the hinge of the big circular wall hatch. The noise was violent, startling, and for an instant the mid deck was filled with dense smoke. But then three small thrusters blew, pushing the severed hatch out and away from the orbiter.
The hatchway became a hole, through which Benacerraf could see the sky. Wind noise forced its way into the crew compartment, drowning any other sound. The opened hatchway was like a wound, cut into the side of the cosy den of the mid deck.
Suddenly, Benacerraf’s heart was racing. It was as if, cocooned in the warm, gentle comfort of the orbiter, she’d not accepted the reality of the obscure technical failures which had plagued the landing. But that hole in the wall was a violation, a rip in the universe.
Chandran reached down, stiffly. He pulled a pin and worked a ratchet handle.
A telescopic escape pole sprouted out of the ceiling over the hatch opening, forced out by spring tension. The steel pole snaked out of the hatch and bent backwards like a reed, forced back by the wind beyond the hull.
Chandran pulled a lanyard assembly out of a magazine close to the hatch. This was a hook suspended from a Kevlar strap. Chandran wrapped the strap around the pole, and fixed the hook to his pressure suit.
Holding the Kevlar strap in his right hand, he stepped up to the hatchway.
At the last second he turned. His mouth was half-open, a spray of spittle over the inside of his visor.
With awful slowness, he turned again. Clinging with both hands to the Kevlar strap, he stood on the rim of the hatchway. Then, ponderously, he let himself fall out.
Benacerraf could see Chandran sliding down the bent pole. He was twisting in the sudden gale, his orange pressure suit flapping against his flesh. Thread stitching on the Kevlar strap tore, absorbing some of Chandran’s momentum. He slid off the end of the pole, and started to fall away from the hull. Benacerraf could see his parachute opening, like a slowly blossoming flower.
For a moment, the egress seemed to have worked.
But then a gust picked up Chandran, and he soared in the air, his limbs loose as a doll’s.
He caromed into the black leading edge of the orbiter’s big port wing, against the toughest heatshield surface the orbiter carried. He fell over the wing’s upper surface, his parachute limp and trailing, and smashed into the big OMS engine pod at the rear of the orbiter.
After that he fell out of Benacerraf’s sight.
Sanjai Chandran – astrophysicist, father of two – was gone. It had taken just a second.
Benacerraf felt her stomach turn over, and saliva pooled at the back of her throat.
As the crew tried to bail out – tried to work through that dumb-ass tacked-on Shuttle egress system – Marcus White tried to focus on the job he’d volunteered for.
… He remembered coming down to the surface of the Moon, with Tom Lamb at his side:
He leaned forward in his spacesuit, against the restraints that held him standing in his place, trying to see. The LM went through its pitchover manoeuvre, and suddenly there was the Moon below him, a black and white panorama, as battered as a B – 52 bombing range, the shadows long in the lunar morning. There was too much detail, almost a crowd of craters. Really, it was nothing like the sims, with their little cameras flying over plaster-of-paris mocked-up landscapes.
But there was his target, the little collection of eroded craters they’d dubbed the Parking Lot, almost lost in that black and white sea of craters. ‘Hey, there it is,’ he’d said. ‘Son of a gun, Tom. Right down the middle of the road …’
The Moon’s surface had plummeted up to meet them; they were coming in like a bullet, and he’d tipped the LM back to slow it, and the eight-ball had tilted sharply …
Shit, shit. Focus, you old asshole.
It was Benacerraf’s turn.
She took a fresh lanyard assembly from the magazine, hooked into her suit, and slid it over the pole. Then she stepped up to the rim of the hatch. She clung to a handhold there, facing the air, framed by metal.
She could sense the wind, just inches away from her. The hull of the orbiter was still hot from the frictional heating of the entry, and she could feel its warmth, seeping through her boots. To her left, the wing and tail assembly were huge, blocky, black and white shapes.
And, far below, astonishingly far, she could see the Mojave. It was a brown plain, gently curving like a shallow dome, crisscrossed by pale road surfaces, and the dry salt lakes shone like glass.
Bill Angel grabbed her shoulder. ‘I know it’s hard,’ he shouted. ‘But Sanjai knew the rules. You got to play the hand you’ve been dealt, Paula. Godspeed.’
She turned and looked at him. His eyes were shining. This was, she realized, Bill’s apotheosis, what he lived for.
She thought of Chandran, and felt disgust at such bullshit.
She loosened her grip on the handhold –
– she would never have the guts to do this, to follow Sanjai –
– she leaned over the lip of the hatch, feeling the pole taking some of her weight –
– and she pushed herself out of the hatch, kicking against its sill as hard as she could.
She skimmed down the pole. She felt the brisk rip of the breakaway stitching. The hook, sliding roughly over the pole, made a noise like a roar. In a second she reached the pole’s end, and she fell away into the air.
It was like slamming into a wall. The breath was knocked out of her. And there was nothing beneath her feet for four miles. There were sharp tugs at her back as her pilot and drogue chutes opened automatically. She felt herself being hauled sideways and upwards.
She looked up.
She was already dropping away from the orbiter. She’d fallen under the port wing, and the orbiter was a huge delta shape, hanging in the sky only a few yards above her, the big silica tiles on its underside scarred and scorched. Black smoke trailed from the fat OMS engine pods on the tail.
Then it was gone, falling away into the huge air around her, trailing contrails. The white felt of its upper heatshield seemed to shine in the low morning sunlight.
Her main chute opened above her, and she fell into her harness with an impact that jarred the wind out of her.
She was no longer falling. She was just dangling here, and when she looked at her feet, she could see the thinly scattered towns of the Mojave rim, still miles below, obscured by mist. And there was the orbiter, a white delta shape, dropping like a stone, already beneath her. Skimming above the mist, it was the most vivid object in the world, receding rapidly.
She looked up. She could see four more chutes, opening out in the air.
Of Sanjai Chandran, of course, there was no sign.
She felt a sudden warmth between her legs, as her bladder released.
Gently, Lamb worked his pedals, and the control stick. He felt the crippled orbiter respond to his touch. He’d flown big aircraft, 747s and KC-135s. In them there was always a certain lag. But the orbiter was much more responsive, given its size more like a fighter than a liner; he could feel he was flying a big craft, but the responses to the controls were positive and crisp.
Today, though, Columbia was sluggish.
It was time for his own egress …
Things were calming down, though.
The master alarm hadn’t sounded for, oh, three or four minutes. And when he scanned his instruments, when he put it together, the data from his eight-ball and his CRT and his alpha-mach indicators told him that things weren’t too bad. He still had, in fact, enough energy and altitude for a feasible landing profile.