by Nick Lake
“yes,” says Virginia, over the radio. she gives a little wave with the end of the arm.
“ok. i want u to lock onto the gyro. Leo & i are going to undo the bolts. then u’re going to pull it away from the station. the spare gyro is in bay 3. then we install the new gyro. then u put the old 1 in bay 3 where the new 1 was. got that?”
“sure,” says Virginia.
“so repeat it,” says my mother.
Virginia repeats it. little mistakes get u killed.
when my mother’s happy, Virginia moves the robot arm until it grips on to the external assembly on the gyro. she checks & double-checks that it’s secure, by trying to move the arm—gears grind, but it’s going nowhere. it’s locked on.
“wrenches,” says my mother.
i open the tool box on the RCV & take out a motorized wrench & pass it to her. then i take out the second. she beckons me over & shows me the 8 bolts we need to unscrew. “i’ll take the ones on this side,” she says. “u take that side.”
i try to block out what is around us, the stars, the earth, the moon. the endlessness of empty space. i try to shrink the world to what is right in front of my visor: the gyro bolts & the side of the station, gleaming silver in the sunlight. it’s hot in the suit, despite the water-cooling undergarment, & i can feel sweat beading on my forehead. all sounds are muffled, apart from the beeping of my heart monitor & the voices coming in thru the radio.
i get my wrench on the first bolt & turn. it’s hard. the simplest activities on an EVA become hard because at the same time as twisting the wrench u’re trying to maintain ur position vis-à-vis the station, with no gravity to assist & in a bulky suit. all ur muscles are working to keep u straight as u concentrate on the task at hand. not to mention u’re manipulating the wrench, with a huge glove over ur hand that makes fine motor control virtually impossible.
twist.
twist.
twist.
i turn the wrench carefully, & eventually the bolt comes loose. before it can float away i catch it in the same glove & transfer it to the tool box on the RCV, which is lined with elastic strips going in orthogonal directions that can be used to secure small objects.
then the next bolt.
then the next.
i glance up at my mother. she’s hard at work on her last bolt, way quicker than me. i catch a glimpse of the earth, still rotating below us, the landmass of India now, blue ridges of mountains, brown expanses of desert. the world catches my breath, holds it in the glaciers, in the sprawling cities.
i turn from it & it’s still there, the colors, the greens & blues & browns reflected in the shining surface of the space station, in all the planes of metal & glass. a kind of projection of the earth below, shimmering, beautiful, especially because it’s so vivid against the deep, deep blackness of space beyond.
“focus,” says my mother.
so i turn back to the last bolt, & that’s when i c that my visor is misting up.
“uh, Nevada, my visor is…i have some kind of condensation,” i say. i can c the plate holding the gyro & the last bolt but it’s all swimming, blurred.
“condensation or vision problem?” says Boutros, from down there on the earth i’ve never been to.
“condensation. i think.”
“checking vitals,” says Dr. Stearns. “heart rate is a little high. but we’d expect that with no prepressurization. incidentally u 2 need to hurry up. i’m concerned about long-term neurological damage.”
oh. great.
my mother has swung herself over to me. i c her helmeted head in front of me, smudgy thru my misted visor. now i don’t need to worry about the mind-breaking distraction of the view, because i can’t c much at all. also there’s something in my eye. some kind of grit. “i’m concerned about what’s causing his helmet to steam up,” my mother says.
“yes, of course,” says Dr. Stearns. “technical. over to u.”
another voice comes on. a woman. “Leo, are ur eyes sore at all?”
“yes. i mean, not sore. but i have like some grit in there.”
“ah,” says the woman.
“ah,” says Dr. Stearns.
“ah?” i say. “what does ah mean?”
i’m gripping the handle on the station too tightly; my hand is hurting. i try to relax my fingers.
“purification system?” says my mother.
“that’s what i’m thinking,” says the woman’s voice.
“agreed,” says Dr. Stearns.
“ok, Leo,” says the woman to me. obviously to me. i’m feeling a little hysterical at this point. i’m tethered to the outside of the station & everything on the other side of the suit—which is also nothing—wants to kill me. “ur air is cleaned by a filter that uses lithium hydroxide to remove the carbon dioxide u’re breathing out. we think that lithium hydroxide is leaking. it’s caustic, so it’s irritating ur eyes & causing u to c condensation.”
“what do i do?”
“u need to purge ur suit, right now.”
“what?” no one ever does this. it’s insanity. i’d be purging all the air i have to breathe.
“trust me, Leo. ur suit will be filling with fresh oxygen all the time. try to slow ur breathing, u’ll be ok.”
“wait, what if—”
“no waiting. now. hit ur purge valve.”
“but i—”
“now, Leo.” if it’s possible for a person to speak in all caps, she is doing it. “NOW, LEO.” like that. then she adds: “that’s an order.”
it’s dark now, & not just because my visor is misted; when u orbit at 17,500 miles an hour, the night comes on u like a switch, & now i’m in a total absence of light that feels metaphorical in a much more horrible way.
i c the stars, glinting blurrily, all the magnificence of space, windowed by a small visor: how much beauty it has in it, how much endlessness, & nothing to judge u at all.
& nothing to show u any kindness either. a cold song, with no music to it.
ok, i think. ok, it’s up to u, Leo.
i know where the purge valve is, next to my left ear on the helmet, but i never thought i’d use it. it’s for dumping my air out into space, after all. but i turn it anyway. the air starts to hiss out of my suit, bubbling out into the vastness of space—i actually c the bubbles, thousands of them, iridescent in the light from the ship, drifting out into the blackness.
i slow my breathing, trying to use as little air as possible while the atmosphere flushes from my suit, constantly reminding myself in a kind of mantra that there is new oxygen coming in, there is new oxygen coming in, there is new oxygen coming in.
i feel light-headed & i only know that i let go of the station when my mother grabs my hand.
slow breaths.
slow breaths.
& then, almost too gradually to discern, the mist starts to lift, & under the beam of my suit lamp i c the truss & the RCV & the robot arm & the gyro again, as if a window is being cleaned in front of me. the pricking in my eye begins to lessen.
i take a deep breath.
“i’m ok,” i say. “i’m ok.”
“hold on, then,” says my mother. i c she’s still gripping my gloved hand. i grab the handle on the station with my other hand & let go of her.
“thanks,” i say.
u can’t shrug in a space suit but i feel her shrug. “we have to move quickly now,” she says.
“yes,” says Dr. Stearns over the radio. “the leak is still there, so even tho u’re filling the suit with fresh ox, the lithium hydroxide is going to start building up again. u have 10 minutes.”
“until my vision goes again?”
“until u die.”
it’s so matter-of-fact, so blunt, that i don’t know what to say. “ok,” i say eventually.
“here,” says my mother. “i’ll do the last bolt.”
“no,” i say. “i’ve got it.”
“u’ll need this.” she hands me my wrench. i must have let go of it when i was purging.
i nod & turn to the last bolt. i get the wrench on it & turn. nothing. it’s stuck. i turn again. nothing. i start to panic.
shit.
shit.
but then my mother puts her hand with mine on the long-handled wrench & we both twist &—
suddenly—
it frees, & then i can turn it until it’s off. i stow it in the webbing.
“remove it with Dextre please, Duncan,” says my mother. the robot arm lifts the gyro up & away from the station side. she turns to me. “now we have to take out the new 1. robot arm is busy.”
it’s like a game where u have to move little tiles around to make a picture. Grandpa sent 1 up to me once, at Christmas. old gyro onto the robot arm. new gyro into position, leaving the storage bay free. old gyro into the bay.
we stay clipped onto the cable & move along the ship until we reach bay 3, & my mother undoes the clasps securing it closed. we open it & there’s the new gyro. it’s heavy—probably a few hundred lbs.—but we’re in 0 g, so it’s more a case of the bulkiness & the encumbrance of the thing, in terms of its shape.
very carefully, we open the straps that are holding it in place & lever it with a wrench, until it floats out of its storage space. then we each hold on to it with 1 hand, to stop it drifting away from us. it’s the size of a bed. not an easy thing to move along, when u’re in a space suit & clipped to the side of a space station.
sweating, muscles screaming, i edge along, keeping it steady. my breathing is rapid now. & i don’t know how much that’s the exertion & how much it’s the bends, which i undoubtedly have now—i can visualize the nitrogen bubbling in my veins.
move clip.
move hand.
push gyro along a bit.
move clip.
move hand.
push…
repeat.
repeat.
sweat is pouring down into the neck of my space suit by the time we get the gyro roughly into position.
“wait,” says Virginia over the radio. “i’ll stow the old 1. then i’ll help u.”
the robot arm has more degrees of freedom than the RCV, which is basically a train that can only go back & forth on the truss. the arm can go round too, so it can move in 2 axes. Virginia drives it round us & over to bay 3, where she gently puts the old gyro away. then she uses the automatic closing function to seal it.
the arm comes back & holds the new gyro still while we adjust its position until the holes line up with the hull.
“there,” says my mother.
& then we take all the bolts we removed & screw them back in.
simple.
simple—but it takes minutes. i don’t know how many minutes, but i do know that as i screw in my last bolt my eyes are starting to feel gritty again, to feel like they have sand in them, not that i know what sand feels like—analogies are a difficult thing when u grow up on a space station. mostly u learn them from books. not from experience.
“new gyro is a go,” says my mother. “i repeat, new gyro is a go.”
“good work,” says Boutros. “now get back inside. right now.”
“Duncan, prepare the hyperbaric chamber for Leo,” says Dr. Stearns. “immediate compression. 24 hours. pure oxygen.”
“already prepared,” says Virginia. “Libra & Orion helped.”
thanks, Libra, i think. thanks, Orion.
we unclip from the cable & clip onto the RCV. then Virginia drives us back to the hatch. my vision is clouding. shit. shit.
“vision is clouding,” i say.
“move,” says the woman from Nevada. no idea what her name is. “fast.”
“how long have i got?”
“2 minutes,” says Dr. Stearns. “maximum.”
fog erases the earth. the blackness. the moon. the beautiful reflections in the gleaming silver of the station. no vision. no sound, apart from the slight hissing of the RCV wheels & the voices in my radio, increasingly urgent voices.
“get that hatch open.”
“move.”
“help him thru.”
“Duncan, commence repressurization of air lock.”
the sun rises.
again.
& then i’m dimly aware of someone taking the suit off me, easing me out of the cooling garment, pulling me thru the air-lock door & across modules—hatches & panels rolling by, my vision clearing, showing me metal walls, screws, warning signs, all passing me like a vid, scrolling in front of my eyes.
then i’m in a beige chamber, smooth walls curving around me, like a coffin. i feel a squeezing, a pressure on my chest, & then a rushing sensation & a hissing sound as it fills with pure oxygen.
there’s bright light to my right, & i turn & c my mother thru a round window in the side of the chamber. she is hovering, face close to the glass.
“how are u feeling?” she says.
i think about this. my joints hurt. my breathing feels shallow. there are stars dancing in front of my eyes, like some part of space has drifted in with me, is encircling me still. my heart is a piston in my chest, pounding, a gyro spinning out of control. “not so good,” i say.
“Dr. Stearns is monitoring ur vitals,” she says. “he thinks u’ll be ok. ur limbs are showing no rashes. ur torso’s clean too. so as long as u don’t develop neurological deficits…”
“is that possible?”
“yes.”
i already knew that, but for some reason i wanted her to say it.
“ok,” i say. “so now i just wait.”
“now u just wait. 24 hours.”
i don’t know why i say this next part but i do, & then i can’t take it back, the sound waves are out in the chamber, in the station, echoing off the module walls. “stay with me?” i say.
“i can’t,” says my mother. “i need to go to the bridge. we need to follow thru on Brown. notify his family. i asked to be the 1 to do it. i mean…i was with him when it happened.”
“shit,” i say. “i forgot. how could i forget?”
“u had a lot on ur mind,” she says.
“oh my god,” i say. “his family.” i can’t imagine the call, how they’re going to feel. to know that he was smacked into space by a cargo container because of a dumb-luck accident. i picture them, in a bungalow in California or a suburban house in Atlanta, or wherever they are—i don’t know the first thing about Brown other than he was scared, other than he was inexperienced—& i c his family answer a vid call on their screen & their world collapse, the vacuum of space pushing in, crushing it.
a critical leak.
destroying their world. their habitat, their safety.
i feel sick. no one i have met has ever died before, i mean apart from my grandmother, but i only ever saw her on vidlink when i was really little; i can barely picture her now. somehow having been in the same module as Brown only an hour earlier makes it weird in a whole other way. i also feel like it’s all my fault. like if i’d pushed for them to use my plan, to use the vibrations…
but no. the rocket just misfired, that’s all.
i look into my mother’s bowl-lens eyes, magnified by the circular window, wondering if she’s thinking the same thing as me.
they look back at me, blank as vid screens.
“well,” says my mother. “at least he got what he wanted. at least he got his burial in space.”
then she’s gone.
i lie in the chamber, for 24 hours.
nothing to read.
no vids.
just lying there, oxygen pumping in to the capsule & to my lungs. pressure at 2x atmos.
it’s dull.
there’s not really a lot more i can say about it.
Libra & Orion come to get me when the 24 hours are up.
Dr. Stearns has already checked my vitals, remotely, & declared me healthy. at least until they can do a full functional MRI of my brain down in Nevada, to c if there’s any neuro damage from the bends. but my joints feel ok, i have no rashes, & my heart rate & blood pressure
are fine.
i made it back just in time.
Libra hands me some new clothes—i was stripped out of the water-cooling suit before going into the hyperbaric chamber & no one much worried about giving me a fresh outfit before saving my life.
“thanks,” i say.
“no problem,” she says.
“ur mother & Virginia are waiting on the bridge,” says Orion. “looks like we’re going home early.”
“really?”
“yeah. with everything going fubar & all.”
“but the station is stabilized?” i ask.
“uh-huh,” says Libra. she leads the way thru the station, & i follow, Orion behind me, the 3 of us torpedoing in file. “all 4 gyros working.”
“then why take us off station now?”
“u think we were asking questions, once they said we could go down there?” says Libra.
of course she wants to go home. to what INDNAS has called our home anyway. she wants to hold her mother. so does Orion, probably, but he’s more inscrutable as usual, is just swimming along behind me, catapulting elegantly off hatches & handles. most likely he just wants to play his flute in a concert hall & hear it echo off the walls.
a simple wish.
simple but impossible.
until now.
when we reach the bridge, my mother & Virginia look up from manuals tied to the table with elastic.
“good; u’re up,” says my mother. “Nevada wants us in the bus in 1 hour.” astronauts like her call the docking & landing module a bus. makes it more ordinary, i suppose. less scary.
“an hour?” i say.
“yes. there’s a window. conditions are clear at the landing site. they want us down before the next storm front comes in. & they want us off the station anyway.”
“why?”
she blinks. “Brown died.”
“well, yes, but—”
“& we’re low on fuel, even with the gyros back online. with all the people off, they can power down the oxygen & the pressure & the cooling. divert everything into the gyros & the boosters, keep the station in status quo until someone can bring up some more fuel.”
this doesn’t sound convincing to me & i open my mouth to say so, but she waves a hand.