“But why haven’t they reentered and landed?”
“There could be a variety of reasons, not all of them bad. But again, we just do not know. What we are sure of is that all our carefully planned emergency procedures are in progress, and the entire space community is joining hands to help get them back safely.”
“You can’t fly another of your ships up there and rescue them?”
“We only have one other ship at this time, and that very operation is being considered as we speak, yes.”
“And how long do they have? How much air?”
“Four days at least. They are in no danger right now, but we wouldn’t want to see them stay up there more than a few more days.”
Something catches her eye off camera and Diana glances to her right, spotting Richard, who is peeking around the corner and gesturing to her to finish and follow.
“I hope you’ll excuse me, but I have to go attend to something. We’ll keep you briefed.”
The reporter turns to the camera as Diana unclips the microphone and hands it off, pushing past six other camera crews to hurry from the room.
Her CEO is waiting at the end of the hallway, his expression even more sallow than before, and she wonders how that’s possible.
“What?”
“In here.”
She follows him into an empty office and closes the door.
“Diana, they’ve stayed up there too long.”
“Excuse me, isn’t that a ‘Well, duh!’ statement?”
“No, no… I mean, our orbital debris clearance was only good for half a day. They were never supposed to be in that orbit this long.”
“Richard, you’re trying to tell me something. Stop dancing.”
He sinks into the nearest chair, defeated. “NORAD called. There’s a piece of an old Russian booster in a polar orbit that’s going to take them out inside three hours.”
"What?"
“They said it’s a dead-on collision—they called it a conjunction—from the side at seventeen thousand miles per hour. It won’t be survivable.”
It’s her turn to be staggered, and she leans on the edge of the desk to absorb the news.
“There’s nothing we can do?” she asks.
“Maybe if we could talk to them! Otherwise, they’ll never see it coming.”
“God!”
“I know it.”
“Well… do we have to tell the world? I’d recommend we sit on it for a while at least.”
“Okay.”
“And, Richard, there’s one other thing, though it’s going to make me sound even colder than before.”
“What’s that?”
“Which is better? A catastrophic collision we can’t control instantly ending it, or a spacecraft with two dead people in it circling for a half century?”
“Good God, Diana!”
“Sorry, but think about it. Not that we can do anything.”
He’s on his feet and she can tell it was the wrong thing to throw at him. His frustration and panic have been looking for a target and she just handed him one.
“Don’t you have any feelings at all?”
“Of course! But it’s my…”
“What the hell’s the matter with you? Damage control is one thing, but… but…”
“Richard! There are two guys up there I care about. I was trying to make you feel a little less panicked.”
“Two you care about? I mean, I know you know Bill…”
She’s blushing and can’t figure out why. There’s no love interest regarding Kip Dawson, but she remembers his big eyes lighting up and his little-boy enthusiasm and suddenly thinking about him being smashed to atoms after the terror he’s already been through is too much. She feels the tears before she realizes they’re falling, and she lets Richard gather her into his arms.
“I’m sorry!” she says, heartfelt.
“Me, too,” he answers. “I apologize.”
They part awkwardly and she searches for a Kleenex. “I’ve got cameras waiting. I’m not telling them this. And I still think you should be the one doing these interviews.”
“I can’t. And you’re doing wonderfully.”
She turns to the door and stops to look back.
“Richard, is it truly unavoidable?”
He nods sadly. “Unless we can talk to them or they light off the rocket or unless NORAD is wrong. There’s just nothing we can do.”
“I guess we can pray. I haven’t done a lot of that for a very long time.”
Chapter 19
For just a moment several hours back Kip saw a glimmer of something on the horizon, a momentary flash just enough to convince him that he isn’t yet resigned to his fate. During the next entire orbit he’d strained to see it again, whatever “it” had been, his hopes telegraphed through a pounding heartbeat that maybe, just maybe it was a rescue craft. But by the fourth hour after the flash, his hopes evaporated.
This time his sadness and the letdown are muted, as if he should be embarrassed for even raising the possibility of deliverance again, and especially for crabbing backward along the emotional arc he’s tried to travel to reach a state of acceptance.
Before that flash—that glimmer of hope now dashed—he’d slept some more, shaken by the realization that more than a day has elapsed since launch.
The laptop has been opened and closed several times, but the words he wants to type seem stuck in his heart. Yet, once again he pulls the weightless machine to him, secures it to his lap, and stares at the keyboard for the longest time before his fingers move to the keys.
A strange message pops up asking his approval for some sort of connection and he answers yes without thinking, then can’t get it back.
What the heck was that?he wonders, taking a quick detour into the Windows Control Panel to see if something’s unusual. But nothing jumps out and the connection utility shows the computer connected to nothing, no networks, no modems, no other humans.
He calls up a word processing window and begins anew.
Anyone out there?
Of course not. At least not in my lifetime, which will be short.
But let’s pretend you are there, whatever year it is when you finally read these words.
For the record, I suppose I should yell Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! ( At least I think that’s the right phrase.) I’m a passenger on the private spaceship Intrepid,which launched from Mojave, California, and we were hit by some sort of small object which came right through the cabin and right through my pilot’s head, killing him instantly. No one can hear me on the radios, and apparently I only have four days of air left.
And this isn’t fun anymore.
I probably had more days of air than five at first, but I used it the first day panicking, crying, raging, and generally acting like an idiot. But it’s okay now. Death happens. I know intellectually that there’s no chance of rescue or survival, and I realize that there will be no reprieve, no heroic stretching of the available air supply, and no magic solutions derived by teams of sweating scientists below in the eleventh hour. This won’t be. Apollo 13
When I won this private spaceflight, they warned me very carefully that if anything happened, neither NASA nor any other country’s space program was going to attempt to save me. I accepted the risk, and I’m sure what happened was beyond anyone’s ability to foresee, as far as I can tell. But now… here I sit, knowing I have four days left to say something to a mute disc drive, and the worst part is I can’t even say good-bye to my family and friends or anyone else, even though I’m passing over their heads every hour and a half.
What’s wrong, by the way, is that because of the thing that hit us, the retro rocket won’t fire. So I’m stuck in a stable orbit and sick with guilt over the fact that my wife, Sharon, begged me not to take this risk. Turns out she was dead right, pun intended. It was an unforgivably selfish act. I expect my son, Jerrod, will never forgive me either, since he already continues to blame me for his mother’s death, and my little girls will never have the chance to hear directly from me why this all happened, and why I decided to come up here and ended up depriving them of a father.