AMERICA ONE (33 page)

VIN had been floating in space for nearly twenty-four hours now and was getting used to it. In a drawer in a storage compartment, he found large metal slip-on shoes with straps. His “feet” would fit into them and he realized that the entire craft was far bigger than their cramped quarters in the shuttle cockpit; it was time to move in.

He returned to the control module and checked all the dials. They were the same as twenty minutes earlier and all the lights on the console were still green.

“Jonesy, it is showing safe to live in here. Shall we open the hatches all the way through? Ryan said that the connection tube would be as safe as the rest of the two craft, once both systems were working.”

“Good idea. Open the first hatch from your end, if the tube lights stay green, I will open the shuttle’s inner hatch.”

VIN opened the hatch and then waited.

“Still green,” Jonesy said. “Hold on, one is flickering, so is the second one. The first light has suddenly turned orange. OK, it has changed back to green. Now the third one has turned orange. I think that must be the air pressure warning light.”

“I think so,” replied VIN. “The third light in here has gone to orange. I would assume that the air pressure must have dropped to fill the connection tube with air. Two of mine are now green.”

“It’s getting better here, too,” replied Jonesy. “I have two greens and one orange. Great! I have three greens, I’m opening my hatch.” He did so and nothing much happened. All the lights stayed green and both men sighed with relief.

Jonesy left the hatch open and without his suit on glided through the open connection port and, smiling at VIN, grabbed the frozen bottle out of the space-suited younger man’s hand. Jonesy let the bottle float and helped his partner off with his helmet.

VIN thought the first breath of space station air was like breathing straight out of a scuba cylinder; the air had a sort of metal taste, but it was breathable. The temperature was colder outside than his warm suit, and slowly they got his top part off. The process wasn’t easy as both men were floating around the command module like two convulsing birds in flight Then VIN remembered the metal shoes. He told Jonesy to follow him and like two aircraft in formation, they swooped down the long hallway and through the end hatch. Jonesy tried to grab a shoe, but being weightless, the shoes didn’t move until he placed both his feet on the ground, and pulled them off the magnetic mother unit.

“Crap! These magnetic shoes nearly caused me to head butt the wall,” Jonesy stated. He put on a pair and so did VIN once the last of his outer suit was removed, and suddenly they could walk around the floor of the craft, also the walls of the craft, and even walk around the roof of the craft, just like flies.

The next morning, refreshed after his eight-hour drive the day before, and the usual early morning run, Ryan went into to Hangar Seven.

Astermine Two
was being prepared for its first flight into space. The five computers on board were already live and were tracking DX2014 from daily inputs from the engineers.
Astermine One
, at the space station, was also already tracking asteroid DX2014; Jonesy and VIN would land on it in four months’ time.

Astermine Two
was still waiting for her new more-powerful hydrogen rocket thrusters. Nobody considered the upgrade that important, as the calculations on the magnetic pull of DX2014, showed that the older thrusters could still get either fully loaded craft off the asteroid with 30 percent power to spare.

The space coordinates of DX2014 were being fed into all ship’s computer memories every twelve hours. The information came directly from Ryan’s friend, the guy who had found DX2014 in the first place over a decade ago. The tracking computers at the large space observatory 450 miles west of Austin, Texas, where he currently worked, were feeding the information over the Internet.

With the Observatory tracking over 18,000 pieces of rock in space, the small, slow-moving asteroid in the middle of nowhere wasn’t very important, and the automated reports sent to Ryan’s computers in Nevada weren’t noticed by anybody other than the man who had set up the information channel.

DX2014 was still more than a hundred million miles away and heading to the same general area of the solar system where earth would be in four months. The asteroid was traveling towards earth at a sedate 3,000 miles an hour faster than earth was moving through space.

The second shuttle in Hangar Six was being loaded with the mining equipment: two large brush sweepers, each five-foot tall and weighing in at 300 pounds. They had been soundly vacuum-wrapped in sterile plastic sheeting and were about to be placed into separate aluminum canisters to be loaded into the shuttle.

Ryan headed back to his office after seeing that everything was running smoothly and contemplated his next moves. His project was like a game of chess. He was trying to think a dozen moves ahead of anybody else who could become interested in his project in the near future.

Now, relaxed after his drive, he grabbed a cup of coffee and sat down to contemplate. He had twenty minutes before his next meeting. There was little he could do for the next few days. He was to travel over to Turkey with the C-5 Galaxy to pick up his Russian plutonium-238 in its leaded storage container; his current problem was to come up with a salient reason he could give the Air Force as to why he needed to fly their aircraft to Europe. The only things that came to mind so far were a possible promotional tour, an investment gathering trip to raise more capital for the project, or maybe even that he was negotiating agreements with private companies to take products, or scientific tests into space for them.

As he pondered the problem, his only conclusion was to use part of all three reasons. All he really wanted to achieve was to get his four-ton lead container, currently inside a six-foot wooden packing crate back to the USA in time for Ms. Sinclair to fly it into space. Once in space it was safe from anybody who would consider it dangerous, or wanted to get their hands on five pounds of pure, clean plutonium-238.

He was still deep in thought when the three C-5 pilots knocked on his door and entered his office.

Meanwhile, a hundred miles above Malaysia, his other two pilots were having a party. After losing track of Nevada time, they had slept too long, then both worked out on the stationary bike; and one had completed his first spacewalk, this time taking in the wonders of space.

After a weird but solid workout VIN donned his full spacesuit with the jet pack connected to the system on his back. All three docking ports were on the outer three walls of the command module. While VIN got comfy in the suit Jonesy entered the third unused docking port and secured a long thin cord to the inner wall of the docking port. Then he secured it with a D- ring to VIN’s suit connector. VIN was ready and he floated head first into the vertical tube. Jonesy sealed the hatch, and slowly reduced the pressure from the command module’s control center, and for the second time in his life, VIN opened the outer hatch, and floated into the vacuum of cold black nothing.

All five of the future space pilots had rehearsed this procedure a hundred times during the winter months, and this spacewalk was necessary to get to the canisters of supplies from the third and fourth cargo holds of
Astermine One
. The forward supply compartment could be entered from the craft’s docking port, but the third, fourth, and fifth cargo areas were not hatched, as the tanks of liquid gas were stored in the inner walls.

Slowly VIN allowed himself to glide out of the hatch. It was a tight fit with the jet pack, and he had to be careful that none of his equipment hit hard against the metal of the craft. A couple of feet from the craft, he took a few very frightened seconds to see the nothingness around him. “
Wow!”
he thought to himself. “
This is even better than viewing a space movie at the IMAX theatre.”

His control monitor was showing everything was working correctly and the fresh American bottled air tasted better than the old stale air in the Russian “beer can” that tasted like metal. VIN secured his cord to the outer wall on his first return so that the port would close and operate with a canister inside.

Using the small jetpack thruster, and allowing the rope to play out, he gently aimed himself away from the third hatch, so that he could float over the corner of the station and to the next wall where
Astermine One
was connected.

Meanwhile, Jonesy was maneuvering through the open connection port to the spacecraft to open its small side cargo doors. VIN came over the roof to see the silhouettes of the two space craft as the sun appeared behind them; he wished he had a camera. As he approached
Astermine One
he watched as the two side doors of the third and fourth compartments opened. Jonesy was controlling them from the flight deck.

Ryan’s plans dictated that each flight into space would carry the maximum allowed cargo, and inside
Astermine One
’s rear cargo holds were ten canisters, seven empty for the mining expedition, and the three top canisters secured in a pyramid formation held supplies. Each silver canister was exactly sixty inches in length, twenty inches across, and small enough to get through any of the space hatches.

The nuclear battery had been permanently fitted inside one of these cylinders, its connections and dials interfaced into the cylinder.

Ryan had designed these canisters for several uses in space, with 10 empty canisters fitting in a pyramid form perfectly into each of the three rear compartment areas of the
Astermine
craft for the precious metal cargoes they were about to fetch from DX2014. Sixty canisters could fit inside the larger cargo areas of the shuttles.

VIN needed to transfer three canisters into the space station, the rest of the supplies were in the connecting supply compartment behind the spacecraft’s cockpit, and that was Jonesy’s job.

Over the next hour, VIN carefully unbuckled one canister at a time, connected it to a special clip on his suit, and returned to the docking port. There was no rush apart from his maximum-allowed three-hour spacewalk, and he often looked down at the earth, sometimes below his feet, sometimes above his head. There seemed to be a large storm in the middle of the Pacific, maybe a hurricane, he thought to himself. The best part was when the sun, hidden behind the earth, made its round edge look bright and glow like a halo around the face of an angel.

Just to make sure that they were hidden from any searching eyes, Jonesy switched the bay lights off each time VIN left the cargo area.

The last canister, showing a written weight of 130 pounds on a piece of hard plastic taped to its side, was placed inside the docking port. He decided that he needed a rest and, still having ten minutes before the port would become free, he let his 150-foot line play out to its full extent and just hung out there for waiting for Jonesy to get the cylinder out of the chamber, tie it down in the second sleep room, and then ready the hatch for his return.

“You going to hang out there all day, kid?”
asked Jonesy as he saw his partner just floating out there enjoying the free ride.
“You had better watch out, a great white space shark might glide in and think you are a meal.”

“Tell me another bedtime story, Mr. Jones. You couldn’t even scare little kids with that one. I could see the monster coming from several light years away.”

“Come on kid, hurry up. I will feel better once we are all sealed up tight like a can of tight, crappy sardines again.”

Vin carefully returned to the inner sanctuary of the their living quarters in space and, after taking the needed hour to get his complete suit off, he tried out the “shower” system aboard the beer can.

The water smelled horrible; a whole pint of it ran around an inner plastic suit, like a rain coat, except this time the water was kept inside, not out. The suit gave him one pint of water to bathe in, and one pint to rinse.

He read the instructions given to them in English and managed to exit the suit, which then enabled any wet remains to be sucked into the craft’s water cleansing system, and seal up the suit again. He felt about 5 percent cleaner than when he went in, and began to realize that living in space did have its downsides.

Being a positive thinking person, he dismissed the negative thoughts and thought about a grand dinner of vodka, orange juice, fish eggs, soup, and whatever he decided on from the American rations. After months of dirty, sweaty living conditions in Iraq, 5 percent cleaner was better than what he had been accustomed to in desert operations.

Jonesy closed the outer hatches to both outer craft for security after his flying partner floated in. He smiled at VIN’s feeble attempt to sing in the shower and imagined that the kid was having an interesting time in the space craft cleansing system.

Dinner was what he expected. There was no need to open the new U.S. supplies VIN brought across yet.

The bottle of vodka left out by his partner was beginning to defrost and he could see that it was about a quarter full. They made a small hole in one of the pouches of liquid orange juice, squirted the yellow bubbles of juice into the vodka bottle doing their best to mix the two liquids together, and aligned the openings of the two bottles. Then Jonesy, who thought himself best at this necessary space maneuver, allowed as close to 50 percent of the floating bubbles to pass from one bottle to the second and stopping the flow with a finger of each hand so VIN could cap both bottles.

He felt like a drug addict preparing his fix, but who cared? It wasn’t as if he was being watched up here.

An hour later Jonesy turned away as VIN opened a sealed pack of American crackers and, working close to his mouth so not to lose any black balls into the air, proceeded to noisily slurp down some of the tiny black eggs from a jar, and then throw a cracker in his mouth.

It sounded awful. Jonesy was sure it tasted awful, but the way VIN was slurping, sucking, and biting down on any escaping particles would have even impressed the Russian cosmonauts. Jonesy closed his eyes, quietly sucked on his floating Screw Driver and listened to Jimmy Buffett in between the vulgar sounds of VIN sucking down his dinner.