John Nance - Orbit

The President sits back in thought, his eyes watching the forested beauty below as the Marine One pilots begin the descent to the presidential ramp at Andrews, where one of the two specially built Boeing 747s used as Air Force One is waiting.

Suddenly he’s forward again, in Ron’s face.

“There’s a principle here, Ron, and in my view it’s worth the risk. One, we protect our own, civilian or government. Two, we may have only two shuttles left, but we don’t have to plead for help because we’re afraid to use them. Three, this goes to the heart of American trust of and pride in our capabilities, and in NASA, and four, I know what Kosachyov is up to. There is a commercial purpose behind it I can’t ignore. This is like letting Airbus snag a U.S. Air Force contract, something that will never happen on my watch.”

“So, we fly?”

He’s nodding. “Damn right we fly. Unless there’s a solid, no-foolin’ safety concern beyond the routine.”

“I’ll tell Shear.”

“Oh, we need to do more than that.” The President’s already pulling the receiver out of its cradle in his armrest.

“You’re calling Moscow?”

A naughty grin that would fit a much younger man breaks across the President’s face.

The connection to the Web address carrying the alleged transmission from space has apparently frozen, and Alastair thinks he knows why.

The e-mails pouring into his own mailbox from addresses he doesn’t recognize have overloaded it.

And now the frozen transmission.

He pulls up another screen and calls up a bulletin board he’s found, a site for people nuts about space travel. Sure enough, the message from the man calling himself Kip is there, too, and still actively scrolling!

Right! They’re retransmitting it.

Another excited message from Becky has made it to an alternate mailbox and he opens it quickly.

So why are all my messages to you on the normal channel getting bounced? I don’t want to see another of those @%!^#$ “Mailer-Daemon” things! If you get this, let me know. Your stranded spaceman’s transmission is exploding. Someone’s retransmitting it everywhere and I’ve already seen it on eight sites. And Ali-boy, I think the poor guy IS really up there and is really, REALLY screwed! And the story he’s telling is so amazingly rad.

Me

Alastair checks the time, amazed to find it’s nearly two-thirty in the morning. He feels like he just sat down. The only light on in the room is the gooseneck over his keyboard, but suddenly he feels the need for more. It’s chilly and he’s already pulled on a sweater, but it’s not enough. He snaps on the ceiling light, aware of how closely his dad monitors the electrical bill, but there’s still too little heat and he pulls a small ceramic heater from the closet, the one he’s been told never to use, before sitting back down at the keyboard.

Whatever all this is, he decides, it is way more than he can handle now. But there is one thing he hasn’t done yet that just has to be accomplished. He checks his notepad for the e-mail address he wrote down of the company in California that launched the spacecraft, and writes as simple a message as he can.

Dear American Space Adventures,

I don’t know if it’s real or not, but there’s a guy saying he’s a passenger in your spaceship Intrepidand he’s sending a continuous letter into the Internet, and I’m forwarding the Web site address. It’s frozen up on me, but you can see it being retransmitted at two other places. I’m sending a file with my record of the first part of what came in.

If there really is a problem, I hope everything turns out okay.

Your friend, Alastair Wood.

Kalgoorlie-Boulder, Western Australia

Jeez, what would it feel like to be up there all alone? he wonders, knowing that some of the words he first read—words he thought were part of a scam—might hold the answer to that.

Maybe he should reread them.

But first, he decides, he’ll take a look at his jammed-up mailbox. He opens the long list and pages to the latest one, not believing the address: ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, his national network.

Dear Sir or Madam: We have been forwarded a copy of an e-mail you sent to several friends last night with a Web address that apparently is the only live transmission from a stranded space tourist on an American craft in orbit. If this is true, and you are the one who somehow found it, we would very much appreciate the opportunity to interview you this morning as soon as possible. We would like very much to know how you managed to come across such a transmission, and how you reacted. Won’t you please call us at our toll-free number in Sydney? Wherever you are in Australia, we can send a camera crew to you.

James Haggas

Executive Producer

The number is at the bottom and Alastair sits there staring at it, wondering what to do and remembering that the way this thing started was by his hacking into a private transmission. Not terribly legal.

I should get on the telly and tell the whole bloody world? I don’t think so!

Suddenly the urge to shut down the computer and hide overwhelms him.

Can they find me through an unregistered e-mail address? he wonders, his stomach contracting with worry. Dad will kill me.

He snaps off the ceiling and desk lights and dives under the covers. The bedcovers always feel like the best defense against a world gone mad.

For the previous agonizing day and a half, Arleigh Kerr has had to deal with the reality that without communication a flight director has virtually nothing to direct. Two of the staff have kept Mission Control operating in the hopes that somehow a data stream or other useful information will once again start pouring through their monitors, but nonetheless it’s felt like a deathwatch.

And now, from the most unlikely quarter, contact?

Arleigh stands at his console, waiting for the room to fill, as his people rush back in, each wearing cautious expressions. When the room is back up to strength, Arleigh leans down and looses a flurry of keystrokes into his computer keyboard, then glances up at the largest of the screens before them, waiting for the text to appear.

“What’s this, Arleigh?” the flight dynamics controller asks.

“It’s coming in through an obscure site on the Internet, one of the servers we’ve used for e-mail. We would have never seen it except for someone way out in the boonies of Australia. The guy e-mailed us a half hour ago where to find this.”

“But what is it?”

“We think,” Arleigh says, “that it’s our passenger, Kip Dawson, trying to communicate. But apparently he doesn’t know anyone’s listening… or reading. I’ve got a lot more, and if this is truly him, it tells what happened yesterday.”

Arleigh highlights the first portion about the impact and Bill Campbell’s demise and lets it sink in.

“I want everyone to read everything he’s written, then punch up line eighteen to pick up with his real-time transmissions. I don’t know what we can learn that can help him, since we can’t talk back, but I want you to scour every line for facts that might help us get him down.”

“How is this being transmitted, exactly?” the woman in charge of capsule communication asks.

Arleigh shrugs as he looks around the room. “Who has the details on this computer interface to the Internet. Janet? How is this possible?”

A tall woman with her hair severely pulled back meets his gaze with a deer-in-the-headlights expression.