“That’s the rumor.”
“And Adamski wants to see if these did, too,” said Weiss.
“I guess so,” Sandy said.
Weiss looked down at his feet. Wavelets lapped against his jeans. A single minnow darted around his shoes. Something big was happening. Something bigger than politics, bigger than war, bigger than any scandal he ever had uncovered. He thanked Sandy for her help and rushed around the carcasses until he found Tucker.
“Come on,” he said, grabbing the cameraman by the collar.
“I’m not finished.”
“Fuck ’em. We’ve learned all we can from here for now.” He started back toward the Rover.
“Where’re we going?” asked Zeke. He had to run to keep up.
“Remember a few years ago,” said Weiss, ignoring the question because he had no real answer, “NASA had all those wigged-out ideas for manufacturing oxygen for long duration space flights. Remember what they were going to use?”
“Plants.”
“Not exactly plants. Plankton. Phytoplankton. Microscopic bugs that’re the most efficient oxygen-producing organisms on the planet. Better than trees.”
“So?”
“These whales eat plankton. They also look like they died of starvation, along with the ones in San Diego.”
“What’s that add up to?”
“Damned if I know,” Weiss said, puffing now, sweating as he scurried across the hot sand toward the waiting Rover. “But it’s something big. I can feel it in my bones.”
Tucker made no reply. He knew that an Aaron Weiss hunch meant there was a story waiting to be uncovered. Besides, Zeke had that same quivering feeling along his spine.
17 AUGUST 1998
SPACE SHUTTLE CONSTELLATION
It is important to realize that space workers are not astronauts in the original sense of the term. Their function is not to pilot spacecraft or explore other bodies of the solar system. They are not trained pilots or former military officers.
Space workers live and work in orbiting facilities such as the Trikon Station for extended periods of time, much as oil-rig workers go to remote sites such as the Alaskan North Slope or platforms far out in the North Sea. They perform construction and maintenance tasks or conduct scientific research under conditions that cannot be duplicated on Earth. They live in isolation and with the constant knowledge that there is less than half a centimeter of aluminum separating them from the extremely hostile environment of space.
There is no predicting how a particular person will react to life in an orbiting facility. Test pilots seemingly immune to motion sickness have been stricken by severe nausea during the early portions of their time in space. Calm, seemingly well-adjusted scientists and technicians have developed whole constellations of personality dysfunction symptoms that the psychologists have dubbed Orbital Dementia.
Apparently, Orbital Dementia is similar to the psychological malady found among certain members of Antarctic “winterover” teams, but is overlaid with the physical stresses unique to the microgravity environment of outer space. Studies have revealed three general phases. In the first, the person will be cranky and/or angry. In the second, the person will become reclusive. In the third, the person will become violently aggressive, even murderous or suicidal. Transdermal motion-sickness pads have been developed to counteract nausea until the person adjusts to weightlessness. But so far, no such “quick-fix” remedy has been developed for Orbital Dementia. Psychologists and psychiatrists have studied the experiences of the Skylab, Salyut, and Mir missions, as well as Antarctic “winterover” teams, but have failed to devise a test that will accurately predict a person’s behavior in space. One psychologist likened the task to predicting the weather. I think it more akin to trying to predict an earthquake.
Hugh O’Donnell felt his teeth loosening, his spine coming apart, the breath leaving his chest in a rush of involuntary grunts. God, don’t let me piss myself. Don’t let me…
The thunder of Constellation’s lift-off obliterated his thoughts. He fought to raise his eyes toward the digital clock on the bulkhead above the middeck storage lockers. His neck slapped back against the headrest after a single, stroboscopic glance. Mission time was T plus forty seconds. Eight minutes of this. That was what the instructor had said. Eight minutes of sheer hell before serenity.
The thunder suddenly stopped. Shit goddammit engine failure. We’re falling I’m gonna die. Still he felt as if a gang of giants were pressing down on him. He wrenched his head to the right. Next to him, Lance Muncie still bucked crazily in his seat, hands plastered to the armrests, his face twisted as if he were peering into the mouth of hell. O’Donnell managed another glance at the clock. T plus fifty seconds. That’s right. That’s why the silence. The shuttle had gone past Mach 1.
“Main engines at sixty-five percent.” The voice of Commander Williams crackled over the loudspeaker as flat and calm as a scorekeeper’s at a tennis match. O’Donnell and the other eleven passengers bound for posts on Trikon Station were stacked in the middeck of the converted old NASA orbiter. Constellation had completed more than thirty missions before being purchased by Trikon International in 1994. It was an ungainly-looking vehicle compared to the Europeans’ spiffy little Hermes, or the six sleek aerospace planes developed jointly by NASA, Rockwell, and Boeing. But the space shuttle could haul more payload than the space plane, and Hermes was just beginning its flight test program. Reliable old Constellation’s generous cargo capacity was essential to the maintenance of Trikon Station.
“Roger,” said the ground. By popular vote, the passengers had requested a feed of the voice transmission between the flight deck and mission control.
Calmer now, O’Donnell imagined a picture he had seen countless times on television screens: Constellation arcing over the Atlantic Ocean in its “heads down” altitude, the burns of the two SRBs and the three SSMEs spewing out a combined pillar of fire, shrinking to a dollop of orange, and finally disappearing in the darkening blue of the sky. He was on top of that flame, his hands gripping armrests and a three-hundred-pound cinder block pressing squarely on his chest and those giants still shaking and pummeling him.
He turned his head enough to see the portside monitor. The shuttle was some thirty miles above the Atlantic. The bright Florida sky had deepened to a fuzzy blue-black.
Looks like I’m going to Trikon Station, O’Donnell thought optimistically. From sunny Cal to a metal booby hatch in low Earth orbit. He trembled inwardly, whether from anxiety or anticipation he could not tell.
The g-forces abated appreciably. Williams spoke directly to the passengers on the middeck: “We are now in a low elliptical orbit. In approximately thirty-three minutes, we will have a second OMS burn to boost us into the same orbit as Trikon Station.”
“Whoooweee!” Freddy Aviles howled.
O’Donnell realized that his hands were floating free. He forced them back to his lap and curled his fingers under the strap of his safety harness. His head felt funny, stuffed, as if his sinuses were jammed full of cotton wadding.
“Hey, Lance, this is something, ain’t it?” called Freddy. He sat immediately to O’Donnell’s left, but his voice sounded muffled through the congestion in O’Donnell’s head.
Muncie groaned in response.
“He doesn’t look so good,” said O’Donnell.