“Damn straight,” Casey said.
“Besides, just like your new friend—that pretty female reporter in front who was making goo-goo eyes at you—said: what the bloody hell else do you do around here?” Jodie quipped, and everybody got a good laugh out of that. Jodie gave Brad an accusing and inquisitive—and maybe a jealous? Brad wondered—eye but said nothing more. “And where did that Great Escape thing come from?” She then switched her voice to that of James Garner playing the character Hendley in the movie. “?‘You want to talk about hazards? Let’s talk about hazards. Let’s talk about you. You’re the biggest hazard we have.’?” Another round of laughter.
“All right, all right, very funny,” Brad said. “Let’s see how this works out. I’m going to fly in space soon enough anyway, I can guarantee you that, so if anyone else wants to take this opportunity, I’ll defer. Jodie?”
“Not me, mate,” Jodie said. “I like sand and surf and sea level—even Cal Poly is almost too high above sea level and too far from the beach for me. Besides, I don’t want to be anywhere else but right here in this lab watching the monitors when Starfire lets loose.”
“Jerry?”
The thought of going up into space didn’t seem to make Jung-bae too comfortable. “I don’t know,” he said uneasily. “I would like to design and test spacecraft someday, but as far as flying in orbit in one . . . I think I will pass. Besides, I want to be out at White Sands monitoring the rectenna and maser output. We are still having problems with the lithium-ion capacitors. We are storing plenty of power, but we occasionally have problems transferring the power to the microwave cavity.”
“I’ll get some more experts to help you with that, Jerry,” Brad said. He turned to Casey. “Then it’s just you and me, Casey. What do you say? It’s your maser—you should be up there.”
Casey’s face was a mixture of apprehension and confusion. “I don’t think so, Brad,” she said. “I don’t like people looking at me at airports or department stores—a paraplegic around a dozen astronauts on a space station? I don’t know . . .”
“Well, just think, Casey—the last things you need in space are legs, right?” Brad said. “You’ll be just like everyone else up there. No wheelchairs in space, lady.”
She looked down at her wheelchair, her eyes averted, for a long moment . . . and then her head and arms snapped up and she shouted, “I’m going into space!”
The team went through a dry run of the test-fire procedures until late in the afternoon, then had a meeting with university president Harris and passed along the news of who was going to fly to Armstrong Space Station. Harris immediately scheduled the flight physicals for the next morning, after which he would make the announcement to the media. It wasn’t until early evening that they were able to go home. Brad had just arrived at his apartment building in Poly Canyon and was about to carry his bike and backpack up the stairs when he heard, “Hey, stranger.”
He turned and found Jodie, her laptop backpack in hand. “Hi, you,” he said. “We’re not strangers. I see you every day.”
“I know, but only at school. We live in the same complex, but I hardly see you around here.” She nodded toward Brad’s bicycle. “Were you just going to carry your bike and backpack up five flights of stairs, mate?”
“I always do.”
“Wow. Good onya.” She glanced around him. “I noticed you don’t carry the cane anymore.”
“I just never replaced it.”
“Won’t Chief Ratel get mad at you?”
“He got hurt last spring, closed up shop, and moved away—to Florida, I think,” Brad said. That was entirely true—afraid that the Russians would target him as well as Brad, Kevin Martindale had urged him to take his wife and get out of town, which he reluctantly did. “I should have let you know about that, but . . . you know how things were.”
“Wow. I guess it’s been a while since we’ve caught up,” Jodie said. “So you don’t go to the gym anymore?”
“Every now and then I’ll do a self-defense refresher at a gym downtown,” Brad said. That was mostly true, but it was every week, sparring with a member of Chris Wohl’s team—and he would do firearms refresher training every other week. Brad had a permit that allowed him to carry a pistol on campus—he never told Jodie or anyone else on the Starfire team about that. “Most of the rest I do in my living room, on the bike, or doing stuff like carrying the bike up to my apartment.”