sky. He saw the crew, strapped into their seats, bodies shaken like dolls, spines snapping, hearts exploding. Though Mission Control had not told them the details of the catastrophe, the nightmarish visions filled his head, made his heart pound, his mouth turn dry.
'Your thirty minutes are up, guys,' came Emma's voice over the intercom.
'Time for depress.' Hands clammy with sweat, Nicolai opened his eyes and saw Luther start the depressurization pump. The air was being sucked out, the pressure in the crew lock slowly dropping. If there was a leak in their suits, they would now detect it.
'A-OK?' asked Luther, checking the latches on their umbilical tethers.
'I am ready.' Luther vented the crew lock atmosphere to space. Then he released the handle and pulled open the hatch.
The last air hissed out.
They paused for a moment, clutching the side of the hatch, staring out in awe. Then Nicolai swam out, into the blackness of space.
'They're coming out now,' said Emma, watching on closed-circuit TV as the two men emerged from the crew lock, umbilical tethers trailing after them. They removed tools from the storage box outside the airlock. Then, pulling themselves from handhold to handhold, they made their way toward the main truss. As they passed by the camera mounted just under the truss, Luther gave a wave.
'You watching the show?' came his voice over the UHF audio system.
'We see you fine on external camera,' said Griggs. 'But your EMU cameras aren't feeding in.'
'Nicolai's too?'
'Neither one. We'll try to track down the problem.'
'Okay, well, we're heading up onto the truss to check out the damage.' The two men moved out of the first camera's range. For a moment they disappeared from view. Then Griggs said, 'There they are,' and pointed to a new screen, where the space-suited were moving toward the second camer's propelling themselves hand over hand along the top of the truss.
Again they passed out range. They were now in the blind zone of the damaged camera and could no longer be seen.
'Getting close, guys?' asked Emma.
'Almost -- almost there,' said Luther, sounding short of breath.
Slow down, she thought. Pace yourselves.
For what seemed like an endless wait, there was only silence from the EVA crew. Emma felt her pulse quicken, her anxiety rising. The station was already crippled and starved for power.
Nothing must go wrong with these repairs. If only Jack was here, she thought. Jack was a talented tinkerer who could rebuild any boat engine or cobble together a shortwave radio from junkyard scraps. In orbit, the most valuable tools are a clever pair of hands.
'Luther?' said Griggs.
There was no answer.
'Nicolai? Luther? Please respond.'
'Shit,' said Luther's voice.
'What is it? What do you see?' said Griggs.
'I'm looking at the problem right now, and man, it's a mess. The whole P-6 end of the main truss is twisted around. Discovery must've clipped the 2-B array and bent that end right up. Then she swung over and snapped off the S-band antennas.'
'What do you think? Can you fix anything?'
'The S-band's no problem. We got an ORU for the antennas, and we'll just replace 'em. But the port-side solar arrays -- forget it. We need a whole new truss on that end.'
'Okay.' Wearily Griggs rubbed his face. 'Okay, so we're definitely down one PVM. I guess we can deal with that. But we must reorient the P-4 arrays, or we're screwed.' There was a pause as Luther and Nicolai headed back along the main truss. Suddenly they were in camera range, Emma saw them moving slowly past in their bulky suits and enormous backpacks, like deep-sea divers moving through water. They stopped at the P-4 arrays. One of the men floated down the side of the truss and at the mechanism joining the enormous solar wings to the truss backbone.
'The gimbal assembly is bent,' said Nicolai. 'It cannot turn.'
'Can you free it up?' asked Griggs.
They heard a rapid exchange of dialogue between Luther and Nicolai. Then Luther said, 'How elegant do you want this repair be?'
'Whatever it takes. We need the juice soon, or we're in trouble, guys.'
'I guess we can try the body shop approach.' Emma looked at Griggs.
'Does that mean what I think it means?'
It was Luther who answered the question. 'We're gonna get out a hammer and bang this sucker back into shape.' He was still alive.
Dr. Isaac Roman gazed through the viewing window at his unfortunate colleague, who was sitting in a hospital bed watching TV. Cartoons, believe it or not. The Nickelodeon channel, which the patient stared at with almost desperate concentration. He didn't even glance at the space-suited nurse who'd come into the room to remove the untouched lunch tray.
Roman pressed the intercom button. 'How are you feeling today, Nathan?'
Dr. Nathan Helsinger turned his startled gaze to the viewing window, and for the first time noticed that Roman was standing on the other side of the glass. 'I'm fine. I'm perfectly healthy.'
'You have no symptoms whatsoever?'
'I told you, I'm fine.' Roman studied him for a moment. The man looked healthy enough, but his face was pale and tense. Scared.
'When can I come out of isolation?' said Helsinger.
'It's been scarcely thirty hours.'
'The astronauts had symptoms by eighteen hours.'
'That was in microgravity. We don't know what to expect here, and we can't take chances. You know that.'
Abruptly Helsinger turned to stare at the TV again, but not before Roman saw the flash of tears in his eyes. 'It's my daughter's birthday today.'
'We sent a gift in your name. Your wife was informed you couldn't make it. That you're on a plane to Kenya.' Helsinger gave a bitter laugh.
'You do tie up those loose ends well, don't you? And what if I die? What will you tell her?'
'That it happened in Kenya.'
'As good a place as any, I suppose.' He sighed. 'So what did you get her?'
'Your daughter? I believe it was a Dr. Barbie.'
'That's exactly what she wanted. How did you know?'
Roman's cell phone rang. 'I'll check back on you later,' he said, then turned from the window to answer the phone.
'Dr. Roman, this is Carlos. We've got some of the DNA results. You'd better come up and see this.'
'I'm on my way.'
He found Dr. Carlos Mixtal sitting in front of the lab computer.
Data was scrolling down the monitor in a continuous stream, CTGT ... The data was made up of only four letters, G, T, A, and C. It was a nucleotide sequence, and each of the letters represented the building blocks that make up DNA, the genetic blueprint for all living organisms.
Carlos turned at the sound of Roman's footsteps, and the expression on his face was unmistakable. Carlos looked scared Just like Helsinger, Roman thought. Every one is scared.
Roman sat down beside him. 'Is that it?' he asked, pointing at the screen.
'This is from the organism infecting Kenichi Hirai. We took it from the remains that we were able to ... scrape from the Discovery.' Remains was the appropriate word for what was left of Hirai's body. Ragged clumps
