Gravity (7 page)

Cape Canaveral Even from a distance, the sight took Emma’s breath away. Poised on launchpad 39B, awash in brilliant floodlights, the shuttle Atlantis, mated to its giant orange fuel tank and the paired solid rocket boosters, was a towering beacon in the blackness of night.

No matter how many times she experienced it, that first glimpse of a shuttle lit up on the pad never failed to awe her.

The rest of the crew, standing beside her on the blacktop, were equally silent. To shift their sleep cycle, they’d awakened at that morning and had emerged from their quarters on the third floor of the Operations and Checkout building to catch a nighttime glimpse of the behemoth that would carry them into space. Emma heard the cry of a night bird and felt a cool wind blow in from the Gulf, freshening the air, sweeping away the stagnant scent of the wetlands surrounding them.

“Kind of makes you feel humble, doesn’t it?” said Commander Vance in his soft Texas drawl.

The others murmured in agreement.

“Small as an ant,” said Chenoweth, the lone rookie on the crew.

This would be his first trip aboard the shuttle, and he was so excited he seemed to generate his own field of electricity. “I forget how big she is, and then I take another look at her and I think, Jesus, all that power. And I’m the lucky son of a bitch gets to ride her.” They all laughed, but it was the hushed, uneasy laughter of parishioners in a church.

“I never thought a week could go by so slowly,” said Chenoweth.

“This man’s tired of being a virgin,” said Vance.

“Damn right I am. I want up there.” Chenoweth’s gaze lifted hungrily to the sky. To the stars. “You guys all know the secret, I can’t wait to share it.” The secret. It belonged only to the privileged few who had made the ascent. It wasn’t a secret that could be imparted to another, you yourself had to live it, to see, with your own eyes, blackness of space and the blue of earth far below. To be pressed backward into your seat by the thrust of the rockets. Astronauts returning from space often wear a knowing smile, a look that says, I am privy to something that few human beings will ever know.

Emma had worn such a smile when she’d emerged from Atlantis’s hatch over two years ago. On weak legs she had walked into the sunshine, had stared up at a sky that was startlingly blue.

In the span of eight days aboard the orbiter, she had lived one hundred thirty sunrises, had seen forest fires burning in and the eye of a hurricane whirling over Samoa, had viewed an earth that seemed heartbreakingly fragile. She had returned changed.

In five days, barring a catastrophe, Chenoweth would share the secret.

“Time to shine some light on these retinas,” said Chenoweth.

“My brain still thinks it’s the middle of the night.”

“It is the middle of the night,” said Emma.

“For us it’s the crack of dawn, folks,” Vance said. Of all of them, he had been the quickest to readjust his circadian rhythm to the new sleep-wake schedule. Now he strode back into the O and C building to begin a full day’s work at three in the morning.

The others followed him. Only Emma lingered outside for a moment, gazing at the shuttle. The day before, they had driven to the launchpad for a last review of crew escape procedures.

Viewed up close, in the sunlight, the shuttle had seemed bright and too massive to fully comprehend. One could focus on only a single part of her at a time. The nose. The wings. The tiles, like reptilian scales on the belly. In the light of day, had been real and solid. Now she seemed unearthly, lit up against the black sky.

With all the frantic preparation, Emma had not allowed herself to feel any apprehension, had firmly banished all misgivings. She was ready to go up. She wanted to go up. But now she felt a twinge of fear.

She looked up at the sky, saw the stars disappear behind an advancing veil of clouds. The weather was about to change.

Shivering, she turned and went into the building. Into the light.

Half a dozen tubes snaked into Debbie Haning’s body. In her throat was a tracheotomy tube, through which oxygen was forced into her lungs. A nasogastric tube had been threaded up her left nostril down her esophagus into the stomach. A catheter drained urine, and two intravenous catheters fed fluids into her veins. In her was an arterial line, and a continuous blood pressure tracing danced across the oscilloscope. Jack glanced at the IV bags over the bed and saw they contained powerful antibiotics. A bad sign, it meant she’d acquired an infection—not unusual when a patient has spent two weeks in a coma.

Every breach in the skin, every plastic tube, is a portal for bacteria, and in Debbie’s bloodstream, a battle was now being waged.

With one glance, Jack understood all of this, but he said nothing to Debbie’s mother, who sat beside the bed, clasping her daughter’s hand.

Debbie’s face was flaccid, the jaw limp, the eyelids only partially closed. She remained deeply comatose, of anything, even pain.

Margaret looked up as Jack came into the cubicle, and gave a nod of greeting. “She had a bad night,” said Margaret. “A fever. They don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“The antibiotics will help.”

“And then what? We treat the infection, but what happens next?” Margaret took a deep breath. “She wouldn’t want it this way. All these tubes. All these needles. She’d want us to let go.”

“This isn’t the time to give up. Her EEG is still active. She’s not brain dead.”

“Then why doesn’t she wake up?”

“She’s young. She has everything to live for.”

“This isn’t living” Margaret stared down at her daughter’s hand. It was bruised and puffy from IVS and needle sticks. “When her father was dying, Debbie told me she never wanted to end up like that. Tied down and force-fed. I keep thinking about that. About what she said…” Margaret looked up again. “What you do? If this was your wife?”

“I wouldn’t think about giving up.”

“Even if she’d told you she didn’t want to end up this way?” He thought about it for a moment. Then said with conviction, “It would be my decision, in the end. No matter what she or anyone else told me. I wouldn’t give up on someone I loved. Ever. if there was the smallest chance I could save her.” His words offered no comfort to Margaret. He didn’t have the right to question her beliefs, her instincts, but she had asked opinion, and his answer had come from his heart, not his head.

Feeling guilty now, he gave Margaret one last pat on the shoulder and left the cubicle. Nature would most likely take the decision out of their hands.

A comatose patient with a systemic infection already on death’s threshold.

He left the ICU and glumly stepped into the elevator. This was a depressing way to kick off his vacation. First stop, he decided he stepped off on the lobby level, would be the corner grocery for a six-pack. An ice-cold beer and an afternoon loading up the sailboat was what he needed right now. It would get his mind off Debbie Haning.

“Code Blue, SICU. Code Blue, SICU.” His head snapped up at the announcement over the hospital address system. Debbie, he thought, and dashed for the stairwell.

Her SICU cubicle was already crowded with personnel. He pushed his way in and shot a glance at the monitor.

Ventricular fibrillation! Her heart was a quivering bundle of muscles, unable to pump, unable to keep her brain alive.

“One amp epinephrine going in now!” one of the nurses called out.

“Every one stand back!” a doctor ordered, placing the defibrillator paddles on the chest.

Jack saw the body give a jolt as the paddles discharged, and saw the line shoot up on the monitor, then sink back to baseline.

V fib.

A nurse was performing CPR, her short blond hair flipping up with each pump on the chest. Debbie’s neurologist, Dr. Salomon, glanced up as Jack joined him at the bedside.

“Is the amiodarone in?” asked Jack.

“Going in now, but it’s not working.” Jack glanced at the tracing again.

The V fib had gone from coarse to fine. Deteriorating toward a flat line.

“We’ve shocked her four times,” said Salomon. “Can’t get a rhythm.”

“Intracardiac epi?”

“We’re down to Hail Marys. Go ahead!” The code nurse prepared the syringe of epinephrine and attached a long cardiac needle. Even as Jack took it, he knew that the was already over. This procedure would change nothing. But he thought about Bill Haning, waiting to come home to his wife. And thought about what he had said to Margaret only moments ago.

I wouldn’t give up on someone I loved. Ever. Not if there was the smallest chance I could save her.

He looked down at Debbie, and for one disconcerting moment the image of Emma’s face flashed through his mind. He swallowed hard and said, “Hold compressions.” The nurse lifted her hands from the sternum.

Jack gave the skin a quick swab of Betadine and positioned the tip of the needle beneath the xiphoid process. His own pulse was bounding as he pierced the skin. He advanced the needle into the chest, exerting gentle negative pressure.

A flash of blood told him he was in the heart.

With one squeeze of the plunger, he injected the entire dose of epinephrine and pulled out the needle. “Resume compressions,” he said, and looked up at the monitor. Come on, Debbie. Fight, it. Don’t give up on us. Don’t give up on Bill.

The room was silent, everyone’s gaze fixed on the monitor. The tracing flattened, the myocardium dying, cell by cell. No one needed to say a word, the look of defeat was on their faces.

She is so young, thought Jack. Thirty-six years old.

The same age as Emma.

It was Dr. Salomon who made the decision. “Let’s end it,” he said quietly. “Time of death is eleven-fifteen.”

The nurse administering compressions solemnly stepped away from the body. Under the bright cubicle lights, Debbie’s torso like pale plastic.

A mannequin. Not the bright and lively woman had met five years ago at a NASA party held under the stars.

Margaret stepped into the cubicle. For a moment she stood in silence, as though not recognizing her own daughter. Dr. Salomon placed his hand on her shoulder and said gently, “It happened so quickly. There was nothing we could do.”

“He should have been here,” said Margaret, her voice breaking.

“We tried to keep her alive,” said Dr. Salomon. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s Bill I feel sorry for,” said Margaret, and she took her daughter’s hand and kissed it. “He wanted to be here. And now he’ll never forgive himself.” Jack walked out of the cubicle and sank into a chair in the nurses’ station. Margaret’s words were still ringing in his head. He should have been here. He’ll never forgive himself.

He looked at the phone. And what am I still doing here? he wondered.

He took the Yellow Pages from the ward clerk’s desk, picked up the phone, and dialed.

“Lone Star Travel,” a woman answered.

“I need to get to Cape Canaveral.”

Cape Canaveral Through the open window of his rental car, Jack inhaled the humid air of Merritt Island and smelled the jungle odors of damp soil and vegetation. The gateway to Kennedy Space Center was a surprisingly rural road slashing through orange groves, past ramshackle doughnut stands and weed-filled junkyards littered with discarded missile parts. Daylight was fading, and up ahead he saw the taillights of hundreds of cars, slowed to a crawl. Traffic was up, and soon his car would be trapped in the conga line of searching for parking spots from which to view the morning launch.

There was no point trying to work his way through this mess.

Nor did he see the point of trying to make it through the Port Canaveral gate. At this hour, the astronauts were asleep, anyway.

He had arrived too late to say goodbye.

He pulled out of traffic, turned the car around, and headed back to Highway A1A. The road to Cocoa Beach.

Since the era of Alan Shepard and the original Mercury seven, Cocoa Beach had been party central for the astronauts, a slightly seedy strip of hotels and bars and T-shirt shops stretching along spit of land trapped between the Banana River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Jack knew the strip well, from the Steak House to the Moon Shot Bar. Once he had jogged the same beach where John Glenn used to run. Only two years ago, he had stood on Jetty Park and gazed across the Banana River at launchpad 39A. At his shuttle, the bird that was supposed to take him into space. The memories were still clouded by pain. He remembered a long run on a sweltering afternoon. The sudden, excruciating stab in his flank, an agony so terrible he was brought to his knees. And then, through a haze of narcotics, the somber face of his flight surgeon gazing down at him in the ER, telling him the news. A kidney stone.

He’d been scrubbed from the mission.

Even worse, his future in spaceflight was in doubt. A history of kidney stones was one of the few conditions that could permanently ground an astronaut. Microgravity caused physiologic shifts in body fluids, resulting in dehydration. It also caused bones to leach out calcium.

Together, these factors raised the risk of new kidney stones while in space—a risk NASA did not want to take.

Though still in the astronaut corps, Jack had effectively been grounded.

He had hung on for another year, hoping for a new assignment, but his name never again came up. He’d been reduced to an astronaut ghost, condemned to wander the halls of JSC forever in search of a mission.

Fast-forward to the present. Here he was, back in Canaveral, no longer an astronaut but just another tourist cruising down A1A, hungry and grumpy, with nowhere to go. Every hotel within forty miles was booked solid, and he was tired of driving.

He turned into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel and headed for the bar.

The place had been spiffed up considerably since the last time he had been here. New carpet, new barstools, ferns hanging from the ceiling. It used to be a slightly shabby hangout, a tired old Hilton on a tired old tourist strip. There were no four-star Cocoa Beach. This was as close as you came to luxury digs.

He ordered a scotch and water and focused on the TV above the bar. It was tuned to the official NASA channel, and the Atlantis was on the screen, aglow with floodlights, ghostly vapor rising around it. Emma’s ride into space. He stared at the image, thinking of the miles of wiring inside that hull, the countless switches and data buses, the screws and joints and O-rings.