Orbit Page 17

  It’s just past 7 A.M. and only three of the control room staff are present, all watching the multiple television signals their public relations director has been assembling on the screen that covers the entire front of the room. Where normally an orbital map would compete with lists and graphs and a live shot or two at different times in a launch and return mission, TV morning shows are in progress, every one devoting their coverage to the phenomenon of a public transfixed by the journaling of a man about to die.

  Kip has been “silent” for more than an hour, the live transmission still flashing the last words of the last sentence he wrote before, presumably, going to sleep.

  Diana straightens up from one of the consoles and smiles an equally tired and tolerant smile at their flight director. “Am I interrupting any other work here, Arleigh?”

  He pauses and shakes his head. “Naw. I guess I’m just pulling your chain. It’s just…with a bird still up there…”

  “I know. It feels all wrong. Just like my complete inability to control even the smallest part of this story feels all wrong.”

  “What are they yammering about?” Arleigh asks, gesturing irritably to the silent TV images, each of which has the now-stalled crawl of Kip’s writings across the bottom of each screen.

  She punches up the audio from NBC and adjusts the volume, then punches it off again.

  “I’m not a sociologist, Arleigh, but this is fascinating. I grew up in broadcasting, and I think you’re looking at the beginnings of a kind of phase two. Phase one was a passenger trapped in space and facing death, and they’re largely still on that phase. In phase two, the story becomes this unprecedented situation of his writing so freely without knowing the world is reading along with him.”

  “And phase three?”

  “If I’m right…and I’m just guessing…phase three will be when the story becomes what he’s saying. The substance of his thoughts and how they relate to all of us, not just the fact that he’s writing them.”

  Arleigh is looking at her quizzically.

  “What?”

  “Diana, doesn’t this feel a little…sordid? You know…I mean I’m just a technical guy, but doesn’t the word voyeuristic come to mind?”

  “A prying observer seeking the sordid or scandalous?”

  “Yes. Exactly.”

  “Doesn’t that more or less describe us as a people? Certainly the networks and cable companies think so, paying gazillions of dollars to be voyeurs. I mean, Arleigh, look at it. It’s everywhere! From that thoroughly idiotic ‘O. J. Low-Speed Chase’ that none of us could turn off, through that murderer’s trial before the world’s stupidest jury, through the plague of reality shows and the unbelievable things now broadcast on cable.”

  “Not a good commentary on humanity, I agree.”

  “And it’s not just us. We’ve taught the world to be voyeurs and they’ve gleefully joined us.”

  Arleigh gestures to the multiple images. “But this just feels dirty, Diana.”

  “I know this guy, Arleigh.”

  “Personally?”

  “We’ve talked. But I knew from the first moment I met Kip that his level of enthusiasm for what we do was very special. You should have seen his eyes light up when he was on Good Morning America, talking about how this was the dream of a lifetime. I’d already suggested that he’d be a great public relations icon for us when he got back.”

  “I was getting the feeling you had a special concern.”

  “I do feel protective of him, not that I can do anything.”

  Arleigh smiles and cocks his head. “You’re not dating the customers are you, Diana?”

  She feels her face redden. “Arleigh! That’s beneath you.”

  “Sorry.” He has both hands up in apology and she nods, embarrassed that he’s identified exactly what she’d been thinking the night before, that Kip Dawson was a man she could get interested in.

  Diana clears her throat, more like a short growl of terminated disgust.

  “The point I was getting ready to make, Arleigh, is that one reason the public is already resonating with him is that he’s an average Joe, a good guy from Middle America, who knows for an absolute fact in his mind that he’s dead in a few more days.”

  “That is incredible.”

  “How would either of us feel? And how would we react? His thoughts are uncontaminated by hopes of rescue, contact with the ground, anything. So what we’re reading has a quality about it…and there’s a word I’m searching for…”

  “Eloquence?”

  She nods, tearing up slightly. “Yeah. Eloquence. That’s exactly it. Even if his writing isn’t brilliant, what he’s saying, how he’s dying, is eloquent. If that makes us voyeurs, dying along with him, then so be it.”

  “You…don’t think he’s going to make it, then?” Arleigh asks, looking deathly pale, as if she’s got the key.

  “Do you?” she asks, equally off balance. They stare at each other for a few seconds like microwave antennae transmitting volumes of unseen information for which no vocal narration is needed. There is hope of rescue, but their passenger doesn’t know it, and neither of them has enough faith that it can be done.

  “Can you turn the sound back on?” Arleigh says, yanking them both away from the subject.

  “Sure.”

  She punches up NBC’s Today again, catching the host in mid-sentence.

  “…excerpts we just showed you coming down from the private spacecraft Intrepid, many very personal stories have already been told, some with the names of friends and lovers he hasn’t seen since his teen years. In one passage, Dawson writes about his first love, a girl named Linda Hammel, wondering where she is now. This story is so deep and personal that we felt someone should search out people such as Linda, and amazingly we found her living right here in New York City. She was gracious enough to join us this morning to give us some insight into this remarkable man. Linda, good morning.”

  Diana shakes her head and punches up Good Morning America just as the host comes on.

  “In the broadcast business when there is what we call a breaking story, we refer to what we do as ‘continuing coverage,’ but this is an extraordinary story that plows new ground. So, while asking you to bear with us as we try to figure out the best way to report what is clearly an evolving story…and while it’s continuously writing itself across the bottom of your screen…we’re going to spend the next hour giving you as much background as we can on who Kip Dawson is, as a man, a husband, a father, a salesman, a friend. All this would normally seem invasive. But considering that most of us have eagerly been reading his words as they come down on a radio link to the Internet from orbit raises the question of whether we should have been doing so in the first place.

  This morning we’ll talk again with Kip’s wife, Sharon, from her family home in the Houston area, but first we go to a gentleman who’s worked with Kip Dawson for many years in the pharmaceutical sales business, Dell Rogers, who joins us from our ABC affiliate in Phoenix.”

  Diana kills the volume and brings up a succession of other network shows, each struggling to craft their own portrait of Kip, before switching the sound off again and gaining the attention of the three staffers sitting one tier in front of her.

  “I’ve got the various audio tracks on the comm switcher, so you can listen to whatever you want.”

  “Diana,” Arleigh interjects, his eyes on the screen.

  “Yes?”

  “He’s awake.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Kip’s typing again.”

  ABOARD INTREPID, 7:22 A.M. PACIFIC

  There’s apparently no choice now about growing a beard. One doesn’t pack a shaver on a three-hour tour.

  Kip rubs his hand over the stubble threatening to morph into something he’s sworn he would never wear. It itches, and he itches, pretty much all over, and even though he’s already stripped once and sponged himself off, he thinks a hot shower would be a good substitute for a last meal.

&
nbsp; The dream he’s awakened from has ended again with a falling sequence. But the fact that he’s remembering his dreams is extraordinary, and he hurries to write this one down, knowing how ridiculous it will look to his future reader if he doesn’t explain it.

  He shakes his head to clear the fog and takes some more water, deciding to save the next delectable cereal bar for a few hours from now. There will still be cereal bars and water when there’s no air left.

  The shroud of sadness that is his companion greets his awakening. He’s getting used to it, like learning to relax and play a few rounds of poker with the grim reaper during a five-day hiatus in his morbid duties, even though he knows he’s the next client on his list. The waking sequence is like a fast-forwarded version of his first day up here: a bolt of terror and startled uncertainty, denial, struggle, and anger, and then acceptance that his fate is a done deal, his demise a matter of a few days.

  And then he remembers the keyboard, and for some reason he can’t fathom, he’s developing a feeling of responsibility toward that future reader, the man or woman ten or fifty or a hundred years hence who first reads the words he’s writing.

  Responsibility! If I could have a tombstone, maybe that should be the inscription: Here lies a really, really responsible man!

  The phrase “three-hour tour” keeps rolling around in his head, a direct product of the dream, and he wonders how many even remember the old campy TV show that spawned that oft-repeated warning: “Never, ever, go on a three-hour tour.” The entire dream was about the S.S. Minnow and Bob Denver’s Gilligan’s Island, with some emphasis on Ginger—of the long evening gown and killer body—standing with him on the beach with a shovel having a debate about digging for hidden passages back to Honolulu.

  Must be the cereal bars, he concludes, though he’s eager to escape back into the process and, at least for a while, leave Intrepid to orbit by itself.

  I grew up feeling guilty. I think maybe most of us did, and that seems a sad commentary on the process of growing up American. My Mom was Lutheran, and thus had a long-standing knowledge of guilt and precisely what to do about it. My Dad was Southern Baptist, and guilt in his view seemed to trigger outrage—at himself and anyone else not towing the line. I loved my folks—I think I said that before—and I kind of feared my Dad’s anger and definitely was terrified of disappointing him. That kind of fear is probably needed to keep the boundaries in place and keep a kid out of trouble. But what I didn’t need—and got in spades—was an Atlas-sized load of institutional guilt for almost everything else.

  A sudden beeping courses through the spacecraft, bringing Kip’s attention to the front panel. Lacking the experience to scan the complicated array of instruments and see an anomalous indication instantly, his eyes dart back and forth looking for a blinking light or an indication in motion or something.

  The beeping continues unabated. Kip, trying to zero in on the source of the sound, slowly works past the echoes around him and finds himself laughing almost uncontrollably for a few seconds.

  He reaches out and cancels the alarm he set himself on a sophisticated little clock on the forward panel and looks up in time to catch the next sunrise before turning back to the keyboard.

  Where was I? Oh yes. Guilt. I was supposed to feel guilty, especially about any sexual feelings, let alone my doing anything about them. I was a teenage boy awash in testosterone driving me to find a girl to couple with, and I’m told that my feelings are dirty and bad. Sex, they taught me, was just barely tolerable in private in the dark and in shame, even within marriage. What a crime, the concept of using “sin” to describe the most beautiful act in life. In my family, original sin was a concept humans earned all the time, and every instance of failure of mine—whether grades or conduct or thought-crime—would engender reminders not that I was merely human and thus fatally flawed, but that I should pity myself because of those flaws. I was supposed to grow up on my knees—not worshipping my Maker, but apologizing to Him for His own act of making me imperfect. Talk about confused! No wonder we spend so much money and time as a people on psychological analysis.

  What is that?

  Something has changed, Kip realizes. The sound of the air conditioning, pressurization system more or less wobbled for a second. Once again he scans the panel, his heart in his throat. If that system goes down, or the fuel cells fail, the end will come a lot quicker.

  But once more everything appears stable and his ears aren’t clicking, and when he finds it, the cabin pressure indication looks normal. Slowly—as if looking away would allow the indications to start going sour and only continuous scrutiny could prevent such—he disconnects once again and forces himself back to what he was writing.

  Despite all the dour messages I got as a kid, I grew up kinda liking me. That was actually a big victory in itself, because if I had applied all the religious terror that both sides of my parental equation taught me, it was clear I was on a fast-track to hell, mainly for being an average teenage boy. In truth, I was a pretty good and honest kid, but since I was made to feel guilty about pretty much everything, that set the stage for my thinking as an adult.

  When the very act of being a normal human is labeled bad and sinful, your guilt becomes an ever-present companion. Like Eeyore and his tail. I feel guilty for so much in my life, and sometimes I feel guilty even for feeling guilty. Thoreau said in Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Good Lord, yes, that’s been me. And when it comes to courage to break out, yes, I’ve been a failure. Don’t abused women do that, too? Just take it and hope things will get better?

  Feeling guilty was engineered into my mental operating system, but you know something? How can we really be all that bad if God put us here? Aren’t we defaming Him to suggest such a thing? Where does society get off deciding that human beings are inherently so bad and flawed and evil that we have to spend our lives feeling guilty about being us?

  Here I sit, three hundred and ten miles and an impenetrable distance above my planet, and it’s literally like pulling the lens back and getting a broader view. My God, it makes me want to yell at everyone down there: Don’t waste time feeling bad about being an imperfect human. Acknowledge your mistakes, correct them, and go on, but take the risk of enjoying what you’ve got, and be brave enough to change what doesn’t work. Don’t be depressed by those who want us all to feel guilty, about being busy, about being American, or about not conforming to someone else’s stereotype.

  And if I truly did have a bullhorn loud enough to be heard down there, I’d say one more thing, loud and clear: Tell your kids how much you love them and how proud you are of them, and spend as much time with them as you possibly can (it’s so sad how few of us really do that well). You see, I’ll never have another chance to tell my son and my daughters how much their dad loves them. But all those moms and dads down there still do. What a gift.

  Chapter 27

  KALGOORLIE-BOULDER, WESTERN AUSTRALIA, MAY 19,

  7:45 A.M. PACIFIC/10:45 P.M. WST

  The chances of remaining anonymous being slim to none, Alastair forces himself to head downstairs in search of his father. Scenes from the Green Mile come to mind as he contemplates the potential ferocity of his dad’s reaction.

  Dead boy walking! he thinks, feeling ill.

  It was hard enough to feign innocence this morning before school, especially with the arrival of two more e-mails from ABC, quickly deleted. But the live narrative from space he illegally uncovered is now a worldwide story, and even his father is captivated by it.

  Dad has spent the whole evening in front of the telly, darting to the kitchen to grab his food and return, one eye kept on the words crawling across the bottom of the screen.

  His mother, too, is hooked—worse than any soap opera. She, too, wanted to stay in front of the screen, so dinner became a can of heated chili.

  According to his father, the local search for the hacker who started it will be successful.

  “Why, Dad?” Alastair ask
s, trying hard to keep his voice from shaking.

  “Because, ultimately, the police will force the Internet provider involved to divulge the owner’s name. They may want to thank him, but they’ll probably prosecute him, too. If he was my kid, I’d probably strangle him with the cord to his mouse.”

  It was all Alastair could do to keep a plastic smile on his face and nod as his stomach twisted. He flew to his room, but another round of pleading e-mails from the Australian network pushed him past the tipping point, convincing him to confess now, rather than fessing up after a public discovery as they haul him to the nearest jail.

  “Dad?”

  His folks’ bedroom is dark and the door is open, and as he lets his eyes adjust, he can just make out his mother’s form under the covers, her long, sandy hair spilling over the side of the bed. His father’s side is empty, so he continues down the hallway to the living room, practicing his opening line.

  Dad, there’s something I have to tell you. No. Dad, I need to tell you something important. Dammit, no. Dad, sit down. I have a confession to make.

  The TV is still on, of course. He could hear it from his room. And his father is still in the same spot he was an hour ago, on the couch, leaning forward, his hands clasped, concentrating lest he miss reading a word. He’s wearing a pullover, and as Alastair draws closer he can see his father holding what looks like a handkerchief.

  The message on the screen is only one line long and moving, but he lets his eyes follow it for a second, recognizing enough to know that the man stuck in orbit—Kip—is talking about his son in the Air Force Academy again. Alastair doesn’t understand why the son is so angry, but the father’s remorse touches even Alastair’s tough father.

  “Dad?” he says, tentatively, barely above a whisper, as if failing to be heard could be an escape pass and he can flee back to his room.

  There’s no response, so he narrows the distance to five feet and tries again, forcing himself to speak louder.