The Glass Lady (26 page)

Drifting slowly, the command pilot floated horizontally toward the six dark front windows of the cockpit. With a push from his hand upon the back of his empty front seat, Parker did a half somersault and sank headfirst down the hatchway in the floor behind his left seat.

The weightless airman entered the dark mid-deck. He did a momentary handstand before twisting rightside up with a gentle kick on the ceiling by the square hole through which he had just floated headfirst.

Parker steadied himself with his fingers gripping a handhold on the mid-deck wall. The glare of the flightdeck lights topside of the access hole bathed him in white light. He hovered beside the locked and sealed, side doorway of the mid-deck. Through that circular hatch, Enright and Parker had entered Endeavor three and one-half hours earlier.

At Will Parker's side, the hatch's 12-inch-wide, triplepane round window was dark behind its sun filter. He braced his back against the mid-deck airlock, a floor-to-ceiling cylinder five feet wide. The airlock filled the rear section of the mid-deck. Beyond the airlock wide enough to hold two pilots was the payload bay's lethal vacuum.

The AC reached over his head to the instrument panel on the ceiling by the access hole. On mid-deck, Overhead Panel-M013Q, Parker flipped eight toggle switches which filled the cramped lower deck with floodlights.

Pushing off from the airlock, Parker floated to the front end of Shuttle's basement. On the flightdeck above, Jacob Enright still worked the RMS arm.

At the front of the mid-deck, the AC stopped his weightless flight at the floor-to-ceiling stacks of small lockers resembling a wall of large post office boxes. He opened his personal box and peered in at floating combs, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and a safety razor. He retrieved a small brown bag before he closed the locker box.

Twisting his pressure-suited body, he turned toward the rear airlock and pushed off the wall of lockers. He floated back toward the portside hatch and the ceiling hole above.

At the portside, rear corner of the mid-deck, wedged tightly between the cylindrical airlock and the wall, is the waste collection system compartment—the zero gravity latrine.

The zero-gravity biffy resembles a tiny stall from a bus station washroom.

Parker opened the narrow metal door which revealed the unisex commode. From the open door of the small stall, Parker could have unraveled the privacy curtain which stretches from the vertical edge of the open biffy door to the galley which faces the latrine. The curtain encloses the area of the side hatch. Another curtain can be pulled from the top edge of the open stall door to be stretched overhead to block out the view from the flightdeck into the biffy from the gaping access hole in the ceiling. What the hell, Parker thought.

Parker backed into the stall and forced his floating body down onto the commode's saddle. He pulled a lap belt across his waist. His feet found the foot restraints which secured his boots to the floor. With Parker wearing his bulky pressure suit, the fit in the stall was tight.

The Colonel opened the small paper sack which he had retrieved from his personal locker. A finger-size plastic hypodermic syringe floated out beside a small amber vial of fluid. He pulled off the guard cap from an inch-long, 20-gauge needle.

Parker caught the syringe before it could float with the cabin air currents up through the ceiling hole toward the flightdeck. The sitting pilot pulled the syringe plunger out, almost to the end of the plastic syringe. With the plunger retracted, he thrust the needle into the vial's rubber stopper. After depressing the plunger to fill the vial with air, he withdrew into the syringe an equal volume of fluid. The needle squeaked as he pulled it from the vial. He read the vial before he returned it to the crumpled sack: “Carbocaine 2% Mepivacaine HCL,
veterinary equine use only
.”

Looking at the syringe, the tall airman smiled. Many times, he had trusted his life and comfort to an old, sweating horse. Now he would again. A man should ride a tall horse, he mused. Good old salt.

After unzipping the suit's horizontal belly zipper, he forced his hand into the bulky suit until it touched his right thigh as far as the suit would let him reach. Even through his long woolies, he could feel the heat which throbbed through his right leg from the shin upward through his groin. With his eyes closed, Parker pulled out his hand and he returned it to his thigh with the syringe.

Parker grimaced as the needle penetrated his long johns and his thigh. He slowly injected the horse painkiller into his body.

The sitting pilot capped the needle and returned the emptied hypo and the vial to the little sack which he stuffed into his suit pocket.

Parker sat quietly, fully suited, secured by his seat belt to a multimillion-dollar toilet which hurtled through space at a velocity of 300 miles per minute. He removed his stuffy helmet which he parked in midair before his face.

Slowly, the grinding pain in Parker's right leg drew away from the airman who slouched at his post in the stall. His eyes closed lightly and the synaptic distance between the tall man and his inflamed leg grew. In a minute, his long legs were gone and his hip was gone and his lower back was gone. The lower half of the flier had gone to sleep seduced by his injection. Without thought, he hugged the handrails on either side of his hips to keep from flying away with his numb legs left behind.

Without his helmet, the command pilot could now listen to his ship.

As Shuttle lives, so does she breathe. The warm, dry air from liquid oxygen bottles carried the low hum of cabin fans and ducts. Hot black boxes in floors, bulkheads, and equipment bays hummed softly. From his painless and cozy metal corner, the drowsy airman imagined himself in a submarine, an iron lady sheltering his fragile manform with her warm metal heart.

A dazzling ring of piercing white light burst around the circular frame of the hatchway's window shade just beyond the biffy's open door. Nine minutes and 3,000 miles past Australia's midnight darkness, Endeavor was coasting into sunrise high above the Tokelau Islands in a dawn South Pacific. Within the starship where everything floated without weight, there was utterly no sense of motion.

With wisps of daylight from the shaded hatch touching his numb legs, Parker opened his eyes. He looked into the sweat-stained interior of his helmet, which floated a foot from his face. He licked his strangely dry mouth and his lips which faintly tingled from the horse medicine flowing in his veins with narcotic tranquility.

Parker locked his helmet to his suit's neckring before he unstrapped himself from the seat which he could not feel. He pushed his weightless body from the tiny stall and he closed the metal door behind him.

With his legs free from heat and pain, but useless, he placed his fingers on the sill of the ceiling hole and lifted himself toward the flightdeck. His left hand hit the eight switches on the mid-deck ceiling as he flew up through the hatchway. With the lights exinguished, the mid-deck was illuminated by the ring of blinding daylight leaking around the edges of the sunshade secured to the porthole in the side door.

The faceplate on Parker's helmet was open for breathing when he floated up into the harsh daylight of morning on the upstairs flightdeck. His legs trailed limply behind him as he slowly flew to Enright's side at the rear of the cockpit. In zero gravity, he did not need his legs anyway.

The copilot was busy with his manipulator controls when the AC reached his side. Enright did not notice that his captain had to crouch and use his hands to steer his feet into the floor's foot restraints. Parker rose, connected his two air hoses to his suit, and plugged into the aft station intercom. When the AC felt the suit's air supply against his face from the neckring vents, he closed his faceplate and visor to breathe air laced with the scent of rubber hoses and sweat.

“About ready to send out the dogs for you, Skipper,” Enright said without moving his face from the large rear window now filled with morning daylight, LACE glinting in the ferocious sunshine, and the bulbous Soyuz.

“Feel much better, Jack. Ready to deploy the PDP?”

The AC glanced at the mission clock between the two square windows in the aft bulkhead adjacent the payload bay. It read “Day 00: 02 Hours: 47 Minutes: 30 Seconds, Mission Elapsed Time.”

“Got the end effector secured to the grapple probe on the plasma package. About ready.”

“Super, Jack.”

Parker glanced over Enright's right shoulder at the twin television monitors. The top screen was full of the grapple rod at the top of the package which was locked to the floor of the bay within its protective pallet.

“Ready to deploy the PDP, Will.”

“It's your baby, Number One.”

Enright rechecked the RMS panel before his chest. The small lighted windows at the upper right corner confirmed the secure capture by the end effector of the grapple handle atop the plasma diagnostics package.

With his left hand, Enright turned the RMS mode knob to auto sequence Three and the AUTO-3 light illuminated white. The AC threw a switch to release the hold-down clamps at the base of the PDP housing. Enright flicked the spring-loaded, proceed toggle switch and Mother slowly flew the RMS arm upward.

The 353-pound, 26-inch-long, 42-inch-diameter cylinder, built by the University of Iowa, slowly lifted out of the OSS pallet which held it. The PDP stopped at the arm's first, automatic pause point five feet above the bay floor.

“Looks real clean, Jack.”

“And Mother likes it . . . Let's fly with it, Skip. Goin' to manual-augmented.”

As Endeavor dashed in daylight across the Equator northeastward to begin Revolution Three at 02 hours, 51 minutes out, Enright powered up the translational hand controller for his left hand and the rotational hand controller for his right hand.

The Aircraft Commander busied himself with the aft console for the digital autopilot making certain that the RCS thrusters held Shuttle's trim with the nose pointing northward, perpendicular to their ground track, and with Endeavor's belly facing east toward the rising sun. The DAP held the ship's left wing pointed straight down toward the brilliant sea.

Enright, with Mother's help, steered the end effector with the PDP attached at the far end of the 50-foot-long RMS arm. The computer raised the PDP over the bay's left side toward LACE which rolled slowly in the blinding sunlight 30 yards away. With the RMS mode selector in manual-augmented-orbiter-loaded, the RMS gently steered the PDP toward LACE.

“Zero point two feet per second,” Enright called as his hands worked with Mother's silicon brain to fly the plasma-sensing package toward LACE where the PDP would sniff for LACE's wake of radiation and electrical fields.

The arm hoisted the plasma sensor 40 feet above the open bay. The two pilots could only watch it through the two overhead windows above their rear work station. When the arm stopped at a pause point, Enright commanded the EEU to maneuver slowly outboard until the package had been waved in the direction of the end of Shuttle's port wingtip. From there, the arm would ferry the package over the open bay doors toward the opposite wingtip. Outside their windows and on the television screen, the pilots watched the PDP canister.

“Endeavor, Endeavor: Colorado with you by Hawaii at 02 hours, 53 minutes. With you four minutes. Your temperatures are Go. And we're looking at PDP data coming downlink.”

“Mornin', Hawaii,” the tall flier called. “What do you see from the PDP?”

“Backroom says you're plowing through a wall of electromagnetic garbage . . . Drop your visors immediately if they're up.”

The two airmen looked at each other through their laser-proof visors.

“Garbage, Flight?” Enright inquired, pressing his mike button.

“Like boating down the Cuyahoga in Cleveland, buddy,” the radio crackled.

“What about a magnetic wake? Why is that serious, as problems go?”

“The best we had hoped for, Colonel, was a simple mechanical failure with LACE.” Admiral Hauch's large frame was rumpled and exhausted. Behind him, the clock on the wall of the basement bunker read 53 minutes past noon Washington time. Beside it, a second clock face read 02:53. Beneath that clock hung the words “MISSION ELAPSED TIME, SHUTTLE.”

“A breakdown in LACE's flux generator is leaking a wake of magnetic energy.” The Admiral slouched in his high-backed chair. He fumbled with his thick fingers and looked at his sweating hands instead of at the ten grim faces around the large table set upon the glass floor. “Any other problem with LACE would have meant that we only had to bring her down at a reasonable opportunity—hopefully before she takes a pot shot at Endeavor, or God forbid at Soyuz. But magnetic problems mean that now we are on a deadline, an absolute deadline. General Gordon, you should take it from here . . .”

The General from the Air Force and commander of the new U.S. Air Force Space Command from Colorado Springs nodded from across the table.

“Admiral, a magnetic disturbance inside LACE means that the bird is greatly susceptible to external magnetic influences. Any sudden magnetic disturbance in space could trigger another round of stray firings of the laser . . .”

“Can these magnetic disturbances be predicted—disturbances from space, I mean?”

“Not from space, no, Colonel . . . But from Earth, yes, and predicted to the second.”

“From Earth, General?”

“Yes. Michael, what do you have?”

“General.” A tall engineer in civilian clothes took over. Group Captain Michael Dzurovcin looked tired from his dawn flight to Washington from the Air Force Geophysics Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base, Massachusetts. “We can predict a serious—very serious—magnetic perturbance when the vehicles cross the SAA . . .”

“The SAA?”

“Yes. The South Atlantic Anomaly—a huge area due east of South America which is the center of gigantic magnetic storms. At Endeavor's present altitude, the SAA stretches from Uruguay in South America all the way across the Atlantic to Cape Town, South Africa. And it's a thousand nautical miles wide, from latitude 30 degrees South down to 48 degrees South. It was the South Atlantic Anomaly which caused one of the early failures on the Hubble Space Telescope. By June 1990, after only five weeks in space, NASA figured out that the Anomaly's intense radiation interference was actually destroying computer memory on board the telescope. Memory bits which were supposed to be off were switched on, and on-bits were switched off by the radiation fields . . .