“Did she say why he was going?”
“She couldn’t be specific except to say that he was taking over control of a research project. Now the way I see it—”
“Shut up, Weiss.” Yablon leaned back and stared at his cigar. “I wonder. Bianco needs a traveling drugstore with him wherever he goes. And now he’s going into space. Hmmm.”
“It can’t be a coincidence. The whale deaths. Bianco taking charge. There must be a connection.”
“I heard you the first time,” said Yablon. He looked Weiss dead in the eyes for the first time. “Two seats on the space plane are out of the question. We don’t have that kind of pull.”
“Arrange with TBC for the use of their transmitter on Trikon Station. I can handle a Minicam myself,” said Weiss.
“You’re going by yourself?” Tucker wailed.
“Sorry, Zeke.”
“You’re going on the space plane and to Trikon Station without me?” Tucker seemed stunned.
“I don’t like it any more than you do,” said Weiss. “Yeah, but you’re doing it anyway.”
“This is big, Zeke.”
“So I’ve been hearing.”
Russell Cramer was running out of time. Rather, Kurt Jaeckle’s efforts at reversing Tighe’s decision to send Cramer Earthside were running out of time. Tighe refused to discuss the issue. Period. End of story. So Jaeckle turned his attention elsewhere. He spent an entire afternoon on his private comm unit lobbying everyone he could contact at NASA and ESA. Tighe was acting precipitously, he said. The project would be severely hampered without Cramer; he was the Mars Project’s chief biochemist.
The effort was a failure. Everyone at both agencies deferred to the decision of Commander Tighe.
“For Chrissakes, Kurt,” said one NASA bigwig who had been Jaeckle’s staunchest supporter at the agency, “the guy went berserk! You can’t expect to give him some aspirin and send him back to work.”
Jaeckle was wounded by the rebuke. It made him feel like a little boy, and a boy he wasn’t. He was a world-famous astronomer. He was a best-selling author. Millions of people recognized him by his face alone.
He needed to get his mind off Russell Cramer.
He decided to visit the observatory. The log showed that the Deep Space Study’s instrument pod was due to be recalibrated. Normally, he dispatched the astronomy payload specialist to perform this menial task. But today he would go himself. And he would take Lorraine along with him. Otherwise, what was the point?
Lorraine accepted the offer. A little warily, Jaeckle thought, but at least she accepted. Somebody still likes me.
They met at the main airlock just after the dinner hour. The space suits were stored in lockers lining the connecting tunnel.
“I think a size Small will be best for you,” said Jaeckle, floating along the row of lockers until he reached the end. Lorraine noticed that he picked out a Small for himself, too.
“Why do they have to call them EMUs?” she complained, pointing to the letters stenciled on each locker door.
Taking her question literally, Jaeckle replied, “Government jargon,” with a small sniff of distaste. “It sounds more official to say extravehicular mobility unit.”
“I mean, why can’t they just call them space suits, like everybody else?”
Pulling one of the empty suit torsos from its locker, Jaeckle repeated, . “Government jargon,” as if that explained everything.
The suits looked like haunted sets of armor, arms floating out slightly, as if occupied by a headless, handless ghost. The helmets bobbed loosely on short tethers attached to the shelf at the top of each locker. They towed the bulky gear to the airlock and sealed themselves inside.
Helping Lorraine to slip an oxygen mask over her chestnut hair, Jaeckle said, “We’ll have to prebreathe pure oxygen for one hour.”
Lorraine nodded. She said nothing, and Jaeckle did not see the look in her eyes that said, I know about the prebreathing requirements. I’m the station’s medical officer, after all.
Neither of them was very adept at donning a space suit. Pulling on the legs was easy enough, although Lorraine had to wiggle her feet furiously to worm them into the attached boots. Then came the struggle of working her arms into the sleeves of the hard upper torso; it was like trying to pull on a sweatshirt made of armor plate. And it kept bobbing away from her. She finally had to ask Jaeckle to hold it still for her. When at last she popped her head through the neck ring Lorraine felt as if she had been underwater for half an hour. By the time they were safely buttoned in, with the life-support backpacks connected and all the seals and couplings checked out, the prebreathe was almost complete.