Feet first, the AC floated into the airlock hatch. Still upside down inside, he inserted his boots into the foot restraints on the airlock ceiling.
“AC’s in the airlock, Flight,” Enright reported by his wireless headset.
“Copy, Jack. With you another three minutes.”
The dark airlock illuminated with harsh, white lights as the AC flipped a row of toggle switches located at his up-side-down eye-level by the open hatch.
In the five-foot-wide can, the tall command pilot easily somersaulted to put his head at the module’s round ceiling. Only his boots were visible to Enright, who had floated to the open hatchway. The copilot floated on his side with his boots toward the mid-deck’s access hatch on the portside wall.
Inside the airlock, the AC inspected the hoses, which ran from the airlock wall into two Portable Life-Support Systems, PLSS, backpacks which hung suspended upon the airlock’s walls. Attached to each backpack was the top half of a thick white space suit.
“SCU’s both secure, Jack.”
“You copy that, Flight?”
“We heard him, Jack. Service and Cooling Umbilicals secure.”
“I hear you from the can, Colorado,” the AC radioed from the wide airlock.
The SCU lines charge the breathing oxygen and coolant water tanks within each PLSS backpack, which is permanently built into the upper torso of Shuttle’s space suit for going outside in orbit. Two such upper torsos hung on the airlock’s inside walls. Each helmetless upper torso and attached PLSS pack was half of Shuttle’s extra-vehicular mobility unit, or EMU.
Slowly somersaulting, the Colonel returned headsdown to the control panel by the open hatch of the airlock. The AC worked the controls which sent a flow of Shuttle oxygen and coolant water into the two PLSS backpacks.
“Fillin’ them up, Jack.”
“ ’Kay, Will,” the floating copilot called into the open hatchway.
“One more minute with you, Endeavor.”
“Uh huh, Colorado,” Enright called.
“Backroom confirms a contact with your Angola sighting, Endeavor. NESS got an image of it through GOES-5. No doubt it was a missile, Endeavor.”
From 22,300 miles high, the Hughes Aircraft Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite monitored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Earth Satellite Service had blinked its glass eye at the right moment. In synchronous orbit, the satellite sits stationary in the sky as the Earth turns beneath it at precisely the same speed as the satellite’s velocity across the sky.
“We hear you, Flight,” Enright replied. “Understand a hot target alright.”
“Losing you here, Jack, at 04 hours and 08 minutes. Sunup in 4 minutes. Begin Rev Four at 04 plus 20 plus 04. Next network contact by Hawaii in 18 minutes…”
The ground’s voice from sleeping Australia trailed off as Endeavor led LACE and Soyuz across the arid Great Sandy Desert in the Western Territories of north-central Australia. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef on the continent’s eastern coastline of the Coral Sea lay 1,000 nautical miles and 3 flying minutes away. From Australia’s coast, Shuttle would cross open water for 26 minutes and 7,800 nautical miles en route to California. Endeavor crossed a new time zone every 3 minutes and 45 seconds. But there was utterly no sense of motion within Endeavor’s cozy climate of dry air smelling faintly of rubberized air ducts and sweat.
“Time to suit up,” Enright called to Parker as the tall airman emerged headfirst from the airlock. As the AC steadied himself beside Enright, Shuttle sped through the darkness over the Australian desert, where only lizards and scorpions hunted in the darkness 90 minutes before sunrise on earth. For Shuttle, sunup would come in three minutes.
During the next quarter hour out of earshot of ground stations, the Crew Activity Plan called for the pilots to pry their bodies from their cumbersome, five-layer ejection escape suits. Each orange suit weighed 24 pounds.
“You first, Jack.”
Four hours, ten minutes aloft, Endeavor flew over Australia’s eastern coastline for the Coral Sea. As Shuttle crossed the shoreline, directly below lights twinkled faintly from the village of Ingham, Queensland, Australia.
Enright unzipped his heavy suit’s belly. Behind him, Parker had braced himself against the airlock. As the AC grasped both of Enright’s shoulders, the thin copilot forced his sweating head down through the suit’s helmetless, circular neckring. With a grunt of effort, Enright forced his head and shoulders through the suit’s open chest. As Parker behind him held the copilot’s suit, Enright floated out of the garment. Pulling his weightless legs behind him, Enright moulted, shedding his orange rubberized skin. In his long johns, Enright did a somersault as he flew out of his suit, which Parker held in his large hands. Enright’s long-sleeved drawers were moist with perspiration and the little cans of charcoal filters in the mid-deck floor labored against the cabin’s scent of a locker room at halftime.
Enright felt like doing a zero-G cartwheel in his new freedom without the bulky suit to restrain his movement. The AC read the rooky’s face.
“Can’t fly with your feathers wet, buddy.”
Enright smiled.
Outside, at 04 hours and 12 minues MET, a new sun burst explosively over the eastern horizon a thousand miles away. The Earth below was still in darkness as the high starship entered daylight above the Louisiade Archipelago in the pre-dawn Coral Sea. A fiercely bright white ring seeped around the circumference of the mid-deck, hatch window’s cover. The narrow band of daylight was brighter than the cabin’s floodlights. Upstairs, daylight careened over the unshaded sills of the flightdeck’s ten windows. Mother in her systems management mode felt the flightdeck warm to morning. She increased the flow of coolant water from the flightdeck’s aluminum veins to the space radiators deployed on the open bay doors.
“Mornin’, Skipper,” Enright said in his long woolies. The AC nodded cheerfully.
Enright took his empty suit and floated with it toward the narrow bunk beds nestled against Endeavor’s starboard mid-deck wall. He pushed back the curtain hiding a narrow berth which resembled the sleep stations in a submarine torpedo room.
Enright stuffed his man-size suit into the top berth. From the same bunk he hauled out massive white trousers. He parked the bottom torso of his extravehicular mobility unit suit in mid-air. Then he secured his damp ascent suit into the berth where it reposed like a third crewman. Normally the bottom half of the EVA suit is stored in the airlock with the upper torso. There had not been time to put everything in its appointed corner before this flight. Four hours and fifteen minutes out, Endeavor flew in full daylight over the Solomon Islands of Guadalcanal and New Georgia. The tiny island of Bouganville lay 425 miles to the northwest, halfway to the hazy horizon. On the ground, it was morning twilight. On the three sleepy islands, the sun was half an hour from warming the silent fields of weathered crosses aligned in long, perfect rows. There in the sandy ground, fifty years earlier, Company B, 145th Infantry of Ohio’s bloodied Thirty-seventh Division had left its youth forever behind, wrapped in green ponchos.
Endeavor cruised over the sea toward the Equator 1,500 miles of groundtrack to northward.
The heavy eight-layer trousers of Enright’s EMU stood like half a man between the two floating pilots. Attached permanently to the thick legs of the half-suit were heavy boots. The section of EVA suit ended at its round waistring. The upper half of the suit hung with backpack attached upon the inside of the airlock.
Enright floated into the fetal position in mid-air as he climbed out of his long johns. He stood naked except for his jockey-shorts-style Urine Collection Device which covered his middle. The UCD shorts could collect and store a quart of urine.