Back to the Moon

by Homer Hickam

“Six tons of useless mass that we’ve got to move,” Jack muttered. “The Big Dog’s going in there.”

  “Why do you call it Big Dog?”

  “When you hear it fired, you’ll understand. It sounds just like a pit bull.”

  “Cute.” He heard her breathing easier. She was becoming acclimated. “I love the way you men make pets out of your machines,” she added.

  He smiled, actually pleased that she was doing so well on her first EVA. The standard-issue astronaut would have gotten at least a hundred hours of training in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab before Houston would have even considered letting him do an EVA. Jack kept the banter going. “Well, I’m glad we’re at least a source of amusement for you, High Eagle.”

  “This is going to be a lot of work, isn’t it?” she asked suddenly.

  “The record for changing out a shuttle main is eight hours. We have about the same amount of time to remove all three if we want to get back on our timeline. Fortunately, we don’t have to follow ground procedures.”

  “We’re just going to rip the engines out?”

  “We’re going to carefully rip them out.”

  Jack adjusted the camera attached to his helmet and flicked it on. If it worked, Virgil should be able to see what Jack was doing. “Do you see us, Virg?” Jack called.

  Virgil’s comeback was instantaneous. “Yep. I see the shroud’s gone and you’re at the coolant control valve of the number three engine.”

  Jack was thankful he was going to have Virgil giving him advice as he proceeded. There were few at the Cape who had changed out more shuttle mains than Virgil Judd. Jack untethered and turned to face Penny. He pointed into the dark recesses of the engines. “If I get stuck in there, I might need you to come help me out.”

  Penny peered into the tangle. “Don’t get stuck, okay?”

  “I’ll do my best.” Jack began to worm his way into the wires and tubing, moving slowly, gauging each move, trying not to get his backpack snagged. When he got deeper, he switched on his helmet lights. “What do you see, Virg?”

  “Good picture, Jack. You’re at the engine interface panel.”

  A cavity allowed Jack to straighten up and turn around. He swept his light back along his path, tubing and cables still vibrating from his passing. He faced the bulkhead and directed his lights at the big bolts that ran along the edge. When he saw that each bolt had a recess, he got worried. “What are the holes for, Virg? Not for squibs, I hope.”

  “Negative. There are no pyrotechnics in the engine compartment. Those are for the transducers used to measure torque.”

  “How much torque?”

  “Only about twenty foot-pounds. You should be able to manhandle them with the Essex wrench if the power tool can’t do it.”

  Jack set about his task. He clipped the safety wires and then put the power tool on the first of the bolts. “It’s turning!” he cheered.

  “Great. Okay, don’t do any more on the bolts,” Virgil advised. “Cut all the propellant lines and electronics first. Let me see everything you cut before you do it and I’ll give you the go-ahead.”

  Jack needed more hands. “High Eagle, could use some help in here. You’ll need to untether.”

  He heard her sigh but then she said, “Coming in.” The girl had guts, he had to give her that.

  When Penny came up beside him, he handed her a pair of heavy wire cutters. “Here’s the drill, High Eagle. I’ll point, Virgil will say if it’s okay, and then we’ll take turns cutting. It’ll be slow going and hard on our hands. When I need to rest, you’ll cut. Then vice versa. Got it?”

  She was squinting again. “Got it.”

  Jack knew that getting Virgil’s permission before any tube or wire was cut was critical. There was little danger if the main engine propellant lines were cut because they contained only water and ice, but the OMS and RCS lines that ran along the aft bulkhead were extremely hazardous. If they were accidentally cut, the resulting high-pressure spray of nitrogen tetroxide or monomethyl hydrazine could deteriorate the EMU suit fabric rapidly. And if both got loose and mixed, the engine compartment would become a giant bomb.

  After cutting out two engines Jack called for a stop when he heard Penny groan. “It feels like my fingernails have been pried back to the quick,” she complained. “These damn gloves!”

  “I know it’s hard, High Eagle,” Jack said quietly, his voice thick with fatigue. “But you’re doing a damn good job.”

  There was a vibration in the engine compartment. Jack put his glove against the bulkhead. “Did you feel that?”

  “Did something hit us?” Penny worried.

  His glove picked up another vibration. “There it is again. I wonder—”

  Before Jack could finish his thought, the engine compartment exploded in furious movement, wires and cables and cut tubing flying around like maddened snakes. A thick cable whipped Jack, sending him smashing into an RCS line. The line flexed and then broke, flooding the compartment with toxic monomethyl hydrazine.

  SMC

  “Flight, PROP.”

  Sam keyed his mike. What the hell did the propulsion controller want? “Go ahead, PROP.”

  “Flight, there was indication of ice in the port aft RCS line. I just popped it out of there. Then I compensated with a burst from starboard. Looks like I might have started an inadvertent tumble.”

  Sam felt his stomach bottom out. “You didn’t tell Columbia what you were going to do?”

  There was an “uh-oh” pause from the woman. “Negative. It’s normally routine. We do it all the time.”

  Sam stood up, found the woman on the PROP console, and glared at her. She raised her head, looked embarrassed. “Propulsion, this flight is never going to be routine.” She nodded her head, ducked it back behind her monitor. Sam punched up the comm loop. “CAPCOM?”

  “CAPCOM. Go.”

  “Tell Columbia what we did and that we meant no harm.”

  “Roger that.”

  Columbia

  Virgil looked up from a drawing. Columbia shuddered, then there was a big thump, like a distant bass drum. Virgil looked out a window, saw the shuttle was starting to tumble slowly on her Z-axis, tail over nose. Then there was a long, staccato series of muffled drumbeats. Virgil pawed the transmitter of his headset. “Houston, Columbia. Are you firing the RCS?”

  “Sorry about that, Columbia,“ the CAPCOM replied. “We were clearing your port aft RCS of ice. Can you stabilize?”

  Virgil fought his way to the pilot’s seat, found the OMS/RCS power switches, and safed them, but still an engine burned. Columbia tumbled ever faster, like a boulder rolling down an eternal black slope. Virgil kept working, desperately going after all power distribution switches. When he finally gave up trying to isolate the problem, he slapped off the main computer power bus and the muffled roar abruptly stopped. Turning off the computer had caused valves upstream to slam shut, not a good thing to do to sensitive hardware.

  Virgil held his hand up to shade his eyes. The sun was flashing through the flight deck windows like a doppler spotlight. Columbia was in a head-over-heels somersault. Virgil braced himself against the artificial minigravity caused by the centrifugal force of the tumble. Drops of sweat were flying off his face. He clawed his way back to the view ports. Every ten seconds Columbia completed a rotation. The earth and stars seemed to be playing leapfrog. Virgil felt his stomach start to complain. Just as he reached for a barf bag, something white flashed past the aft view ports. An EMU suit glove. Someone had died out there. He pressed the bag to his mouth, his body racking spasmodically.

  SMC

  “Sam, it’s Bonner.”

  Sam turned in his chair, saw Bonner coming out of the VIP room. He was weaving. “Shit. He’s drunk!”

  Bonner plowed up to Sam’s console, looked at the graphic of the tumbling shuttle on the CRT. “You’ve got him! Good work, Sam!”

  Sam saw Lakey standing over the CAPCOM. He was putting down the long line phone. His mouth was open in aston
ishment at Bonner’s appearance. He’d probably called the director, tracked him down at the Rawhide from the look of him, told him that Columbia was in a tumble because something the SMC had done. “Frank, you’re in no shape to be here,” Sam said, waving all his controllers’ eyes away from the scene.

  Bonner leaned on the console. “Keep pumping the RCS jets,” he said, summoning up the precise words with obvious difficulty. “Do it, Sam.”

  “It was a mistake, Frank. We’re correcting it now.”

  “No. Keep pumping or you’re relieved.”

  “You can’t relieve me while you’re drunk. Go home. Sober up and then come back and do it if that’s what you want.”

  Bonner lurched to the edge of the platform. He looked down at the youthful controllers, who were all staring back, eyes wide. “I am ordering you to. . . to...” He seemed to catch himself. He turned back to Sam. “That bastard is a murderer.”

  “That isn’t true, Frank,” Sam replied softly, understanding a little what was upsetting Bonner. “Medaris made a bad mistake but that’s all it was. He paid the price. And it was a long time ago.”

  Bonner leaned against the console, “He took everything away from me.”

  “What’s he talking about, Sam?” Crowder whispered nervously.

  Sam saw Hank Garcia watching from the VIP-room door. “Get over here!” Sam mouthed.

  Garcia ran over, took Bonner by his elbow. Bonner straightened, as if remembering his dignity. He looked at Sam. “Sam, stop Medaris. I’ll give you anything you want to do it.”

  “You don’t have the power to give me anything,” Sam muttered. “Get him out of here, Hank,” he ordered Garcia.

  “You’re relived, Tate!” Bonner yelled over his shoulder as he was half pushed, half carried, from the SMC. “Relieved!”

  Sam went after Lakey. “I told you not to interfere with my control room.”

  Lakey took a step back. “Sam, listen to me. I didn’t realize Bonner was drunk. But he doesn’t matter. Think about it. If we put them in a perpetual tumble by firing up the RCS, we’ll get them so sick all they’ll be able to do is puke. Then we can bring them in and end this thing.”

  Sam pushed his long, bony finger into the astronaut’s chest. “You listen to me. This control room was built to protect spacecraft, not to harm them. And as long as I’m in charge, that’s the way it’s going to be. I don’t want to see you in here again.”

  “You can’t banish me from the control room, Sam. I’m the chief of astronauts.”

  Sam grabbed him by his collar, spun him around, and pushed him in the direction of the security guard at the door. “Take him out of here and flush his clearance,” he ordered the guard. Then he went back to his console, knowing his hours in Shuttle Mission Control were numbered. He punched up all the loops. “SMC, this is Flight. Forget what you just saw. The director is having a bad day. If I hear a word of this on television or read anything about it in the newspapers, I’ll find out who did it and have their hide. Understand?” When no reply came, Sam gave the room a good vulture and then as good a smile as he could summon up. “CAPCOM, get Columbia back. Let’s see if we can help them for a change.”

  Columbia

  Jack was knocked against the propellant line. It broke, a blast of bluish spray erupted, just missing him. Penny lunged for the line, grabbed it, twisted it away from both of them toward the aft bulkhead. It stopped spraying, a valve upstream snapping into place. But her suit felt strange. She looked down at her right glove, saw the reason. The fuel had eaten away some of the material from the tip of the index finger. Reflexively, she pressed the finger to her suit. Wrong move. More of the material sloughed off. She gasped for air, a fog of moisture beginning to condense on her faceplate....

  Jack gripped a dangling bundle of cables and pulled toward Penny, arriving just as she started to subside into unconsciousness, her arms waving in front of her. He pinched the affected glove but the material was too degraded to seal. Even in zero g the suit seemed to sag on her, the awesome vacuum pulling the life out of her. The internal wrist seal wasn’t working. There was only one thing he could do. He had heard it discussed as a contingency among the astronauts, always dismissed as impossible. He squeezed the latches on her glove and pulled it off, pushing her hand back inside the arm and then swinging the aluminum wrist joint against the folds of his outer suit, creating a temporary seal. He was rewarded with the sight of her suit filling, the emergency 6,000 psi oxygent tank inside automatically venting. Behind the fog of her faceplate he saw her eyes flutter and then open. “Relax, High Eagle, I’ve got you.”

  “Medaris, I don’t feel so good.”

  He looked at her DCS readout. The pressure was still down. He braced his feet and dug into the bag at his waist for a roll of duct tape. He couldn’t think about it. He had to do it.

  He unlatched the wrist of his left-hand glove, stripped it off. His hand emerged momentarily into the icy chill of space before he plunged it inside the open arm of her suit. A hot fire shot up his hand to the wrist seal, the capillaries of his exposed skin bursting. He clamped the two rings of the space-suit arms together and wrapped the gray tape around them, once, twice, three times. The blinking numbers on her chest pack told the story. Pressure dropping, shutdown imminent. . . He started another wrap of tape.

  Virgil ran his hands over his face again and again, trying to get control of himself. He stared back into the payload bay. He would have to go out and get them. Not that it would matter. He was as dead as they. He couldn’t land a shuttle, not with it tumbling like it was, and he didn’t know how to stop it.

  He heard Sam’s voice. “Columbia, Houston. Fire up your computers. We’ll get you out of your tumble. It must’ve been the ice. All the valves stuck open. We’ll get ’em closed.”

  Virgil did as he was told without comment. Within a minute the RCS thrusters started to pump forward and aft. Columbia settled down. That was when a movement in the cargo bay caught his attention. “Hey!” he screamed at the universe. “Hey! Would you look at that!”

  Before his disbelieving eyes Jack Medaris and Penny High Eagle were coming down the sill toward the safety of the airlock hatch. The real miracle was they appeared to be holding hands!

  THE VEEP’S PARTY

  The Vice President’s Residence

  The vice president’s official residence was on the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Massachusetts Avenue, a rambling brick house on a broad green lawn. It looked more like a museum than a place to live but Vanderheld had put his stamp on it, turning it into a stately mansion filled with artwork and the veep’s eclectic collections of butterflies and books. To help along the World Energy Treaty, he had decided to hold a party for the Senate. Vanderheld would remind them of the President’s journey to Baghdad. The treaty Edwards had gone to broker was tied, he’d explain, to WET. With WET’s restrictions on dangerous alternative energy schemes, oil was all the more important to the United States. The Middle East needed to be a stable region. Iraq and Iran were the keys to that. Vanderheld was known as a great storyteller. He was wowing a group of half-drunk senators with his story about the time, as a very young man, he’d climbed the Matterhorn. “I looked around for my guide and saw him sitting down on this ledge,” he said to their grins. “What’s wrong, Günter?’ I asked. He threw up his hands. “I came to climb, not run, up this mountain, Herr Vanderheld!”

  While the appreciative audience chuckled, Vanderheld spotted the attorney general and FBI Director Mark Hennessey coming in an hour late for the party. Hennessey saw him at the same time, said something to Hawthorne, and came up to the veep. “Sir, the attorney general and I need to talk to you.”

  Vanderheld raised his eyebrows. “Is it that important I should leave my guests?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Vanderheld shrugged, led the way into his study. The AG was wearing a gown that hung off her big shoulders like a black tent. She shook the veep’s hand, patted him on the shoulder, but that was as far as she
went. She never gave out hugs. “I thought you needed to hear this right away, sir. The committee of federal judges I appointed to study the contract that damned southern lawyer has been waving around has come in with an opinion. They tell me it’s likely to hold up in court. In other words, it’s a legal contract between this MEC outfit and the government, signed and sealed by that idiot the President has for a secretary of the Department of Transportation.”

  Vanderheld absorbed her rapid-fire delivery. “Why does DOT have anything to do with the shuttle?”

  Hawthorne snorted. “The space business, especially the launching of commercial payloads, is so full of overlapping agencies and congressional mandates, it’s a fool’s paradise. DOT has a piece of it and so does the Department of Commerce, and they’re always wrangling for a bigger share. The contract specialists at DOT liked the idea that the MEC contract would establish DOT as a player in lining up shuttle payloads.” Hawthorne sighed, shook her head. “The devil is always in the details. There’s one paragraph in there that can be interpreted to mean if MEC pays a million to DOT and a million to NASA, it gets exclusive use of the shuttle, period. It doesn’t say that they have to do anything other than pay the money. And it doesn’t say that they have to adhere to any schedule other than their own.”

  “Tammy, let me get this straight,” Vanderheld said. “You’re telling me that the Columbia hijack is legal?”

  “I’m telling you exactly that, sir. Oh, we can get them for little technicalities on safety and so on, might even get them for endangering the astronauts in the elevator, but their presence aboard the shuttle is covered by their contract.”

  Vanderheld walked to the window, looked out into the darkness. “Endeavour has launched,” he said stiffly. “It was against my better judgment, frankly. I told the President that. Bernie Sykes convinced him otherwise. I fear someone will be hurt up there.”

  “Well, maybe you should call it off,” Hawthorne said. “Especially since it looks like those old boys are up there more or less quasilegal.”

  “I don’t think the President will agree, Tammy,” Vanderheld said sadly. “He just wants this over. It looks bad for him while he’s trying to negotiate a peace treaty in Iraq.”