say Voice of America. You understand?’
Jesus. He felt electrified. I wonder what the hell has happened, if they can get home …
But what a way to find out, from some poor little guy, lost in a shit-hole in the mountains of Cambodia.
‘Rager, Topdog. I copy. Thank you.’
‘And to you, Pilgrim, a good night.’
Yeah. A good night faking my records.
Somewhere in the sky above him – for all the peril those guys were in – Americans were undertaking vast, wonderful adventures. And here he was, flying this bucket of bolts, splashing liquid fire over peasants. Doing something so shitty that even his own Government wouldn’t admit it was happening.
I got to get out of this. Of course, despite a lot of pressure from the White House, NASA had yet to fly a black man into space. It would be a long haul for Ralph Gershon …
But it couldn’t be worse than this.
Gershon and his wingman climbed back to altitude, and Gershon turned his nose for home.
Mission Elapsed Time [Day/Hr:Min:Sec] Plus 000/00:12:22
Earth was a wall of blue light, as bright as a slice of tropical sky; it dazzled her, dilating her eyes, making the sky pitch black when she looked away. The Command Module’s windows were tiny, already scuffed, but even so they let in shafts of startling blue, and the cabin was bright, cheerful, light-filled.
‘Houston, we have a hot cabin.’ Stone tapped a gloved forefinger against a temperature gauge. ‘Running at seventy-seven.’
‘Copy, Ares,’ Young said. ‘We recommend you put coolant fluid through the secondary coolant loop.’
‘Rager,’ said Gershon. ‘Ah, okay, Houston, now I’m seeing a fluctuation of my water quantity gauge. It’s oscillating between, I’d say, sixty and eighty per cent.’
‘Copy, Ralph, working on that one …’
And Stone said he suspected there was a helium bubble in an attitude thruster propellant tank. Young recommended that he perform a couple of purge burns of the attitude thrusters to burn out the bubble. So Stone began to work that out. Meanwhile, Young came back with an answer to the water gauge problem; it looked as if it was traced to a faulty transducer …
And on, and on, a hail of small checks and detailed, trivial problems.
York had her own checklist to follow. She worked her way through the pale pages quickly, opening and closing circuit breakers, throwing switches, calling out instructions for Stone and Gershon. She was immersed in the hiss of the air in her closed helmet, the humming of the Command Module’s instruments and pumps, the rustle of paper, the crackle of Young’s voice calling up from the ground, the soft voices of Gershon and Stone as they worked through their post-orbit checklists.
This was a mundane procedure they’d followed together dozens of times before in the sims.
But, she realized, it was a profound shock to go through this routine – not in some stuffy ground-based trainer – but here.
If she looked ahead of the craft she could see the planet’s curve. It was a blue and white arc with black space above it. But when she looked straight down, the skin of the Earth filled her window, scrolling steadily past as if she were viewing some colorful map on a computer screen.
She was amazed by the transparency of the air. There was a sense of depth to the atmosphere, a three-dimensional appearance that surprised her. There were shadows under the clouds as they slid across the face of the seas. The clouds thickened toward the equator, and when she looked ahead, tangential to the Earth’s surface, she could see them climbing up into the atmosphere, as if Ares was heading for a wall of vapor. On the land she could easily make out cities – a gray, angular patchwork – and the lines of major roads. The orange-brown of deserts was vivid, but the jungles and temperate zones were harder to spot; their color did not penetrate the atmosphere so well, and they showed up as a gray-blue, with the barest hint of green.
She found the lack of green disappointing.
She saw the wake of a ship, feathering out like a brush stroke on the sea’s calm surface.
Gershon, in his center seat, leaned toward her. ‘Quite a view, huh.’
She turned her head – and quickly regretted it; her head felt like a tank of fluid, sloshing when she moved. She held her head steady for a few seconds, and let the sloshing settle down again. Resolutely, she tried not to think about her stomach.
Space adaptation syndrome. She understood what was happening to her. Without gravity, little particles of calcium on sensitive hairs in the inner ear took up random positions, and the body couldn’t work out which way was up. It generally went away after a few days.
But right now it was a huge embarrassment to York.
More carefully, she turned back to the window. They were passing over storm clouds now, thunderheads which piled up on top of each other as if solid, cliffs and ravines of cloud miles deep. She could see lightning, sparking in the clouds like living things, propagating across storm systems thousands of miles across. The clouds, illuminated from within, glowed purple-pink, like neon sculptures. ‘Look at that. It looks as if the thunderheads are reaching up toward us.’
‘Only about a tenth of the way,’ Gershon said mildly.
‘Pressure’s okay,’ Stone said now. He began to take off his gloves and helmet.
York unlatched her gloves and pulled them off, and shoved them into a pocket on her couch. She grasped the sides of her helmet, which came loose with a click; she pushed it up over her head.
She moved too quickly. Suddenly her head was full of sloshing fluid again, and saliva flooded her mouth.
Her helmet, rolling loose, clattered against a bank of switches. Gershon grabbed it easily, laughing. ‘Interception!’ In his pressure suit he looked small, compact, comfortable. He threw the helmet up in the air again with a twist; the helmet revolved, oscillating about two spin axes.
York felt embarrassed, clumsy. And, watching the helmet, suddenly she was retching.
‘Oh, man,’ Stone said in disgust. He handed her a plastic bag, and York fumbled it open, and pushed her face into it.
As she heaved, a greenish sphere, about the size of a tennis ball, came floating up out of the bag. It was shimmering, and complex pulsations crossed its surface.
York watched in awe. Maybe I ought to film this. It was a demonstration of fluid mechanics in the absence of gravity; she wondered if the wave patterns, dominated by surface tension, could be predicted by computer.
Now the glob of vomit split in two. One half headed toward the wall, and the other made straight for Gershon.
‘Ah, shit,’ Gershon said, and he tried to squirm out of the way.
The glob hit him in the chest, with a soft impact;
