Orbit

Chapter 37

Like a gathering of pallbearers, Diana thinks as she glances at the stricken faces of those standing outside Richard DiFazio’s office. Richard hangs up the phone and motions them in, most electing to stand, hands thrust deep in pockets, eyes downcast at the latest message from Kip.

Diana finds the couch and sits, sensing their immense frustration.

“We’ve thought through everything we know, boss,” Arleigh begins. “Using a laser to blink Morse code at him was about the last, most desperate suggestion. But there’s no way to tell him no fewer than two spacecraft are trying to get off their pads to reach him.”

“He’s going to die trying to spacewalk, right?” Richard asks.

The deeply weary breath Arleigh Kerr draws and exhales seems to answer the question.

“Not necessarily. We taught him—we teach all of them—the basics about a spacewalk. If he can’t get the suit on and get it inflated and tested to a green light status, he probably won’t try it.”

“But if he does?”

“There’s no way this guy can fix a spacecraft, and he doesn’t have a hand thruster, so if he forgets to connect his tether, he’ll… just float away. Or he’ll tear his suit and die trying.”

“Or he’ll just spend his final hour outside on purpose,” Richard adds, speaking their collective thoughts. “I know I probably would. With Bill’s body inside getting ripe and all.”

“Well, the view’s going to be better out there,” Arleigh agrees.

“So, bottom line, there’s no chance for him outside, and even if he succeeds in not floating off, there’s no way he can fix the ship. Right?”

Several of the men shrug and Arleigh voices the response. “We don’t have any idea what it would take to repair the ship, but the chances are slim to none. Anyway, if we figure an hour for him to get ready past the time he stopped typing, he should be heading for the airlock now. That means about one and a half hours and he’ll either be dead or back inside and typing again.”

Kip floats out of the airlock the same way he got in: head and shoulders first, checking to make sure the tether is tight before turning around and facing the surface of the Earth passing below without the constraint of Intrepid’s tiny windows.

Oh my God!

Words are failing him, even in his mind. With almost a hundred-and-eighty-degree view from his helmet, he’s simply flying along, his own satellite, as part of Texas slides along soundlessly beneath him. Only the fans and the small hiss of the air supply break the silence, and he turns starward, shocked by the moon hovering clear and bright above. For the longest time he just stares, floating, flying, incredulous, and wishing he’d done this days before.

No point in going back inside, he figures. What a way to leave! Thank you, God, for this chance!

He can see the Gulf Coast below, along with New Orleans, and thinks fondly of the times he’s enjoyed the chicory coffee and beignets with their snowstorm of powdered sugar at Cafe du Monde, in spite of being ignored by the waiters.

Pensacola is visible to the east, as is Panama City, which triggers a few more memories. A line of thunderstorms is marching toward Atlanta to the north and he can see lightning flashing, noiselessly visible from space. Not as impressive as the thunderstorms he’s seen over Africa in the darkness, lightning pulsing away over a thousand miles as if the storms were communicating in bursts. But the storms near Atlanta are impressive enough.

Nothing can prepare you for the magnificence of this! he thinks, wishing he still had the laptop in front of him and the ability to share this, too, with the distant future.

He knows there’s a depressurization safety sequence to be followed in order to blow the suit when it’s time. Or he can just cut off the oxygen. But he thinks a sudden depressurization might be better and quicker. The suit has approximately an hour and a half of air, and then the options expire. So he’ll have one and a half hours to take all this in and…

Whoa, I came out here to check the tires, he recalls, pulling on the tether to rotate back toward Intrepid and move in from where he’s been floating five feet away.

He sees no indication of meteor damage near the door, so he begins pulling himself upward and over the top of the spacecraft. But there are no handholds and suddenly he’s floating up and away slowly with no choice but to pull on the tether, which starts him back toward the door.

Kip floats motionless by the open hatch, while he figures out how to get to the other side. As far as he can tell, there is no handheld thruster to propel him, and no handholds on the fuselage to hang on to. But he has a tether at least as long as the spacecraft, and the nose is only fifteen or so feet in front of the hatch.

Kip uses the open door as a launching pad for propelling himself along the fuselage toward the nose. He waits until he’s just abeam of the tip of the nose before looping the tether over the top of the fuselage and around like a rodeo cowboy throwing a rope. With the line now going over the top from the door and coming back to him under the chin of the nose, he tightens his grip and pulls, letting his shoulder bounce off the left side of the nose. Suddenly he’s floating back toward the door, and he uses the structure to stop himself and turn upside down before starting to pull himself around beneath the fuselage using the tether that’s now snaking over the top and around the bottom. Carefully, making sure to keep his speed and momentum as slow and controllable as possible, he comes around to the right side and finds what he’s been looking for.

A hole approximately three inches wide of flared metal and fiberglass sits just next to where an inspection panel has been blown away, providing access inside. The cavity is just behind the point where the pressure bulkhead divides the livable capsule inside from the service areas behind. He carefully touches one of the edges, closing his fingers around it to stop his drift. There are wires visible just inside. He can see a major wiring bundle slit in half by whatever hit them as it exited the side at a shallow angle.

No wonder the engine wouldn’t fire!

He stares at the damage, wondering whether to just go back, or try for a closer look.

The small tool kit in the leg pocket of his suit contains a knife and electrical tape, both on tethers of their own. Overcoming the momentary urge to just give up and return inside, he begins assembling what he thinks he’ll need as he floats to one side of the hole. He places the knife beside him and lets go, marveling at how it just sits there in mid-space gyrating slightly with each tug of the tether, its own tiny little satellite. He supposes if he disconnected it and batted it down toward Earth, it would eventually deorbit and burn up. But right now it’s obediently staying more or less where he wants it.

The severed wiring is chaotic, but as he looks more closely, he can count perhaps twenty actual wires completely cut and others merely grazed.

Okay, suppose I treat this like speaker wire? Is there color coding? Yes! Look at that! Red, orange, and green stripes go to whatever else has red, orange, and green stripes. I’ll probably run out of air before I can get them all, but what the hell.

He secures himself with his left hand, which is holding both the edge of the hole and the wire, working inside the hole and letting the knife blade bite into the insulation around the first cut wire, scraping it away neatly before finding the other end and doing the same. Twisting them together and taping off the result is incredibly awkward in the inflated gloves and the worry about slicing open his suit on the jagged edge of the hole is great, but he keeps each movement under tight control and slowly works through each of the wires, going faster as he gets more familiar with the bulky gloves.

There is intense heat from the sun’s unfiltered rays on his left side and he remembers to change position to keep from overwhelming the suit, which is getting warm inside.

The suit’s control panel is showing twenty minutes of air left by the time he finishes splicing every wire for which he can locate a mate. He folds and replaces the knife and the tape, before pulling himself back over the top to the open airlock door, where he stops to make a critical decision.

It would be so much more meaningful to die out here, he thinks. Just a button push. But, if I do, I’ll never know if the repairs have changed anything. Is there any chance the radios could be working now and I could reach someone?

And what if, somehow, he’s reconnected the rocket?

No! he cautions himself. Don’t rekindle all your hopes! No way the engine is going to light off. That requires a professional. The best I can hope for is that somehow I’ve bumped something the right way and restored space-ground communications. But as long as I’m floating here trolling for meteors, I’ll never know.

Five more minutes, Kip decides, drinking in the view as the terminator slips by below, just past the Red Sea, and he watches the glow from what he decides must be the Saudi Arabian desert city of Riyadh sitting like a twinkling, grounded star against the darkness of the desert to the east.

He knows by now that the retrofire point—should he need it—is just under an hour away, which means that even if he decides to test the rocket motor, he’ll have to wait for that window. Not that anything is going to happen.

But he does feel the tiniest glimmer of hope.

Okay, he decides. Let’s get back in, and once I’m sure nothing’s going to change, I’ll come back out and end it here.