Robert Sawyer: Above It All

Rhymes with fear.

The words echoed in Colonel Paul Rackham’s head as he floated in Discovery’s airlock, the bulky Manned Maneuvering Unit clamped to his back. Air was being pumped out; cold vacuum was forming around him.

Rhymes with fear.

He should have said no, should have let McGovern or one of the others take the spacewalk instead. But Houston had suggested that Rackham do it, and to demure he’d have needed to state a reason.

Just a dead body, he told himself. Nothing to be afraid of.

There was a time when a military man couldn’t have avoided seeing death — but Rackham had just been finishing high school during Desert Storm. Sure, as a test pilot, he’d watched colleagues die in crashes, but he’d never actually seen the bodies. And when his mother passed on, she’d had a closed casket. His choice, that, made without hesitation the moment the funeral director had asked him — his father, still in a nursing home, had been in no condition to make the arrangements.

Rackham was wearing liquid-cooling long johns beneath his spacesuit, tubes circulating water around him to remove excess body heat. He shuddered, and the tubes moved in unison, like a hundred serpents writhing.

He checked the barometer, saw that the lock’s pressure had dropped below 0.2 psi — just a trace of atmosphere left. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to calm himself, then reached out a gloved hand and turned the actuator that opened the outer circular hatch. “I’m leaving the airlock,” he said. He was wearing the standard “Snoopy Ears” communications carrier, which covered most of his head beneath the space helmet. Two thin microphones protruded in front of his mouth.

“Copy that, Paul,” said McGovern, up in the shuttle’s cockpit. “Good luck.”

Rackham pushed the left MMU armrest control forward. Puffs of nitrogen propelled him out into the cargo bay. The long space doors that normally formed the bay’s roof were already open, and overhead he saw Earth in all its blue-and-white glory. He adjusted his pitch with his right hand control, then began rising up. As soon as he’d cleared the top of the cargo bay, the Russian space station Mir was visible, hanging a hundred meters away, a giant metal crucifix. Rackham brought his hand up to cross himself.

“I have Mir in sight,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. “I’m going over.”

Rackham remembered when the station had gone up, twenty years ago in 1986. He first saw its name in his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World Herald. Mir, the Russian word for peace — as if peace had had anything to do with its being built. Reagan had been hemorrhaging money into the Strategic Defense Initiative back then. If the Cold War turned hot, the high ground would be in orbit.

Even then, even in grade eight, Rackham had been dying to go into space. No price was too much. “Whatever it takes,” he’d told Dave — his sometimes friend, sometimes rival — over lunch. “One of these days, I’ll be floating right by that damned Mir. Give the Russians the finger.” He’d pronounced Mir as if it rhymed with sir.

Dave had looked at him for a moment, as if he were crazy. Then, dismissing all of it except the way Paul had spoken, he smiled a patronizing smile and said, “It’s meer, actually. Rhymes with fear.”

Rhymes with fear.

Paul’s gaze was still fixed on the giant cross, spikes of sunlight glinting off it. He shut his eyes and let the nitrogen exhaust push against the small of his back, propelling him into the darkness.

“I’ve got a scalpel,” said the voice over the speaker at mission control in Kaliningrad. “I’m going to do it.”

Flight controller Dimitri Kovalevsky leaned into his mike. “You’re making a mistake, Yuri. You don’t want to go through with this.” He glanced at the two large wall monitors. The one showing Mir’s orbital plot was normal; the other, which usually showed the view inside the space station, was black. “Why don’t you turn on your cameras and let us see you?”

The speaker crackled with static. “You know as well as I do that the cameras can’t be turned off. That’s our way, isn’t it? Still — even after the reforms — cameras with no off switches.”

“He’s probably put bags or gloves over the lenses,” said Metchnikoff, the engineer seated at the console next to Kovalevsky’s.

“It’s not worth it, Yuri,” said Kovalevsky into the mike, while nodding acknowledgement at Metchnikoff. “You want to come on home? Climb into the Soyuz and come on down. I’ve got a team here working on the re-entry parameters.”

“Nyet,” said Yuri. “It won’t let me leave.”

“What won’t let you leave?”

“I’ve got a knife,” repeated Yuri, ignoring Kovalevsky’s question. “I’m going to do it.”

Kovalevsky slammed the mike’s off switch. “Dammit, I’m no expert on this. Where’s that bloody psychologist?”

“She’s on her way,” said Pasternak, the scrawny orbital-dynamics officer. “Another fifteen minutes, tops.”

Kovalevsky opened the mike again. “Yuri, are you still there?”

No response.

“Yuri?”

“They took the food,” said the voice over the radio, sounding even farther away than he really was, “right out of my mouth.”

Kovalevsky exhaled noisily. It had been an international embarrassment the first time it had happened. Back in 1994, an unmanned Progress rocket had been launched to bring food up to the two cosmonauts then aboard Mir. But when it docked with the station, those cosmonauts had found its cargo hold empty — looted by ground-support technicians desperate to feed their own starving families. The same thing had happened again just a few weeks ago. This time the thieves had been even more clever — they’d replaced the stolen food with sacks full of dirt to avoid any difference in the rocket’s pre-launch weight.

“We got food to you eventually,” said Kovalevsky.

“Oh, yes,” said Yuri. “We reached in, grabbed the food back — just like we always do.”

“I know things haven’t been going well,” said Kovalevsky, “but—”

“I’m all alone up here,” said Yuri. He was quiet for a time, but then he lowered his voice conspiratorially. “Except I discover I’m not alone.”

Kovalevsky tried to dissuade the cosmonaut from his delusion. “That’s right, Yuri — we’re here. We’re always here for you. Look down, and you’ll see us.”

“No,” said Yuri. “No — I’ve done enough of that. It’s time. I’m going to do it.”

Kovalevsky covered the mike and spoke desperately. “What do I say to him? Suggestions? Anyone? Dammit, what do I say?”

“I’m doing it,” said Yuri’s voice. There was a grunting sound. “A stream of red globules … floating in the air. Red — that was our color, wasn’t it? What did the Americans call us? The Red Menace. Better dead than Red … But they’re no better, really. They wanted it just as badly.”

Kovalevsky leaned forward. “Apply pressure to the cut, Yuri. We can still save you. Come on, Yuri — you don’t want to die! Yuri!”

Up ahead, Mir was growing to fill Rackham’s view. The vertical shaft of the crucifix consisted of the Soyuz that had brought Yuri to the space station sixteen months ago, the multiport docking adapter, the core habitat, and the Kvant-1 science module, with a green Progress cargo transport docked to its aft end.

The two arms of the cross stuck out of the docking adapter. To the left was the Kvant-2 biological research center, which contained the EVA airlock through which Rackham would enter. To the right was the Kristall space-production lab. Kristall had a docking port that a properly equipped American shuttle could hook up to — but Discovery wasn’t properly equipped; the Mir adapter collar was housed aboard Atlantis, which wasn’t scheduled to fly again for three months.