burn. It’s probably something we can still do after all this is done. But it makes more sense to try and move it forward than back.”

  “Well, yeah, of course. It’ll probably be a longer burn after,” I comment. “But say it doesn’t happen at all?”

  “Why wouldn’t it happen?” Shepard asks.

  “Well, the dosage we got…”

  “Are you saying, ‘What if we don’t pull through?’”

  “Well, there is a non-zero possibility now, right?” I look at Kerwin, and he nods.

  “You’re as bad a worrywart as they are,” Shepard says.

  “I’m just saying, what kind of eventualities should we plan for? We should plan for the realistic. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but this is realistic now. So where’s the spacecraft going to end up if we’re not around to do the burn? Probably in interplanetary space. But maybe in a highly elliptical orbit, which might decay at some point.” I can see that they’re seeing it now, these dark fantasies I had from last night. “All the logs, all the records, the micrometeorite package, the flyby film from the SIM bay. If there’s any chance of it surviving without us, we should take that chance. We don’t want it all to go to waste, right?”

  “It is a valid point,” Kerwin concedes. “I mean, the telescope film, the canister we put out after the flyby, I don’t see us going back out there to get that any time soon. But other than that, we’d want to bring everything over to the command module early…”

  “The command module isn’t going to survive reentry if the other modules are still attached,” Shepard says. “I mean, if the stack reenters whole and starts breaking up, the manned module would probably break off early, but then you’d have the CSM all together. On its own, the command module’s stable enough to survive, but attached…it’ll probably go nose first, burn up…”

  “My point exactly.” I’m weary and worn out, and I do not want to talk about this, but I feel like we have to.

  “So, what…if two of us are out of action, the third one has to…” Shepard doesn’t need to finish the sentence, because we know what he’s talking about: the last remaining person will jettison the modules so the lonely little command module can continue its journey home, a space capsule and a time capsule, a little silvery relic of our last days. “Jesus, you are morbid.”

  “I…I mean, none of us wants to think about it, but we don’t want to waste what we’ve done up here, either…”

  “Obviously that would be an extreme last resort,” Shepard says.

  “Obviously.”

  Tiredly we complete our meals and clean. None of us says it out loud, but we all want is to go back downstairs and rest. I hope I am just being a worrywart.

  I float off to the bathroom. When I’m cleaning up, a clump of hair comes off in my hand.

  •••

  “I’m not feeling entirely well,” Shepard confides to me later downstairs, when Kerwin is upstairs taking his turn in the bathroom. He doesn�
�t look entirely well, either; I think he’s lost hair, too.

  I do not ask. Instead it’s: “You don’t want to talk to the doctor?” with what I hope is an appropriately small grin. “He told me we don’t have to worry about being grounded for a while.”

  “Very funny.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “I’m…uhh, I think I’m a little feverish.”

  I place the back of my hand on his forehead. He’s surprisingly warm.

  “We should definitely talk to Joe.”

  “Yeah,” he says weakly. “It’s funny. I just…I never want to admit when I’m sick.”

  “None of us do.”

  “It’s not just the normal pilot thing, it’s…Louise, my family. God is the great doctor in the sky, all that Christian Science bullshit. They’re convinced the only antidote to illness is happiness.”

  “Well I’m fucked, then,” I deadpan.

  He doesn’t laugh. I don’t know how much he’s really listening to me at all now, so much as saying something that’s been on his mind for a while. “When I had my ear thing, all those years I spent grounded, I tried it. I mean, I think I tried it. I was willing to try anything.” He does sound tired and weak; I cannot entirely believe this is the same man who seemed so larger-than-life to me. “Maybe it was a catch-22 situation. I couldn’t be healed unless I was happy, I couldn’t be happy unless I was healed, and back on flight status. All I know for sure is: if thought could have cured me, I’d have been back up here in no time. But I had to cave in. I went to the doctors who knew what to do. And it worked! I made it back up here.” He sighs, a long and lonely sigh. “I made it back up here. The moon and Venus. I guess you don’t always know what’s good for you.”

  It occurs to me, not for the first time, that he’s six years older than me, and eight years older than Kerwin: already a grandfather. And maybe his age is making a difference, and not for the better. But I need to say something good, something with intention. “We’ll…we’ll get through this.”

  Now he is listening. “Since when did you become the voice of positivity?”

  I chuckle. At least his humor’s still there.

  “I do want to talk to Louise again. That’s the…” He pauses and convulses. “…that’s the thing. Despite all the crazy religious stuff, she was a helluva woman. All the moving around, all the crazy behavior on my part, she stuck with me, through it all. I wasn’t always a good husband, but man, she was a good wife.”

  “She is a good wife,” I correct him. “Joan, too. I…I cheated on her. I was having an affair when we left. She was sort of glad I was going to be gone so long. She was afraid, too, she had a bad feeling about all of this. But home, all the arguments…I was hard on her, I was hard on all of them. I had so many expectations. But I was a bad husband myself, looking back.”

  Now his eyes are far away again, his voice distant. “I do want to talk to Louise again.” There is something in his tone that’s disturbing: a resignation, a lack of hope. Again he convulses.

  The curtain to the main deck is pulled back: Kerwin’s head in the hatchway, a tone of deep concern in his voice. “Gentlemen, the telescope’s showing solar activity. We need to get back up to the command module.”

  •••

  There is not time for much: I grab a Bible and the Antarctica book and my journal, and by the time I have everything, Shepard is already floating on up. I follow, and as I pass the telescope, I see on the monitors an x-ray image: another loop rising towards us.

  Then, back through the tunnel. To save energy, I run an abbreviated powerup. We get the fuel cells going, and turn on the heaters, and that’s it. We are in survival mode.

  Before long, everything’s settled down to a new normal, an uneasy tenuous air of negative expectation. We’re all thoroughly tired, ready to rest already. I open the Bible to Job and start reading the first chapter. There’s talk of Job’s opulence, and then the cruel discussion between God and Satan about whether Job will turn his back on God if things go wrong; then comes the absurdly awful chain of events that befalls Job, followed by his serenity in the face of calamity.

  My hair is falling out in clumps now. The others, too. No one’s trying to hide it anymore. Or maybe no one can. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Lord.

  11 SEP 1972

  An unexpected return to the command module. Shepard is feverish. We’re all going very prematurely bald. Naked I came into this world, and naked shall I leave.

  I sleep fitfully, thinking of the end, the three of us gone, the spacecraft reentering months from now, tumbling, burning up, a Viking funeral.

  •••

  In the morning Shepard is practically incoherent. Our dosimeters haven’t gone up much this time, less than 10 rads, but Shepard is obviously suffering from what came before.

  Joe gives him antibiotics. We power up the radios and transmit a Morse status over the omnidirectional antenna. It takes a while to understand their response, but in the end there is not much. There’s little they can do but acknowledge our predicament.

  I am tired, and the symptoms have not gone away. If I move too fast, I get lightheaded. I stay in place in front of the console and read. Job and his dialogues, and when I get bored of that, the Brits in Antarctica, sledging across the sea ice between camps on the fringe of the continent, seeing their ponies stranded on ice floes, axing them to death lest they suffer.

  But it is not all bad. “The warm glow of the sun with the keen invigorating cold of the air forms a combination which is inexpressibly health-giving and satisfying to me, whilst the golden light on this wonderful scene of mountain and ice satisfies every claim of scenic magnificence,” Cherry-Garrard writes. “No words of mine can convey the impressiveness of the wonderful panorama displayed to our eyes.”

  I look to the windows: blackness. This is what we have left. Months and months of this.

  •••

  Another night in the command module. This CME doesn’t seem as intense as the first one, but Kerwin wants to keep us safe in case there’s a last spasm from the sun.

  Every trip through the tunnel to the bathroom feels like an epic odyssey. It requires conscious thought and effort to move. I am weary beyond words. Shepard is beyond that, even. For him, we give up on the bathroom and wrestle him back into one of the fecal containment garments.

  The last of my hair has fallen out, everywhere. Everything else is still all wrong. But this is the most visible symptom. We all look strange now. Not just bald, but eyebrowless.

  Shepard’s fever has not gone down.

  “Al,” Joe says. “We need to give you another dose.”

  Shepard mumbles something.

  “You’re fighting an infection,” Kerwin says, tired. “The radiation killed bone marrow. Our white blood cell counts are low.”

  Again Shepard mumbles.

  Kerwin gently places a pill in the other man’s mouth. “Swallow, Al,” he urges. He is kind and hopeful but also insistent. “Come on. Swallow.”

  I want this all to end.

  •••

  In the night, I wake with a start.

  Shepard is moaning, a soft anguished haunting moan. He’s behind us, in the lower equipment bay; I pull myself between the couches to see. His eyes are closed. I put my weak hand to his forehead and I’m startled by the heat. He rolls away weightlessly under my soft touch, and his body convulses in a fever quiver.

  “Al. Al.” Whatever ill will I’d had for him has vanished with his sickness. “Al.” Even during the worst of it, when we’d been butting heads, I wanted to get back on decent terms with him, but not like this. Anything but this. I want to emerge from this nightmare, to wake back into the ordinary routines that once seemed like such drudgery. I want him to get better, to snap back into character and be the same cantankerous asshole he’s always been. I am shocked at how much I want it.

  He shudders, unconscious, and moans.

  I squeeze a blob of water from the dr
ink bottle and gently cup it onto his forehead. It coats his skin like gelatin, then seeps past the bald ridge where his eyebrows should be. I gently try to wipe the stray water from his eyes. I want to help. I don’t know if I’m doing any good. I don’t know if I’m doing anything.

  There’s water clinging to my fingers. I’m too tired to go looking for a washcloth. I dab my hands on my coveralls. I look at Shepard and hope.

  He falls silent.

  •••

  In the morning, he is gone.

  I wake and look: nothing. An empty space. And Kerwin still over on the far side, asleep.

  I am still weak. Even weightless, it is all I can do to investigate. I pull myself under the console and up through the tunnel. Nothing.

  I am trying to imagine what happened, if he woke up and tried to go to the bathroom, or if somehow in his fever he thought he’d be able to use the radio in the manned module, or what. I am afraid to look over at the main deck. But it is empty.

  Somehow I am perplexed and relieved, but only for a moment.

  I pull myself over there and look down into the sleeping chamber, and at last I see his lifeless legs.

  •••

  I don’t know what to do, not right away.

  If I were my normal self, I could come up with some plan. This is not something we prepared for in any way. There are no body bags on board.

  As a pilot, death is all around you. You are familiar with it, even if it’s uncomfortable. (And in fact you should not be comfortable with it, for that discomfort keeps you alert, keeps you sharp.) But even though you’re familiar, it is invisible. It usually happens offstage. You see a splash of fire on some Korean hillside below, and afterwards there is an empty bunk, and you are sorting through someone’s possessions, deciding what to throw out and what to send back home, but you have to remind yourself it’s real, for part of you wants it to be just some playacting, bad fantasy, like at any moment they will walk through the door and ask what you’re doing with their stuff. Sometimes you do end up at a crash site, and that is tough. There is a sickly sweet smell you can’t forget because you know what it is. And you may see the remains, and that is upsetting. But there is a disconnect between what you see and your memories; you know they are the person you knew, but there is still an unreality to it all. And it is someone else’s problem to actually deal with it, to clean it all up. And then at the funeral you just see the closed casket, and it all feels unreal yet again.