EPILOGUE

My interest is in the future because I am going to spend the rest of my life there.
-- Charles F. Kettering

23 August

"I can see it!" Joscelyn Donahue cried out. Radar confirmed, hours before, that Aurora closed in on them via the optimal planar and phase windows. Something within her, though, refused to believe it until her own eyes gave witness.

The bright blue-white dot -- crisp and sharp in the airless void -- drifted slowly, almost imperceptibly slowly, below and behind them in its co-elliptic orbit. With thrust adjustments, it would be soft-docking with them within an hour.

She and the others waited, silently, almost breathlessly. Soon she, Chad Haley (none the worse for his startling side-trip) and a man she thought she knew, who now called himself Paul Volnos, would don their helmets, depressurize their air locks, and work their way across the outside of the space station to transfer fuel from the Starblazer to pods Five and Thirteen. More than the joy she felt at the imminence of their salvation, she thrilled at the power of the human mind: how a passion for the unknown brought her to the edge of Space, and how the compassion of strangers turned the complex laws of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, and mathematics into a successful orbital rescue.

Her gaze remained pinned on the approaching spaceship, as if losing sight of it would be a crime against their saviors, against all the efforts of man. Aurora became to her the symbol of everything decent, good, and honorable about humanity.

She no longer feared for the future of mankind. It could prevail against any adversity.

***

Rex Ivarson could not sleep. While awaiting fuel for pods Five and Thirteen, the crew spent their time pumping the last wisps of hydrogen and oxygen in the other tanks into fuel cells for electricity and water. Then they flushed oxygen into the hydrogen tanks and opened everything up. In short order, the station had become a lot roomier.

Not until they had teased the wheel up to a stable orbit would they be able to give it the appropriate 3 rpm spin for pseudogravity. Until then, he and Grace enjoyed the unbearable lightness of being in free fall.

The view out of the thick window gripped his attention as surely as any earthly wonder. In his nearly nine decades of life, he had often imagined that he would someday live in Space. As the years trudged onward, though, and several false dawns teased him with promise then failed to deliver, he grew to believe that he would die on Earth. Now he gazed at the blues and greens and whites and tans of his home world and wondered -- warmly, without nostalgia -- if he would ever return. He withdrew the laptop computer from the pouch in front of him, pressed it securely to the Velcro fuzz on the lap section of his pressure suit, and switched it on.


MEMOIRS OF A TRAMP SPACER

I was born in a decade in which a hoofed mammal was the primary form of human transportation, and the airplane had only just been invented. I grew up in a town not far from where Mark Twain was born, and I shook his hand when he once visited, or so my mother said. I was two and he was seventy-five.

I am the world's oldest astronaut, yet I feel younger, more vital, lighter of heart, and more hopeful than I ever felt in my most callow youth.

Human ingenuity is the only true miracle, a thrilling marvel that puts to shame the meager boasts of priests and shamans.


Ivarson glanced over at his slumbering wife and smiled.

***

The funeral was quick, simple, and inelegant. Adrienne Oakwood's body, wrapped in a sheet of gold-hued reflective Mylar, floated near the the hatchway to her pod, held lightly by Paul Volnos at her head and Chad Haley at her feet. The other defenders of the space station stood by their respective pods, while the rest watched from their view ports, mutely pensive.

Paul's voice sounded thin and worn inside his own helmet. "I didn't know Adrienne Oakwood too well," he said into the radio microphone, "but she proved her dedication to our cause by paying the ultimate..." His voice caught and paused as he gazed at the curving limb of Earth silhouetted against the black of Space. "It's so pointless," he said after a moment. "Why do they try to stop us from leaving? Don't they know we're no good to them staying where we don't want to be? Why attack us for following an urge older than society itself? What are they afraid of?"

He took another breath. "Adrienne died fighting to defend this puny toehold in Space against a power that envies and fears a free people. If her death has any meaning, it is to show the world that human beings still have backbones, and that there are some values worth fighting for, even to the end."

Paul released his grip. With a mighty shove in the anti-orbital direction, he and Chad propelled Adrienne's body away from the station. It drifted like a glittering charm lost from a bracelet. The others watched for a long while as they grew farther and farther apart. Sunlight danced on the funeral shroud until all the living could see was a sparkling pinpoint of golden brilliance.

***

The crew of Earth's first genuine space station strapped in for a long-delayed full-length sleep period. The novices called it "night-time" even though the sky glowed with stars all day, too. One crew member, though, chose to sleep without straps that first night in Space.

Tammy Reis drifted in slumber inside the roomy hydrogen tank of Pod One. If it were not for the perforated decking that separated the tank into three levels, it would have been as large as a cathedral. It did not matter what size it was; she felt just as holy, just as blessed. Free of all restraint, she surrendered her conscious thoughts about her past and future to the eternal now of her dreams.

Paul Volnos, the only one not to turn in, took the first four hour watch. His heart still pounded from the excitement of viewing live GSN coverage of Aurora's safe return to Kennedy and its subsequent preparation for another refueling flight. Sherry Cooper stated publicly that they had received funding for the construction of another two Starblazers -- one to be operated solely for Leora Thane's tours.

He maneuvered quietly through the holes cut to connect the spheres at each deck level. The pressure hatches would have to be shipped up on later Starblazer flights.

He hovered for a long time in Pod One -- near Tammy, watching her sleep. In free fall her hair drifted loosely about her, undulating fluidly with her breathing. The pulse in her carotid arteries caused her head to bob gently up and down, as if nodding her approval. Her arms, unbound by gravity's pull, reached forward and outward from her body, like the open arms of a beckoning lover. Her face bore no evidence of the torturous path she had followed into Space. On it now lay the peaceful calm of one who has finally found her home.

She had served NASA in her passion for Space and received in return only a brief, painful taste of it. Rejecting her path, Paul had forsaken Space completely. Both actions, he realized now, gazing at the only woman he had ever loved, were mistakes. NASA was never really an enemy, simply an obstacle to be overcome. No one, nothing outside of their own souls was ever the true enemy. The real foe, the most vicious betrayer, lurked only in their hearts and their minds, consisting entirely of fears and doubts, of their sense of what life could or could not be.

Paul Volnos slowly drifted toward Tammy and tenderly took her into his arms, careful not to wake her from her slumber. Her warmth merged with his as -- still in dreams -- her arms closed about him.

***

She floated in the vast reaches of Space, naked before the splendor of the stars, and gazed at the planet below. Though she knew it to be Earth, it looked like no Earth in the waking world.

With carefree abandon, she dove toward the ocean that covered a hemisphere, and fell toward the rich blue sea, wind singing in her ears, the scent of salt and cool morning air filling her lungs. With a sudden surge of energy and motion, she rebounded into the sky, reaching upward, higher and higher, to embrace a pure white crescent Moon as she raced to join the Sun in its journey.

Tammy Reis touched the dawn of a new day.


THE END

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