Gravity. Part 6

A comatose patient with a systemic infection already on death's threshold.

He left the ICU and glumly stepped into the elevator. This was a depressing way to kick off his vacation. First stop, he decided he stepped off on the lobby level, would be the corner grocery for a six-pack. An ice-cold beer and an afternoon loading up the sailboat was what he needed right now. It would get his mind off Debbie Haning.

"Code Blue, SICU. Code Blue, SICU." His head snapped up at the announcement over the hospital address system. Debbie, he thought, and dashed for the stairwell.

Her SICU cubicle was already crowded with personnel. He pushed his way in and shot a glance at the monitor.

Ventricular fibrillation! Her heart was a quivering bundle of muscles, unable to pump, unable to keep her brain alive.

"One amp epinephrine going in now!" one of the nurses called out.

"Every one stand back!" a doctor ordered, placing the defibrillator paddles on the chest.

Jack saw the body give a jolt as the paddles discharged, and saw the line shoot up on the monitor, then sink back to baseline.

V fib.

A nurse was performing CPR, her short blond hair flipping up with each pump on the chest. Debbie's neurologist, Dr. Salomon, glanced up as Jack joined him at the bedside.

"Is the amiodarone in?" asked Jack.

"Going in now, but it's not working." Jack glanced at the tracing again.

The V fib had gone from coa.r.s.e to fine. Deteriorating toward a flat line.

"We've shocked her four times," said Salomon. "Can't get a rhythm."

"Intracardiac epi?"

"We're down to Hail Marys. Go ahead!" The code nurse prepared the syringe of epinephrine and attached a long cardiac needle. Even as Jack took it, he knew that the was already over. This procedure would change nothing. But he thought about Bill Haning, waiting to come home to his wife. And thought about what he had said to Margaret only moments ago.

I wouldn't give up on someone I loved. Ever. Not if there was the smallest chance I could save her.

He looked down at Debbie, and for one disconcerting moment the image of Emma's face flashed through his mind. He swallowed hard and said, "Hold compressions." The nurse lifted her hands from the sternum.

Jack gave the skin a quick swab of Betadine and positioned the tip of the needle beneath the xiphoid process. His own pulse was bounding as he pierced the skin. He advanced the needle into the chest, exerting gentle negative pressure.

A flash of blood told him he was in the heart.

With one squeeze of the plunger, he injected the entire dose of epinephrine and pulled out the needle. "Resume compressions," he said, and looked up at the monitor. Come on, Debbie. Fight, it. Don't give up on us. Don't give up on Bill.

The room was silent, everyone's gaze fixed on the monitor. The tracing flattened, the myocardium dying, cell by cell. No one needed to say a word, the look of defeat was on their faces.

She is so young, thought Jack. Thirty-six years old.

The same age as Emma.

It was Dr. Salomon who made the decision. "Let's end it," he said quietly. "Time of death is eleven-fifteen."

The nurse administering compressions solemnly stepped away from the body. Under the bright cubicle lights, Debbie's torso like pale plastic.

A mannequin. Not the bright and lively woman had met five years ago at a NASA party held under the stars.

Margaret stepped into the cubicle. For a moment she stood in silence, as though not recognizing her own daughter. Dr. Salomon placed his hand on her shoulder and said gently, "It happened so quickly. There was nothing we could do."

"He should have been here," said Margaret, her voice breaking.

"We tried to keep her alive," said Dr. Salomon. "I'm sorry."

"It's Bill I feel sorry for," said Margaret, and she took her daughter's hand and kissed it. "He wanted to be here. And now he'll never forgive himself." Jack walked out of the cubicle and sank into a chair in the nurses' station. Margaret's words were still ringing in his head. He should have been here. He'll never forgive himself.

He looked at the phone. And what am I still doing here? he wondered.

He took the Yellow Pages from the ward clerk's desk, picked up the phone, and dialed.

"Lone Star Travel," a woman answered.

"I need to get to Cape Canaveral."

Cape Canaveral Through the open window of his rental car, Jack inhaled the humid air of Merritt Island and smelled the jungle odors of damp soil and vegetation. The gateway to Kennedy s.p.a.ce Center was a surprisingly rural road slas.h.i.+ng through orange groves, past ramshackle doughnut stands and weed-filled junkyards littered with discarded missile parts. Daylight was fading, and up ahead he saw the taillights of hundreds of cars, slowed to a crawl. Traffic was up, and soon his car would be trapped in the conga line of searching for parking spots from which to view the morning launch.

There was no point trying to work his way through this mess.

Nor did he see the point of trying to make it through the Port Canaveral gate. At this hour, the astronauts were asleep, anyway.

He had arrived too late to say goodbye.

He pulled out of traffic, turned the car around, and headed back to Highway A1A. The road to Cocoa Beach.

Since the era of Alan Shepard and the original Mercury seven, Cocoa Beach had been party central for the astronauts, a slightly seedy strip of hotels and bars and T-s.h.i.+rt shops stretching along spit of land trapped between the Banana River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Jack knew the strip well, from the Steak House to the Moon Shot Bar. Once he had jogged the same beach where John Glenn used to run. Only two years ago, he had stood on Jetty Park and gazed across the Banana River at launchpad 39A. At his shuttle, the bird that was supposed to take him into s.p.a.ce. The memories were still clouded by pain. He remembered a long run on a sweltering afternoon. The sudden, excruciating stab in his flank, an agony so terrible he was brought to his knees. And then, through a haze of narcotics, the somber face of his flight surgeon gazing down at him in the ER, telling him the news. A kidney stone.

He'd been scrubbed from the mission.

Even worse, his future in s.p.a.ceflight was in doubt. A history of kidney stones was one of the few conditions that could permanently ground an astronaut. Microgravity caused physiologic s.h.i.+fts in body fluids, resulting in dehydration. It also caused bones to leach out calcium.

Together, these factors raised the risk of new kidney stones while in s.p.a.cea"a risk NASA did not want to take.

Though still in the astronaut corps, Jack had effectively been grounded.

He had hung on for another year, hoping for a new a.s.signment, but his name never again came up. He'd been reduced to an astronaut ghost, condemned to wander the halls of JSC forever in search of a mission.

Fast-forward to the present. Here he was, back in Canaveral, no longer an astronaut but just another tourist cruising down A1A, hungry and grumpy, with nowhere to go. Every hotel within forty miles was booked solid, and he was tired of driving.

He turned into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel and headed for the bar.

The place had been spiffed up considerably since the last time he had been here. New carpet, new barstools, ferns hanging from the ceiling. It used to be a slightly shabby hangout, a tired old Hilton on a tired old tourist strip. There were no four-star Cocoa Beach. This was as close as you came to luxury digs.

He ordered a scotch and water and focused on the TV above the bar. It was tuned to the official NASA channel, and the Atlantis was on the screen, aglow with floodlights, ghostly vapor rising around it. Emma's ride into s.p.a.ce. He stared at the image, thinking of the miles of wiring inside that hull, the countless switches and data buses, the screws and joints and O-rings.

Millions of things that could go wrong. It was a wonder that something did not go wrong, that men, imperfect as they were, could design and build a craft of such reliability that seven people are willing to risk themselves inside.

Please let this launch be one of the perfect ones, he thought. A launch where everyone has done their job right, and not a screw is loose. It has to be perfect because my Emma will be aboard.

A woman sat down on the barstool beside him and said, "I wonder what they're thinking now." He turned to look at her, his interest momentarily captured by a glimpse of thigh. She was a sleek and sunny blonde, with one of those blandly perfect faces whose features one forgets within an hour of parting. "What who's thinking?" he asked.

"The astronauts. I wonder if they're thinking, Oh, s.h.i.+t, what'd I get myself into?"

He shrugged and took a sip of scotch. "They're not thinking anything right now. They're all asleep."

"I wouldn't be able to sleep."

"Their circadian rhythm's completely readjusted. They probably went to bed two hours ago."

"No, I mean, I wouldn't be able to sleep at all. I'd be Lying awake thinking up ways to get out of it."

He laughed. "I guarantee you, if they're awake, it's because they can't wait to climb on board that baby and blast off."

She looked at him curiously. "You're with the program, aren't you?"

"Was. Astronaut corps."

"Not now?"

He lifted the drink to his lips, felt the ice cubes clink sharply against his teeth. "I retired."

Setting down his empty gla.s.s, he got to his feet and saw disappointment flash in the woman's eyes. He allowed himself a moment's consideration of how the rest of the evening could go were he to stay and continue the conversation.

Pleasant company. The promise of more to follow.

Instead he paid his bar tab and walked out of the Hilton.

At midnight, standing on the beach at Jetty Park, he gazed across the water toward pad 39B. I'm here, he thought. Even if she don't know it, I'm with you.

He sat down on the sand and waited for dawn.

July 24

"There's a high-pressure system over the Gulf, which is expected to keep skies clear over Cape Canaveral, so RTLS landing is a go.

Edwards Air Force Base is seeing intermittent clouds, but that's expected to clear by launch. TAL site in Zaragoza, Spain, is current and forecast go. TAL site in Moron, Spain, is also and go. Ben Guerir, Morocco, is experiencing high winds and sandstorms, and at this time is not a viable TAL site." The first weather briefing of the day, broadcast simultaneously to Cape Canaveral, brought satisfactory news, and Flight Director Carpenter was happy. The launch was still a go. The poor landing conditions at Ben Guerir airport was only a minor concern, since the two alternate transatlantic-abort landing sites in Spain were clear.

It was all backups within backups, anyway, the sites would be needed only in case of a major malfunction.

He glanced around at the rest of the ascent team to see if there were any new concerns. The nervous tension in the Flight Control Room was palpable and mounting, as it always was prior to a launch, and that was good. The day they weren't tense was the day they made mistakes.

Carpenter wanted his people on edge, with all synapses snappinga"a level of alertness that, at midnight, an extra dose of adrenaline.

Carpenter's nerves were as taut as everyone else's, despite the fact that the countdown was right on schedule. The inspection team at Kennedy had finished their checks. The flight dynamics team had reconfirmed the launch time to the second. In the meantime, a far-flung cast of thousands was watching the same countdown clock.

At Cape Canaveral, where the shuttle was poised for launch, the same tension would be building in the firing room of the Launch Control Center, where a parallel team sat at their consoles, preparing for liftoff. As soon as the solid rocket boosters ignited, Houston's Mission Control would take over. Though thousands of miles apart, the two control rooms in Houston and Canaveral were so closely interconnected by communications they might as well have been located in the same building.

In Huntsville, Alabama, at Marshall s.p.a.ce Flight Center, research teams were waiting for their experiments to be launched.

One hundred sixty miles north-northeast of Cape Canaveral, Navy s.h.i.+ps waited at sea to recover the solid rocket boosters, would separate from the shuttle after burnout.

At contingency landing sites and tracking stations around the world, from NORAD in Colorado to the international airfield at Banjul, Gambia, men and women watched the clock.

And at this moment, seven people are preparing to place their lives in our hands.

Carpenter could see the astronauts now on closed-circuit TV as they were helped into their orange launch-and-entry suits. The images were live from Florida, but without audio. Carpenter found himself pausing for a moment to study their faces. Though none of them revealed a trace of fear, he knew it had to be there, beneath their beaming expressions. The racing pulse, the zing of nervousness. They knew the risks, and they had to be scared.

Seeing them on the screen was a sobering reminder to ground personnel that seven human beings were counting on them to do their jobs right.

Carpenter tore his gaze from the video monitor and focused his attention back on his team of flight controllers, seated at the consoles. Though he knew each member of the team by name, he addressed them by their mission-command positions, their t.i.tles reduced to the shorthand call signs that was NASA-speak. The guidance officer was nicknamed GDO. The s.p.a.cecraft communicator was Capcom. The propulsion systems engineer was Prop. The trajectory officer was Traj. Flight surgeon was shortened to Surgeon.

And Carpenter went by the call sign of Flight.

The countdown came out of the scheduled T-minus-three-hours hold. The mission was still a go.

Carpenter stuck his hand in his pocket and gave his shamrock key ring a jingle. It was his private good-luck ritual. Even have their superst.i.tions.

Let nothing go wrong, he thought. Not on my watch.

Cape Canaveral

The Astrovan ride from the O and C building to launchpad 39B took fifteen minutes. It was a strangely silent ride, none of the saying much. Just a half hour before, while suiting up, they had been joking and laughing in that sharp and electric tone that comes when one's nerves are raw with excitement. The tension had been building since the moment they had been awakened at two-thirty for the traditional steak and eggs breakfast. Through the weather briefing, the suiting up, the prelaunch ritual of dealing out cards for the best poker hand, they had all been a little too and cheerful, all engines roaring with confidence.

Now they'd fallen silent.

The van came to a stop. Chenoweth, the rookie, seated beside Emma, muttered, "I never thought diaper rash would be one of the job hazards." She had to laugh. They were all wearing Depend adult diapers under their bulky flight suits, it would be a long three hours liftoff.

They accepted help from the launchpad technicians, Emma stepped out of the van.

For a moment she paused on the pad, gazing up in wonder at the thirty-story shuttle, ablaze with spotlights. The last she'd visited the pad, five days ago, the only sounds she'd heard were sea wind and the birds. Now the s.p.a.cecraft itself had come to life, rumbling and smoking like a waking dragon, as volatile propellants boiled inside the fuel tank.

They rode the elevator up to Level 195 and stepped onto the grated catwalk. It was still night, but the sky was washed out by pad lights, and she could barely get a glimpse of the stars overhead.

The blackness of s.p.a.ce was waiting.

In the sterile white room, technicians in lint-free "bunny" suits helped the crew, one by one, through the hatch and into the orbiter.