“Now I know how a cow feels in a milking barn,” he said.
“Wait till we move on to number two,” said Jeffries with a laugh that was nearly malicious. O’Donnell saw that there was a safety belt on the seat.
Dan Tighe watched the progress of the logistics-module transfer from the command center’s viewports. Standing beside him at the RMS console, a crewman operating the remotely controlled arm had already deftly detached the expended log module, stuck it on a temporary berthing mast, and was preparing to remove the replacement module from Constellation’s payload bay. Two other crewmen hovered outside in MMUs, manned maneuvering units, fondly nicknamed flying armchairs, ready to assist if the going got too tricky for the robot arm.
New food in, old garbage out, thought Tighe. Wryly he remembered some old soldier’s maxim: The army is like the alimentary canal. No matter what goes in one end, nothing comes out the other end but crap.
Tighe had flown slot in the Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s precision flying team. He had test-piloted jet fighters. He had commanded half a dozen shuttle missions for NASA. Now his flying days were over. Sure, he was still sailing clear around the world every ninety minutes. But as commander he didn’t fly the station; nobody did. The station sailed around the world on its own, a diamond-shaped man-made moon. Tighe would never pilot a plane or a spacecraft again. He was fighting just to stay on as commander of this station.
This job was babysitting, not flying. There was a contingency plan for manually operating the complex system of translation and attitude thrusters in the event of a major gyroscope malfunction. He had trained for over a hundred hours with the hand controller that would override the automatic system in the event of such an emergency. But that had been on a simulator. Tighe doubted that the station could actually be “flown” the way its designers claimed.
What a laugh that would be, he thought bitterly, They won’t let me fly because of my goddamned blood pressure, but maybe I could take control of this contraption and zoom her around for a while. Wouldn’t that be sweet?
He pictured the look on Henderson’s face and the frenzy at Mission Control if he suddenly started maneuvering the space station. It’d be like trying to fly a house. This station isn’t going anywhere; just rolling around the Earth, time after time, day after day. Neither of us is going anywhere, are we?
His days were monotonous. He monitored the constant stream of data generated by the station’s subsystems. He dispatched his crew to perform necessary tasks. He listened for alarms he prayed he never would hear. He refereed disputes between competing Trikon researchers. And all the while he struggled against being seduced by boredom. That was the greatest danger; not a meteoroid hit, not debris, not some weird chemical created in the labs. Simple boredom, a simple relaxation of vigilance.
Tighe frowned as he watched the two astronauts cavort in their MMUs. He missed the exhilaration of EVA. The media still called them space walks, and for once Tighe preferred the more romantic name. When he had first come to Trikon Station during the early shake-out phase, he would occasionally clamp himself into an MMU and jet outside the station. Strictly speaking he was not even supposed to do that much “flying,” but if Dr. Renoir knew about it she at least chose not to make an issue of it.
One time he had parked himself beneath the station’s nadir, where he could see nothing of the station, not the girders, not the modules, not even the shuttle that had transported him and his men to this outpost in the sky. He was completely alone and over Texas. Luminescent clouds scudded across the plains, tumbling before the wind, then curling into fishhooks where the Ozarks reared their craggy heads. He had a wife and a son down there, somewhere beneath those fishhooks. Three hundred miles away. Might as well be three hundred million.
He had made mistakes. Dammit, he had made mistakes. He thought he was being a good husband. When Cindy wanted to go back to school, after Bill was born, he made no objection. He was proud of her when she graduated, even if he was in the middle of a shuttle mission and couldn’t attend the ceremonies. Sure, she was upset. She had a right to be. But when NASA grounded him over this stupid hypertension business Cindy had been tremendously supportive. He saw a whole new life starting for the two of them. Three of them; Bill was finishing high school, ready for college.