The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (41 page)

“You two both buttoned tight?”

“Yes.”

“Keep an eye on the air gauge.” He cracked the hatch open a few millimeters.

“Pressure’s okay. No red lights.”

Nodding, Kinsman pushed the hatch open all the way. He pulled himself easily up and into the shoulder-wide tunnel, propelling himself down its curving length by a few flicks of his fingers against the ribbed walls.

Light and easy,
he reminded himself.
No big motions, no sudden moves.

When he reached the laboratory hatch he slowly rotated, like a swimmer doing a lazy rollover, and inspected every inch of the tunnel seal in the light of his helmet lamp. Satisfied that it was locked in place, he opened the lab hatch and pushed himself inside. Carefully, he touched his slightly adhesive boots to the plastic flooring and stood upright. His arms tended to float out, but they touched the equipment racks on either side of the narrow central passageway. Kinsman turned on the lab’s interior lights, checked the air supply, pressure and temperature gauges, then shuffled back to the hatch and pushed himself through the tunnel again.

He reentered the spacecraft upside-down and had to contort himself in slow motion around the pilot’s seat to regain a “normal” attitude.

“Lab’s okay,” he said finally. “Now how the hell do we get her through the tunnel?”

Jill had already unbuckled the harness over Linda’s shoulders. “You pull, I’ll push. She ought to bend around the corners all right.”

And she did.

The laboratory was about the size and shape of the interior of a small transport plane. On one side, nearly its entire length was taken up by instrument racks, control equipment and the computer, humming almost inaudibly behind light plastic panels. Across the narrow separating aisle were the crew stations: control desk, two observation ports, biology and astrophysics benches. At the far end, behind a discreet curtain, was the head and a single hammock.

Kinsman sat at the control desk, in his fatigues now, one leg hooked around the webbed chair’s single supporting column to keep him from floating off. He was running through a formal check of all the lab’s life systems: air, water, heat, electrical power. All green lights on the main panel. Communications gear. Green. The radar screen to his left showed a single large blip close by: the power pod.

He looked up as Jill came through the curtain from the bunkroom. She was still in her pressure suit, with only the helmet removed.

“How is she?”

Looking tired, Jill answered, “Okay. Still sleeping. I think she’ll be all right when she wakes up.”

“She’d better be. I’m not going to have a wilting flower around here. I’ll abort the mission.”

“Give her a chance, Chet. She just lost her cookies when free fall hit her. All the training in the world can’t prepare you for those first few minutes.”

Kinsman recalled his first orbital flight. It doesn’t shut off. You’re falling. Like skiing, or skydiving. Only better.

Jill shuffled toward him, keeping a firm grip on the chairs in front of the work benches and the handholds set into the equipment racks.

Kinsman got up and pushed toward her. “Here, let me help you out of the suit.”

“I can do it myself.”

“Shut up.”

After several minutes, Jill was free of the bulky suit and sitting in one of the webbed chairs in her coverall fatigues. Ducking slightly because of the curving overhead, Kinsman glided into the galley. It was about half the width of a phone booth, and not as deep nor as tall.

“Coffee, tea or milk?”

Jill grinned at him. “Orange juice.”

He reached for a concentrate bag. “You’re a hard gal to satisfy.”

“No I’m not. I’m easy to get along with. Just one of the fellas.”

Feeling slightly puzzled, Kinsman handed her the orange juice container.

For the next couple of hours they checked out the lab’s equipment in detail. Kinsman was reassembling a high resolution camera after cleaning it, parts hanging in midair all around him as he sat intently working, while Jill was nursing a straggly-looking philodendron that had been smuggled aboard and was inching from the biology bench toward the ceiling light panels. Linda pushed back the curtain from the sleeping area and stepped, uncertainly, into the main compartment.

Jill noticed her first. “Hi, how’re you feeling?”

Kinsman looked up. She was in tight-fitting coveralls. He bounced out of his web-chair toward her, scattering camera parts in every direction.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

Smiling sheepishly. “I think so. I’m rather embarrassed . . .” Her voice was high and soft.

“Oh, that’s all right,” Kinsman said eagerly. “It happens to practically everybody. I got sick myself my first time in orbit.”

“That,” said Jill as she dodged a slowly-tumbling lens that ricocheted gently off the ceiling, “is a little white lie, meant to make you feel at home.”

Kinsman forced himself not to frown.
Why’d Jill want to cross me?

Jill said, “Chet, you’d better pick up those camera pieces before they get so scattered you won’t be able to find them all.”

He wanted to snap an answer, thought better of it, and replied simply, “Right.”

As he finished the job on the camera, he took a good look at Linda. The color was back in her face. She looked steady, clear-eyed, not frightened or upset.
Maybe she’ll be okay after all.
Jill made her a cup of tea, which she sipped from the lid’s plastic spout.

Kinsman went to the control desk and scanned the mission schedule sheet.

“Hey, Jill, it’s past your bedtime.”

“I’m not really very sleepy,” she said.

“Maybe. But you’ve had a busy day, little girl. And tomorrow will be busier. Now you get your four hours, and then I’ll get mine. Got to be fresh for the mating.”

“Mating?” Linda asked from her seat at the far end of the aisle, a good five strides from Kinsman. Then she remembered, “Oh, you mean linking the pod to the laboratory.”

Suppressing a half-dozen possible jokes, Kinsman nodded. “Extra-vehicular activity.”

Jill reluctantly drifted off her web-chair. “Okay, I’ll sack in. I am tired, but I never seem to get really sleepy up here.”

Wonder how much Murdock’s told her? She’s sure acting like a chaperon.

Jill shuffled into the sleeping area and pulled the curtain firmly shut. After a few moments of silence, Kinsman turned to Linda.

“Alone at last.”

She smiled back.

“Uh, you just happen to be sitting where I’ve got to install this camera.” He nudged the finished hardware so that it floated gently toward her.

She got up slowly, carefully, and stood behind the chair, holding its back with both hands as if she were afraid of falling. Kinsman slid into the web-chair and stopped the camera’s slow-motion flight with one hand. Working on the fixture in the bulkhead that it fit into, he asked:

“You really feel okay?”

“Yes, honestly.”

“Think you’ll be up to EVA tomorrow?”

“I hope so. I want to go outside with you.”

I’d rather be inside with you.
Kinsman grinned as he worked.

An hour later they were sitting side by side in front of one of the observation ports, looking out at the curving bulk of Earth, the blue and white splendor of the cloud-spangled Pacific. Kinsman had just reported to the Hawaii ground station. The mission flight plan was floating on a clipboard between the two of them. He was trying to study it, comparing the time when Jill would be sleeping with the long stretches between ground stations, when there would be no possibility of being interrupted.

“Is that land?” Linda asked, pointing to a thick band of clouds wrapping the horizon.

Looking up from the clipboard, Kinsman said, “South American coast. Chile.”

“There’s another tracking station there.”

“NASA station. Not part of our network. We only use Air Force stations.”

“Why is that?”

He felt his face frowning. “Murdock’s playing soldier. This is supposed to be a strictly military operation. Not that we do anything warlike. But we run as though there weren’t any civilian stations around to help us. The usual hup-two-three crap.”

She laughed. “You don’t agree with the Colonel?”

“There’s only one thing he’s done lately that I’m in complete agreement with.”

“What’s that?”

“Bringing you up here.”

The smile stayed on her face but her eyes moved away from him. “Now you sound like a soldier.”

“Not an officer and a gentleman?”

She looked straight at him again. “Let’s change the subject.”

Kinsman shrugged. “Sure. Okay. You’re here to get a story. Murdock wants to get the Air Force as much publicity as NASA gets. And the Pentagon wants to show the world that we don’t have any weapons on board. We’re military, all right, but
nice
military.”

“And you?” Linda asked, serious now. “What do you want? How does an Air Force captain get into the space cadets?”

“The same way everything happens—you’re in a certain place at a certain time. They told me I was going to be an astronaut. It was all part of the job . . . until my first orbital flight. Now it’s a way of life.”

“Really? Why is that?”

Grinning, he answered, “Wait’ll we go outside. You’ll find out.”

Jill came back into the main cabin precisely on schedule, and it was Kinsman’s turn to sleep. He seldom had difficulty sleeping on Earth, never in orbit. But he wondered about Linda’s reaction to being outside while he strapped on the pressure-cuffs to his arms and legs. The medics insisted on them, claimed they exercised the cardiovascular system while you slept.

Damned stupid nuisance,
Kinsman grumbled to himself.
Some ground-based MD’s idea of
how
to make a name for himself.

Finally he zippered himself into the gossamer cocoon-like hammock and shut his eyes. He could feel the cuffs pumping gently. His last conscious thought was a nagging worry that Linda would be terrified of EVA.

When he awoke, and Linda took her turn in the hammock, he talked it over with Jill.

“I think she’ll be all right, Chet. Don’t hold that first few minutes against her.”

“I don’t know. There’s only two kinds of people up here: you either love it or you’re scared sh . . . witless. And you can’t fake it. If she goes ape outside . . .”

“She won’t,” Jill said firmly. “And anyway, you’ll be there to help her. I’ve told her that she won’t be going outside until you’re finished with the mating job. She wanted to get pictures of you actually at work, but she’ll settle for a few posed shots.”

Kinsman nodded. But the worry persisted.
I wonder if Calder’s Army nurse was scared of flying?

He was pulling on his boots, wedging his free foot against an equipment rack to keep from floating off, when Linda returned from her sleep.

“Ready for a walk around the block?” he asked her.

She smiled and nodded without the slightest hesitation. “I’m looking forward to it. Can I get a few shots of you while you zipper up your suit?”

Maybe she’ll be okay.

At last he was sealed into the pressure suit. Linda and Jill stood back as Kinsman shuffled to the airlock-hatch. It was set into the floor at the end of the cabin where the spacecraft was docked. With Jill helping him, he eased down into the airlock and shut the hatch. The airlock chamber itself was coffin-sized. Kinsman had to half-bend to move around in it. He checked out his suit, then pumped the air out of the chamber. Then he was ready to open the outer hatch.

It was beneath his feet, but as it slid open to reveal the stars, Kinsman’s weightless orientation flip-flopped, like an optical illusion, and he suddenly felt that he was standing on his head and looking up.

“Going out now,” he said into the helmet-mike.

“Okay,” Jill’s voice responded.

Carefully, he eased himself through the open hatch, holding onto its edge with one gloved hand once he was fully outside, the way a swimmer holds the rail for a moment when he first slides into the deep water.

Outside. Swinging his body around slowly, he took in the immense beauty of Earth, dazzlingly bright even through his tinted visor. Beyond its curving limb was the darkness of infinity, with the beckoning stars watching him in unblinking solemnity.

Alone now. His own tight, self-contained universe, independent of everything and everybody. He could cut the life-giving umbilical line that linked him with the laboratory and float off by himself, forever. And be dead in two minutes. Ay,
there’s the rub.

Instead, he unhooked the tiny gas gun from his waist and, trailing the umbilical, squirted himself over toward the power pod. It was riding smoothly behind the lab, a squat truncated cone, shorter, but fatter, than the lab itself, one edge brilliantly lit by the sun; the rest of it bathed in the softer light reflected from the dayside of Earth below.

Kinsman’s job was to inspect the power pod, check its equipment, and then mate it to the electrical system of the laboratory. There was no need to physically connect the two bodies, except to link a pair of power lines between them. Everything necessary for the task—tools, power lines, checkout instruments—had been built into the pod, waiting for a man to use them.

It would have been simple work on Earth. In zero gee, it was complicated. The slightest motion of any part of your body started you drifting. You had to fight against all the built-in mannerisms of a lifetime; had to work constantly to keep in place. It was easy to get exhausted in zero gee.

Kinsman accepted all this with hardly a conscious thought. He worked slowly, methodically, using as little motion as possible, letting himself drift slightly until a more-or-less natural body motion counteracted and pulled him back in the opposite direct ion.
Ride the waves, slow and easy.
There was a rhythm to his work, the natural dreamlike rhythm of weightlessness.

His earphones were silent, he said nothing. All he heard was the purring of the suit’s air-blowers and his own steady breathing. All he saw was his work.

Finally he jetted back to the laboratory, towing the pair of thick cables. He found the connectors waiting for them on the side wall of the lab and inserted the cable plugs.
I pronounce you lab and power source.
He inspected the checkout lights alongside the connectors. All green.
May
you produce many kilowatts.