Captain Howard glided down the ladder already suited up, but with his helmet visor open. The pouches under his eyes looked darker than usual; his face was a gray prison pallor. With six trainees aboard, the officers slept in their 50 seats up on the flight deck, a factor that did not increase officers' love of trainees.
"You both checked out?" Howard asked in a flat, drained voice.
Mr. Personality, thought Kinsman.
Howard was not satisfied with the trainees' check of their suits. He went over them himself. Finally, with a sour nod, he waved Colt to the airlock and went in with him. The lock cycled.
Kinsman slid his visor down and sealed it, turned to wave a halfhearted "so long" to the others, then floated to the airlock and pushed himself through the hatch. The heavy door swung shut and he could hear, faintly through his helmet padding, the clatter of the pump sucking the air out of the phone booth-sized chamber. The red light went on, signaling vacuum. He opened the outer hatch and stepped out into the payload bay.
The orbiter was turned away from the Earth, so that all Kinsman saw as he left the airlock was the endless blackness of space. He blinked as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, and saw tiny points of light staring at him: hard, unwinking stars, not like jewels set in black velvet, as he had expected, not like anything he had ever seen before in his life.
"Glory to God in the highest . . ." Kinsman heard himself whisper the words as he rose, work forgotten, drifting up toward the infinitely beautiful stars.
When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained . . .
Howard's grip on his shoulder suddenly brought him back to the here-and-now. The Captain clicked a tether to the clip on Kinsman's waist, then pointed to his own wrist. Kinsman looked down at the keyboard on the wrist of his suit and turned the radio on.
Howard's voice immediately came through his ear- phones, a much higher fidelity sound quality than Kinsman had expected:
"We're using channel four for suit-to-suit chatter. Ship's frequency is three; don't use it unless you have to talk to the flight deck."
"Yessir," said Kinsman.
"Okay. Let's get to work." 51
Kinsman glanced out at the stars again, then followed Howard and Colt to the padded mound of insulation covering the final satellite in the payload bay. It was a large fat drum, taller than a man and so wide that Kinsman knew he and Colt could not girdle it with their outstretched arms.
"The checkout panels in the flight deck indicate a malfunction in the battery that powers the antenna foldout," Howard's voice grumbled in his earphones.
Under the Captain's direction they peeled the protective covering from the satellite. It was an aluminum cylinder with dead black panels of solar cells circling its middle and four dish-shaped antennas folded across its top.
"Kinsman, you come up here with me to manually unfold the antennas," Howard ordered. "Colt, check out the bat- tery."
Floating up to the top of the satellite with the Captain beside him, Kinsman asked, "What kind of a satellite is this? Looks like communications, but it's going into a polar orbit, isn't it?"
"Seventy-degree inclination," Howard replied curtly. "You know that as well as I do. Or you should."
Kinsman did know. He also knew that the orbit was highly elliptical, so that the satellite hung over the Eurasian land mass for a much longer period of time than it sped past the other side of the globe.
