In the Blackness of Space

by Robert Kuntz

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  Thank you

  IN THE BLACKNESS OF SPACE

  Robert D. Kuntz

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  IN THE BLACKNESS OF SPACE

  COPYRIGHT 2014 by ROBERT D. KUNTZ

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or Pelican Ventures, LLC except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  eBook editions are licensed for your personal enjoyment only. eBooks may not be re-sold, copied or given away to other people. If you would like to share an eBook edition, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with.

  Contact Information: titleadmin@pelicanbookgroup.com

  All scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version(R), NIV(R), Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com

  Cover Art by Nicola Martinez

  Harbourlight Books, a division of Pelican Ventures, LLC

  www.pelicanbookgroup.com PO Box 1738 *Aztec, NM * 87410

  Harbourlight Books sail and mast logo is a trademark of Pelican Ventures, LLC

  Publishing History

  First Harbourlight Edition, 2014

  Electronic Edition ISBN 978-1-61116-320-9

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  The first book was always going to be for Libby.

  Without a loving and supportive wife,

  there is no story.

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks to Libby for believing in me, for waiting around all those mornings when I was at the computer writing, and for your persistence in helping to improve the book. For the growth and faith I needed to write this story, I am deeply in your debt.

  Thanks to editors Barbara Early and Nicola Martinez. I've often wondered why writers thank their editors at the end of a book. Now I know. Your challenging questions, thoughtfulness, and thoroughness have improved the book immensely. Nicola, your cover art is stunning and captures the spirit and fun of the story. Barbara, your support of the book and suggestions for it have been invaluable. You both have blessed me with your faith and warmth.

  Thanks to Skyline Writers for reading endless revisions of this book. Your feedback, both the appreciation and the criticism, helped me find the full story.

  Thanks to Jim Davis from Skyline Writers. It's amazing to me that someone who worked on Biosphere II joined our writer's group as I was writing this book. Not only did you help me with the science of the biomes and the physics of spacecraft, but you asked the key question that sparked the idea for Grant's spacewalk.

  Thanks to Mom and Dad. You raised me to be a reader and to dream.

  1

  Houston, Texas, January 4, 2052 (Launch minus 15 days), 08:07 CST.

  Billy Jepler’s lips pursed in a mischievous grin. “If they begged you to join the Galileo crew,” he repeated, “what would you ask for?”

  Blackness charged the edges of my vision, blurring the walls of the diner. I felt the sweat coming. I hated blacking out in public. Taking slow, deep breaths, I forced myself to look across the table at him.

  “Never.” Somehow, the word escaped my clenched teeth. My voice rose, “I will never ride in a car. Or bike or bus or train. I’ll never leave Earth.” I took a long, steady breath, trying to quiet my pounding heart.

  Billy was dressed in a black power suit. Even though he was overweight, with an unruly head of black hair, his serious persona had a sobering effect on people. You could joke with Billy Jepler, but you never bluffed, bullied, or blathered.

  Billy waved his hands and then clicked his ballpoint pen a dozen times. “Grant, relax. I know your fears. Who met you ten years ago when you were a new PhD who’d walked over a thousand miles from Charleston to work here at NASA?”

  My heart settled. I looked around the dimly-lit diner. The shades were pulled down, blocking the small square windows in front. A ceiling fan turned lazy circles overhead. The only other customers were back by the kitchen.

  A broad-shouldered man of inexhaustible energy, Billy had a boyish face with steel blue eyes. Plump like the donuts he was savoring, he reminded me of a throbbing number 8. I was like a tepid number 1, a bean pole with straight hair and a thin nose.

  Billy pointed a beefy finger at me. “My question is not ‘Would you go to FarSpace?’ My question is ‘If you had them over a barrel, what would you ask for?’” He glared at me, but then raised an eyebrow.

  I grinned. As serious as Billy could be, he had a spirit of fun when it came to his friends. He knew how to bump me off the downward slide to blacking out. I took another slow breath. “An Elvis Presley record collection, a bassoon and electric guitar, a pair of kestrels, two poodles, and blueprints for Confederate naval vessels.”

  Billy nodded thoughtfully. “Things from the crew’s two-hundred-pound packages…nothing for you.”

  “I’m not going!” Sweat soaked my forehead. I focused on my breathing. Five seconds in, five seconds out. Slow seconds in, steady seconds out. Your feet are on the ground; you’re OK. I looked down at the ancient rust-colored linoleum, cracked and buckled like a Martian landscape.

  I was surprised Billy had asked me to breakfast. Two days ago, Manny Weppler, the computer specialist on the Galileo’s crew, had a prolonged seizure during a launch simulation. He was in the hospital, on a ventilator, diagnosed with mission-disqualifying California encephalitis. Billy had to be going crazy to find a replacement.

  I’d known Jepler for ten years. He was the master of multi-tasking, working on dozens of projects at once. Billy’s deals, cons, trades, and larceny had saved the program countless times. We had a vision to send people deep into space, to planets where humans might live. With the president-elect promising to end FarSpace on his first day in office, we had to launch in two weeks.

  Billy leaned forward. “OK, you’re not going. But, Grant, work with me here. You’re the most knowledgeable person I know. It’s not just that you can walk me into the ground with those sturdy legs. You can think me into the ground with that brilliant mind. You have a passion for what we’re doing and you see the big picture, so I need to know.” His voice was soft. “What changes would you make?”

  We’d protected FarSpace from so many gnat-brained accusers that it was hard for me to criticize the program. “You won’t tell anyone from outside?”

  “Only Jean-li Neuwin, the VidNet reporter,” he said sarcastically. “I have a mini-pod-corder in my shirt pocket, and I’ll tell her the recommendations of Dr. Grant J. Chapman, the most anal computer genius in the FarSpace support crew.” His ballpoint fired off another staccato burst. “Relax. Just tell me.”

  I picked up my orange and then peeled and sectioned it. The four sections without seeds I put on the right side of my plate. The six sections with seeds on the left. Using my fork, I pierced those with seeds and worked the seeds out. I lin
ed up the fifteen seeds in three rows of five. They reminded me of pungent, miniature number 9s. “Whoever established those miserly weight restrictions doesn’t have the intelligence God gave kumquats. The nauts are risking their lives. They’re the most important element in the whole mission. You don’t send people on a twenty-five-year trip into space and deny them two-hundred pounds of personal gear. If you’re loyal to your people, you let them take the stuff of their dreams.

  “Let Naomi Branch take her kestrels. She’s raised them since they hatched. Let Carmen Pioquinto have her Elvis record collection, electric guitar, and bassoon. Let Ushamla Beduee take her rose bushes, bee hives, and those maddening mazes she sends bees through. Let Ihor Dremenev take his poodles and Bronson Gwen his naval blueprints. They’ll be in space for years. Give them what will keep them sane.”

  I ate an orange section from the left. The taste reminded me of my walk to Houston. On the way through Louisiana, the road went past an orange grove. I helped myself to an orange, and as I ate each section, I slipped the seeds into my pocket. With the fifteen seeds on my plate, I now had 177,215 orange seeds, 3,988 peach pits, 5,735 cherry pits, plus apple seeds.

  “You are an amazing man,” Billy said. “At most, you talk with the Galileo’s crew ten minutes a month. Yet you know their hobbies and interests because you care about them.”

  I shrugged.

  Billy clicked his ballpoint as if he were trying to wear it out. “But you have to be realistic, Grant. You can’t add kestrels, bees, and poodles. They’d breathe oxygen and eat food the crew needs.”

  I looked up from the seeds. “You don’t understand it, do you?”

  Billy grinned. “You’re the science geek, not me.”

  “Look, Billy, the Galileo’s going on a twenty-five-year trip. In 1980, a pair of researchers estimated that every year a person eats three times his weight in food, breathes in four times his weight in oxygen, and drinks eight times his weight in water. Multiply that by eight crew members and twenty-five years, and stocking the ship would require a grocery store the size of Rhode Island. You can’t send that to FarSpace. So the crew members have to raise their own food and recycle air and water. They need a complete ecosystem, one with functional redundancy. You can’t have your CO2 scrubbing system inoperative when you’re out past Jupiter.”

  Billy looked fondly at his last donut and nodded. “It’s more complicated than sending a farm into space.”

  “Right. It’s not just growing crops. It’s recycling human and animal waste in a system that keeps humans, plants, and animals alive.

  “The ship’s ecosystem is modeled on the Biosphere II experiments of the 1990s, taking nature’s interdependent life-enhancing systems into space. The living part of the Galileo is made up of two rings, each with seven distinct biomes, one after another like beads on a bracelet.

  “There’s a small rainforest with a seventy-five-foot waterfall and trees that will reach one hundred feet.”

  “The nauts need monkeys and macaws?”

  “Neither of those made the cut. The rainforest’s tropical foliage, along with the plankton and coral reef in the ocean biome, recycles CO2 back into oxygen so the nauts keep breathing.

  “The next biome is a dual-pond, tree-lined savannah. The stream from the rainforest flows through the savannah ponds and then twists through the smallest biome, the mangrove swamp. Then the stream flows into the tiny ocean. It’s a 660,000-gallon sea with a living coral reef, a sliver of beach, and coconut palms.”

  Billy centered his donut on his plate.”I remember that. An ocean the size of an Olympic swimming pool.”

  “The next biome,” I said, “is the fog desert with lizards and cacti, followed by the ag biome with pygmy goats, chickens, and crops including oats, rice, sweet potatoes, beans, and onions.”

  “And the last biome,” Billy said, nodding, “has the rooms where the crew lives.”

  “More than rooms. It’s got living quarters, machine shops, labs, med-bay, gym, and library. The nauts will have to fix the plumbing, monitor the health of the biomes, and repair farm bots when they’re light years from Earth.”

  “OK, that’s the Galileo.”

  “No. That’s the first ring, half the Galileo. In order to have failsafe redundancy, they’ve built a second ring.”

  “With a second rainforest, ocean, and farm.”

  “If something goes awry nine light-years from home, you can’t just pop over to the neighbor’s for a dozen eggs to replenish your flock.”

  “I get it. Functional redundancy.”

  “Their lives depend on it.”

  I ate another orange section from the left and enjoyed the juice trickling down my throat. I thought again of the long walk from Charleston and the seeds I’d started collecting on the way. I now had seeds from five varieties of common apples: 2,701 Cortland, 409 Grimes Golden, 3,511 Jonathan, 1741 Melrose, and 122 Albemarle Pippen. I knew if I planted them, each one would grow its own new variety. Apple seeds were like that. But I kept them nonetheless.

  Billy squinted his eyes nearly shut. “The rings are balanced ecosystems. And now you’ve got a problem. You want to add kestrels, bees, and poodles. That ruins the ecological balance. You’ll kill the nauts.”

  “Not if you keep the Beta Ring attached to the ship.”

  “Take a third complete ecosystem?”

  “Why not? Go beyond functional redundancy to failsafe redundancy.”

  “But the cost.”

  “Billy, you’re not thinking. The Beta Ring is already in space. It’s the base on which the Galileo’s been built. It’s been connected to the rings from the beginning. Construction crews lived there. Its animals and plants have supported human life for seven years. It will cost less to keep it in place than to disconnect it.”

  Billy held up a hand. “Calm down, Grant. You’ve convinced me. No need to wake Houston.” He thought for a minute and then said, “So why do the engineers say the Beta Ring won’t hold up to a twenty-five-year space flight?”

  “You’ve been listening to Rennellson. He has the IQ of a flatworm and the guts of a paramecium. Yes, he’s the head engineer. Yes, he’s more vocal than anyone else. But guess who loses his job if the Beta Ring goes to FarSpace? Talk to other engineers—like Malloy and Granger on the rigging team. The Beta Ring was built to last 75 years. Take it along. Don’t let the next administration put it in mothballs.”

  I ate another orange slice from the left.

  “It’s all about failsafe redundancy,” Billy muttered. “Back-up systems, ‘spare’ animals, and environment.”

  “It’s all for the nauts. You do everything possible not only to keep them alive, but to give the nauts a life.”

  Billy lifted a finger. “Point one, no priority higher than the nauts.” He looked at his donut and thrust out two fingers. “Point two, failsafe redundancy for every aspect of FarSpace.” Suddenly his eyes got wide, and a gleeful look passed over his face, as though he’d discovered the key to donut heaven.

  “Grant, you’ve sparked a breakthrough for me, solved a giant problem.”

  I didn’t get it.

  Billy leaned back in his seat, picked up his donut, and took a bite. He sighed and then chewed with a faint smile on his lips. He looked at me with steely eyes. “OK, you miracle worker. Tell me what you would take. What would keep you sane?”

  I took a deep breath and looked at Billy’s cherry red tie. “Plenty of people think I’m not sane. I won’t get in a car…”

  Billy clicked his pen furiously. “You have degrees in this stuff. Help me out here.”

  Billy’s questions were bothering me. Sweat began to collect on the back of my neck. “I’m not going!”

  My arms started to shake. If I didn’t get out of this dingy place and into fresh air and sun, I’d black out. I stood from the table and glared at Billy. I’d only blacked out twice this month. First the sweat, then the shakes, and finally the system got so overloaded it shut down.

  As I reache
d the door, I shouted back at him, “I believe in FarSpace, you know. We need a challenge bigger than ourselves. If we bring back proof that planets are habitable, people will settle the stars.”

  I shoved open the door and lurched out into the sunshine. In 1,714 steps, I reached Travis Park, a small patch of grassy lawn bordered by thick oak trees dangling with Spanish moss. The best antidote for blacking was anchoring myself in nature. If I could sit on the bench, curl my toes in the grass, and hear the birds’ joyful singing, the shakes and sweats would fade. I was managing. Even Dr. H said so.

  For early January, the air was unusually hot and muggy, but the grass by the foot of the oak tree was like cool silk. A lively concert from the wrens poured from overhead. The little birds were musical number 67s, singing light into the sun.

  It wasn’t like Billy to pressure me. We were friends. We went on long walks together. He told me things he didn’t tell anyone except his wife, Beth. At NASA, Billy was a trouble-shooter. He fixed snarls, bottlenecks, logjams, and complete impossibilities. Billy coaxed and conned, bargained and bartered, swapped and swindled, until he got what we needed.

  Something was nagging me about Billy. I forced it out of my mind and looked out over the park, watching dogs tug on their leashes and squirrels tease them. At 8:52, my watch alarm beeped. I shut it off and headed to Dr. Hudson’s. Everyone on the FarSpace project meets with a shrink, even the bigs.

  My regular appointment wasn’t for two weeks. But Dr. H’s secretary had called me the day before, asking if I could switch. She’d given me directions to the new office.

  I liked Dr. H. He had gentle green eyes that lit up when he saw you. Even when he challenged me, I knew that he understood me. “Grant,” he’d said last time, “you’re a problem solver. You’re open; you let the solution come.”

  That was how I felt about smoothing code. In the zone, solutions come.