'He was drunk,' said Bridget.
Casper halted and turned to look at her. She stood with her arms grimly crossed, her red hair like the flaming halo of an avenging angel.
'The doctors told me,' she said. 'Blood alcohol level of point one nine. As pickled as a herring. This isn't just our usual bad luck. This is our own dear Sully fucking up again. My only consolation that for the next six weeks, he's gonna have a big tube stuck up his dick.'
Without a word, Casper walked out of the visitors' waiting room, headed up the hall, and pushed into Sullivan's hospital room. 'You moron,' he said.
Sully looked up at him with morphine-glazed eyes. 'Thanks for the sympathy.'
'You don't deserve any. Three weeks before launch and you pull some goddamn Chuck Yeager stunt in the desert? Why didn't you just finish the job? Splatter your brains while you were at it? Hell, we wouldn't have known the difference!' Sully closed his eyes.
'I'm sorry.'
'You always are.'
'I screwed up. I know ... '
'You promised them a manned flight. It wasn't my idea, it was yours. Now they're expecting it. They're excited about it. When was the last time any investor was excited about us? This could have made the difference. If you'd just kept the bottle corked -- '
'I was scared.'
Sully had spoken so softly Casper wasn't sure he'd heard him right.
'What?' he said.
'About the launch. Had a ... bad feeling.' A bad feeling. Slowly Casper sank into the bedside chair, all his anger instantly dissolving.
Fear is not something a man readily admits to. The fact that Sully, who regularly courted destruction, would confess to being afraid left Casper feeling shaken.
And, at last, sympathetic.
'You don't need me for the launch,' said Sully.
'They expect to see a pilot climb into that cockpit.'
'You could put a goddamn monkey in my seat and they'd never know the difference. She doesn't need a pilot, Cap. You can all the commands from the ground.' Casper sighed. They had no choice now, it would have to be an unmanned flight. Clearly they had a valid excuse not to launch Sully, but would the investors accept it? Or would they believe, instead, that Apogee had lost its nerve? That it lacked the confidence to risk a human life?
'I guess I just lost my nerve,' said Sully softly. 'Got to last night. Couldn't stop ... ' Casper understood his partner's fear -- the way he understood how one defeat can lead inexorably to another and then another until the only certainty in a man's life is failure. No wonder he was scared, he had lost faith in their dream. In Apogee.
Maybe they all had.
Casper said, 'We can still make this launch work. Even without a monkey in the cockpit.'
'Yeah. You could send up Bridget instead.'
'Then who'd answer the phones?'
'The monkey.' Both men laughed. They were like two old soldiers, mustering up a shred of cheer on the eve of certain defeat.
'So we're gonna do it?' said Sully. 'We're gonna launch?'
'That was the whole idea of building a rocket.'
'Well, then.' Sully took a deep breath, and a ghost of the old bravado returned to his face. 'Let's do it right. Press release the wire services. One mother of a tent party with champagne. Hell, invite my sainted brother and his NASA pals. If she blows on the pad, at least we'll go outta business in style.'
'Yeah. We always had an excess of style.' They grinned.
Casper rose to leave. 'Get better, Sully,' he said. 'We'll need you for Apogee III.'
He found Bridget still sitting in the visitors' waiting room. 'So what happens now?' she said.
'We launch on schedule.'
'Unmanned?'
He nodded. 'We fly her from the control room.'
To his surprise, she huffed out a sigh of relief. 'Hallelujah!'
'What're you so happy about? Our man's laid up in a hospital bed.'
'Exactly.' She slung her purse over her shoulder and turned to leave.
'It means he won't be up there to fuck things up.'
August 11.
Nicolai Rudenko floated in the air lock, watching as Luther wriggled his hips into the lower torso assembly of the EVA suit.
To the diminutive Nicolai, Luther was an exotic giant, with those broad shoulders and legs like pistons. And his skin! While Nicolai had turned pasty during his months aboard ISS, Luther was still a deep and polished brown, a startling contrast to the pale faces that inhabited their otherwise colorless world. Nicolai had already suited up, and now he hovered beside Luther, ready to assist his partner into the EVA suit's upper torso assembly. They said little to each other, neither man was in the mood for idle chatter.
The two of them had spent a mostly conversationless night sleeping in the air lock, allowing their bodies to adjust to an atmospheric pressure of 10.2 pounds per square inch -- two thirds that of the space station. The pressure in their suits would be less, at 4.3. The suits could not be inflated any higher, or they would be too stiff and bulky, the joints impossible to flex.
Going directly from a fully pressurized spacecraft into the lower air pressure of an EVA suit was like surfacing too fast from the depths of the ocean. An astronaut could suffer the bends. Nitrogen bubbles formed in the blood, clogging capillaries, cutting off precious oxygen to the brain and spinal cord. The consequences could be devastating, paralysis and stroke. Like deep-sea divers, to give their bodies time to adjust to the changing pressures. The night before a space walk, the EVA crew washed out their lungs with a hundred percent oxygen and shut themselves into the air lock for 'the camp-out.' For hours they were trapped together in a small chamber already crammed full of equipment. It was not a place for claustrophobics.
With his arms extended over his head, Luther squirmed into the suit's hard-shelled upper torso, which was mounted on the air lock wall. It was an exhausting dance, like wriggling into an impossibly small tunnel. At last his head popped out through the hole, and Nicolai helped him close the waist ring, sealing the halves of the suit.
They put on their helmets. As Nicolai looked down to fit his helmet to the torso assembly, he noticed something glistening on the rim of the suit's neck ring. Just spittle, he thought, and put on the helmet. They donned their gloves. Sealed into their suits, they opened the equipment lock hatch, floated into the adjoining crew lock, and shut the hatch behind them. They were now in an even smaller compartment, barely large enough to contain both the men and their bulky life-support backpacks.
Thirty minutes of 'prebreathe' came next. While they inhaled pure oxygen, purging their blood of any last nitrogen, Nicolai floated with his eyes closed, mentally preparing for the space ahead. If they could not get the beta gimbal assembly to unlock, they could not reorient the solar panels toward the sun, they be starved for power. Crippled. What Nicolai and Luther accomplished in the next six hours could well determine the fate of the space station.
Though this responsibility weighed heavily on his tired shoulders, Nicolai was anxious to open the hatch and float out of the lock. To go EVA was like being reborn, the fetus emerging from that small, tight opening, the umbilical restraint dangling as swims out into the vastness of space. Were the situation not so grave, he would be looking forward to it, would be giddily anticipating the freedom of floating in a universe without walls, dazzling blue earth spinning beneath him.
But the images that came to mind, as he waited with his eyes closed for the thirty minutes to pass, were not of spacewalking. What he saw instead were the faces of the dead. He imagined Discovery as she plunged from the
