The Infinite Tides (6 page)

Eriksson was smiling, his face lit within the glass dome of the helmet. His white teeth. His blue eyes. “Ready for the fun part?” he said.

“Ready,” Keith said.

“Mission Control, all clear here.”

And the CAPCOM’s voice from Earth: “EV-1, we’re glad to hear that.”

“Lighten up, Corcoran,” Eriksson said. “This is supposed to be fun. You made the ride, remember?”

Had he not been smiling before? He did so now, self-consciously. “Eyes on the prize,” he said.

“If I had a Magic Marker I’d have you sign the thing.”

“Next time.”

“I’m going to hold you to that,” Eriksson said. “Mission Control, EV-2 is safely connected to MSS and we are good to continue.”

“Green light for EVA.”

“MS-2, give me a minute to get clear and we’ll be good to go.”

“I hear you, Bill. One minute to clear.”

A long moment of silence then. He watched Eriksson as he slid away and out of sight. Then only the long stretch of the truss where it fled in perspective into weightless distance and the black rectangular mirrors of the solar arrays lifting toward the darkness of space.

“All clear,” Eriksson’s voice came at last. “You ready, Chip?”

“Ready,” he said. Then to ground: “MS-2, we are clear to proceed.”

“I hear you, Keith. Stand by.” Again silence. Then, “Here we go.”

And so here it was. He had designed the arm, had supervised its installation and had tested it repeatedly over the preceding weeks, but this was the moment where it would all come together at last. The sensation was clear and smooth and silent, the body of the ISS moving alongside him as the mechanism pushed him along the truss, open areas of darkness yawning up at him where the superstructure lay exposed and then disappearing under closed white panels reflecting sunlight. To his right, the distant blue ocean flecked with white clouds and to his left the endlessness of the stars, like images from a film or a still picture on the periphery of his vision, unreal, impossible, the white and black surface of the station and the crisscrossing beams of the truss flowing past him. Bisected boxes, planes and angles, all of which aligned in perfect symmetrical structure that was no less than a tangible, physical manifestation of the numbers themselves, so close he could have reached his gloved hand out and touched these things as his body passed them: this panel of the aluminum meteoroid shield, this padded trussbeam, this line of rivets, this long and beautiful machine.

The task itself was not unlike removing a huge dishwasher from between countertop and floor and cabinetry, the power driver in his gloved hand turning the bolts and stowing them in the bag again and again, Mission Control occasionally relaying instructions as he worked, the process tangible and solid and continuous, the bolts unscrewing
from their housing, floating in the microgravity as he pawed them with his gloved hands, then transferring them to the mesh bag attached to his wrist. Then another. And another. As clear and straightforward as a simple equation: moving each variable to zero until the whole tank was free of its housing. Then at last he pushed his gloved hands through the scoops he had attached there and pulled his fingers tight against the handles. “OK, Mort, let’s pull this out nice and slow,” he said.

“Affirmative, EV-2,” Stevens said. “Slow and steady wins the race.”

He felt himself drifting back, the huge white block of the nitrogen tank coming with him in perfect and absolute silence, its five hundred fifty pounds rendered close to zero in the microgravity, the robotic arm pulling him backwards so that he was lifted up and away from the truss, away from the station itself, out into the plane that was parallel to Earth and was itself a kind of orbit, a parabola extending from yet another parabola which was no parabola at all but a circle.

“MS-2, we’re looking good here,” he said. “We’re just about clear of S1.”

And a moment later the tank was indeed clear, leaving behind a square gap where it had once been housed, the empty nitrogen tank a rectangular box the size of a refrigerator, held now by two simple handles gripped by his gloved fingers, his space-suited body standing straight and tall at the end of the robotic arm, his boots the only direct attachment to the machine he had designed to carry him.

“Ready to wipe some windshields?” Stevens said in his ear.

“Affirmative, MS-2. All ready here,” Keith said.

Then Stevens again: “EV-1, we are ready to proceed to ESP-3.”

And Eriksson: “Affirmative, Destiny. All clear.” Then to Keith: “Have fun, Chip.”

There was a brief pause and then he began to turn, slowly, the huge segmented arm twisting until he was tilted at a slight angle, the tank moving with him as the scene shifted in the helmet glass: the long stretch of the truss and the more distant Russian module and the radiators blazing in the sunlight and then the solar arrays and the whole
of the ISS as he continued to move up and away from it all, the motion of his lifting and the distances below him seeming to shift as he watched. One zero eight-point-five, this line he moved along, the axis of the truss line crossing the modules at seventy-three meters and the point of motion that was himself and the full nitrogen tank he held in his outstretched hand, that point moving along the parabolic arc, mapped along a path he could see as if it existed only as a graph on a sheet of paper. One zero eight-point-five, each number before him, not just the total but the graduated divisions that marked off the measurements as if some enormous thermometer marked by regularly spaced red lines.

“How’s it look up there?” Stevens said.

He paused before answering. Then he said, “MS-2, visual clean and clear.”

“Yeah, but how does it look?”

“It looks … ,” he said. Then he paused again. There were no words. The whole of the station like an enormous winged insect and the arm swinging him backwards above it so that the farthest reaches of the truss and the huge black rectangles of the solar arrays flashed and reflected their darkness to him, diminishing as he moved, knowing what was below even when he could not see it, as if points on a map or a grid, points denoted clearly and plainly by their coordinates. The names shuttled by—the Mobile Servicing System, the S0 truss segment and then the Unity Node, the Columbus Module, the Destiny Lab—objects named to denote the idea of their most perfect state of being, as if already clarified by their purpose or by the purpose they had been set forth to fulfill and all of them designed by other engineers, other mathematicians. He moved above them, pressing toward the apex of that motion where the parabolic curve would shift from zero to one, all of it visible now: the various modules where they clustered below him and the black mirrors of the solar arrays where they connected to the long crisscrossing trusses, each shape outlined and ringed in blue lines and arrows, the numbers circling and ringing
and indicating and denoting their symbolic values. The numbers of the machine. The perfect machine.

Then Mort Stevens’s voice in his helmet: “You still with me, Keith?”

“Hang on,” he said. Then, “I wish … I wish you could see this. It’s amazing here.” Not even aware of whom he was addressing. He thought he would actually tear up, that he would actually cry. Not because of the mission or because he had accomplished everything he had set out to do but because what he could see in that moment was so stunning in its beauty and purity and complexity that it could not be believed. Everything within the angle of his vision rendered infinite. My god. Below him spun the bulge of South America where the brown and muddy Amazon emptied into the Atlantic and a swirl of clouds that ran under the Destiny Module like a dust mote swirling under a piece of furniture: green and brown continents and blue oceans and white clouds and above it all: the clear and precise white and black of the station and the robotic arm itself where it moved in umbilical perspective down to the Kibo Module, the ISS, those oxygen-filled tubes in which they worked and lived. And Keith Corcoran: floating above it all.

Already Earth returning to its forty-five minutes and thirty seconds of night as he moved in the orbit path, the coming of darkness like some lightning eclipse, and he pulled one hand free—not even thinking now, for perhaps the first time in his life completely without thought—and clicked off the light of his helmet and peered into the multicolored glow of space itself. All his life the numbers in his mind arrayed in some black substance that was this substance, this dark matter, and now here it was and he stood on a platform and was raised up into it as if into some pool that drifted not below him but above, his body cresting into that surface and breaking it and finding no numbers there whatsoever, instead only the stars, not on the flat dome of the night sky but actually in perspective and distance and in color and not a one of them twinkling or blinking but steady and solid and so clearly at different distances and sizes and locations and of varieties
staggering to behold. A universe comprised of radiation and light and gravity and energy and mass. What equation to describe such a reckoning? What set of numbers? Only the dark matter and the resplendent and glorious universe itself spinning out all around him. Around us all.

It was only a single moment and then the numbers fell into their places once again. His heart ascatter in his chest. The robotic arm he had designed. The tangent of theta. Pi over two. Sine equals one. The apex had been reached and he was descending down the other side of the long arc and the radians moved through his mind—two pi over three, three pi over four, five pi over six—and it already seemed like something that had occurred in a dream, as if he had been sleeping or had slept and had imagined the thinking of some other man, of some other astronaut. His mouth dry. His heart racing as if he had been startled awake. What was he doing here? What were any of them doing out here at all?

And then it was over. You are here. Nowhere else.

Stevens’s voice in his helmet: “Looking good, Keith.”

He blinked quickly behind the helmet glass. “Uh …,” he said, the sound as if from somewhere else, as if someone else’s voice, someone distracted. “MS-2, I read you. Smooth and steady.”

“Five meters,” Stevens said.

And Keith said: “All clear.”

Then he could see Eriksson on the more distant P3 truss, the long black rectangles of the solar arrays spreading out from his tiny shape like the petals of some metallic flower. He shook his head inside the helmet. Eriksson before him on the truss, moving in his own awkward spacesuit. He had already pulled the full nitrogen tank from its storage site, had stowed it on the opposite side of the truss so that Keith could place the empty tank in his hand directly into the gap left behind and Mort Stevens was moving him into position to do so.

“That looked like a good ride,” Eriksson said.

“It was,” he said. His gaze had settled upon a shape behind Eriksson,
out past the black empty bowl of Earth, the curved distance of which was illuminated in a glowing blue arc. There, just at the horizon, rode the smaller sharp sickle of the moon, drawn in a thin white line as if the closed half of a perfect empty circle and holding there for some uncountable moment as he watched, its shape appearing to pause in orbit, unmoving and suspended against the edge of the earth. It might have held there only a moment. It might not have held there at all. In the next instant, the whole of that shape seemed to shudder and plunge into the dark surface of the planet and was gone.

“Everything all right?” Eriksson said.

“Of course.” His voice was faint and weak. He cleared his throat and spoke again, more firmly this time: “Everything’s A-OK.”

“How’s about you turn on your helmet light so I can see you,” Eriksson said.

“Right.” He reached up and flipped on the light. There was a flutter inside his chest as if a hollow there had opened: a cabinet, an emptiness, a vacancy. And a strong feeling that he had lost something. Something tangible. The toolbag. His helmet. The wrench. The instructions tethered to his wrist. But everything he had when he pulled himself through the airlock was accounted for. And yet the feeling remained.

When he and Eriksson reentered the module, Tim Fisher, Mort Stevens, and Petra Gutierrez were all there waiting for them and he shook each of their hands in turn, their faces smiling. He too, smiling now.

“Well done, gentlemen,” Stevens said.

“You too, Mort,” Eriksson said. “Thanks for the piloting work.”

“Glad to be a part of it,” Stevens said.

Eriksson had finished shaking Stevens’s hand and now Keith did so, still half smiling. “Feel about the same?” Keith said.

“Yeah. Works perfectly,” Stevens answered.

“Smooth?”

“Yes. How was it on your end?”

“Fine,” Keith said. He paused. Stevens was looking at him, waiting. “What’s the draw?”

“I’ll get you the data. Super minimal, I’m sure.”

“Within the test parameters?”

“As far as I could tell. No fluctuations.”

“I’d like to see the data.”

“I can start the analysis in the next hour,” Stevens said.

Eriksson laughed at his side. “Christ, Chip,” he said. “Power down, already.”

Keith looked at him, then back at the crew, and tried to smile.

“It worked great,” Eriksson said. “Just like you designed it.”

“All right, all right,” Keith said. He glanced up at Stevens and nodded and Stevens shrugged.

Then Petra: “Sure looked like a fun ride.”

“It was,” Keith said. “Amazing.”

“I got a couple of good pictures of it with the Nikon,” Fisher said. “Through the window.”

“Fantastic,” Keith said. “I appreciate that.”

“Well?” Petra said. “What was it like?”

He looked at her, her eyes expectant. All of them waiting for his response. “I don’t know what to say about it. It was like … floating.” They waited for him to say more but no more words would come to him. Inexplicably, he thought of Quinn.

“Looked pretty amazing through the window,” Fisher said. “You were pretty far away.”

“Yeah,” Keith said. “Seemed like it too.”

There was a pause in the conversation and then Fisher said, “Hey, Bill, CAPCOM is waiting to hear from you.”