I see new gravestones. Some of these plots are under pristine snow, but there’s one with dirt and snow mingled, and tracks leading up to it. Vietnam, other tragedies, lives cut even shorter than Ed’s. Sons come home, young men sleeping in the cold. There is a sense of perspective in this, but there is also something deeper and darker, an infinite sorrow, the thought of other parents losing their only sons, their only children. Lives unremembered, except by them.
There is a contingent of cadets in long overcoats: young faces flush with cold. There are chairs by the gravesite, and a caisson and a coffin and a flag. Everything has been perfectly prepared and arranged: a smooth and perfect machine whose entire existence feels like blasphemy.
We are all in place. An officer with a walkie-talkie gives a nod; the cadet at the head of the formation yells “Preeeee-sent Arms!” Rifles snap to vertical.
The T-38s arrive overhead, white against the gray sky, flying low: the missing man formation. Their engines howl, hollow and low, a sound that scrapes the soul.
This feels impossibly wrong.
•••
We have to do something.
The smell that permeates the manned module is impossible to bear; even if we could somehow contain everything, keep it all from getting worse, everything is already bad enough. It is difficult to eat. Difficult to think.
All I know is: we have to do something. And that thought alone energizes me, stirs me into action. There is a brightness now, at the thought of doing something. My fever has gone and I feel that strange buoyant energy of the newly healthy. I still look bald and strange, but I feel well.
“We have to get him out,” I tell Joe.
“Out?”
“Out. All the way.”
“That’s…that’ll take some doing.”
“Yeah.” Another EVA, a depressurization with very little feedback from Houston…obviously something that wasn’t on anyone’s mission plan.
“Are you up for it?”
“I am. Anyway, we have to do it. This is…disgusting in here. We can’t survive like this for months.”
“No, we can’t.”
We talk through the plan: moving him all the way up into the command module, getting our suits on, turning on the command module finally (as late as possible in the process, since we’ve already asked so much of it), plugging in to the environmental control system, depressurizing, opening the hatch, then easing him on out and casting him off into space.
“You’re forgetting one thing. We still need to do the course correction.”
“After,” I say. “That has to come after this. After we get him out. It’ll be a separation maneuver, too, like any time we jettison something.”
Physics being what it is, once Shepard is out there, he’ll be following along with us on the same trajectory for the next several months. It could even conceivably cause problems during reentry, if he somehow drifts ahead of us. Unless, of course, we change our trajectory afterwards, which we already need to do anyway.
“We’re not jettisoning him.” There is a tone of disappointment in Joe’s voice at my word choice. “It’s a burial.”
This summons images of all those World War II documentaries, kamikaze attacks off Okinawa and such, burned and battered ships, canvas-shrouded sailors being slid offboard, commended to the eternal deep.
“Yeah, you’re right.” I can’t help but think Shepard himself would approve. “A burial at sea.”
•••
We spend the rest of the day preparing.
I am anxious that I do well, that I do this, that I set things right.
“Are you up for this?” Joe asks over lunch.
“I have to be.” The awful smell is everywhere, still. In weightlessness it can be hard to smell; the face gets puffy and the sinuses don’t drain. But this is so bad it’s all I can do to choke down anything. I grab my nose so I can take a few odor-free breaths between bites; it makes me feel like I’m choking on my food, though. “I’m the one with the full suit, the water connectors. Why do you ask?”
“A few days ago, you were…on your deathbed, it seemed like.”
I look away, then back. “We’re not going to have another chance to do an EVA, are we?”
“On this mission?” Kerwin looks at me, incredulous. “We’ll be lucky if we have enough O2 in the service module to repressurize when we’re done.”
“We should have a good forty minutes out there, right?”
“Why do you ask?”
“I’m thinking I should take care of a couple things outside.”
“Like what?”
“Well, get down to the manned module high-gain antenna…point it back up away from the spacecraft so we can listen to Houston down there without repointing the spacecraft.”
“That…” He stops and thinks. “That does sound like it’s worth doing, actually. What else?”
“Oh, you know. Get a look around, see if anything else needs to be taken care of.”
He looks a little skeptical, not that I blame him. “Are you up for all that? I can take the EVA, if you want. Just attach the O2/N2 connector hose from the umbilical…”
It occurs to me that this is the logical decision, in some respects. He hasn’t been out there yet, and I was pretty sick. And yet…no. There are a few things I need to do. “There isn’t going to be much to see out there,” I point out. “Sun and blackness. And you should be able to come out the hatch a little, head and shoulders. You’ll get a little look around, you’ll see. There isn’t much to see.”
“It’s not that…I mean, I have been a little healthier through this whole thing…”
“I’ve been out there already,” I point out. “I’m fresher with this stuff. I’ve seen all the handholds and guiderails recently. It’s all fresh in my mind. I know what’s out there, where I need to go. Practice is everything in this business.”
He gives a little smile and shakes his head, just a little. “As long as you’re feeling better…”
“I am.”
We clean up our trays, dispose of our trash, get back to work.
I believe I am feeling better.
Here and there I do feel flashes of…what? Lingering sickness? Ordinary pre-work jitters? I cannot say.
I pride myself on being honest, on telling the truth at all times, at all costs. That was drilled into me as a cadet, and before. And yet you’re also always told to put on a mask, to acknowledge orders and complete tasks and not let your voice betray your feelings.
It occurs to me, too, that there have been times where I’ve lied to myself, and it’s propagated outwards from there. Conversations with Joan in particular.
I’ve told Joe I’m feeling better. I hope I’m being honest.
•••
Nighttime. Or space night, at least.
We retire to the sleeping chambers. I read more from Job, God’s response: Where were you when I founded the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its size; do you know? Who stretched out the measuring line for it? And then: Have you fitted a curb to the Pleiades, or loosened the bonds of Orion? And: Do you know the ordinances of the heavens; can you put into effect their plan on the earth? God lays out everything, all the things God has done; God puts Job in his place, and at the end of this epic enumeration, Job says: I have dealt with great things that I do not understand; things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. And Job repents, and God restores him to health and prosperity, and despite the epic suffering, everything’s fine in the end.
I put the Bible back in the Beta cloth bag and try to go to sleep.
I float there for a good twenty minutes before it’s clear that my mind has no interest in letting my body get some rest. Every thrum of a pump or whir of a fan seems like it has been tailor-made to keep me awake. I try to stay still and let sleep creep up. But my bladder betrays me: pressure, impossibly often, sends me back upstairs to the lavatory, and makes my mind move once more.
I cannot help but thin
k the EVA is the make-or-break point for the entire mission: if we pull it off, everything will be made good. But if we can’t get Shepard out there, and can’t get the manned module antenna pointed back away from the spacecraft, and pull it all off without instructions from Houston...
Finally I am digging out good old Cherry-Garrard for some late-night reading, a distraction to shut down the mind-machine. He tells of a side expedition before Scott’s ill-fated trip to the Pole; he and two other men set out through the Antarctic night on a multi-week sledge journey, an impossibly miserable ordeal to an Emperor Penguin rookery. They endure cold so awful that the author fears his whole-body shivering will break his back; the night blizzard winds are ferocious, and at one point their tent is blown away. They despair of returning to their main camp alive; at several points, the author finds himself hoping for death. They do finally procure five penguin eggs and head back to their home base, and the author breaks two of the eggs on the way. Eventually, of course, they do make it back to their camp, where the specimens are to be pickled in alcohol for transport back to England. Three penguin eggs: a slender reward for the immense risk to three human lives. (In a humorous postscript, the author ends up at a natural history museum some years later; he’s brought the eggs there for public display, but the custodian for the museum doesn’t pay him much mind. He finds himself murderously angry: he’s trying to preserve the slim treasure for which they sacrificed so much, and nobody’s paying attention. I can relate: there is this desperate desire to know that all the suffering, all the effort, actually means something.)
Nothing will mean anything if we don’t survive tomorrow.
I read on: on the author’s return to the main camp, a warm dry sleeping bag feels like paradise; he and his companions sleep “ten thousand thousand years.”
I am grateful that our mission isn’t ending in sickness and infirmity for me, at least. I am not going out quietly in my sleep. We have a chance to do something.
I read on, onto the start of the polar journey itself. There is a quotation from Tennyson’s Ulysses at the start of Chapter IX. Kerwin has made very few notes in the book, but this passage is heavily underlined, and the page is dog-eared; there are smudges of finger-grease on the pages so as to suggest that he has come back to read this often:
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
•••
And now it is the day.
19 September 1972, a day that had meant nothing whatsoever on our initial mission plan, means everything now. So we are here, and we are doing what we need to do, and there is great comfort in that.
We have finally been able to get Shepard up into the command module. I do not want to go into the details, but it was an unpleasant experience, a variety of awful sensations. And we have turned off the environmental controls in the manned module so it won’t try to maintain pressure once we open the hatch, won’t keep pumping air out into nothingness.
And now we are back in the command module, helmets on, Kerwin on the environmental control system hoses, and me connected to the umbilical, and as the oxygen/nitrogen mix begins to flow, it pushes the foul air out of our suits, and everything starts to feel clean and fresh and new.
“Suit pressure steady. GO for depress.” Kerwin says.
“GO for depress.” I am in the center, and I reach up for the dump valve, and soon we see the pressure dropping, dropping, dropping, and now again all of our clean bright surroundings are deadly; there is no life for us for now except in our suits, these small cocoons of cloth and rubber and metal and glass.
I feel a moment of weakness. Sickness? I do not know. It is too late to do anything differently, too late to do anything but do.
The hatch swings open easily and I pull myself out into the great bright blackness. When the spacecraft is sunlit and the visor is down, one can’t see nearly as many stars as you see in, say, a night in Wyoming back on Earth, and there is some faint sadness in that. We are in the universe but cannot see it. But of course I cannot dwell on these things.
Through the suit I feel the gentle tug of Kerwin’s hands on the umbilical, keeping it coiled and in the cabin, close against the edge of the door so we don’t get Shepard tangled up in it when we are sending him out.
“Give me a little more play on the umbilical,” I say.
Kerwin obliges and I reposition myself, body against the side of the command module, head and arms at the side of the hatch, ready to help.
“In position?” Kerwin asks.
“In position.”
“OK, I’m going to send him out.”
This is one of the parts I’m worried about, one of the things nobody’s done, or practiced, even.
The back of Shepard’s helmeted head appears in the hatchway, and comes out, and then his shoulders. Joe is moving him out slowly and I am holding on to the handrail with one hand and minding the umbilical with the other, keeping it safe where it feeds through the corner of the hatch, making sure it doesn’t get pinched or crushed. His body moves strangely, floats towards me, snags on the hatch; I have to push it away, and switch my grip on the handrail. But then at last: legs, feet.
“OK, he’s clear,” I say at last, and let loose a tremendous sigh of relief.
There’s a lanyard attached to each of his boots; we tied them both on during the prep work. Kerwin’s holding one still, and now I stop minding my umbilical and grab the other one.
“I’ve got him.”
“OK. Letting go. I’ll come out a bit and grab you.”
Now Kerwin appears, head and arms and shoulders, about as far out as he can get without straining the shorter O2/N2 and water hoses that are keeping him plugged in to the spacecraft. I pull myself forward a bit with my handrail hand and he grabs me gently, hands on my torso, and he moves me up and pushes my weightless body up so I am more or less vertical now relative to the hatch, and all the while I am holding on to the lanyard and Shepard is floating more or less perpendicularly to me now, and I can see the back of his legs and torso, his body floating unresponsive, and I can’t help but wonder if this is what I looked like to him when he pulled me in after my last spacewalk.
And now I pull him in a little so I can get a grip on his torso, and Kerwin is holding on to my legs, and I fumble for a second and Shepard almost slips from my grasp, but then that’s it, I have him, and everything is still going according to plan.
“OK, I’ve got him and I am in position.”
“All set?”
“All set. I should say something, at least.”
“Something?”
“A prayer, maybe.”
“Go for it.”
I take a second and compose my thoughts, and ask God for the words. Then: “Lord, here we are in the heavens with your servant Alan Shepard. A place of endless night, and endless light. We commend him to your care, that he may rest now in your presence, and rise again with you.” Something about this feels wrong; I don’t know that Shepard truly believed, and he certainly never acted like anyone’s servant. But the words are out there now, and maybe they mean something.
With a gentle push, I cast him off, in what I believe to be a retrograde direction. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, his body gets smaller. And it does all seem so surr
eal: I used to belong to you.
“All right. Getting tight on time here,” Kerwin says. “Back to the antenna.”
“Back to the antenna.”
We only have so much oxygen left in the service module to feed our spacewalk; we’ve done some calculations, and at the end of the mission we will now have to cast off the manned module as late as possible so we can ride out the last hours on the reentry bottle in the command module. So there is a tight timeframe to do everything left.
I feel weak all of the sudden. I don’t know if it is lingering sickness. There is a touch of lightheadedness, and I would love a sip of water, but after everything that happened before, I do not have a drink bag in my suit.
“You OK?” Joe asks.
“I’m OK.” I have to be. I cannot rest, cannot relax, cannot take any relief. I need to keep going.
I pull myself over to the handrails going up to the manned module. I head back up to that bright place, the scene of my failure. It is time to make things right.
“How are we on O2?”
“Tight. Maybe 20 more minutes until we won’t be able to do a full repress.”
“Guess we gotta stop talking.”
There is a familiar tickle of water down near my neck.
I stop and take a breath. I think back to my spacewalk, the water in the helmet, and realize: it wasn’t the drink bag at all; it must’ve been a leak in the cooling garment somewhere.
I don’t say anything. I just turn off the water flow on my connector hose.
The high-gain antenna is down at the far end and around to the side. I work my way down the handrails slowly and deliberately. And now it is in front of me, the big round dishes pointed uselessly down.
I am worried about this bit, too. I wasn’t over here during the last walk; there aren’t any footrests in position to work, and I am concerned about how far it is from the nearest handrail. I reach up with one hand and it doesn’t quite reach the truss on the back. I am anxious about losing my grip, anxious about the small blob of water I feel down by my neck. If I float off, away from the ship, Joe will have to reel me back in, and we’ll have to start all over from the command module, and we’ll have lost valuable time, time we may not have. And if the water blob gets in my eyes…
Island of Clouds: The Great 1972 Venus Flyby (Altered Space Book 3) Page 27