A little more than a minute later, they hit Mach 3 as they slammed through thirty kilometers. The smartfoam that cradled Becca’s head and neck prevented her from turning her head, but the high-res 3-D display in front of her gave her a clearer view than the thick-paned window to her left. Becca thought she could make out the curvature of the hazy powder-blue horizon under a sky that was rapidly transitioning from deep indigo to black.
In even less time, they reached Mach 5 and sixty kilometers. The cradle’s hybrid engines had given up the increasingly futile task of trying to suck in oxygen from an almost nonexistent atmosphere, and were now running in pure rocket mode, gulping down their tanks of liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
Five minutes into the flight, the Galahad reached an altitude of a hundred kilometers and a velocity of 3.5 kilometers per second, running hot in essentially airless space, so the speed of sound no longer meant much. The cradle’s fuel was exhausted, save for that needed to safely return to the Mojave Spaceport, and the pilot hit the disconnect. The cradle dropped away with a thunk, turning for its return to Mojave. Galahad proceeded under its own engine power, steadily gaining altitude and velocity. Becca gratefully noted it was a less grueling procession; she no longer felt like she was trying to bench-press her own weight.
In the next quarter-hour, the Galahad added another four kilometers per second to its velocity, and three hundred kilometers to its altitude. The pilot cut the shuttle’s engines; they were in stable low Earth orbit and they could stay there almost indefinitely without engine power. Eventually, the minute but unceasing drag of the thermosphere would slow them enough that they’d fall back to Earth . . . but they’d be gone before then.
Looking out the window, Becca could see the curved, pale bluish-white horizon that rimmed an immense swath of white clouds over the dusky icy-green hues of the Atlantic Ocean. She was in space, and it was glorious, and best of all, she wasn’t vomiting! No weight, nothing to hold her breakfast down, but it was staying there of its own accord: the space sickness patch really worked.
Crow had told her it would, but she’d heard it wasn’t foolproof.
Maybe it wasn’t, but it was working for her.
“Hell of a thing,” said the guy across the aisle from her. Darlington? Too good-looking, notch in chin. Big white teeth . . . like the big bad wolf.
He was right, though, and she nodded: hell of a thing.
The pilot came up and said that they were closing with the orbital tug, so they might feel a slight bump. In truth, the nudge was almost unnoticeable.
Becca couldn’t see it, but she knew the tug was similar in design to the shuttle’s launch cradle. Since the tug operated solely in space, it didn’t need wings or streamlining or air intakes or the robust framework of the launch stage, but like the launch cradle, it was unpiloted and remotely controlled.
Right now it was under the command of the shuttle crew. As they approached the space station, it would come under station control. Galahad’s pilot brought the tug up under the shuttle and the shuttle docked into the tug’s rigid carbon-composite mesh hammock. Twin sets of engines and fuel tanks flanked the craft, much smaller than the ones that had lifted them from Earth.
There was no announcement from the pilot or any bright flare of exhaust from the engines firing in space, but Becca could tell when they were on their way out of low Earth orbit. Her weightless state disappeared, as the thrust of the tug’s engines pushed her back into her seat with a few tenths of a gee. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but, already, she was missing the experience of weightlessness. She was actually relieved by the feeling: she’d be spending a good part of the Saturn trip in zero-gee and the rest of it in low-gee accommodations, and secretly she’d been worried it might not suit her.
One more of the many things that she fretted about that she could scratch off her list of worries.
The pilot came on and said, “Folks, there’s not much to do now except sit back and enjoy the ride up to the station. Since we’re passing over the terminator line, I’m going to dim the cabin lights so you can get a taste of what night in space is like. Enjoy the view.”
Becca pressed her face as close to the window as she could and looked back. The broad arc of the horizon was aglow with a thin rainbow band of light, a sunset scene from orbit. The sunset faded rapidly as the spaceship passed over to the night side of the earth, and the stars popped out. Clear and untwinkling, they were set in a true-black sky that she’d never seen at night on Earth, even hiking in the Rockies. The effect was so intense it felt unreal, like a movie special effect. Below her she could see an occasional flicker of lightning in the clouds and, through the gaps in the clouds, she could see the lights of the modern metropolises of northern Africa and southern Asia.
Then dawn started to break ahead of the ship, and Becca pulled out of her reverie. She checked the time; she’d lost an hour enraptured by space. She sighed and went back to her workslate. She needed some kind of plan, even a quarter-baked one, to present when she got to the station.
“Okay, deep breath,” she murmured to herself. “What do I know that I can’t change?”
The good-looking guy asked, “Did you say something?”
“Nothing,” she said.
Becca ran through the big picture in her head. In space, there was only one way to get rid of heat, and that was by radiation. At room temperature, it would take roughly a square kilometer of radiator to get rid of a gigawatt of heat.
She needed to get rid of several. So that approach wouldn’t fly, because the radiator would simply weigh too much. So let’s run hotter and to hell with efficiency.
She punched numbers into the slate to check her mental arithmetic. At five hundred degrees Celsius, she could dump forty times as much heat per square meter of radiator; six hundred degrees Celsius would be even better, at more than sixty times.
That should get the radiator down to areas that might be manageable.
Let’s make believe that works. How do I get the heat to the radiator?
She scanned through her tables of heat properties of materials.
If I’m running that hot, the best thing for sucking up heat is probably melting metal. It’s hundreds of times better than heating up a radiator fluid. Man, gotta love those phase changes.
Becca closed her eyes and began running design possibilities. How long she was down, she didn’t know. As she worked, unseeing, Space Station Three appeared on the monitor, three white tubes side by side. The central axis tube was longer and thinner than its flanking partners, the two living modules, which the station personnel called “habitats.” At one end of the axis was a smallish cluster of stocky modules, at the other a much larger cluster, with solar panels extending from it like petals on a daisy.
The habitats rotated about the axis tube at one revolution per minute, attached by hundred-meter-long elevator shafts at both ends. It created the illusion that the whole station was rotating lazily in space.
The Galahad began its delicate rendezvous maneuvers. Becca was oblivious, the excitement of space travel completely driven from her mind. This was her real element—the space between her ears. She’d taken an impossible engineering problem, run it to ground, and was now bludgeoning it into submission. She couldn’t have been happier; in some ways, an emerging solution to an impossible problem resembled an orgasm in the pleasure it created.
Yeah, melts just above 600°C, great heat of fusion, decent emissivity . . .
She opened her eyes and punched in a new set of heat flow parameters and watched the plots come up.
Oh, sweet. I can pull this off, I think . . . the power boys won’t be pleased.
She grinned to herself; let them deal with intractable problems for a change, see how they like it.
The shuttle jerked beneath her butt: ever so slightly, but definitely. The pilot came up: “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to USSS3. Thank you for flyin
g Virgin-SpaceX. We hope to serve you again soon.”
11.
Three of them hadn’t been up.
Sandy, Becca, and John Clover were fine when they were strapped down—weightlessness had been more or less meaningless in the comfortable flight chairs, more like a science experiment than anything—but walking on their own was disconcerting: the combination of weightless limbs and shoes that stuck to the floor was odd. They shuffled off the Galahad, moving slowly; a group of cheerful station employees kept an eye on them, and pointed them off to their various destinations.
“Don’t worry about it,” Crow said to the three of them. Having been up before, he more or less knew what he was doing, and Fiorella had already disappeared. “When we get out to the habitats, we’ll get some weight back, and you’ll be fine.”
“I need someplace that I can work, right quick,” Becca said. “And I need just a few minutes’ access to the Big J before I talk to Fang-Castro.” The Big J was a government supercomputer.
“We can get you that. Figure something out?”
“I think so,” she said. She felt ungainly and floppy, and kept having to remember to put the next foot down.
A tall, thin woman in a jumpsuit said to Clover, “Dr. Clover? I’m Sandra Chapman. I’ve read your ‘Possible Aspects of Alien Cultures’ about two hundred times and I have a lot of questions for you. Here, let me take the cat. Put your foot down. Now the next one, down. You’ll get it.”
Becca, Clover, and their guides got on an electric cart, which whirred away, leaving Sandy behind with a heavyset, middle-aged balding fellow, who introduced himself as Joe Martinez.
“I’m a handyman up here. I’m going to show you around. We need to get your camera gear,” he said. “The other folks are going to take the lift out to one of the habitats, where they’ll have some ‘gravity.’ You and I’ll head over to Engineering. It’s down the axle where the solar arrays and physical plant are. It’ll be zero-gee the whole way, which will give you a chance to practice your movement skills.”
They found his camera case—Martinez said his personal effects would be delivered to his cabin and tied it into another cart. “You don’t actually sit down on these things so much as just hang on,” Martinez said, as they started down the central tube.
The inside of the axle looked like the inside of some . . . well . . . science fiction movie tunnel, Sandy decided. An ice-white rectangular tube lined with pipes ranging in size from five or six centimeters to thirty centimeters, all neatly labeled and color-coded.
Sandy held on and asked, “What are we doing?”
“I was told that you’re going to be the primary cinematographer, as well as the documentarian on this mission with Ms. Fiorella. You’ll have to do a lot of EVAs, so, we thought as long as you’re up here, we’d check you out on an egg, and let you figure out how to shoot from one.”
“Sort of like a test, to see if I can shoot from one,” Sandy said.
“I wasn’t going to say that,” Martinez said. “Some people find eggs to be pretty intuitive, but I’ve had Ultra Stars up here who froze the first time we put them in one. We sort of need to find out where you’re at.”
“Gotcha,” Sandy said.
Sandy thought they might have been pulled a hundred meters down the axle when they arrived at what Martinez called the egg crate. A dozen eggs hung from overhead mechanical arms, each in a separate cubicle, much like a series of garages. Each cubicle was an air lock, with an elevator-sized area between two inner doors, and an outer door that opened to space.
“There are interlocks that prevent the space door from being open when either of the inner doors is open,” Martinez said. “We have two inner doors . . . just in case. In fact, everything has a just-in-case safety factor built in.”
He pointed at an egg: “This one is yours.”
They cycled through the air lock, and Martinez showed Sandy how to climb into the pilot’s seat, how to strap himself down. “You fly it in shirtsleeves—anything that would wreck an egg wouldn’t be salvaged by wearing a pressure suit. An egg sort of is a pressure suit—it’s just bigger, heavier, and more capable.”
“I was in one once,” Sandy told him. “At Disneyland.”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good one,” Martinez said. “Not nearly as much fun, though—you still get dragged down by gravity. With these babies, you fly.”
Martinez spent an hour running him through the egg’s controls. At the basic level, there wasn’t much to it. The joystick and some push buttons controlled the low-power thrusters. Grips on either side controlled the manipulator arms. “Looks like an old-fashioned video game,” Sandy observed.
“You play those?” Martinez’s face lit up.
“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with them. Played ’em, took ’em apart, put them back together again. Sometimes they still worked when I got done with them.”
“What was your best old game?” Martinez asked.
“Jeez . . . if you put a gun to my head, I’d say, Hi-Speed Ass-Teroids.”
Martinez: “No! You got one?”
“Somewhere. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the left-hand wiper, though.”
“Oh, man. You gotta get that up here.”
When Sandy had the major controls down, Martinez asked, “You wanna go out and play in the yard?”
“Can we?”
“That’s why we’re here.”
Martinez slaved Sandy’s egg to his own, so that he could override Sandy’s controls if he needed to. “That’s not likely unless you get really disoriented. The thing is equipped with safeties up the wazoo. You can’t spin it too fast or ram it into anything. Proximity and acceleration sensors and overrides won’t allow it. You can’t blow yourself out of orbit. And if you think of some other way to wreck it . . . don’t do it.”
“Gotta take my cameras,” Sandy said.
“Yeah. There’s an equipment rack just to the left of your seat,” Martinez said. “I’ll take us free of the dock. Once we’re well clear of the station, I’ll let you mess around for a while and then I’ll hand the controls over to you and you can try it for real.”
When Sandy was set, Martinez moved to the next air lock over and strapped himself into another egg: Sandy could watch him through a hardened glass window that separated the two compartments.
A few seconds later, Martinez spoke to him through a speaker set into the bulkhead behind his head: “You ready?”
“All set.”
“Opening the air locks.”
The outer doors rolled back, and the overhead mechanical arm pushed them out of the station, then retracted. They were floating free, and Martinez said, “I’ll take us out to the playground.”
They slowly jetted away from the station, and Sandy had his first good, long look at the Resort.
The living modules, the habitats, rotated about the main axle at a leisurely one revolution per minute, attached by hundred-meter-long elevator shafts at both ends, which conveyed personnel and cargo to and from the center axle. Computer-controlled counterweights piggybacked on the shafts, a few tons of dead weight that slid in and out to keep everything in balance as equipment and personnel moved around the modules.
The one RPM rotation of the habitats produced enough centrifugal force to simulate one-tenth of Earth gravity in the living quarters. Because of the distance between the tubes and the axle, the rotation actually looked quite swift from Sandy’s viewpoint outside the ship. An egg that was motionless relative to the center axis, if struck by a moving tube, would be batted away like a tennis ball. The egg’s proximity alerts would not permit that, and it had never happened, but it was a theoretical possibility, given a dead egg.
The habitats themselves were squarish tubes, ten meters on a side and a hundred meters long, with meter-thick walls. The walls were slabs of self-healing structured foam that was less
dense than air. The foam was inter-layered with ceramic-composite and carbon fiber fabric, designed to be resistant to micrometeorite impacts. Anything smaller than a millimeter or so shattered against the fabric layers in the wall.
A centimeter-sized rock could punch its way entirely through and exit the far side, but that wasn’t a fatal accident as long as it didn’t hit anyone on its way through. The foam could fill in a several-centimeter-diameter hole in seconds. In the thirty years the station had been operational, an impact like that had happened only once. A researcher’s quarters had been trashed as it went through, but she’d been working, so all she suffered was considerable aggravation and the irrevocable loss of a childhood teddy bear that had been unlucky enough to be in the meteorite’s path.
When they were a few hundred meters out, Martinez said, “I’m giving you your controls. Try not to screw it up, but if you do, I’ve still got you.”
“Got it.” Sandy sat there for a minute, looking around. Strapped into the egg’s chair, he was as comfortable as he had been on the shuttle. Not even his subconscious had to think about what to do with body parts and zero-gee. All that surfing: sometimes you’d get driven under by a big wave, and you needed to relax, and let it happen, but always remain aware of where “up” was. Where the air was.
And the view here was much better than anything he’d had in the Pacific: his own personal window into the universe.
“You just gonna sit there?” Martinez called.
“Just soaking in the view. You’ve got one hell of a backyard,” Sandy said. He started to laugh, and didn’t stop for a moment, his first good laugh since the day he left for Argentina. He felt like somebody had just taken two hundred pounds of lead off his back.
Martinez laughed with him, the pure joy of being outside.
Saturn Run Page 9