Ripley turned around as Margaret Attwood, dressed in MIT sweats, jogged up to him. They embraced, and she gave his butt a playful squeeze. There was nothing indirect about her.
“Morning, Maggie. I didn’t think you’d be up this early.”
She grinned. “Good sex gives me energy.” She looked toward the VAB and beyond it the broad gravel road that led to the brilliantly lit launch complex three miles farther. The giant H2C would be trundled to the pad later today, so this would be the last morning they could jog out there and back.
Like most astronauts, Ripley was not a large man. At five eleven with short cropped hair, a spare compact body and lean features, he gave the appearance of being agile, like a gymnast without a spare ounce of meat on his frame. But Maggie was even smaller, the Olga Korbet of the astronaut corps, and almost pretty enough to be a model or actress. In fact NASA had used her in some of their television advertisements and promotional videos. In three months she would ride the shuttle up to Freedom, the international space station, for a six-month stint which would give her the record for the longest any American woman stayed in space. She was looking forward to the assignment with a lot of enthusiasm. She was divorced and there were no children for her to miss. Her husband, jealous of her career, had tried to bat her around the night NASA had selected her for astronaut training. When the fight was over she had a bloody nose and a couple of bruises, but her husband had to be taken to the hospital with a broken arm and collar bone, a couple of fractured ribs and a dislocated hip. The next morning she filed for a divorce which he did not contest. Her nickname for a long time afterwards was Mighty Mouse, but no one messed with her.
An open Toyota Land Cruiser with National Space Development Agency markings passed on the road; the two uniformed guards glanced at them, but didn’t slow down.
“Is it just me, or is something going on?” Maggie asked as they jogged toward the VAB.
“Prelaunch jitters.”
“I went over to Hiroshi’s office before dinner last night to talk to him about the locking collar problems we’ve been having. I’m not sure about the fix they installed. But he refused to see me. His secretary said that he had a busy schedule and was flying up to Sasebo.” Hiroshi Kimura was the chief engineer in charge of satellite preparation, and of necessity he had more contact with the five-member NASA team than any of the other project engineers and scientists. He often flew to the Mitsubishi Satellite Design Center in Sasebo overnight, returning in the morning.
“He’s got a full plate.”
“He didn’t go. After I left your place, I went for a walk down by the payload building. I saw him coming out.”
“Did he see you?”
“Damn right he did, but he didn’t say a thing to me, didn’t even acknowledge my presence.”
“So he had a change of plans,” Ripley said. “Come on, Maggie, I think it’s you who’s getting prelaunch jitters now.”
“Three days ago he was the old Hiroshi, at least, he was still pretending to tolerate us. Suddenly I don’t even get a nod. It’s the same with everyone else. Nobody’s saying a thing. Hell, they don’t even want to make eye contact.”
“Has Hilman said anything to you about it?” Among the other NASA advisory team members, Hilman Hammarstedt, a metals stress management engineer, was at fifty-three the oldest, and the only one who’d never been an astronaut and never wanted to be. A dour, emotionless man, he never told a lie, never exaggerated and was above all a consummate listener and judge of people.
“He brought it up to me yesterday when you were at launch control. Wondered if he had BO or something. Neil and Don noticed the shift in attitude too.” Neil Johnson was an electrical engineer, and Don Wirth was their metallurgical engineer. They’d both completed astronaut training and were waiting for assignments on Freedom.
“What’d you tell them?”
“We’ve got a job to do, and when it’s done we’re out of here.”
Ripley nodded. “Good advice. If the Japanese have a bug up their asses, then so be it. In the meantime they want to link their satellite with our space station so they’re going to have to put up with us a little while longer.”
“The rub is that I like the Japanese. They’re neat, organized and polite.”
“Raw eggs mixed with rice as a breakfast treat I won’t forget real soon.” In his opinion Japanese food was even worse than the rations he’d endured aboard Mir, although slices of frozen raw salt pork eaten with canned black bread and reconstituted onions came close. Susan, his ex-wife, who’d had pretensions of becoming the wife of a ranking air force officer at the Pentagon and becoming involved in the Washington scene, could not understand what she called his “blue-collar” thinking. Right now he’d give a week’s pay for a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder with cheese, large fries and a real Coke.
Working with the NASA Tiger team for twenty-one days straight without a break had not softened Hiroshi Kimura’s attitude toward Americans; if anything he’d become even more distant than in the beginning. There was no doubt that he was a brilliant man and knew everything there was to know about satellite design and construction, but he walked around with a permanent chip on his shoulder. Ripley and his crew rode over from the visitors’ mess hall where they found him in the diagnostic center overlooking the main assembly bays where the Greyhound bus — sized satellite was being made ready to load aboard the H2C.
Ripley sent his people downstairs and knocked on the open door. “Good morning, Hiroshi.”
Kimura, dressed in white coveralls like everyone else, was studying a display over the shoulder of one of the technicians seated at a console. He looked up, his narrow black eyes expressionless. “Good morning, Major. Did you get my message?”
“What message is that?”
Kimura’s bland expression didn’t change. He said something to the technician, then motioned for Ripley to follow him back to his office down the corridor. The airless little room was furnished only with a desk, on which sat a computer monitor and keyboard, and a stand on which was displayed a perfect scale model of the satellite which the Japanese called Hagoromo II, the veil of the angel, after the 1990 Hagoromo which achieved lunar orbit, making Japan only the third nation ever to achieve such a feat.
Ripley sat down across the desk from Kimura and handed him the line-item diagnostic test manual.
“Margaret has some concerns about the upper locking collar which we’d like to work on this morning. In addition I’ve marked a dozen tests I’d like redone. Some of the original data seemed contradictory.”
“The locking collar has been brought up to specifications.” Kimura opened the thick manual to the first of the pages Ripley had marked with paper clips. “This has been done, the data is on your terminal.”
“Wasn’t there yesterday,” Ripley said.
“We did the testing overnight.” He flipped the page. “This has been done too.”
“Margaret said she saw you down here. Works the same at the Cape, you know, last-minute tweaking. We can’t seem to avoid it. But I’d like you to look at the rest of the items, some of them in our opinion are crucial.”
“Everything is crucial.” Kimura looked up from the manual. “Why did you bring this to me this morning?”
“Because this stuff is important. And it’s my job, remember? We’re here to ask questions, for which you’ll give us the answers. Then you ask us questions, which we’ll answer. When we’re finished you’ll put the satellite into mid-Earth orbit and a few days later it’ll rendezvous with Freedom. Nobody wants this project to fail.”