The Glass Lady (32 page)

For an instant Parker and Enright were diverted to a yellow plume from a nose thruster on Soyuz. Slowly, the triple-module, 23-foot-long Soviet craft backed away from the tight formation. The high sun glinted blindingly from Soyuz's two solar cell wings, 35 feet from tip to tip.

The relentless sun, high and east of the four ships, washed out the details of each vessel's body. Parker could see a very faint green glow upon LACE's body in a direct line with the antenna-dish device protruding from the Chinese craft.

Endeavor's command pilot jerked reflexively in his long johns against his loose lap belt when a thick, blue-green beam burst out of LACE's open shroud.

The hair behind Parker's neck tingled where his helmet ended at his water-cooled drawers.

LACE's beam of light was faint with the sparkling Pacific behind it. But Parker topside and Enright below clearly saw the light strike and remain upon the manned Chinese ship.

In the instant between heartbeats, the Chinese vessel pitched forward toward LACE. The intruder's spherical head cartwheeled forward as if her thick body had been jerked backward from beneath her black, iron feet.

In the blink of Parker's wide eyes, the round head of the tumbling Chinese ship passed directly through LACE's steady, blue-green beam. The Chinese craft excreted a fine cloud of gas and glittering flakes of frost which she had carried on her cold side away from the sun. A huge teardrop cloud of gas, shining frost, and tiny bits of debris swelled around the craft. In the brilliant sunlight, the Chinese vessel was nearly invisible inside a gauzelike shroud which silently leaked from her ruptured hull. A ship was dying.

The round forward module of the doomed vessel bowed toward LACE. Within a spreading cloud of gas, the head of the Chinese craft took LACE's lasing broadside for only three seconds.

In the instant before the dying ship exploded without sound, Parker sat frozen on the flightdeck as LACE's thick green beam reflected off the Chinese death ship.

LACE's beam bounced at a right angle off the Chinese hulk. Its reflected laser beam shot sideways silently into Endeavor.

As a reflex, Parker lifted his bootless feet off the floor under the instrument panel. He watched the beam of energy lie silently against Endeavor's glass body beneath his left side.

In an instant, the lased photons stopped.

“Jacob!”

The command pilot's voice over the intercom was shrill. Outside, Endeavor's six forward windows were covered with a cloud of vaporous debris. Parker momentarily paused to listen and feel for any impact upon Endeavor's fragile glass flanks. Shuttle was bedrock stable as Mother held the con in her firm hand.

“Jack!” the seated AC shouted into his faceplate.

The headset within the Colonel's helmet was silent.

In one motion, Parker pushed his seat back along its floor tracks as he pulled his communications plugs and released his lap belt. He floated from his seat, rolled over in mid-air, and soared helmet-first down the hatch hole behind his seat.

As the flier floated from the ceiling hole into the middeck, he turned his face toward the window of the side entry hatch. Where he expected to see Enright, he saw only the round window. Beyond the hatch window was a thick yellow cloud. For an instant, he recognized a pilot's recurring nightmare of the view when descending below minimums on short final.

Parker somersaulted weightlessly until he was right-side up. He held his position with his hands braced against the basement ceiling. In his long underwear from which disconnected water tubes floated, the AC's stocking feet were a foot off the floor. When he whispered, “Jack,” no one heard him. He was not plugged into a communications plug and did not wear a wireless headset.

Parker hovered in the air. He swallowed hard behind his closed faceplate.

Opposite the cloudy window of the side hatch, Jacob Enright stood rigidly with his face hidden by his silvered EVA visor.

Enright was right-side up with his PLSS backpack touching the sleeping berths on the starboard side of the mid-deck. The air pressure in his EMU suit forced his arms straight out at his sides. Floating with his boots and massive white legs two feet off the floor, the copilot hung motionless. He resembled a hard-suited Scarecrow waiting patiently for Dorothy and The Tin Man to cut him down.

“Jacob” Parker breathed inside his heavy helmet where no one could hear.

The AC pushed his helmet from his sweating head. The plastic container banged behind him against the latrine door. He swam to his partner.

Without his helmet, Parker could hear Enright's backpack softly humming as its fans, pumps, and condensers cooled and scrubbed the silent airman's claustrophobic world.

Parker placed his large hands on either side of Enright's small chestpack. He pulled his copilot down from where his helmet touched the ceiling. The AC could feel the rigidity of Enright's body inside the massive suit.

Parker carefully moved Enright to the center of the cabin where he eased the silent load sideways. Enright floated spread-eagle in the center of the mid-deck. Parker gently pushed him toward the floor until Enright hovered on his back with his PLSS backpack six inches off the floor.

In the perpetual freefall of orbit, neither pilot had any weight. But they did have mass. With one hand on the cabin's handrails which jutted from walls, floor, and ceiling, Parker's free hand was maneuvering a ponderous mass. He moved what on Earth would have been a 150-pound pilot inside a stiff 225-pound space suit. Although Parker had steered Enright's body to the floor in seconds, the command pilot had worked himself into a sweat. Each instant he pushed Enright, the force shoved Parker backward in his weightless state. Pushing Enright to the floor only sent Parker floating upward to the ceiling. The AC was panting with perspiration burning his eyes when Enright's back bounced lightly off the floor.

The AC straddled his rigid partner. He braced one foot through each of Enright's armpits. Bending well over, Parker wedged his bare, wet head against the airlock. Enright's silver outer helmet was between Parker's mesh-covered shins, one swollen twice the size of the other. Twice every second, the AC's right calf throbbed hotly in time with his pounding temples.

Crouching over Enright who did not stir, the pilot in command gently lifted off his partner's extra vehicular activity outer visor. The bubble visor floated out of Parker's moist hands toward the ceiling.

“Jack,” Parker whispered.

Between the tall airman's knees, he saw Enright within the fishbowl, pressurized helmet. Will Parker did not recognize the face.

“Endeavor, Endeavor: Colorado with you by Goldstone at 04 hours and 36 minutes.” Parker could not hear the ground's transmission, which stopped upstairs on the flightdeck at his empty earphone plug. Shuttle approached the California coast 800 miles away in piercing noontime sun.

“Jack,” the kneeling pilot sighed. His breath fogged the outside of the clear helmet, chilled by the PLSS air blowing from the vent behind Enright's head.

Jacob Enright's face was cherry red and swollen to twice its normal size. The puffy cheeks creased around swollen, thin slits of tightly closed eyes. Having lost its normal proportions, Enright's face looked like the face of a red and distressed newborn infant.

“Endeavor, Endeavor . . . We have PM downlink. Negative voice. Check your audio panels. Colorado standing by at 04 plus 39.” The great dish antenna at Goldstone, California, beeped to no one as Shuttle crossed the coastline at Santa Cruz, 120 miles south of San Francisco.

Parker tightened his knees, which held Enright's stiff armpits to the mid-deck floor. Carefully, the AC laid a large palm on each side of his partner's helmet. With a quick, quarter turn of the bubble helmet, he broke the pressure seal of the neckring. The helmet's seal popped under its internal pressure with the sound of a pop-top beer can. A rush of cool air from the open neckring washed over Parker's face, wet with sweat. The chilly breeze which continued to blow from the back of the helmet smelled of sweat, rubber hoses, and cooked meat.

Parker grimaced as he disconnected the thin air tube which ran from the inside of the EMU suit to the helmet's vent pad behind Enright's head wearing the soft Snoopy communications helmet. Enright's thickly puffy lips pressed against the two microphone booms jutting from the cheeks of the Communications Carrier Assembly. The soft CCA had been dubbed “Snoopy helmet” back in Apollo and so it remained.

Parker sent the clear helmet floating toward the sleep station berths where it stopped against a reposing orange pressure suit which Parker had worn during launch. The AC moved a thick knob sideways at the base of Enright's chestpack. The rush of air in the depressurized EMU suit stopped and the digital timer at the top of the chestpack stopped at 17 minutes.

“Endeavor, Endeavor: Colorado by Goldstone broadcasting in the blind. Negative contact. Listening secondary frequency 2217.5. Over.” Only the tense bunker of Mission Control in the Rocky Mountains heard the anxious call.

When Parker laid his ear over Enright's red and peeling nose he noticed that the facial swelling had opened the snap of the chin strap on the Snoopy comm helmet. The little strap floated upward toward Parker's sweating face.

“Thank God,” the Colonel whispered as Enright breathed shallowly and rapidly into his captain's ear.

“Endeavor . . . Colorado at 04 plus 41.” The Goldstone, California, dish pointed eastward, following Shuttle as she crossed the Colorado River over the northeast tip of Lake Powell, Utah. “Acquisition of signal by UHF-only through Northrop.” The antennae at Endeavor's alternate landing site on the gypsum sands in New Mexico ached to listen to the silent purple sky of a winter afternoon in the desert.

A pilot learns to recognize many things: the gentlest buffet from a wing about to stall; the feel in the seatbones of a runway one foot from the wheels which cannot be seen from the cockpit but which can be felt by a pilot's special neurons. And flash burns. Any flier with friends who fly has logged time waiting for news from the burn ward. William McKinley Parker had looked too many times at this same puffy red face soon to fester into watery blisters. The Aircraft Commander winced, creasing deep furrows in his gaunt face.

“I'm here, Jack,” the tall man sighed as he floated close to the charred face of his brother.

Parker rose and floated on his side toward the galley unit by the painfully bright window in the mid-deck hatch. Outside, the gas cloud had boiled away in the fearsome sun to a faint haze of yellow and glistening snowflakes. He did not linger there.

“Endeavor: With you by Kennedy at 04 hours, 44 minutes. Still negative contact voice.” Shuttle flew 180 miles due south of St. Louis. “Please configure Number Two on your network signal processor. KSC listening.”

Parker fetched a hand towel from the galley's accessories locker. He pulled out the cold-water nozzle which he buried in the little square of cloth. Floating upright beside the side window, Parker hovered with his knees flexed toward his middle. His feet were above the floor as he shot cold water into the towel. Bubbles of water rose and burst into tiny globules against the mid-deck ceiling beside the access hole which led upstairs to the flightdeck.

Returning to Enright, the AC found his shipmate levitating a foot above the floor. In his deflated EMU suit, Enright's motionless arms floated upward in front of his swollen face already oozing serum from dime-size blisters.

Parker straddled the prone copilot and he laid the wet rag gently over Enright's lips. He took care not to touch the open blisters and he waited and he perspired. His right leg up to his groin felt like Enright's face looked.

“Endeavor: With you by BDA at 04 plus 47.” The antennae at Bermuda in the Atlantic listened to the western sky, where Shuttle cruised over the Great Smokey Mountains 200 miles northeast of Atlanta. “Negative contact. If you hear us, check your circuit breakers on Panel Overhead-Five, Row B, at signal conditioners Operational-Forward One through Four and Midships One and Two. Also check MDM breaker Flight Forward Three. Colorado listening by Bermuda . . .”

Parker laid a second wet towel upon Enright's lips. The copilot sprawled on the mid-deck floor moved his mouth against the cool water globules clinging to his lips.

“Easy, pard,” the AC whispered. “Nod if you're with me, Jack.”

The kneeling command pilot felt Enright's enormous, beet-red face move slightly against his fingers.

“Can you open your eyes, Jacob?”

The burned airman creased his swollen forehead. His eyes blinked half open and Enright labored to focus. Tears welled in the outside corners of his bloodshot eyes. The droplets formed a growing globe of salty water on Enright's blistered cheeks. In weightlessness, tears, like all liquids, do not run. Instead, the weightless molecules adhere to each other, held together by their surface tension.

“Welcome home, Number One,” the big man sniffed.

Enright nodded.

The AC knelt beside his crewmate. Parker held his position with one hand braced against an airlock handrail.

“Endeavor: You are feet wet at 04 plus 49. Still negative voice. If you are upstairs, configure to Pre-amplifier Two at Panel Aft-A1A2 on your S-band modulation. With you another three minutes.”

Shuttle crossed the East Coast over Wilmington, North Carolina, for blue water. It was nearly 3 o'clock down below on a chilly December afternoon.

Enright blinked the tears from his red hung-over eyes. His voice croaked dryly.

“Easy, Jack. You're a might sunburned, second degree from the looks of it. God knows what you would look like without that visor on when you got hit. Can you move?”

Parker watched Enright slowly lift his boots. The AC's free hand pressed his partner's chestpack to hold him from floating away.

“Try your arms, Jack.”

Enright closed his thick eyelids as he slowly lifted his arms one at a time. When Enright felt Parker's hand upon his chestpack, he closed both gloves upon his captain's hairy forearm, which stuck out of his mesh woolies.