The pressure gauge in the lock was reading normal, and so was the one for the module… wait a moment, I saw it go down just a hair. It was enough that the inner door could not be opened unless I hit the emergency override switch, there in the lock.
Procedure was to activate my suit if the pressure was 10 psi or less. It was still a long way from that, and if it did begin to fall rapidly, if whatever puncture had been made suddenly grew, I could activate the suit in two seconds flat. So I overrode, and opened the inner hatch. I swung out onto the ladder and took two of the round patches stored there and a smoke generator, which I broke to activate, then held still to see which way the smoke drifted. It went up, so I followed the smoke up the ladder.
At the very top of the module the air was swirling a lot more violently than it had midship. But the pressure was still good, as the automated air system released more air to make up for what was being lost, something it would continue to do unless the losses reached a much higher level. I could see the smoke being sucked away into a tiny hole. Sprayed-on insulation had exploded inward like glass hit by a BB.
“We hit something,” I said over the radio. “There’s a breach, smaller than a BB. You think we hit a BB?”
[324] “If we hit something that big, at this speed,” Travis said, “it would have torn us apart. A speck of dust, or a very small grain of sand. Don’t put the patch on until-”
“I’ve got the situation in hand, Travis. Sorry, I meant Captain.”
“You’re doing fine, Manny.”
The thing cooled fast. I didn’t risk touching it, but I put a patch over it and it held. The smoke stopped swirling. When I was sure it was securely in place I went back down the ladder, then up again with a silicone sealer gun, and caulked around the edge of the patch. Once, twice, three times for good measure. Vacuum did not suck the thick, gooey stuff in around the edges of the patch. Mission accomplished.
“Let’s save this story until we get back,” I suggested when I’d climbed back into the central module and as Kelly was helping me remove and fold the suit.
“Suits me,” Travis said. “Kelly, make a note, would you? When we’re building Red Thunder Two, we add an extra layer of steel outside the nose of the ship, with a foot or so of space between it and the hull. Then something like this hits us, all its energy will be soaked up by the shield.”
“Red Thunder Two?” Kelly asked. Travis grinned.
“Sure. You didn’t think this trip was going to be the end of it, did you?”
“Tell the truth, I hadn’t thought that far ahead at all.”
To say that Dak and I were eagerly looking forward to turnaround would be quite an understatement. What’s the biggest attraction about space travel? When you think about it, much of a life in space has to do with restrictions, on just about everything. Your living space is more constricted than a submarine.
The one area where you are freer than you are on Earth is your freedom from gravity. Free fall. Weightlessness. Flying like a bird, bouncing around like a rubber ball. You can’t possibly read about it, or see it, without wishing you could be that free.
Ironically, Red Thunder took that away. Not that I’m complaining. Months and months of weightlessness, or three days of one-gee acceleration and deceleration? I think anybody would opt for the three days.
[325] But then there was turnover.
It was possible to turn the ship without turning off the drive, but it had never really been done before, and Travis, like all good pilots, was a staunch conservative. He would turn off the drive before turning around, and he would do it slowly, taking between ten and fifteen minutes. So for that amount of time, we would get to have fun in free fall.
We spent the last hour before turnaround tidying up the ship, since anything that wasn’t tied down would immediately float when the drive went off. That could really be annoying since, according to Travis, “It is axiomatic that, in weightlessness, everything you will soon need will seek out and find the absolute worst hiding place possible, sure as bread falls butter side down.”
The last thing that happened before turnaround was that Travis handed out plastic garbage bags. We laughed, and he just gave us a small smile.
Two minutes after engine shutdown, I was sick as a dog.
My only consolation was that Dak was blowing chunks, too. We each filled our plastic bags, and asked miserably for another. Ten minutes into turnaround I was cursing Travis, Can’t you get this over with faster? By then I was into the stage where you’ve brought up everything you have, and still can’t stop. The dry heaves.
How could it possibly be worse? Oh, please. The thing that made it infinitely worse was… Alicia and Kelly were having the time of their lives.
They loved free fall. They bounced off the walls, did midair aerobatics that would have made the Red Baron proud. From time to time they stopped laughing enough to apologize… and then the ridiculousness of the situation hit them again. I doubted I’d ever forgive them.
“Almost there, guys,” Travis called from above us. “Don’t get discouraged. Over fifty percent of people experience nausea on their first flight.”
“Did you get sick?” Dak asked. I said nothing. I was at the point where simply hearing the word “nausea” was enough to send me into a fresh fit of barfing.
“Well, no. Luck of the draw, I guess. Okay. Everybody strapped in? [326] Now, look at the space over your heads. If there’s anything floating in that space, it’s gonna come crashing down on you in about ten seconds. Are you all clear?”
We reported we were clear. Travis eased the throttles up… and I felt myself settling down into the foam of my acceleration chair. There was a g-meter in my line of sight, just a needle attached to a spring, and I watched it creep toward that magic number of one gee…
And the whole ship shuddered, there was a huge thump! from somewhere aft, and Travis eased up on the throttles so fast we all would have been thrown from our couches if we hadn’t been held in place with lap belts.
Instantly I was too scared to be sick. We all looked around, knuckles pale as we gripped the air rests.
“No alarm,” Dak whispered. He was right. No bells clanged, no recording of Kelly told us This is not a drill! How could that be?
“No pressure breach,” I said, scanning my boards for an indication of the problem. All my lights were green. So were everybody else’s… then Dak noticed his signal-strength indicators for the various channels he had been picking up from Earth. All the meters were zeroed.
“The antenna,” Alicia guessed.
“We lost the antenna,” Travis called out from above us. “Has to be. I’m unbuckling now, take a look… yes, it’s gone.”
“What did it hit?” I asked.
“It hit a strut,” Travis said. “Manny, I just flipped a coin and you’re it. Come to the bridge, you are acting pilot for a while.”
I unbuckled, my queasiness returning, and floated up to the bridge. Travis was out of his command chair, leaning close to a side window for a look at the strut.
“I don’t see any damage from up here,” he said, “but I’ll have to go out and take a look.” He lowered his voice, without actually whispering. “If something happens to me, you are in charge. What will you do?”
Throw up, crap in my pants, and have a nervous breakdown, not necessarily in that order, I thought. But I said, “Kill our velocity.”
“That’s locked into the computer,” he said. “Just do what we’d [327] already planned to do. That will bring you to a stop about a hundred thousand miles from Mars.”
“Plot a course back to Earth,” I said.
“Never hurry,” Travis said. “Take your time. You’ll have plenty of time. The tutorials for the navigation program are good. But before you do that, while your speed is low, send somebody out, Kelly or Alicia, to check the strut if I haven’t been able to get a report back to you. You and Dak, you aren’t rated for free-falling suit work until you’ve put in eight hours weightless without throwing up. Sorry, that’s the way it has to be. You can not throw up in a suit. Okay?”