“Help me, Jacob.”
Parker did not feel his blue lips move. But inside his bubble helmet he recognized his own voice.
Enright’s swollen eyes blinked moistly behind his gauze mask.
“Dr. Ruslanovich!”
“We are listening, Yakov. Major Karpov is already in our orbital module relieving cabin pressure. I am now closing to three meters.”
The Soviet pilot flew his ship from the center section, the re-entry module of Soyuz.
“Understand, Soyuz… Hang on, Will.” Enright’s transmission was followed by labored breathing coming from outside over the radio. “Soyuz in motion to your left, Will.”
Soyuz eased closer to LACE. The 7-ton ship required a minute to stop ten feet from Parker bolted to LACE’s flanks. The Russians’ arc lights filled the American’s mirror faceplate. Parker could feel its radiant heat upon his face.
Soyuz is bulbous and her long rendezvous antennae give a look of metallic clutter, akin to a spacefaring oil rig. She is three modules bolted end to end. Her maneuvering rockets — small compared to Shuttle — and her stores and tankage are in the 9-foot wide afterbody. Attached to this service module is the 3-ton, funnel-shaped, re-entry module. In this center module, the crew of either two or three cosmonauts rides into orbit and home again. This compartment houses the flight controls and instrumentation. It is cramped, spartanly appointed, and all business. And attached to this is the forward, spherical, orbital module which is the on-orbit workbench and experiment station. Only the middle, re-entry module returns to Earth.
The Soyuz-TM is the final generation of the vehicle which through over 40 flights and 25 years aloft is the work horse of Soviet manned spaceflight. She had come a long way since the first manned Soyuz flight killed Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on April 24, 1967.
If to the naked eye Soyuz appears boxy and primitive beside Shuttle, which is fourteen times heavier, she remains the object of her crews’ affection and of her American competitors’ respect. Like sitting an aged B-17 Flying Fortress beside a supersonic B-1 bomber: one may shine with sensual sleekness, but one exudes a heritage which brings a fine mist to pilots’ eyes. Like the old bomber with a generation of oil stains blackening her weathered cowlings, Soyuz is a proven ship of the line with a proud past which could be trusted. Enright did.
“Brother Ivan on station, Will.”
The AC cranked his stiffening neck to his left where Soyuz hung motionless against black sea and black sky. In the light from the payload bay, he could see frost sparkling on the service module of Soyuz’s afterbody.
“Got ’em, Jack.” Parker’s voice was breathless.
Enright felt obliged to keep the command pilot talking.
“Looks like 3 or 4 meters, Skip.”
“Ah, ah… Yeh, Jack. Maybe ten feet.”
“He’s dumping cabin. Can you see his hatch on the orbital module forward?”
“I’m awake, Jack. No need to walk the patient.” The AC’s voice was annoyed and very tired.
“Sure, Skipper.”
“Sorry, buddy… I hurt, but I’m on duty, ’kay?”
“Copy, Will.”
“Colonel? Karpov here. I am in hard suit. Cabin depress completed. Hatch in motion.”
Enright trained the remote arm’s cameras on the Russian ship. In the glow from Shuttle’s bay, he saw in his television monitor that the Soyuz orbital hatch swung inward toward their cabin. Enright made a mental note: Perhaps an inward opening hatch was designed to prevent a seal rupture as had killed three cosmonauts in June 1971 when Soyuz Eleven became a deathtrap on the long ride back into the atmosphere.
A large round helmet emerged from Soyuz’s open hatch on the side of the orbital module. In the glare from Shuttle’s bay lighting, Enright could read “CCCP” stenciled across the white helmet above a gold, mirrored visor.
“Cavalry comin’, Will.”
“See ’im, Jack.”
“I am outside.” Thickly accented words filled Parker’s helmet with slow and labored English. The Russian’s transmission went to Endeavor which multiplexed the traffic out to Parker.
At the end of a thick, tether umbilical secured to his space-suit middle, the Russian floated out of Soyuz at Shuttle Mission Elapsed Time 07 hours 11 minutes.
As the boots of the Soviet flier cleared his hatch, the far eastern horizon behind Endeavor exploded with red and orange. The horizon’s curvature glowed a deep purple as the white sun seared through the atmosphere close to the sea.
Shuttle flying on her left side, Soyuz, LACE, Karpov and Parker outside, all plummeted over the horizon of the Indian Ocean into fierce daybreak. Below, the sea remained black for five more minutes. Overhead, the stars were erased in the black sky between the high moon and the low red sun.
“I am coming, Colonel,” the Russian panted.
“I’ll be here, Alexi,” Parker sighed into his fifth sunrise in seven hours.
Cosmonaut Karpov’s umbilical tether was covered with a thermal-protection wrap of aluminized insulation. In the low sun, the Russian’s safety line glowed brilliantly.
Alexi Karpov wore the Soviet’s new, Orlan-DMA space suit. But he was not strapped to the Russians’ new manned maneuvering unit. Their MMU, much like Will Parker’s rocket backpack, was first flown in space, manned in February 1990 on a spacewalk from the Mir space station. the MMU is too bulky to fit through the narrow, 1967-vintage hatch on the Soyuz-TM spacecraft. The Russian MMU remains a fixture inside the Kvant-2 research module which docked with Mir in 1989. The larger hatchway on the Kvant allows the MMU to be flown from Mir, but never from Soyuz.
Karpov carried a hand-held airgun of stainless steel which glistened brightly in the sunshine above the sea still dark. The cosmonaut fired a burst of compressed gas which pushed him slowly toward LACE and Parker who rode it. The gas gun was similar to the handheld thruster carried by America’s first spacewalker, Astronaut Edward H. White on board Gemini Four in June 1965. Two years later, Astronaut White and two colleagues were incinerated on the Cape Canaveral launch pad. White, Virgil Grissom, and Roger Chaffee burned alive inside Apollo spacecraft No. 201 atop its Saturn 1-B rocket.
“Halfway, Colonel.” Karpov dragged his wrist-thick tether toward LACE and Parker. His voice went by hardwire from his large white helmet over the umbilical to Soyuz where Russian black boxes converted the intercom to FM transmissions.
“I see you, Alexi.” Parker’s voice was weakening.
“Not long now, Will.” Enright gritted his teeth in his rear station of Endeavor’s flightdeck. Light-headedness tormented his ability to concentrate. He squinted through his gauze mask at the empty jug of electrolyte which floated near his left shoulder.
“Finally got dirt underfoot, Jack.”
Endeavor flew over the narrow strip of Java, Indonesia, where the sun had reached the planet below at 07 hours 15 minutes. Java passed between Parker’s boots in seconds, followed by specks of rosy ground. Dawn warmed the Kepulauan Kangean Islands southeast of Borneo. The Equator was only 600 miles and two flying minutes to the north.
“Good morning, Villam.”
“And to you, Alex-yeh.” Parker labored to properly pronounce his brother’s name.
The Russian laid one thick glove against LACE where the low sun had warmed its shiny black side to the boiling point of water. Parker felt Karpov’s other glove firmly upon his shoulder.
The Russian floated very close to Parker. Karpov’s white knees touched the left side of the American’s MMU backpack.
Karpov and the immobilized American were so close that their helmets gently touched without sound in the airless dawn. The Soviet pilot released his grip upon his airgun. It floated motionless behind Parker. Carefully, Karpov wedged both of his massively padded arms between LACE and the Colonel.