The Glass Lady (12 page)

“I shall pray for you and that other young man tomorrow.” She looked worried in the sunshine.

“I would be very grateful, Sister.” The Colonel did not smile. His face was thin and tired. A slight flush burned his hollow face.

“Emily is in her room, Colonel.”

“Thank you.” The tall man nodded as he limped past the large woman to enter the cool, clean building made of clay baked starchy white by two centuries of Texas suns.

Inside, young adults laughed with pleasure when the Colonel in his faded blue flightsuit entered the large room. They ran or hobbled or wheeled themselves toward him.

Parker coaxed each muscle of his lean face, one neuron at a time, to open into a warm, familiar greeting. He touched many hands, many happy faces. As the Colonel greeted the grown men and women with the childlike faces, he could taste his heart.

The Colonel steered through the throng toward a long hallway. On the walls hung framed lithographs of oceans and mountains.

At a closed door marked “Emily Parker,” the doorknob disappeared into his large hand.

“Daddy!” cried the young woman inside who ran to embrace the big man. She buried her clear face into his chest. The airman held her thin shoulders and he laid his chin upon her auburn hair.

“How's my Emily girl?” the Colonel smiled, pushing the woman to arm's length.

“Awful fine! How's my daddy?”

“Awful fine. Awful fine . . . Come sit beside me.”

The Colonel backed into a large chair which filled a comer of the small but airy room filled with a girl's peculiar softness: stuffed animals, thick books full of pictures with bright colors, and a flowered bedspread upon a single bed.

The woman in her late twenties sat cross-legged at his feet, resting her lovely face upon his left leg above his knee. She held his hard, left hand to her face in both of her small hands. For a long time, they sat in silence. The low morning sun shone orange upon her hair, which was askew upon her forehead.

“I'm sorry I have not come for four days, Emily girl.”

“That's okay,” she smiled with a child's face. “You have to be a colonel. I know.”

He squeezed her face gently with the hand cradling its softness.

“Emily, I have to go flying tomorrow with Mr. Enright. I've told you about him. Remember?”

The woman pursed her eyebrows in thought.

“Very far?” She became serious.

“Yes, Emily. But only for two days.”

The woman opened the fingers on one hand and she counted off two with her other hand.

“Yes. You are very good.” He smiled.

“I am very good,” she giggled.

“Emily, while I am away, Dr. Casey will visit you. Is that okay?”

“Sure. I like her lots. She reads to me and we take walks. She knows all about animals and sailboats . . . Do you like her, Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Well, does she like you?”

“I think so.”

“Then can she be my mom, and take care of you and me?”

The big man turned his face from the child-woman in his hands.

“I don't know, Emily,” he said toward the dazzling daylight beyond the single window.

“That's okay,” Emily smiled.

For many minutes, he stroked her hair. Her gray eyes closed.

“Tell me about it again, Daddy. About the black sky even when the sun shines. Please?” Emily adjusted her face upon his lap. She cuddled his firm hand to her smooth cheek.

William McKinley Parker closed his heavy eyes. The morning sun was warm and crimson behind his eyelids. He listened to Emily's gentle breath, warm upon his left hand. With his right fist, he rubbed the throbbing heat above his right knee.

“Just as on the Earth,” he began, “in space, there is a daytime sky and there is a nighttime sky. Only, both skies are black way up where there is no wind blowing and no bird singing.

“When the sun is shining, the sky is still black. But it is a dull black. And even though the sky is black, there are no stars in it. From way up there, the sun shining upon the blue Earth is more than daylight. The Earth glows like a shining blue jewel. The clouds which closely touch the seas and the mountains are the Earth's warm breath. The warm Earth with her blue water and green land and red deserts reflects the daylight sun back into the black sky. This warm and breathing dayglow washes out all but the brightest stars, all but maybe Sirius in the North and Canopus in the South. Up there in the daytime, only these two stars and Venus and Jupiter shine against the black sky.

“But at night when the sun is gone, the sky is more than black. It is blacker and starrier than the sky over a meadow far from the city. The space sky without the sun is a shiny black, a wet blackness. It is like the midnight sky seen by looking down into a glass smooth lake with a midnight sky above it.

“And the stars at night: More than can be counted, more than could be named, more than one star for every person alive in the world, more than one star for every person who ever did live in the world. The stars are forever. The same white stars and red ones and blue ones that Moses looked at and that Jesus looked at.

“At night, the Earth way down below is not perfectly dark. It never is. The living Earth at night always glows with the faint lights of cities, and of towns with their white churches and an old courthouse at their centers.

“The nighttime stars never twinkle up there.

“At the edge of the world, the stars which do not twinkle move down toward the west. Only when they touch the thin, chill breath of the glowing dark Earth do they twinkle. But only for a minute. At the hazy corners of the Earth, the stars become misty and dim, like a light under water. And then they go out when they fall swiftly, silently, over the edge. At the place far, far below a starship, where the stars go out, there it is nighttime. Nighttime for all of the people, the farmers, the factory workers, the children, everyone.

“Just like down here, the sun comes up in the East, but very fast.

“At morning, from a spaceship sailing round and round, morning and night come eighteen times every day, once every forty-five minutes.

“First the Earth's hazy, black edges in the east become red. A ribbon of red is no thicker than your little finger held out as far as you can. And the red ribbon after a minute gets redder and redder until it becomes orange. And with the orange, the sun peeps up over the edge of the world, a burning white globe no bigger than a quarter held out at the end of your arm. But it is too hot and too white bright to look at. The new sun is a white fire in the black sky which burns away the shadows on the Earth below.

“From a whirling spaceship that goes all the way around our little world every ninety minutes, the sun moves upward and across the sky so fast that you can see it moving, rising and setting.

“When the white sun climbs all the way up and over and then starts down toward the western edge, it stops at the edge of the world for the blink of an eye, maybe two.

“The setting sun stops right at the edge, barely touching the far corner of the world. But instead of going white and full over the edge, the sun first becomes flat. Imagine holding a half-dollar so you can see it all round in your fingers held way out. Now, very slowly turn it over on its side until it is flat, just a straight line. The sun does this before it falls over the world's western corner to where it is evening far below. The flat sun makes the Earth's far corner burn orange and red. And all of the little white church steeples are red and all of the old courthouses, and the trees and the blue mountains, too.

“With a final burst of white and red, the flat sun is gone, gone over the edge to where it is daytime somewhere very far away . . .

“When a body so high and so far away has seen the sun go flat up there, and has seen the black sky go all moist in its starry fullness, he is not the same ever again . . . Never.”

For many minutes the bright eyes peculiar to airmen blinked as they watched the brilliant daylight swirl in through the window. He could feel upon his left hand the warm, wet breath of his life which nuzzled his fingers.

The woman did not stir, not even when a distant lunch bell chimed in the hallway and the walls rang with the clamor of those who would be forever children. William McKinley Parker wondered if Emily slept at his feet.

“Daddy?”

“Emily.”

“Will Mister Enright take care of you up there?”

The tall flier thought and he blinked hard until he could find his throat.

“I believe that he will.”

“Finally, ladies and gentlemen, we now want to end this pre-flight press conference. Our crew, Colonel Parker and Lt. Commander Enright, are probably a little tired after flying here from Houston an hour ago. We will break for lunch after which the crew will go over to Pad 39-A to observe the fueling of the Shuttle Endeavor. At this time, we have loaded Endeavor's cryogenic liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen tanks in the orbiter. These super-cold fuels power the onboard electrical system and the cabin's air systems. The liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen for the main engines will be loaded into the external tank later tonight. Although it may look rushed, our countdown is essentially quite routine as we rely on the automatic Launch Process Sequencer.

“The Shuttle Transportation System was designed from the beginning for rapid turn-around. On this, the Intelsat-6 rescue mission, we are doing nothing with this system which is more than it was designed to do. “Everything we have to do on the Intelsat rendezvous has been done on Shuttle 11's Solar Max repair, the Palapa-Westar retrieval on Fourteen, and the LDEF recovery on Thirty-two in January '90.

“We remind you that the terminal countdown begins at 3 o'clock tomorrow morning, aiming for lift-off of Endeavor at 10 a.m., Eastern Time. We will rendezvous with the Intelsat-6 satellite during Endeavor's first orbit. We have already fired Intelsat-6's onboard rocket to lower its orbit to the 130 nautical mile height where Endeavor can get to it. Our Soviet colleagues will launch tonight at midnight, our time.

“Our crew will get to sleep by 8:00 tonight due to their early wake-up call. We will entertain one final question for either crewman . . . ?”

“Lieutenant Commander Enright: Today, December 17th, is the anniversary of the Wright Brothers' first flight of a powered aircraft. Your mission tomorrow to refurbish a failed satellite is some kind of monument to Kitty Hawk. As the junior member of this crew making your first flight into space, how do you want to be remembered for this special flight?”

“Well, that's quite a question. I have given a lot of thought to the mission.” Jacob Enright cast a sideways glance at Parker's twinkling eyes. He weighed his words to make them truly worthy of The Icemen. “When people look back on this space rescue assignment, I want them to think of me and say . . .” No one breathed as the intense, young airman framed his thoughts for posterity. “I want people to think of me and say, ‘Who was that masked man? We didn't even have a chance to thank him.' ” Jack Enright's thin face was stone-cold serious.

No one moved. Enright dared not look at the NASA brass surrounding him with wide eyes. But he did turn to face Colonel Parker at his elbow.

When William McKinley Parker nodded his genuine pleasure, his smiling partner felt knighted. At long last, Jacob Enright knew that he had arrived. He was one of The Icemen.

* * *

“You put Neil Armstrong's ‘one small step' to shame, Number One!” the tall pilot laughed with his arm around Enright's shoulders. “Or should I say ‘Tonto?' ”

“‘Number One' still sounds just fine to me, Skipper,” Enright smiled. The chicken-wire elevator bounced to a stop 180 feet above the concrete base of launch pad 39-A. The pair in blue flightsuits stepped into the White Room wrapped tightly around the nose section of the erect Shuttle Endeavor.

Only the side of the vertical starship could be seen in the White Room's sterile, surgical atmosphere. The side hatch through which they would crawl tomorrow was open wide. Thick covers protected the one-foot wide, round window in the center of the thick, crew-access hatch. One story higher in the 20-story-high tower, engineers in airtight helmeted safety suits serviced the Reaction Control System's sixteen jet thrusters in Endeavor's black tiled nose. As soon as Parker and Enright leave the White Room, the two RCS tanks in Endeavor's nose will be topped with 930 pounds of monomethl-hydrazine fuel in one tank and 1488 pounds of nitrogentetroxide oxidizer in the other tank. The two small helium tanks in the nose RCS pod which pressurize the two propellant tanks were already full of gas.

“A work of art, Number One,” the pilot in command said as he touched the ship's heat-absorbing, pure glass tiles around the open side hatch. The glass brick felt like a styrofoam coffee cup. After other flights into space by Endeavor, the coded fabrication numbers etched into each brick of silica remained clearly readable.

Beyond the White Room's walls, technicians were installing the many explosive charges which power the inflight separation mechanism on the two Solid Rocket Boosters. Each SRB, 149 feet long and 12 feet thick, each packed with one million pounds of rubbery, high explosive fuel, would do their work tomorrow for 122 seconds before being cast off into the sea. Strapped to Endeavor's belly, also unseen beyond the gantry wall, the empty external tank, 155 feet long and 28 feet wide, with 36,000 inches of welds, was being serviced. The ET would be filled during the pre-dawn darkness with 1,337,358 pounds of liquid oxygen oxidizer and 224,458 pounds of liquid hydrogen fuel, each super-cold at nearly 250 degrees Fahrenheit below zero.

“Always awesome, Will.”

The taller pilot nodded.

“When you boys are done with your fifty-cent tour, after you've kicked the tires, we can taxi up to the pumps to fill ‘em up.” The closeout chief smiled warmly at his crew. One hundred feet below, technicians prepared to fill each of the maneuvering rocket engine pods on either side of Endeavor's tail with 9,000 pounds of fuel and 14,866 pounds of oxidizer for each of the two Orbital Maneuvering System engines. These OMS motors, one in each tail cone, each generating three tons of rocket thrust, would push Shuttle into orbit after the three Space Shuttle Main Engines, SSME's, have burned up their fuel in the external tank after 8½ minutes of powered flight. Each rear pod also must be topped with another 2,418 pounds of fuel and oxidizer to drive each OMS pod's 14 reaction control system jets used to maintain Shuttle's attitude in space.