Rescue Mode

by Ben Bova

Benson tapped the key on his wristpad and heard the fans whine a little higher.

  “You’ve got a little more than five hours of oxygen supply,” Nomura went on. “You’re good to go.”

  “Okay,” said Benson. “Amanda, you ready?”

  “Ready.”

  He looked aft along the handholds that ran down the truss toward the massive propellant tanks. The TMI tanks looked intact. No apparent damage. We’ll have the propellant we need to go into orbit around Mars, Benson knew. Good.

  But the TEI tanks were leaking, too, even though he could not see an obvious plume spouting from them. The ship’s sensors reported they were losing propellant. Could the sensors be wrong? Benson wondered. Maybe the impact of the collision knocked them off.

  Too good to be true, he thought. We’ll have to go down there and see what’s what. If we’ve lost as much as the sensors say, we might not have enough for the Trans-Earth Injection burn. We’ll be stranded at Mars.

  Pushing those fears to the back of his mind, Benson looked at the mangled mess of broken crosspieces and twisted aluminum struts where the collision had occurred. Of the twelve crosspieces, only two remained undamaged. Furthermore, only two were holding the ship together.

  “Ted,” he called, “we’ll have to do something to strengthen the damaged section of the truss. Otherwise, the stress when we ignite the nuclear rocket for the Mars capture burn will probably make them buckle and break.”

  “Don’t want that,” said Connover.

  “Amen.”

  “I’ll ask the bright boys back home to give us some ideas,” Connover said. “Uh, Bee, I just got a batch of bad news. Mission Control has studied the telemetry and they say we’ve lost a lot of propellant. A lot. Their calculations say that if the leak isn’t patched in the next seven to eight hours we won’t have enough H2 to get home. The LAD isn’t working well and they say we might already have passed that point. They’re also worried about the water leak. It was huge.”

  Benson frowned. The Liquid Acquisition Device—LAD in NASA’s infinite jungle of acronyms—was the sensor in the propellant tankage that monitored the amount of liquid hydrogen remaining in the tank. Benson knew LAD readings could be off by as much as ten percent in zero-gee, but from the sound of Connover’s voice, the situation was even more serious.

  “We’d better get down there, then, and patch the leak,” he said.

  “Bee, should Hi and I get ready to come out in case you can’t fix it in time? It’ll take us three hours to pre-breathe pure oxy.”

  “Right. Get started. We might need some extra hands out here.”

  July 22, 2035

  04:14 Universal Time

  Earth Departure plus 108 Days

  The White House

  “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.”

  For this special briefing to the news media, the reporters and commentators had been assembled in the classically decorated East Room, which was large enough to hold them all, plus the dozens of photographers, bloggers, and camera crews. Though a few of the participants were wearing VR equipment, they still hadn’t been able to convince the White House to allow them to physically interact with the president during one of these events, an engagement that would undoubtedly raise viewership by orders of magnitude for the organization that was able to pull it off.

  They all got to their feet as President Harper strode in, wearing a dark blue business suit and carefully knotted gold tie, which complemented the gold and white decór of the venerable room.

  His podium had been set up beneath Gilbert Stuart’s full-length portrait of George Washington, which had been saved from destruction by Dolley Madison when the British army burned the Executive Mansion during the War of 1812.

  Harper felt bone weary, physically and emotionally exhausted by this long day’s news from the Mars mission. But he glanced up at the painting and reminded himself that this house had seen its share of excruciatingly difficult times.

  Turning a weary smile to the newspeople, he motioned for them to be seated.

  “First, I want to thank you all for coming out so late in the evening. I had considered holding this briefing tomorrow morning, but the American public—and the world—shouldn’t have to wait all night to learn what’s happened to the Arrow and her crew.”

  Harper went through a succinct description of the accident that had struck the Mars-bound spacecraft: the collision, the damage to the ship, the crew’s reaction.

  “I’ve got to say,” he concluded, “that Commander Benson and all his crew have come through this very difficult and demanding experience with flying colors. There was only one injury, a slight bump on the head, to the ship’s meteorologist, Mikhail Prokhorov.”

  Several dozen hands shot into the air and the room filled with urgent cries of “Mr. President! Mr. President!”

  Harper hesitated as he noticed his wife standing at the rear of the room with Ilona Klein, his news media chief. He nodded to his wife as he called on the reporter from Space Live!, hoping that it would be a softball. It wasn’t.

  From his seat in the front row, Space Live! reporter Adrienne Anderson asked the most important question of them all. “Will the crew survive this accident?”

  “They’ve survived so far,” Harper replied. “Their life-support equipment is undamaged and their morale is excellent.”

  “But it’s been reported that one or more of their fuel tanks has been punctured. Will they be able to continue the mission?”

  Harper said tightly, “We intend to.”

  Without waiting to be called on, Fox News’ Gloria Miller—bright, blonde and brassy—asked, “Will they have sufficient propellant to go all the way to Mars and back?”

  “They’re coasting to Mars right now, so they won’t use any propellant until they have to go into orbit around the planet.”

  The next dozen questions all harped on the propellant issue. President Harper temporized by telling them that the top experts at NASA were working on the problems raised by the propellant leakage.

  At last a lean, lanky, potbellied younger man got to his feet. “Len Eames, the Science Daily Show. I’m sure you’re aware that Senator Donaldson has called for an end to all manned space missions. Doesn’t this accident prove his point, that it’s too risky to send humans into space?”

  Harper had been waiting for that one. His jaw set and his eyes focused on the nearest TV camera, he answered, “It was risky to cross the Mississippi and settle the west. It was risky to first fly airplanes. It was risky to go to the Moon. But brave men and women took those risks and we’re all better off for it.”

  “Yes,” Eames said, “but Senator Donaldson intends to bring his proposition before the Senate Subcommittee on Space. What’s your reaction to that, sir?”

  Bristling, President Harper replied, “There will be no cutting of the manned space program while I’m President of the United States.”

  But he knew that he was already a lame duck, with little more than eighteen months to remain in office.

  July 22, 2035

  Earth Departure Plus 108 Days

  04:20 Universal Time

  Extravehicular Activity, the Arrow

  As Benson and Lynn worked their way cautiously across the damaged section of truss and headed toward the leaking propellant tank, Virginia Gonzalez’s voice sounded in their headphones.

  “Bee, the video feed from your helmet is crystal clear, but the feed from Amanda’s has a lot of static. Her audio is fine, so whatever’s causing the problem seems to be limited to video only.”

  Benson puffed out a breath. He knew that if this were an ordinary spacewalk—as if any spacewalk was ordinary—then the flight rules would require that Amanda return to the airlock and end her EVA as quickly as possible. The camera feed was considered mission critical, for safety reasons. The rules were quite clear.

  But this wasn’t an ordinary spacewalk.

  “Noted,” he said to Gonzalez. “Amanda will stay with me unl
ess something else goes off nominal. I need her help.”

  “Copy that.”

  “How’re Ted and Hi doing?”

  He could sense Virginia’s shrug. “They’re down at the main airlock, pre-breathing oxygen and getting into their EVA suits.”

  “Right,” said Benson.

  Only then did he look across toward Amanda to see if his decision was okay with her. He felt grimly pleased when she gave him a silent “thumbs up.”

  “Okay, kid,” he said to her. “We’ve got a propellant leak to fix.”

  “Let’s do it,” Amanda said.

  “Right.” He turned back to face the mangled truss. “Now we have to figure out how to get across the damaged area and down to the aft tank so we can figure out how to patch the damned thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “We’ve got to cross over the damage using what’s left of the handholds, and without snagging our suits on the broken spars. Then we have to make sure our tethers reach across without getting caught or cut. Sharp edges and spacesuits just don’t get along.”

  “Bee, I’m with you. Let’s get closer and figure out how to get across.”

  Benson nodded, straightened himself out as best he could, then turned himself to face the damaged truss.

  Make certain nothing has changed, he said to himself as he looked hard at the broken and twisted spars.

  Satisfied that it hadn’t, he began to pull himself hand-over-hand toward the aft section of the ship—and the mangled area of the truss. Amanda followed closely behind him, mimicking his slow, careful moves.

  It took about ten minutes to reach the damaged section. It looked much worse close up than it had from the habitation module’s aft window. Part of the truss was simply missing, blasted out into deep space along with the fragments of whatever had hit them. About six feet of the truss was damaged, including two feet that was just empty space and two intact spars. They were all that was holding the ship’s modules and tankage together.

  The top and bottom edges of the broken truss segment were a tangled mess of fractured and bent spars, their broken ends razor sharp. To Benson they looked like twisted, angry claws; any one of them could rip a pressure suit open and kill the person wearing it.

  “We’ve got to get across this mess,” he told Amanda.

  She said nothing.

  Turning weightlessly to face her, Benson said, “I’ll go across first. You watch me. Once I’m across, you follow me.”

  “Okay.” Amanda’s voice sounded shaky to him.

  “If I don’t make it,” he said, “you go back inside. Let Ted and Hi come out. Don’t you try this on your own.”

  “Don’t worry, I won’t.”

  “Right.”

  Feeling like a beached whale struggling to get back in the water, Benson pulled himself slowly across the shattered section of truss, splaying his legs outward from his torso so he could move above those reaching sharp claws, imagining himself to be a tightrope walker working upside-down, crossing the rope hand-over-hand. He wasn’t aware that he was holding his breath until he’d crossed to the other side and allowed himself to exhale a long, relieved sigh.

  To Amanda he called, “If you can keep your legs outstretched and go hand-over-hand like I did, you should be fine.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  It didn’t look to him that Amanda needed any advice. He watched as she swung into a handstand and began making her way, carefully but smoothly, across the damaged area toward him. She looked much more graceful than he thought it was possible to be inside the stiffly cumbersome suit. Like a ballet dancer in zero gravity.

  Once she’d made it across, he could see her bright smile of satisfaction through the faceplate of her helmet.

  “You were saying?” she quipped.

  With a grin of his own, Benson replied, “I was saying that we’ll have that leak patched in no time.”

  “That’s what I thought you said.”

  Ahead of them, the truss stretched past the presumably undamaged tanks that held the propellant they’d need to enter Mars orbit, the big oblong radiators that bled off the excessive heat generated by the nuclear reactor, the ungainly cargo module that contained the Mars lander, and then the leaking Trans-Earth Injection tanks.

  “The tanks are farther away than our tethers can reach,” Benson told Amanda. “They’re not long enough to reach the TEI tanks. None of the designers thought we’d have to go on a tethered EVA farther than the lander. They didn’t think we’d have to do this at all and, if we did, that we’d use the SMUs to get here and back quickly.”

  “We’ll have to get to the tanks untethered?” she asked.

  Benson said, “It’s just a few meters.” But he was clearly unhappy at the prospect of giving up the safety tethers.

  Amanda nodded, her movement barely noticeable inside her helmet. Simple gestures were lost to astronauts in spacesuits. The bulky suits hid small body movements.

  Benson and Lynn made their way slowly along the truss, stopping finally at the huge storage module that housed the lander. Benson was still awed by its size. The lander inside it was designed to leave the Arrow once it had attained a stable orbit around Mars, then fly through the planet’s thin atmosphere and land on the surface. After spending thirty days on the surface, it would boost them back to the Arrow, waiting for them in orbit.

  “It’s a shame we came all this way and we probably won’t get to land on the surface,” Amanda said, wistfully.

  “It’ll be more of a shame if we come all this way and don’t get to go home,” Benson said. “We’ll take time to mourn for what might have been after we make sure we fix what has to be.”

  He jabbed a gloved finger at the last handhold on the skin of the cargo container, at the side of the module’s hatch. The designers had not bothered to place handholds any farther aft.

  Their destination was less than thirty feet away, but without being tethered, and without handholds, it looked more like thirty miles.

  Benson hesitated, knowing what he had to do but wondering if he and Amanda could do it.

  How long have we been outside? he asked himself. He thought of asking Gonzalez, at the comm console, about their timeline, but decided against it. Don’t want them to think I’m worried, he said to himself.

  He knew Ted and Hi would be able to come out in another hour or so, if needed. Benson resolved that he and Amanda would finish the repair task. He hoped. The backup team won’t be needed. He hoped.

  July 22, 2035

  Earth Departure Plus 108 Days

  06:31 Universal Time

  Extravehicular Activity, the Arrow

  Benson blinked sweat out of his eyes as he and Amanda inched along aftward until the looming shapes of the TEI tanks filled their horizon.

  No warnings from Taki, he told himself. I guess our vital signs are all okay.

  Still, he asked Lynn, “How’re you doing, Amanda?”

  She puffed out a breath before answering, “Okay. Just following you on down the yellow brick road.”

  If she can make a joke she must be all right.

  The leak was clearly visible, just as the leak from the water bladder had been, but in a different way. There was no spray of ice grains to betray its position. The liquid hydrogen in the tank expanded into gas as it spurted from the tear in the tank’s skin, and hydrogen is colorless.

  But Benson could see that a piece of the forward truss structure was embedded in the smooth skin of the tank, sticking into it like a murderer’s stiletto.

  When the object struck the ship and shattered the truss, this one small segment had been propelled aft, most likely flying alongside the ship almost parallel with the truss itself, until it rammed into the big tank that blocked its path.

  Pointing, he said for the benefit of those listening in the ship, “That must be the source of the leak.”

  Gonzalez’s voice from the comm center confirmed, “Sure looks that way.”

  Ted Connover spoke up. “That’
s got to be the source, Bee.”

  “How’re you guys doing?” Benson asked.

  “Pre-breathe almost complete,” Connover replied. “Now if we can get Hi’s beard jammed into his helmet we’ll be good to go in a half-hour or less.”

  “Right.” Benson turned his attention back to the leaking tank.

  Amanda asked, “How do we get up there?”

  Benson looked at the smooth surface of the tank, unmarred except for the truss segment sticking out of it some fifteen feet above where they were.

  Amanda piped up again. “We’re at the end of our tethers, Bee.”

  If that was supposed to be funny, Benson saw no humor in it.

  “We’re going to have to detach our tethers,” he said.

  “And then what?”

  He tried to shrug inside the suit, failed. “If the tethers reached that far, I could jump toward the spot where the leak is and grab onto the broken piece of the truss. Assuming I made it, I could remove the shard, cover the hole with a patch and then you could reel me back in.”

  “But if you miss?”

  “My next stop would be Alpha Centauri, I guess.”

  Neither NASA nor any other space agency approved untethered spacewalks. The danger of an astronaut floating away from the ship was too great. Unlike swimming, where someone who fell out of the boat had a chance of getting back by reacting against the water, in the vacuum of space there is nothing to react against. If an astronaut floats away from the ship there is no way for him to get back, not unless he is carrying a propulsion rocket on his backpack.

  Benson shook his head inside his helmet. “I’m not sure we can take the risk, Amanda.”

  “But the leak . . .”

  “I know. I know. We’ve got to do something, but jumping into the wild black yonder without a tether isn’t a viable solution.”

  “Bee, we do have a tether,” Amanda said, her voice eager, excited. “We just disconnected ourselves from it back at the lander.”

  He immediately grasped her suggestion. “We’ll have to go back and cut a piece long enough to reach from here to the leak. We’ll tie the loose end to the handhold here.”