Back to the Moon (24 page)

“What are you laughing at?”

He thought to put her at ease by lightly flirting. “I just kind of think you're cute when you try to be macho.”

“You trying to put the move on me?”

“No, just being friendly.”

“Yeah, right. Let's go, Medaris.”

Jack could see he was going to get nowhere with Penny by trying to be nice. Why he had even tried was beyond him.
Back to work.
He had four long tethers on his waist clip. He unclipped one and attached it to Penny's waist so she could use it to stabilize herself when they got to the work site. He started up, hand over hand, climbing
Columbia
's vertical stabilizer, her huge swept-back tail. Tools were swinging from him like pots and pans on a tinker's cart. “Don't let go whatever you do, High Eagle,” he called as he moved. “If you did, Virgil could move the shuttle after you but it'd be a damn hard maneuver and he's never tried it.”

He turned to see if she was following. She was, but slowly. Above them was an immense blue-and-white dome—the Pacific Ocean. Jack watched Penny look up at it, then put her head down quickly. He guessed that she had been struck by vertigo, as often happened to spacewalking shuttle astronauts.

Jack came down the vertical stabilizer and gripped the huge bell of the outboard main engine exhaust nozzle. He turned again to check out Penny. She arrived, still kicking her legs futilely. “The first thing we've got to do is remove the panel that covers the engine compartment. Stop kicking, High Eagle!”

Penny immediately stopped kicking but her boots swung over her head. Jack steadied her, holding her backpack.

“I don't have anything to hang on to.” She gasped, apparently drained from the exertion of climbing over the stabilizer.

Jack placed her so she could reach the rim of the nozzle. “Hold the bell with one hand to steady yourself. Then swing your boots over to the nozzle below and pinch your feet around its edge.”

She tried it. “Okay. But I don't feel very secure.”

Jack made the remaining three waist tethers into one long line, clipped it to Penny, then worked his way down to the external tank attach struts and attached the other end there. “You're tethered to the ET. If you let go, I'll be able to pull you back in. You're perfectly safe.”

Central America rolled by overhead, then a boil of huge white clouds swirling over the Caribbean. Jack saw Penny look up again and just as quickly back down. “This is hard,” she admitted. “I feel like I'm going to fall.”

“It's supposed to be hard,” he said curtly, more so than he meant. He softened his tone. “You're not going to fall. Sir Isaac Newton wouldn't allow it. Do you think you can hold on and let me tether to you while I work around the nozzles?”

He heard her take a ragged breath. “I can try,” she squeaked.

“Grab hold of my feet,” he said, swinging his boots up to her free arm.

For the next thirty minutes Jack worked steadily, using the power wrench on the bolts holding the engine shroud, a flat plate that protected the guts of the engines with cutouts for the big nozzles. Penny kept her boots clamped on the lower starboard nozzle and one hand on the top nozzle. Twice, Jack had no hand- or foothold and swung against the tether. Penny had to hold him or he would have slipped off into space. She was a lot stronger than she looked, Jack thought. When the last bolt came out, he thumped the shroud with his fist, popping the edges loose. Then he peeled it away and set it adrift, exposing the workings of the monster engines.

“Look at
that
!” Penny blurted.
That
was the incredible complex of pumps, tubing, pipes, cables, and wire bundles that had been exposed.

“Six tons of useless mass that we've got to move,” Jack muttered. “The Big Dog's going in there.”

“Why do you call it Big Dog?”

“When you hear it fired, you'll understand. It sounds just like a pit bull.”

“Cute.” He heard her breathing easier. She was becoming acclimated. “I love the way you men make pets out of your machines,” she added.

He smiled, actually pleased that she was doing so well on her first EVA. The standard-issue astronaut would have gotten at least a hundred hours of training in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab before Houston would have even considered letting him do an EVA. Jack kept the banter going. “Well, I'm glad we're at least a source of amusement for you, High Eagle.”

“This is going to be a lot of work, isn't it?” she asked suddenly.

“The record for changing out a shuttle main is eight hours. We have about the same amount of time to remove all three if we want to get back on our timeline. Fortunately, we don't have to follow ground procedures.”

“We're just going to rip the engines out?”

“We're going to
carefully
rip them out.”

Jack adjusted the camera attached to his helmet and flicked it on. If it worked, Virgil should be able to see what Jack was doing. “Do you see us, Virg?” Jack called.

Virgil's comeback was instantaneous. “Yep. I see the shroud's gone and you're at the coolant control valve of the number three engine.”

Jack was thankful he was going to have Virgil giving him advice as he proceeded. There were few at the Cape who had changed out more shuttle mains than Virgil Judd. Jack untethered and turned to face Penny. He pointed into the dark recesses of the engines. “If I get stuck in there, I might need you to come help me out.”

Penny peered into the tangle. “Don't get stuck, okay?”

“I'll do my best.” Jack began to worm his way into the wires and tubing, moving slowly, gauging each move, trying not to get his backpack snagged. When he got deeper, he switched on his helmet lights. “What do you see, Virg?”

“Good picture, Jack. You're at the engine interface panel.”

A cavity allowed Jack to straighten up and turn around. He swept his light back along his path, tubing and cables still vibrating from his passing. He faced the bulkhead and directed his lights at the big bolts that ran along the edge. When he saw that each bolt had a recess, he got worried. “What are the holes for, Virg? Not for squibs, I hope.”

“Negative. There are no pyrotechnics in the engine compartment. Those are for the transducers used to measure torque.”

“How much torque?”

“Only about twenty foot-pounds. You should be able to manhandle them with the Essex wrench if the power tool can't do it.”

Jack set about his task. He clipped the safety wires and then put the power tool on the first of the bolts. “It's turning!” he cheered.

“Great. Okay, don't do any more on the bolts,” Virgil advised. “Cut all the propellant lines and electronics first. Let me see everything you cut before you do it and I'll give you the go-ahead.”

Jack needed more hands. “High Eagle, could use some help in here. You'll need to untether.”

He heard her sigh but then she said, “Coming in.” The girl had guts, he had to give her that.

When Penny came up beside him, he handed her a pair of heavy wire cutters. “Here's the drill, High Eagle. I'll point, Virgil will say if it's okay, and then we'll take turns cutting. It'll be slow going and hard on our hands. When I need to rest, you'll cut. Then vice versa. Got it?”

She was squinting again. “Got it.”

Jack knew that getting Virgil's permission before any tube or wire was cut was critical. There was little danger if the main engine propellant lines were cut because they contained only water and ice, but the OMS and RCS lines that ran along the aft bulkhead were extremely hazardous. If they were accidentally cut, the resulting high-pressure spray of nitrogen tetroxide or monomethyl hydrazine could deteriorate the EMU suit fabric rapidly. And if both got loose and mixed, the engine compartment would become a giant bomb.

After cutting out two engines Jack called for a stop when he heard Penny groan. “It feels like my fingernails have been pried back to the quick,” she complained. “These damn gloves!”

“I know it's hard, High Eagle,” Jack said quietly, his voice thick with fatigue. “But you're doing a damn good job.”

There was a vibration in the engine compartment. Jack put his glove against the bulkhead. “Did you feel that?”

“Did something hit us?” Penny worried.

His glove picked up another vibration. “There it is again. I wonder—”

Before Jack could finish his thought, the engine compartment exploded in furious movement, wires and cables and cut tubing flying around like maddened snakes. A thick cable whipped Jack, sending him smashing into an RCS line. The line flexed and then broke, flooding the compartment with toxic monomethyl hydrazine.

SMC

“Flight, PROP.”

Sam keyed his mike.
What the hell did the propulsion controller want?
“Go ahead, PROP.”

“Flight, there was indication of ice in the port aft RCS line. I just popped it out of there. Then I compensated with a burst from starboard. Looks like I might have started an inadvertent tumble.”

Sam felt his stomach bottom out. “You didn't tell
Columbia
what you were going to do?”

There was an “uh-oh” pause from the woman. “Negative. It's normally routine. We do it all the time.”

Sam stood up, found the woman on the PROP console, and glared at her. She raised her head, looked embarrassed. “Propulsion, this flight is never going to be routine.” She nodded her head, ducked it back behind her monitor. Sam punched up the comm loop. “CAPCOM?”

“CAPCOM. Go.”

“Tell
Columbia
what we did and that we meant no harm.”

“Roger that.”

Columbia

Virgil looked up from a drawing.
Columbia
shuddered, then there was a big thump, like a distant bass drum. Virgil looked out a window, saw the shuttle was starting to tumble slowly on her Z-axis, tail over nose. Then there was a long, staccato series of muffled drumbeats. Virgil pawed the transmitter of his headset. “Houston,
Columbia.
Are you firing the RCS?”

“Sorry about that,
Columbia,
“ the CAPCOM replied. “We were clearing your port aft RCS of ice. Can you stabilize?”

Virgil fought his way to the pilot's seat, found the OMS/RCS power switches, and safed them, but still an engine burned.
Columbia
tumbled ever faster, like a boulder rolling down an eternal black slope. Virgil kept working, desperately going after all power distribution switches. When he finally gave up trying to isolate the problem, he slapped off the main computer power bus and the muffled roar abruptly stopped. Turning off the computer had caused valves upstream to slam shut, not a good thing to do to sensitive hardware.

Virgil held his hand up to shade his eyes. The sun was flashing through the flight deck windows like a doppler spotlight.
Columbia
was in a head-over-heels somersault. Virgil braced himself against the artificial minigravity caused by the centrifugal force of the tumble. Drops of sweat were flying off his face. He clawed his way back to the view ports. Every ten seconds
Columbia
completed a rotation. The earth and stars seemed to be playing leapfrog. Virgil felt his stomach start to complain. Just as he reached for a barf bag, something white flashed past the aft view ports. An EMU suit glove. Someone had died out there. He pressed the bag to his mouth, his body racking spasmodically.

SMC

“Sam, it's Bonner.”

Sam turned in his chair, saw Bonner coming out of the VIP room. He was weaving. “Shit. He's drunk!”

Bonner plowed up to Sam's console, looked at the graphic of the tumbling shuttle on the CRT. “You've got him! Good work, Sam!”

Sam saw Lakey standing over the CAPCOM. He was putting down the long line phone. His mouth was open in astonishment at Bonner's appearance. He'd probably called the director, tracked him down at the Rawhide from the look of him, told him that
Columbia
was in a tumble because something the SMC had done. “Frank, you're in no shape to be here,” Sam said, waving all his controllers' eyes away from the scene.

Bonner leaned on the console. “Keep pumping the RCS jets,” he said, summoning up the precise words with obvious difficulty. “Do it, Sam.”

“It was a mistake, Frank. We're correcting it now.”

“No. Keep pumping or you're relieved.”

“You can't relieve me while you're drunk. Go home. Sober up and then come back and do it if that's what you want.”

Bonner lurched to the edge of the platform. He looked down at the youthful controllers, who were all staring back, eyes wide. “I am ordering you to. . . to...” He seemed to catch himself. He turned back to Sam. “That bastard is a murderer.”

“That isn't true, Frank,” Sam replied softly, understanding a little what was upsetting Bonner. “Medaris made a bad mistake but that's all it was. He paid the price. And it was a long time ago.”

Bonner leaned against the console, “He took everything away from me.”

“What's he talking about, Sam?” Crowder whispered nervously.

Sam saw Hank Garcia watching from the VIP-room door. “Get over here!” Sam mouthed.

Garcia ran over, took Bonner by his elbow. Bonner straightened, as if remembering his dignity. He looked at Sam. “Sam, stop Medaris. I'll give you anything you want to do it.”

“You don't have the power to give me anything,” Sam muttered. “Get him out of here, Hank,” he ordered Garcia.

“You're relived, Tate!” Bonner yelled over his shoulder as he was half pushed, half carried, from the SMC. “Relieved!”

Sam went after Lakey. “I told you not to interfere with my control room.”

Lakey took a step back. “Sam, listen to me. I didn't realize Bonner was drunk. But he doesn't matter. Think about it. If we put them in a perpetual tumble by firing up the RCS, we'll get them so sick all they'll be able to do is puke. Then we can bring them in and end this thing.”