Gravity (21 page)

Burning down their first office. And now, taking their only pilot of commission. He paced the waiting room, thinking, Nothing has ever gone right for us. They’d invested all their combined savings, their reputations, and the last thirteen years of their lives.

God’s way of telling them to give up. To cut their losses before something really bad happened.

“He was drunk,” said Bridget.

Casper halted and turned to look at her. She stood with her arms grimly crossed, her red hair like the flaming halo of an avenging angel.

“The doctors told me,” she said. “Blood alcohol level of point one nine. As pickled as a herring. This isn’t just our usual bad luck. This is our own dear Sully fucking up again. My only consolation that for the next six weeks, he’s gonna have a big tube stuck up his dick.”

Without a word, Casper walked out of the visitors’ waiting room, headed up the hall, and pushed into Sullivan’s hospital room. “You moron,” he said.

Sully looked up at him with morphine-glazed eyes. “Thanks for the sympathy.”

“You don’t deserve any. Three weeks before launch and you pull some goddamn Chuck Yeager stunt in the desert? Why didn’t you just finish the job? Splatter your brains while you were at it? Hell, we wouldn’t have known the difference!” Sully closed his eyes.

“I’m sorry.”

“You always are.”

“I screwed up. I know…”

“You promised them a manned flight. It wasn’t my idea, it was yours. Now they’re expecting it. They’re excited about it. When was the last time any investor was excited about us? This could have made the difference. If you’d just kept the bottle corked—”

“I was scared.”

Sully had spoken so softly Casper wasn’t sure he’d heard him right.

“What?” he said.

“About the launch. Had a … bad feeling.” A bad feeling. Slowly Casper sank into the bedside chair, all his anger instantly dissolving.

Fear is not something a man readily admits to. The fact that Sully, who regularly courted destruction, would confess to being afraid left Casper feeling shaken.

And, at last, sympathetic.

“You don’t need me for the launch,” said Sully.

“They expect to see a pilot climb into that cockpit.”

“You could put a goddamn monkey in my seat and they’d never know the difference. She doesn’t need a pilot, Cap. You can all the commands from the ground.” Casper sighed. They had no choice now, it would have to be an unmanned flight. Clearly they had a valid excuse not to launch Sully, but would the investors accept it? Or would they believe, instead, that Apogee had lost its nerve? That it lacked the confidence to risk a human life?

“I guess I just lost my nerve,” said Sully softly. “Got to last night. Couldn’t stop…” Casper understood his partner’s fear—the way he understood how one defeat can lead inexorably to another and then another until the only certainty in a man’s life is failure. No wonder he was scared, he had lost faith in their dream. In Apogee.

Maybe they all had.

Casper said, “We can still make this launch work. Even without a monkey in the cockpit.”

“Yeah. You could send up Bridget instead.”

“Then who’d answer the phones?”

“The monkey.” Both men laughed. They were like two old soldiers, mustering up a shred of cheer on the eve of certain defeat.

“So we’re gonna do it?” said Sully. “We’re gonna launch?”

“That was the whole idea of building a rocket.”

“Well, then.” Sully took a deep breath, and a ghost of the old bravado returned to his face. “Let’s do it right. Press release the wire services. One mother of a tent party with champagne. Hell, invite my sainted brother and his NASA pals. If she blows on the pad, at least we’ll go outta business in style.”

“Yeah. We always had an excess of style.” They grinned.

Casper rose to leave. “Get better, Sully,” he said. “We’ll need you for Apogee III.”

He found Bridget still sitting in the visitors’ waiting room. “So what happens now?” she said.

“We launch on schedule.”

“Unmanned?”

He nodded. “We fly her from the control room.”

To his surprise, she huffed out a sigh of relief. “Hallelujah!”

“What’re you so happy about? Our man’s laid up in a hospital bed.”

“Exactly.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and turned to leave.

“It means he won’t be up there to fuck things up.”

Nicolai Rudenko floated in the air lock, watching as Luther wriggled his hips into the lower torso assembly of the EVA suit.

To the diminutive Nicolai, Luther was an exotic giant, with those broad shoulders and legs like pistons. And his skin! While Nicolai had turned pasty during his months aboard ISS, Luther was still a deep and polished brown, a startling contrast to the pale faces that inhabited their otherwise colorless world. Nicolai had already suited up, and now he hovered beside Luther, ready to assist his partner into the EVA suit’s upper torso assembly. They said little to each other, neither man was in the mood for idle chatter.

The two of them had spent a mostly conversationless night sleeping in the air lock, allowing their bodies to adjust to an atmospheric pressure of 10.2 pounds per square inch—two thirds that of the space station. The pressure in their suits would be less, at 4.3. The suits could not be inflated any higher, or they would be too stiff and bulky, the joints impossible to flex.

Going directly from a fully pressurized spacecraft into the lower air pressure of an EVA suit was like surfacing too fast from the depths of the ocean. An astronaut could suffer the bends. Nitrogen bubbles formed in the blood, clogging capillaries, cutting off precious oxygen to the brain and spinal cord. The consequences could be devastating, paralysis and stroke. Like deep-sea divers, to give their bodies time to adjust to the changing pressures. The night before a space walk, the EVA crew washed out their lungs with a hundred percent oxygen and shut themselves into the air lock for “the camp-out.” For hours they were trapped together in a small chamber already crammed full of equipment. It was not a place for claustrophobics.

With his arms extended over his head, Luther squirmed into the suit’s hard-shelled upper torso, which was mounted on the air lock wall. It was an exhausting dance, like wriggling into an impossibly small tunnel. At last his head popped out through the hole, and Nicolai helped him close the waist ring, sealing the halves of the suit.

They put on their helmets. As Nicolai looked down to fit his helmet to the torso assembly, he noticed something glistening on the rim of the suit’s neck ring. Just spittle, he thought, and put on the helmet. They donned their gloves. Sealed into their suits, they opened the equipment lock hatch, floated into the adjoining crew lock, and shut the hatch behind them. They were now in an even smaller compartment, barely large enough to contain both the men and their bulky life-support backpacks.

Thirty minutes of “prebreathe” came next. While they inhaled pure oxygen, purging their blood of any last nitrogen, Nicolai floated with his eyes closed, mentally preparing for the space ahead. If they could not get the beta gimbal assembly to unlock, they could not reorient the solar panels toward the sun, they be starved for power. Crippled. What Nicolai and Luther accomplished in the next six hours could well determine the fate of the space station.

Though this responsibility weighed heavily on his tired shoulders, Nicolai was anxious to open the hatch and float out of the lock. To go EVA was like being reborn, the fetus emerging from that small, tight opening, the umbilical restraint dangling as swims out into the vastness of space. Were the situation not so grave, he would be looking forward to it, would be giddily anticipating the freedom of floating in a universe without walls, dazzling blue earth spinning beneath him.

But the images that came to mind, as he waited with his eyes closed for the thirty minutes to pass, were not of spacewalking. What he saw instead were the faces of the dead. He imagined Discovery as she plunged from the sky. He saw the crew, strapped into their seats, bodies shaken like dolls, spines snapping, hearts exploding. Though Mission Control had not told them the details of the catastrophe, the nightmarish visions filled his head, made his heart pound, his mouth turn dry.

“Your thirty minutes are up, guys,” came Emma’s voice over the intercom.

“Time for depress.” Hands clammy with sweat, Nicolai opened his eyes and saw Luther start the depressurization pump. The air was being sucked out, the pressure in the crew lock slowly dropping. If there was a leak in their suits, they would now detect it.

“A-OK?” asked Luther, checking the latches on their umbilical tethers.

“I am ready.” Luther vented the crew lock atmosphere to space. Then he released the handle and pulled open the hatch.

The last air hissed out.

They paused for a moment, clutching the side of the hatch, staring out in awe. Then Nicolai swam out, into the blackness of space.

“They’re coming out now,” said Emma, watching on closed-circuit TV as the two men emerged from the crew lock, umbilical tethers trailing after them. They removed tools from the storage box outside the airlock. Then, pulling themselves from handhold to handhold, they made their way toward the main truss. As they passed by the camera mounted just under the truss, Luther gave a wave.

“You watching the show?” came his voice over the UHF audio system.

“We see you fine on external camera,” said Griggs. “But your EMU cameras aren’t feeding in.”

“Nicolai’s too?”

“Neither one. We’ll try to track down the problem.”

“Okay, well, we’re heading up onto the truss to check out the damage.” The two men moved out of the first camera’s range. For a moment they disappeared from view. Then Griggs said, “There they are,” and pointed to a new screen, where the space-suited were moving toward the second camer’s propelling themselves hand over hand along the top of the truss.

Again they passed out range. They were now in the blind zone of the damaged camera and could no longer be seen.

“Getting close, guys?” asked Emma.

“Almost—almost there,” said Luther, sounding short of breath.

Slow down, she thought. Pace yourselves.

For what seemed like an endless wait, there was only silence from the EVA crew. Emma felt her pulse quicken, her anxiety rising. The station was already crippled and starved for power.

Nothing must go wrong with these repairs. If only Jack was here, she thought. Jack was a talented tinkerer who could rebuild any boat engine or cobble together a shortwave radio from junkyard scraps. In orbit, the most valuable tools are a clever pair of hands.

“Luther?” said Griggs.

There was no answer.

“Nicolai? Luther? Please respond.”

“Shit,” said Luther’s voice.

“What is it? What do you see?” said Griggs.

“I’m looking at the problem right now, and man, it’s a mess. The whole P-6 end of the main truss is twisted around. Discovery must’ve clipped the 2-B array and bent that end right up. Then she swung over and snapped off the S-band antennas.”

“What do you think? Can you fix anything?”

“The S-band’s no problem. We got an ORU for the antennas, and we’ll just replace ‘em. But the port-side solar arrays—forget it. We need a whole new truss on that end.”

“Okay.” Wearily Griggs rubbed his face. “Okay, so we’re definitely down one PVM. I guess we can deal with that. But we must reorient the P-4 arrays, or we’re screwed.” There was a pause as Luther and Nicolai headed back along the main truss. Suddenly they were in camera range, Emma saw them moving slowly past in their bulky suits and enormous backpacks, like deep-sea divers moving through water. They stopped at the P-4 arrays. One of the men floated down the side of the truss and at the mechanism joining the enormous solar wings to the truss backbone.

“The gimbal assembly is bent,” said Nicolai. “It cannot turn.”

“Can you free it up?” asked Griggs.

They heard a rapid exchange of dialogue between Luther and Nicolai. Then Luther said, “How elegant do you want this repair be?”

“Whatever it takes. We need the juice soon, or we’re in trouble, guys.”

“I guess we can try the body shop approach.” Emma looked at Griggs.

“Does that mean what I think it means?”

It was Luther who answered the question. “We’re gonna get out a hammer and bang this sucker back into shape.” He was still alive.

Dr. Isaac Roman gazed through the viewing window at his unfortunate colleague, who was sitting in a hospital bed watching TV. Cartoons, believe it or not. The Nickelodeon channel, which the patient stared at with almost desperate concentration. He didn’t even glance at the space-suited nurse who’d come into the room to remove the untouched lunch tray.

Roman pressed the intercom button. “How are you feeling today, Nathan?”

Dr. Nathan Helsinger turned his startled gaze to the viewing window, and for the first time noticed that Roman was standing on the other side of the glass. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly healthy.”

“You have no symptoms whatsoever?”

“I told you, I’m fine.” Roman studied him for a moment. The man looked healthy enough, but his face was pale and tense. Scared.

“When can I come out of isolation?” said Helsinger.

“It’s been scarcely thirty hours.”

“The astronauts had symptoms by eighteen hours.”

“That was in microgravity. We don’t know what to expect here, and we can’t take chances. You know that.”

Abruptly Helsinger turned to stare at the TV again, but not before Roman saw the flash of tears in his eyes. “It’s my daughter’s birthday today.”

“We sent a gift in your name. Your wife was informed you couldn’t make it. That you’re on a plane to Kenya.” Helsinger gave a bitter laugh.

“You do tie up those loose ends well, don’t you? And what if I die? What will you tell her?”

“That it happened in Kenya.”

“As good a place as any, I suppose.” He sighed. “So what did you get her?”

“Your daughter? I believe it was a Dr. Barbie.”

“That’s exactly what she wanted. How did you know?”

Roman’s cell phone rang. “I’ll check back on you later,” he said, then turned from the window to answer the phone.

“Dr. Roman, this is Carlos. We’ve got some of the DNA results. You’d better come up and see this.”

“I’m on my way.”

He found Dr. Carlos Mixtal sitting in front of the lab computer.

Data was scrolling down the monitor in a continuous stream, CTGT … The data was made up of only four letters, G, T, A, and C. It was a nucleotide sequence, and each of the letters represented the building blocks that make up DNA, the genetic blueprint for all living organisms.

Carlos turned at the sound of Roman’s footsteps, and the expression on his face was unmistakable. Carlos looked scared Just like Helsinger, Roman thought. Every one is scared.

Roman sat down beside him. “Is that it?” he asked, pointing at the screen.

“This is from the organism infecting Kenichi Hirai. We took it from the remains that we were able to … scrape from the Discovery.” Remains was the appropriate word for what was left of Hirai’s body. Ragged clumps of tissue, splattered throughout the walls of the orbiter. “Most of the DNA remains unidentifiable. We have no idea what it codes for. But this particular sequence, here on the screen, we can identify. It’s the gene for coenzyme F420.”

“Which is?”

“An enzyme specific to the Archaeon domain.”

Roman sat back, feeling faintly nauseated. “So it’s confirmed,” he murmured.

“Yes. The organism definitely has Archaeon DNA.” Carlos paused. “I’m afraid there’s bad news.”

“What do you mean, bad news’? Isn’t this bad enough?”

Carlos tapped on the keyboard and the nucleotide sequence scrolled to a different segment. “This is another gene cluster we found. I thought at first it had to be a mistake, but I’ve since confirmed it. It’s a match with Rana pipiens. The northern frog.”

“What?”

“That’s right. Lord knows how it picked up frog genes. Now here’s where it gets really scary.” Carlos scrolled to yet another segment of the genome. “Another identifiable cluster,” he said.

Roman felt a chill creeping up his spine. “And what are these genes?”

“This DNA is specific to Mus musculis. The common mouse.”

Roman stared at him. “That’s impossible.”

“I’ve confirmed it. This life-form has somehow incorporated mammalian DNA into its genome. It’s added new enzymatic capabilities. It’s changing. Evolving.”

Into what? Roman wondered.

“There’s more.” Again Carlos tapped on the keyboard, and a new sequence of nucleotide bases scrolled onto the monitor. “This cluster is not of Archaeon origin, either.”

“What is this? More mouse DNA?”

“No. This part is human.” The chill shot all the way up Roman’s spine.

The hairs on the back of his neck were bristling. Numbly he reached for the telephone.

“Connect me to the White House,” he said. “I need to speak to Jared Profitt.”

His call was answered on the second ring. “This is Profitt.”

“We’ve analyzed the DNA,” said Roman.

“And?”

“The situation is worse than we thought.”

Nicolai paused to rest, his arms trembling from fatigue. After months of living in space, his body had grown weak and unaccustomed to physical labor. In microgravity there is no heavy and little need to exert one’s muscles. In the last five hours, and Luther had worked nonstop, had repaired the S-band antennas, had dismantled and reassembled the gimbal.

Now he was exhausted. Just the extra effort of bending his arms in the turgid EVA suit made simple tasks difficult.

Working in the suit was an ordeal in itself. To insulate the human body from extreme temperatures ranging from -250 to 250 degrees Fahrenheit and to maintain pressure against the vacuum of space, the suit was constructed of multiple layers of aluminized Mylar insulation, nylon ripstop, an Ortho-fabric cover, and a pressure-garment bladder. Beneath the suit, an astronaut wore an undergarment laced with water-cooling tubes. He also had to wear a life-support backpack containing water, oxygen, self-rescue jet pack, and radio equipment. In essence, the EVA suit was a personal spacecraft, bulky and difficult to maneuver in, and just the act of tightening a screw required strength and concentration.

The work had exhausted Nicolai. His hands were cramping in the clumsy space suit gloves, and he was sweating.

He was also hungry.