Helen’s eyes move from the alien to the flow of information tracking across the faceplate of her helmet. The g-forces are now pushing her eyeballs back into her head a bit, so this is tricky, but she manages. She can push enough air out of her lungs to communicate, confirming data back to Mission Control.
Prime Space has pulled out all the stops for the Eidolon launch. They’ve been in sim mode since the five a.m. wake-up call. They had sims for when they waved good-bye to their families and colleagues from behind the sealed partition (Helen has no idea if that was her daughter or a simulated version of her daughter) and they had sims for when they enacted various departing rituals including the old Russian one of peeing on the right tire of the vehicle taking them to the launch pad—in Helen’s case, emptying a vial of urine on the tire—very much a real tire and real urine, although the landscape outside the truck was virtual. They had sims for a long elevator ascent to their craft. Considering that Primitus was sitting on a platform in the desert, and not atop the Manus V, the noise and motion of the “elevator” was especially impressive.
And all along, Helen has been asking herself, Does it feel real? Which is not a question she would be asking if it were real, and so the answer, on some level, must be no.
And yet.
Now her eyeballs are going out instead of in. This will be the big rush, when God step-step-steps and kicks their little football, and the sound of tarsal connecting with craft will be a mighty boom and God’s bulging thigh will shred his tights. Not nicey-nice God, but Old Testament God, letting Job have it, capable of large-scale smiting.
Helen has a speech she gives about leaving Earth:
“Of course, we are all focused on following what is happening technically in the spacecraft, and being prepared to deal with any issues. But when you hear the SRBs—sorry, Solid Rocket Boosters—fall away for the first time, you are just filled with awe for the dedication and ingenuity and expertise of the incredible number of people who have contributed to that moment. It is truly a time to marvel at what our species is able to do.”
Nothing of the kind! Nothing of the kind had she felt during any of her missions. You didn’t have time for poetic thoughts like that.
Very few people could say what they actually felt in a particular moment. Possibly nobody knew.
Helen cannot name the something that has always been in the back of her mind during those moments when she has left the Earth. Intense focus on what was happening in the present eclipsed all else, but things do not disappear during an eclipse, only disappear from view. Something is there.
How does it feel?
Big.
Bigger.
This is escape velocity, a fine phrase. This will be new, when it is real. Helen has never gone beyond Low Earth Orbit. This will be Deep Space.
It’s not happening. But it sort of is.
Helen can’t help but watch the clock. Your body can take more than you think it can. It helps it, comforts it, when you can give it an end point. You can take quite a bit when you know that at the end of your ordeal, you will be in space and there will be weightlessness.
To stand on Earth is not quite the sessile event it seems. To stand on Earth is to fall to Earth. People forget that. People take our planet’s feeble but constant gravitational embrace for granted. To orbit the Earth is not to be shot up to some magical zone where there is no gravity, but to be shot up in such a trajectory that your subsequent fall means you won’t hit anything; you will persistently and permanently miss the Earth and circle around it. To have done this is to understand the persistence and permanence of falling and to understand that what is true does not always feel like what is true. It doesn’t feel like falling to stand on Earth. It doesn’t feel like falling and missing to circle around it.
On the way to Mars, the astronauts will escape Earth’s gravity and their motion will be dominated by the gravitational field of the sun, and they will fall around the sun, until that fall gets them close enough to fall around Mars.
But it won’t feel like they are falling, or flying. Primitus will be tethered to the spent upper stage of its rocket, which, when its thrusters are fired, will cause rocket and craft to revolve around each other. This centrifuge will provide 98 percent Earth-like gravity conditions in the Hab. They will experience microgravity only for discrete moments, or if they have to perform a space walk. The centrifuge will protect the crew’s muscles, their bone density, their vision, and their cognitive functioning. And it will take away the joy of falling with everything falling around you.
Microgravity is the heroin, the God, the unrequited love, of astronauts. Nothing feels as good or does more damage.
Before her first experience in Prime’s Bright Star centrifuge-enabled craft, Helen was told by other astronauts that the spin up “is a little bit of a transition,” which was astronaut-speak for “You will want to puke like you have never wanted to puke before.”
Now, of course, this will all be simulated, but considering the elaborate theatrics Prime has provided this far, Helen expects to feel some real nausea. It’s not that hard to make humans feel sick, even her. She’s taken the antinausea meds in preparation. Once fake spin-up is completed, they will descend into the Habitat section of Primitus and pretend that the real Earth gravity present in a module in Utah is artificial gravity from a centrifuge that has been successfully created in space. They don’t have to do anything goofy like shout, “My God! It worked!” Although that would be funny.
“Here we go!” Sergei shouts, because the God that kicked them has now run to the end of the field and caught them in his hands. It amuses God, perhaps, to toss them from one hand to the other. This goes on for seventeen seconds longer than it should, and is somewhat more violent than she has experienced before.
Okay, much more violent.
When she feels ill, Helen has a visualization of a tree that she employs. Biofeedback. No one vomits at the thought of a tree.
And then God does a funny thing.