“Try it now, Colonel.”
Parker nodded inside his double helmets. Neither flier could see the other’s face behind his mirrored faceplate glowing like burning magnesium in the rising sun.
When Parker jerked the grapple fixture release ring on his chest, Karpov pressed his left gloved hand against LACE. His right hand forced Parker away from LACE. The American felt Karpov’s arm pressing against his upper chest between the small chestpack and his neckring.
Parker did not move off.
“No joy, Jack,” the AC sighed.
“Got lots of time, Skip,” Enright mumbled.
The two Americans waited high above the tropical isle of Celebes 100 miles due east of Borneo as a brief flurry of Russian dialogue filled the vacuum.
“I try something else, Colonel.”
“Sure.” Parker closed his eyes. His knees, elbows, and shoulders moved in joint capsules which felt filled with sand.
Karpov eased back a foot from Parker. In the ferocious daylight, the Russian adjusted his snakelike tether, which had coiled about his boots. After pushing the umbilical out of his way like a bride adjusting her train, Karpov floated up LACE’s broiling side.
At the top of LACE, six feet above Parker’s head, the Russian slowly somersaulted taking care not to tangle in his lifeline. He stopped upside down along LACE’s body.
Above the brilliant sea dotted by tiny islands, Parker and Karpov floated head to head. The Russian’s feet pointed toward the sky. Parker’s boots were framing the blue-green ocean. With their helmets touching, both men waved away the coiled mess of Karpov’s tether line.
“Okay,” the Soviet airman panted from the exertion of keeping his body from floating away from LACE.
The Russian flexed his thick legs until he appeared to kneel against LACE just above Parker’s helmet. He braced a gloved hand on each wing of Parker’s boxy maneuvering unit on each side of Parker’s sparkling helmet.
“You pull release device. I push.”
“Sure, Alexi… You with us, Jack?”
“Here, Will. Looks like you both will make the Bolshoi for sure. At 07 plus 18, we’re Rev Six.”
Beneath Parker’s feet, the Kepulauan Sula Islands of Indonesia crept toward Soyuz off Endeavor’s long tail. Radio contact with Guam was two minutes away.
Parker could feel the pressure of Karpov’s hands against the MMU backpack. The American’s body flexed backward.
At the instant Parker pulled the grapple fixture’s release lever, Karpov pushed off LACE with his knees while his forearms gripped Parker’s helmet. Had Parker’s MMU backpack not fit him behind like an old chair, his spine would have ruptured his stomach.
“Skipper!” Enright shouted hoarsely into empty space.
14
Parker was held in a headlock by Alexi Sergeovich Karpov, twice decorated Hero of the Soviet Union. The pilots rolled end over end through the sky toward Shuttle. Where no wind blows and where no bird flies, the Siamese airmen joined at their visored faces tumbled toward a white sun against a black sky at the leading edge of Endeavor’s right wing.
Although Karpov had kicked mightily off LACE, he had worked against the mass of 1,200 pounds of pilots, pressure suits, life-support packs, and tether cable. His leap had heaved the pair slowly into the vacuum.
“Thrust, Will! Thrust!” Enright’s cry was joined by a torrent of Russian from a shouting Uri Ruslanovich in Soyuz.
As the two shipbound airmen shouted to their soaring partners, Parker furiously fired his MMU jets to stop the tumbling and the flight of the two pilots who pitched slowly toward Endeavor’s right wing. Like a wall of white, the glass-covered wing pointed straight up. Parker and Karpov tumbled slowly through space in an orbit of their own directly above the Equator and Pulau Obi Island east of Borneo.
The starboard wing of Endeavor is 60 feet wide where its root joins Shuttle’s body and 5 feet thick. Its trailing edge behind is 26¼ feet long. Covered by inch-thick aluminum skin beneath its heat-resistant glass tiles, the four-spar wing is built by Grumman, the old Ironworks on Long Island.
When Karpov and Parker slammed into Endeavor’s starboard wing, Shuttle’s 100-ton mass did not twitch from the collision. Shuttle budged no more than the windshield of an 18-wheeler absorbing the impact of an insect.
Enright stood at the aft flightdeck station in the port-side corner. He looked through the rear window across the open bay toward the starboard wing pointing skyward. Because Parker and Karpov had slammed into the thick inner wing where the bay door drooped over the sill, Enright could not see them on the far side of the 13-foot-high wall of the payload bay.
“Skipper!”
Parker did not reply. In his pain-wracked arms, he clutched Alexi Karpov, who did not move.
As Enright held his breath, he floated off the floor to put his swollen and blistered face close to the rear window.
“Will?” he repeated. Enright watched the coiled, shining, umbilical tether of the Russian float above the bay edge. Like a cobra rising, the end of the lifeline floated upward.
The tether line was attached to nothing. Air rushing from the open end made the umbilical sway like a loose fire hose.
“Endeavor: Configure AOS by Guam at 07 plus 20. We do not have the AC on the television. And we see his pulse at 140. Status, please!.. Standing by.” The voice radiated from Guam to Shuttle 966 statute miles southwest of the island antenna.
“Stand by one, Flight!” Enright demanded breathlessly over the Sonsorol Islands. “Will!”
Enright was already steering the remote arm across the bay to peek over the edge with the RMS elbow camera.
Loaded with the heavy plasma diagnostics package, the arm moved slowly at its loaded rate of 2½ inches per second. Pilots earn their pay by making pilots’ decisions. Enright made one.
With a squeeze on the pistol-grip trigger in his right hand, the arm’s end effector let go of the 350-pound plasma package. The expensive experiment from the University of Iowa spun free twenty feet above the sunlit bay into its own lonesome orbit. Its inertia carried it past Endeavor and upward. There, the PDP’s systems would die by suffocation where it would circle the planet. Instantly and automatically, the whole arm stopped against its emergency brakes. Mother felt the arm lighten when the PDP can veered away. The computer stopped the arm to await the end of the limber arm’s oscillations induced by the sudden loss of the heavy canister. Immediately, Enright assumed full manual control of the mechanical arm, ordering it to continue toward the bay wall. The arm’s Caution and Warning lights — DERIGIDIZE and RELEASE — both illuminated red, and the computer’s television screen flashed RATE LIMIT ALERT to demand the pilot’s attention to the bending moments straining the fragile arm. Enright ignored the alarms.
“Jack, Colorado has rate C and W on the RMS, a high-rate alert on the plasma package, and a derigidize indication on the end effector… What’s up? Over!”
“I dumped the PDP and rammed Will and Karpov. Stand by, damn it!”
Enright fumed through clenched teeth behind his bandages as he steered the twanging arm over the edge of the bay. Colorado Springs waited quietly as stunned controllers watched their television monitors. They saw Endeavor’s starboard bay wall grow larger as the arm’s camera approached the white wing.
Enright steered the remote arm by hand. He flew it by reference to the view from his window and from the elbow camera.
Over the island of Ulithi, 600 nautical miles north of the Equator, the television by Enright’s right shoulder was filled with two white-suited figures. The figure nestled within the manned maneuvering unit moved his thick arms.
“Thank God,” Enright sighed. “I have you, Will! Wave if you read me.”