Back in her hotel room she tried to call Palmer Gabriel in San Diego. It took half a dozen tries to connect with the operator, and when the call finally went through, she got only Palmer's voice mail.
'They have a sick astronaut on ISS,' she said. 'Palmer, this is what I was afraid of. What I warned all of you about. If it's confirmed, we have to move fast. Before ... ' She paused, glancing at the clock. To hell with this, she thought, and hung up. I have home to San Diego. I'm the only one who knows how to deal with this. They'll need me.
She threw her clothes into the suitcase, checked out of the hotel, and climbed into a taxi for the fifteen-mile ride to the airstrip in Buena Vista. A small plane would be waiting for her there to fly her to La Paz, where she could catch a commercial flight to San Diego.
It was a rough taxi ride, the road bumpy and winding, the dust flying in the open windows. But the part of the trip she truly dreaded was the flight coming up. Small planes terrified her. If for her rush to get home, she would have made the long drive up the Baja Peninsula in her own car, which was now safely parked at the resort. She clung to the armrest with sweaty palms, imagining what sort of aviation disaster awaited her.
Then she glimpsed the night sky, clear and velvety black, and she thought of the people aboard the space station. Thought of the risks other, braver human beings took. It was all a matter of perspective. A ride in a small plane is nothing compared to the an astronaut faces.
This was not the time to be a coward. Lives might hang in the balance.
And she was the only one who knew what to do about it.
The spine-rattling ride suddenly smoothed out. They were now on a paved road, thank God, and Buena Vista was just a few miles away.
Sensing the urgency of this journey, her driver accelerated, and the wind whipped through the open windows, stinging her face with dust. She reached down to crank up the glass. Suddenly she felt the taxi swerve left to pass a slow-moving car. She glanced and saw to her horror they were on a curve.
'Senor! Mas despacio!' she said. Slow down.
They were neck and neck with the other car now, the taxi just pulling ahead, the driver unwilling to surrender his gain. The ahead wound to the left, dipping out of sight.
'Don't pass!' she said. 'Please, don't -- ' Her gaze shot forward and froze on the blinding lights of another car.
She raised her arms to cover her face, blotting out the brilliance of those lights. But she could not shut out the scream of the driver and the shriek of her own voice as the headlights leaped toward them.
August 3.
From his seat behind the glass partition of the crowded visitors' gallery, Jack had a clear view down into the Flight Control Room, where every console was manned, every controller neatly attired for the TV cameras. Though the men and women working below might be intently focused on their duties, they never entirely they were being observed, that the public eye was trained on them, and every gesture, every nervous shake of the head, could be seen through the wall of glass behind them. Only a year ago, Jack had manned the flight surgeon's console during a shuttle launch, and had felt the gaze of strangers, like a vague but uncomfortable trained on the back of his neck. He knew the people below were feeling it now.
The atmosphere in the FCR appeared icy calm, as were the voices on the comm loop. It was the image NASA strove to maintain, of professionals doing their job and doing it well. What the public seldom saw were the crises in the back controller rooms, near-disasters, the Chinese fire drills when things went wrong and confusion reigned.
Not today, he thought. Carpenter's at the helm. Things will go right.
Flight Director Randy Carpenter was leading the ascent team.
He was old enough and experienced enough to have witnessed a multitude of crises during his career. It was his belief that spaceflight tragedies were not usually the result of one major malfunction, but rather a series of small problems that piled up resulted in disaster. He was therefore a stickler for details, a person for whom every problem was a potential crisis. His team looked up to him -- quite literally, because Carpenter was a giant of a man, six foot four and nearly three hundred pounds.
Gretchen Liu, the public affairs officer, was sitting at the far left, last-row console. Jack saw her turn and give the viewing gallery A-OK smile. She was dressed in her TV best today, a navy blue and gray silk scarf. This mission had caught the world's attention, and although most of the press was gathered at the launch site in Cape Canaveral, there were enough reporters here in JSC's Mission Control to pack the observation gallery.
The ten-minute countdown hold ended. On audio, they heard final weather clearance, and then the countdown proceeded. Jack leaned forward, his muscles tensing as events cascaded toward liftoff. That old launch fever was back. A year ago, when he'd walked away from the space program, he thought he'd left all this behind. But here he was, caught up once again in the excitement.
The dream. He imagined the crew strapped into their seats, the vehicle trembling beneath them as the chambers of liquid oxygen and hydrogen built up pressure. He thought of their claustrophobia as they close their visors. The hiss of oxygen. The quickening of their pulses.
'We have SRB ignition,' said the public affairs officer in KSC'S Launch Control. 'And li*off! We have liftoff! Control has now shifted to Houston's JSC ... ' Tracing across the central screen, the shuttle's course arced eastward along its planned flight path. Jack was still tense, his racing. On the TV screens mounted above the gallery, images of shuttle were being transmitted from Kennedy. Communications between Capcom and shuttle commander Kittredge played on the speakers. Discovery had gone into its roll and was climbing into upper reaches of the atmosphere, where blue sky would soon darken to the blackness of space.
'We're looking good,' said Gretchen over the media loop. In her voice they heard the triumph of a perfect launch. And so far was perfect.
Right through Max Sentence, through SRB sep, through main engine cutoff.
In the FCR, Flight Director Carpenter stood immobile, his gaze fixed on the front screen.
'Discovery, you are go for ET sep,' said Capcom.
'Roger, Houston,' said Kittredge. 'We have ET sep.' It was the sudden jerking up of Carpenter's massive head that told Jack something had just changed. In the FCR, a flutter of activity seemed to animate all the flight controllers at once. Some of them glanced sideways at Carpenter, whose normally slouching shoulders had snapped up to attention. Gretchen had her hand pressed to her earpiece as she listened intently to the loop.
Something has gone wrong, thought Jack.
The air-to-ground loop continued to play on the gallery audio.
'Discovery,' said Capcom, 'MMACS reports umbilical doors have failed to close. Please confirm.'
'Roger that, and we confirm. The doors are not closing.'
'Suggest you go to manual command.' There was an ominous silence. Then they heard Kittredge say, 'Houston, we're A-OK now. The doors have just closed.' Only then, when Jack released a sharp breath, did he realize he'd been holding it. So far this was the only glitch. Everything else, he thought, is perfect. Yet the effects of that sudden adrenaline still lingered, and his hands were sweating. They'd been reminded of how many things can go wrong, and he could not shake off this new sense of uneasiness.
He stared down at the FCR and wondered if Randy Carpenter, the best of the best, felt the same sense of foreboding.
It was as though the clock in his brain had automatically reset itself, shifting his sleep and wake cycles so that his mind to alertness at one A.M. Jack lay in bed, eyes wide open, the luminous glow of his nightstand clock staring back at him. Like shuttle Discovery, he thought, I am racing to catch up with ISS. With Emma. Already his body was synchronizing itself to hers. In an hour, she would be waking up, and her workday would begin.
And here was Jack, awake already, their rhythms in near parallel.
He did not try to go back to sleep, but rose and got dressed.
At one-thirty A.M., Mission Control was quietly humming with activity.
He glanced first in the FCR, where the shuttle sat. So far, no crises had occurred aboard Discovery.
He went down the hall to Special Vehicle Operations, the separate control room for ISS. It was much
