John Nance - Orbit

The shock of Intrepid ’s sudden telemetry reactivation is still ping-ponging back and forth among the fine technical minds in the room and despite the obvious, there is still no widespread willingness to accept the idea that Kip Dawson, a rank amateur, has actually repaired Intrepid ’s radios.

“Is there a master circuit breaker for all the radios he could have pushed back in?” one of the structural experts asks, wondering why the rest of the group merely shake their heads as if the question is technically embarrassing—which it is. She hears the ongoing discussions of the oxygen and nitrogen mix and the CO 2levels, the adequacy of the remaining fuel, and the fact that all systems except voice communication appear to be working as if nothing had ever impacted the ship and killed its pilot.

“The external airlock door is showing open,” Chuck Hines reports.

“You didn’t see that before?” Arleigh asks over the interphone.

Chuck turns and addresses him directly. “It just now came up on the telemetry readout. The inside door is still closed, inside atmosphere still breathable.”

“Dammit, he’s got less than fifteen minutes of air left to get back in there,” Arleigh is saying, as much to himself as to the control room.

Over and over again Diana hears them returning to the almost hushed discussion of the apparent “far out” reality of how Intrepid ’s downlinks have sprung back to life—the “impossible theory” first fueled by the startling decision Kip Dawson had written about several hours ago:

I’m going to wiggle into Bill’s space suit and see if there’s anything I can do outside to patch up the damage.

“How could he know? Do we cover how to do an emergency spacewalk in ground school, Arleigh?” Chuck Hines is asking.

“Yes, to the same extent airline passengers are schooled on emergency evacuation.”

“If I wasn’t looking at all this stuff streaming down,” Chuck says, “I’d tell you the chances he successfully put on Bill’s suit and went outside and repaired the ship are zero. But you tell me, which is more likely? He did it, or the problem was cured by mystical equipment self-repair uncontaminated by human contact?”

“I’d vote for Kip.”

“Yeah,” he sighs. “Me, too.”

Diana tunes out the discussion, focusing on the numbers cascading down on one side of the screen while her mind reaches for him so many miles away. Daring to hope, just a little, where no hope had been was logical. But the startling reality is how much it impacts her. She knows fatigue is in charge now. If there’s some uncontrolled, starry-eyed tendency to slide toward falling in love with him, it would be, she thinks, like falling in love with Elvis before he passed. She’s mature enough to know that myth and reality are seldom connected, except in the mind.

She knows all of it, and yet Kip to her has become as compelling as gravity.

Diana shakes her head and tells her common sense to immediately search out and destroy such little-girl fantasies. After all, the man is married.

The thought is interrupted by a shout from one of the console positions.

“Hey, everyone! Intrepid ’s outer door just closed, and I’m getting a pressure drop inside!”

Strange, Kip thinks, how climbing back inside feels like spoiling a good stage exit. He looks around the tiny, tublike interior of the airlock, working to suppress his feelings of claustrophobia.

The whoosh of air from the interior fills the tiny space quickly and he can feel the rigidity of the space suit diminish. The green light indicating equal pressure comes on and he works the inner door locks and swings it open, taking his time again in extricating himself.

For just a moment he considers leaving the suit in place and pressurized before remembering the limited oxygen in the airpack. He cuts it off and secures the little arm-mounted control panel before removing his helmet, securing it before working to adjust himself back into the command chair. The bulky space suit is a bit easier to handle when deflated, but he wishes he could have just kept it sealed. Bill’s physical decomposition is now stomach-turning. All the more reason, he thinks, to take his leave outside in the most spectacular arena imaginable.

But he’s agreed with himself to try the rocket one last time, on the chance it might make a difference. And now, sitting in front of the command panel, the thought hits him that if it fires, he’ll then have an incredibly complicated flying machine to guide through the atmosphere but without benefit of flight training. Not to mention figuring out how, and where, to land it. Succeeding in a spacewalk repair, a deorbit burn, and a reentry, only to crash and die in a botched landing would be awful. Worth a complaint to DiFazio himself.

And the thought makes him chuckle. Yeah. If they kill me with inadequate ground training, I’ll never speak to them again.

The humor masks the fear that’s contracting his stomach, and he’s already flipping through the checklists looking for the very page that turns up now, a reference to another checklist he hasn’t seen—one for emergency reentry.

The discarded headset is floating to his left, disturbed by his movements, and he wonders if he should put it on and try the radios one last time.

No point in wasting time with that. Whatever I was messing with out there didn’t have anything to do with the antennas.

The storage compartment for the ship’s manuals is just out of reach, and he has to unbuckle again to lean far enough over to open it, worry now rising that he won’t be ready in time.

There!

The checklist is in his hands and he opens it, reading too quickly, having to force himself to slow down and reread it.

God, if I’d seen this before, I could have turned the ship automatically!

Someone down there, Kip thinks, decided that with one astronaut aboard each flight, it made good sense to write the checklist so that a rank amateur could follow it.

And even with a dozen glider flights and basic stick and rudder skills, and a couple of fixed-wing flights in a single-engine Cessna in his head, Kip has never felt so much like an amateur.

He checks the time. Twelve minutes to go. Just time enough to learn how to place the small bullet-shaped icon on the attitude indicator in the arms of the moving “V” that is the flight director, the key to keeping the ship in the proper attitude on the way down.

He keeps looking for the information on how to punch an autopilot button and let the ship fly itself, but it either doesn’t exist, or he can’t find it. He’ll have to manually follow the small, projected dot on the attitude indicator all the way and hope for the best—flipping the tail assembly into the split reentry configuration at the right moment, reconfiguring on time, and keeping the engine pointed in the right downward direction until coming through ninety miles up.

Like drinking from a fire hose, he thinks, realizing that he’s actually thinking of reentry as a real possibility and getting way ahead of himself. After all, if the engine doesn’t fire, the rest of it is academic.

“We have a live picture, General,” the duty controller announces, bringing Chris Risen’s eyes around to the front of the room where the slightly fuzzy image of Intrepid is swimming into view, a telescopic shot from the Russian crew.

“Where are they?” Chris asks, moving alongside the controller, a sharp young female captain.