by T I WADE
VIN thought the first breath of space station air was like breathing straight out of a scuba cylinder; the air had a sort of metal taste, but it was breathable. The temperature was colder outside than his warm suit, and slowly they got his top part off. The process wasn’t easy as both men were floating around the command module like two convulsing birds in flight Then VIN remembered the metal shoes. He told Jonesy to follow him and like two aircraft in formation, they swooped down the long hallway and through the end hatch. Jonesy tried to grab a shoe, but being weightless, the shoes didn’t move until he placed both his feet on the ground, and pulled them off the magnetic mother unit.
“Crap! These magnetic shoes nearly caused me to head butt the wall,” Jonesy stated. He put on a pair and so did VIN once the last of his outer suit was removed, and suddenly they could walk around the floor of the craft, also the walls of the craft, and even walk around the roof of the craft, just like flies.
The next morning, refreshed after his eight-hour drive the day before, and the usual early morning run, Ryan went into to Hangar Seven.
Astermine Two was being prepared for its first flight into space. The five computers on board were already live and were tracking DX2014 from daily inputs from the engineers. Astermine One, at the space station, was also already tracking asteroid DX2014; Jonesy and VIN would land on it in four months’ time.
Astermine Two was still waiting for her new more-powerful hydrogen rocket thrusters. Nobody considered the upgrade that important, as the calculations on the magnetic pull of DX2014, showed that the older thrusters could still get either fully loaded craft off the asteroid with 30 percent power to spare.
The space coordinates of DX2014 were being fed into all ship’s computer memories every twelve hours. The information came directly from Ryan’s friend, the guy who had found DX2014 in the first place over a decade ago. The tracking computers at the large space observatory 450 miles west of Austin, Texas, where he currently worked, were feeding the information over the Internet.
With the Observatory tracking over 18,000 pieces of rock in space, the small, slow-moving asteroid in the middle of nowhere wasn’t very important, and the automated reports sent to Ryan’s computers in Nevada weren’t noticed by anybody other than the man who had set up the information channel.
DX2014 was still more than a hundred million miles away and heading to the same general area of the solar system where earth would be in four months. The asteroid was traveling towards earth at a sedate 3,000 miles an hour faster than earth was moving through space.
The second shuttle in Hangar Six was being loaded with the mining equipment: two large brush sweepers, each five-foot tall and weighing in at 300 pounds. They had been soundly vacuum-wrapped in sterile plastic sheeting and were about to be placed into separate aluminum canisters to be loaded into the shuttle.
Ryan headed back to his office after seeing that everything was running smoothly and contemplated his next moves. His project was like a game of chess. He was trying to think a dozen moves ahead of anybody else who could become interested in his project in the near future.
Now, relaxed after his drive, he grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down to contemplate. He had twenty minutes before his next meeting. There was little he could do for the next few days. He was to travel over to Turkey with the C-5 Galaxy to pick up his Russian plutonium-238 in its leaded storage container; his current problem was to come up with a salient reason he could give the Air Force as to why he needed to fly their aircraft to Europe. The only things that came to mind so far were a possible promotional tour, an investment gathering trip to raise more capital for the project, or maybe even that he was negotiating agreements with private companies to take products, or scientific tests into space for them.
As he pondered the problem, his only conclusion was to use part of all three reasons. All he really wanted to achieve was to get his four-ton lead container, currently inside a six-foot wooden packing crate back to the USA in time for Ms. Sinclair to fly it into space. Once in space it was safe from anybody who would consider it dangerous, or wanted to get their hands on five pounds of pure, clean plutonium-238.
He was still deep in thought when the three C-5 pilots knocked on his door and entered his office.
Meanwhile, a hundred miles above Malaysia, his other two pilots were having a party. After losing track of Nevada time, they had slept too long, then both worked out on the stationary bike; and one had completed his first spacewalk, this time taking in the wonders of space.
After a weird but solid workout VIN donned his full spacesuit with the jet pack connected to the system on his back. All three docking ports were on the outer three walls of the command module. While VIN got comfy in the suit Jonesy entered the third unused docking port and secured a long thin cord to the inner wall of the docking port. Then he secured it with a D- ring to VIN’s suit connector. VIN was ready and he floated head first into the vertical tube. Jonesy sealed the hatch, and slowly reduced the pressure from the command module’s control center, and for the second time in his life, VIN opened the outer hatch, and floated into the vacuum of cold black nothing.
All five of the future space pilots had rehearsed this procedure a hundred times during the winter months, and this spacewalk was necessary to get to the canisters of supplies from the third and fourth cargo holds of Astermine One. The forward supply compartment could be entered from the craft’s docking port, but the third, fourth, and fifth cargo areas were not hatched, as the tanks of liquid gas were stored in the inner walls.
Slowly VIN allowed himself to glide out of the hatch. It was a tight fit with the jet pack, and he had to be careful that none of his equipment hit hard against the metal of the craft. A couple of feet from the craft, he took a few very frightened seconds to see the nothingness around him. “Wow!” he thought to himself. “This is even better than viewing a space movie at the IMAX theatre.”
His control monitor was showing everything was working correctly and the fresh American bottled air tasted better than the old stale air in the Russian “beer can” that tasted like metal. VIN secured his cord to the outer wall on his first return so that the port would close and operate with a canister inside.
Using the small jetpack thruster, and allowing the rope to play out, he gently aimed himself away from the third hatch, so that he could float over the corner of the station and to the next wall where Astermine One was connected.
Meanwhile, Jonesy was maneuvering through the open connection port to the spacecraft to open its small side cargo doors. VIN came over the roof to see the silhouettes of the two space craft as the sun appeared behind them; he wished he had a camera. As he approached Astermine One he watched as the two side doors of the third and fourth compartments opened. Jonesy was controlling them from the flight deck.
Ryan’s plans dictated that each flight into space would carry the maximum allowed cargo, and inside Astermine One’s rear cargo holds were ten canisters, seven empty for the mining expedition, and the three top canisters secured in a pyramid formation held supplies. Each silver canister was exactly sixty inches in length, twenty inches across, and small enough to get through any of the space hatches.
The nuclear battery had been permanently fitted inside one of these cylinders, its connections and dials interfaced into the cylinder.
Ryan had designed these canisters for several uses in space, with 10 empty canisters fitting in a pyramid form perfectly into each of the three rear compartment areas of the Astermine craft for the precious metal cargoes they were about to fetch from DX2014. Sixty canisters could fit inside the larger cargo areas of the shuttles.
VIN needed to transfer three canisters into the space station, the rest of the supplies were in the connecting supply compartment behind the spacecraft’s cockpit, and that was Jonesy’s job.
Over the next hour, VIN carefully unbuckled one canister at a time, connected it to a special clip on his suit, and returned to the docking port. There was no rush apart from h
is maximum-allowed three-hour spacewalk, and he often looked down at the earth, sometimes below his feet, sometimes above his head. There seemed to be a large storm in the middle of the Pacific, maybe a hurricane, he thought to himself. The best part was when the sun, hidden behind the earth, made its round edge look bright and glow like a halo around the face of an angel.
Just to make sure that they were hidden from any searching eyes, Jonesy switched the bay lights off each time VIN left the cargo area.
The last canister, showing a written weight of 130 pounds on a piece of hard plastic taped to its side, was placed inside the docking port. He decided that he needed a rest and, still having ten minutes before the port would become free, he let his 150-foot line play out to its full extent and just hung out there for waiting for Jonesy to get the cylinder out of the chamber, tie it down in the second sleep room, and then ready the hatch for his return.
“You going to hang out there all day, kid?” asked Jonesy as he saw his partner just floating out there enjoying the free ride. “You had better watch out, a great white space shark might glide in and think you are a meal.”
“Tell me another bedtime story, Mr. Jones. You couldn’t even scare little kids with that one. I could see the monster coming from several light years away.”
“Come on kid, hurry up. I will feel better once we are all sealed up tight like a can of tight, crappy sardines again.”
Vin carefully returned to the inner sanctuary of the their living quarters in space and, after taking the needed hour to get his complete suit off, he tried out the “shower” system aboard the beer can.
The water smelled horrible; a whole pint of it ran around an inner plastic suit, like a rain coat, except this time the water was kept inside, not out. The suit gave him one pint of water to bathe in, and one pint to rinse.
He read the instructions given to them in English and managed to exit the suit, which then enabled any wet remains to be sucked into the craft’s water cleansing system, and seal up the suit again. He felt about 5 percent cleaner than when he went in, and began to realize that living in space did have its downsides.
Being a positive thinking person, he dismissed the negative thoughts and thought about a grand dinner of vodka, orange juice, fish eggs, soup, and whatever he decided on from the American rations. After months of dirty, sweaty living conditions in Iraq, 5 percent cleaner was better than what he had been accustomed to in desert operations.
Jonesy closed the outer hatches to both outer craft for security after his flying partner floated in. He smiled at VIN’s feeble attempt to sing in the shower and imagined that the kid was having an interesting time in the space craft cleansing system.
Dinner was what he expected. There was no need to open the new U.S. supplies VIN brought across yet.
The bottle of vodka left out by his partner was beginning to defrost and he could see that it was about a quarter full. They made a small hole in one of the pouches of liquid orange juice, squirted the yellow bubbles of juice into the vodka bottle doing their best to mix the two liquids together, and aligned the openings of the two bottles. Then Jonesy, who thought himself best at this necessary space maneuver, allowed as close to 50 percent of the floating bubbles to pass from one bottle to the second and stopping the flow with a finger of each hand so VIN could cap both bottles.
He felt like a drug addict preparing his fix, but who cared? It wasn’t as if he was being watched up here.
An hour later Jonesy turned away as VIN opened a sealed pack of American crackers and, working close to his mouth so not to lose any black balls into the air, proceeded to noisily slurp down some of the tiny black eggs from a jar, and then throw a cracker in his mouth.
It sounded awful. Jonesy was sure it tasted awful, but the way VIN was slurping, sucking, and biting down on any escaping particles would have even impressed the Russian cosmonauts. Jonesy closed his eyes, quietly sucked on his floating Screw Driver and listened to Jimmy Buffett in between the vulgar sounds of VIN sucking down his dinner.
VIN thoroughly enjoyed himself; the caviar tasted just like fish. He nearly let several single balls escape but managed to catch them, and slurp them down an inch or two in front of Jonesy’s cringing face. His partner seemed to relax once he had consumed three jars of the eggs and a whole sleeve of crackers one by one; then he started on a self-heating pouch of scrambled eggs on toast in-between slugging down his Screw Driver.
Both men were intrigued by this totally new and interesting world. They didn’t realize it was five o’clock somewhere, actually in Perth Australia, and not in Nevada as Ryan was having a morning meeting with the inner group of scientists.
Two weeks later, in Nevada, the second spacecraft was ready and packed for the third flight into space four weeks from then. The second shuttle was still being readied for its deployment into space, and its cargo was due in from Turkey.
Jonesy and VIN had now spent two weeks in space. They were gaining a little bit of weight, even though they upgraded their fitness routines to four hours per day each. The magnetic shoes had come in handy and were used in ways their designers hadn’t planned. Both men would put a set of shoes on their gloved hands and with now four magnetic holders keeping them grounded, they could do push-ups and other exercises.
Much of their enjoyment came from devising new ways to exercise every muscle in their bodies. They had certain command module, shuttle and spacecraft monitoring requirements every eight hours, and if one was asleep the other would attend to noting the readouts on all craft, check quantities of all necessary supplies, turn their energy usage down from day-mode to sleep-mode, and make sure that the two large solar antennas on the outside wall of the communal room were perfectly aligned with the sun.
The International Space Station passed them once every three days, each time at a slightly higher orbit passing at least 300 miles from the Russian craft.
In their daily coded communications with earth they were told that the craft had dropped two feet closer to earth than when they arrived, currently losing altitude by one foot a week.
Life was pretty monotonous for the two men; the exact opposite was true in Nevada.
****
Ryan decided to tell the Air Force that he had a couple of potential investors that wanted to be part of the program, both from countries friendly with the USA, and they wanted to meet.
For the first time since he had opened the airfield for his project he allowed an Air Force jet to enter his air space and to land for a briefing on what he was up to. Ryan didn’t want the world to arrive on his doorstep and stated that one small jet only would be allowed to land.
Before the Air Force jet’s arrival, he had the C-5 towed outside its hangar onto the middle of the apron and left the massive hangar door open. Then he ordered the second shuttle, Silver Bullet II, to be wheeled out and its hangar door also left open. The rest would be out of bounds for the visiting VIPs with the other hangar doors closed.
The small Gulfstream came in from the south on time. It flew low overhead and the pilot set up for a landing from the west. Of the half dozen people he had invited, only three said they would be on the flight, a member of the Air Force, the CIA, and the NSA. There were actually four men after two Air Force airmen stepped out of the rear side door and stood at attention once the aircraft was towed into Hangar Three, out of the afternoon sun.
Ryan was there to welcome the VIPs with his head of security, and Bob Mathews in kakis as chief pilot.
“Welcome to my airfield, gentlemen,” Ryan greeted the men as he walked up to shake their hands.
“Mr. Richmond, General Allen Saunders, United States Air Force and base commander at Nellis. May I introduce General John Mortimer, Adjutant to the Chief of Staff in Washington, Tom Ward, Assistant Director, CIA, and Joe Bishop, head of the National Security Agency for the West Coast.
“Welcome!” replied Ryan introducing his men. “On my left is my Chief of Security; Major Parry, U.S. Marine Corp retired and, to my right,
Colonel Bob Mathews, USAF retired. I have put on a small buffet with a bar for you, after we have toured what we have outside. General Saunders, your Dead Chicken has lost no rivets and has no stress cracks, and we have really appreciated the use of her.”
“I remember you, Bob, Andrews, 87,” said General Saunders. “You were the test pilot on the first drone designs, testing them in flight before we flew the first unmanned drone to Dyess in Texas and back; 1988, I think. I watched you fly her on the simulator. You were Lieutenant Colonel back then, correct?”
“Correct, General, I believe you had just achieved Major when we met,” replied Bob.
“Well, you have an excellent pilot here, Mr. Richmond,” added General Saunders. The other three men spoke little.
They walked out into the sun and toured the C-5. There wasn’t much that Ryan had done to change the large aircraft, except show the men how his shuttle was loaded in the front and how it was released out the back.
I assume you are releasing at about 45,000 feet, Colonel?” asked General Saunders.
No, actually we are close to a 53,000-foot release using a 75 degree climb slope, General,” Bob replied.
“How is that possible?” asked General Mortimer, also in Air Force officer uniform. He stopped walking and looked inquisitively at Ryan, and then at General Saunders. General Saunders had never flown the aircraft and knew very little about her. Bob Mathews continued and explained her modifications to the group.
“Wow! 53,000 feet for a C-5! I must tell Boeing about that,” said General Saunders. “I honestly think nobody will believe me, but the way you worked it out, first going into a dive, hitting max speed, climbing at full throttle and then using her cargo as a weight to push her uphill. Is this one of your great ideas, Bob? Only you could come up with that idea.”