John Nance - Orbit

“Chief, do we have a pool going on whether NASA will cancel if the Russians lift off?”

The chief is grinning. “A pool, sir? You mean, as in gambling? As in a chief master sergeant informing the commander of NORAD that his people are violating regulations?”

“Sorry. Of course I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Put me down for twenty that we scrub.”

“Yes, sir. But for the record, I know nothing.”

“Out of limits means out of limits, Griggs!” The launch director is standing now, hands on hips, one of his people standing beside him, the computer screen showing the excessive temperature readings displayed on his master console.

“Stand by, Cully. Do not declare a hold yet.”

“Look at the count, Griggs! How long do you need?”

Griggs has a receiver to his ear and a prepositioned computer team on the other end, physically stationed at a hastily constructed war room one building away.

“Two minutes.”

“You’ve got forty seconds.”

Cully Jones shakes his head and turns back to the screen, rolling his eyes at the engineer waiting for direction on what to do with the temperature indication climbing in a tank that could theoretically explode if it, in fact, was to heat up another twenty-five degrees.

“Watch it like a hawk. If it tops redline plus thirty, we open the vent and hold the countdown.”

“Got it.”

Cully turns back to Griggs, aware of what he’s doing but equally aware that a high reading can’t be easily written off as just another artificial computer-generated anomaly. Like a pilot’s guiding philosophy of instrument flight, safety demands belief in your gauges, until you have solid, almost irrefutable evidence they’re lying.

Cully can feel his blood pressure inching up, something he can usually control, but the series of bad readings and interrupted communications that have marked the last ten minutes are either evidence of a serious, systemic computer glitch—as Griggs insists without much evidence—or a launch sliding toward disaster. This does not feel right.

Griggs turns back to him.

“Okay! Cully, check it now. We’re reading raw pickup data and bypassing the distribution processor that’s been causing so many bad readings.”

The display blinks and the high temperature suddenly drops thirty critical degrees into the green.

“Jesus Christ!” Cully snarls, his eyes on the reading lest it rise again. He turns to Griggs. “That’s real? I can trust it?”

“You bet. This is just more of the nonsense we’ve been fighting all morning. The basic distribution processing program is apparently corrupted and we have no time to reboot the system.”

Another engineer is in his ear on the intercom, and Cully closes his eyes to concentrate on what he’s saying.

“Talk to me.”

“I have a complete data dropout on the SRBs. Total.”

“Stand by!” Once more Cully Jones turns to Hopewell, who is still hanging on to the receiver with his emergency computer team on the other end.

"Griggs?"

“I heard, goddammit! Hang on.”

“I’m declaring a hold.”

The countdown is descending through T minus sixteen minutes, the tension in the control room increasing exponentially.

Kip leans into the keyboard once more.

Having now solved all of mankind’s problems (the doomed passenger says, facetiously) it’s time to turn my attention to some of my own. The challenge is how and when I should pull the plug, or should I just plan to slip off to “sleep.” That problem has been rattling around my head all morning (as measured by my watch, of course, rather than the continuous ninety-minute cycle of sunrises and sunsets that have me humming the song from Fiddler on the Roof, and shedding tears.)

The other thing that has me fibrillating is an embarrassment: If I had a boat that sprang a leak, wouldn’t I at least try to plug the leak? Of course. But I’ve sat here for days waiting for Godot, assuming that nothing more can be done, even though deep down I’ve known all along it’s not true. There is one more overt, physical thing I can do, or at least try.

I’m going to wiggle into Bill’s space suit and see if there’s anything I can repair outside. What are the chances? Below absolute zero. Yes, I’m somewhat mechanically inclined and I can wire up a mean set of speaker wires. Actually my BS degree in electrical engineering is really a smoke screen, since I never used it, and especially not with high-tech messes caused by high-speed objects hitting spacecraft.

And what’s the worse case? I die outside instead of inside, but better with my boots on… space boots though they may be.

You know, I’m feeling a little punchy. I wonder if the CO 2buildup has already begun? I feel more loose. Or maybe just feeling relieved we’re getting close to the end. Relieved and scared out of my mind. That, I think, is the real reason I’m going to go outside and play with the vacuum. I need something to do besides sit here and wait for the inevitable.

I hope you understand—whoever you are and whenever in the distant future you read this—just knowing another human is absorbing all this verbiage has given me a form of companionship. I thank you for that! I thank you for sitting through my grumbling and pontificating and crying and the poor expressions of how I would do things down there if I had the proverbial magic wand.

If any of my kids are still alive when this is found and read, please see that they get the separate letters I’ve written to all four individually. And as for Sharon, in case she is still alive, just this: I’m sorry. I wish things could have been better for us as a couple.

And there is one last overall message I guess I want to leave.

I want for all of you a future in which every human has firmly in his or her mind the scene the three Apollo 8 astronauts saw back in 1968 when this tiny, beautiful blue marble we live on rose over the edge of the moon as they raced along the far side—an almost iridescent oasis of beauty in an endless, star-speckled sea of black nothingness—and they realized they were looking at spaceship Earth, their home. Suddenly wars and borders and conflicts based on economics and theories seemed utterly stupid, and while in reality we’re a long way from being a species that universally shares that startling view, we must—you must—keep moving in that direction.

That goal of harmony and love that a man from Galilee tried to teach us in amazing simplicity so long ago is still the goal we should strive for, regardless of what labels we put on the message. “Us” seems a strange concept, since I’m leaving. But I was a part of spaceship Earth and the human family, a pioneering species that is still relatively blind to a very profound truth that’s so hard to see when you’re working hard and paying bills and raising kids: We are all so very connected! Even me, here, waiting to die in space. I’m connected to everyone down there, and… you know, it’s amazing… as soon as I type these words I feel the warmth of uncounted prayers and a sea of good will and good wishes, as if the entire population of the planet was somehow telepathically saying, “Everything’s okay. Regardless of what happens, it’s okay.” I know that virtually no one down there can discern a single thought of mine, and may never read a word of this. But since I’ve been up here I haven’t felt as enfolded as I do at this moment. But now it’s time for some pro forma struggling. Some self-help that I have to try, so that I will know I didn’t just sit here and ignore options, no matter how bizarre and impossible they may be. So, if I don’t get to write another word, thank you. I left this life as calmly as I could. Not bravely, just calmly. And you know, after everything is said and done, I have been very, very fortunate.