The aisle seat to my right was occupied by a Chinese man in his late thirties. He was clean-shaven, and like everyone else’s aboard, his hair was short. His face was impassive, and I couldn’t tell whether his eyes were smiling or not. (In zero gee, everyone looks sort of Chinese: the puffy features caused by upward migration of body fluids mimic epicanthic folds at the eyes. If you start out Chinese, your eyes end up looking like paper-cuts.) But something in those eyes responded to me, I felt; we communicated too. A little more than I wanted to; I looked away abruptly. Wave of dizziness. Not a good idea to move your head quickly in free fall.
There was a soft overall murmuring in the passenger cabin, audible even over the engine sound: the sum of everyone’s grunts and sighs and exclamations. It was a sound of optimism, of hope, of pleased surprise. I think in another minute someone would have ignored instructions and unstrapped himself…and then we all would have, no matter what the flight attendants said.
But then there was a sound like a gunshot or the crack of a bat, and a banshee was among us, and I felt a draft—
In that year, 2020, the Space Command’s traffic satellites were (as predicted since the 1980s) tracking over 20,000 known manmade objects larger than ten centimeters in diameter in the Low Earth Orbit band. Naturally no flight plan was accepted that could intersect any of them. But there were (also as predicted) countless hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of objects smaller then ten centimeters whizzing around in Low Orbit: too many to keep track of even if sensors had been able to see them. Screws, bolts, nuts, fittings, miscellaneous jettisoned trash, fragments of destroyed or damaged spacecraft, bits of dead spacemen burst by vacuum and freeze-dried by space, the assorted drifting trash of sixty years of spaceflight. Some of these little bits of cosmic shrapnel had relative velocities of more than fifteen kilometers a second. That’s 5400 kilometers an hour—or a little more than 3200 miles per hour. At that speed, a beer-can ring is a deadly missile.
The chances of a collision depended on whose figures you accepted. The most optimistic estimate at that point in history was one chance in twenty; the most pessimistic, one in four. But even the pessimists conceded that the probability of a life-threatening collision was much lower than that.
Our number came up, that’s all.
Whatever it was hulled us forward and from the left, just aft of the bulkhead that separated the passenger cabin from the cockpit.
Two months of training kicked in: nearly all of us got our p-suit hoods over our heads and sealed in a matter of seconds. The banshee wail was cut off, and the roar of air overridden by a softer hissing behind my head. Within moments I could feel my suit expanding. I could see now why they’d been so tight about carry-on items; even with the strict security, the air was filled with a skirling vortex of smuggled items: tissues, gum wrappers, a rabbit’s foot, a pen and postcard dancing in lockstep, all converging on the source of the pressure leak. Small lighted panels in each seatback began blinking urgently in unison, as though the whole plane had acquired a visible pulse, doubtless telling us to fasten our seatbelts and return our seatbacks to the upright position. In my earphones grew the white noise of dozens of passengers talking at once in assorted languages and dialects. I tried to switch to Emergency channel…but for some reason this suit was not like the ones I had trained in: it had no channel selector switch.
I was not especially afraid. The warm glow of the Stardance was still on me, and we had rehearsed this dozens of times. There was nothing to worry about. Any second now, automatic machinery would begin dispensing globules of blue sticky stuff. The globs would be sucked onto the hole in the hull, and burst there. When enough of them had burst, the hole would be patched.
The hurricane went on, and there were no globs of blue sticky. I spotted one of the nozzles that should have been emitting them.
Okay, failsafes fail; that was why we had live flight attendants. Now they would converge on the leak with a pressure patch, and—
—where were the attendants?
I strained to see over the seats in front of me. Seconds ticked by and I could see no one moving. Finally I had to see what was going on: I unstrapped myself and tried to stand.
But my reflexes were obsolete. I rose with alarming speed, got my hands up too slowly, smacked my skull against the overhead hard enough to cross my eyes, ricocheted downward, hit the seat, bounced back upward, cracked my head again, and clutched desperately at the arms of my seat as I plumped back into it; the girl on my left grabbed my arm firmly to steady me. The seat to my right was empty; at the apex of my flight I had seen my other seatmate, the young Chinese, soaring forward down the aisle, graceful as a slow-motion acrobat.
I had also spotted the chief attendant, strapped into the front row aisle seat he had taken after giving us the standard preflight ritual. He was leaning to his left, arms waving lazily, like a dreaming conductor. His p-suit was slowly turning red from the hood down, and from the left side of the hood a fluid red rope issued. It rippled like a water snake, and ran with all the other airborne objects toward the hole in the hull, breaking up into red spheroids just before being sucked out into space. By great bad fortune the chief attendant’s head had been in the path of whatever had hulled us…
Moving carefully, I managed to wedge myself into an equilibrium between the back of my seat and the overhead, and looked aft. I saw at once what was keeping the other attendant: Murphy’s Law. She was struggling with her jammed seatbelt, weeping and shouting something I couldn’t hear.
I looked forward again in time to see the young Chinese land feet first like a cat against the forward bulkhead, absorb the impact with his thighs so that he did not bounce from it, and instantly position all four limbs correctly to brace himself against the draft. Suddenly some other, powerful force pulled on him briefly, trying to yank him sideways and up, but he sensed it and corrected for it at once. (The same force acted on me and the others; I could not figure out how to correct, and settled for clutching the seatback and overhead as tightly as I could until it passed.) A part of me wondered if he gave lessons. He had obviously been in free fall before.
But not in this vessel! The pressure patches could have been in any of four separate locker-sections—a total of more than two dozen small compartments, identified only by numbers.
I could see him pleading for silence, but no one could hear him above the general roar. I could see him gesturing for silence, but almost no one else could. The aft attendant could tell him which locker, but he could not hear her. He looked at me pleadingly.
I spun back to her, and wondered for a moment if she had gone mad with frustration: she had torn her hood back over her head and was waving furiously. Then I got it and pulled my own hood off. The babble of the earphones went away, and I could hear her shouting.
Just barely. The air was getting thin in here. But it was also coming my way: I could just make out a high distant Donald Duck voice, squawking the same word over and over again.
I should have been terrified that the word made absolutely no sense to me, but I did not seem to have time. Once I was sure I’d heard it right, I whirled and dutifully began braying it as loud as I could toward the Chinese.