Orbit

The severed wiring is chaotic, but as he looks more closely, he can count perhaps twenty actual wires completely cut and others merely grazed.

Okay, suppose I treat this like speaker wire? Is there color coding? Yes! Look at that! Red, orange, and green stripes go to whatever else has red, orange, and green stripes. I’ll probably run out of air before I can get them all, but what the hell.

He secures himself with his left hand, which is holding both the edge of the hole and the wire, working inside the hole and letting the knife blade bite into the insulation around the first cut wire, scraping it away neatly before finding the other end and doing the same. Twisting them together and taping off the result is incredibly awkward in the inflated gloves and the worry about slicing open his suit on the jagged edge of the hole is great, but he keeps each movement under tight control and slowly works through each of the wires, going faster as he gets more familiar with the bulky gloves.

There is intense heat from the sun’s unfiltered rays on his left side and he remembers to change position to keep from overwhelming the suit, which is getting warm inside.

The suit’s control panel is showing twenty minutes of air left by the time he finishes splicing every wire for which he can locate a mate. He folds and replaces the knife and the tape, before pulling himself back over the top to the open airlock door, where he stops to make a critical decision.

It would be so much more meaningful to die out here, he thinks. Just a button push. But, if I do, I’ll never know if the repairs have changed anything. Is there any chance the radios could be working now and I could reach someone?

And what if, somehow, he’s reconnected the rocket?

No! he cautions himself. Don’t rekindle all your hopes! No way the engine is going to light off. That requires a professional. The best I can hope for is that somehow I’ve bumped something the right way and restored space-ground communications. But as long as I’m floating here trolling for meteors, I’ll never know.

Five more minutes, Kip decides, drinking in the view as the terminator slips by below, just past the Red Sea, and he watches the glow from what he decides must be the Saudi Arabian desert city of Riyadh sitting like a twinkling, grounded star against the darkness of the desert to the east.

He knows by now that the retrofire point—should he need it—is just under an hour away, which means that even if he decides to test the rocket motor, he’ll have to wait for that window. Not that anything is going to happen.

But he does feel the tiniest glimmer of hope.

Okay, he decides. Let’s get back in, and once I’m sure nothing’s going to change, I’ll come back out and end it here.

Chapter 38

OFFICE OF THE ADMINISTRATOR, NASA HEADQUARTERS, WASHINGTON, D.C., MAY 21, 9:06 A.M. PACIFIC/12:06 P.M. EASTERN

The Russian rescue mission and the administrator of NASA go into motion at the same moment. In Russia the Soyuz spacecraft clears the Baikonaur launch pad while in the Beltway Geoff Shear is already speaking to the White House aide he’s had holding for ten minutes.

“Okay. Put him on. Quickly.”

Less than a minute goes by before the President picks up to hear that the Russians are underway.

“I urge you to let me scrub our launch, Mr. President. It’s unnecessary now.”

“How much time on our countdown, Geoff?”

“Coming up on eleven minutes, sir. We just came off the hold.”

“Geoff, I want our guys to do the job. You know that.”

“Yes, sir, but…”

“And I’ll take the heat for the additional funds, but this is the sort of mission the shuttle was supposed to be able to do. Even if we have to compete with a parking lot full of spacecraft up there I want Kip on our shuttle. And that way the poor guy doesn’t have to ride to the space station first and spend, what, ten days before coming back? I mean, he could be injured.”

“He’s not injured, sir. He’s mentioned nothing about being injured.”

“Well, psychologically he needs to come home.”

“Yes, but, Mr. President, we’ve pushed everybody down there very hard to accomplish this emergency mission so we can comply with your directives, and frankly there have been all sorts of technical problems, and even though we’ve gotten past most of them…”

“When?”

“Today. During the countdown. And in the previous few days. We’re hanging it out.”

“Are you telling me the launch is unsafe?”

A contemplative silence lasts a moment too long.

“Geoff, are you saying on the record this is too dangerous? You have good reason to believe that?”

“I… don’t know for a fact that there’s any inordinate danger, more than usual, but whenever you push hard like this, things can go wrong.”

“What’s gone wrong?”

“Just a lot of computer problems and glitches and low readings. The countdown has been threatened over and over again. But it tells me…”

“But you can’t say definitively that you’re violating any safety parameters?”

“No.”

“Very well, then. We launch, Geoff. And that’s that. Get our guys up there and get Kip Dawson down safely. Clear enough?”

“Very well, Mr. President. Keep your fingers crossed.”

Geoff hangs up and sits for less than a minute, weighing the dangers of triggering what he considers his own “nuclear” option—his last chance to keep the shuttle grounded. It’s a no-brainer, he figures, and suddenly he’s pulling his cell phone from his pocket and punching up the screen to send a coded, numeric text message:

80086672876

He checks the TV monitor on his desk. Less than ten minutes. The display loses one minute before his phone beeps and the return message appears with a simple “OK.”

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, FLORIDA, 9:08 A.M. PACIFIC/12:08 P.M. EASTERN

Dorothy Sheehan stares at the cell phone display in disbelief, wondering if the number she’s been given as a code matches what she’s seeing.

She quickly checks a secure page in her PDA and feels a shiver when the number matches.

It’s the same!

If Shear had asked her to have a cyanide capsule embedded in a tooth against capture she wouldn’t be more surprised. The launch will be safely scrubbed, but she’ll be almost instantly traceable as the saboteur.

There’s no way she can use the computer in the office she’s been assigned, and there’s no time left to return to the vacant office and computer she was using. She snatches up her small briefcase and races to the door, confirming the hall is clear before entering and walking quickly to the far end of the corridor.

Why didn’t I prepare for this? she thinks, knowing the answer. What she’s already embedded can have no direct safety impact on the shuttle or the crew, but what Geoff Shear has just ordered could lead to a major computer shutdown just before liftoff. For the first time in days she feels her confidence ebbing away. Real fright is taking its place. This is her space program, too. It’s one thing to influence the scrubbing of a launch, and another entirely to do so at the very last second when the readings could confuse the launch crew.

The thought of just walking away and reporting there wasn’t time crosses her mind, but her deal with Shear depends on success. She knows him well. And Shear is the one charged with making the tough strategic decisions.