The Glass Lady

by Douglas Savage

  “One of us is, Jack.”

  Enright cartwheeled in the air until his boots against the floor stopped his flip.

  “Show off,” the taller pilot laughed.

  “Was nothing really,” Enright smiled, feeling his new wings.

  As Endeavor, Soyuz and LACE coasted over the nighttime terrain of southern Africa, the two shuttle pilots floated below deck. Enright reached into one of the many equipment lockers covering the forward bulkhead from floor to ceiling. He retrieved two lightweight headsets. These were wireless communications carrier assemblies, CCA’s, which enable intercom and air-to-ground communications without the necessity of plugging into cabin jacks.

  Each flier placed his headset upon his bare head. In the mid-deck, they could remove their sweaty helmets since there were none of the flightdeck’s ten windows vulnerable to laser emissions. In Endeavor’s mid-deck, the only winrdow is the circular, 11½ inch wide, triple-pane window in the side entry-exit hatch. With each of the inside and center panes 1/2-inch thick, and with the outside pane 3/10-inch thick, and with the mirrored, reflective sunshade still in place on the inside porthole, the hatch window was secure from LACE.

  “Howdy, pard,” the AC said, testing his headset.

  “Gotcha, Will. You hear us, Flight?” Enright called, pressing his wireless unit’s Push-To-Talk switch dangling at his chest.

  “Five by five, Endeavor,” the two headset earphones crackled. “With you another one and a half minutes.”

  Shuttle led Soyuz and LACE across Mozambique’s eastern coastline for the black open ocean.

  The AC slowly somersaulted until he was doing a handstand in the center of the mid-deck. He pulled up a hand-crank seated in the floor which opened a small door in the floor. The open bay in the floor houses a rack for holding beer-can size canisters. The small cans hold lithium hydroxide pellets through which stale cabin air is circulated. The pellets remove carbon dioxide from the air exhaled by the crewmen. Activated charcoal, finer than talcum powder, in the same cans removes odors from the cabin air.

  The upside-down airman took the mission’s first two canisters from Enright standing rightside-up. The AC inserted the twin CO2 absorbers into the floor bin’s empty rack. After seating the canisters, Parker pushed the bay closed and returned its latch handle into the small well in the floor.

  “CO2 absorbers inserted, Flight,” Enright radioed as Parker tumbled rightside-up. The two fresh cans would be good for twelve hours. They would keep the cabin air’s concentration of waste carbon dioxide from exceeding 0.147 pounds per square inch partial pressure.

  “LOS Botswana momentarily, Endeavor. At 03 plus 48. See you in twelve minutes. This is . . .”

  Static followed by silence filled the CCA headsets as Africa fell quickly below the western horizon behind Shuttle.

  “How about a burger, Jack?” the AC offered.

  “Think my stomach is still a rev behind the rest of me. Maybe some soup.”

  “Pull up a stool, Number One. I’ll build a fire.”

  Enright smiled rather listlessly. He floated across the compartment to the space between the biffy stall and the man-size, wall-mounted galley. Between the latrine door and the galley unit is the side hatch. Enright wedged his space-suited body into the corner cranny by the latrine. His back rested against the stall door and his boots touched the shaving mirror on the side of the galley facility. As he rested, his weightless arms within his deflated pressure suit floated out in front of his body. Enright’s orange arms looked like those of a sleepwalker. He rested as the mission commander hovered before the narrow galley which is secured to the mid-deck’s portside wall.

  The galley contains an oven, which in 90 minutes can cook pre-packaged hot meals for seven crew members. Parker pulled two plastic envelopes of freeze-dried soup from the forward bulkhead’s lockers. From the galley, the AC pulled out a thin hose and nozzle which squirted hot water into each plastic bag.

  The command pilot sent a soup bag floating over to Enright wedged into his corner.

  As the two pilots kneaded their soup bags to moisten the dried contents, Endeavor coasted in the night sky above the South Atlantic’s Isle Amsterdam at Shuttle’s southernmost point of her orbital track, 38 degrees south latitude, about 3565 statute miles from the South Pole. Upstairs on the flightdeck, the mission clocks ticked past the fourth hour of the voyage.

  “Endeavor, Endeavor,” each headset crackled. “Colorado with you by Yarradee at 04 hours.”

  “Gotcha, Australia,” the AC called through a mouthful of soup, which he sucked from a straw.

  Parker floated motionless four feet off the floor. He levitated in mid-air like a magician’s assistant with his helmetless head touching the side of the airlock at the center of the mid-deck’s rear bulkhead.

  “How’s things in the basement, Will?”

  Flat on his back in the air, the AC squeezed the last of his beefy soup into his mouth.

  “Real cozy, Colorado. Just finishin’ some soup. How’s things in the mountains?”

  “Looking good, AC. We’re waiting for radar lock-up on whatever your Angola traffic may be. Nothing yet, but we’re listening. After your break, we would like you to charge the PLSS packs.”

  “Roger,” the AC called as he shoved his body toward the floor by pushing his ungloved hand against the mid-deck ceiling. Enright watched from his corner.

  Hovering upside down, the long AC hung like a bat with his face close to the floor. The Colonel’s burly left hand held a handhold at the base of the airlock.

  The cylinder-shaped airlock takes up a full third of the back wall of the mid-deck. Standing 83 inches high, the airlock is 63 inches wide on the inside. At the floor end of the airlock is a D-shaped hatch three feet across.

  Grasping the handrail near the floor with one hand, Parker cranked the airlock hatch handle with his free hand. The hatch snapped open with a pop as the hatch seal released excess air pressure and swung open on its side hinges. Parker eased his inverted, floating body out of the way as the thick hatch opened outward into the mid-deck cabin.

  Feet first, the AC floated into the airlock hatch. Still upside down inside, he inserted his boots into the foot restraints on the airlock ceiling.

  “AC’s in the airlock, Flight,” Enright reported by his wireless headset.

  “Copy, Jack. With you another three minutes.”

  The dark airlock illuminated with harsh, white lights as the AC flipped a row of toggle switches located at his up-side-down eye-level by the open hatch.

  In the five-foot-wide can, the tall command pilot easily somersaulted to put his head at the module’s round ceiling. Only his boots were visible to Enright, who had floated to the open hatchway. The copilot floated on his side with his boots toward the mid-deck’s access hatch on the portside wall.

  Inside the airlock, the AC inspected the hoses, which ran from the airlock wall into two Portable Life-Support Systems, PLSS, backpacks which hung suspended upon the airlock’s walls. Attached to each backpack was the top half of a thick white space suit.

  “SCU’s both secure, Jack.”

  “You copy that, Flight?”

  “We heard him, Jack. Service and Cooling Umbilicals secure.”

  “I hear you from the can, Colorado,” the AC radioed from the wide airlock.

  The SCU lines charge the breathing oxygen and coolant water tanks within each PLSS backpack, which is permanently built into the upper torso of Shuttle’s space suit for going outside in orbit. Two such upper torsos hung on the airlock’s inside walls. Each helmetless upper torso and attached PLSS pack was half of Shuttle’s extra-vehicular mobility unit, or EMU.

  Slowly somersaulting, the Colonel returned headsdown to the control panel by the open hatch of the airlock. The AC worked the controls which sent a flow of Shuttle oxygen and coolant water into the two PLSS backpacks.

  “Fillin’ them up, Jack.”

  “ ’Kay, Will,” the floating copilot called into the open hatchway.
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  “One more minute with you, Endeavor.”

  “Uh huh, Colorado,” Enright called.

  “Backroom confirms a contact with your Angola sighting, Endeavor. NESS got an image of it through GOES-5. No doubt it was a missile, Endeavor.”

  From 22,300 miles high, the Hughes Aircraft Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Earth Satellite Service had blinked its glass eye at the right moment. In synchronous orbit, the satellite sits stationary in the sky as the Earth turns beneath it at precisely the same speed as the satellite’s velocity across the sky.

  “We hear you, Flight,” Enright replied. “Understand a hot target alright.”

  “Losing you here, Jack, at 04 hours and 08 minutes. Sunup in 4 minutes. Begin Rev Four at 04 plus 20 plus 04. Next network contact by Hawaii in 18 minutes . . .”

  The ground’s voice from sleeping Australia trailed off as Endeavor led LACE and Soyuz across the arid Great Sandy Desert in the Western Territories of north-central Australia. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on the continent’s eastern coastline of the Coral Sea lay 1,000 nautical miles and 3 flying minutes away. From Australia’s coast, Shuttle would cross open water for 26 minutes and 7,800 nautical miles en route to California. Endeavor crossed a new time zone every 3 minutes and 45 seconds. But there was utterly no sense of motion within Endeavor’s cozy climate of dry air smelling faintly of rubberized air ducts and sweat.

  “Time to suit up,” Enright called to Parker as the tall airman emerged headfirst from the airlock. As the AC steadied himself beside Enright, Shuttle sped through the darkness over the Australian desert, where only lizards and scorpions hunted in the darkness 90 minutes before sunrise on earth. For Shuttle, sunup would come in three minutes.

  During the next quarter hour out of earshot of ground stations, the Crew Activity Plan called for the pilots to pry their bodies from their cumbersome, five-layer ejection escape suits. Each orange suit weighed 24 pounds.

  “You first, Jack.”

  Four hours, ten minutes aloft, Endeavor flew over Australia’s eastern coastline for the Coral Sea. As Shuttle crossed the shoreline, directly below lights twinkled faintly from the village of Ingham, Queensland, Australia.

  Enright unzipped his heavy suit’s belly. Behind him, Parker had braced himself against the airlock. As the AC grasped both of Enright’s shoulders, the thin copilot forced his sweating head down through the suit’s helmetless, circular neckring. With a grunt of effort, Enright forced his head and shoulders through the suit’s open chest. As Parker behind him held the copilot’s suit, Enright floated out of the garment. Pulling his weightless legs behind him, Enright moulted, shedding his orange rubberized skin. In his long johns, Enright did a somersault as he flew out of his suit, which Parker held in his large hands. Enright’s long-sleeved drawers were moist with perspiration and the little cans of charcoal filters in the mid-deck floor labored against the cabin’s scent of a locker room at halftime.

  Enright felt like doing a zero-G cartwheel in his new freedom without the bulky suit to restrain his movement. The AC read the rooky’s face.

  “Can’t fly with your feathers wet, buddy.”

  Enright smiled.

  Outside, at 04 hours and 12 minues MET, a new sun burst explosively over the eastern horizon a thousand miles away. The Earth below was still in darkness as the high starship entered daylight above the Louisiade Archipelago in the pre-dawn Coral Sea. A fiercely bright white ring seeped around the circumference of the mid-deck, hatch window’s cover. The narrow band of daylight was brighter than the cabin’s floodlights. Upstairs, daylight careened over the unshaded sills of the flightdeck’s ten windows. Mother in her systems management mode felt the flightdeck warm to morning. She increased the flow of coolant water from the flightdeck’s aluminum veins to the space radiators deployed on the open bay doors.

  “Mornin’, Skipper,” Enright said in his long woolies. The AC nodded cheerfully.

  Enright took his empty suit and floated with it toward the narrow bunk beds nestled against Endeavor’s starboard mid-deck wall. He pushed back the curtain hiding a narrow berth which resembled the sleep stations in a submarine torpedo room.

  Enright stuffed his man-size suit into the top berth. From the same bunk he hauled out massive white trousers. He parked the bottom torso of his extravehicular mobility unit suit in mid-air. Then he secured his damp ascent suit into the berth where it reposed like a third crewman. Normally the bottom half of the EVA suit is stored in the airlock with the upper torso. There had not been time to put everything in its appointed corner before this flight. Four hours and fifteen minutes out, Endeavor flew in full daylight over the Solomon Islands of Guadalcanal and New Georgia. The tiny island of Bouganville lay 425 miles to the northwest, halfway to the hazy horizon. On the ground, it was morning twilight. On the three sleepy islands, the sun was half an hour from warming the silent fields of weathered crosses aligned in long, perfect rows. There in the sandy ground, fifty years earlier, Company B, 145th Infantry of Ohio’s bloodied Thirty-seventh Division had left its youth forever behind, wrapped in green ponchos.

  Endeavor cruised over the sea toward the Equator 1,500 miles of groundtrack to northward.

  The heavy eight-layer trousers of Enright’s EMU stood like half a man between the two floating pilots. Attached permanently to the thick legs of the half-suit were heavy boots. The section of EVA suit ended at its round waistring. The upper half of the suit hung with backpack attached upon the inside of the airlock.

  Enright floated into the fetal position in mid-air as he climbed out of his long johns. He stood naked except for his jockey-shorts-style Urine Collection Device which covered his middle. The UCD shorts could collect and store a quart of urine.

  Enright took his sweaty wet drawers, wadded them into a ball, and sent his laundry flying directly into a sleep berth.

  “Just like home,” the AC grinned.

  “That good bachelor life, Skipper,” Enright smiled.

  While Enright was crawling airborne from his drawers, Parker had retrieved another set of long johns. These were Enright’s liquid-cooling garment—one-piece mesh long johns of Spandex material. The garment was high-necked with feet attached. The 6½-pound union suit contained 300 feet of plastic tubes through which coolant water would be pumped by the EMU’s PLSS backpack.

  Enright unzipped the coolant garment from throat to crotch and he climbed into it in mid-air while Parker steadied his shoulders. The thin copilot zipped himself into the mesh underwear from which the plastic tubes dangled.

  Five minutes and 1,500 miles from Guadalcanal, at 04 hours 20 minutes into the flight, Endeavor sped northeastward over the Equator to begin her Revolution Four over Tarawa in the Gilbert Islands of the South Pacific.

  With his hands pushing against the mid-deck ceiling, the copilot forced his weightless body into the EMU’s lower torso, which stood stiffly on the floor. Enright grabbed the trousers’ waistring and he pulled the thick pants up to his hips. With the massive pants doubling the size of his lower body, the small pilot looked ready to go wading and fly fishing. To Parker, his crewmate looked like a rodeo clown.

  “Next,” Enright said as he worked to steady his ponderous lower body.

  “Right,” the AC said dryly.

  The mission profile hastily drafted by the Johnson Space Center’s flight operations directorate called for Parker to don his own liquid coolant garment. Although Enright would walk alone in space, Parker would be ready upstairs on the flightdeck to go outside if Enright got into trouble. Wearing his liquid coolant underwear, the AC could climb into his EMU suit in five minutes to go to Enright’s rescue.

  With Enright holding the tall colonel’s shoulders, the AC crawled slowly and painfully from the open middle of his orange pressure suit. Enright floated, braced against the galley unit where he held the AC’s empty ascent suit by its shoulders.

  “Damn, Will,” Enright whi
spered.

  The tall, lanky colonel floated with his long arms raised and touching the mid-deck ceiling. He said nothing as Enright squinted his space-puffy cheeks toward the AC’s right leg. From ankle to knee, the AC’s right calf was swollen to the size of his thigh. At the Colonel’s right mid-thigh, a fist-size knot bulged against his long johns, stained brown with dried blood. The stain was the size of a silver dollar where a horse needle had pricked a surface vein.

  “Our little secret, Number One,” the Colonel said softly.

  “Skipper,” Enright began. He was checked in midthought by a blast of Parker’s captain’s-look. The AC’s glare quickly melted away.

  “Okay, Will.”

  “Thanks, Jack. It doesn’t bother me much. Really.” The tall pilot spoke firmly as his leg, thigh, and groin throbbed with new heat.

  The AC floated stiffly to his berth below Enright’s bunk. He dragged his orange pressure suit, which he tucked into his bunk after first pulling his liquid coolant garment from one of the mid-deck’s 33 forward storage lockers.

  The Colonel hung his coolant garment in mid-air as upon an invisible clothesline. Enright held Parker’s arm as the tall colonel climbed out of his long woolies.

  Enright said nothing as he frowned at Parker’s naked purple right leg. The thickly engorged veins along the swollen calf and shin resembled a road map of Los Angeles, printed in blue on blue.

  The Skipper had to tug hard to pull the 6-pound coolant garment onto his swollen leg. The AC grimaced and the deep pilot’s lines upon his weary face creased from his eyes to his ears.

  “I got you, Skipper,” Enright said quietly as his hands steadied Parker’s shoulders.

  The AC looked over his broad shoulder at his young, lean partner.

  “I know that, Jack,” Parker said softly with assurance absolute.

  Tubes for the coolant water of the EMU suit floated weightlessly about Parker’s waist. Behind him, Enright floated awkwardly in his 90-pound britches of eight layers of urethane-coated nylon, Dacron, neoprene-coated nylon, and aluminized Mylar, all within an outer shell of Gortex and Nomex cloth.