Out of Orbit by Chris Jones Page B

sleeping bag, Pettit found himself thinking about coffee. As it had for the Russians before him, it was becoming a concern. He didn’t have anything like one hundred pouches anymore. But looking out through his window at another orbital sunrise, he decided to hell with it: this was the sort of morning that coffee was made for. He put on his glasses, pulled himself out of his sleeping bag, pushed his way out of his private quarters, and found his center of gravity. With it, he propelled himself in clean, practiced movements, like a swimmer who’s found his stroke, past a sleeping Bowersox, toward the far end of station. There, Budarin remained zipped away. Pettit opened the metal drawer that held his fixes and took out a pouch, a silver bag with powder packed hard into the bottom of it. He filled it with hot water and began hunting for a straw. He found one, as well as a little Russian
tvorog
to eat, and headed back for his sleeping bag. Pettit tucked himself in, savoring another breakfast in bed, and turned his mind toward the day ahead. It was a lazy Saturday. He’d finish his coffee, check his e-mail, and then spend the rest of his weekend cleaning house—scrubbing fingerprints from windows, wiping down handrails with antiseptic solution, even mopping up the occasional coffee splatter.But there wasn’t any hurry. Although he had sometimes felt like it was flying, he knew that time was the single thing he wasn’t really running out of. He was still weeks away from home.
    Pettit took another sip and watched the sun rise for a second time. The rush of it still drew him to the window, the sun coming and going every forty-five minutes, good for sixteen dawns and dusks a day. Next he looked down at the vapor trails that were folding on top of the United States like a quilt, the way they always did, one by one by one, New York to Los Angeles, Boston to San Francisco. They had become his way of catching a glimpse of home even when it was shrouded in storms. But on this day, the horizon was clear and the sun was bright, so bright that he didn’t notice the finger of white smoke spreading out over Texas.
    He finished his coffee. He got up and began puttering, checking his watch every so often to make sure he didn’t miss the ground conference scheduled for that afternoon. At about two o’clock, Greenwich mean time—sailors’ time, the official time zone of station—there was a conversation planned with Houston to draw up next week’s activities. Usually the voice coming out of the radio told the crew what they already knew, and they floated about, keeping their ears half open for news or drama. This time was different. This time, the voice told Expedition Six to stand by.
    There are two main rooms at Mission Control, next door to each other, almost identical in design but now cast under different shadows. In the first, from which the shuttle is commanded, the silence had turned hopeless, watering eyes turned toward the end of
Columbia
’s last orbit, a line left incomplete, frozen on the giant screen at the front of the room. In the second, from which the space station is tracked, and where numb technicians sat behind consoles labeled ODIN, OSO, ECLSS, ROBO, and a dozen other things, a heated debate was unfolding. No one was sure how to tell Expedition Six that
Columbia
, the shuttle that Bowersox had twice piloted, had just disappeared in the thin blue-green envelope beneath them. No one was sure how to tell them that seven friends were probably gone, too.
    Jefferson Howell, a retired marine lieutenant general and theplainspoken director of the Johnson Space Center, ended the debate when he sat down at the radio. He considered his words for only a moment before he pressed a button that would bounce his voice off a satellite and into the space station’s tinny air.
    “I have some bad news,” Howell began, and because it was Howell who was delivering it, Pettit and Bowersox knew exactly how bad before he got the rest