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Gravity
Tess Gerritsen
Copyright
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk
First published in the USA by Pocket Books 1999
Copyright © Tess Gerritsen 1999
Tess Gerritsen asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks
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Source ISBN: 9780006513087
Ebook Edition © JULY 2011 ISBN: 9780007370795
Version: 2016-10-05
To the men and women whohave made spaceflight a reality.
Mankind’s greatest achievements are launched on dreams.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
THE SEA
1
THE LAUNCH
2
3
4
5
6
THE STATION
7
8
THE SICKNESS
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
THE AUTOPSY
16
17
18
THE CHIMERA
19
20
21
22
23
24
THE ORIGIN
25
26
27
THE SEA
28
GLOSSARY
Keep Reading
Acknowledgments
TESS GERRITSEN
By the Same Author
About the Publisher
THE SEA
1
The Galápagos Rift
.30 Degrees South, 90.30 Degrees West
He was gliding on the edge of the abyss.
Below him yawned the watery blackness of a frigid underworld, where the sun had never penetrated, where the only light was the fleeting spark of a bioluminescent creature. Lying prone in the form-fitting body pan of Deep Flight IV, his head cradled in the clear acrylic nose cone, Dr Stephen D. Ahearn had the exhilarating sensation of soaring, untethered, through the vastness of space. In the beams of his wing lights he saw the gentle and continuous drizzle of organic debris falling from the light-drenched waters far above. They were the corpses of protozoans, drifting down through thousands of feet of water to their final graveyard on the ocean floor.
Gliding through that soft rain of debris, he guided Deep Flight along the underwater canyon’s rim, keeping the abyss to his port side, the plateau floor beneath him. Though the sediment was seemingly barren, the evidence of life was everywhere. Etched in the ocean floor were the tracks and plow marks of wandering creatures, now safely concealed in their cloak of sediment. He saw evidence of man as well: a rusted length of chain, sinuously draped around a fallen anchor; a soda pop bottle, half-submerged in ooze. Ghostly remnants from the alien world above.
A startling sight suddenly loomed into view. It was like coming across an underwater grove of charred tree trunks. The objects were blacksmoker chimneys, twenty-foot tubes formed by dissolved minerals swirling out of cracks in the earth’s crust. With the joysticks, he maneuvered Deep Flight gently starboard, to avoid the chimneys.
‘I’ve reached the hydrothermal vent,’ he said. ‘Moving at two knots, smoker chimneys to port side.’
‘How’s she handling?’ Helen’s voice crackled through his earpiece.
‘Beautifully. I want one of these babies for my own.’
She laughed. ‘Be prepared to write a very big check, Steve. You spot the nodule field yet? It should be dead ahead.’
Ahearn was silent for a moment as he peered through the watery murk. A moment later he said, ‘I see them.’
The manganese nodules looked like lumps of coal scattered across the ocean floor. Strangely, almost bizarrely, smooth, formed by minerals solidifying around stones or grains of sand, they were a highly prized source of titanium and other precious metals. But he ignored the nodules. He was in search of a prize far more valuable.
‘I’m heading down into the canyon,’ he said.
With the joysticks he steered Deep Flight over the plateau’s edge. As his velocity increased to two and a half knots, the wings, designed to produce the opposite effect of an airplane wing, dragged the sub downward. He began his descent into the abyss.
‘Eleven hundred meters,’ he counted off. ‘Eleven fifty…’
‘Watch your clearance. It’s a narrow rift. You monitoring water temperature?’
‘It’s starting to rise. Up to fifty-five degrees now.’
‘Still a ways from the vent. You’ll be in hot water in another two thousand meters.’
A shadow suddenly swooped right past Ahearn’s face. He flinched, inadvertently jerking the joystick, sending the craft rolling to starboard. The hard jolt of the sub against the canyon wall sent a clanging shock wave through the hull.
‘Jesus!’
‘Status?’ said Helen. ‘Steve, what’s your status?’
He was hyperventilating, his heart slamming in panic against the body pan. The hull. Have I damaged the hull? Through the harsh sound of his own breathing, he listened for the groan of steel giving way, for the fatal blast of water. He was thirty-six hundred feet beneath the surface, and over one hundred atmospheres of pressure were squeezing in on all sides like a fist. A breach in the hull, a burst of water, and he would be crushed.
‘Steve, talk to me!’
Cold sweat soaked his body. He finally managed to speak. ‘I got startled—collided with the canyon wall—’
‘Is there any damage?’
He looked out the dome. ‘I can’t tell. I think I bumped against the cliff with the forward sonar unit.’
‘Can you still maneuver?’
He tried the joysticks, nudging the craft to port. ‘Yes. Yes.’ He released a deep breath. ‘I think I’m okay. Something swam right past my dome. Got me rattled.’
‘Something?’
‘It went by so fast! Just this streak—like a snake whipping by.’
‘Did it look like a fish’s head on an eel’s body?’
‘Yes. Yes, that’s what I saw.’
‘Then it was an eelpout. Thermarces cerberus.’
Cerberus, thought Ahearn with a shudder. The three-headed dog guarding the gates of hell.
‘It’s attracted to the heat and sulfur,’ said Helen. ‘You’ll see more of them as you get closer to the vent.’
If you say so. Ahearn knew next to nothing about marine biology. The creatures now drifting past his acrylic head dome were merely objects of curiosity to him, living signposts pointing the way to his goal. With both hands steady at the controls now, he maneuvered Deep Flight IV deeper into the abyss.
Two thousand meters. Three thousand.
What if he had damaged the hull?
Four thousand meters, the crushing pressure of water increasing linearly as he descended. The water was blacker now, colored by plumes of sulfur from the vent below. The wing lights scarcely penetrated that thick mineral suspension. Blinded by the swirls of sediment, he maneuvered out of the sulfur-tinged water, and his visibility improved. He was descending to one side of the hydrothermal vent, out of the plume of magma-heated water, yet the external temperature continued to climb.
One hundred twenty degrees Fahrenheit.
Another streak of movement slashed across his field of vision. This time he managed to maintain his grip on the controls. He saw more eelpouts, like fat snakes hanging head down as though suspended in space. The water spewing from the vent below was rich in heated hydrogen sulfide, a chemical that was toxic and incompatible with life. But even in these black and poisonous waters, life had managed to bloom, in shapes fantastic and beautiful. Attached to the canyon wall were swaying Riftia worms, six feet long, topped with feathery scarlet headdresses. He saw clusters of giant clams, white-shelled, with tongues of velvety red peeking out. And he saw crabs, eerily pale and ghostlike as they scuttled among the crevices.
Even with the air-conditioning unit running, he was starting to feel the heat.
Six thousand meters. Water temperature one hundred eighty degrees. In the plume itself, heated by boiling magma, the temperatures would be over five hundred degrees. That life could exist even here, in utter darkness, in these poisonous and superheated waters, seemed miraculous.
‘I’m at six thousand sixty,’ he said. ‘I don’t see it.’
In his earphone, Helen’s voice was faint and crackling. ‘There’s a shelf jutting out from the wall. You should see it at around six thousand eighty meters.’
‘I’m looking.’
‘Slow your descent. It’ll come up quickly.’
‘Six thousand seventy, still looking. It’s like pea soup down here. Maybe I’m at the wrong position.’
‘…sonar readings…collapsing above you!’ Her frantic message was lost in static.
‘I didn’t copy that. Repeat.’
‘The canyon wall is giving way! There’s debris falling toward you. Get out of there!’
The loud pings of rocks hitting the hull made him jam the joysticks forward in panic. A massive shadow plummeted down through the murk just ahead and bounced off a canyon shelf, sending a fresh rain of debris into the abyss. The pings accelerated. Then there was a deafening clang, and the accompanying jolt was like a fist slamming into him.
His head jerked, his jaw slamming into the body pan. He felt himself tilting sideways, heard the sickening groan of metal as the starboard wing scraped over jutting rocks. The sub kept rolling, sediment swirling past the dome in a disorienting cloud.
He hit the emergency-weight-drop lever and fumbled with the joysticks, directing the sub to ascend. Deep Flight IV lurched forward, metal screeching against rock, and came to an unexpected halt. He was frozen in place, the sub tilted starboard. Frantically he worked at the joysticks, thrusters at full ahead.
No response.
He paused, his heart pounding as he struggled to maintain control over his rising panic. Why wasn’t he moving? Why was the sub not responding? He forced himself to scan the two digital display units. Battery power intact. AC unit still functioning. Depth gauge reading, six thousand eighty-two meters.
The sediment slowly cleared, and shapes took form in the beam of his port wing light. Peering straight ahead through the dome, he saw an alien landscape of jagged black stones and bloodred Riftia worms. He craned his neck sideways to look at his starboard wing. What he saw sent his stomach into a sickening tumble.
The wing was tightly wedged between two rocks. He could not move forward. Nor could he move backward. I am trapped in a tomb, nineteen thousand feet under the sea.
‘…copy? Steve, do you copy?’
He heard his own voice, weak with fear: ‘Can’t move—starboard wing wedged—’
‘…port-side wing flaps. A little yaw might wiggle you loose.’
‘I’ve tried it. I’ve tried everything. I’m not moving.’
There was dead silence over the earphones. Had he lost them? Had he been cut off? He thought of the ship far above, the deck gently rolling on the swells. He thought of sunshine. It had been a beautiful sunny day on the surface, birds gliding overhead. The sea a bottomless blue…
Now a man’s voice came on. It was that of Palmer Gabriel, the man who had financed the expedition, speaking calmly and in control, as always. ‘We’re starting rescue procedures, Steve. The other sub is already being lowered. We’ll get you up to the surface as soon as we can.’ There was a pause, then: ‘Can you see anything? What are your surroundings?’
‘I—I’m resting on a shelf just above the vent.’
‘How much detail can you make out?’
‘What?’
‘You’re at six thousand eighty-two meters. Right at the depth we were interested in. What about that shelf you’re on? The rocks?’
I am going to die, and he is asking about the fucking rocks.
‘Steve, use the strobe. Tell us what you see.’
He forced his gaze to the instrument panel and flicked the strobe switch.
Bright bursts of light flashed in the murk. He stared at the newly revealed landscape flickering before his retinas. Earlier he had focused on the worms. Now his attention shifted to the immense field of debris scattered across the shelf floor. The rocks were coal black, like magnesium nodules, but these had jagged edges, like congealed shards of glass. Peering to his right, at the freshly fractured rocks trapping his wing, he suddenly realized what he was looking at.
‘Helen’s right,’ he whispered.
‘I didn’t copy that.’
‘She was right! The iridium source—I have it in clear view—’
‘You’re fading out. Recommend you…’ Gabriel’s voice broke up into static and went dead.
‘I did not copy. Repeat, I did not copy!’ said Ahearn.
There was no answer.
He heard the pounding of his heart, the roar of his own breathing. Slow down, slow down. Using up my oxygen too fast…
Beyond the acrylic dome, life drifted past in a delicate dance through poisonous water. As the minutes stretched to hours, he watched the Riftia worms sway, scarlet plumes combing for nutrients. He saw an eyeless crab slowly scuttle across the field of stones.
The lights dimmed. The air-conditioning fans abruptly fell silent.
The battery was dying.
He turned off the strobe light. Only the faint beam of the port wing light was shining now. In a few minutes he would begin to feel the heat of that one-hundred-eighty-degree magma-charged water. It would radiate through the hull, would slowly cook him alive in his own sweat. Already he felt a drop trickle from his scalp and slide down his cheek. He kept his gaze focused on that single crab, delicately prancing its way across the stony shelf.
The wing light flickered.
And went out.
THE LAUNCH
2
July 7
Two Years Later
Abort.
Through the thunder of the solid propellant rocket boosters and the teeth-jarring rattle of the orbiter, the command abort sprang so clearly into Mission Specialist Emma Watson’s mind she might have heard it shouted through her comm unit. None of the crew had, in fact, said the word aloud, but in that instant she knew the choice had to be made, and quickly. She hadn’t heard the verdict yet from Commander Bob Kittredge or Pilot Jill Hewitt, seated in the cockpit in front of her. She didn’t need to. They had worked so long together as a team they could read each other’s minds, and the amber warning lights flashing on the shuttle’s flight console clearly dictated their next actions.
Seconds before, Endeavour had reached Max Q, the point during launch of greatest aerodynamic stress, when the orbiter, thrusting against the resistance of the atmosphere, begins to shudder violently. Kittredge had briefly throttled back to seventy percent to ease the vibrations. Now the console warning lights told them they’d lost two of their three main engines. Even with one main engine and two solid rocket boosters still firing, they would never make it to orbit.
They had to abort the launch.
‘Control, this is Endeavour,’ said Kittredge, his voice crisp and steady. Not a hint of apprehension. ‘Unable to throttle up. Left and center MEs* went out at Max Q. We are stuck in the bucket. Going to RTLS abort.’
‘Roger, Endeavour. We confirm two MEs* out. Proceed to RTLS abort after SRB burnout.’
Emma was already rifling through the stack of checklists, and she retrieved the card for ‘Return to Launch Site Abort.’ The crew knew every step of the procedure by heart, but in the frantic pace of an emergency abort, some vital action might be forgotten. The checklist was their security blanket.
Her heart racing, Emma scanned the appropriate path of action, clearly marked in blue. A two-engine-down RTLS abort was survivable—but only theoretically. A sequence of near miracles had to happen next. First they had to dump fuel and cut off the last main engine before separating from the huge external fuel tank. Then Kittredge would pitch the orbiter around to a heads-up attitude, pointing back toward the launch site. He would have one chance, and only one, to guide them to a safe touchdown at Kennedy. A single mistake would send Endeavour plunging into the sea.
Their lives were now in the hands of Commander Kittredge.
His voice, in constant communication with Mission Control, still sounded steady, even a little bored, as they approached the two-minute mark. The next crisis point. The CRT display flashed the Pc<50 signal. The solid rocket boosters were burning out, on schedule.
Emma felt it at once, the startling deceleration as the boosters consumed the last of the fuel. Then a brilliant flash of light in the window made her squint as the SRBs exploded away from the tank.
The roar of launch fell ominously silent, the violent shudder calming to a smooth, almost tranquil ride. In the abrupt calm, she was aware of her own pulse accelerating, her heart thudding like a fist against her chest restraint.
‘Control, this is Endeavour,’ said Kittredge, still unnaturally calm. ‘We have SRB sep.’
‘Roger, we see it.’
‘Initiating abort.’ Kittredge depressed the Abort push button, the rotary switch already positioned at the RTLS option.
Over her comm unit, Emma heard Jill Hewitt call out, ‘Emma, let’s hear the checklist!’
‘I’ve got it.’ Emma began to read aloud, and the sound of her own voice was as startlingly calm as Kittredge’s and Hewitt’s. Anyone listening to their dialogue would never have guessed they faced catastrophe. They had assumed machine mode, their panic suppressed, every action guided by rote memory and training. Their onboard computers would automatically set their return course. They were continuing downrange, still climbing to four hundred thousand feet as they dissipated fuel.
Now she felt the dizzying spin as the orbiter began its pitch-around maneuver, rolling tail over nose. The horizon, which had been upside down, suddenly righted itself as they turned back toward Kennedy, almost four hundred miles away.
‘Endeavour, this is Control. Go for main engine cutoff.’
‘Roger,’ responded Kittredge. ‘MECO now.’
On the instrument panel, the three engine status indicators suddenly flashed red. He had shut off the main engines, and in twenty seconds, the external fuel tank would drop away into the sea.
Altitude dropping fast, thought Emma. But we’re headed for home.
She gave a start. A warning buzzed, and new panel lights flashed on the console.
‘Control, we’ve lost computer number three!’ cried Hewitt. ‘We have lost a nav-state vector! Repeat, we’ve lost a nav-state vector!’
‘It could be an inertial-measurement malf,’ said Andy Mercer, the other mission specialist seated beside Emma. ‘Take it off-line.’
‘No! It might be a broken data bus!’ cut in Emma. ‘I say we engage the backup.’
‘Agreed,’ snapped Kittredge.
‘Going to backup,’ said Hewitt. She switched to computer number five.
The vector reappeared. Everyone heaved a sigh of relief.
The burst of explosive charges signaled the separation of the empty fuel tank. They couldn’t see it fall away into the sea, but they knew another crisis point had just passed. The orbiter was flying free now, a fat and awkward bird gliding homeward.
Hewitt barked, ‘Shit! We’ve lost an APU!’
Emma’s chin jerked up as a new buzzer sounded. An auxiliary power unit was out. Then another alarm screamed, and her gaze flew in panic to the consoles. A multitude of amber warning lights were flashing. On the video screens, all the data had vanished. Instead there were only ominous black and white stripes. A catastrophic computer failure. They were flying without navigation data. Without flap control.
‘Andy and I are on the APU malf!’ yelled Emma.
‘Reengage backup!’
Hewitt flicked the switch and cursed. ‘I’m getting no joy, guys. Nothing’s happening—’
‘Do it again!’
‘Still not reengaging.’
‘She’s banking!’ cried Emma, and felt her stomach lurch sideways.
Kittredge wrestled with the joystick, but they had already rolled too far starboard. The horizon reeled to vertical and flipped upside down. Emma’s stomach lurched again as they spun right side up. The next rotation came faster, the horizon twisting in a sickening whirl of sky and sea and sky.
A death spiral.
She heard Hewitt groan, heard Kittredge say, with flat resignation, ‘I’ve lost her.’
Then the fatal spin accelerated, plunging to an abrupt and shocking end.
There was only silence.
An amused voice said over their comm units, ‘Sorry, guys. You didn’t make it that time.’
Emma yanked off her headset. ‘That wasn’t fair, Hazel!’
Jill Hewitt chimed in with a protesting, ‘Hey, you meant to kill us. There was no way to save it.’
Emma was the first crew member to scramble out of the shuttle flight simulator. With the others right behind her, she marched into the windowless control room, where their three instructors sat at the row of consoles.
Team Leader Hazel Barra, wearing a mischievous smile, swiveled around to face Commander Kittredge’s irate crew of four. Though Hazel looked like a buxom earth mother with her gloriously frizzy brown hair, she was, in truth, a ruthless gameplayer who ran her flight crews through the most difficult of simulations and seemed to count it as a victory whenever the crew failed to survive. Hazel was well aware of the fact that every launch could end in disaster, and she wanted her astronauts equipped with the skills to survive. Losing one of her teams was a nightmare she hoped never to face.
‘That sim really was below the belt, Hazel,’ complained Kittredge.
‘Hey, you guys keep surviving. We have to knock down your cockiness a notch.’
‘Come on,’ said Andy. ‘Two engines down on liftoff? A broken data bus? An APU out? And then you throw in a failed number five computer? How many malfs and nits is that? It’s not realistic.’
Patrick, one of the other instructors, swiveled around with a grin. ‘You guys didn’t even notice the other stuff we did.’
‘What else was there?’
‘I threw in a nit on your oxygen tank sensor. None of you saw the change in the pressure gauge, did you?’
Kittredge gave a laugh. ‘When did we have time? We were juggling a dozen other malfunctions.’
Hazel raised a stout arm in a call for a truce. ‘Okay, guys. Maybe we did overdo it. Frankly, we were surprised you got as far as you did with the RTLS abort. We wanted to throw in another wrench, to make it more interesting.’
‘You threw in the whole damn toolbox,’ snorted Hewitt.
‘The truth is,’ said Patrick, ‘you guys are a little cocky.’
‘The word is confident,’ said Emma.
‘Which is good,’ Hazel admitted. ‘It’s good to be confident. You showed great teamwork at the integrated sim last week. Even Gordon Obie said he was impressed.’
‘The Sphinx said that?’ Kittredge’s eyebrow lifted in surprise. Gordon Obie was the director of Flight Crew Operations, a man so bafflingly silent and aloof that no one at JSC really knew him. He would sit through entire mission management meetings without uttering a single word, yet no one doubted he was mentally recording every detail. Among the astronauts, Obie was viewed with both awe and more than a little fear. With his power over final flight assignments, he could make or break your career. The fact that he had praised Kittredge’s team was good news indeed.
In her next breath, though, Hazel kicked the pedestal out from under them. ‘However,’ she said, ‘Obie is also concerned that you guys are too lighthearted about this. That it’s still a game to you.’
‘What does Obie expect us to do?’ said Hewitt. ‘Obsess over the ten thousand ways we could crash and burn?’
‘Disaster is not theoretical.’
Hazel’s statement, so quietly spoken, made them fall momentarily silent. Since Challenger, every member of the astronaut corps was fully aware that it was only a matter of time before there was another major mishap. Human beings sitting atop rockets primed to explode with five million pounds of thrust can’t afford to be sanguine about the hazards of their profession. Yet they seldom spoke about dying in space; to talk about it was to admit its possibility, to acknowledge that the next Challenger might carry one’s name on the crew roster.
Hazel realized she’d thrown a damper on their high spirits. It was not a good way to end a training session, and now she backpedaled on her earlier criticism.
‘I’m only saying this because you guys are already so well integrated. I have to work hard to trip you up. You’ve got three months till launch, and you’re already in good shape. But I want you in even better shape.’
‘In other words, guys,’ said Patrick from his console. ‘Not so cocky.’
Bob Kittredge dipped his head in mock humility. ‘We’ll go home now and put on the hair shirts.’
‘Overconfidence is dangerous,’ said Hazel. She rose from the chair and stood up to face Kittredge. A veteran of three shuttle flights, Kittredge was half a head taller, and he had the confident bearing of a naval pilot, which he had once been. Hazel was not intimidated by Kittredge, or by any of her astronauts. Whether they were rocket scientists or military heroes, they inspired in her the same maternal concern: the wish that they make it back from their missions alive.
She said, ‘You’re so good at command, Bob, you’ve lulled your crew into thinking it’s easy.’
‘No, they make it look easy. Because they’re good.’
‘We’ll see. The integrated sim’s on for Tuesday, with Hawley and Higuchi aboard. We’ll be pulling some new tricks out of the hat.’
Kittredge grinned. ‘Okay, try to kill us. But be fair about it.’
‘Fate seldom plays fair,’ Hazel said solemnly. ‘Don’t expect me to.’
Emma and Bob Kittredge sat in a booth in the Fly By Night saloon, sipping beers as they dissected the day’s simulations. It was a ritual they’d established eleven months ago, early in their team building, when the four of them had first come together as the crew for shuttle flight 162. Every Friday evening, they would meet in the Fly By Night, located just up NASA Road 1 from Johnson Space Center, and review the progress of their training. What they’d done right, what still needed improvement. Kittredge, who’d personally selected each member of his crew, had started the ritual. Though they were already working together more than sixty hours a week, he never seemed eager to go home. Emma had thought it was because the recently divorced Kittredge now lived alone and dreaded returning to his empty house. But as she’d come to know him better, she realized these meetings were simply his way of prolonging the adrenaline high of his job. Kittredge lived to fly. For sheer entertainment he read the painfully dry shuttle manuals. He spent every free moment at the controls of one of NASA’s T-38s. It was almost as if he resented the force of gravity binding his feet to the earth.
He couldn’t understand why the rest of his crew might want to go home at the end of the day, and tonight he seemed a little melancholy that just the two of them were sitting at their usual table in the Fly By Night. Jill Hewitt was at her nephew’s piano recital, and Andy Mercer was home celebrating his tenth wedding anniversary. Only Emma and Kittredge had shown up at the appointed hour, and now that they’d finished hashing over the week’s sims, there was a long silence between them. The conversation had run out of shop talk and therefore out of steam.
‘I’m taking one of the T-38s up to White Sands tomorrow,’ he said. ‘You want to join me?’
‘Can’t. I have an appointment with my lawyer.’
‘So you and Jack are forging ahead with it?’
She sighed. ‘The momentum’s established. Jack has his lawyer, and I have mine. This divorce has turned into a runaway train.’
‘It sounds like you’re having second thoughts.’
Firmly she set down her beer. ‘I don’t have any second thoughts.’
‘Then why’re you still wearing his ring?’
She looked down at the gold wedding band. With sudden ferocity she tried to yank it off, but found it wouldn’t budge. After seven years on her finger, the ring seemed to have molded itself to her flesh, refusing to be dislodged. She cursed and gave another tug, this time pulling so hard the ring scraped off skin as it slid over her knuckle. She set the ring down on the table. ‘There. A free woman.’
Kittredge laughed. ‘You two have been dragging out your divorce longer than I was married. What are you two still haggling over, anyway?’
She sank back in her chair, suddenly weary. ‘Everything. I admit it, I haven’t been reasonable either. A few weeks ago, we tried to sit down and make a list of all our possessions. What I want, what he wants. We promised ourselves we were going to be civilized about it. Two calm and mature adults. Well, by the time we got halfway down the list, it was out-and-out war. Take no prisoners.’ She sighed. In truth, that was the way she and Jack had always been. Equally obstinate, fiercely passionate. Whether in love or at war, the sparks were always flying between them. ‘There was only one thing we could both agree on,’ she said. ‘I get to keep the cat.’
‘Lucky you.’
She looked at him. ‘Do you ever have any regrets?’
‘You mean about my divorce? Never.’ Though his answer was flatly unequivocal, his gaze had dropped, as though he was trying to hide a truth they both knew: he was still mourning the failure of his marriage. Even a man fearless enough to strap himself atop millions of pounds of explosive fuel could suffer from an ordinary case of loneliness.
‘This is the problem, you see. I’ve finally figured it out,’ he said. ‘Civilians don’t understand us because they can’t share the dream. The only ones who’ll stay married to an astronaut are the saints and the martyrs. Or the ones who just don’t give a shit whether we live or die.’ He gave a bitter laugh. ‘Bonnie, she was no martyr. And she sure as hell didn’t understand the dream.’
Emma stared down at her wedding ring, gleaming on the table. ‘Jack understands it,’ she said softly. ‘It was his dream too. That’s what ruined it for us, you know. That I’m going up and he can’t. That he’s the one left behind.’
‘Then he needs to grow up and face reality. Not everyone’s got the right stuff.’
‘You know, I really wish you wouldn’t refer to him as some sort of reject.’
‘Hey, he’s the one who resigned.’
‘What else could he do? He knew he wasn’t going to get any flight assignments. If they won’t let you fly, there’s no point being in the corps.’
‘They grounded him for his own good.’
‘It was medical guesswork. Having one kidney stone doesn’t mean you’ll get another.’
‘Okay, Dr Watson. You’re the physician. Tell me this: Would you want Jack on your shuttle crew? Knowing his medical problem?’
She paused. ‘Yes. As a physician, yes, I would. Chances are, Jack would do perfectly fine in space. He has so much to offer I can’t imagine why they wouldn’t want him up there. I may be divorcing him, but I do respect him.’
Kittredge laughed and then drained his beer mug. ‘You’re not exactly objective about this, are you?’
She started to argue the point, then realized she had no defense. Kittredge was right. Where Jack McCallum was concerned, she had never been objective.
Outside, in the humid heat of a Houston summer night, she stopped in the Fly By Night’s parking lot and glanced up at the sky. The glare of city lights washed out the stars, but she could still make out comfortingly familiar constellations. Cassiopeia and Andromeda and the Seven Sisters. Every time she looked at them, she remembered what Jack had told her as they’d lain side by side on the grass one summer night, gazing at the stars. The night she had first realized she was in love with him. The heavens are full of women, Emma. You belong up there too.
She said, softly, ‘So do you, Jack.’
She unlocked her car and slid into the driver’s seat. Reaching into her pocket, she fished out the wedding ring. Gazing at it in the gloom of her car, she thought of the seven years of marriage it represented. Almost over now.
She slipped the ring back into her pocket. Her left hand felt naked, exposed. I’ll have to get used to it, she thought, and started the car.
*There is a Glossary at the end of this book that contains many of these abbreviations.
3
July 10
Dr Jack McCallum heard the scream of the first ambulance siren and said, ‘It’s show time, folks!’ Stepping outside to the ER loading dock, he felt his pulse kick into a tachycardia, felt the jolt of adrenaline priming his nervous system into crackling live wires. He had no idea what was coming to Miles Memorial Hospital, only that there was more than one patient on the way. Over the ER radio they’d been told a fifteen-car pileup on I-45 had left two fatalities at the scene and a score of injured. Although the most critical patients would be taken to Bayshore or Texas Med, all the area’s smaller hospitals, including Miles Memorial, were braced for the overflow.
Jack glanced around the ambulance dock to confirm his team was ready. The other ER doctor, Anna Slezak, stood right beside him, looking grimly pugnacious. Their support staff included four nurses, a lab runner, and a scared-looking intern. Only a month out of med school, the intern was the greenest member of the ER team and hopelessly fumble-fingered. Destined for the field of psychiatry, thought Jack.
The siren cut off with a whoop as the ambulance swung up the ramp and backed up to the dock. Jack yanked open the rear door and got his first glimpse of the patient—a young woman, head and neck immobilized in a cervical collar, her blond hair matted with blood. As they pulled her out of the ambulance and he got a closer look at her face, Jack felt the sudden chill of recognition.
‘Debbie,’ he said.
She looked up at him, her gaze unfocused, and did not seem to know who he was.
‘It’s Jack McCallum,’ he said.
‘Oh. Jack.’ She closed her eyes and groaned. ‘My head hurts.’
He gave her a comforting pat on the shoulder. ‘We’ll take good care of you, sweetheart. Don’t worry about a thing.’
They wheeled her through the ER doors, toward the trauma room.
‘You know her?’ Anna asked him.
‘Her husband’s Bill Haning. The astronaut.’
‘You mean one of the guys up on the space station?’ Anna laughed. ‘Now, there’s a long distance phone call.’
‘It’s no problem reaching him, if we have to. JSC can put a call right through.’
‘You want me to take this patient?’ It was a reasonable question to ask. Doctors usually avoided treating friends and family; you cannot remain objective when the patient in cardiac arrest on the table is someone you know and like. Although he and Debbie had once attended the same social functions, Jack considered her merely an acquaintance, not a friend, and he felt comfortable acting as her physician.
‘I’ll take her,’ he said, and followed the gurney into the trauma room. His mind was already leaping ahead to what needed to be done. Her only visible injury was the scalp laceration, but since she had clearly suffered trauma to her head, he had to rule out fractures of the skull and cervical spine.
As the nurses drew blood for labs and gently pulled off the rest of Debbie’s clothing, the ambulance attendant gave Jack a quick history.
‘She was about the fifth car in the pileup. Far as we could tell, she got rear-ended, her car spun sideways, and then she got hit again, on the driver’s side. Door was caved in.’
‘Was she awake when you got to her?’
‘She was unconscious for a few minutes. Woke up while we were putting in the IV. We got her spine immobilized right away. BP and heart rhythm have been stable. She’s one of the lucky ones.’ The attendant shook his head. ‘You should’ve seen the guy behind her.’
Jack moved to the gurney to examine the patient. Both of Debbie’s pupils reacted to light, and her extraocular movements were normal. She knew her own name and where she was, but could not recall the date. Oriented only times two, he thought. It was reason enough to admit her, if only for overnight observation.
‘Debbie, I’m going to send you for X rays,’ he said. ‘We need to make sure you haven’t fractured anything.’ He looked at the nurse. ‘Stat CT, skull, and C-spine. And…’ He paused, listening.
Another ambulance siren was approaching.
‘Get those films done,’ he ordered, and trotted back outside to the loading dock, where his staff had reassembled.
A second siren, fainter, had joined the first wail. Jack and Anna glanced at each other in alarm. Two ambulances on the way?
‘It’s going to be one of those days,’ he muttered.
‘Trauma room cleared out?’ asked Anna.
‘Patient’s on her way to X-ray.’ He stepped forward as the first ambulance backed up. The instant it rolled to a stop, he yanked open the door.
It was a man this time, middle-aged and overweight, his skin pale and clammy. Going into shock was Jack’s first assessment, but he saw no blood, no signs of injury.
‘He was one of the fender benders,’ said the EMT as they wheeled the man into the treatment room. ‘Got chest pain when we pulled him out of his car. Rhythm’s been stable, a little tachycardic, but no PVCs. Systolic’s ninety. We gave morphine and nitro at the scene, and oxygen’s going at six liters.’
Everyone was right on the ball. While Anna took the history and physical, the nurses hooked up the cardiac leads. An EKG blipped out of the machine. Jack tore off the sheet and immediately focused on the ST elevations in leads V1 and V2.
‘Anterior MI,’ he said to Anna.
She nodded. ‘I figured he was a tPA special.’
A nurse called through the doorway, ‘The other ambulance is here!’
Jack and two nurses ran outside.
A young woman was screaming and writhing on the stretcher. Jack took one look at her shortened right leg, the foot rotated almost completely sideways, and knew this patient was going straight to surgery. Jack quickly cut away her clothes, to reveal an impacted hip fracture, her thigh bone rammed into the socket by the force of her knees hitting the car’s dashboard. Just looking at her grotesquely deformed leg made him queasy.
‘Morphine?’ the nurse asked.
He nodded. ‘Give her as much as she needs. She’s in a world of hurt. Type and cross six units. And get an orthopod in here as soon as—’
‘Dr McCallum, stat, X-ray. Dr McCallum, stat, X-ray.’
Jack glanced up in alarm. Debbie Haning. He ran out of the room.
He found Debbie lying on the X-ray table, hovered over by the ER nurse and the technician.
‘We’d just finished doing the spine and skull films,’ said the tech, ‘and we couldn’t wake her up. She doesn’t even respond to pain.’
‘How long’s she been out?’
‘I don’t know. She was lying on the table ten, fifteen minutes before we noticed she wasn’t talking to us anymore.’
‘Did you get the CT scan done?’
‘Computer’s down. It should be up and running in a few hours.’
Jack flashed a penlight in Debbie’s eyes and felt his stomach go into a sickening free fall. Her left pupil was dilated and unreactive.
‘Show me the films,’ he said.
‘C-spine’s already up on the light box.’
Jack swiftly moved into the next room and eyed the X rays clipped to the backlit viewing box. He saw no fractures on the neck films; her cervical spine was stable. He yanked down the neck films and replaced them with the skull X rays. At first glance he saw nothing immediately obvious. Then his gaze focused on an almost imperceptible line tracing across the left temporal bone. It was so subtle it looked like a pin scratch on the film. A fracture.
Had the fracture torn the left middle meningeal artery? That would cause bleeding inside her cranium. As the blood accumulated and pressure built up, the brain would be squeezed. It explained the rapid deterioration of her mental status and the blown pupil.
The blood had to be drained at once.
‘Get her back to ER!’ he said.
Within seconds they had Debbie strapped to the gurney and were wheeling her at a run down the hallway. As they swung her into an empty treatment room, he yelled to the clerk, ‘Page neurosurgery stat! Tell them we have an epidural bleed, and we’re prepping for emergency burr holes.’
He knew what Debbie really needed was the operating room, but her condition was deteriorating so quickly they had no time to wait. The treatment room would have to serve as their OR. They slid her onto the table and attached a tangle of EKG leads to her chest. Her breathing had turned erratic; it was time to intubate.
He had just torn open the package containing the endotracheal tube when a nurse said, ‘She’s stopped breathing!’
He slipped the laryngoscope into Debbie’s throat. Seconds later, the ET tube was in place and oxygen was being bagged into her lungs.
A nurse plugged in the electric shaver. Debbie’s blond hair began to fall to the floor in silky clumps, exposing the scalp.
The clerk poked her head in the room. ‘Neurosurgeon’s stuck in traffic! He can’t get here for at least another hour.’
‘Then get someone else!’
‘They’re all at Texas Med! They’ve got all the head injuries.’
Jesus, we’re screwed, thought Jack, looking down at Debbie. Every minute that went by, the pressure inside her skull was building. Brain cells were dying. If this was my wife, I wouldn’t wait. Not another second.
He swallowed hard. ‘Get out the Hudson brace drill. I’ll do the burr holes myself.’ He saw the nurses’ startled looks, and added, with more bravado than he was feeling. ‘It’s like drilling holes in a wall. I’ve done it before.’
While the nurses prepped the newly shorn scalp, Jack put on a surgical gown and snapped on gloves. He positioned the sterile drapes and was amazed to find his hands were still steady, even while his heart was racing. It was true he had drilled burr holes before, but only once, and it was years ago, under the supervision of a neurosurgeon.
There’s no more time. She’s dying. Do it.
He reached for the scalpel and made a linear incision in the scalp, over the left temporal bone. Blood oozed out. He sponged it away and cauterized the bleeders. With a retractor holding back the skin flap, he sliced deeper through the galea and reached the pericranium, which he scraped back, exposing the skull surface.
He picked up the Hudson brace drill. It was a mechanical device, powered by hand and almost antique looking, the sort of tool you might find in your grandfather’s woodshop. First he used the perforator, a spade-shaped drill bit that dug just deeply enough into the bone to establish the hole. Then he changed to the rose bit, round-tipped, with multiedged burrs. He took a deep breath, positioned the bit, and began to drill deeper. Toward the brain. The first beads of sweat broke out on his forehead. He was drilling without CT confirmation, acting purely on his clinical judgment. He did not even know if he was tapping the right spot.
A sudden gush of blood spilled out of the hole and splattered the surgical drapes.
A nurse handed him a basin. He withdrew the drill and watched as a steady stream of red drained out of the skull and gathered in a glistening pool in the basin. He’d tapped the right place. With every trickle of blood, the pressure was easing from Debbie Haning’s brain.
He released a deep breath, and the tension suddenly eased from his shoulders, leaving his muscles spent and aching.
‘Get the bone wax ready,’ he said. Then he put down the drill and reached for the suction catheter.
A white mouse hung in midair, as though suspended in a transparent sea. Dr Emma Watson drifted toward it, slender-limbed and graceful as an underwater dancer, the curlicue strands of her dark brown hair splayed out in a ghostly halo. She grasped the mouse and slowly spun around to face the camera. She held up a syringe and needle.
The footage was over two years old, filmed aboard the shuttle Atlantis during STS 141, but it remained Gordon Obie’s favorite PR film, which is why it was now playing on all the video monitors in NASA’s Teague Auditorium. Who wouldn’t enjoy watching Emma Watson? She was quick and lithe, and she possessed what one could only call sparkle, with the fire of curiosity in her eyes. From the tiny scar over her eyebrow, to the slightly chipped front tooth (a souvenir, he’d heard, of reckless skiing) her face was a record of an exuberant life. But to Gordon, her primary appeal was her intelligence. Her competence. He had been following Emma’s NASA career with an interest that had nothing to do with the fact she was an attractive woman.
As director of Flight Crew Operations, Gordon Obie wielded considerable power over crew selection, and he strove to maintain a safe—some would call it heartless—emotional distance from all his astronauts. He had been an astronaut himself, twice a shuttle commander, and even then he’d been known as the Sphinx, an aloof and mysterious man not given to small talk. He was comfortable with his own silence and relative anonymity. Although he was now sitting onstage with an array of NASA officials, most of the people in the audience did not know who Gordon Obie was. He was here merely for set decoration. Just as the footage of Emma Watson was set decoration, an attractive face to hold the audience’s interest.
The video suddenly ended, replaced on the screen with the NASA logo, affectionately known as the meatball, a star-spangled blue circle embellished with an orbital ellipse and a forked slash of red. NASA administrator Leroy Cornell and JSC director Ken Blankenship stepped up to the lectern to field questions. Their mission, quite bluntly, was to beg for money, and they faced a skeptical gathering of congressmen and senators, members of the various subcommittees that determined NASA’s budget. For the second straight year, NASA had suffered devastating cutbacks, and lately an air of abject gloom wafted through the halls of Johnson Space Center.
Gazing at the audience of well-dressed men and women, Gordon felt as though he were staring at an alien culture. What was wrong with these politicians? How could they be so shortsighted? It bewildered him that they did not share his most passionate belief: What sets the human race apart from the beasts is man’s hunger for knowledge. Every child asks the universal question: Why? They are programmed from birth to be curious, to be explorers, to seek scientific truths.
Yet these elected officials had lost the curiosity that makes man unique. They’d come to Houston not to ask why, but why should we?
It was Cornell’s idea to woo them with what he cynically called ‘the Tom Hanks tour,’ a reference to the movie Apollo 13, which still ranked as the best PR NASA had ever known. Cornell had already presented the latest achievements aboard the orbiting International Space Station. He’d let them shake the hands of some real live astronauts. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted? To touch a golden boy, a hero? Next there’d be a tour of Johnson Space Center, starting with Building 30 and the Flight Control Room. Never mind the fact that this audience couldn’t tell the difference between a flight console and a Nintendo set; all that gleaming technology would surely dazzle them and make them true believers.
But it isn’t working, thought Gordon in dismay. These politicians aren’t buying it.
NASA faced powerful opponents, starting with Senator Phil Parish, sitting in the front row. Seventysix years old, an uncompromising hawk from South Carolina, Parish’s first priority was preserving the defense budget, NASA be damned. Now he hauled his three-hundred-pound frame out of his seat and stood up to address Cornell in a gentleman’s drawl.
‘Your agency is billions of dollars overbudget on that space station,’ he said. ‘Now, I don’t think the American people expected to sacrifice their defense capabilities just so you can tinker around up there with your nifty lab experiments. This is supposed to be an international effort, isn’t it? Well, far as I can see, we-all are picking up most of the tab. How am I supposed to justify this white elephant to the good folks of South Carolina?’
NASA administrator Cornell responded with a camera-ready smile. He was a political animal, the glad-hander whose personal charm and charisma made him a star with the press and in Washington, where he spent most of his time cajoling Congress and the White House for more money, ever more money, to fund the space agency’s perennially insufficient budget. His was the public face of NASA, while Ken Blankenship, the man in charge of day-to-day operations at JSC, was the private face known only to agency insiders. They were the yin and yang of NASA leadership, so completely different in temperament it was hard to imagine how they functioned as a team. The inside joke at NASA was that Leroy Cornell was all style and no substance, and Blankenship was all substance and no style.
Cornell smoothly responded to Senator Parish’s question. ‘You asked why other countries aren’t contributing. Senator, the answer is, they already have. This truly is an international space station. Yes, the Russians are badly strapped for cash. Yes, we had to make up the difference. But they’re committed to this station. They’ve got a cosmonaut up there now, and they have every reason to help us keep ISS running. As for why we need the station, just look at the research that’s being conducted in biology and medicine. Materials science. Geophysics. We’ll see the benefits of this research in our own lifetimes.’
Another member of the audience stood, and Gordon felt his blood pressure rise. If there was anyone he despised more than Senator Parish, it was Montana congressman Joe Bellingham, whose Marlboro Man good looks couldn’t disguise the fact he was a scientific moron. During his last campaign, he’d demanded that public schools teach Creationism. Throw out the biology books and open the Bible instead. He probably thinks rockets are powered by angels.
‘What about all that sharing of technology with the Russians and Japanese?’ said Bellingham. ‘I’m concerned that we’re giving away high-tech secrets for free. This international cooperation sounds high-minded and all, but what’s to stop them from turning right around and using the knowledge against us? Why should we trust the Russians?’
Fear and paranoia. Ignorance and superstition. There was too much of it in the country, and Gordon grew depressed just listening to Bellingham. He turned away in disgust.
That’s when he noticed a somber-faced Hank Millar step into the auditorium. Millar was head of the Astronaut Office. He looked straight at Gordon, who understood at once that a problem was brewing.
Quietly Gordon left the stage, and the two men stepped out into the hallway. ‘What’s going on?’
‘There’s been an accident. It’s Bill Haning’s wife. We hear it doesn’t look good.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Bob Kittredge and Woody Ellis are waiting over in Public Affairs. We all need to talk.’
Gordon nodded. He glanced through the auditorium door at Congressman Bellingham, who was still blathering on about the dangers of sharing technology with the Commies. Grimly he followed Hank out the auditorium exit and across the courtyard, to the next building.
They met in a back office. Kittredge, the shuttle commander for STS 162, was flushed and agitated. Woody Ellis, flight director for the International Space Station, appeared far calmer, but then, Gordon had never seen Ellis look upset, even in the midst of crisis.
‘How serious was the accident?’ Gordon asked.
‘Mrs Haning’s car was in a giant pileup on I-45,’ said Hank. ‘The ambulance brought her over to Miles Memorial. Jack McCallum saw her in the ER.’
Gordon nodded. They all knew Jack well. Although he was no longer in the astronaut corps, Jack was still on NASA’s active flight surgeon roster. A year ago, he had pulled back from most of his NASA duties, to work as an ER physician in the private sector.
‘Jack’s the one who called our office about Debbie,’ said Hank.
‘Did he say anything about her condition?’
‘Severe head injury. She’s in ICU, in a coma.’
‘Prognosis?’
‘He couldn’t answer that question.’ There was a silence as they all considered what this tragedy meant to NASA. Hank sighed. ‘We’re going to have to tell Bill. We can’t keep this news from him. The problem is…’ He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to; they all understood the problem.
Bill Haning was now in orbit aboard ISS, only a month into his scheduled four-month stay. This news would devastate him. Of all the factors that made prolonged habitation in space difficult, it was the emotional toll that NASA worried about most. A depressed astronaut could wreak havoc on a mission. Years before, on Mir, a similar situation had occurred when Cosmonaut Volodya Dezhurov was informed of his mother’s death. For days, he’d shut himself away in one of Mir’s modules and refused to speak to Mission Control Moscow. His grief had disrupted the work of everyone aboard Mir.
‘They have a very close marriage,’ said Hank. ‘I can tell you now, Bill’s not going to handle this well.’
‘You’re recommending we replace him?’ asked Gordon.
‘At the next scheduled shuttle flight. He’ll have a tough enough time being stuck up there for the next two weeks. We can’t ask him to serve out his full four months.’ Hank added quietly, ‘They have two young kids, you know.’
‘His backup for ISS is Emma Watson,’ said Woody Ellis. ‘We could send her up on STS 160. With Vance’s crew.’
At the mention of Emma’s name, Gordon was careful not to reveal any sign of special interest. Any emotion whatsoever. ‘What do you think about Watson? Is she ready to go up three months early?’
‘She’s slated to relieve Bill. She’s already up to speed on most of the onboard experiments. So I think that option is viable.’
‘Well, I’m not happy about it,’ said Bob Kittredge.
Gordon gave a tired sigh and turned to the shuttle commander. ‘I didn’t think you would be.’
‘Watson’s an integral part of my crew. We’ve crystallized as a team. I hate to break it up.’
‘Your team’s three months away from launch. You have time to make adjustments.’
‘You’re making my job hard.’
‘Are you saying you can’t get a new team crystallized in that time?’
Kittredge’s mouth tightened. ‘All I’m saying is, my crew is already a working unit. We’re not going to be happy about losing Watson.’
Gordon looked at Hank. ‘What about the STS 160 crew? Vance and his team?’
‘No problem from their end. Watson would just be another passenger on middeck. They’d deliver her to ISS like any other payload.’
Gordon thought it over. They were still talking about options, not certainties. Perhaps Debbie Haning would wake up fine and Bill could stay on ISS as scheduled. But like everyone else at NASA, Gordon had taught himself to plan for every contingency, to carry in his head a mental flow chart of what actions to follow should a, b, or c occur.
He looked at Woody Ellis for final confirmation. Woody gave a nod.
‘Okay,’ said Gordon. ‘Find me Emma Watson.’
She spotted him at the far end of the hospital hallway. He was talking to Hank Millar, and though his back was turned to her and he was wearing standard green surgical scrubs, Emma knew it was Jack. Seven years of marriage had left ties of familiarity that went beyond the mere recognition of his face.
This was, in fact, the same view she’d had of Jack McCallum the first time they’d met, when they’d both been ER residents in San Francisco General Hospital. He had been standing at the nurses’ station, writing in a chart, his broad shoulders sloping from fatigue, his hair ruffled as though he’d just rolled out of bed. In fact, he had; it was the morning after a hectic night on call, and though he was unshaven and bleary-eyed, when he’d turned and looked at her for the first time, the attraction between them had been instantaneous.
Now Jack was ten years older, his dark hair was threaded with gray, and fatigue was once again weighing down on his shoulders. She had not seen him in three weeks, had spoken to him only briefly on the phone a few days ago, a conversation that had deteriorated into yet another noisy disagreement. These days they could not seem to be reasonable with each other, could not carry on a civilized conversation, however brief.
So it was with apprehension that she continued down the hall in his direction.
Hank Millar spotted her first, and his face instantly tensed, as though he knew a battle was imminent, and he wanted to get the hell out of there before the shooting started. Jack must have seen the change in Hank’s expression as well, because he turned to see what had inspired it.
At his first glimpse of Emma, he seemed to freeze, a spontaneous smile of greeting half-formed on his face. It was almost, but not quite, a look of both surprise and gladness to see her. Then something else took control, and his smile vanished, replaced by a look that was neither friendly nor unfriendly, merely neutral. The face of a stranger, she thought, and that was somehow more painful than if he had greeted her with outright hostility. At least then there would’ve been some emotion left, some remnant, however tattered, of a marriage that had once been happy.
She found herself responding to his flat look with an expression that was every bit as neutral. When she spoke, she addressed both men at the same time, favoring neither.
‘Gordon told me about Debbie,’ she said. ‘How is she doing?’
Hank glanced at Jack, waiting for him to answer first. Finally Hank said, ‘She’s still unconscious. We’re sort of holding a vigil in the waiting room. If you want to join us.’
‘Yes. Of course.’ She started toward the visitors’ waiting room.
‘Emma,’ Jack called out. ‘Can we talk?’
‘I’ll see you both later,’ said Hank, and he made a hasty retreat down the hall. They waited for him to disappear around the corner, then looked at each other.
‘Debbie’s not doing well,’ said Jack.
‘What happened?’
‘She had an epidural bleed. Came in conscious and talking. In a matter of minutes, she went straight downhill. I was busy with another patient. I didn’t realize it in time. Didn’t drill the burr hole until…’ He paused and looked away. ‘She’s on a ventilator.’
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