The sound of the front door opening catches her attention and Bitsy turns to find her husband pulling the door closed and waving. She waves back and ends the call, coming to him quickly, ignoring the prickle of the metallic buttons on his uniform as she enfolds him and holds on tight, aware he’s slightly puzzled, though hugging her back enthusiastically. The hug progresses to a deep kiss and a loosened tie and shirt, and his hands begin an appreciative tour of her body as she tilts her head toward the bedroom.
“How ’bout it, sailor? Wanna get lucky?”
“Does the sun rise in the east?” he answers, grinning as he stops her momentarily. “But… not that I’m complaining, because I’m sure not… but to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“Let’s just say there’s a poor guy flashing past overhead every ninety minutes who’s reminding me how very, very lucky we are.”
Arleigh Kerr replaces the receiver as Richard DiFazio comes back into the nearly deserted control room.
“Any news?” Arleigh asks, aware that the final urgent meeting between their director of maintenance and the chairman was scheduled for an hour before.
“It’s final. We can’t fly. I saw all the reasons up close and personal and he’s right. We’d probably lose our second ship. How about you?”
“The Japanese have scrubbed their launch, pulled the plug.”
“And Beijing?”
“Still scheduled for a liftoff tomorrow morning, three hours before the Russians, and four before the shuttle.”
“Two down, three to go.”
“He’s got a fighting chance. Three launches are good odds.”
“You’re sure the scrubbers will hold?”
Arleigh looks at him long and hard before answering.
“No. I’m not sure. But death by CO 2isn’t instant. Not like suddenly cutting off his air. If someone can get him out of that airlock before he’s too far gone, he could make it. We’ve briefed all of them.”
“And if you were to bet?” Richard asks.
“I wouldn’t. Not on this.”
There are times, Griggs Hopewell thinks, when he can almost recapture that old feeling of NASA invulnerability, those heady days when there was nothing they couldn’t do.
It is night again at the Cape, the night before the launch, the frenetic preparations beginning to pay off, despite the delays. John Kent has gone to sleep for a few hours, but even he’s feeling better about the prospects, and the crew is anxious to go, as most of them always are.
Griggs stands in the heavy night air, swatting at an occasional mosquito as he looks at the shuttle lit up so spectacularly a mile away. The morning he knows will be a challenge. He’s aware that Miss Dorothy from D.C. has not given up, and thwarting her will take a masterful effort, the main thrust of which is just about to begin.
On schedule his cell phone rings and he answers with a quick flipping motion of his right hand.
“Yes?”
“Okay, we’ve got what we came for.”
“Anything overt?”
“Not yet. If she’s got a specific plan, it’s buried in what we found, but there are some very interesting names in the database on her laptop.”
“I’ll meet you in ten minutes as planned.”
He closes the phone, disgusted that he has to play cat and mouse the evening before a launch, just to be able to launch. But if Dorothy Sheehan makes the mistake he expects, she’ll be facing criminal charges—the one element of leverage that may get Shear into another line of work.
Chapter 33
Kip sniffs the air again, fearful of confirming what his senses perceive.
And yes, it is there. Faint, but there, and where there is some smelly evidence of the process of decomposition, there will be more.
He’s stopped typing, aware that his fanciful life story rewrite has wobbled too far afield. It’s not even a good fantasy, and it feels so narcissistic. No, he decides, he should be writing about something else, maybe how he wishes the world was, rather than how rich or famous he’d like to be.
Well, not famous. That’s never turned him on, though now he supposes he’ll be a tiny footnote in space history: “First contest-winning space tourist dies in orbit.”
With the odor, he can’t get Bill out of his mind. Of course he’s going to run out of breathable air anyway, but why hurry the moment?
Now, for some incomprehensible reason, he’s compelled to turn around and actually look at the bagged corpse as it floats Velcroed to the back wall.
What, he might have gone out for a stroll?Kip chides himself. How dumb that he has to actually look. But he had to.
Okay, there’s the space suit idea. Put him in it and seal it, but now it’s far too late for that.
He’s read about the hatch and the airlock now, and knows what he didn’t understand before: This isn’t like a Hollywood movie where the hero can pull a handle and blow anything in the airlock into space. Someone live has to be inside the airlock to work the outer door. So that leaves him getting into Campbell’s space suit, completely depressurizing the ship, opening both doors and floating Bill out, since there isn’t room for two of them in the lock. He’s tried to calculate how many hours of air would be lost, but he can’t find the formula. At least he’d have the air pack on the suit, but when that ran out, he might have nothing.
So, I sit here and die with a stench, or just die faster in clean air. Wonderful choice.
So far it isn’t that bad, though, he thinks. He has just a little over twenty-four hours anyway, according to his best calculation. So perhaps it won’t matter.
To be on the safe side, he carefully hauls the sealed space-suit pack out of the side locker along with the helmet and opens it up, spreading it out and trying to remember the steps they’d been taught on what to don first.
Just in case,he thinks, putting the suit aside and returning to the keyboard. Just in case.
For minutes he sits quietly, listening to the hiss of the air recirculation system that is now less than a day from betraying him, and thinking about the idealized “life” he’s constructed in words. He’s tried to make it work in his mind as well. Bianca, his Brazilian wife who never was, not only loved him and couldn’t wait for him to come home, she was the woman who was at his side in everything, personal and professional, willing to advise him and even counter him when he headed down the wrong track, but as loving and as caring for him as he was for her.
I think so many men forget, or maybe never know, the basics of how a woman’s mind works, which begins and often ends with the simple desire to be loved and cherished and not taken for granted. Expressions of love, tenderness, caring, attention, and appreciation are things we men want, so why do we forget that our ladies do, too? Yes, it’s true that as a rule women give sex to get love, while men give love to get sex, but once the contract is struck, it should be kept, even if it’s that basic.
He stops, thinking about Sharon, recognizing that the failures were not all hers, that he could have done so much better, even when he realized how self-absorbed and high maintenance she was.
Too bad,he thinks, I’ll never have the chance to put what I’ve learned into action.
He leans into the keyboard again.
Anyway, with Bianca, I had never even imagined that kind of relationship, where you just long to bewith each other.
Okay, look… I have a confession to make, future reader. I did have a previous life, but I deleted it. There was no Bianca. It’s all my confused dream, my ideal, of what I would have liked my life to be like. I erased the real one because I wanted something better and more exciting, something filled with accomplishment, and I don’t want to go back now and remember—except for my kids, whom I love. My real kids. Jerrod, my firstborn, Julie, and my twins, Carly and Carrie. More than anything else about my life, I miss them the most. All of them.