by Tom Abrahams
He was statics and dynamics smart. He could calculate how moving and nonmoving parts of a machine would interact.
He was law of energy smart. Clayton could predict the energy generated or conserved by machines based on design.
He was thermodynamic smart. He was good at calculating efficiency or lack of it.
Okay. Maybe this is in my wheelhouse.
Maybe he was good enough to get himself home.
NASA wouldn’t have invested twenty-one million dollars in training him if he were a dope, right?
Clayton knew that he had to pick the right time and calculate the exact attitude at that time to detach from the ISS and start his descent. Some of it was automatic and computer controlled, but he had to feed the computer the right data at the right time. The thought of it was overwhelming. His mind flipped through a series of what-if scenarios like he was living his own Choose Your Own Adventure book. It was paralyzing.
If he uploaded the wrong information to the computer, there were infinite ways to die on reentry. If the engines didn’t burn enough, the descent could be too fast and too high and cause the Soyuz to skip off the atmosphere. He’d be bounced deeper into space and float away like an untethered helium balloon.
If the engines burned too much, his reentry might be too steep with too much speed. He’d burn up.
Usually, the ground team would calculate the return trajectory. They’d find him the right path to Kazakhstan, where the recovery team would welcome him home and hand him an apple as a welcome home gift.
Clayton considered how different his return home would be. He prayed he’d find land and not water. The odds were against him. Two-thirds of the world’s surface was water. If he landed himself in the middle of an ocean, he might as well have burned up in the friction of reentry.
He took a deep breath and fished through the gear stored in the orbital module then pushed himself to the airlock that separated him from the leaking Russian side of the ISS. He had to clear his mind. He thought back to building the RV with his dad.
Nothing about it was easy. Riveting at a precise speed and angle was challenging. Fitting that canopy just right was difficult. Cutting the holes for the instrumentation was a task. There was no room for error.
As they worked, Clayton’s dad often reminded him the biggest obstacle to building the plane, or completing anything monumental, wasn’t in the details. The obstacle was looking too far ahead. If they worried about what came next, they’d never finish the task at hand.
“How do you eat an elephant?” he’d asked his son one afternoon in the hangar while Clayton struggled with a fitting.
Clayton had frowned, wiping sweat from his forehead. “How?”
“One bite at a time.”
Clayton had always been a planner. He’d enjoyed the mental gymnastics of calculating the end of one task to get to the next. It was good for some things and not good for others.
His dad was right. One bite at a time.
The first bite was uploading the proper information to the computer and an official system pre-check. Nothing else mattered if he didn’t do that first. He gave himself a push into the crew module, making sure he hadn’t left anything in the orbital module, and moved into the commander’s seat again. It wasn’t as comfortable as his own seat, now occupied by Boris. Each of the seats had been custom fit for maximum comfort on reentry.
Tucked between the seats next to his cheat sheet was an electronic tablet containing the commander’s checklist. The commander, unlike the other crew members who used a paper checklist, had an iPad.
After calculating the best window for undocking and the correct trajectory, Clayton rechecked his math. He checked it a third time. He believed he was right, but he couldn’t be sure. It was like navigating a plane at night with only the help of VFR and a partially cloudy sky.
Clayton unlocked the device and began swiping through the procedures. He used a stylus to punch buttons on the control panel and began the sequence indicated on the checklist.
“It’s like Ikea put this thing together,” he mumbled as he progressed through the tasks one at a time. “Just give me an Allen wrench and an unpronounceable Swedish name and we’re good to go.”
Clayton then apologized to the Swedish. “That was unfair,” he said. “The Hemnes is a wonderful dresser and the Karmsund table mirror is the perfect accessory.”
He swiped through the checklist again to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. The last step was placing the Soyuz on autonomous power, giving over control to the craft itself. He wouldn’t touch anything else until sixty seconds before it was time to undock. He was almost there.
Clayton gripped the command stick like a magic wand and initiated a series of commands that powered up the docking mechanism. Another series of pokes began the undocking, counting down from ninety seconds.
Ninety seconds. A minute and a half. That was it, and there was no turning back.
Clayton’s stomach rolled. His tongue was thick in his dry mouth. He swallowed against a sandpapery dry throat.
He watched the numbers count backwards, one by one, getting closer to zero. His sense of dread, of base fear, was far more visceral than the sweaty anxiety he’d experienced seventy-two days and sixteen hours earlier when the engines had ignited and pushed him from the bounds of Earth.
Four. Three. Two. One.
Clayton leaned his shoulder forward and used the stick to push another command. It opened the hooks that held the Soyuz tight against the ISS at its connection to the Russian service module. He had another four minutes to wait.
He hummed the Jeopardy! theme song that swam in his head.
“I’ll take Famous Explorers for a thousand, Alex,” he said in his best Alex Trebek impersonation. It actually sounded more like he was impersonating Will Ferrell impersonating Alex Trebek.
“He is the first American astronaut to return to Earth alone in a Soyuz capsule,” he recited.
Pretending it was a buzzer, Clayton turned the stick vertically and punched its top with his gloved thumb.
“Yes,” said Trebek. “Clayton, go ahead.”
“Well, Alex,” Clayton said earnestly in his own voice, “who is…me?”
“You are correct,” he said in the Trebek voice and checked the countdown indicator on the panel in front of him. “You have the board. But hurry, we have only two minutes left.”
“I’ll take People Who Are In Over Their Heads for two hundred.”
“Very good,” said Trebek. “Here is the answer: He started pretending to be a game show host in the most critical moment of his life, totally ignoring the stakes in favor of passive-aggressive avoidance behavior.”
“That’s a really tough one, Alex. I’ll throw caution to the wind and take a guess. Who is me?”
“Oh,” said Trebek, “I’m so sorry. The correct answer is ‘Who is the psychobabbling idiot at the controls of a Soyuz capsule?’”
Clayton watched the numbers tick down.
“That’s all the time we have for today,” Trebek said. “Thanks for joining us for this deorbit edition of Jeh-par-dee.”
Then Clayton remembered Trebek was Canadian. “Figures. Canada keeps saving me from oblivion one way or the other.”
The countdown reached zero and the Soyuz detached using a set of pushers that slowly moved the Soyuz away from the ISS. Clayton checked the display for visual confirmation of the separation from an exterior-mounted camera and from a monitor. He wouldn’t be able to feel it. He’d see it though.
The levity of the game show evaporated and Clayton focused. He licked his cracked lips, remembering he hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since the CME hit the station. He wasn’t hungry; he wasn’t thirsty. He was determined to get home.
In the monitor he could see the full separation of the Soyuz from the ISS. So far, so good. The clock reset. He had three minutes until the Soyuz would fire its thrusters to increase the space between it and the ISS.
Clayton was struck by the
silence of their movements, the disorienting float free of the space station. It was if he’d closed his eyes in the cabin of a plane as it began to pull away from the gate, only to open them, look out the window, and be confused as to whether the plane or the terminal were moving.
The three minutes ended and the burn began. For fifteen seconds the thrusters fired. Clayton counted those seconds in his head. When he reached fifteen, he pressed the panel to upload the data for the autonomous control descent.
Clayton and the Soyuz had two orbits around the Earth. Silent and alone they’d whoosh around the planet to more fully separate the distance between themselves and the ISS. At the end of the second orbit, they’d be miles from the station and ready for the deorbit burn.
Burn. Not a favorite word at the moment. Clayton shifted in the seat, adjusting the straps that held him there. Two orbits at five miles per second. Each orbit lasted about an hour and a half on the ISS. Three more hours. Given that his orbit would be below the station, it wouldn’t take quite as long. Maybe two and a half hours. That was a trip from Houston to Austin, except there were no views outside. He couldn’t watch Earth speed by as he could in the Cupola. Instead he was lodged between two dead men in a space smaller than a Volkswagen Beetle.
Clayton could play Jeopardy! again. He could avoid the obvious. Or he could take stock. He could relish the memories of his life. He could spend time talking to his wife and children, his parents, his twin.
He leaned his head back against the commander’s seat and closed his eyes.
“Jackie, I love you.” His voice cracked and he struggled to keep speaking. “I loved you when I met you. I love you more now. You are the one who holds onto me when I reach too high and lose my balance.”
Clayton couldn’t feel the inertia of the craft as it raced around the globe beneath it, but he was acutely aware of the tears pooling around his eyes, stuck there because of surface tension.
“I know you’ll be okay without me,” he said. “I’m the daredevil, but you’re the strong one. You always have been.” He blinked at the tears. “I remember that time we were driving across the desert. I think it was Arizona. Maybe it was Nevada. We were almost out of gas. I mean, we were on fumes. Just you and me in the middle of nowhere. The kids weren’t even a thought then. I don’t even think we were engaged yet.”
Clayton blinked away the tears and sniffled. “We passed the last gas station while you were sleeping. You woke up and were so upset I hadn’t stopped to fill up. I swear I could see your uvula flapping in your throat as you screamed at me. It got worse when I started laughing at you, promising you we’d be fine.”
Clayton checked an indicator on the panel and made sure the orbit looked good. All was fine as best he could tell.
“I tried to make it into a game. Counting down the miles to the next gas station while the dial kept dropping lower and lower. You were sitting there with your arms folded across your chest, grumbling and calling me every name in the book.”
Clayton opened his eyes and checked for any alarms or anomalies. The automated system was performing well.
“Then we ran out of gas,” he said. “We had no cell service. I thought your head might explode. Instead, you got scary calm. I was a little freaked out. You told me later that once we’d run out of gas, once the threat was gone and the reality set in, the time for complaining was over. It was time to get to work.”
Clayton let the notion soak for a moment. He hadn’t thought about that story in years, not since the last time Jackie reminded the children of their father’s brilliant idiocy.
It was the perfect story. He’d taken the risk without fear, bringing her along unwillingly into the abyss. She’d panicked at not having had a choice, but when the worst happened, she was the one who rose to the occasion. She was the hero.
“We walked three miles to the gas station. I apologized and tried to hold your hand. You rightfully resisted. You were the one who calmly filled the gas can. You were the one who arranged for the ride back to the car. You were the one who cleaned up my mess. When we got back to the car and I cranked the engine, you leaned over and planted a good one on me.”
Clayton’s heart skipped, thinking about that moment.
“I asked you why you kissed me when I’d left us stranded. You said it was because everything turned out okay. No harm, no foul. And you got in a good workout, so you could eat whatever you wanted for dinner. I think we had steak that night.”
Clayton wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to hold her, smell her hair as she clung to him. He wanted her to yell and scream at him. He wanted to hear her tell the story of his brilliant idiocy again and again. He couldn’t be certain of any of it as the Soyuz zipped silently toward its second orbit.
CHAPTER 14
SATURDAY, JANUARY 25, 2020, 4:00 PM CST
CLEAR LAKE, TEXAS
Jackie stopped pedaling and let her momentum push the wheels forward. It was a nice break from the hard ride back to the neighborhood. She hadn’t stopped pedaling since leaving the front gate at Johnson Space Center.
“I’m glad we didn’t see those punk teenagers on the way home,” said Candace as she pedaled next to Jackie. “I don’t think I could have outrun them a second time.”
Jackie agreed with a nod and sigh. She leaned forward in her seat, leaning her weight onto the handlebars, and started pedaling again.
Candace cranked her bike to keep pace. “You think we’ll see them again?”
Jackie wrung her hands on the grip. “Them or someone like them.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Just a gut feeling. They were so…uptight at JSC. Everyone’s so tense. It’s like this isn’t a temporary thing.”
“The power?”
“The power, the cars, the frustration.” Jackie leaned into a right turn, which brought her one street closer to home. “Everything. It’s been less than a day and it feels longer than that. It feels…”
“Darker?”
Jackie stopped pedaling and glided next to Candace. Her new friend had picked just the right word. “Yeah,” she said. “Darker.”
Jackie prayed she’d get home and see Rick Walsh’s Jeep in the driveway. It was a fantasy, she knew, but she could hope. She needed to have hope.
It was one thing to have her adult husband in space. It was another to have her young son incommunicado in what she believed to be a quickly devolving society. In such a short time, she’d gone from not worrying about her son’s safety to focusing on it.
The pair turned another corner and Jackie slowed the bike as the familiar, bitter smell of lingering smoke stung her nostrils. She pressed the brakes with her hands and then rose from her seat and planted her feet on the ground, skidding to a stop.
On the main loop, the road that led to her cul-de-sac, there were easily three times as many people milling around as there were when she left. It looked like Halloween night without the costumes or the candy. Or the fun.
“What is that about?” asked Candace. “Who are those people?”
The sun was setting. It would be dark in a half hour or less. It was hard to make out faces. “I don’t know,” she said.
“I’m new to the neighborhood and all,” Candace said, “but I don’t think they live here.”
“I don’t either,” said Jackie, flexing a leg and leaning the bike to one side.
“Should we check it out?”
“Probably wouldn’t hurt.” Jackie pushed forward on her bike and rolled past the entrance to her street. She looked to the end and her driveway where the cul-de-sac began. No Jeep. She pulled in a deep breath and turned her attention to the crowds ahead of her.
There were men there she didn’t know, but most of the people were women and children. They were carrying bags and backpacks. The closer Jackie got, the more the crowds looked like solicitors. They’d walk up and knock on doors or approach homeowners sitting in their driveways.
Jackie slowed in front of the Vickerses house. Pop and Na
ncy were still sitting in their chairs. The crowds had moved past them.
“What’s going on?” she asked, dismounting from her bike and rolling it up the driveway. “Who are they?”
Pop leaned forward in his chair and waited to speak until Jackie and Candace had gotten closer. Nancy’s arms were folded across her chest.
“They’re from the apartment complex a few blocks away,” Pop said. “They’re asking for handouts.”
Candace glanced over her shoulder at the closest group of people and lowered her voice. “Handouts?”
Nancy nodded. “Food. Water. Gasoline. Diapers. Like we’re a supermarket or something.”
“Now, Nancy,” Pop said, putting his hand on her knee. “They’re frightened. They’re unprepared. Like the rest of us, they don’t really know for certain what happened. I don’t blame them.”
“I don’t blame them,” she snapped under her breath, “but it bothers me they’d think we could help. It’s not as though we’re swimming in produce and nonperishables.”
Jackie watched a woman with two small children approach a neighbor across the street and three houses down. She was the last of the shoppers, as it were. Her bag was virtually empty. Jackie could tell by the way it easily swung back and forth on the woman’s arm.
She couldn’t hear the conversation, but she saw her neighbor hold up a finger. The woman knelt down as she waited, kissed both children on their foreheads, and then graciously accepted two cans of food. She almost genuflected with thanks before moving to the next house.
“It hasn’t even been a day,” said Candace. “They can’t be out of food or other things yet, can they?”
“They’re not out,” Jackie said. “They probably won’t run out for days. But they’re smart.”
“How do you figure?” asked Pop.
“With a hurricane or a flood, we know there’s an end in sight,” Jackie said. “We know we’ve got a week, maybe two, without power. Some of us can go to hotels. Others can go to shelters. Somewhere not far away there is power, and we know it’ll eventually come back on.”