Kennedy actually sneered. “You mean, crash-land Destiny on the surface of Keanu?”
“It’s not really a crash landing,” Williams said, his voice at least twice as loud as necessary—or prudent. Harley’s expression warned the elderly writer, and he continued more quietly. “That’s why Harley said to forget what you know about ops—the closing velocities will be so low that you could think of this as a rendezvous between Destiny—”
“—and a spacecraft a million times larger and more massive,” Shane Weldon said, sipping from his beer. He turned to Blaine. “Of course, that’s just a wild-ass guess. You’ll run the figures.”
Blaine had her Slate with her. “I’m sure they’re good enough for this discussion, but I’ll run them, just in case.”
“Can we get serious here?” Kennedy was no longer hiding his impatience. He had already glanced at his watch.
“You got somewhere else to be, Josh?” Harley said. “Is there a kids’ soccer game on the schedule?” He had judged Kennedy to be one of those precise, ascetic youngish men who worked hard and played, whenever possible, without alcohol, late hours, and unsavory companions. They had been the dominant personality type in mission ops for a generation. It was probably inherent in the job; you couldn’t be a boozer or a womanizer and still possess the appropriate seriousness to manage a flight into space.
Or so the mythology had it. Harley agreed that guys who followed rules made better flight directors—as long as that job was defined as . . . following the flight rules.
But in a situation like this, where the rule book was having its pages bent, if not entirely ripped out, NASA needed a riverboat gambler. A buccaneer. A Shane Weldon.
Not an earnest young father. “Since when is my personal life any of your business?”
“It’s not,” Harley said, “unless it keeps you from doing your job.”
Kennedy was bright enough to take the temperature of the room, and right now it was cool toward him. “Sorry. Let’s work this through.”
Harley said, “The idea is to command Destiny to make a burn, to descend in the flattest trajectory possible . . .”
“And just skid across the surface?” Kennedy’s voice was now neutral, but it was clear he was still horrified.
“It’s largely snow,” Weldon said. Kennedy shot him a look that said: Traitor. “The impact velocity could be as low as three meters a second.”
“Or . . .” Harley said, not wishing to attempt conversions or even division with a vodka tonic aboard.
“Sixty to eighty kilometers an hour,” Blaine said, blushing. Was it doing the math so quickly under pressure? Or the beer? Or something else?
The figure sounded good to Harley until Kennedy said, “That speed would still beat the hell out of my Hyundai.”
Williams was spoiling for a fight. “Your Hyundai wasn’t designed to be blasted into space, then survive thousand-degree heat on a lunar return.”
“Don’t we both know that those are different kinds of durability? The vibration damping and thermal protection aren’t the same as impact resistance, right? I mean, the tiles on the space shuttle could withstand temps of three thousand degrees, but if you dropped a penny on them they would split in two.”
Weldon said, “Josh, no one is suggesting that we might not lose an antenna—”
Kennedy had placed his palms on the small table. He would not look directly at anyone. “It’s the solar panels I’d be worried about, though, okay, you ought to be able to operate for a few days with only one. But consider trying to maneuver to the right attitude, make burns, and reenter without data from Houston.”
“This is where mission ops will shine,” Harley said. “You guys will have the departure burns and times precalculated and preloaded to Destiny’s onboard computers before we make the landing.”
Kennedy was nodding, though not so much in acceptance as impatience. “Yeah, yeah, got that. So we pancake down on the surface and manage not to rip a hole in the side of the vehicle, or scrape off both panels and every antenna.” Now he looked up. “You’ve got four, five people in suits. How the hell do they get on board?”
Harley hadn’t given this problem much thought. Because it was not designed for EVA operations, Destiny did not possess an airlock the way the Venture lander did. Which meant it didn’t have easy-open hatches. There was access through the nose—where the Low-Impact Docking System allowed Destiny to dock with Venture. And there was the side hatch, which was how the crew of four entered the vehicle on the pad and departed from it after landing.
The capsule could be depressurized in an emergency. Its electronics were hardened against exposure to vacuum. But which hatch to open, and how—those procedures weren’t in the front part of the training manual, and the surviving Destiny astronauts would be exhausted and totally dependent on guidance from the ground.
“That is what you guys need to work on,” Harley said, feeling the warmth of the vodka through his entire body. “Which way in is better, through the LIDS or through the side access?”
Kennedy had his own Slate out now and was tapping notes to himself and his team. Nothing made an engineer happier than a tricky engineering problem.
“There are other challenges, too,” Weldon said, for Kennedy’s benefit, and to keep Harley and his team on track. “We might have five or six people rather than four; how do we protect them against g-forces on reentry? Water and oxygen and food shouldn’t be immediate problems, but I’m just guessing on the oxygen front.
“There’s the whole business of sample returns, assuming they’re still carrying anything, and how to secure those when we pluck them out of the ocean.”
“And how easy is it going to be to get five exhausted astronauts out of Destiny when it’s bobbing in the Pacific?” Harley disliked many things about the Destiny design, had fought wars against all of them a decade past. But his greatest hatred was for the water landing, a relic of the Apollo days. Destiny could have been designed to thump down safely on a military range like Edwards, but weight considerations and trade-offs had killed that idea. Now the capsule splashed down off the coast of California, near the Channel Islands, where it would be picked up by a NASA-chartered freighter.
“If I may,” Williams said, knowing well that no one would say no, “I just want to say that this kind of rapid response makes me proud and thrilled. It’s like watching the rescue of Apollo 13. It’s NASA at its best.” He tipped his club soda to Weldon and Kennedy. “Cheers.”
Harley said, “Before we pin on the Congressional Space Medal, what are the next steps?”
“We have to be ready with the landing plan as soon as possible,” Kennedy said. “The moment we hear from the crew, we should start counting down to a burn at first opportunity.”
“And a data upload based on that,” Weldon said. He and Kennedy fired times, phrases, and names back and forth for several minutes, then both stood.
Harley tried to help with the sales pitch. “This isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Ten years ago, when we were looking at NEO missions, we were planning to simply fly a Destiny right down to a surface.”
“Down to the surface of a NEO the size of a football stadium,” Kennedy said. “Or maybe a kilometer across. Keanu is a hundred times larger, with real gravity of its own. I’m not saying it’s impossible. I am saying it ain’t the same deal.”
“Whatever, we’ll be ready in two hours,” Weldon announced. And he tossed down the last of his beer.
Emerging into the Texas afternoon was like entering a broiler. The clouds, threatening rain, managed to dull the glare, but they added to the oppressive thickness of the air. Even with Sasha Blaine pushing his wheels, Harley could feel his energy being drained. “It’s amazing,” Blaine said.
“The discomfort?”
“No!” she said. “It just all looks so normal! Insane things are happening half a million kilometers away, and all these people are just living their lives!”
It was true. There was a McDonald’s a h
undred meters down the road, cars still lined up for lunchtime drive-through. Other vehicles, each one sealed and air-conditioned against the tropical Houston summer heat, glided past on NASA One. Harley knew that there were dozens of protesters at JSC’s back gate, but not out here.
“Jealous?” Harley said.
Blaine blushed again. “Kind of, yeah. This has been . . . fun. And it just shows me that I’m thirty-two and I have no life. No boyfriend, no hobbies, no pets. I just do calculations and teach and every now and then I slip the leash and come someplace like this.”
Harley was in front of his used Dodge Caravan, modified for easy access and equipped with hand controls. “The one benefit, and it may be the only benefit, of being differently mobile is that I don’t have to park across the lot.”
Formerly mobile Harley Drake, driver of a Mustang, would have added, “And since we don’t need to be back at the Home Team for a couple of hours . . .” And likely driven off for an afternoon of sport with Sasha Blaine.
But this was wheelchair Harley, spinal-cord-injury Harley, unable-to-function Harley.
It was also Home Team and Alien Protocol chief Harley Drake.
He used his key to open the side door, then waited for the special lift to extend. “I’ll see you back in the center in an hour.”
Then Blaine said, “Oh, you’ve got someplace better to be?” Harley was forced to conclude that she hoped he might have something more distracting in mind.
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back.”
I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.
RICHARD FEYNMAN’S LAST WORDS
Rachel awoke in her own bedroom, confused and not terribly rested. The light was wrong—bright through the shades. Right, it was afternoon . . . she had slept a long time.
But the sound of the house was wrong. The drone of the air conditioner was audible. That was the problem: Rachel could actually hear the machine.
Which meant something was missing.
Over the past two years, she had gotten used to having the house to herself. Her father made it a point to be home whenever she was . . . he had rearranged his work schedule to allow for telecommuting in the after-school hours, either plopping himself at the kitchen table while Rachel pretended to do schoolwork, or sitting on the sidelines at soccer with his Slate right up to the time Rachel finally told him she hated soccer and was quitting . . . and generally found other things to do between three and six P.M.
But whenever Zack was home, he had music playing . . . country, classical, horrible early nineties pop; it didn’t seem to matter, as long as sound filled the house.
As if her father couldn’t stand the silence. Back when she had had actual conversations with Zack, as opposed to arguments, Rachel had thought about asking him about the music . . . but, feeling she knew the answer, never did.
And now . . . would she ever?
Her father was . . . somewhere on Keanu, out of touch and, according to everything NASA had been saying, out of oxygen, food, and water . . . somehow in contact with the late Megan Stewart.
Maybe she should have taken the sedative Jillianne Dwight had offered. If it hadn’t been so freaking horribly hot outside, she would have sneaked out to the porch and lit up a joint.
As it was, the trip home had been uncomfortable. Amy simply would not shut up about all the weird stuff she’d seen, and how she couldn’t wait to tell everyone how she and Rachel had almost gotten arrested by the FBI. The fact that Rachel had had a conversation with a being who seemed to be her dead mother, reincarnated . . . well, that never seemed to strike Amy as all that interesting.
It was a relief to see her go.
Inside the house, Rachel had walked right past the telescope in the living room that Zack had used to first show her Keanu. In the last few months, of course, no telescope had been necessary.
Rachel had wondered what she would see if she used it now. She hadn’t been online for twelve hours.
Before she checked her page, she glanced at the news feed.
It was all Keanu: “Astronauts Out of Contact” . . . “Space Crews in Danger” . . . “NASA Hiding Zombie Planet” . . .
Some of it seemed to match what Rachel had seen and heard, and some of it was crazy.
The phrase zombie planet made her sick. Keanu-Megan wasn’t a zombie. She knew things that only Rachel’s real mother would know!
She turned to her page and saw that the counter had maxed out on seven thousand messages. Glancing through the first hundred, she saw about seventy versions of, So sorry to hear about your father! The rest said things like, What’d you expect?
There were, of course, the stupid smutty messages, too, boys and men from many nations offering to “comfort” her. Rachel had been online since the age of six; there was nothing new or notable in any of this. All it did was remind her of Ethan Landolt and the fact that he had not even tried to get in touch with her since the launch.
With brutal efficiency, she clicked through more of the messages. Same, same, same. Condolence, your fault, send me a naked pic.
But then her eye saw something that didn’t fit the pattern. This is the beginning of a new age, it said. How great for you to be the first to know that we live on after death. You’re like the women around Jesus at the Resurrection.
That really freaked her out, because she had been feeling something like that . . . and felt stupid for entertaining the idea for even a second. She was just a fourteen-year-old Texas girl whose father happened to be an astronaut. There were a hundred astronauts, so how did that make her special? Her mother had died, but there were hundreds of thousands of girls in the United States in the same situation, too.
She took her fingers off the Slate. At that moment, it looked and felt as alien as anything on Keanu. She wanted it out—
There was a gentle knock at the door. Jillianne. “Hungry?”
The NASA secretary had made turkey sandwiches and a salad and encouraged Rachel to drink water. “I’m guessing this is the first home-style food you’ve had in days.”
Rachel had to admit it was.
“How are you feeling?”
“How do you think?” Rachel caught herself in time, making that sound more plaintive than nasty.
“Well, I’m stunned and afraid and overwhelmed, and I’m just looking at this from the outside.”
“You work with my dad.”
“Yes. I was actually thinking more about . . .” She clearly didn’t know how to say your mother.
“Yeah. Me, too.” And just like that, Rachel began to cry, dissolving into a collapsing, sobbing crouch. It was as if she ceased to function.
Jillianne flew out of her chair and around the table to offer comfort, which only made it worse. Soon both of them were sobbing. Eventually Rachel was able to say, “I just don’t know what to do!”
“Neither do I, honey,” Jillianne said. “I don’t think anybody knows. Look, you’ve had a series of emotional shocks. You haven’t really slept. You might want to reconsider that Xanax.”
“No,” Rachel said. She got up, found a Kleenex, wiped her eyes, and blew her nose. She thought about that message, about the women around Jesus. Not that she thought much about Jesus Christ, but she found the idea intriguing. “I can’t sleep through this. If my dad gets back in touch—”
“You want to be there, I know.” Jillianne looked around. “Well, then. I suppose we should go back to the center.”
“Yes. But I have a stop I want to make.”
“I’m your driver. At your service.”
In answer to queries, no, NASA has not “gone rogue,” no matter what you’re hearing or think you’re hearing. There has been a White House/ National Security presence in MCC since day one. Which isn’t to say that there isn’t bad stuff going on.
POSTER JSC GUY AT NEOMISSION.COM
Tea Nowinski was buttoned up in her EVA suit, within sight of the rearranged floor of Vesuvius Vent, when the tremor hit.
There was no doubting it: Even through the thick fabric of the suit, with sound and sensation muffled by the helmet, she was jolted, as if she had missed two steps coming down a stairway.
It only lasted a second, however. The jolt, a moment of vertigo, then all was calm.
Taj was walking behind her. Behind him was rover Buzz, with Natalia and Lucas inside. “Good God, don’t tell me someone else has a bomb. . . .”
“That felt different,” Taj said. He pointed to his feet, then at the brightness ahead of them. “It seemed to come from deep within, not out there.”
After assuring herself that the occupants of the rover were okay, she resumed her trek.
She had led Lucas and Natalia back through the Beehive to the membrane, with the necessary stop at the campsite to pick up their suits.
Getting herself resuited took twice as long as it should have. She was operating on fumes, of course. She also recognized her own reluctance to go forward . . . emerging to Keanu’s exterior meant she would be one step closer to knowing the fate of what was now her vastly reduced team; would they be able to contact mission control and have some hope of rescue? (On a related note, would Taj ever forgive her for leaving his Zeiss radio/camera with Zack?)
Or were they doomed to death on Keanu? So far, she had to admit, the odds were not good.
At least Lucas and Natalia’s suits had proven to be sound. Even if they possessed tools for repairing leaks or valves, they were no longer capable of performing critical repairs with any confidence.
Taj, in fact, had asked, “What’s our fallback plan?”
“You mean, we go out there, find nothing left, no communication? Our options will be either to sit down and die, or go back through the membrane.”
As they had departed, the return-to-interior option began to look like a poor choice. The wind had grown stronger, the glowworms darker . . . and the vegetation was going through another transition, from “jungle” to something Tea could only describe as “crystal city.” Plants were disintegrating and angular structures were forming on the ground.
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