“He’ll be medicated?” another correspondent retorted. “How is he going to perform his duties if he’s medicated?”
“It’s a standard drug used by almost all station personnel experiencing symptoms of space sickness,” Kai said. It was clear he was not comfortable being the target of all these rapid-fire, rather accusatory questions. “Persons using Phenergan can continue all their normal duties in a very short time.”
Now the correspondents were tapping quickly on their tablets or scribbling quickly on their notepads. President Phoenix could see the rising irritation in Kai’s face and quickly stepped in. “Thank you, General Raydon. How about Margaret Hastings from NBC?” the president asked.
The well-known and longtime White House chief correspondent got to her feet, her eyes narrowed in a way that millions of American viewers recognized as the veteran reporter preparing to dig in her claws. “Mr. President, I must say, I am still in a state of absolute shock,” she said with a distinctive Boston accent that she never lost despite her years in New York and Washington. “I simply cannot fathom the extraordinarily extreme level of risk to the nation you took by traveling up to the space station. I am simply at a complete loss for words.”
“Miss Hastings, life has risks,” the president said. “As I mentioned to Vice President Page, I’m sure a lot of people felt that a sitting president should not have taken the first ride on a motor vessel, locomotive, automobile, or airplane—that it was simply too risky and the technology so new that it wasn’t worth placing the president’s life needlessly in jeopardy. Yet now all that is routine. Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to fly in an airplane, and that was less than ten years after Kitty Hawk. Americans have been flying in space for almost sixty years now.”
“But this is completely different, Mr. President!” Hastings exclaimed. “Space is infinitely more dangerous than flying in an airplane . . . !”
“You can say that now, Miss Hastings, in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when airplanes have been around for over a hundred years,” the president interjected. “But at the beginning of the twentieth century, I’m sure many realized that flying was infinitely more dangerous than riding in a carriage or on horseback, and certainly too dangerous to risk the president’s life when he could just as easily take a carriage, train, or ship. But I know that space travel has advanced to the point where we need to exploit it to help our country and mankind to grow, and the way I chose to do it is to take this trip.”
“But that is not your job, Mr. President,” Hastings said indignantly, as if she was lecturing a young boy. “Your job is to run the executive branch of the government of the United States of America and be the leader of the free world. The location of that very important job is in Washington, D.C., sir, not in outer space!”
“Miss Hastings, I’ve watched you on television for years,” the president responded. “I’ve seen you report from chaotic, shattered urban battlefields, from blood-soaked crime scenes, from disaster areas with looters running through the streets threatening you and your crew. Are you telling me that reporting from the eye of a hurricane was necessary for your job? You went out into one-hundred-twenty-mile-an-hour winds or put on a flak vest and helmet and stepped out into the middle of firefights for a reason, and I think that reason is to drive home the message you wanted to give to your audience.
“Well, I’m doing the very same thing by coming up here,” Phoenix went on. “I believe that America’s future is space, and I wanted to drive home that point by accepting the invitation to fly up here and do it. I wanted to experience what’s it’s like to suit up, fly in space, feel the G-forces, see Earth from two hundred miles up, do a spacewalk, look at this magnificent . . .”
The shock and bedlam in the White House press room erupted once again, and the members of the press corps who were seated shot to their feet as if pulled by a puppeteer with strings. “Do a spacewalk?” they all exclaimed as if in unison. “You did a spacewalk . . . ?”
“It lasted two, maybe two and a half minutes,” the president said. “I stepped out of the spaceplane’s cockpit, was hoisted up atop—”
“You were in the spaceplane’s cockpit?” Hastings shouted.
“I had the opportunity to sit in the cockpit during docking, and I took it,” the president said. He decided right then not to tell them that it was he who did the docking. “I had been told by Vice President Page that the way they first had to transfer to the station from the early models of the spaceplane was via a spacewalk. We were prepared for it, and there was no more danger in it than any other astronaut experiences.”