There had been delays. Two more thruster engines and a fuel pump had failed inspections, and they had had to be replaced. The supplier for the probe’s monopropellant fuel had come up short, delaying fueling by a critical thirty-six hours. Parts were put in backwards by half-asleep technicians, costing the next shift more sleep when they had to be removed and remounted correctly.
But the technicians, the assembly people, the engineers of Jet Propulsion Laboratory persevered. Shifts ran round the clock. Then, as it became obvious the original schedule wasn’t going to happen, shifts were abandoned, and people worked almost until they dropped. People bunked in the cafeteria, in conference rooms, in offices, any place with sufficient horizontal surface and dim lighting to allow sleep.
The local businesses that served JPL employees knew what drove this, and they responded. Popular restaurants got together and organized catering, meals and beverages available virtually around the clock, with the owners picking up the tab. Laundries coordinated with workers to swap out clean changes of clothing fetched from their homes and washed the old ones, without charge. And one supermarket manager, who had attended the California Institute of Technology but dropped out a year before graduation, arranged to have half a pallet of liquid soap and air freshener “fall off a truck” near the JPL loading dock early one morning.
And now, four days past schedule, at just past four in the morning, it was done- barely in time, a mere six days before launch.
Bruce Ng, his polo shirt smudged and slightly torn, his eyes almost totally shut from exhaustion, held a ratchet wrench in his hand. Behind him sat two special shipping containers, one already labeled for special flight to Cape Canaveral, Florida, the other bound for China’s space center in Inner Mongolia. Behind him stood the massive freight doors of the Spacecraft Assembly Building, and behind them freight handlers waited to transfer the containers onto trucks, drive them to the airfield, and load the containers on two NASA aircraft for immediate transport to their destinations.
In front of him, and around him, stood hundreds of workers- every permanent or temporary JPL worker who’d so much as lifted a wrench, fired a welding torch, or drawn a line with a pencil. There were even people present from Accounting, who hadn’t needed to put in overtime, but who wanted to be in at the end.
When the three probes of Sleipnir 1, 2, and 3 had been delivered, only about half as many people had been in the room. Now, with assembly done on Sleipnir 4 and 5, everyone who could get in had done so, to witness the completion of their supreme effort.
“People,” Bruce said in the almost totally silent room, “in the past several months you’ve made history. You’ve set records for building probes. We’ve made mistakes, and we’ve corrected them. We’ve hit obstacles, and we’ve worked through them. And as a result, the probes we’ve delivered have functioned perfectly.
“And you know why we did this. Not for the money. Not for the line on the resume. Not for the extra month of paid vacation time. We did it to preserve the lives of eleven very special people. Thanks to you, those eleven people will have a fighting chance to make it home. They’re not here to thank you right now, but I am. Thank you all.”
There was some applause, if perhaps not all that was deserved. The workers were both proud and grateful, but beyond that, they were exhausted.
Bruce took the wrench and ceremonially tightened one bolt in the doors of each container. With that gesture, so far as the builders of JPL were concerned, Project Sleipnir was complete. What happened afterwards was in NASA’s hands.
Bruce turned back to the crowd and said quietly, “Go home.”
They did. When three of them were pulled over by Pasadena police officers for erratic driving, the officers took one look at the employee parking stickers on their cars and said the exact same thing.
And for all practical purposes JPL ceased to exist for the following two days, at least as a collection of conscious human beings in a vertical position.
Meanwhile, Hermes grew closer.
8891479 Careful, there. You mock the potato people of the far northwest at your peril.
Was the food suprise in one of the origional launches so they know about it know, or is it in either or both of these?
Incidentally, sleep deprivation was probably the ideal state of mind for writing this chapter.
That's gotta be one special supermarket manager, if he managed to convince a company to have their driver deliver part of the load to a location not listed on the bills. And to be clear, that HAD to be a company decision; no single driver would willingly "lose" part of their load like that, lest they risk getting fired and that following them on their DAC for the rest of their career.
Otherwise, I trust the 2 remaining Sleipnir launches will go without incident... right?
8891494
OH make a chp of them of that state and there potato farm as they make a tourist attractions of the space alines and mark of theme eating there poatatos that hel;p save mark and the alines
Love to see these little side shorts that are integral to the main story. The stories who made heroics possible. Somehow I was hoping the Pasadena police call a tow to carry those three to their homes. Or offer to drive.
This was a lovely little chapter, and I was glad Bruce kept his speech short when time is of such essence
As someone who's worked under conditions like you listed, all of this is very accurate. I've had to sleep on a bench in a safe room at a mine, for a month straight. Minimum 12 hour shifts, every day... Usually with dayshift showing up between 1 hour and 2.5 hours late to relieve me. All with no chance to go anywhere, do anything, use the internet or anything of the sort.
But despite not getting the month bonus vacation pay it was still a hugely profitable month. Made more money a week than I usually made a month, especially when I had 16 hours at overtime on a holiday... at doubletime and a half.
Very heartwarming, what JPL and everyone else did.
8891510
The food problem happened, if a little differently, in Spiderpone 1. Spiderpone 2 then launched flawlessly, and Spiderpone 3 only half-failed. Last I remember, 3 was stuck in some orbit or other around Earth.
8891494
Hey Kris, a palette is what you paint with, while a pallet is used for shipping.
8891725
Perhaps she is sensing the emotion of the not the plutonium itself, as it is undergoing all sorts of decay, but rather the process of entropy. "Do what you want, I'll kill you all eventually," seems like the domain of entropy, decay, and/or time.
8891569
I took that to mean the supermarket owner took a pickup truck and drove a palette of stock they'd already paid for out there and dropped it off. Not going through some convoluted scheme to make it literally fall off a truck there.
8891659
tell me more about what compelled 12 hour shifts for a month at a mine, and the year that happened?
8891659 8892320 I'm curious too, because 12-hour shifts sounds like a US mine, but you're Canadian... as if that wasn't obvious from your mention of actually getting paid overtime...
You know what they say: Write what you know.
Silliness aside, here's hoping you get some rest soon.
Heh, "Quatermass and the Pit (Five Millions Years to Earth)" is on right now on TCM. Psychic Martian Cricket Ghosts.
Coma time.
Stop reading for a couple weeks, 50+ chapters manifest out of thin air. Your a machine man. Motivate me to get around to working on my fic.
Speaking of motivation, there was a ton of it here. You don’t need some massive external threat, or huge philosophy changing idea to see humanity at its best. Just give them a cause worth the struggle. I would like to think that, if something like this where to happen, the human race could step up like we see here. So motto.
8891587
Please use more grammar. You type as if you don’t know AT ALL how to use a keyboard. I know that most people don’t use proper gram4rz on t3h intarnetz, but still. You can at least finish a word, if not halfway. Anyways, that idea sounds like it would possibly work in Ireland.
Reading through this again, and absolutely loving it just as much the second time! May be a little late, but I personally like the "fluff" chapters, as you call them. It gives us insight into everything else that's going on around Mark and his friends. Like this chapter for instance. Of course our subconscious knows that the world is working on a way to bring them home, but actually seeing it is inspiring, uplifting, and gets us emotionally invested, just at a point where we're starting to get "adventure fatigue" from everything that's been happening to our crew on Mars. It wouldn't be a proper story without adventure and Murphy of course, but nothing BUT Murphy ends up with Attack on Titan, which I can't stand because of just how black it all is. Just my two cents worth! Keep up the awesome.
For some reason this chapter isn't being registered as 'has been read'. Glitch maybe?
9175919
Shorter chapters do that sometimes, though usually it takes slightly shorter ones than this one to do it for me. Probably something to do with minimum time spent on page, reaching the bottom of the story part of the page, and there may be other things the auto-checkmarker looks at besides, I really don't know.
Easiest way to deal with it is to just manually click the checkbox next to the chapter to checkmark it.
Ohhboy. They seem to be pushing too hard. That's never good.
Wow. That's some community service
I guess everyone around that area has a little bit of astronaut in them
Yeah, don't think anyone there felt up to listening to a long speech
Liquid Pride time.
Stuff like that makes it/us proud to be called a human
Great chapter
Spacey.
Ha.
Reading this chapter at 2:16 AM. Pretty sure I have achieved maximum immersion, woooo--
*Drops dead*
This moments restore my faith in humanity...
That and Alien Waifus
One can only hope once our race is lucky enough to meet aliens we all bond in mutual benefishal friendship 👍