The Glass Lady

by Douglas Savage

  “Two minutes to LOS, Jack. Run the PDP program as soon as possible.”

  “Copy, Flight . . . Stay put a second, Will. RMS in motion.”

  “Be here, Jack.” Parker floated free except for his golden slippers, which held his boots to the payload bay floor.

  The television image of the AC resting by the sealed airlock hatch disappeared as Enright flexed the 50¼-foot-long, 900-pound remote arm. A fully automatic program steered the RMS arm and its end effector unit toward the berthed, plasma-sensing PDP canister. The arm carried its wrist camera and the end effector camera away from Parker, who was now invisible to every human eye in the universe save for the four Russian eyes in Soyuz fifty yards away.

  The arm stopped automatically a foot above the PDP’s grapple probe post.

  “Endeavor . . . ground is losing you at 06 plus 26. Back with you in 13 via Ascension Island. Sunset in 6 . . .”

  Enright did not bother to acknowledge as Shuttle went over the Earth’s edge above San Juan, Puerto Rico. Running the arm manually with Mother’s help, he guided the EEU down to the PDP with his television monitor at his right shoulder. The end effector unit grabbed the package and Enright squeezed the EEU snare trigger in his right hand. A RIGIDIZE light flashed on the Canadian console. Throwing another switch freed the PDP can which rose at the end of the RMS arm out of Shuttle’s bay.

  Enright lifted the ion-sniffer ten feet high. It hung above the open bay with the sea behind it. The sun low in the west glinted off the canister suspended from the arm. The sun swiftly approached the western horizon behind Endeavor and its white globe burned directly into the bay. Parker’s gold plated, outer visor glared like a strobe light.

  “Looks great, Jack.”

  “Feels real smooth, Will. Wrist now in motion.”

  Enright commanded the arm’s furthest joint to lower the PDP until it hung from the arm 90 degrees below the forearm of the RMS. This movement dropped the PDP can away from the elbow joint’s television camera. In fully manual mode, Enright torqued the arm’s joints individually until the outstretched mechanical arm aimed its elbow camera back toward Parker.

  Slowly, the Colonel’s glaring helmet came into view on Enright’s second television screen below the TV monitor which showed only the top of the PDP can.

  “Got you and the PDP, Skip.”

  “Good cameraman, buddy!” The Colonel’s helmet glowed like a small sun atop his huge white suit.

  Six and one half hours aloft, Endeavor was 300 nautical miles east of eastern Venezuela’s coastline, hazy in the gathering gloom of swift sunset in space. The sun began to flatten in the west where it sank through the blue atmosphere at the planet’s cloudy edge.

  Although the sun dipped below the port side of the payload bay as Shuttle flew southeastward on her left side, the six arc lights in the bay covered Parker with harsh light.

  At 06 hours 32 minutes, the sun disappeared for 45 minutes of night. The sea was gone except for tiny patches of fluorescent plankton glowing on the black Atlantic 600 miles north of the Equator.

  Soyuz on LACE’s far side guided her powerful floodlight upon the target rolling slowly at one revolution every six minutes.

  “PDP in place, Skipper. RMS oscillations dampening out.”

  Two of Endeavor’s tail thrusters showered an instantaneous, fiery orange plume into the vacuum as Mother and the Digital Autopilot kept trim. Enright had disabled the 16 RCS jets in Shuttle’s nose by which LACE hovered and where Parker was bound.

  “Okay, Jacob?”

  “Pull your chocks, Will.” Enright momentarily shut off his voice-activated intercom, which dangled from his neck. He added softly, “Godspeed, old friend.”

  Parker rested his gloved hands on each handle at the end of his MMU armrests.

  With his right hand, Parker pumped the MMU’s rotational hand controller. The right hand RHC controlled his attitude in-place. He commanded the cold nitrogen jets by his face and knees to thrust. His body pitched slightly forward as he held his position in the foot restraints. Tweaking the RHC in the opposite direction, tiny jets of 1½ pounds of thrust eased him backward. To protect the EMU suit, the backpack had no hot rocket thrusters. Enright watched by television as Parker checked his MMU jets. Next, the AC’s left fist moved the translational hand controller. The THC handle fired the MMU jets which squirt fore and aft, up and down, left and right. These jets push the MMU and its pilot through space between the black Earth and the moistly starlit sky. The full moon was in the eastern sky well up but blocked by Shuttle’s vertical right wing.

  “Thruster run-up complete, Jack. Ready to roll.”

  The AC’s voice, now rested, was full of Go.

  At 06 hours 34 minutes outbound, the starship flew southeastward across the Equator for the ninth time 420 nautical miles east of Macapa, Brazil.

  “You’re number one for takeoff, Will. Watch your feet, buddy.”

  Enright saw Parker in the greenish television as the AC briskly saluted with his thick arm. He returned his right hand to the hand controller.

  A brief jerk on the THC in his left glove sent Parker rising slowly toward the lighted window in front of Enright’s face. Pushing the THC handle downward the instant his helmet reached Enright’s window, the AC floated freely and motionless at his partner’s bright rear window. The thrusters above and behind the Colonel’s helmet fired an upward burst to bring Parker to a halt before Enright’s face on the far side of the double-pane porthole.

  “You look like the creature that time forgot,” Parker radioed to Enright’s bandaged face, where only puffy eyes were visible. “What was that you were saying yesterday, ‘Who was that masked man?’ ”

  “Maybe I’ll become a prophet. You look a bit Jules Verne yourself, Skipper.”

  “Keep the coffee hot, pard,” the AC smiled inside his mirrored helmet visor. He well knew that he was stealing his best friend’s moment of glory, for which Enright had lived and breathed for a year. Enright could not see the Colonel’s face behind the gold-leaf visor. “Wait up for me, Jack.”

  “Count on it, Will.”

  William McKinley Parker knew he could take that to the bank as his MMU thrusters shoved him upward and away from Enright’s bloodshot eyes.

  From Enright’s aft window, the white figure of the command pilot appeared to ascend straight up. Seconds after the AC’s feet lifted beyond the rear window before the bandaged face, Enright saw his shipmate drift slowly into view outside Overhead Window Eight directly above the copilot’s upturned face. But in his weightless freefall, Parker felt as if he slid out of the bay on his left side. Shuttle lay upon her port side in the frigid darkness 275 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Parker jetted from the bay with his face toward Enright and with his back toward Shuttle’s tall tail. As the AC’s boots cleared the bay and the deployed RMS arm, he could see to his right the star Menkar in the constellation Cetus on the Celestial Equator directly above Endeavor. To his left was the black ocean which changed from mid-winter into a Latin American summer at the microsecond when Shuttle darted south of the Equator.

  As Parker flew ten feet beyond Enright’s ceiling window, the glare of the arc-lighted bay fell dryly upon the white EMU suit and the bulky, white manned maneuvering unit. LACE floated in the light thrown by Soyuz as the tight formation crossed the momentary landfall of the easternmost point of Brazil at 06 hours 35 minutes, MET.

  In the arid light of the open bay illuminated garishly as a stage, Parker drifted as in moonlight. He looked ghostly with his one side shining a cold white, while his other side was black against the black spacescape. Parker’s boxy, shadowy figure so close yet so far from Endeavor sent a tingle down Enright’s sweating neck.

  The AC’s left hand twitched on the arm of his MMU. Invisible nitrogen jets fired upward behind his head and he stopped above Shuttle’s blunt nose fifteen feet from the open bay.

  “You look like a man wearing a bookcase, Skip.” Enright needed to hear his partner’s voice from Out There.
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  “Feels like I left all the books in it,” Parker chuckled over static. Although the cold in nighttime space is so intense that even atoms cease to resonate, the AC was comfortable inside his stiff Beta cloth water-cooled suit.

  From only three Shuttle lengths above the flightdeck, Parker could clearly see Jacob Enright through the 20-inch by 20-inch, triple-pane window in the aft flightdeck ceiling. Parker studied his starship, his glass-shelled home away from home.

  Like the three satellites dead motionless around him, the AC was in an orbit of his very own, governed independently by the dictates of orbital mechanics. Without the cold jets strapped to his backside or Shuttle’s hot RCS thrusters, Will Parker would never close the short distance back to his ship. Never.

  Hanging directly above the flightdeck, Parker could see the cabin lights behind the two ceiling windows and the six forward windows wrapped around Endeavor’s nose. He thought of the nighttime glow of a mountain cabin casting warm, solitary firelight from its windows upon new snow.

  “Surely looks cozy in there, Jack. Real cozy.”

  “I’ll deck the halls for you, Skip.” Enright’s two hands worked to keep the remote arm’s elbow camera aimed upon Shuttle’s wandering son.

  “Thanks, Number One. I can see the whole ship from here. Breathtaking! The thermal blankets in the bay are brilliant. A sixty-foot-long reflector with the bay lighting around it. The PDP pod is maybe 40 feet from me.”

  The plasma-sensing package automatically sniffed and electronically logged Parker’s invisible cloud of nitrogen molecules from the MMU jets.

  “Oh! And I have a full moon just peeking above your starboard wingtip. Awesome! High tide somewhere down below tonight.”

  Enright could see the white moon reflected off Parker’s golden visor. The moon’s face was slightly washed out by the lights from the payload bay.

  “I’ll bet,” the shipbound copilot called as warmly as he could to his friend making a walk which was to have been Enright’s.

  At 06 hours 37 minutes, Endeavor ended her two-minute landfall over South America. The three ships and Parker left Recife, Brazil, behind for the dark South Atlantic. Endeavor and her small human satellite would be over open sea for the next 38 minutes and 11,400 statute miles of darkness.

  “Endeavor, Endeavor. Configure AOS by Ascension at 06 plus 39. With you for 3. Downlink looks fine. All MMU digitals and bio are nominal. We see the AC stopped. You can turn up the TV gain a notch in the artificial light . . . Much better, Jack. Thanks . . . Radio check, Will?”

  “Five by five, Flight. What a night for a moonlight stroll!”

  “We copy that, Will . . . Jack: Could you configure DAP loop Alpha to deadband zero point one.”

  “. . . Autopilot, loop A, to point one, Flight.”

  “We see it, Endeavor. Leave it there. We also want you to forget about the IMU alignment this pass. Your stable member matrix is solid enough all balls.”

  “Okay.”

  “Soyuz: Comm check by Ascension Island.” Colorado hailed through the mid-Atlantic antenna.

  “Soyuz is with you, America. We see Colonel at about 40 meters. Soyuz standing by.”

  “Understand, Major. Thank you.”

  “We will be with our tracking ship for a minute, please,” a Russian voice called into the darkness at sea.

  “Frequency change approved,” Colorado acknowledged, sounding like Departure Control.

  “Thank you,” Soyuz replied as if the Soviet craft required Center clearance. The United States Space Command and the NASA tracking network were tuned to the FM radio spectrum. Colorado was not privy to the Soviet dialogue over blue-green laser between Soyuz and her trawler off nighttime Brazil.

  Parker did not speak directly with the ground. Instead, his MMU radio signal was absorbed by Shuttle which multiplexed his voice to Earth over Endeavor’s antennae.

  “Endeavor, you are Go to affix the grapple fixture to the target. Slow and easy, William. We remind you that your Anomaly proximity pass begins in 6 minutes at 06 plus 47 and lasts one minute. We will look for your postproximity status report by Botswana 3 minutes later. Losing you . . .”

  “Okay, Flight. I’m right and tight out here. Movin’ out to the target.”

  “Copy, Will. Watch your relative rates. At 06 plus 42, data dropout . . .”

  “Guess we’re on our own again, Skip.” Enright felt throbbing in his face as he craned his neck upward to Parker fifteen feet above the flightdeck ceiling. He also felt slightly lightheaded either from the burn-induced fluid imbalance in his body, or from acclimation to weightlessness. The latter process usually requires two days, five for sure.

  Shuttle flew on her side 1,035 statute miles south of Ascension Island in darkness. Below, exactly midway between Sao Paulo, Brazil, to the west and Windhoek, Botswana, to the east, each 2,000 miles from Endeavor, the brass clocks on unseen ships upon the black sea read 2043 local zone time on a clear December night. Below, it was summer.

  “See you in motion, Will.”

  Parker’s left hand directed the MMU’s tiny, cold jets to push the flier toward his target. Through his overhead window, Enright watched the white-suited figure move away slowly. Although no ground station was within radio range, the pilot in the cabin steered the RMS elbow camera to keep it upon Parker. The television would be ready when the network made contact from Africa in seven minutes and 2,000 miles.

  Within ten feet of LACE, Parker jetted to a stop. He still floated on his side with the black water to his left. To his right, the bright star Acamar shone dryly in the southern constellation Eridanus. The corner of the southern sky above Endeavor had few bright stars. The bright star Achernar in Hydrus hung in the south. And Canopus, the heavens’ second brightest star, glowed brilliantly halfway between the horizon and the sky overhead to the southeast. In the sparsely starlit sky of the South Atlantic, most other stars were washed out by the brilliant full moon.

  Parker and Endeavor were both on their sides relative to the ground. But in the arc light from Soyuz, LACE hung vertically with its long, narrow body perpendicular to the sea. LACE’s base pointed toward the center of the Earth in the satellite’s “gravity gradient” stabilization. Because LACE was ten feet long, the planet’s gravity tugged on LACE’s Earth-facing bottom with a force infinitesimally stronger than the gravitational attraction exerted upon LACE’s top end, ten feet farther from the center of the Earth. As result of this minuscule difference in gravity, the target had become stabilized by gravity’s weak grip with the close end down and the far end up. LACE slowly rolled about its long axis, an imaginary line joining the two narrow ends of the 5-ton satellite.

  Parker’s right hand on the MMU armrest fiddled with the rotational hand controller. Combinations of jets on opposite sides of the MMU fired to push the pilot’s feet out from under him until his helmet pointed skyward and his boots pointed seaward. The AC arrested his rotation when his backside faced Endeavor. From Enright’s overhead window where Shuttle rode sideways among the few stars, Parker appeared to float upon his back twenty feet above the flightdeck. Only the MMU was illuminated from below by the lighted payload bay. LACE spun slowly, close to Parker in the light from Soyuz at Parker’s side.

  “What kind of flying you call that, Skipper?” Enright could only see Parker’s back in the overhead window and only his side in the television from the RMS arm deployed at Parker’s left.

  “As Saint John put it, Jack, this is lighter than air.’ ”

  The Colonel quoted a comment from space made years earlier when the Mercury spacecraft Friendship-7 had carried John Glenn into orbit in February 1962.

  “Makes sense, Will.”

  “Okay, I’m two meters out now. Eyeball to eyeball with the target . . . How’s the timeline?”

  Parker looked small as he hovered motionless beside LACE twice his height and twice his breadth. The target was upright relative to the horizon as was Parker two arm-lengths away.

  “Ah . . . Comin’ up
on 06 plus 47, Skipper. I guess we’re there.” Enright’s mouth was dry.

  The three ships with Parker inside their tight triangular formation now skirted within 80 nautical miles of the magnetically volatile South Atlantic Anomaly.

  “Ten seconds in,” Enright called. He had one gauze eyehole on Parker above and the other on the event timer ticking away on the panel in front of his chest.

  With a start, Parker clearly saw from the corner of his eye that Endeavor’s tail grew orange against the backdrop of black starless sky and moonlit sea. Even in the harsh glow from the payload bay, Shuttle’s tail looked like a neon tube as it cleaved through isolated oxygen atoms.

  “Twenty seconds inside, Will.”

  “Jack, I’m lookin’ at one orange tail! I can see it getting brighter even against the bay lights. The SAA must somehow affect the valence electrons of our ion wake . . . Hope that’s all it stirs up.”

  Enright copied the Colonel’s parting remark.

  “Forty inside. Stay put, Will.”

  “I’m sittin’ here.”

  Both airmen glued their eyes upon LACE as they ended their close transit of the Anomaly zone. The target did not twitch. Over his left shoulder, Parker saw the eerie orange glow fade around Shuttle’s tail fin.

  “And . . . 3, 2, 1, sixty seconds. Made it.” Enright sighed audibly behind his moist mask.

  “Kinda hairy, aye, Jacob?”

  “Yeh. How’s my tail now?”

  “Dark as far as I can tell. No glow at all . . . Movin’ in.”

  “Easy, Will.” Enright guided the remote arm’s camera in anticipation of radio contact 2½ minutes away.

  Parker laid both gloved hands upon the grapple fixture attached to his chestpack which controlled his EMU suit. The fixture was the size of a hatbox. The pilot’s heavily gloved fingers made out two clamps on the fixture’s far side opposite the pilot’s chest. Each clamp was open and felt to Parker’s fingers like two hands joined in prayer but with open fingertips.