Titan (2 page)

Tom Lamb moved out through the airlock’s round hatchway, and drifted over to the left payload bay door hinge. There was a handrail and two slide wires that ran the length of the big hinge, and Lamb tethered himself to the wires. She could see his bright EVI armbands.

He turned and waited for her.

“Houston, the hatch is open and EVI is out.”

“We see you, Tom.”

“EV2 is halfway out, getting ready.”

Benacerraf, with her hands on the doorway, felt as if she was frozen in place, as if she really couldn’t step out there.

Lamb lifted up his big gold visor, so she could see his face. “Just stay with it, kid. One step at a time.”

She grunted. “Some kid,” she said.

Somehow, though. Lamb’s gravelly words punctured her tension.

She kept her eyes down on the floor of the payload bay and drifted through the hatch, just as she had done a hundred times in training, in the big swimming pool in the Sonny Center Facility at Ellington Field. She fixed her own tether in place. Now, at least, she wouldn’t go drifting off into space.

For the first time she looked up.

Columbia
was flying with her instrument-laden payload bay pointing at Earth, so that the planet was a ceiling of light above Benacerraf, a belly of ocean strewn with white, shadowed clouds.

Earth flooded the orbiter with light.

When he saw she was tethered, Lamb pulled himself along the length of the payload bay with practiced ease. He reached the far end, and, diminished, he performed a simple pirouette, his tether flailing around him slowly.

“Hey, Paula,” Lamb said now. “Look at your hands.”

She lifted up a gloved hand before her face. There was grease on the glove, from the payload bay door hinge.

When she’d first joined the astronaut corps six years ago Benacerraf had been in complete awe of Tom Lamb.

He was the last Apollo veteran still working in the program, all of thirty-two years since the last Lunar Module had lifted off that remote surface. Tom Lamb still called himself an aviator, Navy style. She knew he had some kind of antique aeronautics degree from some technology institute in Georgia. But as far as he was concerned, Lamb was primarily a graduate of the Naval Pilot Test School at Patuxent River, in Maryland. She knew he had been known as a superb stick-and-rudder man, and his specialism had been night carrier landings, the hairiest flying in the Navy.

And as a young teenager Paula Benacerraf had watched Lamb and his commander Marcus White bounce like sun-drenched beach balls over the rubble-strewn floor of Copernicus.

How could you meet, how could you
work with,
a man like that?

But the awe had soon worn off, for Benacerraf.

Benacerraf was an engineering specialist—her discipline was orbital construction techniques—and she’d come into NASA with a hatful of qualifications, awards and degrees. She’d worked as a ground-based contractor on a number of Space Station construction missions. It was only when, because of Shuttle launch wave-offs and Russian construction delays, the Station assembly sequence had started to fall drastically behind its timeline that the need had been identified to draft the right experience directly into the program.

So—against the advice of her daughter Jackie, against the resistance of her employers—Benacerraf had given up her fancy consultant’s salary and her nice apartment in Seattle, and moved down to the humid stink of Houston, on Government pay.

At first she’d worked as a specialist in the backrooms behind the Mission Control rooms, in Building 30 of JSC, the Johnson Space Center. Then she’d been promoted to work as a Mission Controller, in the FCR—the Flight Control Room—itself.

But it still wasn’t enough. It was pretty obvious that this construction project—if it was ever going to get back on schedule—needed foremen in space.

Benacerraf had been a space nut since watching Lamb and his buddies on the Moon, all those years ago. But the thought of actually going up there herself, in a dinged-up old Space Shuttle, pretty much appalled her.

Tom Lamb himself had been deputed to talk her round. He’d used all the grizzled charm at his disposal.

… But I‘ve got two grandchildren, Tom.

Hell, so have I And if I can still cut it, a couple of years off my pension, why not you?

She was given promises of cooperation, special provisions, fast-tracks through the training. Even bonuses, to compensate her for her dropped salary.
You’ll be treated with respect,
drawled Tom Lamb.
We need you, kid

The training maybe hadn’t been quite as smooth as she’d been led to believe—too much resistance from the Spaceflight Training Division for that, who had insisted she had to work her way through their hierarchy of trainers and simulators, fast-track or no fast-track. But the pumped-up pay had come in as promised.

She just hadn’t bargained for the
respect.

As an ascan, an astronaut candidate, she was royalty—at the rank of princess, at any rate, until she flew. People around the JSC campus were truthfully in awe of her, and the deference with which she was suddenly treated embarrassed her deeply.

But if she was a princess, Tom Lamb was a king among kings. And he loved it. She would watch him stroll through the Public Affairs Office or the clinic or the Crew Systems Lab, and people come running to serve him. And Lamb just lapped it up. It was as if Lamb had spent the whole of his adult life preparing for this role. Which, in a sense, he had.

Her opinion about Tom Lamb had evolved rapidly.

She pulled herself tentatively along the slide wire.

The orbiter was like a splayed-open aircraft. Before her she could see the big delta wings, spreading out to either side of the payload bay. Straight ahead, at the far end of the bay was the bulky, rounded propulsion system housing, with its tanks and the engine bells for the main engines and the orbital maneuvering system. Behind her was the flat rear bulkhead of the cabin section, like the wall of a big roomy shack, which contained the rest of the crew.

The curve of the wings was elegant. But for her, the design was spoiled by the softscreen mission sponsors’ logos displayed there: the US Alliance, Boeing, Lockheed, Disney-Coke. She knew that stuff brought in a lot of money to NASA, but for her it was a step too far.

At the back of the bay she could see the EDO wafer, the extended-duration pallet with its supplement of lox and liquid hydrogen for the orbiter’s fuel cells, which would allow
Columbia
to stretch out this mission to sixteen days. One objective of this flight had been to test the new EDO wafer in extremes of temperature, so the orbiter had been aligned to keep the payload bay in shadow for hours at a time, longer periods than on most flights.

Tom Lamb approached her, along the starboard fuselage longerons. “You ready for the MMU?”

“Sure.”

“Houston, EV2 preparing to deploy MMU.”

“Copy that, Tom.”

Benacerraf made her way to the MMU station. The Manned Maneuvering Unit was a big backpack shaped like the back and arms of an armchair. Since launch it had been stored in its station in the payload bay against the rear cabin bulkhead, on the starboard side.

Lamb had got there first, and he ran a quick check of the MMU’s systems.

“You ready?”

“Let’s do it.”

Lamb held her arms. He turned her around, and she backed into the MMU. She felt latches clasp her suit’s backpack.

“Houston, EV2,” she said. “EMU latches closed.”

“Copy that.”

She pulled the MMU’s arms out around her. She closed her gloved hands around the controllers, which were simple hand-controllers on the end of the arms. A fiber-optic data cable plugged into her suit from the MMU.

Lamb released the tethers which still clipped her to the pay-load bay slide wires, and reached around her. “Captive latches released.”

“Copy.”

He shoved her gently in the back, and she floated away from the bulkhead. “Don’t even think about it,” he said calmly. “It’s just like the sims.”

… Suddenly she didn’t have hold of anything, and she was
falling.

“Oh, shit.”

“We didn’t copy that, EV2,” the capcom said humorlessly.

Lamb ignored him. “Come on, Paula. Turn around.”

She had two big nitrogen-filled fuel tanks on her back now, and there were twenty-four small reaction control system nozzles. She grasped her right-hand controller, and pushed it left. There was a soft tone in her helmet as the thruster worked; she saw a faint sparkle of nitrogen crystals, to her right. In response to the thrust, she tipped a little to the left.

The controller was intuitive; moving it up or down made her pitch, her feet tipping up; left or right gave her a yaw, a sideways tilt. She twisted the handle, and made herself roll about an axis through her head to her feet.

The payload bay rotated around her.

“It’s heavy,” she said. “I can feel the unit’s inertia as I roll.”

“You mass more than seven hundred pounds, suit and all, Paula.”

She blipped the RCS thrusters again, and slowed her roll. She finished up facing Lamb, where he clung to the aft cabin bulkhead. She pushed her left-hand controller, which drove her forward and back. There was a gentle shove, and her drifting slowed.

The MMU seemed to be working well, but its scuffs and scorch marks showed its age. And things most definitely did not feel the same, up here, as in the tethered sims on the ground. When she started moving, she just kept on going, until she stopped herself. She was in a frictionless, three-dimensional environment, like a huge ice-rink, where Newton’s laws held sway in their bare simplicity.

No wonder the Station assembly had proceeded so slowly, she thought. We just aren’t evolved for this environment.

“Okay, Paula,” Lamb called. “You ready for your one small step?”

No, she thought.

“Let’s do it.”

“Houston, EV2 is preparing to leave the payload bay.”

“We copy, Tom.”

Benacerraf tipped herself up so she was facing Earth, with the orbiter behind her.

Earth, before her, was immense, overwhelming. The overall impression was of blue sea and white clouds, the white of an intensity that hurt her eyes. When she looked towards the horizon she could see the atmosphere, a thin blue shell around the planet.

She gave herself a single, firm thrust with the RCS. She felt a small, definite shove in the small of her back.

She rose out of the bay towards the face of Earth; she saw the big silvered doors to either side of her recede.

A tone sounded softly in her helmet, startling her.

“Oh-two alarm, EV2,” the capcom reported.

An oxygen leak. Holed fabric, maybe. “Houston, EV2. Should I come back? I—”

“Belay that, EV2,” Lamb said. “Paula, just take a couple of deep breaths. Relax. You’re safe and snug in there.”

She became aware of her breathing, which was shallow and rapid. Her suit monitors had misinterpreted her high oxygen consumption as a leak.

Deliberately, she slowed her breathing; she tried to unclench her muscles, to relax in the warm cocoon of the suit.

“Just look at the view, kid.”

She looked at the view.

She was flying up towards Africa. The clouds piled over the equator seemed to reach down towards her, clearly three-dimensional and casting long shadows. She could see the Nile, and the ribbon development along it, surrounded by the baked-hard surface of the desert; the dependence of the people on the Nile’s water was clear.

She was extraordinarily comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. She could hear the whir of her backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan—it sounded like a pc fan. She heard squeaks and pops on the radio, as she drifted over UHF stations on the ground. In her bubble helmet she had a hundred and eighty degree vision, and she had a great sense of freedom. She knew that when she returned to the cabin, after the EVA, it would seem constricting, absurdly confining.

As she gazed at Earth—at all of humanity, save for the six on orbit with her on
Columbia
and a handful on Station—she felt some of the tension drain out of her, as if it was being drawn up to the planet. She felt lifted out of the web of concerns that dominated her life: the difficulties of her career, the frustrating pace of the space program, her unsatisfactory relationship with Jackie, her daughter, the blizzard of hassles that made up every day, mail and balky technology and her car and her apartment and accounts she had to pay and…

No wonder people get hooked on this, she thought.

“Okay, EV2, Houston. Coming up to your three hundred feet limit.”

“Copy that.” Three hundred feet was as far as she could allow herself to travel. Moving away from
Columbia,
Benacerraf was actually entering a slightly different orbit. If she went much further, return to the orbiter would become a full-scale rendezvous, a matter of complex course correction maneuvers.

She passed out of the shadow of the wing, and into sunlight; her EMU seemed to glow.

“I see your light, Paula,” Lamb called.

“I’m pleased to hear it, Tom.”

“EV2, Houston. Confirming your ground-to-MMU direct link is operational.”

“Thank you.”

“And your transponder beacon is functioning.”

“Copy that.”

“EV2, Houston. You have a lot of green-eyed people watching you; looks like you’re having a lot of fun.”

“Sure. This is working very nicely. Ah, I’m glad I’ve got old Brer Rabbit out here with me, out in the briar patch where he belongs.”

She heard Lamb chuckle at that, back in the payload bay. She was aping the first words he’d spoken on the Moon.

Most astronauts got off the active list after four or five flights. They moved out into industry, or up into some kind of program management position within NASA. What kind of man was it who would keep on subjecting himself—and his family—to the grind of training, two years for every Shuttle mission, the enormous dangers of the missions themselves, flight after flight, year after year, logging up the spaceflight hours well into his sixties, endlessly defying the survival odds?