Orbit

by John J. Nance

  “Sir, it apparently passed through the equipment bay of their ship, and God knows what damage it did, but knocking out virtually all their communications and their propulsion, control, and, eventually, even life support would not be an outlandish expectation.”

  “Jesus!”

  “Geoff, John Kent in Houston.” The voice of NASA’s chief astronaut, a former Air Force colonel, is not a welcome intrusion.

  “Yeah, John.”

  “We have Atlantis in the vehicle assembly building at the Cape and I can work up an emergency mission plan within an hour if you’d like.”

  “Why, John?”

  Silence fills the room and the circuits, a silence Geoff knows Colonel Kent will be unable to keep.

  “If someone’s alive up there, we can’t just sit on our hands, can we?”

  Geoff gets to his feet, his well-honed ability to put subordinates in their place virtually second nature.

  “Thanks, everyone,” he says on the way out of the room, answering the question by default. He knows the effect on his staff, and he should thank Kent for the opportunity to once again demonstrate how an iron-ass leader wields his power. Those who press beyond the limits of what Geoff Shear wants to hear will be ignored and embarrassed.

  Besides, he thinks darkly, Kent knows damn well what the policy is on rescuing privateers in space.

  Chapter 7

  ABOARD INTREPID, MAY 17, 9:16 A.M. PACIFIC

  So Sharon was right after all.

  Kip thinks of little else. The hope that he might somehow remember how to blast himself back out of orbit and find a way to land seems beyond overwhelming. He looks at the pile of checklists in his lap, having read over several trying to get a mental image of the long litany of technical duties that he’ll have to perform at the right moment in the right way to direct the rocket motor in precisely the right direction to lose all that speed they gained.

  He sighs, shaking his head at the image of himself getting tangled up in what switch to hit next. Even if, somehow, he gets it all right and everything works, he’ll then pop out in the lower troposphere and have an on-the-job learning experience trying to dead-stick an engineless spacecraft down to a runway somewhere without colliding with something hard and unforgiving.

  No, Sharon is going to be right, he decides. But there is still the slightest glimmer in his mind that he could escape. A shred of hope, like believing your football team can somehow use the last five seconds of the game to Hail Mary their way through ninety yards of determined defenders to the winning touchdown.

  Possible, yes. Probable, no.

  Okay, most likely I’m going to die.

  And the hell of it is, he can’t even call Sharon to apologize.

  He looks at his watch, then at the Earthscape passing below. He’s in darkness now somewhere over the Pacific, wondering why he has to wait for three more orbits before trying to leave. Maybe he should plan to try the retrofire sequence at the end of the second orbit, instead of waiting for the third? Or would that bring him down in the wrong place? To fire it right now, for instance, would probably mean a very wet and fatal landing a thousand miles east of Hawaii.

  Wait a minute, dammit! he thinks, responding to a small wave of anger that punches at him, causing him to clench his jaw in self disgust. What am I doing? Giving up without a fight?

  This defeatist attitude, he’s grappled with it before. The “Eeyore Syndrome,” he’s labeled it, a determination to find the worst in every situation. Hasn’t he warned the girls against it? Jerrod, too, until Jerrod literally rolled his eyes at him one day.

  And here I sit programming myself to fail and die. Bullshit!

  He takes a deep, if ragged, breath and forces himself to sit up, to comply with this newfound determination, but not really believing it. His mouth is cotton dry and he reaches for the water bottle by his seat, drinks deeply, then recaps it and slips it back in one of Bill Campbell’s seat pockets.

  Okay, so what do we do first?

  He pulls the checklists back to his lap, ignoring his shaking hands, and starts through the lists of steps again, determined this time to figure out and practice exactly what needs to be done.

  I’ve got five hours before planned reentry. That’s an eternity. So what if it’s hard? I have to try.

  The reward is survival. Possible survival.

  After all, he reasons, they wouldn’t have taught this stuff in ground school back in Mojave if they didn’t think a passenger could handle it. So all the keys have to be right here!

  The first sequence will be to turn the ship around, pointing the engine nozzles in the direction he’s traveling. There may be an automatic system to do just that, he figures, since it’s referenced in the verbiage of the checklist. But then how to initiate the maneuver on the panel? He imagines he may also have to use the control stick, the fighter-pilot-style, video-game type hand-control mounted on the right edge of the armrest.

  Once more there’s a low whooshing noise in his ear, and he realizes he’s been hearing it periodically. Whenever it happens, he feels Intrepid move slightly.

  The reaction jets!

  That’s what it has to be. And there has to be an automatic system making them fire, keeping the ship pointed straight ahead. It’s floating in a three-axis, three-dimensional environment, with yaw, pitch, and roll. Without air outside to operate against flight controls, the only way to move the ship around those three axes is firing tiny jets of whatever propellant Intrepid uses. He remembers the briefing clearly.

  But there’s only so much propellant aboard, and he’ll need to make sure he doesn’t use too much. Without those little jets, there will be no way to position the ship for reentry or even slow down.

  He stares harder at the forward panel, determined to find the appropriate switches and learn how to use them, and slowly, very slowly, some of the nomenclature begins to make sense. Just not enough.

  ASA MISSION CONTROL, MOJAVE, CALIFORNIA, 9:25 A.M. PACIFIC

  Richard DiFazio has never walked into Mission Control in a real crisis, simply because there’s never been a real crisis. A few scary moments, yes, but nothing like this.

  Careful not to usurp the flight director’s authority or give any of his gravely worried crew even more worry, DiFazio stays by Arleigh Kerr’s side and merely nods an affirmation when any of the other technicians look his way.

  The briefing has been chilling, and the time in transit from his home in Lancaster has provided no relief, no indication that it’s all a false alarm. Bill Campbell’s fate, Kip Dawson’s, and the fate of the entire operation is anything but assured, and he can just imagine NASA’s Geoff Shear monitoring this same information—and even doling it out to ASA.

  He knows Shear all too well and loathes him. A Machiavellian, master bureaucrat.

  “Are they helping?” he asks Arleigh regarding NASA’s role.

  “So far, whatever we’ve asked for, they’ve provided.”

  “What are our options, Arleigh?”

  The question seems to stun the flight director into silence. DiFazio watches his face turn pasty, sees him swallow hard and struggle to find the appropriate answer.

  “Well, sir…”

  “Too soon to ask?”

  This question is a welcome rescue and Arleigh nods energetically. “Yes. Too soon. We need to exhaust all other explanations first.”

  “Is Venture unusable? Could we get her ready to go up?” DiFazio asks, referring to the only other spacecraft ASA has, the ship now sitting with a damaged landing gear in one of the hangars.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “If I have to send it up in less than perfect shape to get them back, I’ll do it. It’s guaranteed that no one else is going to help us.”

  More engineers are gathering in front of Arleigh now, and DiFazio pats him on the shoulder, announces that he’ll be in his office, and steps away, rather than stand like a rock in the river, disrupting the flow of their urgent consultations.

  The news
coming into the control room is no better, the info from NASA and NORAD confirming that something was seen streaking in and apparently striking the spacecraft just as communications were lost.

  “In twenty minutes,” Arleigh decides, “I want us all in the conference room with any and all ideas about what we should do and how we should proceed. Any ideas. Okay?”

  He turns them back to their consoles and resumes his position, the iron-jawed leader standing at the helm in hurricane force winds, undaunted by the ferocity of the storm.

  But inside he’s dying.

  JOHNSON SPACEFLIGHT CENTER, HOUSTON, TEXAS,

  9:40 A.M. PACIFIC/11:40 A.M. CENTRAL

  Plaques, models, and framed memorials to a full if frustrating career surround John Kent. He sits at his desk and rubs his closed eyes, wondering what else he can say to the wife of his longtime buddy Bill Campbell.

  “Katie, it is entirely possible that Bill’s okay and working hard to get them down, and just hasn’t been able to cure the communications blackout.”

  “I know,” is the barely controlled response from the Campbell home somewhere near Lancaster, California. “I’ve always known the risks.”

  “Look…I’ve got all our people monitoring everything, and I’m…do not repeat this, okay?…but I’m working on a rescue plan if, for some reason, we need to go up there and bring them back.”

  The silence is long and telling. Katie Campbell knows well her husband’s heartburn over NASA’s official position regarding private spaceflight. And she knows John Kent doesn’t run NASA.

  “Thanks, John.”

  “I’ll call you with any news. Immediately. But you hang in there and have faith.”

  The call ends and he sits back, his mind spinning with possibilities, his personality geared to analysis, action, and cure. The course seems clear: Prepare for the worst case, regardless of Shear’s rancid attitude.

  He lunges from his chair, swinging open his office door and sticking his head into the outer office where a half dozen other astronauts and engineers are waiting.

  “Everybody come on in here. None of this leaves this room, but we’ve got to plan a rescue, just in case.”

  Chapter 8

  ABOARD INTREPID, May 17, 9:56 A.M. PACIFIC

  There is a magnificent planet to admire just outside his window, and Kip forces himself to look up and take quick note of it. He remembers standing beneath the star field last night at the side of that desert road, wishing he was up here. Now he wishes he was back on that deserted road looking up.

  But whatever happens, he made it to space, and the incredible beauty of it somehow blunts the lethality of his situation.

  In other words, he thinks, it is worth it, whatever happens.

  But the thought is short-lived, and he feels fear returning like a thief to steal his resolve.

  He brings his eyes back to the checklist, hopeful he has his jitters sufficiently under control to begin a run-through of the procedure for automatic retrofire. The prospect of having to fly Intrepid manually if the automatic system flubs up terrifies him.

  The autoflight panel is called something else, but it serves the same purpose, since Intrepid is programmed to fly automatically. The ship was set to keep its length parallel to the planet below, the nose in the direction of flight, and rolled over on its back so that the Earth is actually the ceiling, the “up” in the up/down equation. He’s verified the blinking lights and read the messages on the computer screen to make sure it’s all working as advertised, and he’s heard and felt the little reaction jets firing to keep Intrepid from turning or yawing around.

  According to the checklists, just prior to firing the engine to slow down, the astronaut is supposed to feed the computer a new set of coordinates, three numbers which Kip has already found and written down. When those numbers are safely locked in the tiny silicon brain, the machine will automatically fire the reaction jets in just the right sequence to turn their tail end around almost a hundred and eighty degrees and get the ship in the correct position to fire the engine backward.

  Kip looks at his watch. Thirty minutes to the turnaround maneuver, which he’s decided to do about halfway through the second orbit. If Intrepid was programmed to turn itself automatically on the fourth orbit, he wouldn’t be messing with it. But—provided he’s read everything correctly—the commands have to be manually typed in or the ship will never turn around. And only if the rocket motor is firing almost precisely against the direction of flight will they be able to slow down and essentially drop out of the sky.

  He feels momentarily frozen. Part of him wants to stay for the full four orbits, but another part clamors to know whether or not he’s going to survive this. He feels a turf battle in his brain between those competing desires.

  Maybe we should do it now, he thinks. After all, the automatic system can hold us in that backward position for a half hour as easily as it can keep us flying forward.

  He thinks about the fact that he keeps using the pronouns “us” and “we” in every thought of what he should do and what’s happening. Bill is dead. No other living being is aboard, yet he can’t bring himself to shift to “I” and “me.”

  Not yet.

  His hand hovers over the small keyboard and he pulls back, deciding to be disciplined enough to wait for the right moment. Twenty-nine more minutes. Right before the sun sets behind him, which means he’ll be able to see it this time. Sunrise has been in his face, and it was incredible. But he can do twenty-nine minutes.

  He takes a deep breath, the first time in perhaps the past hour. At first there were short, panting, almost hyperventilating breaths, sheer panic. Then his reluctance to breathe deeply lest floating debris from the projectile’s passage get in his lungs. But while some tiny things may still hang in the weightless environment, the air is mostly clean, and he supposes the air filters are responsible.

  But the air does taste a bit stale and processed. He thinks about the class ASA gave on the oxygen system and how the ingenious little devices behind him scrub the air of carbon dioxide, adding small amounts of oxygen as necessary to maintain the right balance, recirculating it all with the correct amount of water vapor and at the correct temperature. And he remembers someone saying the system can keep five people going for thirty hours before the CO2 scrubbers fail. With one person, he guesses, that means much longer. Still, the sooner he gets the hell out of this hostile environment, the better.

  He wonders if ASA will give him a second free flight to make up for this one. Sort of an overbooking penalty type of thing. Give you the damaged flight and provide a new round trip as an apology? The thought triggers his first small chuckle in many minutes. He’ll have to think about how to phrase the question so they can’t resist saying yes. After all, if he’s to be the poster boy…

  The image of Diana Ross at the door of his suite swims through his mind, pleasing and somewhat startling. What was it, eleven hours ago? He supposes he should be thinking of Sharon, but however suppressed it is, the realization that the marriage is over is percolating, and Diana is a great stand-in for other possibilities.

  When things were going so well, the poster boy idea was great. Of course, now he’ll be the very symbol and face of disaster, whatever happens, and surely of no value to her efforts. That thought adds fuel to his bonfire of anxieties.

  Another deep breath and he feels himself calming somewhat, glancing again at the Earthscape passing above, and surveying his surroundings. He thinks about taking a minute or two to meditate, but he doesn’t know how. Sitting quietly with a stiff scotch is as close as he’s ever come, though he’s always wanted to know more about achieving inner peace.

  He looks down, amused at the phrase and the idea. Astronauts in flight suits don’t have time for such things though, do they? Bill Campbell had repeated the advice of a favorite Air Force flight instructor: If a pilot has time to relax, he’s forgetting something. The same mental urgency feels like it’s transferring to him—or maybe it’s just the
flight suit.

  The spiffy royal blue flight suits with the large, colorful mission patches were provided to each of them on the first day of class, two apiece. He kept this one pristine for the flight while wearing the other to class, but clothes really do make the man. He feels like an astronaut, from walking through the classroom door in that zipper-festooned coverall with a pen in the left shoulder pocket even to sitting here now. The only thing missing, he supposes, is some sort of military flight cap.

  His left ear itches and he reaches up, surprised to encounter the earpiece from his headset, still inserted in his ear. He takes the whole apparatus off and scratches his ear liberally. That’s what’s been missing, he thinks. Other than Bill’s companionship and guidance and just human presence, all the way up he had a host of other voices in his ear, and now they’re gone, and it feels, well, lonely.

  All that beauty just outside the canopy bubble and side windows and who can he tell? Not that most humans on earth haven’t seen hundreds of spectacular pictures from space and Earth orbit, but this is what his eyes are seeing, and it feels barren. A reporter without a paper. A TV correspondent without a mike.

  He wishes he could show Jerrod what he’s seeing, or at least describe it. Even Carly and Carrie, their little blond heads bouncing with smiles and giggles, would love his word pictures, as would Julie—even with her eye-rolling teenage sophistication.

  Provided Sharon hadn’t preconditioned them to reject anything he described. Funny, he thinks, running back to them excitedly with some new experience, even as a salesman, was always a joy. It’s as if his delight in pretty sunsets, a fun movie, a wild thunderstorm glimpsed across a purple desert, none of it became enjoyable until he could make it come alive for them. He was the camera for his family, the collector of vicarious joys.

  And he realizes with a start that he really doesn’t know how to just drink it in for himself, and that feels sad. Especially now, when “himself” is all he has.

  I should take some notes on this, Kip thinks, wondering why they never discussed a notepad. There are a few sheets of note paper in the side pocket of his flight suit by his ankle, but he’d really like a full notebook. Big, thick, empty, ready for the pen or pencil, limitless in the scope of the wonders he could record. He always loved the late August trip to the drugstore to buy those school supplies, even through college.