The Glass Lady (41 page)

“We make quite a pair,” the burned copilot said wistfully as he fought to navigate back from the warm, soft edge of dizziness.

“Don't call us ‘the icemen' fer nothin', Jack.” Parker licked beads of perspiration from his upper lip. His face was moist, gray, and weathered like a retired cowboy.

The Russian moaned beside the AC.

“O
₂
, Jack.”

Enright shook the haze from his brain. He found an oxygen mask from the mid-deck's portable oxygen system.

Parker took the yellow airlines-type mask which hissed softly and he pressed its soft cup agaist Karpov's face.

As the kneeling, floating AC held the mask to Karpov's face, Enright rolled forward until his stocking feet touched the mid-deck ceiling. He carried a long cable which was plugged into a ceiling audio panel. With his hands working under Parker's chin, he disconnected the Colonel's intercom cable which stretched into the airlock. The copilot gently pressed the cable he held into the soft CCA headset worn by the Colonel. When the plug snapped into the jack near the AC's throat, Parker was again part of Shuttle's black boxes.

In Parker's arms, Alexi Karpov stirred and pushed the oxygen mask from his face.

“Easy, Alexi,” Parker smiled. A weak exclamation in Russian mumbled from the Major's lips.

“English, Alexi.”

“We are alive?” The Soviet pilot blinked his eyes where he floated close to the floor.

“Yes, my friend. And you are our prisoner,” the AC grinned, cracking deep fissures in his tight face.

Major Karpov tried to sit up.

“Take your time, Alexi. You're in Endeavor. We'll be giving you a ride home.”

The Russian nodded as he collected his wits. His gloved hand rested on Parker's shoulder.

“Soyuz?” Enright called over Parker's head.

“Here.”

“Alexi is coming around. Looks fine. You copy, Doctor?”

“Yes. Thank you! Very good news. Tell the Major it is very lonesome over here.”

“Will do, Uri . . . Soyuz says he misses you, Major.”

The Russian aboard Shuttle sat up without weight. He braced against Parker's arm as the Colonel gripped a handrail on the outside of the airlock.

“You have room for one more?” the Russian asked as he floated upright.

“Got a ticket?” the AC replied as he stiffly straightened his legs beside the airlock.

“You take American Express?” Karpov smiled weakly.

“You're on, Alexi,” the tallest of the three airmen laughed.

Floating in the bright mid-deck, Karpov unzipped his pressure suit and he squeezed through the opened chest area. As he hovered above the floor of the mid-deck, Parker regarded his Russia-red long johns.

“Just as I expected, Major.”

“Yours are blue, yes?” Karpov grinned.

“You betcha,” the AC drawled.

Swimming to the forward lockers, the AC found a set of orange beta cloth coveralls for the Russian. Both Americans steadied the stocky Soviet flier as he floated upside down and pulled the lightweight intravehicular constantwear garment over his body. As he zipped up the front, he patted the American flag sewn upon the sleeve.

“I could lose my pension for wearing this!”

“Who has a pension?” Enright chuckled. The thin, masked copilot handed a communications headset to Karpov, who pulled it over his head and adjusted two, lip microphones.

“How are we on time, Jack?” The command pilot of Endeavor felt much better as the lethal gas bubbles in his joints went back into solution in Shuttle's pressurized cabin.

“About seven and a half hours by now. Gonna be real tight on the Anomaly transit, Skipper.” Enright still felt woozy and his face felt ready to explode. But having Parker home was medicine.

“Yeh.” The AC stood by the round sidehatch window full of daylight in the cabin wall. “You go topside with the Major. I'll stop in the biffy first. And, Jack, don't forget your pressure pants. 'Kay?”

“Sure. This way, Alexi.”

The Americans, in their mesh woolies, and Karpov, in his flightsuit, pulled their communications plugs from the ceiling jacks. Karpov floated behind Enright up through the ceiling hole to the flightdeck.

When they flew through the ceiling, the AC floated on his side to his sleep berth. He rooted inside behind the privacy curtain for a crumpled paper sack. With the little bag in his hand, he backed carefully into the tiny stall. As he closed the latrine curtain, he rubbed his right knee, which bulged like a softball inside his mesh liquid coolant garment.

At 07 hours 34 minutes, Shuttle Mission Elapsed Time, Endeavor, Soyuz, and LACE hurtled northeastward across the Pacific. Although two revolutions earlier they had flown directly over the Hawaiian Islands, they now were 1,200 statute miles northwest of Hawaii and 500 miles beyond the radio range of the Hawaii antennae. Hawaii could not contact the ship this pass.

Alexi Karpov stood with his stocking feet ten inches above the flightdeck floor beside Enright. The copilot was curled into a ball in mid-air as he climbed into his inflatable pants. After donning his air trousers but before he plugged in the air line, Enright flew to the rear station. There, he directed the RMS arm to flex. He pointed the arm's built-in camera toward LACE which hovered motionless beyond the open payload bay.

Cosmonaut Karpov blinked at the flightdeck filled with instrumentation. He had been inside Houston's shuttle simulator during a Glasnost tour. And he was rated to fly the Soviet Buran space shuttle on its massive Energia booster rocket. But he had never seen a working shuttle—American or Russian. The great ship was alive with blinking lights, humming fans, the clutter of business, and the blinding daylight filling the flightdeck's ten windows.

“She's something, huh?” Enright called as he eased into the forward left seat. He gestured to Karpov to take the right, copilot's seat.

“Something,” the Russian said with awe. He buckled into the right seat, where he tucked his hands behind the shoulder harness crossing his chest. He feared that his floating arms might touch the switches which wrapped around his corner.

At Karpov's left, Enright pulled the air hose from beneath the seat. He plugged the line into his rubber pants which inflated tightly from his ankles to his waist. This done, his left hand worked the side panel, where he activated the cabin pressure controls. He raised the air pressure from the pre-EVA level of 10 pounds to normal flight pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch. The two seated airmen forced themselves to yawn to clear their ears as cabin pressure slowly increased. The command pilot did likewise below, where he rubbed his throbbing leg, newly inoculated with horse medication.

As Parker floated upward to the ceiling access hole, the pain in his joints had abated, leaving in its place a dull ache throughout his body. To the AC, whose head rose through the access hole behind Enright, his long body felt like the morning after of his long-gone rodeo days.

Parker floated toward the front cockpit, where he stopped at the center console between the two seats. With his legs flexed off the floor, he balanced with his left hand on Enright's right shoulder. He glanced above the center windows to the digital timer ticking up past Day 00: 07 Hours: 40 Minutes. Nothing but blue water and a vertical horizon glowed beyond the six forward windows, each pane the largest piece of heat-resistant, optical quality glass ever forged. Still on her left side, Endeavor in tight formation with LACE and Soyuz passed the sixth revolution's northernmost declination of 38 degrees north latitude, 1,600 miles west of San Francisco. Their ground track bent southeastward from there. When they made landfall over North America this pass, they would overfly only San Diego and the southern corner of California. This revolution would take them across the States for only one minute. On the next revolution—if Endeavor survived its direct entry into the South Atlantic Anomaly—they would miss North America altogether.

Enright had requested a ground track plot which glowed green on the center of the three forward televisions. A fly-size Shuttle winked three inches to the left of the graphic coastline of California.

“How long to SAA transit, Number One?”

“Thirty-six minutes. Real tight, Will.”

“Yep. Target looks stable.” Parker scanned the left television screen which Enright had tapped into the deployed arm's camera.

“Let's go in, Jack.”

“Want the wheel, Skipper?” Enright looked over his right shoulder.

“Your bird, Number One.”

As Parker spoke, Enright felt his blistered face rub painfully against his antibiotic-soaked bandage. He was smiling as he energized the control stick between his knees and the translational hand controller at the upper left corner of the forward instrument panel.

“We're moving in, Soyuz. Can you move back ten meters?” Enright released his mike button on the control stick between his thighs.

“Soyuz in motion,” a Russian accent called. Through Endeavor's forward windows, the three pilots could see Uri Ruslanovich back the Soviet ship away from Shuttle's tail. The Russian, who flew alone, wore Enright's smile as the Soviet flight engineer assumed his own first command.

Parker pushed off Enright's seat back. The AC floated on his backside to the rear of the flightdeck. With his back facing the flightdeck floor seven feet below him, he stopped with his face close to the starboard overhead window. His stocking feet were against the ceiling behind Karpov's head.

“Soyuz still moving,” Parker called from the rear. “She's all-stop now, well behind us, Jack. You're clear.”

Parker pushed off the ceiling and he righted his long, thin body at the remote manipulator system station at the rear wall. His back faced Enright up forward in the commander's seat.

There was an audible pop from Endeavor's front end as a thruster on each side of Shuttle's nose fired together with downward-firing jets in each of the two tail pods. With Shuttle on her left side, the jets fore and aft firing downward pushed the ship horizontally to close the distance to LACE. At Enright's hand commands to the THC handle, Mother chose the jets to fire, each with 870 pounds of thrust. Small vernier thrusters, each with only 24 pounds of force, fine-tuned Endeavor's slow trajectory toward LACE.

“Endeavor, Endeavor: With you at 07 plus 44 by Gold-stone,” the ground called by the California antenna just over Shuttle's eastern horizon. “Good downlink here. We'll be updating your state vectors momentarily. We show you in motion. Status please?”

“We're Go here, Colorado,” Enright radioed. His tight pressure pants had revived him. “I'm in the left seat, our guest is in the right seat, and the AC is on the RMS. We're sealed at 14 point 6 on the ARS. And we are inbound on the target.”

“Understand, Jack. We'll be with you by the States another fourteen minutes, including a UHF pass via Northrop. We remind you of SAA transit in thirty-two minutes. You are time-critical . . . Will? Watch your arm rates while Jack is in motion here.”

“On it, Flight,” Parker called from his aft post. He watched through the rear window and the overhead window as the remote arm flexed with each pop of Endeavor's thrusters. On the top center of the Canadian console which controlled the arm, a PORT TEMP light was illuminated yellow. The arm's three motors strained to absorb the thrusters' forces, which made the 50-foot-long arm twang with each firing jet. Mother's green television also flashed a SYSTEM ALERT warning. The AC anxiously looked upward as LACE approached with a glaring, blue-green sea behind it. The arm wobbled as a battery of up-ward-firing jets ignited in Endeavor's nose and tail. Karpov jumped reflexively against his lap belt as twin plumes of orange flame erupted before his forward window.

“All stop,” Enright called with LACE only fifteen feet beyond the open bay. Parker watched the arm's far end sway through a foot-long arc.

“She's really dancin',” the AC called.

“We see it down, here, Will. Doesn't look critical . . . Jack, do you have room to roll left ten degrees to put the arm in the shadow of your starboard wing?”

“Ah,” the AC interrupted. “Let's just sit tight and let Mother work.”

“We're sitting,” Enright acknowledged before Colorado could protest.

“We copy, Endeavor,” the ground replied formally. “Please dump your PDP data by OI downlink when you can.”

“Comin' at ya now,” Enright radioed as he reached over his head and over Karpov to the rows of toggle switches and circuit breakers on forward panels Overhead -14, -15, and -16.

As Enright checked his payload signal conditioners, the AC floated at the rear starboard panel arrays with his back toward Alexi Karpov.

“Okay, Flight,” the Colonel began from the rear. “At Panel A-2, payload data interleaver power off; payload encryptor power on; encryptor on; coding transmitter on; network signal processor transmitting bit rate to high; S-Band mode high by transponder Number Two; S-Band power amplifier Number Two on; and, S-Band pre-amplifier Number Two on. Moving on, Flight: OPS recorder Number Two, power on; Number Two recorder to playback in Maintenance Loop One; recorder speed set at three; and, we're running.”

Parker glanced at the mission timer ticking up through 07 hours 45 minutes.

Before being jettisoned overboard by Enright, the Plasma Diagnostics Package had sniffed LACE's electromagnetic wakes much like the wake of a ship underway. The PDP fed its electronic sniffs to one of Endeavor's two operational instrumentation pulse code modulation master units. Simultaneously, the Operational Instrumentation system's Master Timing Unit had slipped time tags into the stream of recorded information to identify each sniff later on. PCMMU Number Two then routed the data to Network Signal Conditioner Number Two. The steady flow of PDP sniffs then flowed at the computer speed of 128,000 data bites per second into Operations Recorder Number Two. In the recorder, the PDP information was stored, awaiting the command from the crew to beep the recorded data to the ground. At Parker's order, the recorder let its encoded sniffs flow into Endeavor's FM Signal Processor. The signal processor fed the time-tagged data to one of Shuttle's FM transmitters which directed the computerized plasma sniffs at a frequency of 2250 megahertz to the ship's S-band antenna quads. Mother automatically selected the best antenna for beaming the signal to the great dish antenna at Goldstone, California.