Hannah was working, hanging face down two hundred and eighty miles above the Earth.
Gigantic feathery whirlpools seethed soundlessly over northern Mexico and the southern parts of the American east coast. A herd of clouds stretched over the Atlantic, the ocean water shone blindingly just by the edge of the horizon, where the planet’s curve became very pronounced.
Incepted by the slanted rays of the sun, shadows outlined every dent and bulge on the continents and on the cloud cover above them, making the whole hemisphere look as if it had been sculpted, molded by some craftsman.
And it all moved, at a visible speed. Groups of more or less straight, elongated super-clouds, like enormous strands of cotton, swum at a seemingly moderate pace in direction opposite of the space station’s flight. The lack of speed was deceptive. The space station was in fact hurtling at an orbital velocity of over seventeen thousand miles an hour. At this speed, the sun rises every ninety minutes.
Attached to the space station’s docking module was the Inquiry, the prototype of NASA’s new space vehicle. An awkward squat cone, a visual throwback to the 1960’s, this was supposed to be the next generation to take up the mantle from the creaky grounded shuttles.
Two puny white figures moved about outside the shuttle. Fragile explorers wrapped in unwieldy protective cocoons that maintained an artificial scarecrow-shaped pocket in which Earth life survives.
The sun’s rays subjected Hannah’s suit to a burning heat of almost two hundred and fifty degrees Fahrenheit. The suit, was, of course designed and built to withstand both this and the minus hundred degrees in the shade; an armor of fifteen layer of insulating material, it could even bounce back miniature asteroids.
Hannah turned and tilted her head inside the space helmet, the helmet itself being immobile, and looked at the controls of the pistol, not risking to disengage it from the bolt it had clumped. This time she set the rotations to twelve per minute. She pressed the ‘trigger’ for twenty seconds, hearing nothing except her own breathing, the low whine of the space suit machinery, and Kelly breathing in his microphone.
“How is it now?” she asked as she decided that the bolt had been loosened enough.
“Wait,” Kelly’s voice replied. “I’m getting some data, in an algorithm of increasing and decreasing flows. Let me see. Yes, it disappears completely for about two seconds and then starts growing, peaks in about eight seconds, and then starts declining again.
“Well, I don’t know what to do,” said Hannah. Kelly didn’t answer, and since she really did not know what to do, she used this opportunity to transfer her attention to the Earth. The angle of the sun’s rays had already slightly changed, and there was a brownish tinge to the portions of the landmass below that were visible through the clouds. Lakes and two major rivers lay dark and mysterious.
She wished dearly that Julian could have been with her, to share this view. She could imagine his face go into that expression of joyful awe which had attracted her so strongly the moment she had realized that he wasn’t faking it. …On the other hand, there was something in him that hinted that at times he was able to achieve inner experiences of similar intensity just from watching a car pass over a rainy street.
“Tal, how you hanging in there?” asked Wilson. Comedian. Who else would ask a man on a spacewalk that? He’d ask the same a criminal on the scaffold, if he could get away with it.
“Excellent!” rang out Tal’s excited voice. I’ve just started my livefeed half a minute ago! Hey, Dr. Campbell, may I ask you to wave for the folks down on Earth?”
Realizing that no more suggestion of dealing with the technical problem were forthcoming, Hannah decided to comply to the full. She disengaged the pistol grip tool, pushed away at a hand restraint and slowly turned her back to her home world, to face the space tourist.
He looked the way everyone looks in a spacesuit, but there was something comical in the way he waved back, as if to confirm that her waving has been duly noted and recorded.
Generously, she followed up her wave with a thumbs up. She grinned, although she knew that her face was invisible behind the visor. Most likely instead of her face all that could be seen would be a small warped reflection of Tal Banks, holding the special ultramodern app and undoubtedly shaking with glee inside his suit.
Hannah wasn’t certain whether the software tycoon’s publicity stunt would revive his company’s fortunes, but it certainly had helped finance this expedition, so buffoon or not it was a question of courtesy to humor him.
He was speaking off the top of his head, later, inside the Inquiry he would edit his words and send a podcast, to accompany the stream of videos, photos and text updates he was churning out in his bid to prove the worthiness of his company’s newest product.
“After almost a year of being empty of inhabitants, the old space station is being looked over by the crew of the Inquiry – the new prototype spaceship which looks so much like the old pre-space shuttle modules.”
Hannah only had time for one noisy sigh, before Tal’s voice returned: “No, wait, I’ll start again. Ahem. The lights are on again on the Friendship Space Station as the crew of the Inquiry has docked with the Togetherness module.”
Yeah, thought Hannah, that sounds more like a report.
“So tell us, Dr. Campbell, what exactly is the problem with the data collector?” asked Tal.
“I wish I knew,” answered Hannah frankly and playfully pretended to whack at the surface of the space station with her pistol grip tool. It looked like she was pointing at something in slow motion.
Kelly’s voice cut in. “Hannah, I’ve gone back to the Inquiry, and it’s time you two came back in from the cold as well.”
“I hear and obey,” said Hannah. “You taken the canister from the bio-module?”
“Yes. I’ve just fastened it in the cargo—oh, uh.”
“What?” asked Hannah, suddenly alert. She didn’t like the sound of that ‘uh-oh’.
“Captain, you smell something?” asked Kelly’s voice.
“I think I do,” said Wilson. “You think maybe it’s leaking?”
“I’ll go and—”
The stars went into a slow spin. Hannah instinctively tightened her grip on the hand restraint as the space station moved.
Gurgling screams and a whooshing sound filled her helmet, but only for a second or two. Then everything went quiet, and then she heard Tal say “Oh my God!”
As she propelled herself with her arm and turned back towards the end of the space station to which the Inquiry was attached, she managed to see the last of the visible air dissipate in the vacuum. Debris floated out, some of it spinning into space, some apparently settling into an immediate tiny orbit around the space vehicle. There was a huge rent in the Inquiry’s hull, the torn sheets of metal bent outward like ragged petals ravaged by some disease.
Although air was no longer coming out of the hole, the initial surge of gas escaping into vacuum in zero gravity had worked like a short burst from a steering rocket, sending the space vehicle and the entire station of which it was now part into an uncontrolled change of orbit.
Hannhah realized that the slight hissing she was hearing now was not static, nor air leaving the space ship – that had already happened - but that the sound was coming from her own constricted throat which refused to let out a scream of terror.
She felt a tug at her right hip and her heart skipped a beat – was she hit by some sort of particle?
Instead she saw the white tether that had connected her to the Inquiry slowly snake away in the vacuum, disconnected from her spacesuit. This meant that the automatic disconnect system had worked: designed to free the tethers in case they were compromised by a leak. But this time it wasn’t the tether that was leaking, it was the mothership itself that had been compromised.
An additional soft purr sounded inside her spacesuit. Twenty five minutes of oxygen reserves had just switched on together with the temperature control batteries.
“Tal Bank,” said Hannah, “hold on to whatever you’re holding on to and do not let go under any circumstance!”
No longer tethered to the spacecraft, the tourist could easily float away, spinning into the darkness.
“What the—What the—What was that? Jesus Christ, was that an explosion?” said Tal.
As if prodded by his question, the hitherto silent ground-control also appeared inside Hannah’s helmet.
“Dr. Campbell, is there an emergency? The Inquiry’s computer has broken contact and no one is answering the radio.”
“You bet there’s an emergency,” said Hannah.
“An explosion?”
Hannah wondered the same thing. With no air between her and the shuttle, no waves of impact or noise of destruction could reach her.
Vacuum, the ultimate insulator. The cold emptiness of space, where humans are not welcome and must fight with tooth and wrench to stay alive for even a second.
Hannah felt her fear crystallize deep inside her solar plexus, compressing into a pinpoint. Soon it would explode and invade her whole being with metastasis of dark terror. Instinctively Hannah pressed in the command sequence with her tongue and the EST blue tube appeared. She sucked in the liquid Extraordinary Situation Tranquilizer.
“I don’t know what it was,” she finally said.
“Hannah, what’s going on, are they dead? Are we dead?”
“We’re not dead yet, Tal,” said Hannah with a deliberate calmness, and turned to look at him.
The space tourist was still clutching his vacuum resistant publicity gadget, the size of a small paperback it was almost completely hidden in the gloves of his spacesuit. An awkward figure attached to an awkward artificial structure, surrounded by the immense vastness of a cold and hostile universe. And me too, thought Hannah, Kelly and Wilson must be dead. It’s just me and Tal left. And we’ll be dead in twenty minutes if I don’t do something.
“Dr. Campbell,” said ground control, “please investigate the spacecraft’s situation.”
“Of course,” said Hannah. Investigate? She thought. Who are they kidding? We’re going to die.
No, she told herself, never! Never surrender! Not when you’ve just met the man of your dreams, not when Julian is down below waiting for you. You must stay alive.
“Tal, Talford Bank, listen to me, do you hear me? Please confirm! Say that you hear me!”
“I hear you, Dr. Campbell,” came the answer after a second’s hesitation.
“Follow me, Tal. We’re returning to the shuttle and we’ll see what’s happened, what can be done, and how we stay alive.”
****
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