Authors: Douglas Savage
“Sunup in 5, Skipper,” Enright noted at 07 hours 06 minutes, MET. Endeavor had already logged 117,540 statute miles across the sky.
“Comin' home,” the AC called with his back to Shuttle. His gloved right hand pulled the release ring on the side of the grapple fixture clinging to himself and to LACE. At the same instant, his left hand pulled back on the THC handle. His small thrusters shot forward, one by each ear and one beside each of his bent knees. He waited to push off from LACE leaving only the flying grapple fixture attached to the target.
“Damn.”
“Say again, Skipper?”
“Said no joy on the disconnect . . . Stand by.”
Enright's bare right hand fine-tuned the zoom lens on the remote arm's elbow camera. Parker's backside and MMU filled the closed circuit television screen.
“Once more, Jack.”
This time, as the AC pulled the release mechanism ring, his left hand pushed hard against LACE's black and frigid side.
Instantly, pain pierced Parker's left elbow and left shoulder. The pain felt like acute tennis elbow, only his shoulder felt the same way. He remained a white fixture upon LACE. When he tried to close his left fist upon LACE, his fingers only trembled. When he tried to open the grapple fixture's jaws which held LACE, they also failed to budge.
“Ah, Jack . . . I'm still attached out here. Negative separation at either end of the grapple unit . . . And I think I may be startin' to saturate a little . . . Crap.”
Parker slowly lowered his sore left arm to the MMU armrest. He had to use his right hand to wrap his left fingers around the THC handle. He breathed hard. Each warm breath activated the lip microphones which filled Endeavor with his distress.
“William?” Enright spoke as calmly as his painful lips and cottony mouth would permit.
“Gimme a minute, Jack.”
“Okay, Will. No rush. Got five hours left in your PLSS.”
Like a weary stockman resting against a fencepost at day's end, the AC gently laid his outer faceplate upon LACE's freezing side. Had the pilot laid bare skin against the motionless satellite, he would have been burned crisp by the terrible cold of space without sun.
Cold sweat beaded upon Parker's upper lip and upon his forehead below his soft Snoopy helmet which held his earphones and twin microphones. The pain in his left arm crept downward into his left knee and ankle. The sensation was the prickly pain of a limb awakening after having gone to sleep. His left foot felt full of gout.
William McKinley Parker was paralyzed.
In the glare of the lights from Soyuz, the Colonel floated in the nighttime sky, alone. At 07 hours 09 minutes, over Parker's left shoulder toward the west, the solitary faint star Puppis-ro sped westward directly above Shuttle. The few stars in the southern sky's constellations Puppis and Vela, directly overhead, were obscured by the white moon which glowed as coldly as statuary marble. The brilliant moon was above and north of Endeavor.
In Parker's joints, from his toes to the cervical joints of his sweating neck, microscopic bubbles of nitrogen gas surfaced in his blood. Throughout his body, his circulation carried a fine frothy head which exerted exquisite pain against capillary walls.
The Bends.
The nightmare of fliers and deep-water divers tightened its grip on the pilot. Parker would have cried were he not afraid of the pain in his temporo-mandibular joints in his gaunt face in front of his ears. His anguish confirmed that his pre-breathing of pure oxygen in the airlock had failed to purge his body of nitrogen before he ventured outside.
Except for his massive EMU suit, Will Parker was naked ten yards from home and 149 statute miles from his mother the Earth. The weakening pilot longed to reassure his partner who waited anxiously in Shuttle.
“Help me, Jacob.”
Parker did not feel his blue lips move. But inside his bubble helmet he recognized his own voice.
Enright's swollen eyes blinked moistly behind his gauze mask.
“Dr. Ruslanovich!”
“We are listening, Yakov. Major Karpov is already in our orbital module relieving cabin pressure. I am now closing to three meters.”
The Soviet pilot flew his ship from the center section, the re-entry module of Soyuz.
“Understand, Soyuz . . . Hang on, Will.” Enright's transmission was followed by labored breathing coming from outside over the radio. “Soyuz in motion to your left, Will.”
Soyuz eased closer to LACE. The 7-ton ship required a minute to stop ten feet from Parker bolted to LACE's flanks. The Russians' arc lights filled the American's mirror faceplate. Parker could feel its radiant heat upon his face.
Soyuz is bulbous and her long rendezvous antennae give a look of metallic clutter, akin to a spacefaring oil rig. She is three modules bolted end to end. Her maneuvering rocketsâsmall compared to Shuttleâand her stores and tankage are in the 9-foot wide afterbody. Attached to this service module is the 3-ton, funnel-shaped, re-entry module. In this center module, the crew of either two or three cosmonauts rides into orbit and home again. This compartment houses the flight controls and instrumentation. It is cramped, spartanly appointed, and all business. And attached to this is the forward, spherical, orbital module which is the on-orbit workbench and experiment station. Only the middle, re-entry module returns to Earth.
The Soyuz-TM is the final generation of the vehicle which through over 40 flights and 25 years aloft is the work horse of Soviet manned spaceflight. She had come a long way since the first manned Soyuz flight killed Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on April 24, 1967.
If to the naked eye Soyuz appears boxy and primitive beside Shuttle, which is fourteen times heavier, she remains the object of her crews' affection and of her American competitors' respect. Like sitting an aged B-17 Flying Fortress beside a supersonic B-1 bomber: one may shine with sensual sleekness, but one exudes a heritage which brings a fine mist to pilots' eyes. Like the old bomber with a generation of oil stains blackening her weathered cowlings, Soyuz is a proven ship of the line with a proud past which could be trusted. Enright did.
“Brother Ivan on station, Will.”
The AC cranked his stiffening neck to his left where Soyuz hung motionless against black sea and black sky. In the light from the payload bay, he could see frost sparkling on the service module of Soyuz's afterbody.
“Got 'em, Jack.” Parker's voice was breathless.
Enright felt obliged to keep the command pilot talking.
“Looks like 3 or 4 meters, Skip.”
“Ah, ah . . . Yeh, Jack. Maybe ten feet.”
“He's dumping cabin. Can you see his hatch on the orbital module forward?”
“I'm awake, Jack. No need to walk the patient.” The AC's voice was annoyed and very tired.
“Sure, Skipper.”
“Sorry, buddy . . . I hurt, but I'm on duty, 'kay?”
“Copy, Will.”
“Colonel? Karpov here. I am in hard suit. Cabin depress completed. Hatch in motion.”
Enright trained the remote arm's cameras on the Russian ship. In the glow from Shuttle's bay, he saw in his television monitor that the Soyuz orbital hatch swung inward toward their cabin. Enright made a mental note: Perhaps an inward opening hatch was designed to prevent a seal rupture as had killed three cosmonauts in June 1971 when Soyuz Eleven became a deathtrap on the long ride back into the atmosphere.
A large round helmet emerged from Soyuz's open hatch on the side of the orbital module. In the glare from Shuttle's bay lighting, Enright could read “CCCP” stenciled across the white helmet above a gold, mirrored visor.
“Cavalry comin', Will.”
“See 'im, Jack.”
“I am outside.” Thickly accented words filled Parker's helmet with slow and labored English. The Russian's transmission went to Endeavor which multiplexed the traffic out to Parker.
At the end of a thick, tether umbilical secured to his space-suit middle, the Russian floated out of Soyuz at Shuttle Mission Elapsed Time 07 hours 11 minutes.
As the boots of the Soviet flier cleared his hatch, the far eastern horizon behind Endeavor exploded with red and orange. The horizon's curvature glowed a deep purple as the white sun seared through the atmosphere close to the sea.
Shuttle flying on her left side, Soyuz, LACE, Karpov and Parker outside, all plummeted over the horizon of the Indian Ocean into fierce daybreak. Below, the sea remained black for five more minutes. Overhead, the stars were erased in the black sky between the high moon and the low red sun.
“I am coming, Colonel,” the Russian panted.
“I'll be here, Alexi,” Parker sighed into his fifth sunrise in seven hours.
Cosmonaut Karpov's umbilical tether was covered with a thermal-protection wrap of aluminized insulation. In the low sun, the Russian's safety line glowed brilliantly.
Alexi Karpov wore the Soviet's new, Orlan-DMA space suit. But he was not strapped to the Russians' new manned maneuvering unit. Their MMU, much like Will Parker's rocket backpack, was first flown in space, manned in February 1990 on a spacewalk from the Mir space station. the MMU is too bulky to fit through the narrow, 1967-vintage hatch on the Soyuz-TM spacecraft. The Russian MMU remains a fixture inside the Kvant-2 research module which docked with Mir in 1989. The larger hatchway on the Kvant allows the MMU to be flown from Mir, but never from Soyuz.
Karpov carried a hand-held airgun of stainless steel which glistened brightly in the sunshine above the sea still dark. The cosmonaut fired a burst of compressed gas which pushed him slowly toward LACE and Parker who rode it. The gas gun was similar to the handheld thruster carried by America's first spacewalker, Astronaut Edward H. White on board Gemini Four in June 1965. Two years later, Astronaut White and two colleagues were incinerated on the Cape Canaveral launch pad. White, Virgil Grissom, and Roger Chaffee burned alive inside Apollo spacecraft No. 201 atop its Saturn 1-B rocket.
“Halfway, Colonel.” Karpov dragged his wrist-thick tether toward LACE and Parker. His voice went by hardwire from his large white helmet over the umbilical to Soyuz where Russian black boxes converted the intercom to FM transmissions.
“I see you, Alexi.” Parker's voice was weakening.
“Not long now, Will.” Enright gritted his teeth in his rear station of Endeavor's flightdeck. Light-headedness tormented his ability to concentrate. He squinted through his gauze mask at the empty jug of electrolyte which floated near his left shoulder.
“Finally got dirt underfoot, Jack.”
Endeavor flew over the narrow strip of Java, Indonesia, where the sun had reached the planet below at 07 hours 15 minutes. Java passed between Parker's boots in seconds, followed by specks of rosy ground. Dawn warmed the Kepulauan Kangean Islands southeast of Borneo. The Equator was only 600 miles and two flying minutes to the north.
“Good morning, Villam.”
“And to you, Alex-yeh.” Parker labored to properly pronounce his brother's name.
The Russian laid one thick glove against LACE where the low sun had warmed its shiny black side to the boiling point of water. Parker felt Karpov's other glove firmly upon his shoulder.
The Russian floated very close to Parker. Karpov's white knees touched the left side of the American's MMU backpack.
Karpov and the immobilized American were so close that their helmets gently touched without sound in the airless dawn. The Soviet pilot released his grip upon his airgun. It floated motionless behind Parker. Carefully, Karpov wedged both of his massively padded arms between LACE and the Colonel.
“Try it now, Colonel.”
Parker nodded inside his double helmets. Neither flier could see the other's face behind his mirrored faceplate glowing like burning magnesium in the rising sun.
When Parker jerked the grapple fixture release ring on his chest, Karpov pressed his left gloved hand against LACE. His right hand forced Parker away from LACE. The American felt Karpov's arm pressing against his upper chest between the small chestpack and his neckring.
Parker did not move off.
“No joy, Jack,” the AC sighed.
“Got lots of time, Skip,” Enright mumbled.
The two Americans waited high above the tropical isle of Celebes 100 miles due east of Borneo as a brief flurry of Russian dialogue filled the vacuum.
“I try something else, Colonel.”
“Sure.” Parker closed his eyes. His knees, elbows, and shoulders moved in joint capsules which felt filled with sand.
Karpov eased back a foot from Parker. In the ferocious daylight, the Russian adjusted his snakelike tether, which had coiled about his boots. After pushing the umbilical out of his way like a bride adjusting her train, Karpov floated up LACE's broiling side.
At the top of LACE, six feet above Parker's head, the Russian slowly somersaulted taking care not to tangle in his lifeline. He stopped upside down along LACE's body.
Above the brilliant sea dotted by tiny islands, Parker and Karpov floated head to head. The Russian's feet pointed toward the sky. Parker's boots were framing the blue-green ocean. With their helmets touching, both men waved away the coiled mess of Karpov's tether line.
“Okay,” the Soviet airman panted from the exertion of keeping his body from floating away from LACE.
The Russian flexed his thick legs until he appeared to kneel against LACE just above Parker's helmet. He braced a gloved hand on each wing of Parker's boxy maneuvering unit on each side of Parker's sparkling helmet.
“You pull release device. I push.”
“Sure, Alexi . . . You with us, Jack?”
“Here, Will. Looks like you both will make the Bolshoi for sure. At 07 plus 18, we're Rev Six.”
Beneath Parker's feet, the Kepulauan Sula Islands of Indonesia crept toward Soyuz off Endeavor's long tail. Radio contact with Guam was two minutes away.
Parker could feel the pressure of Karpov's hands against the MMU backpack. The American's body flexed backward.