Out of Orbit (30 page)

It wasn’t quite as simple as that. If the men used the designated foot- and handholds, the hatch remained just out of reach. They had to go for broke. Relying on their own ingenuity, as well as their gigantic brass balls, Bowersox locked his feet in tight, grabbed Pettit by his legs, and cantilevered him through open space, like a trapeze swinger. Pettit grabbed hold of the lip of the hatch, cleaned away the grit (by dabbing it with the sticky side of a length of tape), and waited for Bowersox to yank him back down. It was exactly as scary as it sounds, but neither man allowed himself to think much about the maneuver before he did it, probably because it was the sort of stunt that a purely logical man would refuse to do. Bowersox and Pettit were each in their own worlds, however, and they saw only a job that needed to be done, and next they saw a way to do it, and then they did it without so much as stopping to catch their breath. Their faces lost behind their gold visors, their breathing mechanical, their movements stiff, they had become robots, machinelike and unfeeling except when they paused to take in the view.

Another job done, they looked down at their to-do lists, checked off their housecleaning, and found that they had only one more task assigned. They were as sad as they were relieved.

At first glance, it seemed easy enough: they had only to mount a light fixture on one of the station’s older installations, the S1 truss. Like the radiator, the light—on the end of a stanchion about three
feet long—had been locked down flat for safekeeping. Bowersox and Pettit were to release the stanchion, which was held tight by two bolts, turn it perpendicular to the truss, and bolt it back down.

The men reached it without difficulty, and they were able to unbolt the stanchion, but for all of their pushing and pulling, they couldn’t pry it from its safe place. Neither of them could budge it, and worse, neither of them could figure out why. And while both of them wanted to finish the job, to complete a perfect space walk, after nearly seven hours outside and now struggling against the clock and fatigue, they were told to pack things up and head for home, cutting those loops of fabric on their way in. Not to worry, they were told. The next crew up would work it out.

It was a long push back to the hatch, a whisper of dejection having taken the ecstasy out of things. But after they had made it back to their front step, they were distracted from their small failure by a reminder of their early bad luck, when they had very nearly missed the chance to head outside altogether. Bowersox turned that loop of white fabric in his fingers before he cut it free.

“What are the odds of that?” he asked, unable to wrap his head around the math—how something so small could have turned into something so big.

“Well, maybe it happened to us because we were able to figure it out,” Pettit said.

Bowersox had thought of another possible reason in the meantime. He pointed to the identification number on his spacesuit. “I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it,” he said, “but I’m wearing 3013.”

The revelation caused both men to take light pause, lingering just a little in wonder. But there was more to their waiting. On their way to a hot dinner (thoughtfully prepared by Budarin), a sponge bath, and their approximation of bed, an exhausted Bowersox and Pettit nonetheless found themselves wishing that they could spend just a few more minutes outside. Through the thin glass of their helmets, the sunlight was brighter, the panorama was wider, even the earth seemed a deeper shade of blue beneath their feet. The pure oxygen pumped into their suits had helped boost the sensation: it
was as if for all of their time on earth they had been half asleep, and now, finally, they knew what it meant to be awake.

·   ·   ·

Three months later, in early April, they would know that feeling all over again, a wish that they might have preferred to see go ungranted. One of the ammonia-filled connectors that helps the radiator keep things cool had somehow lost its thermal cover (a “bootie” in astronaut vernacular). The bootie protected things from the white-hot sun. Without it, the connector was at risk of overheating, slow-cooked like an ant under a magnifying glass. Eventually it would spring a leak, spewing gallons of ammonia into space until the radiator’s stores were empty. The radiator would stop venting the heat generated along with the burning of every watt of electricity on station. Although the station’s other radiators would probably compensate for the lost capacity, tests showed that several other booties risked coming loose, like the first. Were they to make their escape all at once, first the machine, and then the men inside of it, would begin to feel warm, and then hot, and then flash-fried. Bowersox, in his cool, collected way, decided that this was an undesirable series of events. He and Pettit had no choice but to head back outside, this time not to build their home but to save it—the fate of their beautiful ship and their tenuous existence inside of it now resting on the repair of a tiny, mundane part. Like the plastic owls that guard the shuttle from woodpeckers, these seemingly innocuous booties were life.

All over again, they prepared. All over again, they suited up. They checked their tether. They nodded. They emptied out the airlock. And they opened the hatch, this time easily, thanks to Bowersox’s determined handiwork the last time around, flushed with the same thrill that had run through them before.

Except that this time, they came face-to-face with the night. This time, there was no sunlight to welcome them, nor was any shining off the moon. There were no bright stars, and there was no blue earth. There wasn’t even a sense of up or down. This time, there was only the pitchest black, the kind of darkness that looks
liquid, leaving even the stoutest man feeling as though it might swallow him whole. Bowersox and Pettit stopped for a moment, their hearts pounding in their chests, and together they stared into the deepest sort of abyss. As Nietzsche had foretold, it stared as deeply into them.

Before they had a chance to change their minds, Bowersox and Pettit took a deep breath and threw themselves off the back of their ship.

·   ·   ·

Because replacing the booties was a relatively small job—although an absolutely necessary one—the ground had come up with a long list of additional repairs for the two men to complete. They were also scheduled to be apart for some of their second space walk. Bowersox would fix the booties; Pettit had some patchwork electrical work to crack. Together, they would be alone, connected only by their voices in each other’s headsets. Should their tethers snap, there would be no hand to reach out for them, no eyes to see the last horrified looks on their faces.

Bowersox strung his way across to the first bootie. It was still there, but the Velcro tabs that had kept it in place had come undone, and it was hanging by the proverbial thread. He tugged it back into place, pinched together the Velcro seal, and then, to make sure it wouldn’t try to take flight again, he retrieved some Russian-made wire ties out of one of his pockets.

They were another of those simple, indelicate things that the Russians had come to rely on in their time in space. Now the Americans liked them, too. The ties were made of short lengths of soft copper wire with loops at each end—they looked as though they might have been cut from a coat hanger. But when something absolutely, positively, needed to stay tied down, they did the job. Bowersox wrapped one around the troublesome bootie and twisted its ends together, an ugly but perfectly sound repair, the sort of practical handyman’s touch that holds together our billion-dollar machines after we’ve sent them into space. The other loose booties received similar attention.

Meanwhile, Pettit replaced a circuit breaker near the base of the station’s robotic arm and rewired a gyroscope. After he was finished, he joined back up with Bowersox, who had completed his bootie patrol. Each didn’t mind at all returning to the other’s company. Together again, they made their way to Destiny, where some plumbing awaited.

Under a micrometeorite shield, which Bowersox and Pettit popped open like the hood of a car, they found the heat exchanger that connects the internal and external cooling loops. The outside’s ammonia met with the inside’s water at that junction, and it needed a quick touching up before some unhappy alchemy took place.

A child’s dreams of space travel don’t usually include such mundane tasks, but that spot weld was exactly the sort of grunt work that keeps ships afloat. Somebody has to scrape off the barnacles. And while not every plumber has a few hundred carrier landings under his belt or has sampled gas from New Zealand volcanoes, whether it’s in space or under the kitchen sink, pipes spring leaks and somebody needs to fix them. It just so happens that on station, there are only astronauts to call upon.

·   ·   ·

There was one last job that Bowersox and Pettit had started and now both wanted desperately to finish. They wanted to swim over to the S1 truss and get even with the light stanchion that had foiled them three months ago. They were determined to release it from its bear trap. More specifically, they had set their hearts and minds on hitting it, really hard, with a hammer.

Choosing their weapon had betrayed, somewhat unexpectedly, yet another difference between the Russian and American attitudes toward their machines and how best to treat them, the common ground so recently found in copper wire excepted. Within the respective toolboxes were chisels, wrenches, screwdrivers, and philosophies.

Outside, strapped to the side of Unity, there is a large, soft-sided bag, about the size of a bar fridge, filled with Yankee hardware. Pettit
had taken to calling it the Little Bag of Horrors. Every astronaut posted to station, the spacewalkers of Expedition Six included, had learned to dread having to open it. Behind its benign-seeming exterior, perhaps two dozen tools were hiding in wait, tied to the ends of various tethers, some of which kept better hold than others. Whenever the bag was opened, all manner of implements would come bobbing and weaving out, some anchored, some not, leaving the astronaut in front of it doomed to a mad tool-herding scramble. It was as though the men were floating just under the ocean’s surface and had been charged with harvesting kelp in a stiff current. For every one or two strands they managed to gather, another one would slip away or bind up its neighbor, until the flummoxed spacewalkers were left facing down an almighty tangle.

Reluctant to make like jugglers, Bowersox and Pettit had elected to bring their tools with them from inside station. Before they had ventured outside, they had made another important executive decision: when it came to sorting out the light stanchion, they were going to go with the Russian hammer rather than the American one.

The Americans—not wanting their astronauts to go too much to town—had delivered a thin, delicate hammer, clean and pretty. It wouldn’t have looked out of place hanging from a rock collector’s hip or waiting on a watchmaker’s lathe.

The Russians, meanwhile, had sent up something medieval. Their more practical technicians had learned that sometimes brute force is necessary; the universe, after all, was built on collisions. The Russian hammer, then, was an eight-pound sledge. Not only that, but the bottom of its handle had been turned into a kind of sharp-edged pickax. The Russian hammer had some serious teeth.

Now, with one hand holding the truss and with his sledge in the other, Pettit—even in weightlessness—could imagine the heft he wielded. He had hated leaving this job undone the last time around, and now he relished the chance to knock the stubbornness out of the stanchion. The ground warned him not to swing more than once every twenty seconds, leaving enough time to let the vibrations dissipate and keep the station’s gyroscopes from going haywire. That
being said, and with him having promised to abide, Pettit was given permission to wail.

He reared back for a big swing. The friction between his shoulder and his spacesuit didn’t feel particularly good, and when he brought the hammer down, it felt as though he was swinging through water. It wasn’t all that he had hoped for. The hammer bounced against the stanchion with a satisfying shudder—Pettit could only imagine the clang it would have made on the ground—but the blasted thing didn’t budge.

Pettit waited for what felt like a long twenty seconds, adjusted his stance a little, and took another swing. Nothing.

Twenty more seconds, and again, he took his best shot. And again, the stanchion remained unmoved.

Again.

Again.

And again.

Until, on lucky swing number nine, with his lungs heaving and his shoulder rubbed raw, Pettit’s hammer met with success. The stanchion popped loose, floating free. Smiling ear to ear, he grabbed at it and showed it off as though it were a champion steelhead. He had won.

Triumphantly, he and Bowersox set about bolting the stanchion back into place. As they did, they noticed that in spots along its length, this precision piece of engineering had been dinged and dented, and they joked about Pettit’s contribution to its final design. He delighted in thinking that in a decade or two, spacewalkers on the truss might look at the light and marvel at how often it had been struck by space junk. They would think it a magnet. But in reality, in those dents, a rookie astronaut named Don Pettit had left behind a tagger’s graffiti, the way drywallers sometimes sign the back of a slab, and when their wall is torn down, as they almost inevitably are, the demolition workers will know at least who had laid it. In that way, Pettit and his Russian hammer had guaranteed their place in the International Space Station’s tactile history. Together, they had made their mark.

·   ·   ·

Bowersox and Pettit had tied up the last of their loose ends. Happily, sadly, they strung their way back to the airlock. Outside the hatch and its sliced-up fabric loops, they stopped to take one last look at the infinite space that opened just inches from their faces. It was beautiful. They tried to take mental snapshots of these fleeting, misty-eyed glimpses, each of them wondering whether he would ever have the chance to touch the universe again.