Gravity Read online

  A fist-sized mass of clotted blood plopped out, splattering the stainless steel table.

  “Big subdural hematoma,” said one of Roman’s associates. “From the trauma?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Roman. “You saw the aorta—death would have been nearly instantaneous on impact. I’m not sure her heart was pumping long enough to produce this much intracranial bleeding.” Gently he slid his gloved fingers into the cranial cavity, probing the surface of gray matter.

  A gelatinous mass slithered out and splashed onto the table.

  Roman jerked back, startled.

  “What the hell is that?” his assistant said.

  Roman didn’t answer. He just stared at the clump of tissue. It was covered with a blue-green membrane. Through the glistening veil, the mass appeared irregular, a knot of formless flesh. He was about to slit the membrane open, then he stopped himself and shot a glance toward Jack. “It’s a tumor of some kind,” he said. “Or a cyst. That would explain the headache she reported.”

  “No it wouldn’t,” Jack spoke up. “Her headache came on suddenly—within hours. A tumor takes months to grow.”

  “How do you know she hasn’t been hiding her symptoms these past months?” countered Roman. “Keeping it a secret so she wouldn’t get scrubbed from the launch?”

  Jack had to concede that was a possibility. Astronauts were so eager for flight assignments they might well conceal any symptoms that would pull them from a mission.

  Roman looked at his associate standing across the table from him. The other man nodded, slid the mass into a specimen container, and carried it out of the room.

  “Aren’t you going to section it?” said Jack.

  “It needs to be fixed and stained first. If I start slicing now, I could deform the cellular architecture.”

  “You don’t know if it is a tumor.”

  “What else would it be?”

  Jack had no answer. He had never seen anything like it.

  Roman continued his examination of Jill Hewitt’s cranial cavity. Clearly the mass, whatever it was, had increased pressure on her brain, deforming its structures. How long had it been there? Months, years? How was it possible that Jill had been able to function normally, much less pilot a complicated vehicle like the shuttle? All this raced through Jack’s head as he watched Roman remove the brain and slide it into a steel basin.

  “She was close to herniating through the tentorium,” said Roman.

  No wonder Jill had gone blind. No wonder she hadn’t lowered the landing gear. She had already been unconscious, her brain about to be squeezed like toothpaste out the base of her skull.

  Jill’s corpse—what remained of it—was sealed into a new body bag and wheeled out of the room, along with the biohazard containers holding her organs.

  A second body was brought in. It was Andy Mercer.

  With fresh gloves pulled over his space suit gloves, and a clean scalpel, Roman set to work on the Y incision. He was moving more quickly, as though Jill had just been the warmup and he was only now hitting his stride.

  Mercer had complained of abdominal pain and vomiting, Jack remembered as he watched Roman’s scalpel slice through skin and subcutaneous fat. Mercer hadn’t complained of a headache, as Jill had, but he’d had a fever and had coughed up a little blood. Would his lungs show the effects of Marburg virus?

  Again, Roman’s diagonal cuts met below the xiphoid, and he sliced a shallow line down the abdomen to the pubis. Again he cut through the ribs, freeing up the triangular shield that covered the heart. He lifted the sternum.

  Gasping, he stumbled backward, dropping his scalpel. It clanged onto the table. His assistants stood frozen in disbelief.

  In Mercer’s chest cavity was a cluster of blue-green cysts, identical to the cyst in Jill Hewitt’s brain. They were massed around his heart, like tiny translucent eggs.

  Roman stood paralyzed, his gaze fixed on the gaping torso. Then his gaze shifted to the glistening peritoneal membrane. It was distended, full of blood and bulging out through the abdominal incision.

  Roman stepped toward the body, staring at the outpouching of peritoneal membrane. When he’d made his incision through the abdominal wall, his scalpel had nicked the surface of that membrane. A trickle of blood-tinged fluid leaked out. At first it was barely a few drops. Then, even as they watched, the trickle turned into a stream. The slit suddenly burst open into a gaping rent as blood gushed out, carrying with it a slippery flood of blue-green cysts.

  Roman gave a cry of horror as the cysts plopped onto the floor in splatters of blood and mucus.

  One of them skittered across the concrete and bumped against Jack’s rubber boot. He bent down, to touch it with his gloved hand. Abruptly he was yanked backward as Roman’s associates pulled him away from the table.

  “Get him out of here!” Roman ordered. “Get him out of the room!”

  The two men pushed Jack toward the door. He resisted, shoving away the gloved hand now grasping his shoulder. The man stumbled backward, tipped over a tray of surgical instruments, and sprawled to the floor, slippery with cysts and blood.

  The second man wrenched Jack’s air hose from its connection and held up the kinked end. “I advise you to walk out with us, Dr. McCallum,” he said. “While you’ve still got breathable air.”

  “My suit! Jesus, I’ve got a breach!” It was the man who’d stumbled into the instrument tray. He was now staring in horror at a two-inch-long tear in his space suit sleeve—a sleeve that was coated with Mercer’s body fluids.

  “It’s wet. I can feel it. My inner sleeve is wet—”

  “Go!” barked Roman. “Decon now!”

  The man unplugged his suit and went running in panic out of the room. Jack followed him to the air lock door, and they both stepped through, into the decon shower. Water shot out of the overhead jets, pounding down like hard rain on their shoulders. Then the shower of disinfectant began, a torrent of green liquid that splattered noisily against their plastic helmets.

  When it finally stopped, they stepped through the next door and pulled off their suits. The man immediately peeled off his already-wet scrub suit and thrust his arm under a faucet of running water, to rinse away any body fluids that had leaked through the sleeve.

  “You have any breaks in your skin?” asked Jack. “Cuts, hangnails?”

  “My daughter’s cat scratched me last night.”

  Jack looked down at the man’s arm and saw the claw marks, three scabbed lines raking up the inner arm. The same arm as the torn space suit. He looked at the man’s eyes and saw fear.

  “What happens now?” said Jack.

  “Quarantine. I go to lockup. Shit…”

  “I already know it’s not Marburg,” said Jack.

  The man released a deep breath. “No. It’s not.”

  “Then what is it? Tell me what we’re dealing with,” said Jack.

  The man clutched the sink with both hands and stared down at the water gurgling into the drain. He said softly, “We don’t know.”

  SEVENTEEN

  Sullivan Obie was riding his Harley on Mars.

  At midnight, with the full moon shining down and the pockmarked desert stretched out before him, he could imagine it was the Martian wind whipping his hair and red Martian dust churning beneath his tires. This was an old fantasy from boyhood, from the days when those precocious Obie brothers shot off homemade rockets and built cardboard moon landers and donned space suits of crinkled foil. The days when he and Gordie knew, just knew, that their futures lay in the heavens.

  And this is where those big dreams end up, he thought. Drunk on tequila, popping wheelies in the desert. No way was he ever getting to Mars, or to the moon either. Chances were he wouldn’t even get off the goddamn launchpad, but would be instantly atomized. A quick, spectacular death. What the hell; it beat dying at seventy-five with cancer.

  He skidded to a stop, his bike spitting up dirt, and stared across the moonlit ripples of sand at Apogee II, gleaming
like a streak of silver, her nose cone pointed at the stars. They had moved her to the launchpad yesterday. It was a slow and celebratory procession, the dozen Apogee employees honking horns and beating on their car roofs as they followed the flatbed truck across the desert. When she had finally been hoisted into position and everyone squinted up against the blazing sun to look at her, they had suddenly fallen silent. They all knew this was the last roll of the dice. In three weeks, when Apogee II lifted off, she would be carrying all their hopes and dreams.

  And my sorry carcass as well, thought Sullivan.

  A chill shot through him as he realized he might be staring at his own coffin.

  He goosed the Harley and roared back toward the road, bouncing across dunes, leaping over dips. He rode with abandon, his recklessness fueled by tequila and by the sudden and unshakable certainty that he was already a dead man. That in three weeks he would be riding that rocket to oblivion. Until then, nothing could touch him, nothing could hurt him.

  The promise of death had made him invincible.

  He accelerated, flying across the bleak moonscape of his boyhood fantasies. And here I am in the lunar rover, speeding across the Sea of Tranquility. Roaring up a lunar hill. Launching off to a soft landing…

  He felt the ground drop away. Felt himself soaring through the night, the Harley growling between his knees, the moon shining in his eyes. Still soaring. How far? How high?

  The ground hit with such force he lost control and tumbled sideways, the Harley falling on top of him. For a moment he lay stunned, pinned between his bike and a flat rock. Well, this is one fucking stupid position to be in, he thought.

  Then the pain hit him. Deep and grinding, as though his hips were crushed to splinters.

  He gave a cry and fell back, his face turned to the sky. The moon shone down, mocking him.

  • • •

  “His pelvis is fractured in three places,” said Bridget. “The doctors pinned it last night. They tell me he’s gonna be confined to bed for at least six weeks.”

  Casper Mulholland could almost hear the sound of his dreams popping, like the loud burst of a balloon. “Six… weeks?”

  “And then he’ll be in rehab for another three or four months.”

  “Four months?”

  “For God’s sake, Casper. Say something original.”

  “We’re screwed.” He slapped his palm against his forehead, as though to punish himself for daring to dream they could ever succeed. It was that old Apogee curse again, cutting them off at the ankles just as they reached the finish line. Blowing up their rockets. Burning down their first office. And now, taking their only pilot out of commission. He paced the waiting room, thinking, Nothing has ever gone right for us. They’d invested all their combined savings, their reputations, and the last thirteen years of their lives. This was God’s way of telling them to give up. To cut their losses before something really bad happened.

  “He was drunk,” said Bridget.

  Casper halted and turned to look at her. She stood with her arms grimly crossed, her red hair like the flaming halo of an avenging angel.

  “The doctors told me,” she said. “Blood alcohol level of point one nine. As pickled as a herring. This isn’t just our usual bad luck. This is our own dear Sully fucking up again. My only consolation is that for the next six weeks, he’s gonna have a big tube stuck up his dick.”

  Without a word, Casper walked out of the visitors’ waiting room, headed up the hall, and pushed into Sullivan’s hospital room. “You moron,” he said.

  Sully looked up at him with morphine-glazed eyes. “Thanks for the sympathy.”

  “You don’t deserve any. Three weeks before launch and you pull some goddamn Chuck Yeager stunt in the desert? Why didn’t you just finish the job? Splatter your brains while you were at it? Hell, we wouldn’t have known the difference!”

  Sully closed his eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  “You always are.”

  “I screwed up. I know…”

  “You promised them a manned flight. It wasn’t my idea, it was yours. Now they’re expecting it. They’re excited about it. When was the last time any investor was excited about us? This could have made the difference. If you’d just kept the bottle corked—”

  “I was scared.”

  Sully had spoken so softly Casper wasn’t sure he’d heard him right. “What?” he said.

  “About the launch. Had a…bad feeling.”

  A bad feeling. Slowly Casper sank into the bedside chair, all his anger instantly dissolving. Fear is not something a man readily admits to. The fact that Sully, who regularly courted destruction, would confess to being afraid left Casper feeling shaken.

  And, at last, sympathetic.

  “You don’t need me for the launch,” said Sully.

  “They expect to see a pilot climb into that cockpit.”

  “You could put a goddamn monkey in my seat and they’d never know the difference. She doesn’t need a pilot, Cap. You can uplink all the commands from the ground.”

  Casper sighed. They had no choice now; it would have to be an unmanned flight. Clearly they had a valid excuse not to launch Sully, but would the investors accept it? Or would they believe, instead, that Apogee had lost its nerve? That it lacked the confidence to risk a human life?

  “I guess I just lost my nerve,” said Sully softly. “Got to drinking last night. Couldn’t stop…”

  Casper understood his partner’s fear—the way he understood how one defeat can lead inexorably to another and then another until the only certainty in a man’s life is failure. No wonder Sully was scared; he had lost faith in their dream. In Apogee.

  Maybe they all had.

  Casper said, “We can still make this launch work. Even without a monkey in the cockpit.”

  “Yeah. You could send up Bridget instead.”

  “Then who’d answer the phones?”

  “The monkey.”

  Both men laughed. They were like two old soldiers, mustering up a shred of cheer on the eve of certain defeat.

  “So we’re gonna do it?” said Sully. “We’re gonna launch?”

  “That was the whole idea of building a rocket.”

  “Well, then.” Sully took a deep breath, and a ghost of the old bravado returned to his face. “Let’s do it right. Press release to all the wire services. One mother of a tent party with champagne. Hell, invite my sainted brother and his NASA pals. If she blows up on the pad, at least we’ll go outta business in style.”

  “Yeah. We always had an excess of style.”

  They grinned.

  Casper rose to leave. “Get better, Sully,” he said. “We’ll need you for Apogee III.”

  He found Bridget still sitting in the visitors’ waiting room. “So what happens now?” she said.

  “We launch on schedule.”

  “Unmanned?”

  He nodded. “We fly her from the control room.”

  To his surprise, she huffed out a sigh of relief. “Hallelujah!”

  “What’re you so happy about? Our man’s laid up in a hospital bed.”

  “Exactly.” She slung her purse over her shoulder and turned to leave. “It means he won’t be up there to fuck things up.”

  August 11

  Nicolai Rudenko floated in the air lock, watching as Luther wriggled his hips into the lower torso assembly of the EVA suit. To the diminutive Nicolai, Luther was an exotic giant, with those broad shoulders and legs like pistons. And his skin! While Nicolai had turned pasty during his months aboard ISS, Luther was still a deep and polished brown, a startling contrast to the pale faces that inhabited their otherwise colorless world. Nicolai had already suited up, and now he hovered beside Luther, ready to assist his partner into the EVA suit’s upper torso assembly. They said little to each other; neither man was in the mood for idle chatter.

  The two of them had spent a mostly conversationless night sleeping in the air lock, allowing their bodies to adjust to a lower atmospheric pressure of 10.
2 pounds per square inch—two thirds that of the space station. The pressure in their suits would be even less, at 4.3. The suits could not be inflated any higher, or the limbs would be too stiff and bulky, the joints impossible to flex. Moving directly from a fully pressurized spacecraft into the lower air pressure of an EVA suit was like surfacing too fast from the depths of the ocean. An astronaut could suffer the bends. Nitrogen bubbles formed in the blood, clogging capillaries, cutting off precious oxygen to the brain and spinal cord. The consequences could be devastating: paralysis and stroke. Like deep-sea divers, astronauts had to give their bodies time to adjust to the changing pressures. The night before a space walk, the EVA crew washed out their lungs with a hundred percent oxygen and shut themselves into the air lock for “the campout.” For hours they were trapped together in a small chamber already crammed full of equipment. It was not a place for claustrophobics.

  With his arms extended over his head, Luther squirmed into the suit’s hard-shelled upper torso, which was mounted on the air lock wall. It was an exhausting dance, like wriggling into an impossibly small tunnel. At last his head popped out through the neck hole, and Nicolai helped him close the waist ring, sealing the two halves of the suit.

  They put on their helmets. As Nicolai looked down to fit his helmet to the torso assembly, he noticed something glistening on the rim of the suit’s neck ring. Just spittle, he thought, and locked on the helmet. They donned their gloves. Sealed into their suits, they opened the equipment lock hatch, floated into the adjoining crew lock, and shut the hatch behind them. They were now in an even smaller compartment, barely large enough to contain both the men and their bulky life-support backpacks.

  Thirty minutes of “prebreathe” came next. While they inhaled pure oxygen, purging their blood of any last nitrogen, Nicolai floated with his eyes closed, mentally preparing for the space walk ahead. If they could not get the beta gimbal assembly to unlock, if they could not reorient the solar panels toward the sun, they would be starved for power. Crippled. What Nicolai and Luther accomplished in the next six hours could well determine the fate of the space station.