The Glass Lady (37 page)

“Take five, Skipper.”

“Sure, Jack,” the AC panted. One minute southeast of New Orleans, Endeavor crossed western Florida over St. Petersburg.

The pilot outside rested against the grapple fixture as the glass-covered starship crossed the Florida peninsula from St. Pete to Miami in forty-five seconds. Below, the Merritt Island antennae at Cape Canaveral listened to Parker's telemetered pulse rate just this side of tachycardia.

“Take your time, Will,” Colorado called through the Kennedy Space Center antenna.

“He is, Flight,” Enright advised so his captain could catch his breath.

“Just like Gemini, Flight,” Parker radioed over his backpack transmitter. “Everything in Zero-G outside takes a little longer.” Parker hoped the strained calm in his voice would pacify ground medics. With his wet eyes closed, he thought of Gemini Nine. Then, unexpected stress during a space-walk by Astronaut Eugene Cernan in June 1966 overtaxed the space suit's coolant loops. His helmet faceplate fogged so badly that he had to come inside his cramped, two-man ship early.

“No rush, Will,” the ground offered. “Give the coolant loop a break.”

“My pleasure,” the slowly recovering pilot breathed.

“We're listening by Bermuda now at 06 plus 22, Endeavor.”

“Hear you,” Enright acknowledged. They flew southeastward over open water toward the easternmost tip of South America 13 minutes and 3,900 flying-miles distant.

“With you another 3 minutes by Bermuda, Endeavor.”

“Okay,” Enright called from his aft station upstairs on the flightdeck.

Over the Atlantic, very blue in the long sun angles of late afternoon, the three ships sped southeast.

“Grapple fixture free,” Parker called as he stood upright in his foot restraints. He now carried 300 pounds on his back and 50 pounds upon his chest, all wrapped around his 225-pound suit. Although weightless, he felt like a piano mover at work.

“Great, Will,” Bermuda radioed. “Hold short a moment . . . Jack: We want the PDP recorders running now.”

“Done,” Enright said behind his moist and sticky facial bandages. He leaned to his left and threw a switch beneath the starboard rear window. He turned on instrumentation in the Plasma Diagnostics Package berthed in its pallet at the tail section of the bay. The PDP would record LACE's electromagnetic wake and any leaks from the target's gas-laser generator.

“Two minutes to LOS, Jack. Run the PDP program as soon as possible.”

“Copy, Flight . . . Stay put a second, Will. RMS in motion.”

“Be here, Jack.” Parker floated free except for his golden slippers, which held his boots to the payload bay floor.

The television image of the AC resting by the sealed airlock hatch disappeared as Enright flexed the 50¼-foot-long, 900-pound remote arm. A fully automatic program steered the RMS arm and its end effector unit toward the berthed, plasma-sensing PDP canister. The arm carried its wrist camera and the end effector camera away from Parker, who was now invisible to every human eye in the universe save for the four Russian eyes in Soyuz fifty yards away.

The arm stopped automatically a foot above the PDP's grapple probe post.

“Endeavor . . . ground is losing you at 06 plus 26. Back with you in 13 via Ascension Island. Sunset in 6 . . .”

Enright did not bother to acknowledge as Shuttle went over the Earth's edge above San Juan, Puerto Rico. Running the arm manually with Mother's help, he guided the EEU down to the PDP with his television monitor at his right shoulder. The end effector unit grabbed the package and Enright squeezed the EEU snare trigger in his right hand. A RIGIDIZE light flashed on the Canadian console. Throwing another switch freed the PDP can which rose at the end of the RMS arm out of Shuttle's bay.

Enright lifted the ion-sniffer ten feet high. It hung above the open bay with the sea behind it. The sun low in the west glinted off the canister suspended from the arm. The sun swiftly approached the western horizon behind Endeavor and its white globe burned directly into the bay. Parker's gold plated, outer visor glared like a strobe light.

“Looks great, Jack.”

“Feels real smooth, Will. Wrist now in motion.”

Enright commanded the arm's furthest joint to lower the PDP until it hung from the arm 90 degrees below the forearm of the RMS. This movement dropped the PDP can away from the elbow joint's television camera. In fully manual mode, Enright torqued the arm's joints individually until the outstretched mechanical arm aimed its elbow camera back toward Parker.

Slowly, the Colonel's glaring helmet came into view on Enright's second television screen below the TV monitor which showed only the top of the PDP can.

“Got you and the PDP, Skip.”

“Good cameraman, buddy!” The Colonel's helmet glowed like a small sun atop his huge white suit.

Six and one half hours aloft, Endeavor was 300 nautical miles east of eastern Venezuela's coastline, hazy in the gathering gloom of swift sunset in space. The sun began to flatten in the west where it sank through the blue atmosphere at the planet's cloudy edge.

Although the sun dipped below the port side of the payload bay as Shuttle flew southeastward on her left side, the six arc lights in the bay covered Parker with harsh light.

At 06 hours 32 minutes, the sun disappeared for 45 minutes of night. The sea was gone except for tiny patches of fluorescent plankton glowing on the black Atlantic 600 miles north of the Equator.

Soyuz on LACE's far side guided her powerful floodlight upon the target rolling slowly at one revolution every six minutes.

“PDP in place, Skipper. RMS oscillations dampening out.”

Two of Endeavor's tail thrusters showered an instantaneous, fiery orange plume into the vacuum as Mother and the Digital Autopilot kept trim. Enright had disabled the 16 RCS jets in Shuttle's nose by which LACE hovered and where Parker was bound.

“Okay, Jacob?”

“Pull your chocks, Will.” Enright momentarily shut off his voice-activated intercom, which dangled from his neck. He added softly, “Godspeed, old friend.”

Parker rested his gloved hands on each handle at the end of his MMU armrests.

With his right hand, Parker pumped the MMU's rotational hand controller. The right hand RHC controlled his attitude in-place. He commanded the cold nitrogen jets by his face and knees to thrust. His body pitched slightly forward as he held his position in the foot restraints. Tweaking the RHC in the opposite direction, tiny jets of 1½ pounds of thrust eased him backward. To protect the EMU suit, the backpack had no hot rocket thrusters. Enright watched by television as Parker checked his MMU jets. Next, the AC's left fist moved the translational hand controller. The THC handle fired the MMU jets which squirt fore and aft, up and down, left and right. These jets push the MMU and its pilot through space between the black Earth and the moistly starlit sky. The full moon was in the eastern sky well up but blocked by Shuttle's vertical right wing.

“Thruster run-up complete, Jack. Ready to roll.”

The AC's voice, now rested, was full of Go.

At 06 hours 34 minutes outbound, the starship flew southeastward across the Equator for the ninth time 420 nautical miles east of Macapa, Brazil.

“You're number one for takeoff, Will. Watch your feet, buddy.”

Enright saw Parker in the greenish television as the AC briskly saluted with his thick arm. He returned his right hand to the hand controller.

A brief jerk on the THC in his left glove sent Parker rising slowly toward the lighted window in front of Enright's face. Pushing the THC handle downward the instant his helmet reached Enright's window, the AC floated freely and motionless at his partner's bright rear window. The thrusters above and behind the Colonel's helmet fired an upward burst to bring Parker to a halt before Enright's face on the far side of the double-pane porthole.

“You look like the creature that time forgot,” Parker radioed to Enright's bandaged face, where only puffy eyes were visible. “What was that you were saying yesterday, ‘Who was that masked man?' ”

“Maybe I'll become a prophet. You look a bit Jules Verne yourself, Skipper.”

“Keep the coffee hot, pard,” the AC smiled inside his mirrored helmet visor. He well knew that he was stealing his best friend's moment of glory, for which Enright had lived and breathed for a year. Enright could not see the Colonel's face behind the gold-leaf visor. “Wait up for me, Jack.”

“Count on it, Will.”

William McKinley Parker knew he could take that to the bank as his MMU thrusters shoved him upward and away from Enright's bloodshot eyes.

From Enright's aft window, the white figure of the command pilot appeared to ascend straight up. Seconds after the AC's feet lifted beyond the rear window before the bandaged face, Enright saw his shipmate drift slowly into view outside Overhead Window Eight directly above the copilot's upturned face. But in his weightless freefall, Parker felt as if he slid out of the bay on his left side. Shuttle lay upon her port side in the frigid darkness 275 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Parker jetted from the bay with his face toward Enright and with his back toward Shuttle's tall tail. As the AC's boots cleared the bay and the deployed RMS arm, he could see to his right the star Menkar in the constellation Cetus on the Celestial Equator directly above Endeavor. To his left was the black ocean which changed from mid-winter into a Latin American summer at the microsecond when Shuttle darted south of the Equator.

As Parker flew ten feet beyond Enright's ceiling window, the glare of the arc-lighted bay fell dryly upon the white EMU suit and the bulky, white manned maneuvering unit. LACE floated in the light thrown by Soyuz as the tight formation crossed the momentary landfall of the easternmost point of Brazil at 06 hours 35 minutes, MET.

In the arid light of the open bay illuminated garishly as a stage, Parker drifted as in moonlight. He looked ghostly with his one side shining a cold white, while his other side was black against the black spacescape. Parker's boxy, shadowy figure so close yet so far from Endeavor sent a tingle down Enright's sweating neck.

The AC's left hand twitched on the arm of his MMU. Invisible nitrogen jets fired upward behind his head and he stopped above Shuttle's blunt nose fifteen feet from the open bay.

“You look like a man wearing a bookcase, Skip.” Enright needed to hear his partner's voice from Out There.

“Feels like I left all the books in it,” Parker chuckled over static. Although the cold in nighttime space is so intense that even atoms cease to resonate, the AC was comfortable inside his stiff Beta cloth water-cooled suit.

From only three Shuttle lengths above the flightdeck, Parker could clearly see Jacob Enright through the 20-inch by 20-inch, triple-pane window in the aft flightdeck ceiling. Parker studied his starship, his glass-shelled home away from home.

Like the three satellites dead motionless around him, the AC was in an orbit of his very own, governed independently by the dictates of orbital mechanics. Without the cold jets strapped to his backside or Shuttle's hot RCS thrusters, Will Parker would never close the short distance back to his ship. Never.

Hanging directly above the flightdeck, Parker could see the cabin lights behind the two ceiling windows and the six forward windows wrapped around Endeavor's nose. He thought of the nighttime glow of a mountain cabin casting warm, solitary firelight from its windows upon new snow.

“Surely looks cozy in there, Jack. Real cozy.”

“I'll deck the halls for you, Skip.” Enright's two hands worked to keep the remote arm's elbow camera aimed upon Shuttle's wandering son.

“Thanks, Number One. I can see the whole ship from here. Breathtaking! The thermal blankets in the bay are brilliant. A sixty-foot-long reflector with the bay lighting around it. The PDP pod is maybe 40 feet from me.”

The plasma-sensing package automatically sniffed and electronically logged Parker's invisible cloud of nitrogen molecules from the MMU jets.

“Oh! And I have a full moon just peeking above your starboard wingtip. Awesome! High tide somewhere down below tonight.”

Enright could see the white moon reflected off Parker's golden visor. The moon's face was slightly washed out by the lights from the payload bay.

“I'll bet,” the shipbound copilot called as warmly as he could to his friend making a walk which was to have been Enright's.

At 06 hours 37 minutes, Endeavor ended her two-minute landfall over South America. The three ships and Parker left Recife, Brazil, behind for the dark South Atlantic. Endeavor and her small human satellite would be over open sea for the next 38 minutes and 11,400 statute miles of darkness.

“Endeavor, Endeavor. Configure AOS by Ascension at 06 plus 39. With you for 3. Downlink looks fine. All MMU digitals and bio are nominal. We see the AC stopped. You can turn up the TV gain a notch in the artificial light . . . Much better, Jack. Thanks . . . Radio check, Will?”

“Five by five, Flight. What a night for a moonlight stroll!”

“We copy that, Will . . . Jack: Could you configure DAP loop Alpha to deadband zero point one.”

“. . . Autopilot, loop A, to point one, Flight.”

“We see it, Endeavor. Leave it there. We also want you to forget about the IMU alignment this pass. Your stable member matrix is solid enough all balls.”

“Okay.”

“Soyuz: Comm check by Ascension Island.” Colorado hailed through the mid-Atlantic antenna.

“Soyuz is with you, America. We see Colonel at about 40 meters. Soyuz standing by.”

“Understand, Major. Thank you.”

“We will be with our tracking ship for a minute, please,” a Russian voice called into the darkness at sea.

“Frequency change approved,” Colorado acknowledged, sounding like Departure Control.

“Thank you,” Soyuz replied as if the Soviet craft required Center clearance. The United States Space Command and the NASA tracking network were tuned to the FM radio spectrum. Colorado was not privy to the Soviet dialogue over blue-green laser between Soyuz and her trawler off nighttime Brazil.