Epicycle - P. J. Plauger

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Analog, Novembar 1973
Epicycle
P. J. PLAUGER
A theory doesn't have to describe the real world to be true—and helpful!
"Thar she blows! Hot and straight!"
I could hear Jenkins' reedy voice reverberate inside the control module, almost
enough to restore the timbre muffled by his work helmet. No trick of acoustics could
correct for his garbled slang, though. Kids these days weren't even taught that
Connecticut once had thriving seaports—I guess you can't expect them to
distinguish between the jargon of a whaler and a submariner.
It was the sailors who owned the stars in those days. If you don't believe me, take
a look at a constellation map of the Southern Hemisphere. People bold enough to
venture into strange waters didn't hesitate to write their words all over the sky. No
ancient gods for them—the Clock and the Telescope helped them find their way.
Sailors were a pretty good bunch, considering they were all men.
But now the NASA career types are starting to call themselves a navy (Congress
already gave them the stars). Boys like Jenkins and Scott playing grownup. I hear the
latest style at Skyhook is wearing one tiny gold earring, pirate fashion," and smoking
tobacco. Machismo is alive and flourishing in orbit, my friends.
The Orbital Booster System was surely near burnout and separating rapidly. Even
on attitude jets alone, those pigs could rack up a respectable delta-V in pretty short
order. Not that I could see all this, mind you. Regulations required that control
module ports be protected from pitting, whenever possible, during close maneuvers.
You can bet my two little helpers would do all the "protecting" the law allowed.
They wouldn't even let me outside! My one and only trip into space, aborted
before it really began, and those acned Tom Corbetts lacked the decency to let me
stick my head out the hatch. Regulations again, of course. Let me tell you I'd had it
up to here by then with NASA's damned regulations. I wanted to stomp my feet and
bawl, but naturally I couldn't do either one.
The stomping was physically impossible, as you can well imagine; but the crying
was equally forbidden, even though it violated no physical law. Gallant explorers of
the spaceways never cry, you see. They are brave and tough. Men, that is. Manure.
Shuffling and clanging noises. One of the two was entering the lock. I assumed
the fireworks were over, such as they were. Rockets aren't very impressive in
vacuum—they just show a sort of pointy glow. Or so I'm told. Still, I wish I could
 have watched.
The inner door swung open and a red-banded bubble head fluttered out. I
recognized the species as a NASA lieutenant-I could tell it was Jenkins by his
markings. He closed the hatch and started the cycle for Scott before unsuiting. I
tried to look as if I hadn't been trying not to cry.
Frizzy hair tufting out in all directions, eyes somehow never quite in focus.
Lieutenant Jenkins was the archetypal mathematician. Everything was right angles and
planes in his young world. I'm certain he regarded the merciless vacuum around us
as just a satisfyingly zero nothing. Me, I was a troublesome curvilinear boundary
condition in his otherwise perfect world.
"OBS is disposed of, ma'm," he said, as if he suddenly remembered I was there.
You'd think he'd just interrupted his homework to take out the garbage for mommy.
I'd offered to compute a suitable disposal maneuver for the malfunctioning booster,
in fact, but Jenkins had reacted with hurt pride and horror. That was man's work.
"Very good," I replied as offhandedly as I could muster. It was somehow
necessary to keep up the pretense that I was commanding the mission, even though
my wishes were overruled at every turn.
More clanging noises. The next time that lock cycled, I would be going through it
into Skyhook. Two days from then I'd be swooping into Houston, leaving behind a
hundred meters of unexposed film and a quarter century of wasted dreams. My eyes
began to burn-something in the air—so I studied the communications console
intently while Scott entered.
They had finished stowing their working gear by the time I looked up. Scott
already had his comic book out. He was unbelievable. We used to joke about the
illiterate engineers at school, but the truth was they could ace any liberal arts course
they set their minds to, and we knew it. They just didn't have much truck with
anything they couldn't apply.
But Scott, I think, was truly semi-literate. You could see his lips move slightly as
the balloons and simple figures drifted by. The scan rate was set at MIN, of course,
and he still keyed HOLD from time to time. Put a flattop on that blocky head and a
varsity letter on his tunic and you could lose him in any of the old football factories.
In fact, I wish you would.
I resigned myself to twenty-five hours of inaction amid poor company. Once the
bad news was in, that we'd have to ditch the OBS and return, I'd promptly
computed a Hohmann transfer to the emergency backup booster orbiting at eighteen
thousand kilometers. We could have left ten and a half hours after separation—why
hang around with nothing to do but float and stare at each other? But NASA had to
do it the company way, as usual, and burn computer time to verify my calculations.
They couldn't admit I was right, even though it was common knowledge that I
could practically do orbit calculations in my head. So they set up a flight plan for
one synodic period later, muttering something about perturbation corrections.
Result, we had to rot an extra fourteen-odd hours in synchronous orbit.
 We really didn't have to abort. I mean the control module had a self-contained
life-support system and enough juice in her jets to handle alignment maneuvers (more
than enough, alas!). Skyhook could have let us do my experiment and come get us
later. There was precedent for that.
But those damned regulations got me again. As long as a spacecraft has status
critical and enough thrust to make it to safety, rules say it's gotta come home to
poppa. Pronto. We could just make it to our backup on a minimum energy-transfer
orbit inside (regulation) tolerances—provided we did no station-keeping maneuvers
beforehand. So a perfectly viable experiment had to be scrubbed in the interest of
"safety." Bah!
I couldn't argue with the "condition critical" designation. A stuck damper rod in
an OBS pile can lead to a lot of radiation that I'd rather not have around, thank you.
It wouldn't go boom, but in the six or seven days it spent slagging down, the pile
would use up a year's supply of fissionables. And that makes for a lot of neutrons.
(Of course, all it needed was a well-placed kick to break the rod loose, and I
knew exactly where to aim. The radiation hadn't built to an intolerable level yet. I
won't repeat to you what Skyhook said when I offered to go back and fix it. My
thesis adviser said something similar when I repaired a hundred kilovolt Cockroft
Walton on the fly with a bobby pin at three a.m. one morning. When the data's
coming in, a grad student will do anything to keep it coming.)
But we'd disposed of the damned booster and we'd already reached station—and
the Comsat tender was due out in three weeks and could pick us up with very little
extra fuel expenditure. Our life support was good for five weeks. It seemed only
natural to save a ten-million-dollar investment and let me do my thing. Or so it
seemed to me.
I reasoned and argued with Skyhook for three hours. I wheedled and pleaded. But
I knew it was a losing battle. Being the first civilian woman to make it into space, I'd
already used up all the good will I could scrounge. Those NASA cowboys weren't
about to leave a lady in distress, even if she liked it there.
So there sat I within five meters of a lifelong goal, hamstrung by fate and a sexist
bureaucracy. Jenkins was playing with the calculator—chess, it looked like—and
Scott was still wrapped up in the adventures of Aquaman or some-such. Real fun
people. I began to brood.
It all started when I was in college. Well anyway, that's when my plan crystallized;
I'm sure you could trace it back to my toilet training if you tried hard enough. But
that was when I started getting ready for space.
You see, I was always interested in astronomy. Daddy bought me a refractor
when I was nine and I'd built my first Newtonian before I'd been kissed. A crisp,
winter night would keep me enthralled for hours. Long after my brothers were driven
in by the numbing cold, I'd be happily thumbing through Norton's for another binary
star.
 "Margo, are you still out there?" was my mother's standard midnight plea. And,
"Don't you ever sleep?" when she caught me out before dawn. But she let me have
my way, and I flourished under the stars.
I picked a college on the basis of its optics, two ten-inch reflectors and a
sixteen-inch Cassegrain; but college came through with three delightful
surprises—astrophysics, computers, and men. Those have been my principal loves
ever since (though not always in that order), and wellsprings of endless joy and grief.
But I'm forgetting about my plan.
Astrology was having a renaissance about then, and the charlatans were really
cleaning up. One of the cuter of these frauds, an English major in real life, asked me
to help him with his math (he couldn't read an ephemeris the same way twice to save
his soul). So one thing led to another and I ended up writing a computer program to
cast horoscopes.
Not the numerology garbage, mind you. I just placed the planets in the houses and
left the interpretation up to him. I got ten bucks rakeoff from his twenty-five-dollar
fee and kept a clear conscience. Writing the program was good exercise and
besides, he really was cute.
(After twenty years of haggling with university and government committees, I have
come to regret that early self-righteousness. I could have used the practice in
duplicity and doubletalk, not to mention the extra fifteen dollars!)
But there I was at the computer console, one cloudy night, when the idea
sprouted. Sooner or later the space program would have to open up to civilian
researchers, much as the national labs did to help justify their continued existence. It
would take a good reputation to get sent into orbit, plus an experiment that needed
expert on-site tending. I've never been handicapped by false modesty, so I knew
even then I could meet both those requirements in time.
Time was the dominant variable, as it so often is in astronomy. By guess and by
golly I settled on the early 1980's as the politically ripest time. That would put me in
my forties, but then most of the early astronauts were around that age. Physical
condition would count for a lot, but I'd always kept pretty trim. I resolved then and
there never to miss my daily session in the swimming pool—and except for a hiatus
to bear two children I've kept that promise pretty well.
So all right, I was headed for space; when to go was still the question. That was
when I had my stroke of genius—I would cast my own horoscope, only in reverse.
Forty minutes of eager dialogue with the number cruncher sealed my fate. I would be
going into or bit in the spring of 1984.
It was mostly a matter of plotting the elongations of all the planets, that is, how far
away from the sun they appear, as a function of time. The Messier objects, galaxies
and such, are fairly sparse around Aries (that's where the sun is in late March—sorry
if I keep forgetting that not everyone knows his zodiac). So I wanted a favorable
arrangement of planets in the spring, if possible.
I hit the jackpot. In the spring of 1984, Venus would be just past greatest
 elongation and swinging toward Earth. Mars would be in opposition, about as close
as you could ask. All the outer planets would be far enough from conjunction for a
good view, and even Mercury had a chance to be seen. So long as the sun didn't get
too rowdy, sunspots and all that, I'd be home free.
They say the stars impel but do not compel. In my case that wasn't true. I'd spent
the last twenty-five years enjoying life and growing, but I never once lost sight of my
target. I won't tell you about all the little triumphs and near disasters along the way
(well, maybe just a few). It was proof enough of my perseverance that I kissed my
family good-bye and lifted off on schedule—a quarter-century after I set my goal.
And there I sat thirty-five thousand kilometers out in space, having done
everything right along the way, thwarted by a damned stick of carbon.
Jenkins was beginning to tire of his chess match, and Scott had long since sacked
out. Keeping up with Aquaman can be pretty grueling. I suppose I should have been
lapping up the view through the ports, but it was such a poor second to what I really
wanted that I didn't have the heart. I made an effort to be sociable.
"Is this your first trip out to synch orbit?" I opened. Most work is done below the
Van Aliens, so it was a moderately intelligent question to ask.
"Oh no, ma'm," with a worldly air. Then, suspecting that I might know the truth,
"Well, actually, it's my first
orbital
assignment this far out. But my sophomore
outing was circumlunat. We got to do an out-and-back to drop off some repeaters."
A little warmth had crept into his manner, for the first time since we'd met.
"They let me do the translunar injection," he said with pride, "and they didn't need
any course corrections until halfway back."
So that was it. I wonder if he bothered to look down at the Moon as they swung
around it.
"You did a pretty accurate job of putting us on station," I added. A little flattery
never hurt. "I haven't detected any drift since we got here." Actually, we were fast by
twelve kilometers per hour by my measurements, but what the hell.
"I always park on a dime," he preened. Then, in a conspiratorial whisper, "Scott
is consistently three-quarters of a second fast on engine shutdown. He beats the
automatics every time. Once you learn to correct for systematics like that, it's just a
matter of careful navigation." We shared a chuckle.
"I guess engineers never learn to appreciate precision," I opined. Jenkins nodded
sagely. "You know, back when I was in school, we used to tell engineer jokes—just
like the British jokes people tell now." We also told mathematician jokes, but I didn't
mention that.
"In fact, it's kind of funny. This crew, I mean. A mathematician, a physicist and
an engineer all in the same situation. That was the format for a lot of the stories."
I hesitated, then decided to take a chance on offending the boy.
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