Challenger Park by Stephen Harrigan

Author:Stephen Harrigan [Harrigan, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-26474-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nineteen

The International Space Station orbited the earth at a height of 240 miles and a speed of 17,500 miles per hour. It was 146 feet long, an ungainly assemblage of odd-shaped components—cylindrical living modules, rectangular solar arrays, cone-shaped air locks and mating adapters—that gave this fantastically engineered craft a look of haphazard inelegance. In the dream Lucy was having, the station was worse than inelegant, it was malevolent. Its hard surfaces and jumbled structural themes seemed like a deliberate mockery of organic coherence, a silent inhuman rebuke of everything made of flesh and blood. The only thing recognizable about it was its spreading solar arrays, which reminded Lucy of the unmoving wings of a dead moth.

The dream unfolded like a simulation. Lucy was on the flight deck of the shuttle, running through her checklists, positioning her body so that she could see past the commander’s and pilot’s positions to the forward windows, through which she watched the moth growing ominously larger as they approached. Lucy sensed something wrong, some glitch in the software, some leak somewhere in the thruster system. For some reason her children were on board, below her in the mid-deck. She could not see them but could hear them deliriously laughing as they floated about in weightlessness, unaware of the impending collision that only she could avert. She frantically paged through the checklists, but as soon as she drew near to solving the problem the checklist branched into multiple new subcategories, and she didn’t know which one to follow. She steeled herself and chose one at random, and it too soon diverged, sending out tendrils of procedures for shuttle systems whose properties she had never heard of or even imagined. She was lost in the checklist like a child lost in a smothering forest, unreliable paths leading off in every direction. She desperately listened for Walt’s patient voice to break in over the loop, explaining to her what she should do next, reassuring her that it was only a simulation. But she didn’t hear his voice, and the evil form of the space station kept drawing closer as her frantic mind grew hopeless.

It was when she began to hear the screams of her children from the mid-deck—Bethie calling out to her that she was afraid and that Davis couldn’t breathe—that she woke. Lucy was practical about nightmares. She had trained herself when she was a girl not to regard them as omens, and as an adult she had not much patience with the whole idea that there was any benefit in “interpreting” them. They were the discharges and spasms of an overstimulated brain, their themes were either glaringly obvious or hopelessly cryptic, and in any case they could be dismissed without fear of some sort of cosmic penalty. In the first few minutes after waking this morning, however, she had to ride this dream out. It still clung to her, and it took a while for her to be able to safely accept that it had not been real.

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