Pillar to the Sky (27 page)

Absurd. Better to use gravity itself to build the Pillar from the top down. Start at geosynch, then simply lower the cable, though the word “simply” was very much an exaggeration.

The crew set up basic housekeeping, prepping up so that at any moment one of them could go EVA. Then with the entire team in space and on earth taking a collective deep breath, Franklin ordered for the deployment to begin.

The drum carrying the wire up beyond geosynch began its ascent, while at the exact same instant the thruster, with the wire from the second drum attached, fired up for a short burst of six seconds, and the wire attached to it started to play out—silently, of course, in the vacuum of space. It was soon unspooling at the full speed of almost two hundred kilometers of wire an hour, following a complex trajectory downward, with timed stops of the thruster to allow a certain amount of slack to spin out from the drum, the slack providing reserve time if a snag should develop; the snag would then be untangled before too much tension built up on the wire. In fact, the wire was nearly a thousand miles longer than necessary, to provide for that slack; it could be taken in later once the end was firmly anchored to the ground.

The calculation of this had been a magnificent venture into the unknown that had given Gary and Eva many a sleepless night. The influence of solar wind on the strand, or a collision with debris, a functional satellite, or even an untrackable meteor the size of a pebble, could end it all. Once locked in place, perhaps better calculations could be made, but at this stage the variables changed second by second as the wire spun out and down. And the tough one: the tug thruster, as it was now being called. When it fired up, it was indeed towing a wire thousands of miles long, but the longer the cable, the more time it would take until the tensile stress reached the deployment reels. If that stress was too great, it would pull the entire unit out of position; if there was not enough, the wire spinning off the reels would just float and coil, and if it ever wrapped around the manned module or the deployment unit itself, it would probably destroy it.

Those on the ground, even when ordered in a four-hour rotation to sleep, could barely rest, the tension was so high. Franklin looked as if he had aged ten years in the last two weeks, and of the members of the ever-present media—many of whom were cheering the team on in the tradition of Walter Cronkite and CBS—more than a few were the kind who just waited for a disaster to occur so they could breathlessly report the end to this project, with plenty of “investigations” to follow.

For nearly two hundred hours, all went flawlessly. The counterweight drum rolled out nearly 16,000 of its intended 17,000 miles before jamming. But that was more than sufficient for the present. Everything was riding on the next twenty-four hours as the thruster, zeroing in on its anchor point, would do the final burns that would drop it into the atmosphere and guide it to the platform off of Aranuka and thus lock the first thread in place. The game was at its most complex moment, guiding descent, but the closer to earth, the stronger the gravitational pull, so at times it had to fire extended counterburns to keep velocity down.

With twenty-one hours to go, the reason for investing billions in putting three astronauts up to geosynch finally arrived. The drum began to jam up, a nearly invisible strand of wire overlapping, tangling on the drum, and in under a minute it had stopped unwinding. Fortunately the clutch design prevented an instantaneous stoppage, which would have snapped the wire, though it did “backspin” onto the drum for several hundred revolutions. Only human hands could sort out the tangle, and in less than ninety minutes, when by the immutable laws of orbital mechanics the thruster had to fire up again if they were to drop straight in on the platform at Kiribati, rather than come smashing down somewhere in the Pacific or even Brazil.

As Selena Singh was opening the airlock, she paused for a few seconds.

If I have but one more flight in life, this is it,
she thought. Far, far below was earth, its face fully illuminated by the sun behind her shoulder, the glorious blue-green sphere … and her first thought was that they needed to send up someone like Ray Bradbury or Richard Bach to really tell the rest of humanity of the beauty and wonder of it all.

The mission was indeed forgotten for a brief moment as she took in the glorious splendor of it all, the brilliant sphere that contained the entire world she knew; to its right, beginning to rise, a quarter moon, the reflected light so brilliant she immediately snapped down her polarized filter, regretting she had to; she had so dreamed of just seeing a sea of stars.

The mission. Focus on the mission. You can take a few minutes to play tourist after it’s over.

She had one of the new, smaller thruster packs on her back; there was no way they could have fitted the full-size units carried on board the old shuttles and the space station. Besides, they were docked to the deployment reel platform, and she elected to use the handholds to pull herself over while telling her backup, Kevin Malady, to fire up the high-intensity lights. Someone had come up with the simple idea of actually putting a dab of reflective paint on the wire at one-meter intervals. That caused intense debate, as it was calculated to add over two hundred kilos to the total weight, and there was speculation on whether the paint would even adhere in the vacuum of space or else flake off, perhaps jamming up the whole works.

In the wonderful days of NASA such things would have been tested and retested before ever being used. But not now, not on this project, for which Singh was being paid half a million a year for this moment—to risk her life—and to dedicate an entire flight just to testing dabs of paint would delay everything yet again and cost millions.

Singh knew her heart and breathing rates were being monitored, as they should be for all EVAs, and it annoyed her. As she approached the reel, of course she was scared. It looked as if the paint had flecked off as predicted. Wherever the hell the cable was, it was hard to discern.

She flipped up her polarizing sun shield and now she could see it, the brilliant sunlight glinting off the cable.

“I can see it!” she exclaimed. “Up here in this sunlight I can actually see the wire. It is like a string of diamonds!”

She looked to her left. The string of diamonds, as she had called it, snaked off, down toward earth. There was no tension to it; it was loose, slack, like a rope drifting on a slow-moving river.

“MB One, Kiribati, we have initiated renewed thrust. That line will begin to tense out in under thirty minutes.”

“Kiribati, Singh. You must have it cleared before then.”

She switched on the high-intensity lights mounted to her helmet and could easily see the problem: the overlay in the wire on the reel, which threatened to snag when renewed tension snaked up the line from the thruster unit now closing in on the earth’s surface.

It meant going inside the open pod bay of the deployment unit, being careful not to brush against the diamond-like wire, and then, by hand, gently move the wire, which was nearly wrapped around the guide spindle. It reminded her, of all things, of a tangled reel of fishing line when she was a little girl, crying while her brother was reeling in a big catch, and how her loving father untangled the mess and then showed her how to cast her line back out without it tangling.

She braced herself with her right hand on a handhold built into the spindle deployment unit, careful not to let her legs touch the lose wire coiling about.

“Singh, Kiribati. Thruster has fired again; watch your time.”

The spindle guide was the first thing she had to focus on. It had jammed in place, and she caught glimpses of the wire: it had slackened for an instant, then coiled around the spindle guide, triggering the drum to stop deployment; but while slowing down the wire had “back tangled” exactly the way it would on a fishing reel.

“Kiribati, Singh. We have a back snag on the drum; you should be able to see it with my helmet camera. I will clear the spindle first, then manually work the snag off the drum.”

Ever so gingerly she took hold of the wire. Her gloves, which cost over a million dollars a pair, were coated with the same material as the wire; otherwise they would be sliced open as she carefully worked the tangle clear. It was a simple enough operation, only taking several minutes. The billion dollars spent to put her there had just paid off. If they had gone with the original idea of actually lowering the drum, without manned back up it would have been the end of the entire program.

The next step was to clear the back tangle. Using a computer control strapped to her forearm, she activated the reverse on the drum. The back snag started to play out, and she gingerly took hold of the wire, guiding it out, pulling it clear, and letting it drift out behind her. Checking the chronometer in her heads-up display, she could see that time was running short; but the back tangle was just about cleared and in two minutes the drum would start spinning again, feeding out more line as the thruster, 22,000 miles below, continued its descent.

It was finally cleared, and with a sigh she carefully backed away from inside the drum.

“Kiribati, Singh. We’re cleared.”

“Singh. Exceptional work!” It was Franklin rather than Mission Control.

She could actually see the wire going tense, the reel beginning to rotate, within seconds spinning up to a blur, the spindle that guided the wire deployment effortlessly moving back and forth the same way spindles had moved in spinning mills two hundred years ago.

“Kiribati, Singh. All is nominal. Returning to MB One.”

“Singh, Kiribati. Incredible work. You earned your pay today.”

But as she let go of the handhold to reach out to the capsule, the movement caused a slight torque effect, making her feet rise up. It was one thing to practice on the ground, or even in a water tank to simulate weightlessness, but out here there was no volume and mass of water to prevent her feet from rising.

Singh’s left foot brushed against the wire behind her, which was again spinning out at over one hundred miles an hour. All the talk about a red-hot knife slicing though butter was true. Carbon-60 nanotubing in a two-millimeter strand was far more dangerous than a string of razor blades unreeling at the same speed. In less than a second the wire had sliced through Singh’s boot, tissue, tendons, and bones, entirely severing three toes and finishing the job by cutting clean through the sole of the boot.

Kevin Malady, her backup for the EVA, reacted before Singh could even cry out. He saw the toe of her boot being sliced off, the surreal pattern made by liquid, blood, spilling into the vacuum and near-absolute-zero temperature of space. Pushing off the side of MB One, he grabbed hold of her within seconds, making sure his own legs cleared the wire spinning out.

The radio chatter now was overwhelming, between Singh’s gasp of pain, the call from Kiribati asking what happened, and the doctor monitoring her vitals in the control room shouting that something had gone wrong.

Kevin already had the emergency patch out and was pulling off the cover that exposed the adhesive surface. It was awkward: the patch had been designed to be used when an astronaut lost fingers or sliced open his or her space suit … but not this.

While holding Singh with one arm, he opened the packet containing the patch and slapped it over the cut-open boot. It would not be the wound that killed her in the next thirty seconds; it would be depressurization as a result of the hole in her suit. As the suit decompressed, it would not be like all the ridiculous movies of decades past in which bodies exploded. Hopefully the pressure cuffs positioned above the knees and elbows would activate, but even then, exposed to space, she could lose her leg from the knee down. If the cuff didn’t fully activate, she would just simply depressurize, the last breath of air sucked out of her lungs. They had been trained in such an event to keep exhaling, otherwise the imbalance of external and internal pressure would actually cause their lungs to fatally rupture even if they could be hauled back into a pressurized environment.

“Tom, be ready with that door!” Kevin shouted.

The only words out of Singh were “Kiribati, I screwed up. I think I cut my foot off.”

Kevin kept a forceful hold on the patch to insure it did not blow out, pressing it in, feeling the outward pressure at five pounds per square inch trying to blow it off even as it solidified into place. He continued to hold it tightly in place as he hung on to Singh, while the wire continued to spin out; if either brushed against it, they were dead, and he would be damned if he would lose her. They had trained for maneuvering in zero gravity, but it was still delicate work; all the while he kept reassuring her, telling her not to move, to let him guide her back to safety.

He pushed off, taking Singh with him, and nearly drifted past the hatch when their crewmate, Tom McMurtry, snagged him by the left leg and pulled him back in feet-first.

Kevin slammed the hatch shut, sealing it, while Tom hit the pressurization and air, at five pounds per square inch, flooded back into the capsule.

The radio was still chattering: the doctor on the ground, Kiribati control, and amazingly even some damn press who had tapped into their frequency were shouting questions about what in hell had just happened. Kevin ignored them.

Tom, cursing soundly, reached up and slapped off the switch to the main radio feed, then switched to the secured and scrambled link back to Kiribati.

Singh was remarkably calm, taking off her own helmet as pressurization reached five pounds, although she was crying, not with pain but in frustration.

“I screwed up—damn all to hell, I screwed up!”

“I gotta get your boot off,” Kevin said. “It’s gonna hurt.”

“Get it off,” she said, voice still breaking. “Oh my God, I screwed up. I’m so sorry.”

“Shut up!” Tom shouted, arms around her shoulder, working to get the upper part of her EVA suit off so he could give her an injection of painkiller and start an IV.

“Hang on, angel,” Tom said.