“Are . . . we . . . doing . . . okay, Boomer?” the passenger asked, trying with all his might to suppress the growing darkness in his vision that indicated the beginning of unconsciousness. He pretended he was a bodybuilder, flexing every muscle in his body, hoping to force enough blood into his head to keep from dropping off.
“We’re in . . . in the green, sir,” Boomer replied. For the first time in this entire damned flight, the passenger thought, he could detect a hint of pressure or strain in Hunter Noble’s voice. His tone was still measured, still succinct and even official, but there was definitely a worried edge to it, signifying even to a newbie space voyager that the worst was yet to come.
Crap, the passenger thought, if Hunter Noble—probably America’s most oft-traveled astronaut, with dozens of missions and thousands of orbits to his credit—is having trouble, what chance do I have? I’m getting so tired, he thought, trying to fight the damned G-forces. I’ll be okay if I just relax and let the blood flow out of my brain, right? It won’t hurt me. The pressure is starting to make me a little nauseous, and for God’s sake I don’t want to barf in my helmet. I’ll just relax, relax . . .
Then, moments later, to his complete surprise the pressure ceased, as if the turnscrews on the vise that had been pressing on his entire body simply disappeared after just a few minutes. Then he heard the surprising, completely unsuspected question: “You doing okay this splendid morning back there, sir?”
The passenger was somehow able to reply with a curt and completely casual, “It’s morning, Dr. Noble?”
“It’s morning somewhere, sir,” Boomer said. “We have a new morning every ninety minutes on station.”
“How are we doing? Are we doing okay? Did we make it?”
“Check out your detail, sir,” Boomer said. The passenger looked over and saw the man’s arms floating about six inches above his still-unconscious, reclined body, as if he were sleeping while floating on his back in the ocean.
“We’re . . . we’re weightless now?”
“Technically, the acceleration of gravity toward Earth is equal to our forward velocity, so we’re in effect falling but never hitting the ground. We are hurtling toward the Earth, but Earth keeps on moving out of the way before we hit it, so the net effect feels like weightlessness,” Boomer said.
“Say what?”
Boomer grinned. “Sorry,” he said. “I like saying that to Puddys. Yes, sir, we’re weightless.”
“Thank you.”
“We’re currently cruising past Mach twenty-five and climbing through one hundred twenty-eight miles’ altitude up to our final altitude of two hundred and ten miles,” Boomer went on. “Course corrections are nominal. When we stop coasting at orbital speed, we should be within ten miles of Armstrong at matching speed, altitude, and azimuth. It looks very cool, sir, very cool. Welcome to outer space. You are officially an American astronaut.”
A few moments later Jessica Faulkner drifted back to the passenger cabin, her eyes still alluring behind the closed visor of her space-suit helmet. The passenger had seen plenty of astronauts floating in zero-G on television and movies, but it was as if this was the first time he had seen it in person—it was simply, utterly unreal. He noticed her movements were gentle and deliberate, as if everything she touched or was about to touch were fragile. She didn’t seem to grasp anything, but she used a few fingers to lightly touch the bulkheads, ceiling, or deck to maneuver herself around.
Faulkner checked on Spellman first, checking a small electronic panel on the front of his space suit that displayed conditions in the suit and the wearer’s vital signs. “He looks okay, and his suit is secure,” she reported. “As long as his gyros don’t tumble when he wakes up, I think he’ll be fine.” She drifted over to the first passenger and gave him a very pretty smile. “Welcome to orbit, sir. How do you feel?”
“It was pretty rough when the rockets kicked in—I thought I was going to pass out,” he replied with a weak smile. “But I’m doing all right now.”
“Good. Let’s get you unbuckled, and then you can join Boomer in the cockpit for the approach. He might even let you dock it.”
“Dock the spaceplane? To the space station? Me? I can’t fly! I haven’t hardly driven a car in almost eight years!”
Faulkner was unstrapping the passenger from his seat, using tabs of Velcro to keep the webbing from floating around in front of them. “Do you play video games, sir?” she asked.
“Sometimes. With my son.”