Liftoff!
In this exclusive excerpt from Stephen Harrigan’s new novel, Challenger Park, an astronaut prepares to blast into space for the FIrst time. But her mind keeps drifting toward more worldly concerns.
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Surly and Tom Terassky were already strapped in, staring up at the sky through the cockpit windows, facing the two thousand switches of the control panel. With Larry’s help, Lucy heaved herself up into the Mission Specialist 1 seat behind Tom. They were both sweating. The seat was cramped and hard, a thin cushion over an unforgiving steel frame. Larry handed her her communication cable and oxygen hose. He adjusted the fit of her helmet and guided her through her comm checks.
“How are you feeling?” he asked her. “Raring to go?”
“Raring to go,” Lucy repeated as she noticed the condensation that had briefly formed on the inside of her visor. She felt her heart beating with a steady insistence that she thought at first was caused by the exertion of getting into her seat but which she finally had to recognize was just outright fear. The air was still thick, but now that all the hoses were attached, chilled water began circulating through the ventilation garment she wore beneath her pressure suit, and as her body cooled, the sense of being trapped began to ease. She felt calmer after Buddy was strapped into the seat beside her and calmer still when Patti and Chuck Nethercott had been settled into place in the mid-deck. She could not see Patti and Chuck but could hear their voices on the loop, and the knowledge that the crew was together gave her a familial sense of comfort.
“Well, I guess it’s time for my boot heels to be wanderin’,” Larry said as he reappeared on the flight deck, the sweat still glistening on his forehead. He had obviously rehearsed this lighthearted exit line, but it didn’t quite work out, since Lucy heard his voice catch and saw him blink hard to clamp down on a tear that was forming in his eye. She couldn’t blame him for being emotional at the enormous thing that was about to happen to these six people in his charge. He shook each of their hands and was bold enough to give Lucy an awkward kiss on the top of her helmet before he whispered, “Godspeed,” and left them alone on the flight deck.
“I think he likes you,” Buddy said.
“Shut up,” Lucy answered him.
Not long after, Lucy heard the crew hatch close and Ground confirm it with Surly. They were alone now, the six of them, alone in the massive vessel that in a few hours’ time was scheduled to erupt with the force of a volcano and drive them through the atmosphere. Soon there would be no one within three miles of them, except for the rescue crew stationed in a protective bunker a mile away. Lucy stared upward, looking between Surly’s and Tom’s shoulders at the sky, now vibrantly blue with the full morning light, a few inconsequential clouds straying in from the ocean side of the Cape. The weather was good; the updates from Ground were positive.
“You know what, space cadets?” Surly said to the crew over the loop, in one of the lulls when the voice of the orbiter test conductor was not passing along information or running through checklists. “I think this is really going to happen. I think we’re going to get off the pad on our first try.”
Lucy knew there were still a thousand things that could scrap the launch: a minor radar anomaly, a sensor warning, an unexpected weather complication. But the conviction was growing in her that it was going to take place, that nothing would stop it, that the launch was not just on schedule but ordained. Part of her wanted to surrender to that conviction, to take comfort in the fact that fate was overriding every choice she could make and every apprehension she could feel. But there was also a part that would not deliver herself so passively, and that was the part that kept envisioning her children in their room at the launch control center, the dutiful way they would be drawing their pictures on the dry-erase board before they’d be taken outside to stare at the billowing flames and feel the shaking ground as the engines of their mother’s spaceship ignited.
She listened as Surly and Tom, from the commander’s and pilot’s seats in front of her,admired the pristine switches of the Endeavour cockpit—so different from the worn, constantly used switches in the simulator. She listened to Buddy anxiously humming parts of a song she couldn’t quite place and to Patti’s and Chuck’s good-natured complaints from the mid-deck about the spectacular view they would have during launch of the storage lockers.
At this point in the countdown, there was not much for the crew to do except lie on their backs in their rigid seats and try to distract themselves with talk. When Lucy became aware of her own silence, she thought of Christa McAuliffe. She had once listened to the tape of the prelaunch cockpit banter of the Challenger crew: Judy Resnik complaining about how her butt was numb; Greg Jarvis offering to give her a massage; Dick Scobee, the commander, breaking in with an authoritative observation every now and then about the wintry Florida weather outside. It was the same sort of high-spirited and nervous commentary that Lucy was listening to today, but what had struck her at the time she heard the tape, and what came back unwelcomed to her memory now, was Christa’s near-total silence. She had not joined in the conversation; she had seemingly drawn no consolation from the jittery fellowship of her crewmates but had sunk into a contemplative isolation at her station in the windowless mid-deck. What had she been thinking about during this sustained silence? Had she been wondering about the children who would soon be motherless and the cheerful reassurances by which she had betrayed them? Only once on the tape had Lucy heard Christa speak. She had said, as the winter wind whistled outside, sweeping the frost off the fuel tank so that those looking out the cockpit windows thought it was snowing, “It’ll be cold out there today.”
Next to Lucy, Buddy shifted in his hard seat. “I’ve got to pee again,” he said. She told him she didn’t need to know that, but as soon as he had announced it, she’d felt once again the pressure of her own bladder. It was all right. She would rather concentrate on physical discomfort than on the dread that could steal over her if she allowed herself to dwell on the wrong thoughts. Her back was starting to ache, so she squeezed a bit of air into the inflatable lumbar pad. The slight shift in position that resulted helped her back, for a moment at least, but sharpened the urge to urinate. She felt a bit hollow as well and was starting to regret that she had skipped breakfast. Her mouth was dry. She told herself it was because she had been avoiding liquids, but she suspected it was really from fear.
Another hour passed, the countdown moving smoothly toward the automatic hold that would come at nine minutes before launch. Lucy listened as Surly talked to the woman monitoring the ground launch sequencer, watched as the abort light brightened and dimmed on the console in front of him as Ground conducted an abort check. Lucy reviewed the emergency escape procedures printed on a card Velcroed to her sleeve, though of course she had long known them by heart. She also knew that if there was a sudden fuel leak or fire while they were still on the pad, it was a benign fantasy to think she could release herself from all the straps binding her to her seat and drag herself and the 85 pounds of space suit she was wearing to the escape basket outside the gantry before being incinerated in a vicious explosion.
Buddy started humming again, just a few bars of some improbable tune—was it “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain”?—and then he drifted back into silence as the call-outs from Ground grew more frequent and the communications discipline began to tighten.
It was happening. At T minus nine minutes, there was a built-in hold for ten minutes. Lucy checked to make sure all her straps were tight and glanced again at the emergency egress card. She no longer registered the pressure in her bladder. The pains in her back were still there, and now there were cramps in her upended legs, but none of it mattered any longer.
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