Authors: Jack McDonald Burnett
That was another thing—there was no
down
, in space. She wasn’t supposed to think of the bottom of the pool as the floor: in zero-G, there is no floor, no ceiling. Conn kept struggling to orient herself so the bottom of the pool was below her feet. It was a waste of energy, but it was so hard to unlearn.
Conn had done all right in the pool last time, but she found now that she forgot almost everything she learned about zero- and low-gravity maneuvering after about forty-five minutes back in one-G.
Today, Conn made her way gingerly in her pressure suit through the replica command module to the hatch. The suit was part of the drill: without it, she would kill herself and fail the scenario by opening the hatch. Twice, she had been tricked into it with nothing on but a wetsuit and breathing apparatus.
This wasn’t a working hatch, and she did not open it as she would in the real craft. Instead, she braced herself and pushed the cover off the one-to-one-size hole in the replica. She took hold of either side of the opening while a NASA diver held the mock shell of the module down so it wouldn’t move. Then Conn pulled and launched herself out.
Instinctively, she let go of the rim—leaving her thrusting forward with no way to brake. She caught her foot abruptly on the rim and jerked to a stop, her body drifting slowly back toward the opening. She heard what was becoming her least favorite sound: the gym whistle that said she was done and had to start over. She mimed her exasperation: she hadn’t launched herself irretrievably into space, she had caught herself. Besides, if this had been an actual emergency, she would have been tethered before spacewalking.
But that was no good. She had to unlearn letting go of the rim of the hatch. She had to unlearn launching herself through the opening in the first place.
“Zero-G feels like freedom to you,” her instructor said later, when she was dry. “You have to quit thinking that way.” She had to
unlearn
. “Gravity is freedom—freedom to exert all the force you want without adverse consequences. Zero-G will literally kill you if you exert too much force. It’s incredibly limiting. The sooner you internalize that, the better off you’ll be.”
Naturally, Eyechart wasn’t having the same problems. He had his own instructor and divers coaching him around the replica command module and lunar lander corresponding to his mission. As the first week back in the pool wore on, Conn noticed him quitting and changing long before she did. She resented that, and Eyechart seemed to relish her resentment.
The second week came, and Conn felt herself getting better. Yet her instructor still whistled her down for the most minor mistakes. When she stopped making mistakes, the instructor whistled and told her to start over for reasons he refused to make clear. At first, Conn figured she must be doing something imperfectly, and he wanted to coax her toward perfection. But when he refused to even explain, there was no opportunity to improve.
Conn had a call with Peo the Thursday of her second week and complained about not being able to actually practice moving around, what with all the whistles going off all the time. Peo listened quietly, exchanged some pleasantries and spoke on some work topics, then the call was over.
On Friday, it was as though her instructor had swallowed the damn whistle. He barely blew it. Conn was thrilled at first, but when she herself could recognize mistakes she was making, and her instructor didn’t whistle, she became frustrated all over again. Practice was terrific, but it was better when somebody told you what you were doing right and wrong.
Saturday’s session was more of the same. On Sunday, her off day, Conn got up at the crack of dawn and drove her Dyna-Tech-paid rental car five hours to Brownsville. Peo was in town again for the weekend.
“Your instructor any better with that whistle?” Peo asked over lunch.
“Not better, no. He’s not blowing it at all now. The last couple of days have been like my first three weeks all over again. Just letting me float around like a kid in a swimming pool with—you know, those inflatable arm things?”
Peo sympathized, and Conn wasn’t sure whether to thank her for trying to intervene. She left her meeting with Peo just as full of doubt as when she had arrived.
Conn was worn out from the morning’s drive, but had to make the return trip so she could resume training first thing Monday. On the way back, she was pulled over. She couldn’t guess why. The officer who stopped her recognized her, of course, but stopped just short of asking her for an autograph. The rental had a taillight out. The cop seemed almost apologetic, but evidently didn’t feel bad enough to let her go with a warning. He even asked her where she was coming from and whether she’d been drinking, in what Conn considered a pathetic attempt to keep the encounter going. She had to sign that she’d received the ticket, and she figured that piece of paper became a collector’s item itself.
Monday, Conn had a new instructor. She couldn’t have asked for a better experience: whenever she did something right, her instructor positively reinforced her. When she goofed, he either whistled for her to start again, or else corrected her over the radio and let her continue. She felt she made more progress that one Monday than in the two weeks before.
So, Peo had stepped in to keep someone from sabotaging her training. Twice. And hopefully this time it would work. Conn fairly shook with indignation. Who would so callously put her life in danger by trying to ensure she didn’t learn all there was to know about working in zero-G? Her first thought was the CIA woman, Raich. Showing Peo who is in charge by, what? Making it more likely Conn would die in space?
When she emerged from the pool, Eyechart was in some kind of heated discussion. With her instructor, not his own. The instructor shook his head and walked away. Eyechart fixed her with a look of utter contempt.
It was him. It was Eyechart, sabotaging her training.
Conn didn’t know whether to scream or cry.
December, 2033–March, 2034
Pete Goshen resigned from the Saturn crew in December, three months to the day before departure. He determined that his marriage would not come out the other side of a nearly five-year trip in good shape—this after initially assuring Peo up, down, left, and right, with his wife at his side, that it wouldn’t be a problem. To make matters worse, he announced his decision to the world before informing Peo in private.
Delaying departure was not an option: only with a March 19, 2034 liftoff would the four planets involved in getting to Saturn and back be in the right relative places. The choices were to scrub the mission and possibly try again in 2039 (and possibly not), move forward with only two astronauts going to Saturn, or replace Goshen on the crew.
Peo and Dyna-Tech wanted to avoid scrubbing. A lot of companies and governments had paid a lot of money toward the mission, not to mention the resources Peo, the company, and the astronauts had poured into it. Sending just Callie Leporis and Grant Loomis was technically feasible, but would potentially compromise both astronauts’ safety. And no replacement for Goshen could start from square one and be ready in three months.
So Peo re-recruited Al Claussen back onto the Saturn crew. It would take three months of intense preparation, but he was the one person on Earth who could be ready to go on March 19.
Rather than find another astronaut to take Al’s place on the moon, it was determined that just Conn and Jake Dander would go, and only Conn would land. It made economic sense for all the same reasons it had made sense to send only Jake and Peo to the moon eleven years before. Peo was practical enough to be concerned about Conn’s safety, landing, moonwalking, and taking off from the surface of the moon all by herself. (Conn was grateful she’d had “emergency” training in putting on a pressure suit by herself.) But Peo was also convinced that Conn was acing her training. And the lander would do most of the work when it came to landing and taking off again.
They had corralled the lunar lander-slash-rover,
Hippeia,
from Peo’s own mission to the moon, and were souping her up at Gasoline Alley. They had trimmed enough bulk that it would accommodate two astronauts instead of just one. Now, only Conn would land and
Hippeia
would be even more nimble on the surface, with much more room for geological samples and other materials to be brought back to Earth.
Key to Peo’s decision was that Conn wouldn’t really be alone on the moon anyhow. She would be joined by two Chinese taikonauts, Scott Daniels from NASA, and Erik Tyzhnych. When she was discussing all this with Conn, prior to making the announcement, Conn opened up about her suspicions that Eyechart was trying to sabotage her training.
“He’s an astronaut,” Peo said. Peo believed astronauts were a cut above, Right Stuff-infused, uncommonly impressive people, with abilities and experiences most other humans didn’t have. As such, she believed astronauts as a group, respected and looked out for one another. There was competition, and some pettiness, as in any profession, but fundamentally, every other astronaut should have Conn’s back and vice-versa.
“When I complained to you about my instructor, you made phone calls and got things changed, right?” Right. “Doesn’t that mean there’s obviously something hinky going on? If you can fix it with a phone call? It’s not like anybody pushed back, told you they were doing what they thought they needed to do to get through to me.”
“Maybe,” Peo said. “But that doesn’t mean Eyechart is behind it. It could be Raich or her friend from Homeland leaning on people.”
“In your experience, does NASA take orders about astronaut training from the CIA? Nate Petan would laugh them off the phone.” Peo had to admit Conn was right. Veteran astronauts, though, they would listen to—if not the higher-ups, at least the instructors. “Eyechart resents having to take what he considers remedial classes before he can go back into space. He resents me for being so untrained and clueless that I need the same classes. He doesn’t like me. At all.”
“When you go back to Houston in April, I want you to report in daily,” Peo told her. Conn remained convinced that Eyechart was out to get her, and was dangerous.
Meanwhile, Al Claussen worked day and night getting up to speed on the Saturn spacecraft. Conn was in charge of getting the crew’s affairs ready for them to be gone for nearly five years. She obtained the appropriate powers of attorney so that someone at Dyna-Tech could file tax returns for the astronauts each year. She set up as many of their bills as possible—student loans, supplemental insurance premiums, house payments—as pay-direct from Dyna-Tech. She even made sure their voter registrations would not lapse for failure to vote while they were gone.
She was happy to play catch up to get Al Claussen’s details in order. Conn was nervous about being alone in the lunar lander, and she liked and respected Al—she hoped he felt the same way—so she was torn about his exchanging Earth’s moon for a couple of Saturn’s. But she had been able to tell that beyond being the mission commander, there wasn’t really anything in the moon trip for him. He had taken the moon mission because Peo had asked him to. He’d become reenergized when he switched back to the Saturn crew, so Conn felt an obligation to be happy for him.
Callie and Grant were obviously relieved to have him back. During their early training, the three of them had shared days in isolation tanks to simulate the close quarters, noise, and lack of privacy they would encounter on the mission. They had managed without any major confrontations. Of course, there was a huge difference between ten days in isolation with one another and four-plus years on a spaceship, but that was just it—the three of them had been chosen in the first place after a great deal of observation and study. They were compatible.
Providentially, by the time Goshen quit, the crew had not yet trekked to the Arctic Circle to practice working on the surfaces of Titan and Tethys. This they did shortly after Al Claussen rejoined the crew. First stop: Devon Island, Nunavut, Canada, temporary home to NASA researchers and practicing astronauts for decades and the best analogue on Earth to the surface of other planets and moons in the solar system. There, the crew donned their pressure suits and made their cautious way around while learning about geologic strata in impact craters (Haughton Crater on Devon Island was as close to an impact crater on Titan as they could get on Earth). They also learned which geologic features were commonplace and which ones were worthy of close study. They were practicing for the science they would do on Titan. It was also an opportunity to break in the pressure suits in an environment close to Titan’s. It was winter in the Arctic Circle, and most of their field practice was done in the dark, by design: visibility on gassy Titan was liable to be low, and they would explore Ithaca Chasma on Tethys in the dark so as to avoid the direct radiation of the sun.
There would be no rover on the Saturn mission. Conn’s lunar lander could double as a ground-based vehicle for use on the moon, but humans had been to the moon and knew the environment. No one had yet mapped or explored Titan to a degree that anybody could be certain a rover would stay on solid ground and avoid damage extreme enough to make return impossible. Tethys presented some of the same problems, as well as a few of its own. The Saturn mission astronauts would do their exploring on foot.
Conn talked Skylar Reece into letting her watch the closed feed from Devon Island. The forsaken landscape looked alien enough that Conn could imagine the astronauts were on Mars. The three crew members made their slow, bulky way up slopes, down crater walls, over cracks and crevices. It was clear the experience was getting them excited for the real thing.
Devon Island had represented the moon and Mars in NASA training—Cole Heist and his crew had practically lived there in the months running up to their liftoff—but it passed for Titan as well. For real Tethys practice, the crew moved four hundred miles north into Canada’s Quttinirpaaq National Park. Tethys was solid ice, but cold enough that it would resemble rock in every important way. The raw, frozen landscape of the park was as good a place as any on Earth to practice exploring the smaller moon.