Rescue Mode - eARC (18 page)

“Bee, I’m with you. Let’s get closer and figure out how to get across.”

Benson nodded, straightened himself out as best he could, then turned himself to face the damaged truss.

Make certain nothing has changed
, he said to himself as he looked hard at the broken and twisted spars.

Satisfied that it hadn’t, he began to pull himself hand-over-hand toward the aft section of the ship—and the mangled area of the truss. Amanda followed closely behind him, mimicking his slow, careful moves.

It took about ten minutes to reach the damaged section. It looked much worse close up than it had from the habitation module’s aft window. Part of the truss was simply missing, blasted out into deep space along with the fragments of whatever had hit them. About six feet of the truss was damaged, including two feet that was just empty space and two intact spars. They were all that was holding the ship’s modules and tankage together.

The top and bottom edges of the broken truss segment were a tangled mess of fractured and bent spars, their broken ends razor sharp. To Benson they looked like twisted, angry claws; any one of them could rip a pressure suit open and kill the person wearing it.

“We’ve got to get across this mess,” he told Amanda.

She said nothing.

Turning weightlessly to face her, Benson said, “I’ll go across first. You watch me. Once I’m across, you follow me.”

“Okay.” Amanda’s voice sounded shaky to him.

“If I don’t make it,” he said, “you go back inside. Let Ted and Hi come out. Don’t you try this on your own.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t.”

“Right.”

Feeling like a beached whale struggling to get back in the water, Benson pulled himself slowly across the shattered section of truss, splaying his legs outward from his torso so he could move above those reaching sharp claws, imagining himself to be a tightrope walker working upside-down, crossing the rope hand-over-hand. He wasn’t aware that he was holding his breath until he’d crossed to the other side and allowed himself to exhale a long, relieved sigh.

To Amanda he called, “If you can keep your legs outstretched and go hand over hand like I did, you should be fine.”

“Sure,” she said.

It didn’t look to him that Amanda needed any advice. He watched as she swung into a handstand and began making her way, carefully but smoothly, across the damaged area toward him. She looked much more graceful than he thought it was possible to be inside the stiffly cumbersome suit.
Like a ballet dancer in zero gravity
.

Once she’d made it across, he could see her bright smile of satisfaction through the faceplate of her helmet.

“You were saying?” she quipped.

With a grin of his own, Benson replied, “I was saying that we’ll have that leak patched in no time.”

“That’s what I thought you said.”

Ahead of them, the truss stretched past the presumably undamaged tanks that held the propellant they’d need to enter Mars orbit, the big oblong radiators that bled off the excessive heat generated by the nuclear reactor, the ungainly cargo module that contained the Mars lander, and then the leaking Trans-Earth Injection tanks.

“The tanks are farther away than our tethers can reach,” Benson told Amanda. “They’re not long enough to reach the TEI tanks. None of the designers thought we’d have to go on a tethered EVA farther than the lander. They didn’t think we’d have to do this at all and, if we did, that we’d use the SMUs to get here and back quickly.”

“We’ll have to get to the tanks untethered?” she asked.

Benson said, “It’s just a few meters.” But he was clearly unhappy at the prospect of giving up the safety tethers.

Amanda nodded, her movement barely noticeable inside her helmet. Simple gestures were lost to astronauts in spacesuits. The bulky suits hid small body movements.

Benson and Lynn made their way slowly along the truss, stopping finally at the huge storage module that housed the lander. Benson was still awed by its size. The lander inside it was designed to leave the
Arrow
once it had attained a stable orbit around Mars, then fly through the planet’s thin atmosphere and land on the surface. After spending thirty days on the surface, it would boost them back to the
Arrow
, waiting for them in orbit.

“It’s a shame we came all this way and we probably won’t get to land on the surface,” Amanda said, wistfully.

“It’ll be more of a shame if we come all this way and don’t get to go home,” Benson said. “We’ll take time to mourn for what might have been after we make sure we fix what has to be.”

He jabbed a gloved finger at the last handhold on the skin of the cargo container, at the side of the module’s hatch. The designers had not bothered to place handholds any farther aft.

Their destination was less than thirty feet away, but without being tethered, and without handholds, it looked more like thirty miles.

Benson hesitated, knowing what he had to do but wondering if he and Amanda could do it.

How long have we been outside?
he asked himself. He thought of asking Gonzalez, at the comm console, about their timeline, but decided against it.
Don’t want them to think I’m worried
, he said to himself.

He knew Ted and Hi would be able to come out in another hour or so, if needed. Benson resolved that he and Amanda would finish the repair task. He hoped. The backup team won’t be needed. He hoped.

July 22, 2035

06:31 Universal Time

Earth Departure Plus 99 Days

Extravehicular Activity

Benson was blinked sweat out of his eyes as he and Amanda inched along aftward until the looming shapes of the TEI tanks filled their horizon.

No warnings from Taki,
he told himself.
I guess our vital signs are all okay.

Still, he asked Lynn, “How’re you doing, Amanda?”

She puffed out a breath before answering, “Okay. Just following you on down the yellow brick road.”

If she can make a joke she must be all right
.

The leak was clearly visible, just as the leak from the water bladder had been, but in a different way. There was no spray of ice grains to betray its position. The liquid hydrogen in the tank expanded into gas as it spurted from the tear in the tank’s skin, and hydrogen is colorless.

But Benson could see that a piece of the forward truss structure was imbedded in the smooth skin of the tank, sticking into it like a murderer’s stiletto.

When the object struck the ship and shattered the truss, this one small segment had been propelled aft, most likely flying alongside the ship almost parallel with the truss itself, until it rammed into the big tank that blocked its path.

Pointing, he said for the benefit of those listening in the ship, “That must be the source of the leak.”

Gonzalez’s voice from the comm center confirmed, “Sure looks that way.”

Ted Connover spoke up. “That’s got to be the source, Bee.”

“How’re you guys doing?” Benson asked.

“Prebreathe almost complete,” Connover replied. “Now if we can get Hi’s beard jammed into his helmet we’ll be good to go in a half hour or less.”

“Right.” Benson turned his attention back to the leaking tank.

Amanda asked, “How do we get up there?”

Benson looked at the smooth surface of the tank, unmarred except for the truss segment sticking out of it some fifteen feet above where they were.

Amanda piped up again. “We’re at the end of our tethers, Bee.”

If that was supposed to be funny, Benson saw no humor in it.

“We’re going to have to detach our tethers,” he said.

“And then what?”

He tried to shrug inside the suit, failed. “If the tethers reached that far, I could jump toward the spot where the leak is and grab onto the broken piece of the truss. Assuming I made it, I could remove the shard, cover the hole with a patch and then you could reel me back in.”

“But if you miss?”

“My next stop would be Alpha Centauri, I guess.”

Neither NASA nor any other space agency approved untethered spacewalks. The danger of an astronaut floating away from the ship was too great. Unlike swimming, where someone who fell out of the boat had a chance of getting back by reacting against the water, in the vacuum of space there is nothing to react against. If an astronaut floats away from the ship there is no way for him to get back, not unless he was carrying a propulsion rocket on his backpack.

Benson shook his head inside his helmet. “I’m not sure we can take the risk, Amanda.”

“But the leak . . .”

“I know. I know. We’ve got to do
something
, but jumping into the wild black yonder without a tether isn’t a viable solution.”

“Bee, we do have a tether,” Amanda said, her voice eager, excited. “We just disconnected ourselves from it back at the lander.”

He immediately grasped her suggestion. “We’ll have to go back and cut a piece long enough to reach from here to the leak. We’ll tie the loose end to the handhold here.”

“That’ll work! Won’t it?”

“It’s better than floating off to infinity.”

“Or beyond.”

“Let’s get started.”

It took forty-five minutes to get back to the cargo module, cut a fifty-foot length of the tether, and return to the leaking TEI tank. Benson tied one end of the tether to the last of the handholds. Looking up, he was surprised to see Amanda reattaching its other end to the belt of her suit.

“What’re you doing?”

“I’ll make the jump, Bee. You stay anchored here and pull me back.”

“The other way around, you mean.”

“No, Bee. Let me do it. I can patch the hole. I don’t want to be the anchor man. I’m afraid of messing it up, and that’ll mean I’ve killed you.”

“Bullshit.”

“Really, Bee. Let me make the jump. Please. I’ll feel a lot better that way. I can do it.”

“All right,” he heard himself say. “You jump, I’ll be your anchor.”

“I’m ready,” she said.

Trying to hide his unease, Benson said, “Right. Let’s do it.”

Ted Connover called from inside the ship. “Bee, we’re ready to come out.”

“Hang loose,” Benson said. “We’ll call if we run into trouble.”

“Why don’t you wait and let Hi and me come out and help you?”

Shaking his head, Benson replied, “Don’t want to risk both our astronauts if we don’t have to. Besides, every minute we wait is another couple hundred pounds of hydrogen squirting out into space.”

“But—”

“Sorry, Ted. You and McPherson stand by. Amanda’s going to try to reach the leak.”

“Amanda?” Connover practically squeaked with surprise.

“Yes, Amanda. We’re ready to go now.”

Amanda nodded inside her helmet. But she had a sudden flash of memory of her miserable attempts at ballet lessons in school. The teacher was as kind as she could be, but she made it clear that a chunky, heavy-legged ballerina just wasn’t going to make the grade.

I can do this, she told herself as she stared at the leaking TEI tank. I’ve got to do it!

“You ready?” Benson’s voice in her helmet earphones sounded tense.

“Yeah,” she responded. “Ready.”

“Go.”

Amanda bent her knees as best as her suit would allow, and launched herself toward the damaged area of the tank.
I’m flying!
she marveled.
Being weightless helps.

She hit the tank with a thud that only she could hear, the sound carrying from the tank through her suit by conduction. But she had landed too far from the broken truss spar to reach it. She bounced off the tank and started drifting away from the ship. Before she could panic she felt the tug of her tether. Bee was pulling her back to safety. For the first time since she’d been a child, Amanda offered up a swift prayer of thanks.

“Not so bad,” Benson was telling her. “You almost made it.”

She grabbed the truss beside him, saying, “Let me try again.”

“Right.”

This time her leap was right on the mark. She thumped against the tank and wrapped both her gloved hands around the undamaged truss segment before the momentum of her impact pushed her away again.

“Gotcha!” she exclaimed.

“Good girl!” Benson called.

A moment’s exultation was all she got. Benson quickly demanded, “What do you see, Amanda? Remember, your video isn’t working, so all we’ve got is your voice report.”

“I see the damage,” she answered. “It’s a pretty big tear.” She put her gloved hand over the leak. “I can feel the gas escaping. Pushes against my fingertips.”

“You’ll have to pull the spar out of the hole,” Benson said.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. To herself, she added, Without jerking myself off the tank altogether.

Slowly, deliberately, she wormed the broken piece of truss out of the hole it had dug into the tank’s skin.

Blinking sweat out of her eyes she cried, “Got it!” and held the twisted length of metal up in one hand like a victorious warrior.

“Roll over on your back before you throw it away,” Benson told her. “That way the recoil from your throw won’t push you off the tank.”

“Good thinking, Bee.”

Amanda tried to lie flat, but her bulky backpack made her feel as if she were laying on a pile of rocks. Gripping the truss segment with both hands, she tried to recall how she made two-handed free throws when she played basketball in school.

She lifted the segment over her head and heaved. It disappeared into the blackness of space. Bet that’s a record for free throws, she thought. A zillion miles.

“Great toss!” Benson called.

Rolling slowly, cautiously onto her belly, she pulled out the patch kit and got to work. Be extra careful, she told herself. Hydrogen is sneaky stuff.

Standing at the base of the big, curving tank, Benson was thinking the same thing. Hydrogen leaked through almost everything. The lightest element, its atoms were the smallest of them all. Even in its diatomic form, H
₂
, the stuff leaked through seals that held everything else.

Amanda took no chances. She covered the leak with a patch and smeared it with gobs of epoxy. Then she slapped more patches around the edges of the first one and sealed them firmly, too.