Orbit

Chapter 16

It’s sunset when Kip awakens.

There are sixteen sunsets per day in low Earth orbit, and at first he has no idea which one he’s looking at as Intrepid flies backward, eastbound around the planet.

He glances at his watch, startled at how late it is back in California. He’s been asleep for hours, and it’s dark in Mojave, where he and the spacecraft should now be parked. He was supposed to be drinking champagne right now at a postflight party.

In sleep there were dreams he almost recalls, confused, kaleidoscopic, but dreams of his kids and meadows and for some reason a fast convertible that kept trying to get through a snow-covered pass in the Rockies with his father aboard.

But he’s pretty sure what he’s perceiving now is reality, and it sucks. All the excitement of being where he is, seeing what he’s seeing, floating in zero gravity, is ruined by the reality that he’s stranded and in grave danger.

He laughs, a short, loud expression of disgust. Danger? Is that what I’m in? Try doomed! Try dead!

Another small wave of buzzing dizziness passes over him and he realizes it has nothing to do with the zero gravity and his inner ear and vestibular balance system. It’s his mind working overtime to reject this reality, like a kid with his fingers in his ears mouthing “na-na-na-na-na!” as loud as possible to drown out unwanted information.

So, what, exactly, is going to kill me? Am I going to run out of food, water, oxygen? Maybe die of boredom?

Kip can’t believe he’s chuckling, but the chuckle is building to a laugh, and he’s laughing hard enough to draw tears.

That’s it. I’m going to die of boredom long before running out of air!

Ground school details are coming back, and he remembers the discussion about the air cycle machines and the fact that the life limit isn’t oxygen. It’s getting rid of carbon dioxide—the same problem that threatened the Apollo 13 crew.

So how long do I have? he wonders, attempting to keep the question clinical, ignoring his shaking hands.

It has to be written down somewhere, he thinks. Maybe in one of the checklists. He starts pawing through the nearest one, locating a table in the back in small print, a grid with the number of people aboard plotted against the capability of the CO₂ scrubbers.

Five days. One person, five days. So that’s it. In five days I’ll sit here and keel over from CO ₂poisoning. Probably not an unpleasant death.

At least, he figures, without communication he won’t have to listen to Sharon say, “I told you so.” That in itself is a blessing, but the forced joke falls flat and he finds himself reviewing the arrangements he’s made.

The life insurance will pay, and they’ll all be financially okay without him. Besides, even if there was no insurance, her well-heeled father wouldn’t let her go wanting. The house in Tucson will be paid off and there will be a million left to put into investments, so they can live off the interest. He’s left careful instructions.

The pragmatism evaporates, leaving his heart exposed, and he thinks about how eager he was to take this flight, and how right Sharon was to worry, and how much he misses his kids. The twins, Carly and Carrie, are barely five. Kip knows they’ll remember their father mostly from family videos and snapshots. He will easily be replaced, as long as Sharon can find an appropriately obedient male to dominate, someone who by definition will be good to the girls.

Julie, however, is thirteen, and losing her dad will be devastating. She’s bonded with Sharon, but never lost the effects of the trauma of her mother’s sudden death.

Thank God, Jerrod is on his own now. He’ll miss him the most, mainly because of the unfinished business between them, and the anger he’s never been able to defuse.

Some of Bill Campbell’s words return, something he said just before dying about their being in an orbit so stable they could stay up here for fifty or sixty years.

My God, Kip thinks, Jerrod will be almost eighty before this spacecraft falls into the atmosphere and my long-dead body burns up on reentry. How awful for Jerrod and the girls to know their dead father is flying by overhead every ninety minutes your entire life.

Or maybe it won’t happen that way. Surely some spacecraft will eventually be assigned to come open the hatch and see what happened, retrieve any data files from the computers and deal with the dead. Maybe then all they’ll do is give it a push toward Earth.

Or maybe he should just save everyone the trouble and when the air is all but unbreathable, just shoot himself out of the airlock with Bill’s body. The two of them would hardly be a flash in the sky on reentry… or would they just be floating alongside Intrepid for decades?

Strange, he thinks, that even death should be so meticulously planned.

Every couple of minutes he looks around as if rediscovering where he really is, and with each such moment the wave of depression breaks over him again, a rising tide drowning all hopes. He pushes the images of Sharon and his children out of his mind for now. The need to decide his own fate is far too strong, and he finds himself facing it with an unexpected equanimity.

Do I have any chance at all?

No rescue flight. They made that clear, but doesn’t ASA have another spacecraft? He remembers their talking about it—and the fact that it was damaged. Which is probably why the last-minute warning that there was no rescue potential if anything went wrong.

So the cavalry won’t be on the way.

Is there anything I can do?

He already knows the answer. He’s punched every button, read and reread the checklists ad nauseam, and it’s inescapable that the meteorite that killed Bill also took out the engine, or at least the ability to fire it.

No, face it, kiddo. We’re dead in five days. Period.

So, he wonders, how does one spend five remaining days on—or in his case, high above—the Earth? Not that the choices aren’t severely limited, but his mind is sharp, even if saddened and stressed and panicked.

He remembers the notes he was starting to write in the laptop. But no one’s going to read it… for at least a bunch of years. Maybe even sixty.

But surely someone will eventually find and download and study everything he puts on that hard drive. So maybe he should write a narrative and copyright it to his kids and grandkids, just in case the story could bring some money.

Who knows? he thinks . They pay ridiculous sums to read the stories of criminals and the seriously disgraced. Why not a dead dad from half a century before?

He remembers a fantasy he’s nurtured his entire life in which he owns a beautiful wooden-hulled sailing ship at least a hundred feet long with an incredible master cabin, several guest rooms, and a small, ornate, walnut-trimmed captain’s office. He sees himself every evening repairing to his little office to open a big, bound, blank notebook to write in a clear and ornate hand beautifully phrased passages about the day, his feelings, the state of the ship, and his life.

Every night, without fail! How wonderful that would be. Like being his own Greek chorus and his own reflective, calm, and intelligent critic.

But the image is too ludicrous a contrast to the reality of an overscheduled dad who has been known to fall asleep from exhaustion before even having a chance to brush his teeth.

Kip looks around, aware there’s not a scrap of wood aboard Intrepid, but finding sudden similarities between where he is and that mythical ship’s office—and his nightly journal. His imagination could panel the walls, especially now. And maybe he could even imagine the creak of heavy ropes and the slap of waves on the hull.

There’s no bound, blank book, but there is a laptop aboard.

And there will be an audience someday.

And there are five days left, which is a lot more than would be available to some poor soul T-boned to death at an intersection on the planet below.

The word “epitaph” comes to mind.