Encounter With Tiber Read online

  “You’re fine,” Lori said. “Get ’em out, Chris.”

  He climbed down onto the mid deck below, trying to sound both confident and casual as he said, “All right, in order and by the book, people. Sharon, you’re first.”

  At once she undid her lap belt, threw her harness back, and unhooked oxygen, comm, and cooling water lines. She stepped forward to meet Chris at the base of the pole, by the dark open doorway.

  The curved metal pole protruded fourteen feet from the side of the ship into the howling wind outside. The purpose of the pole was to carry the crew out beyond the slipstream before releasing them. Endeavour was still moving at nearly two hundred miles per hour; if they just stepped out the door, they would be caught in the slipstream and hurled against the fuselage, wing, or rudder.

  With a tug, Chris undid the Velcro on the upper right strap over the shoulder of Sharon’s suit, exposing the ring there. He guided her to the row of hooks that waited, hanging from the base of the pole by short straps, and fastened the ring on Sharon’s suit to the hook. “Grab it,” he said, over the suit radio, and Sharon took the strap in both hands, reaching up to do so—she was a small woman, just a couple of pounds over the minimum weight and exactly the minimum height. “Tuck hard, and stay tucked!” Chris added. “I’ll give you the pushoff.”

  Sharon picked her feet up off the floor so that she hung from the pole by her right shoulder. Chris shoved her forward and the hook slid through the securing mechanism; another push, and she slid outward away from Endeavour. The 200 mph wind yanked her around so that her head pointed toward the ship’s nose and she hung face down over the cold black sea more than five miles below. The pole was curved so that the wind would move her gently along it; she accelerated down the pole to its end and sailed off the end into the ever-darkening sky. The release of tension from the hook would arm Sharon’s chute, and an automatic altimeter would deploy it when she reached a safe altitude; all she had to do now was carry out the basic procedures for waiting to be rescued.

  Swiftly, Chris got J.T. and Harold onto the pole and out the door in the same way, sending each into the night. By the time Dirk went, it was getting truly dark; Chris could see stars through the open door as Dirk’s silhouette, tucked into a ball, face down and head forward, slid down the long pole and sailed off into the sky. All the while he kept up what later, when people had made such a big deal out of it that he didn’t want to hear about it again, he called a “running line of patter,” reassuring each crew member, checking through every small detail, trying for a perfect by-the-book bailout and plenty of assurance to his crew.

  Henry came next, as Lori had told him to. The ship was now on autopilot; since all it had to do was descend straight ahead for another two hundred seconds at most, and the shuttle autopilot was so sophisticated that theoretically it could land the ship even if the whole crew were incapacitated, Chris didn’t spare much thought to worry about there not officially being a pilot anymore. He yanked the Velcro and pulled the ring as he told Henry, “Okay, just like the others, so far I’ve had perfect tucks from everyone. A bit to the left—there.” He slid the ring from Henry’s suit onto the hook on the pole. “Tuck up and let’s go, see you in Spain—okay, good.”

  Henry had pulled his feet up into a tight tuck. Chris shoved the large man hard, using his shoulder, and Henry’s hook slid out of its restraining mechanism and down the pole, Henry swinging under it, suddenly lining up with the wind, hurtling down the pole, and disappearing out into the stars.

  Chris turned to assist Lori and she wasn’t there. He looked back behind him and there she was; as she had been climbing down from the flight deck onto the mid deck, her harness had snagged on her chair, and now she was struggling to free herself. Chris jumped up onto the upper deck, grabbed the stuck part, and yanked as hard as he could, but without success. “Lean in toward your chair,” he said. “It’s almost free.”

  She did, and that gave him some slack. He pushed the stiff hose a bit farther into the crevice, the thick gloves making him do it all by sight since he could barely feel what he was handling. His pressure suit didn’t let him see things at his waist either, and something like Murphy’s Law dictated that the hang-up would be at waist level, so he found he was rocking back and forth to take a look and then try to move the hose. Finally by pinching it flat and pulling gently, he gained some slack before it caught again. Another pinch and a twist broke her free, and Lori finally climbed down onto the mid deck. “Not bad, jumpmaster. I knew I hired you for something,” Lori said.

  They leaped to the door and Chris hastily deployed her ring and got her onto the second hook on the pole. “Remember to tuck!” he said.

  “Thank you,” she replied. “Now get in place yourself. Captain gets off last.”

  He stood in front of her and felt her pop the Velcro to free the ring on his right shoulder, something pulling upward, and then a firm tug as she made sure the hook was really on his ring. “And don’t you forget to tuck, either,” she added. “Just like all the drills, Chris; see you in the bar later tonight.”

  He kicked forward hard, felt the mechanism release him down the pole, and, hands still clutching the strap, slid out and down the pole, pulling his legs up tight to his chest and tensing his arms.

  When the wind grabbed him it was as if a giant hand had seized his whole body and tried to pull it off the pole behind Endeavour. He was abruptly flying forward, headfirst, perpendicular to the pole face pointed down at the sea below, and then he swooped down the pole in a motion that felt like some exotic amusement ride, the hook running over the pole making a terrible thunder through his helmet.

  The rumble of the hook and its pull on his shoulder ceased, and he was weightless, falling through the starlight toward the little glimmers that danced on the dark sea three miles below him. In the corner of his eye he saw Endeavour shoot away forward in front of him, as his much greater wind resistance caused him to slow down abruptly while the ship flew on ahead.

  A long few breaths went slowly by and then Chris’s altimeter decided he was at a low enough altitude; the chute deployed and he found himself yanked savagely upward for a moment, then drifting down. He could feel a great deal of motion and realized, with a grunt of irritation, that there was a fairly high wind tonight; not only had the seven crew members, released across a period of four minutes or so, been scattered along twelve miles of Endeavour’s trajectory, but now the wind would scatter them further. He could see stars off to the sides in several directions as he floated down on the chute, so apparently, even if the waves were bigger and the wind stronger than he’d have liked, at least there would be clear light to see them by. As he descended, the Moon, not far from full, rose majestically out of the sea to the east. Twisting to look that way, he picked out Lori’s parachute, so at least everyone had gotten out the door all right.

  The Moon had nearly cleared the surface of the water, a huge glowing orb like a monstrous eye against the horizon, when Chris triggered his life preserver so that it was fully inflated by the time that he plunged into the water.

  One of many strange things was that there was no sensation of wetness; the pressure suit was still sealed and though there were only about ten minutes or so of air in it, that was more than enough for the purpose. Chris felt a strange shove on his back and looked around to see his dinghy automatically deploying. It swelled up behind him, forming a little platform on the sea, and he gripped the side, pushing down and hauling himself up. One hard heave put him into the dinghy, and now he was able to open his visor and let himself cool off and breathe comfortably. He activated the survival radio to help them find him; his personal locator had been on since he left the ship, so he was sure they knew where he was.

  He looked over toward the Moon; a full Moon means a high tide when it passes directly overhead, but here in the middle of the ocean he couldn’t think of what difference it would make to him. As he watched, he caught another glimpse of Lori as she splashed down all but due east of him,
shadowed against the Moon. If the rescue crew got here soon enough, he could possibly point her out to them; he could just see her dinghy from where he bobbed on the waves.

  Far off in the distance he heard the rumble of a jet, but it didn’t seem to be coming this way; a couple of hours later, as he lay in the dinghy, a helicopter approached and dropped a specialized, larger dinghy—one in which they could haul him back up—plus a pararescue jumper to help get him into it. Assisted by the pararescue diver in his wet suit, Chris climbed over to the lift dinghy, and the rescuer joined him. Then suddenly the cables overhead tightened and hauled them up toward the belly of the chopper. It was less than three hours since they had lifted off.

  The two things that were to make it a bigger event had already happened, but no one knew yet. A CNN camera crew, en route in a Learjet from London to cover a civil war in Africa, had heard the news and managed, using their radio scanners, to listen in on NASA communications and figure out the position that Endeavour was headed for. As they diverted to the site, they found that one of their scanners could pick up the shuttle’s radio beacon, and thus, between further announcements of the position and following the path along which the signal grew stronger, they rapidly closed in on Endeavour.

  As they raced after it, phone calls were fanning out of Atlanta to everywhere, offering rights and collecting money; by the time Endeavour finally hit the Atlantic, four networks were carrying it besides CNN, right at the beginning of prime time, and so an estimated 128 million viewers saw it happen.

  The shuttle had never been designed to ditch in water; it had pushed the edge of the technology of the early 1970s, when it had been designed, and many desirable features had had to be sacrificed.

  It also had “the glide ratio of a brick,” as the first pilots to fly it tended to say, meaning that compared to other aircraft, the ratio between how far it moved forward and how far it fell in a given time, when gliding, was extremely unfavorable.

  This wasn’t obvious at first when Endeavour was still fairly high above the water. It seemed to be flying along more or less as usual, except that its door was open and a pole protruded from it. Still guided by its autopilot, it stayed straight and level.

  But as it dropped closer to the water, you could see from its relative motion that it was coming in very fast. Now millions watched as it fell fast and hard, flat bottom to the water.

  The impact was partly masked by a great plume of white water as Endeavour made contact. The force broke her in half; the crew cabin, in the forward part, went under and sank like a stone, but the largest part, with the wings, cargo bay, and engines, tore free of the cabin and flipped over on its back, rudder-first into the water. With a great eruption of air bubbles, Endeavour slipped down into the dark green water and was gone, on its way to the mud a mile below, taking the U.S. Hab with it. In the bright moonlight, the CNN crew captured the whole eerie spectacle, the crewless Endeavour flying mindlessly down onto the sea surface, breaking apart in an immense spray of white foam, and sliding into the dark, choppy sea. Within a day, one out of every six people on Earth—a billion people—would see that spectacular crash on the moonlit sea and would hear some announcer intone that the United States had lost not just a shuttle but also the living quarters for the International Space Station.

  The other thing that was memorable was still worse; no one knew how it had happened, but Sharon Goldman’s arm was broken when they found her. Broken arms are common enough even in sport parachutists and military ejections—the force of the wind when you jump out of an airplane is strong enough to break an elbow or pull an arm out of its shoulder socket, if it catches you the wrong way. And she had been bailing out at far greater speeds. In any case, with a broken arm, she had been unable to climb into the dinghy. When they found her, she was hanging by the wrist she had knotted into one of the grab lines, from the side of the upside-down dinghy, only her hand above the water, drowned.

  The inquiry couldn’t reconstruct exactly what had happened; clearly she’d had to open her visor to breathe, but so had everyone else. There was nothing wrong with her life preserver as far as they could tell, except that at some time or other it had deflated after being inflated. Theories abounded—that she had panicked, that she had been unable to bear the pain in her broken arm from being yanked through the water and had deflated it herself trying to get a more stable position, that she had been overcome by hypothermia and become irrational, that something had gone wrong because this was her first time in the new improved suits, or that her life preserver had simply failed in a way no one could duplicate afterwards.

  I was sort of sad, but at the age of four the concept of death isn’t there yet, really; I knew death was something that could happen on a space voyage, and I knew that it was bad, but beyond that I had no real appreciation at all for what had happened. I was just glad that Dad was safe and would be home much sooner. If he had gone up to ISS as planned, he’d have been there for six months, and now I would probably see him in a day or so. Grandma, who had a pretty good idea of what space politics was like, and what kind of trouble was ahead with the loss of so much of the space program’s physical capital in one accident, simply told me, “Now, don’t be surprised if your father is very sad and upset when he gets back. He might not have a lot of time for you, or want to do anything together. He’s just had a really, really bad day.”

  2

  IT SELDOM TAKES THE news media more than an hour or two to decide what the essence of a story is, what kind of tale to tell to the public. Four images stayed in the public mind from the initial coverage, and television reporters quickly found a simple way to link them.

  The first of these was the Endeavour crash itself. The sheer violence and power with which a symbol of American prowess had been torn apart guaranteed that the media would run it over and over; if the media lives for nothing else, it’s image and impact, and here was an image with a powerful impact. The second was of the dinghy floating on the sea, Sharon Goldman’s lifeless hand reaching for the help that had come far too late.

  Set against those overwhelming images of loss and destruction, which played over and over on television for days afterwards, there were two countervailing ones. One was of a grinning, laughing Lori Kirsten being pulled from the water. (For years afterwards, Aunt Lori used to get annoyed by that photo—enough so that Dad and later Sig knew they could always get a rise out of her by asking what joke the rescue crews had been telling her. She said nobody should be held responsible for the way they looked when they had just missed being killed, and that she was laughing not because she was having fun but because she was relieved.)

  And the other was the voice of Chris Terence, carefully and calmly helping each astronaut onto the pole and out the door, and finally freeing Lori from the tangle that one of her suit hoses had made in her seat.

  That one used to make Dad angry, too. “What I was doing was just following the manual, damn it. Same thing Lori was doing. We were following standard procedure for that situation. If that’s what makes a hero, then every postal clerk who sells you a stamp for the right price is a hero. And I don’t see why—”

  That was about the point where he would normally get cut off, because he would be having the argument with Grandma, Mom, or the NASA PR people. Grandma would point out that his career was advancing and that it was about time. Mom would sit down and patiently explain, once again, that nobody in the business, with the possible exception of Mom herself, was interested in any of that, that TV news exists to sell shampoo, not to inform the public, and that holding up someone as a hero is much more important, from a standpoint of shampoo sales, than examining whether there is anything heroic about that person.

  And some NASA Public Affairs Officer or other—the kind my father called a “PR clown”—was usually on the other end of a phone line, so at the time I didn’t hear what they were saying. I asked Dad what PR stood for, and he said “Privacy Rapists,” a term which Grandma and Mom refused to explain, except to t
ell me that Dad was kind of upset and I shouldn’t take anything he said too seriously.

  Years later, when I had a little more experience with such things myself, I understood a lot more of what had been going on. NASA was in deep trouble. The budget cuts of the last few years had always been imposed with the insistence that the space station would go forward, if for no other reason than the sheer embarrassment that would ensue if, having lured the Russian space program, Japan’s NASDA, and Europe’s ESA into this thing, we then backed out of the deal. So the agency had little discretion in how it spent its funds; ISS had to be their top priority. Other missions had been restricted to what could fly on the old, heavy Columbia, mostly smaller-scale science missions. Atlantis, Discovery, and Endeavour had been almost dedicated to ISS.

  Nor was there any apparent easy way to replace Endeavour. The Balanced Budget Act of 1996 had made deficit spending impossible in 2002, so any extra funds would have to come from somewhere else. There was little prospect of building a new shuttle, as had been done after the Challenger disaster fifteen years before; the replacement had been Endeavour itself, and besides the design was almost thirty years old now.

  But there was no way that the remaining three orbiters, Discovery, Atlantis, and Columbia, could carry the necessary traffic for the station, most especially because only Discovery and Atlantis were equipped to dock there. Columbia, too old and heavy to be equipped for docking, was picking up many of the other NASA missions that called for a shuttle.

  There had been a serious effort to find a new launch vehicle to take the shuttle’s place, but that too had run afoul of simple bad luck. In the early 1990s, experiments had begun in the Strategic Defense Initiative Office to try for a single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) vehicle—a craft that would have “airliner like” operations, with no staging necessary to reach space, deliver astronauts and cargo, and return, with a quick turnaround at every point—what most ordinary people pictured when they thought of a “spaceship” or “rocket ship.” The initial test vehicle, the DC-X, had demonstrated that the necessary maneuvering capabilities were indeed available; it could take off, hover, go from flying nose-down to flying tail-down, and land on its exhaust quite successfully.