by Keith Graham
It was Christmas Eve and the alarms were sounding. An
emotionless female voice was saying, “Warning. This is not a drill. All station
personnel are to report to their radiation posts. All passengers are to report
to a designated protected area. There are seventeen minutes until dangerous
radiation conditions,” the message kept repeating, ticking down the minutes.
The intensity of Solar Flares had been building all year,
and this latest one seemed to be one of the largest. The passengers on board
Virginia Station in low lunar orbit made their way towards common room 4E that
was on the inner side of the rim. The common room, shielded by several meters
of the station's water supply in addition to the heavy aluminum bulkheads, was
one of the safest places on the station.
McDermott Whitman, correspondent for the Baltimore Sun,
wandered in early. As a resident of Virginia Station for nearly a month, this
was the third drill that he'd been through, and he had his bag of emergency
supplies packed and ready. Whitman had been waiting for a delayed connecting
ship to Ganymede that was stuck at Phobos station. The Flare would be dangerous
for anywhere from a few hours to a few days. His bag had a toothbrush, a clean
shirt, and a three-day supply of homegrown vodka purchased for an outrageous
amount of cash from one of the stewards.
Whitman's usual table was in the far corner. He could watch
the whole room from the table and take notes for an article he would never
write about the romance of space travel. His editors were getting insistent in
their demands for something from him to justify his salary, but the space
station was drab, the fellow travelers were uninteresting, and his recorder was
never working right.
One of the stewards brought in a Christmas tree made of wire
and green duct tape. He placed it on a table in the center of the room. A
passenger brought in a guitar and sat dangerously close to Whitman, who reached
into his bag under the table and poured himself a shot. Whitman figured it was
going to be a long night, and he should start in early on his Christmas cheer.
Whitman was a “Bah Humbug” kind of person at heart.
The acoustics of the room were poor. As the alarm began to
tick down the minutes and more passengers entered the room, the sound level
began to go up. People spoke louder to be heard above the background noise, and
the positive feedback soon brought the noise up to a roar.
A child began to cry near Whitman. It was a whining tone
that he recognized from one of his ex-marriages. It was the “I want something,
and you had better give it to me, or I'll make a scene” cry. He cursed silently
because he could see the family that owned the little whiner was heading for a
table right next to his. Whitman did not hate kids, he just didn't like being
near them.
McDermott Whitman was a sour faced man with rumpled clothes
and a three-day growth of beard who could rely on his looks to keep contact
with humanity to a minimum. The room, however, had filled up fast and the
tables next to his were the only empty ones left. He burped loudly and tasted
the vodka, hoping no one would want to share his table. If he were especially
lucky, the family with the kid would not want to communicate with him.
The heavy metal doors to the room slammed shut and everyone
quieted down all at once. The voice on the communication system announced, “Radiation
Storm Protocols now in place. Passengers are not to leave designated safe areas
until radiation levels return to safe minimums.”
There was a banging on the doors and a steward let a
straggler into the room. The conversations began again, but this time they were
hushed and subdued.
The kid at the next table whimpered as the family settled
in. The child's eyes roamed around the room in curiosity. She was clutching a
large doll with a 3-deo instead of a head, but the three-dimensional array was
dark. The arriving storm had shut down all net access.
The family consisted of a mother, a father, a child and an
older woman. The older woman was too old to be a nanny. Whitman guessed that
the parents had dragged Grandma along to care for the brat while they were at
work on jobs at the lunar science stations. Although she looked spry and not
far into her sixties, Whitman wondered how the family had obtained medical
clearance to bring her along.
The common room had a canteen and the stewards were going
around taking orders. The family asked for a Christmas dinner of rice and a
goulash that the staff had put together from a shipment of soy steaks and some
fresh vegetables. By eavesdropping, Whitman was able to learn that the little
girl's name was Susan and the older woman was the child's Grandmother. Whitman
noticed that one of the stewards shook the older woman's hand while saying a
few words that Whitman could not hear. The older woman laughed and nodded her
head.
When the meal came, Susan fussed and fidgeted all through
it. At first, she refused to eat and then demanded that they leave and go see
someone named Janice. The child banged the doll she had against the table and
asked her father to fix it. He tried to explain to her that the flare had
brought all the nets down, but she didn't understand.
Susan needed three trips to the bathroom during the meal and
refused to drink her milk without a straw. The child's poor behavior was
embarrassing, but everyone was willing to put up with it. Susan was obviously
over-tired from the prolonged travel, and Common Room 4E was not really a
child-friendly place.
After dinner, Susan settled down. The effects of the milk
and the dim lighting were helping her to relax. She looked around the room,
staring in turn at all the flare bound travelers around her.
Whitman watched the stewards, who were going from table to
table with mugs of cider. He caught the eye of one of them. When they came by,
he slipped the steward one of his precious bottles of vodka to warm up the
cider for anyone who wanted it. The steward smiled and winked as he took the
bottle.
Whitman smiled at the child when she looked at him. He must
have frightened her because she started up her siren again.
“Shush, Susan” Grandma said, petting the little girl while
trying to distract her from the scary man.
“I want my Saji-Kahn” Susan cried, shaking her doll.
“It won't work here. The network is down because of the
solar flare,” Grandmother explained. “Nothing will work until it passes.”
Susan just cried louder. Grandma took the Saji-Kahn doll and
placed on an empty seat. She then picked Susan up and sat her on her lap. The
small woman was not much larger than the little girl was.
“Now hush, and I'll tell you a story about Virginia Station.
The story is about a Christmas Eve a long time ago. It is a good story and not
many people know it. You should listen because you might have grandchildren
some day, and you will want to tell them the story.”
The little girl quieted down and leaned against her
grandmother. She released little hiccups from time to time as Grandmother
rocked her and rubbed her back.
This is the story that the grandmother told:
###
I worked here before they called it Virginia Station. Its
name at first was “The Lunar Low Orbital Station” or LLOS. I wasn't called
Grandmother then. I was called Noriko, and I was a junior structural engineer.
When I was 29, the Space Authority hired me to work on the station because I am
also an expert welder. As a student in San Francisco, I won art competitions
with some of the sculpture that I made with my welder. I thought they wanted
me, so I could make the station beautiful.
When I arrived at the station, I was the only girl in my
group. There were twelve welders, and they were all older and bigger than I
was. I was assigned sleeping quarters in the construction trailer, which was
really a temporary station to hold men and machines while the station was
built.
The Manager of the construction teams was a former astronaut
named Marshall Martine. He was an Air Force fighter pilot and engineer who flew
into space three times on the old shuttles. His job was to organize the
assembly of the station from the parts that arrived from the Earth and the
Moon. My job was to weld them together with my arc welder.
One by one, he gave orders to the welders. Each man got a
welding cart and a set of plans with his section outlined. Their orders were to
coordinate with the crews of wranglers who moved the girders and plates into
position. Each of us was an engineer and had special training on how to weld
the station together in the vacuum of space.
When Marshal came to me, he frowned. He was nearly two
meters tall and weighed over 100 kilograms, while I was only 155 centimeters
tall and weighed less than 50 kilograms. He did not frighten me, though, and I
asked, “Where do you want me to work?”
“I don't know what to do with you,” he said, “You'd never be
able to handle those structural units. They would crush you,” he shook his
head.
“There's more to it than that,” he said. “I just don't think
that you'd be useful in an emergency. For now, I am assigning you to quality
control inspections. I want you to stay in the trailer and prepare an
inspection schedule.”
“But I am a welder,” I protested, “I was sent here to weld!”
“I’ll tell you what to do,” he said gruffly. “Read your job
description. It says you are a welder, but you are also to work at ‘Related and
Lesser Duties’ if I tell you to.”
I was so disappointed. I wanted to work on Virginia Station
to build something beautiful. I hoped someday to come to Virginia Station with
my grandchildren, point to a wall or a floor, and say to them “See that weld? I
did that.”
But, I had very little to do. The inspection schedule was
already in the construction plans, and my job was to copy it out to a separate
document and link it to the production progress tables that the crews updated
each day. As each slice of the station was completed, I went out, checked the
welds, and measured the tolerances. There were hardly ever any problems. When
there were problems, I did not even get to fix them. The men worked twelve-hour
shifts and returned very tired. They had little to say to me. I was very bored
and very lonely.
Slowly the station came together. Structural aluminum and
titanium plating arrived from the moon every day. Supplies, materials,
millwork, and tools arrived from the earth every week. Men with new skills
arrived from Earth once a month, but I remained one of only a few women on the
construction crews and the only woman welder. Marshall Martine would not let me
weld, and I hated him for it.
The station began to look like a great wheel. When the
spokes and the central hub were nearly completed, I moved to a stateroom in the
hub.
Each day I went all the way around the station. I wore my
spacesuit all the time, even in the pressurized sections. The station was not
yet spinning, so there was no gravity. There were ropes strung through all the
passageways. I flew from place to place like a bird, using the ropes to guide
me. Virginia Station is a kilometer in circumference and the ring is 400 meters
wide. This is a large area and I had to check all of it. I x-rayed all the
welds at least once and checked off on my PIM as I visually inspected each
connection on a regular schedule. In space, the station gets very hot in the
sun and then very cool as it passes through the moon's shadow. Every few hours,
the welds are stressed, and any weld can break if there is even the smallest
flaw.
After about four months, the station shell was nearly
complete. It was Christmas Eve and there was a little party in the crew rooms.
Someone had made some home-brewed beer and a few of the men were drinking it.
Even though it was Christmas Eve, everyone had to work a
full shift. One of the wrangler crews that had sampled a little too much beer
was not as careful as they should have been. They lost control of a large
bundle of structural aluminum, and it bumped the station. It was a tiny bump,
but the accident made the girders vibrate slowly like a large rubber band. The
vibrations moved around the station, causing sympathetic vibrations in all
parts of the incomplete structure.
This was before the station was set to spinning, and it was
not as strong as it is now. A small section of the structural metal cracked and
some welds failed. As a section moved out of the moon's shadow and into the
sun, the expanding struts pushed the structural girders out, buckling the
titanium and causing loss of air containment in a pressurized area.
There was no one in the section at the time, but the loss of
air pressure caused many problems. Part of the design of the station required
that the passageways maintain air pressure. This gives them strength the way a
balloon has strength when blown up, but an empty balloon is just a floppy piece
of rubber.
The station lost its stability, but most of the welds held.
As the station circled the moon every five hours, it would stress itself
further by the expansion and contraction of the metal. I had to get out to the
outer ring, locate any possible points of failure, and reinforce them.
Most of the men scurried to the construction trailer to wait
for the vibrations to dampen down. I, however, went to a materials pile,
wrapped a couple of dozen pieces of aluminum angle stock with duct tape, and
grabbed a welding cart. The cart and the stock metal probably weighed more than
three of me.
I grabbed at the ropes running up one of the spokes to where
the computer said the damage was worse and started pulling myself with my load
up the passage. I passed work crews rushing down towards the hub to get to
safety. Some trades were working strictly in pressurized areas. They thought
that the suits were optional. Their supervisors had been very lax in letting
them work without suits.
When I reached the outer ring, you could hear the station
creaking. I grabbed at a joist and held on tight as I stopped, the inertia of
the metal bundle following me. The structural supports were very strong, but
the design was for zero gravity. The station was ten times stronger than it
needed to be, but structures were still very thin and light by Earth
construction standards. They bent and shivered as the station slowly settled
into its new configuration. Each time a bulkhead slipped, or a weld snapped, there
was a crack that sounded like a gunshot and vibrations rolled around and around
the kilometer of the station's rim, making it groan like an old man.
The station's total structural distortion ended up being
less than 40 centimeters, but at the time, it seemed like it was coming apart
at the seams. I tacked aluminum stock with my welder onto each of the four
places where the hub joined to the rim. I made the sure the jury-rigged braces
were holding and moved on to the next hub joint. There were eight hubs, each
125 meters apart. I zoomed down the rim at top speed, barely touching the
ropes. My welding cart and heavy bundle of stock came up behind me at the same
break-neck speed.
I nearly knocked Marshal Martine over when he came along,
speeding from the opposite direction. I struggled to stop the weight of my cart
and material from dragging me past him. I told him what I was doing. He had had
the same idea, but he was moving slower because he had to cannibalize other
structures to make braces. He had not been able to grab any stock. We went to
the next spoke together, and reinforced the joint. He held the metal in place
while I made quick spot welds.
“We're just about done here,” he said after we worked on two
more spokes, “but we passed a buckled section of bulkhead about 200 meters
back. I think I should go reinforce that before it looses air pressure.”
He zoomed off back the way he had come, and I went after
him. I had to go slower because I was towing a welding cart and a lot of mass
in aluminum stock.
When I caught up with Marshall, he was pushing hard against
a wrinkle in the titanium alloy skin that made up the station's bulkheads. A
weld had failed, and the skin had pulled loose from the short structural
members that held it stiff. The wrinkle was shiny where the protective paint
was flaking off. The stress cracks radiated out from a diagonal line that
crossed the whole wall. The thin metal still had a lot of strength, and I was
certain it would be able to hold as long as air pressure kept pushing it out
against the aluminum joists supporting it.
“Here, give me an angle beam,” he said, and I handed him a
3-meter length from the package I had been hauling. He placed it along the
corner where the wall meet the floor and pulled out his welder.
“Wait!” I yelled. Something was wrong. The air felt wrong
and there was a hiss coming from behind us. I had worked with oxyacetylene
torches, and I knew the feel of the air when pure oxygen escaped. I could not
smell it because I had my helmet on. Anyway, oxygen does not have a special
smell, except for the staleness of air that has been in a can for months. I
heard it, though. There was a sharp hissing coming from a line hidden somewhere
behind a wall. The air had a feel that I recognized. It was a kind of slipperiness.
There was a ruptured gas line somewhere and the air supply in the station was
oxygen and helium. The oxygen line had cracked!
Too late, Marshall looked up at me with a questioning look
on his face. He was snapping the tip of the welding rod against the bulkhead to
check for a good ground. The snap of the spark glowed brilliantly white for a
moment, and the wall burst into blinding flames.
The blast blew us back. In pure oxygen, everything burns.
The titanium alloy of the sheet metal glowed in colors from a bright yellow to
a pale violet. In zero gravity, things burn hotter because there are no
convectional air currents to cool the flame. The flame burns intensely until it
uses up the oxygen near it. The hot gases rush out, and then cooler air rushes
in, bringing new oxygen. The flame burned with an enormously loud put-put
motorboat sound.
Marshall's arm caught fire. He waved it around, looking for
some way to put it out, but it just flared. I leaped on him, knocking him over
and away from the flame. We went tumbling down the corridor away from the fire.
I wrapped myself around his arm as best I could, trying to deny the flame its
supply of oxygen.
Suddenly, the fire burned through the bulkhead and the air
rushed out of the passageway with a roar. The hard vacuum of space filled the
room as the emergency doors slammed closed. Then there was the silence of
vacuum. The fire had died as quickly as it had started.
I looked at Marshall. The material of the spacesuit arm was
burned away, showing raw skin and flesh. The exposed skin was turning dark
purple in the cold vacuum. His suit's air was leaking out through the rags of
his suit. He was unconscious. The emergency sphincter at the elbow was charred,
and it had failed. The shoulder joint had constricted, but was leaking. The
suit was designed to be fireproof, but pure oxygen will always find something
to burn if given a chance.
I grabbed my roll of duct tape from the welder's cart and
wrapped it around his arm and hand until the whole roll was gone.
I quickly checked my suit. There were char marks on the
front where the flame had touched it, but the suit was all in once piece and
intact.
I checked Marshall's air pressure gauges on his chest. The
tape stopped most of the leakage, but he was still loosing air. His hand and
arm needed immediate medical attention if they were to be saved at all. He had
only minutes of air left.
There was no way to get the emergency doors rolled back, and
we could not wait for a rescue crew. There was only one thing to do. I pulled
out the welder and set the voltage to cutting level. I put a cutting rod in the
bit and started to work on the bulkhead around the failed point. In moments,
there was a gap big enough for me to drag Marshall through.
When we got outside the passage and into space, I could see
the moon spinning by at dizzying speed below me. It looked like a giant gray
ball, taking up most of the sky, rolling in space. I could see the construction
trailer tied to the hub. The trailer had a doctor and a fully equipped hospital
designed for just this kind of emergency. The hospital was rarely used for
anything except a few bumps and bruises. Marshall had been a careful manager
and had a good safety record up to now.
I pushed off towards the trailer and using the jets in the
suit, I easily steered to the trailer's airlock. As I tried to get the lock
open and not lose hold of Marshall, he woke up, and I heard through the radio, “Thanks
Noriko. I guess I was wrong about you,” he smiled at me through the plastic of
the helmet, and I smiled back.
###
Grandma stopped talking and took a sip of the cider that had
arrived. The surrounding tables had grown quiet. She took a larger gulp of
cider and smiled at the little girl. All within earshot were listening to her
story. The little girl looked at her grandmother with new interest and
appreciation.
Just then, the all clear signal rang out, but few people
stood up to leave. The Christmas tree was almost complete and the stewards were
stringing popcorn to decorate it. There was a group at one side of the room
singing 'Adeste Fideles' very loud and out of key.
“Grandma!” the little girl called out, tugging on Noriko's
sleeve. “What happened to the mean man? Did he get better? What happened to his
arm?”
Everyone at the table laughed aloud at this. They had heard
the story many times. The little girl looked puzzled.
“Why, don't you know?” grandma laughed. “He recovered fully,
and his arm is just fine. While he was getting better, he put me to work
supervising all the repairs, and then I did all the finish welding myself.”
“I changed my mind about him. He turned out to be a very
nice person. And you know what?”
The little girl shook her head.
“Well, I liked him so well that I married him. Marshall
Martine is your grandfather. You'll have to call him when we get to the moon
and tell him that you like the station we built together.”
When Grandma finished telling her story, all the surrounding
tables started talking and laughing at once. A few people got up, introduced
themselves, and shook Noriko's hand, telling her how much they liked her story
and her beautiful station.
At midnight, the lights dimmed, and the homemade Christmas
tree was lit up with little red and green LED's from the station's stock of
repair parts. Everyone sang the old carols like “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer”,
“Silent Night”, and “Blue Christmas.”
When Whitman finally left his table, he was a little tipsy
and almost tripped navigating through the common room. Out in the main
passageway, Grandma, and her family were standing together, looking at the
wall. Grandma was saying, “See that weld dear, the little line in the wall. I
did that. It was over forty years ago, and it seems like yesterday.”
Little Susan ran a finger down the fine straight bead of the
weld and smiled.
Whitman asked the family to pose for a picture. For once,
the recorder seemed to be working correctly. He thought it would be a nice
Christmas present for his editor.
“Construction Worker Returns to Virginia Station After 40
Years” The headline would read.
Whitman figured that the old man would go for it. Now that
the solar flare had died down, the story might even arrive before Santa's
Sleigh.
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