“Helmet lock and lock-lock, Skipper.”
“Hear you, Jack.”
Enright pulled a handle sideways at the front base of his chestpack. Instantly, he felt a rush of cool, pure oxygen surge out of the helmet vent pad behind his head. The suit circulation sucked the oxygen from his face down toward his feet where it was drawn back into the PLSS backpack. The PLSS recovered the oxygen at a rate of six cubic feet per minute to remove from the air water vapor, odors, and the pilot’s exhaled carbon dioxide. The removed moisture was pumped by the PLSS into backpack storage tanks for recirculation through the liquid coolant garment against the astronaut’s body. As in farming, nothing was wasted.
Enright bent his head to view the gauges beneath his chin on the top of the chestpack. The bottom portion of his clear helmet was optically ground to slightly magnify the small meters on his chest.
“Oxygen at 4.3 pounds relative, Skipper.”
“Super, Jack. Come on out.”
Enright disconnected the backpack’s service and cooling umbilical line, unsnapped the PLSS from the wall bracket which held the pilot fast to the airlock, and he floated free.
Carefully, Enright stuck his helmeted head through the yard-wide hatch of the airlock. Parker guided his shoulders like an obstetrician at the moment of birth to prevent Enright from snagging the awkward million-dollar suit or the thick backpack on the hatch rim. The PLSS barely cleared the hatch.
“Thanks, Will.”
The suited copilot stood upright in the mid-deck. Sealed within his massive EMU, the pilot already panted from the effort of holding his arms down at his sides. The oxygen pressure in the suit, 4.3 pounds greater than the surrounding cabin pressure, made the arms rise, like blowing into an inside-out rubber glove pops out the fingers. Keeping the EMU’s arms down required constant work by the pilot inside.
“Endeavor: Colorado with you via Hawaii at 04 plus 26.” The AC in his liquid coolant long johns heard his headset crackle. His partner listened to the ground call from inside his airtight fishbowl. Shuttle’s internal wireless audio system exchanged radio signals with Enright’s backpack radios.
“Gotcha, Flight,” the AC replied as he pressed his mike button. Both pilots floated with their feet slightly above the mid-deck floor. The stiff knee joints of his suit kept Enright’s knees bent.
“Okay, Will. We have a good lockup on you. We’re up-linking your state vectors now. How you guys coming?”
The Hawaii station beamed to Shuttle exacting, electronically encoded statements of her velocity and position across the sky. In her Guidance and Navigation mode running on one of the ship’s four primary computers, Mother received and digested the navigation update from Earth. Her warm, black boxes memorized the information for crosschecking the three inertial measurement units humming in Endeavor’s nose.
“We’re fine up here, Flight. Jack is suited and on pure 02. He went internal on the PLSS at 04 plus 23. And I’m in my water pants.”
Enright floated beside the command pilot. On Enright’s chestpack, a digital timer ticked upward past 00:04 to keep the flier appraised of his oxygen time remaining.
“Wilclass="underline" We want you on the flightdeck right now, please. Give us a call when you’re upstairs. No delay, buddy. Only with you another five minutes this pass.”
Parker and Enright looked at each other. The AC shrugged. Enright held his ground by grabbing a ceiling handhold.
“Okay, Will. Go on up and leave Jack in the mid-deck. We want Jack to confirm placement of his EVA visor and to remove the sunshade from the mid-deck hatch. When you get upstairs, maneuver to minus-Z. Move out, guys.”
The Ground Controller knew that Enright’s EMU suit would not fit through the ceiling access hole to the flight-deck topside. The Spacecraft Communicator’s voice relayed from Colorado Springs failed to conceal the urgency.
“On it, Flight,” the AC called as he pressed his mike button. Parker floated headfirst into the airlock. Since his liquid cooling drawers had built-in feet like a child’s sleeper, he was not uncomfortable in the cool cabin air. The AC floated out of the airlock. He carried another large helmet. This one was white all around except for a rectangular face area. Enright took the second helmet from the Colonel and he placed it carefully over his clear helmet. He twist-locked the new helmet to his neckring. The face region of the outer visor was a mirror, laser-proof. Standing beside Enright, Parker saw his own lined face in the reflection from the mirrored visor.
“Jack has the EVA visor in place, Flight. I’m goin’ up.”
“Copy, Will. Call from upstairs,” the ground called impatiently.
Parker flew on his side to his bunk on the starboard wall. He retrieved the helmet from his orange pressure suit. When he pulled off his light headset and pushed the damp helmet and its anti-laser visor over his head, a communications cable dangled from the neckring of the helmet.
“AC goin’ topside, Colorado.”
“Understand, Jack.”
Until Parker plugged in his cables on the flightdeck, he had no link to Shuttle’s four S-band, phase-modulated antennae.
Four hours and twenty-nine minutes aloft, Shuttle passed over the island of Kauai, Hawaii, in full daylight.
The AC gave Enright a thumbs-up as the tall flier hauled his grossly swollen right leg through the ceiling hole. He left Enright alone below decks where the copilot went to work on the window cover of the egress hatch by the galley.
“With you, Flight,” the AC called from the upstairs, forward cockpit after he plugged in his communications cable. Drawing his lap belt across the waist of his liquid coolant underwear, he squinted into the fierce daylight of the flightdeck. “You with me, Jack?”
“On station down here, Will,” Enright radioed from below, where he fiddled with the circular window cover.
“Rollin’ over, Flight,” the command pilot called from the forward left seat.
Endeavor’s Digital Autopilot held trim with the ship flying on her left side and her white, glass-covered nose pointing northwest perpendicular to the line of flight.
Parker pushed several square, white, lighted pushbuttons on the center console between his seat and the copilot’s empty seat. He took over manual control of the ship’s reaction control system thrusters.
“I have the con,” the Colonel advised as he worked the rotational hand controller between his thighs.
“Understand,” the earphones crackled inside Parker’s helmet.
With the RCS jets in vernier mode, the thrusters popped only instantaneously no matter how far the AC torqued the control stick in his right hand. He maneuvered the 100-ton starship slowly to avoid excessive loads upon the open doors of the payload bay.
Slowly, the vessel rolled rightside-up as Mother chose the best combination of Shuttle’s 44 RCS thrusters to obey the pilot’s hand commands.
“Heads up,” the AC confirmed when Shuttle’s black belly faced the brilliantly blue Pacific. “Keep an eye on our Freon loop temperatures, Colorado.”
“Will do, Endeavor.”
With Shuttle flying rightside-up, the sun burned fully upon the open bay and upon the space radiators which require the cold shade of the inverted ship’s shadow to do their work. Hence, Shuttle’s normal belly-up attitude in space.
Without waiting for instructions, the AC cranked up the flow rate of the ship’s freon coolant loops through which Endeavor sweats.
The ship’s nose pointed northwest. Parker did not look over his left shoulder through the window where he knew LACE and Soyuz followed in tight formation. With Shuttle’s port side toward their companion ships, Jacob Enright in the mid-deck looked directly at their nearby traffic through the hatch window in the port side.