At least he’s coaxed a chuckle out of himself.
He’s read that death row inmates, no matter how brazen and sociopathic, lose their bravado just before execution, and he sees why. It’s not hypothetical anymore. Leaving this life and this body is about to be his new reality. Every human’s fear of what lies on the other side drowns all the neat Biblical assurances in a tsunami of doubt.
Kip works to control his breathing, which has become fast and shallow. He feels his heart rate declining.
What happens, he wonders, when scrubbers saturate? Will he just suddenly feel light-headed? Will he keel over? Or will it be long and agonizing?
He catches sight of the unfolded emergency space suit floating near Bill’s bagged remains and wonders why the idea of putting it on and going outside is tugging at him. Should he do it to die out there? Would it be any easier?
No, something else, some reason that he almost recalls from a dream and can’t put his finger on.
The suit has a small tool kit like nothing he’s seen before. They showed the components in ground school but he barely paid attention. Now he turns and pulls the suit to him, searching for the correct pocket and pulling out the silver-plated kit.
He can visualize himself wiggling into the suit, figuring out how to pressurize it, stuffing himself in the tight little airlock, and floating outside. Maybe another meteor will get him, fast and painlessly. Or cosmic rays sterilize him (not that there’s any chance of that being a problem now). And he’d be doing all that struggling to play in-flight mechanic? Get real.
Yet he thinks, it’s like guzzling chicken soup for a cold. It may not help, but it can’t hurt.
Whether the fatigue he feels suddenly is emotional he can’t tell, but the thought of flailing around trying to put on that complicated pressure suit is exhausting, and he decides not to decide for a few hours. After all, there’s another delectable cereal bar and much more to write before he’s ready to think about trying. And maybe it would be a lot more comfortable just to stay inside and slip away slowly.
But there it is again, that misguided feeling of hope, a glimmer that there could be some way out he hadn’t considered as he turns back to the keyboard.
The fact that it’s ten minutes past nine and his phone hasn’t rung can’t be good.
Geoff Shear opens the tiny instrument and finds the symbol that confirms the ringer is set to on. It is.
The Chinese Long March missile boosting their crew capsule into low Earth orbit should have cycled through first- and second-stage cutout by now and their astronaut—all by himself in a three-person craft—should be approaching orbital velocity.
The cell phone suddenly corks off, startling Geoff who didn’t realize he was that jumpy. The practiced act of sweeping the phone toward his face while flipping it open is completely unconscious.
“Yes?”
“The Chinese scrubbed, Geoff. This is Jake at NRO.”
“Shit! How’re the Russians doing?”
“Still on countdown for a noon-our-time liftoff.”
“I knew the Chinese would fink out.”
“I think they tried hard, but there was a major fuel leak early this morning, and they couldn’t resolve it. One of my people speaks Mandarin and we had him patched into their comm channels.”
“So they’re completely out?”
“Yes. I’ll call you back, as things progress at Baikonaur.”
Chapter 35
“What now?” Chris Risen asks, glancing at the chief master sergeant and noting his sudden shift of attention to the commercial television feed being displayed on his console.
“The Secretary of State, sir. They were just interviewing him coming out of the White House. Kip set off another controversy by recommending a type of death penalty for countries that don’t cooperate with the civilized world.”
“And the Secretary has to respond.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Where are we on the countdowns, Chief?”
“At the Cape they’re at T minus eighteen minutes. At Baikonaur, T minus nine.”
In the old days of the Soviet Union the idea of a live video feed from the Russian spaceport would have been James Bondish, a fantasy. But now, Chris thinks, we’re sitting here watching that very video feed live and in color, as are the Russian people.
He can see the liquid oxygen venting from the Russian proton booster assembly, the gantry now moved out of the way, the scene looking very similar to the video feed coming in from the Cape.
“Chief, do we have a pool going on whether NASA will cancel if the Russians lift off?”
The chief is grinning. “A pool, sir? You mean, as in gambling? As in a chief master sergeant informing the commander of NORAD that his people are violating regulations?”
“Sorry. Of course I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Put me down for twenty that we scrub.”
“Yes, sir. But for the record, I know nothing.”
“Out of limits means out of limits, Griggs!” The launch director is standing now, hands on hips, one of his people standing beside him, the computer screen showing the excessive temperature readings displayed on his master console.
“Stand by, Cully. Do
“Look at the count, Griggs! How long do you need?”
Griggs has a receiver to his ear and a prepositioned computer team on the other end, physically stationed at a hastily constructed war room one building away.
“Two minutes.”
“You’ve got forty seconds.”
Cully Jones shakes his head and turns back to the screen, rolling his eyes at the engineer waiting for direction on what to do with the temperature indication climbing in a tank that could theoretically explode if it, in fact, was to heat up another twenty-five degrees.
“Watch it like a hawk. If it tops redline plus thirty, we open the vent and hold the countdown.”
“Got it.”
Cully turns back to Griggs, aware of what he’s doing but equally aware that a high reading can’t be easily written off as just another artificial computer-generated anomaly. Like a pilot’s guiding philosophy of instrument flight, safety demands belief in your gauges, until you have solid, almost irrefutable evidence they’re lying.
Cully can feel his blood pressure inching up, something he can usually control, but the series of bad readings and interrupted communications that have marked the last ten minutes are either evidence of a serious, systemic
