From Enright’s aft window, the white figure of the command pilot appeared to ascend straight up. Seconds after the AC’s feet lifted beyond the rear window before the bandaged face, Enright saw his shipmate drift slowly into view outside Overhead Window Eight directly above the copilot’s upturned face. But in his weightless freefall, Parker felt as if he slid out of the bay on his left side. Shuttle lay upon her port side in the frigid darkness 275 degrees Fahrenheit below zero. Parker jetted from the bay with his face toward Enright and with his back toward Shuttle’s tall tail. As the AC’s boots cleared the bay and the deployed RMS arm, he could see to his right the star Menkar in the constellation Cetus on the Celestial Equator directly above Endeavor. To his left was the black ocean which changed from mid-winter into a Latin American summer at the microsecond when Shuttle darted south of the Equator.
As Parker flew ten feet beyond Enright’s ceiling window, the glare of the arc-lighted bay fell dryly upon the white EMU suit and the bulky, white manned maneuvering unit. LACE floated in the light thrown by Soyuz as the tight formation crossed the momentary landfall of the easternmost point of Brazil at 06 hours 35 minutes, MET.
In the arid light of the open bay illuminated garishly as a stage, Parker drifted as in moonlight. He looked ghostly with his one side shining a cold white, while his other side was black against the black spacescape. Parker’s boxy, shadowy figure so close yet so far from Endeavor sent a tingle down Enright’s sweating neck.
The AC’s left hand twitched on the arm of his MMU. Invisible nitrogen jets fired upward behind his head and he stopped above Shuttle’s blunt nose fifteen feet from the open bay.
“You look like a man wearing a bookcase, Skip.” Enright needed to hear his partner’s voice from Out There.
“Feels like I left all the books in it,” Parker chuckled over static. Although the cold in nighttime space is so intense that even atoms cease to resonate, the AC was comfortable inside his stiff Beta cloth water-cooled suit.
From only three Shuttle lengths above the flightdeck, Parker could clearly see Jacob Enright through the 20-inch by 20-inch, triple-pane window in the aft flightdeck ceiling. Parker studied his starship, his glass-shelled home away from home.
Like the three satellites dead motionless around him, the AC was in an orbit of his very own, governed independently by the dictates of orbital mechanics. Without the cold jets strapped to his backside or Shuttle’s hot RCS thrusters, Will Parker would never close the short distance back to his ship. Never.
Hanging directly above the flightdeck, Parker could see the cabin lights behind the two ceiling windows and the six forward windows wrapped around Endeavor’s nose. He thought of the nighttime glow of a mountain cabin casting warm, solitary firelight from its windows upon new snow.
“Surely looks cozy in there, Jack. Real cozy.”
“I’ll deck the halls for you, Skip.” Enright’s two hands worked to keep the remote arm’s elbow camera aimed upon Shuttle’s wandering son.
“Thanks, Number One. I can see the whole ship from here. Breathtaking! The thermal blankets in the bay are brilliant. A sixty-foot-long reflector with the bay lighting around it. The PDP pod is maybe 40 feet from me.”
The plasma-sensing package automatically sniffed and electronically logged Parker’s invisible cloud of nitrogen molecules from the MMU jets.
“Oh! And I have a full moon just peeking above your starboard wingtip. Awesome! High tide somewhere down below tonight.”
Enright could see the white moon reflected off Parker’s golden visor. The moon’s face was slightly washed out by the lights from the payload bay.
“I’ll bet,” the shipbound copilot called as warmly as he could to his friend making a walk which was to have been Enright’s.
At 06 hours 37 minutes, Endeavor ended her two-minute landfall over South America. The three ships and Parker left Recife, Brazil, behind for the dark South Atlantic. Endeavor and her small human satellite would be over open sea for the next 38 minutes and 11,400 statute miles of darkness.
“Endeavor, Endeavor. Configure AOS by Ascension at 06 plus 39. With you for 3. Downlink looks fine. All MMU digitals and bio are nominal. We see the AC stopped. You can turn up the TV gain a notch in the artificial light… Much better, Jack. Thanks… Radio check, Will?”
“Five by five, Flight. What a night for a moonlight stroll!”
“We copy that, Will… Jack: Could you configure DAP loop Alpha to deadband zero point one.”
“… Autopilot, loop A, to point one, Flight.”
“We see it, Endeavor. Leave it there. We also want you to forget about the IMU alignment this pass. Your stable member matrix is solid enough all balls.”
“Okay.”
“Soyuz: Comm check by Ascension Island.” Colorado hailed through the mid-Atlantic antenna.
“Soyuz is with you, America. We see Colonel at about 40 meters. Soyuz standing by.”
“Understand, Major. Thank you.”
“We will be with our tracking ship for a minute, please,” a Russian voice called into the darkness at sea.
“Frequency change approved,” Colorado acknowledged, sounding like Departure Control.
“Thank you,” Soyuz replied as if the Soviet craft required Center clearance. The United States Space Command and the NASA tracking network were tuned to the FM radio spectrum. Colorado was not privy to the Soviet dialogue over blue-green laser between Soyuz and her trawler off nighttime Brazil.
Parker did not speak directly with the ground. Instead, his MMU radio signal was absorbed by Shuttle which multiplexed his voice to Earth over Endeavor’s antennae.
“Endeavor, you are Go to affix the grapple fixture to the target. Slow and easy, William. We remind you that your Anomaly proximity pass begins in 6 minutes at 06 plus 47 and lasts one minute. We will look for your postproximity status report by Botswana 3 minutes later. Losing you…”
“Okay, Flight. I’m right and tight out here. Movin’ out to the target.”
“Copy, Will. Watch your relative rates. At 06 plus 42, data dropout…”
“Guess we’re on our own again, Skip.” Enright felt throbbing in his face as he craned his neck upward to Parker fifteen feet above the flightdeck ceiling. He also felt slightly lightheaded either from the burn-induced fluid imbalance in his body, or from acclimation to weightlessness. The latter process usually requires two days, five for sure.
Shuttle flew on her side 1,035 statute miles south of Ascension Island in darkness. Below, exactly midway between Sao Paulo, Brazil, to the west and Windhoek, Botswana, to the east, each 2,000 miles from Endeavor, the brass clocks on unseen ships upon the black sea read 2043 local zone time on a clear December night. Below, it was summer.
“See you in motion, Will.”
Parker’s left hand directed the MMU’s tiny, cold jets to push the flier toward his target. Through his overhead window, Enright watched the white-suited figure move away slowly. Although no ground station was within radio range, the pilot in the cabin steered the RMS elbow camera to keep it upon Parker. The television would be ready when the network made contact from Africa in seven minutes and 2,000 miles.
Within ten feet of LACE, Parker jetted to a stop. He still floated on his side with the black water to his left. To his right, the bright star Acamar shone dryly in the southern constellation Eridanus. The corner of the southern sky above Endeavor had few bright stars. The bright star Achernar in Hydrus hung in the south. And Canopus, the heavens’ second brightest star, glowed brilliantly halfway between the horizon and the sky overhead to the southeast. In the sparsely starlit sky of the South Atlantic, most other stars were washed out by the brilliant full moon.