imagined.
It was heading right for them.
“My God, here it is already!” Lazutkin yelped.
Tsibliyev couldn’t believe it.“What?”
“It’s already close!”
“Where is it?”
Now everything began to happen fast. As Lazutkin looked out through the window, the brightly sunlit Progress appeared to be heading straight for a collision with base block, its twin solar arrays making it appear like some shiny white bird of prey swooping down on them.
“The distance is one hundred fifty metres!” he shouted.
Tsibliyev thought Lazutkin must be mistaken. His left pinkie remained clamped on the braking lever. The Progress should have been moving at a crawl.
“It’s moving closer!” Lazutkin said. He looked outside again and saw the big ship coming on inexorably.“ It shouldn’t be coming in so fast!”
“It’s close, Sasha, I know; I already put it down!”
Tsibliyev was holding the controls tightly, his left pinkie clamped on the braking lever. The ship should have been slowing. It didn’t seem to be responding.
To his horror, Lazutkin saw the Progress pass over the Kvant docking port and begin moving down the length of base block.
Tsibliyev saw it on the screen.
“We are moving past!” he shouted.
Lazutkin remained glued to the window.
“It’s moving past! Sasha, it’s moving past!”
Lazutkin watched the Progress come on then turned to Foale.
“Get into the ship, fast!” he told Foale, directing him to the Soyuz.
“Come on, fast!”
Foale, who had still not seen the Progress, acted quickly, pushing off the wall, shooting across the dinner table, and hurled over Tsibliyev’s head toward the Soyuz, which rested at its customary docking port on the far side of the node. Then, just as Foale passed over the commander, something happened that may or may not have had a profound effect on all their lives. One of Foale’s feet whacked Tsibliyev’s left arm. Later, everyone on board disagreed on the effect this accidental bump may have had on the path of the onrushing Progress.
As Foale passed, Tsibliyev sat frozen at the controls, his face a mask of concentration. He was convinced he could keep the Progress out away from the station, that if he held tightly enough to its current course it would still miss them. Not until the last possible second, when the hull of the station ominously filled his entire screen, did the commander realize there was no avoiding a collision.
“Oh, hell!” Tsibliyev yelled.
As the black shadow of the Progress soared by his window, Lazutkin closed one eye and turned his head.
The impact sent a deep shudder through the station. To Lazutkin, still glued to the base block window, it felt like a sharp, sudden tremor, a small earthquake. Foale, swimming through the node toward the open mouth of the Soyuz, felt the violent vibration when his hand brushed the side of the darkened chamber.
“Oh!” Tsibliyev shouted, as if in pain. He stared at his screen, barely comprehending what had happened. He said aloud, “Can you imagine?”
The master alarm sounded, eliminating all but shouted conversation.
“We have decompression!” Tsibliyev yelled. “It looks like it hit the solar panel! Hell! Sasha, that’s it!”
Confusion broke out as Lazutkin turned and began to swim toward the node, intent on readying the Soyuz for immediate evacuation.
“Wait, come back, Sasha!” Tsibliyev barked.
It was the first decompression aboard an orbiting spacecraft in the history of manned space travel. As Lazutkin hovered beside him, waiting for an order, Tsibliyev remained at his post, staring at the screen, like the captain of a stricken ship.
“How can this be?” he asked.“How can this be?”
After that his words were drowned out in the manic din of the master alarm.
Floating alone in the node, Foale paused. After a moment he realized he was still alive. His ears popped, just a bit, telling him that whatever hole had been punctured in the hull, it was probably a small one. The station’s wounds, whatever they were, were not immediately fatal. They should have enough time to evacuate.
He turned and faced the entrance to the Soyuz, where a tangle of cables, a mass of gray-white spaghetti, spilled out of the escape craft’s open mouth. Executing a deft little flip, he turned backward and entered the Soyuz feet first, extending his legs behind him, his head and shoulders protruding from the capsule.
As he turned to look back toward base block, Foale fully expected Lazutkin and Tsibliyev to come charging into the node after him to begin the evacuation. They didn’t. Foale waited five, ten, then twenty seconds. There was no sign of the Russians. They remained somewhere back in base block, out of his sight.
After roughly a minute of waiting, Foale began to worry. He was certain the Progress struck the station either in base block or in Kvant. These were considered “non-isolatable” areas – that is, a hull breach in either area could not be sealed off. In emergency drills simulating a meteorite strike against the hull of either module, the crew was given no option but to abandon ship. Foale couldn’t understand why Lazutkin and Tsibliyev weren’t evacuating.
Tsibliyev swivelled out of his seat and crouched by the floor window behind him. There, barely 30 feet away, so close he felt he could reach out and touch it, he saw the Progress sagging against the base of one of Spektr’s solar arrays. It looked as if the long needle on the leading edge of the cargo ship’s hull had pierced a jagged hole in the array’s wing-like expanse. He couldn’t be certain, but the Progress appeared lodged against the hull. Lazutkin crouched by the window and looked down. He saw it too.
The commander turned, thinking he would fire one of Progress’s forward thrusters to, as he later put it, “kick it” off the station. But just as he began to leave the window, he saw the cargo ship shift and move forward once again, striking and denting a boxy gray radiator on the side of Spektr’s hull. Then it kept moving forward and, after a long moment, floated free again.
Tsibliyev held his breath, hoping that the Progress would now fly free of the station without hitting any more of its outer structures.
“Where are they?”
Foale couldn’t understand what Tsibliyev and Lazutkin were doing. Emergency procedures mandated that they immediately evacuate the station, but the two Russians were nowhere to be seen. It occurred to Foale that his two crewmates were doing something to try and save the station, when they should be evacuating it. He knew that this kind of going-down-with-the-ship mentality wouldn’t have been unusual among the pride-soaked cosmonaut corps; it was precisely the reckless kind of behaviour Linenger had been warning everyone about. Foale crawled out of the Soyuz and began to fly back toward base block, intent on finding out what was going on.
But the moment Foale emerged from the Soyuz, Lazutkin hurtled out of base block into the node. In a flash he was at the little ship’s entrance. Foale, realizing that Lazutkin was now prepared to begin the evacuation, was unsure of his role.
“Sasha, what can I do?” he asked.
Lazutkin ignored or didn’t hear the question; the alarm was so loud it was difficult to hear
