by Ben Bova
“Ted, you and Hi get the patch kit and find the breach. Given the rate we’re losing air, it’s not going to be small. And there might be more than one.”
Turning to Gozalez, “Virginia, get on the comm and make sure we can still call home. Double check the telemetry stream and see if the smart guys can tell us what the hell happened out here.
“Amanda, I need you to secure whatever’s not buttoned down and to note any and all damage you see while you’re doing it. Come back as soon as you can and give me a report.”
Clermont appeared at the hatch. “We found Mikhail. He was in the lav and whatever happened knocked him off his feet and he hit his head on the bulkhead. He was unconscious, but he’s coming around now. Taki is looking after him.”
“Thanks, Catherine,” said Benson. “Let me know more once Taki’s had a chance to check him out.”
With a wisp of a smile, Catherine added, “It was quite a struggle to pull up his pants.”
A few giggles. Benson grinned. They can still laugh. That’s good, he thought.
One by one the crew left the command center to check on damage and report back to Benson. Once alone, he turned to the status board to see what kind of shape the ship was in and what their chances of surviving the next few hours might be.
It didn’t look good. Benson knew already that something really bad had happened, but he didn’t fully appreciate the extent of the damage until he surveyed the panel lights in front of him. Scarcely a system warning light remained unlit.
Depressurization. He didn’t need the status board to tell him that. How fast are we losing air? How much time do we have before we’ll have to get into the EVA suits to survive? And how long can we live in the suits? Ten hours, twelve at best, he knew.
Water was leaking from the radiation shield that protected the habitat. Not an immediate life-threatening problem, but one that would have to be fixed. Quickly.
Backup communications antenna offline. Again, not an immediate problem, as long as the primary antenna was functioning.
Power generation down by forty-five percent. That means something’s damaged the solar panels, Benson realized. The ship needed those solar arrays to power the life-support systems, the lights, the food freezers and the ship’s heaters.
Spacecraft stabilization alert. Something was causing the ship to vibrate. He could feel it in his shoes, a slight shuddering, like a man trembling from the cold. Or from fear. If the display screen’s graph was accurate, the vibration was slowly increasing as the ship rotated to produce artificial gravity. Left unchecked, the vibrations were going to get worse, Benson figured.
That could put more stress on the main truss than it’s designed to handle. We could break apart! Have to deal with that as soon as we can.
With relief, he saw that the nuclear reactor and propulsion system were offline as they were supposed to be. No alerts showing radioactive leakage from the fission reactor. The status lights for the reactor and propulsion system were all green, except one. One of the hydrogen propellant tanks was showing yellow. Either the Integrated Vehicle Health Monitoring systems, IVHM, had detected a disturbance and was running a self-diagnostic, or there was a slow hydrogen leak, too small to warrant a full-blown warning, but enough of a concern to call for continued monitoring. Considering the immediate issues facing them, Benson decided that a yellow alert would just have to wait.
The ship jolted again, hard enough to slam Benson into the forward panel. He heard yelps and curses from down the passageway. As he steadied himself, his heart sank: the light on the propellant management monitor went from yellow to red. We’re leaking propellant. That’s bad.
“Bee, you’ve got to see this,” Connover shouted over the open intercom. “Hi and I found the source of the air leak and we’re trying to patch it, but that last bump knocked us around before we could get started.”
Connover sounded excited, but in a good, controlled way. To Benson, Ted sounded eager, almost happy to have something vital to do.
“We looked out the aft window at the solar arrays and the boom,” the astronaut went on, “or what’s left of it. The truss is broken in several places and unless we do something soon it’s not going to stay in one piece.”
There was no trace of fear in Connover’s voice. He’d found a problem, now the job was to solve it.
For a moment, Benson considered going down to the aft window to see the damage for himself. But only for a moment.
Instead he spoke into the intercom microphone, “Virginia, do you have mission control on the line? If so, patch me in. I need to talk to them ASAP about the boom.”
“Got ’em. Coming right up. You’re on.”
“Houston, we’ve had a major event here,” Benson said. “Probably a collision; I don’t see anything telling me there’s been an onboard explosion. I know you’re getting telemetry so please tell me if I’ve got it wrong.” Without waiting for a response he went on, “Whatever hit us damaged the truss connecting the hab module to the rest of the ship. It may be about to snap. If that happens we’ll go flying off in one direction while the rest of the ship, including the propulsion system, goes off in another. I think we need to stop the rotation to take the stress off the truss and buy us some time so we can go EVA and see about reinforcing the damaged section. What do you think?”
One thousand . . . two thousand . . . three thousand . . . four thousand . . . The interminable time delay irked Benson terribly.
“Arrow, we copy.” Benson didn’t recognize the voice. One of the techs who manned the comm board on what was supposed to have been another boringly routine day. “We’re pulling in every support team in the place. They’re looking at the telemetry. I’ll hand your message to the structures team ASAP and get you an answer. Might take a few minutes, though.”
“Houston, we don’t have a few minutes. I need to know now whether despinning us or keeping the spin as is will be the least stress on the boom. Right now we still have spin and artificial gravity, but we’re wobbling all over the place.”
One thousand . . . two thousand . . . three thousand . . . four thousand . . .
A different, deeper and more authoritative voice answered, “Commander Benson, we can’t have a definitive answer for you until we’ve taken the telemetry and run it through the simulations, maybe even building some new finite element models of the damaged boom. Can you take some pictures of it so we can see where it’s broken?”
The ship quivered again. The emergency lights flickered and almost went out.
“Houston, we don’t have time for models and simulations! I need someone there, someone with the goddamned experience to tell me what their intuition says and I need it now!”
One thousand . . . two thousand . . . three thousand . . . four thousand . . .
“We hear you, sir, but we don’t have that person in the center right now. It’s going to take some time.”
“We can’t wait. I’m going to tell Ted to slow our rotation rate and see if we can’t some stress off the truss.”
One thousand . . . two thousand . . . three thousand . . . four thousand . . .
“That’s your call, Commander. You’re there and we aren’t. Do you know you’ve got a propellant leak?”
“I’ll worry about that later. Virginia, keep them on the line.”
“Will do, Bee.”
July 21, 2035
Earth Departure Plus 98 Days
17:38 Universal Time
Johnson Space Center
Nathan Brice was having an early lunch in JSC’s spacious cafeteria, enjoying a quiet few moments alone, away from the bustle and tension of the control center. Even on a routine, quiet day there were always people clamoring for his attention, decisions to make, emotions to deal with. He was fastidiously tucking his napkin into his shirt collar when a breathless technician from the mission control center raced up to his table.
“They’ve been hit by something!” the young man blurted.
Brice shot to his fee
t. “Arrow?”
“Yessir. Prob’ly a meteoroid.”
Rushing toward the exit, napkin fluttering under his chin, Brice asked, “How bad’s the damage?”
“It looks pretty bad. Don’t know the full extent yet.”
His open jacket flapping as he ran for his car, Brice called to the youngster, “Get everybody you can find! Roust them all, wherever they are! The whole team.”
“I will!”
The car was like an oven after just half an hour in the Texas sun. Brice revved the engine and punched the air conditioner on full blast, then peeled out of the parking lot and headed for the mission control building.
His mind raced. What could possibly hit them way out there? It had to be a meteor. Of all the mother-loving, good-for-nothing, goddamned shit-faced things that can happen, out in the middle of nowhere, they’ve hit something.
Raising his eyes to heaven as he hunched over the steering wheel, Brice muttered, “Thanks again, God. First you nearly let the propellant mission go bad, then you killed Connover’s family. What’s next, a plague?”
By the time he swept into the mission control center, Brice had vented his rage and seemed to the harried engineers and technicians to be cool and very much in command. Each of the lead engineers huddled around him as he slid into the chair of his console. In three minutes he had a good picture of what had happened to the Arrow.
“Get Benson on screen for me,” he said into the Bluetooth as he clipped it over his ear.
It took a few seconds, but at last Bee’s image took shape on his console’s center screen. Even through the clear plastic air mask that Benson was wearing he looked drawn, hard-eyed, his lips pressed into a thin line.
“What’s your status, Bee?” asked Brice.
Then he waited for the reply.
At last Benson snapped, “That’s what we’d like to know.”
“Status?” he repeated calmly.
Again the wait.
Then, “Air leaking. Propellant leaking. Our main problem is that the truss is damaged and our spinning is putting too much stress on it. It could snap.”
“Despin,” said Brice immediately. No simulations, no model analyses. Just the one word.
When Benson replied, his lips had curved slightly into a tight little smile.
“Thanks, Nate. That’s what I thought we should do.”
“Good. Take it all the way down to zero. You’ll have to put up with microgravity until we get the situation analyzed and come up with a fix.”
This time Benson’s smile was broader. “Right. By the way, do you know you’ve got a napkin stuck under your chin?”
Senator William Donaldson was lunching in the Senate dining room on she-crab soup. To his Massachusetts constituents he professed a preference for New England style clam chowder. But this Carolina dish was his real favorite.
Sitting across the table from him was Professor Oliver Jansen, chief of MIT’s robotics laboratory.
“We could design robots to do anything those astronauts can do,” Professor Jansen was saying, rather sullenly, Donaldson thought. Jansen was a round-faced man with longish dark hair and the largest hands Donaldson had ever seen.
“Do you mean on the space station or on the Moon?” asked the senator, between spoonfuls.
“Either one. And that includes the people heading for Mars, as well. Robots could do whatever they can do, and at a fraction of the cost.”
“You actually have robots that can do whatever a human being can do?”
The professor blinked. Once. Twice. “We’ll have them, once we get the funding we need for development.”
Donaldson eyed the professor warily. “And how much would it cost to develop such robots?”
Jansen waved one of his large hands. “Less than a billion.”
Which would go to MIT, Donaldson thought. Quite a feather in my cap, steering a billion-dollar program to my state.
His press secretary appeared at the dining room’s entry, brushed past the venerable maitre d’ and hurried to Donaldson’s table.
The senator saw him approaching. He looks excited, Donaldson thought. Then he wondered idly why they were still called “press secretaries.” The news media had moved into the digital age with alacrity. Newspapers were anachronisms now.
The young aide leaned over Donaldson’s shoulder and announced, “Senator, there’s apparently been an accident on the Mars ship!”
“What do you mean, apparently?”
Still standing, the press secretary explained, “I have a friend who works in mission control, in Houston. She phoned me just a few minutes ago. Very hush-hush, but they’ve run into trouble up there.”
Senator Donaldson digested the news in a heartbeat. “Get to NASA’s public-relations chief for confirmation. Find out how serious the problem is.”
“Right,” said the aide. And he dashed off, past the maitre d’, who frowned disapprovingly at the disturbance in his restaurant’s normally placid atmosphere.
Professor Jansen was frowning too. “They could all get killed, couldn’t they?”
“It’s a possibility,” Donaldson allowed. “They’re a long way from home, a long way from help.”
Shaking his head, the professor said, “If we’d sent robots we wouldn’t have to worry about it.”
Donaldson nodded agreement. But in his mind he was already shaping the speech he would make on the Senate floor, calling for an end to all human space flight, and end to risking the lives of our best and brightest young men and women.
July 21, 2035
Earth Departure Plus 98 Days
17:44 Hours Universal Time
The Arrow
Benson headed down the passageway from the command center toward the aft window where Connover and McPherson were feverishly working to patch a thumb-sized hole in the ship’s skin. Fortunately, the ship’s computer had detected the leak and already stopped trying to replenish the module with air from the reserve tanks, preventing the waste of precious air while the repairs were underway.
The goal now was to stop the leaks before air pressure got so low in the module that they’d have to don their EVA suits.
Benson nodded to the two men as he peered out the window at the barely illuminated aft section of the ship and the truss connecting them to it. The sunlight cast long shadows, making it difficult to distinguish the individual beams that made up the truss. But just below the solar panels Benson could see that several segments were gone and others were bent at least twenty degrees off their proper alignment.
That’s why we’re wobbling, he realized at once. Unless we do something soon the other segments of the truss are going to break and we’ll be lost.
Nomura’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Bee, this is Taki,” she called over the intercom. “We’re at risk of hypoxia from the decreasing pressure. We need to be on the lookout for the symptoms: light-headedness, confusion, fingers and toes tingling. If that starts to happen, I need to know about it.”
“Did everybody copy that?” Benson said. “We’ve trained for this, but our bodies don’t always know it. Keep aware of how you feel and let Taki know if you think you’re starting to feel any of those symptoms.”
Without listening to the crew’s responses, Benson turned to Connover. “Ted, I need you to kill the ship’s rotation. Get up front and get on it. Now. You’ll need to slow us down gradually, don’t make it a sudden stop. I’m not sure how much longer we’ll stay together if we keep spinning. I’ll help Hi finish the patching while you get to it.”
“On my way,” Connover handed the patch kit to Benson and started forward.
The ship shuddered again. Benson looked up and through the window he saw one of three remaining unbroken segments of truss snap, sending small pieces of debris sailing outward and away from the ship. The sunlight glinted from the debris as the pieces spun away, quickly becoming lost in the starry abyss of deep space.
That’s what’s going to happen to us, Benson thought, if I�
�ve made the wrong call. If the stress produced by firing the cold gas thrusters to stop the spin snaps the last two of the truss’ segments, we’re cooked.
He shook his head. This isn’t the time for second-guessing. He glanced over at McPherson, who was busily slapping patches on the holes in the skin and sealing them with epoxy.
“Bee, I’ve got this just about finished.” McPherson said. “If you need to be somewhere else, go to it.”
“Right. Thanks.” Benson handed McPherson the patch kit he was carrying and headed for the privacy cubicles, where Prokhorov was recovering from his head injury. Before tackling the next shipboard crisis, he told himself, I ought to look after the health of the crew—at least briefly.
Prokhorov was zippered into his sleep bag, his heavy-lidded eyes half open. His forehead looked as if he’d been hit with a crowbar, red and swollen, with an inflamed brownish spot forming just above his eyebrow. Taki Nomura was crouched over him, gently laying a wet compress across the injury.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Nomura said, looking up at Benson.
“Glad to hear it,” he said. “You’d better give the medics back at mission control a report on his status as soon as you can leave his side.”
“I’m all right,” Prokhorov muttered thickly. “Just a little dizzy, that’s all.”
“You get some sleep now,” Taki told the Russian. “You’ll be fine.”
Benson went with her as she headed along the passageway toward the infirmary. “I gave him a dose of painkillers. He’ll sleep for several hours. When he wakes up, he’ll have a lump on his head, but nothing worse.”
“You x-rayed him?”
“Not yet. When he wakes up. I don’t expect an x-ray of his head to show anything.”
Benson almost laughed. “You mean his head’s empty?”
“No,” Taki replied, with a perfectly straight face. “Actually, it appears to be completely solid.”
The ship shuddered again. Taki lurched into Benson, who reflexively wrapped his arms around her stubby form.