Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (11 page)

“Weird.” He looked at his watch. “You good? I need to finish pulling the carpet so your Mom and Seeana can refinish the floor.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

He vanished.

I considered going back for a jacket but decided the hoodie I was wearing would be enough. Before long, though, I regretted the choice. There weren’t any cabs cruising the streets so I asked a woman walking a dog. “Yeah. Your best bet would be to walk up to the Marriott City Center.” She pointed north. “Like three blocks that way. There’ll be cabs there.”

I was chilled by the time I got there and, before taking a cab, I went inside, found a restroom, and jumped home for my wool coat.

Seventeen minutes and twenty-five dollars later, the cab dropped me curbside at Terminal Two, Salt Lake City International Airport. I kept my hood up and my face down and picked an alcove behind the Starbucks at baggage claim five. There was a camera, but it was blocked by a sign directing people to ground transport.

Good enough.

*   *   *

The helmet was a polycarbonate fishbowl, a true sphere, sitting on a metal collar with through fittings which in turn terminated in a flange and seal.

“It was tested to hard vacuum,” Cory said.

“With a person in it?”

Cory tapped the fishbowl, “It did some time in the eleven-foot chamber at Johnson, on an experimental suit. It was an attempt to make a disposable suit—cheap enough to use once and discard. The suit design didn’t work out, but the helmet never failed.”

“How do you test it without a suit? And what do you mean by hard vacuum?”

“Hard vacuum is all over the place in the literature, but when I use it, I mean fractions of a pascal—the thermosphere and above.

“We test solitary helmets two different ways. One is to put them on a test stand and pressurize them to ten atmospheres. That’s effectively the difference between one atmosphere inside and a vacuum outside. The other method
is
in a vacuum—in a chamber on a sealed test flange—one atmosphere inside, vacuum outside. We did both on this.”

“And it passed?”

“To one atmosphere.” He jabbed his thumb toward the suit stand at the end of the bench. “
We
only need a third of that four-point-nine psi, for the MCP suit.”

“Where’s your life support?”

He tilted his head. “Pardon?”

“What are your test subjects going to
breathe
?”

“Oh. You run an O
2
line, on a pressure regulator set to four point nine psi, and absorb the CO
2
with soda lime or lithium hydroxide in the helmet. We could just purge the CO
2
but that would contaminate the vacuum.”

“Contaminate? A bit of oxygen and CO
2
is going to contaminate your pristine vacuum?”

“Contaminate as in ‘pressurize.’ The vacuum pumps are good, but you purge the helmet and you probably raise the pressure several pascals, and it will take a bit of time to pump it back down. You want consistent vacuum for the tests.”

“Could you run the O
2
from a tank, instead?”

“It
was
run from a tank.”

“I mean a tank on the suit.”

“Oh, sure, no difference.”

“And could you run
that
in space?”

“Just a tank and some absorbent?” He frowned. “You’d want something more robust than that, with backups. That’s not my area of research, really. Just needed them able to breathe for my tests. But spaceworthy life support? Well, NASA has already done thousands of hours of EVA—they’ve got it wired.”

He wasn’t getting my point. “When will NASA test your suit in orbit, Cory?”

And when will NASA give
me
a spacesuit?

He frowned. “The design needs to be proven. It has to be tested in chambers and refined. I’ve got to solve the closure problem.”

“I see,” I said. “You want to contribute to the space program. You’ve got the long view. You’re thinking about a push to Mars within the next twenty years.”

“Well, yeah.”

I leaned in and locked eyes with him, causing him to lean back, a bit alarmed.

“Cory, you give me a working helmet and an hour of breathable air and I’ll test your suit in orbit
this week
.”

His eyes widened and he licked his lips.

I said, “I’m fine with advancing the state of technology for NASA
and
every other space program, but I’m not waiting to buy a ticket. The difference between you and me is that you’re depending on
their
space program—” I pointed at him and then jerked my thumb back at myself. “—while I’m making my
own
.

“You want to come along?”

*   *   *

The weekend had gone well for Tara and Jade, though Jade didn’t want Tara to go back. They were more clingy than they’d been on Friday, if that was possible.

“Decide,” I said. “Tara’s mom is probably passing through Provo, now. When she gets to the airport and Tara doesn’t show, I’m not the one who’s going to call her. Pretty sure you’ll get some interesting calls from
both
sets of parents.”

Jade rolled her eyes and reluctantly let go of Tara.

I made Tara buy me a hot chocolate at the baggage-claim Starbucks at Salt Lake City International and hung around while she checked in with her mom by phone.

“Hey, Mom. I’m here … yeah, not for another hour, but the flight got in early to Chicago and they had an earlier flight just leaving and overbooking issues on my scheduled flight so they asked if I’d switch. No problem. I have a book. Just let me know when you’re about to get here and I’ll be curbside.”

She stuck her tongue out at me and disconnected.

“I could’ve stayed with Jade another forty-five minutes!”

“Your mom could’ve been early, too. You guys decide about Europe?”

“She’s going to try and sell it to her parents. You can really get me to Paris?”

“
Mais oui, enfant.
A lot easier than it was to get you
here.
”

“Okay. She’s selling it to her parents—her dad’s onboard with it already. If her mom stops with the objections, I’ll join them the second week of their trip. A week and a half in Europe wouldn’t suck.”

“Okay. You good? I’d keep you company, but I have to go get some calcium hydroxide.”

“You need calcium? Remember to take vitamin D with. It improves absorption.”

I laughed. “I’ll keep that in mind.” I doubted that vitamin D would help calcium hydroxide absorb more carbon dioxide, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to try and swallow any.

I left from a bathroom stall around the corner.

*   *   *

This was the deal:

I would provide the required parts and materials and wait until Cory rigged up a pressure-sensor onesie so we could test whether we were getting thirty kilopascals evenly over my body. In return, he would create a life-support pack I could use in orbit.

Not that we didn’t argue about some of the details.

“Do you know how much lithium hydroxide costs?” I’d said after five minutes online. “Why can’t we just use diving-grade soda lime? Isn’t that what you were going to use in the chamber tests?”

Cory was working on the sensor onesie, sewing the ends of flexible strain gauges onto a dancer unitard. “Too heavy,” he said without looking up. “The price difference is negligible compared to how much it costs to get it out of the gravity well.”

I shook my head. His habits of thought were still locked into the old system. I said, mildly, “How much does it cost NASA to get something into orbit?”

“With the Falcon Heavy, the rate has dropped to a thousand bucks per pound and that’s the cheapest rate to date. So you see, it’s worth it to go with lithium hydroxide for the scrubber. It’s forty percent lighter.”

“Cory, how much does it cost
me
to get something into orbit?”

He looked up from the work. “
Oh
. I don’t know. I don’t know if you
can
get into orbit.”

I felt like punching him. I held up my arm, exposing the scab. “I can get a lot farther toward orbit than
you
can.”

All right, maybe
I
wasn’t so sure either, but the suit was the roadblock to finding out.

He nodded. “I guess.”

“But the important thing, is, no matter how far up I get, it won’t cost us any more than we’ve already spent. We have the suit, we have the helmet, and it’s pretty trivial to rig air. Even if I’m limited to fifty pounds of cargo, my cost to orbit is effectively zero dollars per pound.”

“What? Even just going by the material costs of the prototype, that’s not true. I’ve got over forty K in the EAP fibers alone. Call it twice that for the whole rig. That’s still sixteen hundred bucks per pound.”

“But if this works, I can go to orbit
more than once
, Cory, with no further expenses. I’ll be able to go to orbit over and over again, as long as the suit lasts. These are capital costs, not operating expenses. If you’re going to count them against the size of the payload, you need to multiply the size by the number of payloads.”

Cory shook his violently as if to clear it.

“Whoa. That’s so weird.” He exhaled sharply then took two slow breaths. “Weight has always been a priority in this field, a major consideration in all design choices. Even the MCP suit was partly an answer to the problem of heavy, bulky EV suits.”

“So, are you okay with soda lime? According to that chart you gave me, even with moderate exertion, two kilograms will give us over five hours. And the at-rest metabolic rate would give us over twenty hours.”

He came over and said, “Show me your numbers.”

I pointed at the online data sheet. “One hundred fifty liters of CO
2
per kilogram of absorbent. The chart says a person would discharge fifty-eight point six liters per hour at a walk, fourteen point four liters per hour at rest. So, two kilos is three hundred liters divided by all that.”

“Where are your calculations?”

“Pardon? Nearly sixty goes into three hundred five times—five hours. And fourteen point four is less than a quarter of that, so four times five—twenty hours. Basic math.”

His lips moved and I realized he was doing the numbers in his head like I had. “Okay. We can use soda lime, but I want a spreadsheet, not approximations in your head.”

“Don’t trust my math?”

He held his lower lip between his teeth. “It doesn’t matter,” he finally said. “It’s not the probability of you being wrong—it’s the
consequences
of you being wrong.”

“Cory, I can be back on the ground
instantly
. I’m probably the safest test subject you could have.”

He shook his head sharply. “If you
noticed
. The first symptom of CO
2
toxicity is drowsiness. Understand?”

I could tell he was serious, even a bit upset.

“Sure, Cory. A spreadsheet. And checked separately on paper and with a calculator.”

“By more than one person.”

“Okay.” I smiled. “Nice to know you care.”

He blushed. “Well, uh, wouldn’t want to lose the suit.”

“Sure, Cory. Sure.”

*   *   *

Two days later, Cory finished wiring the pressure-sensor onesie. He calibrated each sensor using weights to exert known pressures, adjusting them in his monitoring program, then he went back and checked them all again, using weights of different sizes.

“Satisfied?” I asked when he finally stopped.

He shrugged. “I guess. This is how I calibrated the life-model pressure sensor and that worked out.” He glanced at me. “I hope.”

I jumped back to the Yukon to put it on. I had to be careful not to snag any of the wires or the multiplexor box where it clipped to the collar of the unitard. I returned, feeling like some kind of android, and jumped into the relaxed MCP suit.

Cory hooked up the multiplexor before tightening the suit, checking the readings. “Got the gravity thing happening on the soles of your feet, but pretty negligible right now everywhere else. Let’s do it.”

He reduced the voltage even slower than he had the first time, anxious not to snag any of the strain-gauge wires, but in less than a minute he’d reduced it all the way and the suit was squeezing down on my skin again.

“Feel all right?” He wasn’t even looking at me when he asked, his gaze moving to the readouts on the laptop.

“Feels fine, Cory. How’s it looking?”

“Average is good, but there’s a low reading below twenty-seven thousand eight hundred.” He was scrolling down through the individual readouts. “Huh, right armpit. Lift your arm, please.”

I raised my right arm and rotated the shoulder.

“That’s got it. Might have been twisted or there was a fold of cloth, but it’s above thirty-one now. Lower it.”

I did so and he nodded in satisfaction. “Good, excellent. Let’s do some yoga.”

It wasn’t really yoga, but it involved me standing in various poses: crouching, bent over at the waist, reaching up, reaching down, sitting, crawling, kneeling. Then we cycled the suit, relaxing it completely, then back to tight again, and did it all over.

Cory was pleased. “It’s good. Pretty much what we expected.”

“Well,
I
expected it,” I said. “You didn’t seem so confident.”

He shrugged. “I thought we had a pretty good chance, but I wasn’t willing to proceed without checking.”

“So, orbital, yes?”

“Whoa. So now we need to test the neck gasket.”

The latex neck gasket sealed into the suit’s helmet flange and clung to the neck like a turtleneck. Its job was to keep the helmet’s air pressure from leaking out past the neck, and through the weave of the EAP fibers. You wanted the body’s sweat to outgas past the fabric, but not your breathing air.

Even before you pressurize the helmet, it is squeezing on your neck. It doesn’t quite interfere with breathing or blood flow, but for the first five minutes after you put it on, you get the feeling someone is gently choking you to death.

With the polycarbonate fishbowl helmet locked on me, Cory slowly pressurized it with a compressed air tank, first to 1 psi. As the air pressure in the helmet increased, it pressed the latex seal against my skin more uniformly, improving the seal. After 1 psi seemed to be holding, he increased the pressure in one psi intervals until we were at our operating pressure: 4.9 psi.