CHAPTER 15

Immediately upon your arrival to Space, your body begins to make accommodations to free fall. Some are not so pleasant. The liquids in your body redistribute themselves. No longer pulled by gravity (which your body has learned to compensate for over a billion years of evolution), your legs force the fluids to the "upper" part of your body. Your face puffs up and turns ruddy. The pressure on your sinuses makes you feel as if a cold is coming on. Your eyes get a little bloodshot. You may sneeze a lot, or sound nasal when you speak. Your legs will get skinny, almost looking as if they are atrophying.

Blood pooling in your chest cuts down on your lung capacity. You'll begin growing a few inches. This is due not just to the fact that you are weightless. The fluid redistribution flows to your spine, too. The discs between your vertebræ absorb this fluid and swell, pushing the bones farther apart. So you're getting taller.

At the same time, this redistribution of fluids sends jumbled signals to your body. You no longer feel thirsty, since your brain is getting a "full" signal from your thoracic zones. You have to remind yourself to drink regularly or you'll get dehydrated. Even so, you'll lose five pounds or more (in terms of mass) over the next few weeks. None of these changes are permanent: if you return to Earth, you'll get shorter and regain your water-weight.

But you don't intend to return to Earth, do you?

-- The Orbital Settlers' Guide

30 December, Year Two

Distracted by all the preparations, Tammy did not notice the relative silence of the crew cabin until the whine of the Constitution's turbopumps set it in sharp relief. Then came the roar of the main engines, then the terrible six-second wait. As Constitution strained at its massive clamps, computers verified all three engines firing and operating properly. Only then did the command go out to ignite the SRB's. The pair of solid rocket boosters had to fire simultaneously and with identical thrust. If one engine failed to ignite, or ignited too late, or delivered sub-critical thrust, the STS would tumble over sideways like some giant pinwheel firework and demolish launch pad 39A. With no way to shut down the solid rockets -- as they could the liquid-fueled main engines -- once the SRB's roared, the Shuttle crew irrevocably committed their bodies to Space -- or to Eternity.

The SRB's ignited flawlessly. Tammy felt only a slight pressure from the liftoff. Within seconds, however, the pressure grew greater and greater. The dizzying sensation of being shoved forward, as if from a catapult on an aircraft carrier, excited her more than could a kiss from any lover. Unlike the catapult though, the sensation lingered, increasing. She knew that her childhood decision to train for an astronaut career by riding roller coasters had been the correct one. She lay strapped onto an infinite elevator with the up button punched good and hard.

They hit Max-Q at eight miles up, over the Atlantic, and Constitution trembled like a stallion galloping at heart-stopping speed. Within seconds, the worst Earth's atmosphere could do lay behind them, and the engines throttled up to one hundred four percent of their rated power.

The renewed force of acceleration pressed her into the hard, narrow seat at four times her earthly weight. She sought this her entire life, this overwhelming rush of power directed by human will, unbelievable energy pointed like a finger of fire at the heavens, the triumph of the human mind over that most ancient of masters: gravity. She was free, now, finally free...

An overwhelming cry of unbridled joy escaped, startling her pilot, Lt. Comdr. Scott Boyd. He understood instantly, though, for he also let loose with a cowboy whoop that sounded archaic in the spaceship, yet struck Tammy as completely appropriate. Constitution was the ultimate bronco and Space the ultimate wide-open range.

Then the engines cut off, and the feeling of freedom struck her even harder, like a doubled fist. On the KC-135 jets that dropped through parabolic dives to tease her with a half of a minute weightlessness, she never had time to feel and consider all that her body was going through. Onboard Constitution, she felt suspended at the center of the Universe. She felt light and free.

Not all the sensations were pleasant. Her head felt stuffed with mud. In free fall, no longer working against gravity, her body redistributed fluids, concentrating them in the upper torso and head. Her eyes grew bloodshot, with puffy patches appearing under them; her high cheekbones rode even higher, giving her an exotic, exaggeratedly Oriental appearance; her head throbbed and swam with every movement; her breasts floated high beneath her blue flight suit; her hair drifted around her head like a dark nebula; her internal organs shifted upward, narrowing her slender waist even more.

She ignored the unpleasant sensations, even the bout of nausea that NASA euphemistically labeled "early flight malaise." She chose to focus on the fulfillment of her dream.

Everything she had dreamed about since childhood had come true. With this, her third flight, she became a fully fledged space shuttle commander. She felt an uncompromised freedom in her flight above Earth. She closed her eyes to savor the emotion.

* * *

Tammy maneuvered from the flight deck to the mid-deck. Entering head first, she glanced around and a familiar feeling of disorientation overwhelmed her. The enclosure hung upside down from her point of view, and even though she was a veteran of two previous flights, her mind still refused to interpret the altered angles. They called it jamais vu, the feeling of never having been in a familiar place. And it could set off sudden and violent nausea.

She fought it, thinking back to her youth, of the hours she spent at amusement parks on roller coasters, tilt-a-whirls, scramblers, and hammers in her own private effort to desensitize her to space sickness. It worked; the rising tide of malaise subsided and she positioned herself before the camera. Rotating about, the image of the mid-deck suddenly matched her mental map and her stomach quieted. She resolved that she would not embarrass herself or the mission with any unscheduled demonstration of zero-g fluid dynamics. She was not too sure about the congressman, though.

"I think I'm going to throw up!"

The congressman stared sickly at Tammy, his skin pallid, his eyes jerking about as they sought to process information that conflicted with what his inner ear relayed. The only part of him that looked as it did on Earth was his wavy brown hair, held firmly in shape by whatever epoxy politicians used for photo opportunities.

"You can't throw up in Space," Reis told him as she floated around his shuttle seat. "You can only throw out." She smiled, trying to calm his obvious panic with the lame old joke.

Ludlow Woolsey IV tried to hold back, but the sensations created by free fall relentlessly assaulted his guts.

Tammy kept her right hand near the pocket on the right thigh of her dark blue shuttle overalls. With her left hand, she skillfully undid Woolsey's straps.

Woolsey -- on Earth, at least -- had become a handsome man in his late forties, quite unlike the awkward rocket club supervisor Tammy had observed with disdain back in Los Gatos. His wavy salt-and-pepper hair had probably won the carpetbagger as many votes in his Oregon district as sharing the name of the powerful and respected Utah senator Ludlow Woolsey III, his father. In orbit around the Earth onboard Constitution, though, he looked like a sick and miserable child. Free fall caused fluids to accumulate in his face, puffing it out. That happened to everyone, though on Woolsey it looked worse. Even the extra blood circulating in his face did not give him the ruddy look the others possessed. In fact, space-sickness paled him and covered his flesh with beads of clammy sweat that refused to run off, simply clinging in place like the heads of rivets.

"Oh, nuts," Reis said, reaching quickly into her pocket for the sick bag.

An instant too late. The Honorable Ludlow Woolsey IV blew his cookies.

"Jon! Get the vac!" she cried out.

"Busy!" Jon Franck's voice shouted from beyond the flight deck.

Vomit rocketed forth from the politician's mouth like campaign promises, spreading outward in a noxious, churning swirl of pulsating globules of red, green, and brown chunks suspended in viscous yellow bile and stomach acids. Woolsey gazed at the meteor of puke for only an instant before the sight of it made him retch again. This time, Tammy got the bag in place.

Nausea was nothing unusual to an astronaut. Reis knew that every stray droplet had to be removed from the air before it reached the ventilator ducts. A billion-dollar spaceship could ill afford circulating as powerful an agent of corrosion as stomach acid. She withdrew a tightly bound piece of cloth from what she called her puke pocket and unfurled it. The green mosquito netting, while not an official piece of NASA equipment, passed all the strict requirements for inclusion onboard the Shuttle: its fireproof fibers would neither break off nor create lint, and the material would not outgas any chemical vapors.

The net made a very efficient air strainer.

While the congressman continued to heave into the sack, Reis bounced toward the main cloud of debris and pinched the edges of the mosquito netting to create a small parachute. Waving it back and forth, she strained the mess out of the air. It took a good ten minutes.

The average Space Shuttle flight cost about one billion dollars and lasted about a week, though this one cost two billion and would last a month. The crew this flight consisted of four astronauts, not counting the slightly green representative. Reis's ten minutes of cleanup, by such a scale of measure, cost the taxpayers about one hundred sixteen thousand dollars.

On the other hand, had she not cleaned it up, the damage could have run into the millions.

Tammy Reis maintained a painful awareness of the true costs of spaceflight and resented providing an orbital junket for Ludlow Woolsey IV, not to mention mopping up the messes of the useless tagalong. As chairman of the House Subcommittee on Space, Science and Technology, his official purpose was to confirm the flightworthiness of the newest Shuttle and to inaugurate once again the Civilians in Space program.

She cursed mentally and -- glad that free fall also disabled her sense of smell -- used an absorbent towel to wipe off the locker door where the first salvo made impact. Finished, she wadded the towel and netting into a wet ball and propelled gently toward Woolsey's seat.

Lud, as he insisted on being called, acted affably, broad and friendly in his gestures, politely solicitous of his old acquaintance Tammy, respectful of the astronauts' knowledge and skill, and quietly awed by the power of the shuttle. Right now, though, he looked as if he had been hit with the worst case of flu on earth. His stomach ceased convulsing for the time being, and he wordlessly gave her the bag when she extended her hand to him. She replaced it with an empty one, just in case.

She stuffed the towel and net into the bag, sealed it, and used her gold Fisher Space Pen to mark the date and time of the incident on the label, along with the name of the source. That done, she kicked over to one of the many lockers that lined the bulkheads of the mid-deck and opened it. A piece of tape written in black marker designated the refrigerated unit as the vomit vault. Below it, a note in another hand commanded: SECURE ALL BARF BEFORE RE-ENTRY! She tossed the plump bag inside and shut the hatch.

"Thank you, nurse," Woolsey managed to say with a sickly, weak grin.

Reis flashed a crooked smile. "Just one of the many and varied services we offer our honored guests."

Woolsey laughed, some of the color returning to his puffed-up face. "It's not exactly the Ritz, is it?"

"No," she said as she unstrapped him. "On the other hand, you can't beat the view."

The straps retracted and he floated free.

"This is amazing," he said, his sickness all but forgotten. His arms, relaxed, drifted into a loose sit-up-and-beg attitude. His waist and knees bent a third of the way chestward. "Did you ever believe when you and Volnos were kids that you'd actually make it up here?"

"Yes," Reis answered seriously. "All the time. And a lot sooner than it turned out." She put an arm around his waist. "We're not going to do any acrobatics. You'll need at least a couple of days to get used to free fall. Let me take you to the flight deck and we'll give you the best window." She glanced at her wristwatch, an unpretentious black Casio Data Bank calculator watch in which she also stored a digital crib sheet of emergency commands for the ship's computers. "We should be over Madagascar right now."

* * *

Once he hovered in front of the viewing port, Woolsey's stomach calmed and he floated in wonder. Outside, two hundred-ten miles below, crawled a stunning panorama of color and texture. The greens and browns of Madagascar drifted past, the cities of Majunga, Tananarive, and Tamatave smudged by visible brown hazes of smog. Nothing to compare to New York or London, perhaps, but a visible mark of human existence. There followed a stretch of twinkling sapphire-blue Indian Ocean. Suddenly, the twin Mascarene Islands appeared off the bow, moving slowly aftward.

After observing the congressman's adhesion to the window for a few moments, Reis silently drifted back and away from him, softly making contact with the far bulkhead to work her way hand-over-hand through the shaft to the mid-deck.

Jon Franck hung in front of the controls for the remote manipulating arm, running a test on the system and reviewing procedures with Mission Specialist Federico Kayanja, in charge of deploying the experimental solar panels for Space Station Unity stored in the rear of the cargo bay. They would share duties, too, in the South American Laboratory for Space Agriculture.

"If only they allowed us to send down a video of that," Franck said, turning toward Reis. "What a reelection bid that would be! 'Vote for Woozy Woolsey, the--' "

"Can it, Jon."

"Don't take such good care of him," he continued. "He might start following you around like a puppy."

"Tammy? Are you down there?" Woolsey's voice sounded distant even though he was only a few feet away in the shaft.

"See what I told you?" Franck said.

Reis saw the direction in which Woolsey's feet popped through the hatch.

"Don't come in that way!" she shouted.

"What?" Woolsey entered the mid-deck feet first and looked around him. From his point of view, Reis and Franck levitated on their heads below him; the mid-deck seats hung from one wall, instruments and lockers lined other walls at a crazy angle. He really did turn green this time.

Reis hollered, "Your local vertical's wrong -- No! Use the sick bag!"

* * *

"Commander Reis!" The voice awakening her sounded muffled by the persistent stuffiness in her head. The voice was that of shuttle pilot Boyd. He maneuvered into the mid-deck area and hung there upside down -- at least to her point of view. "Franck, Kayanja," he said. "Time to start earning our keep."

Reis emerged from her sleep restraint -- a sleeping bag attached to the mid-deck bulkhead to prevent crew members from drifting around like so much flotsam -- ahead of the others. Gently kicking off a bulkhead, she rammed a shoulder against Boyd's soft space boots. Franck, the astronaut with all the seniority, had pulled a mere flight crew position on this maiden voyage of Constitution. Reis suspected that the ill treatment resulted from the conclusions he had espoused about NASA years ago while serving on the Challenger investigatory commission, conclusions that were not greeted with warmth by NASA management. Franck denied it, stating that he had pulled what duty he could to be part of the historic first flight of Constitution and the first STS flight with a woman commander.

"First assignment this morning is an interview with GSN." She glanced at her wristwatch. "Seven minutes from now."

Boyd nodded, then went on his way. He established a downlink to Houston and the Global Satellite Network. Tammy gave her head a shake, setting in motion waves of jet-black hair. The other astronauts flanked her.

"Good morning, Constitution," Tom McDermott, the GSN news anchor said, "and good morning pilot Scott Boyd. How's the view from up there?"

"The view is fantastic, sir, utterly fantastic."

Reis fought to keep from rolling her eyes. Leave it to an astronaut to come up with a lifeless description of incomparable beauty.

"That's great. And I see Shuttle Commander Tammy Reis there. Good morning, Tammy."

"Good morning, Tom." Two, she thought, could play the first-name condescension game.

"How does it feel to be the first woman to command the Shuttle?"

She smiled to hide her annoyance at the question. "Being commander of the Shuttle Transportation System is the most thrilling adventure I could ever experience. Just to be a part of the spasce program is an honor and a--"

"So it's pretty fantastic for you, too."

Reis stopped. "Yes," she concluded, adding in an acidic tone, "It is utterly fantastic."

* * *

Joscelyn Donahue's forehead wrinkled imperceptibly as she frowned at her boss. Marcus Grant never followed the shuttle, yet there he sat in his office watching one of those banal orbital interviews on the wall screen, feet up on the desk, hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. He was not smiling, and did not seem to be enjoying the experience.

She observed him quietly for a while, then said, "Pretty insipid, huh?"

"Shh." Grant waved a hand to silence her, then slipped it back behind his silver-grey head.

The newsman asked the commander of Constitution about the cost of flights. "Aren't you concerned that America can't afford the Shuttle?"

Reis set her jaw and took a deep breath. It was time to defend NASA. "That would be a legitimate concern if there were some alternative to the Shuttle. There isn't any. Russia built the Buran Shuttle and only flew it once because of the cost. They abandoned it because they had a working alternative in the form of their heavy-lifting Proton series of disposable launchers. America doesn't have the equivalent to fall back on. We did, once: we had the Saturn Five. That's gone, now, and private enterprise has dropped the ball despite active scientific and financial encouragement from NASA. We may be exploring Space in a luxury sports car, but that's only because there aren't any Model T's around."

Lt. Comdr. Boyd opened his mouth and raised a hand to interrupt her when she added, "And I know you've been seeking the 'woman's viewpoint' this time around because it's another 'first woman' flight, so here it is: speaking in my political capacity as a woman, I'll state emphatically that I want my children to be born and grow up on other planets and I will do anything I can to ensure that it happens in my lifetime. Not thirty years from now, but ten years, five years. The US space program is the only program that will allow us even the hint of a chance at that dream, at making that dream a firm reality."

There was a long silence after she finished, the newsman requiring a moment to gather his thoughts after the gentle tirade. "Um, thank you, Dr. Reis." He searched for a segué, finally saying, "Well, here's hoping that your next first will be the first baby born in orbit. Now -- Colonel Kayanja, as the first Kenyan to ride the Shuttle, does your wife want to raise children on the Moon?"

Visible only on Grant's huge hi-def wall screen, Tammy's eyes rolled toward her eyebrows.

During the exchange with Reis, Joscelyn watched Grant instead of the TV. His knuckles were white, his laid-back posture tense -- almost forced. His narrow, intense gaze hid something she had never seen before. She was certain that it was hatred, but a hatred that transcended the mere subject of space travel, a topic he usually avoided. A darkness dwelled behind his eyes, an anger and a contempt as deep as the foul sediment beneath the dark waters of a poisoned well.

"Fetch Haley," Grant said in a low voice that chilled Joscelyn with its belying calm. "Tell him to finalize his affairs as if he had only one year to live."

* * *

Haley clasped the SkyPilot goggles lightly in his left hand while tapping his gloved right hand against the chair arm. The urge to jump over to Grant and help him was nearly overpowering. His boss fiddled with something in VR, wiggling his fingers, nodding his head this way and that, reaching, twisting, pointing as if conducting some invisible symphony or molding a phantasmal sculpture. Beside Haley sat Donahue, also patiently awaiting her boss's demonstration.

"All right," Grant said, waggling a finger in their direction. "Suit up and come in."

They donned their goggles and adjusted the headphones.

"I liked your ideas for the sea rocket and the balloon launch, but I can't use them for security reasons. First off, the big booster is great, but towing it out to sea is like dragging a five hundred foot banner that says 'Hey! Track me by satellite! I'm a gigantic rocket!' And keeping the crew building it quiet is a challenge in itself."

They floated above a virtual airfield at about two thousand feet, the horizon obscured by clouds and haze.

"Second," he continued, "the balloon launch, while elegant, is also slow and leaves us vulnerable for hours to aircraft and radar sightings."

"I've considered that," Haley said. "The balloon would be constructed of radar absorbent--"

"The key is secrecy." Their view of the airfield changed as if they were diving toward it. "What do you see down there?"

"Airport," Joscelyn said. "Hangars, aircraft, three runways."

"Good. Let's drop into the landing pattern." The view shifted with vertiginous speed to four hundred feet on final approach. Instead of lining up with the runway, though, they buzzed the tiedown area. "What did you see there?" Grant asked as they pulled out of the pass.

"Airliners." Haley's voice sounded impatient. "Six of them. Boeing Seven-Forty-Sevens."

"Let's watch." At Grant's command, the aircraft taxiied swiftly onto the runway and one by one lifted off at fast-forward speed, tearing past clouds and into the sky. Their point of view paced the airplanes at a dizzying velocity.

Haley spoke dumbfoundedly. "You're not suggesting what I think you're--"

"Watch."

The half-dozen 747's flew a loose delta formation. In the lower left of the image appeared airspeed and altitude indicators. At 45,000 feet and 600 miles per hour indicated air speed, flames erupted from the rear of all six aircraft. Off they flew at a breathtaking pace, angling higher and higher into the purpling sky. When the sky turned black and stars appeared, the engines shut off and the airplanes began to behave unstably, pitching, yawing, and rolling this way and that. Tiny flashes of light on the wing, nose, and tail countermanded the motions, keeping the airplanes-cum-spacecraft in a synchronized attitude.

Grant, with a gesture, moved the three of them to a point of view that placed the aircraft between them and the Earth. The view of the aircraft high above the clouds, moving across the planet at nearly five miles a second, stunned the two new viewers.

The aircraft shifted about in a decidedly non-ærobatic maneuver. Using the tiny impulses of the attitude rockets, five of the planes rolled over on their backs at precise sixty-degree angles, their wingtips almost touching. They formed a belly-out hexagon, wingtip to wingtip.

"You can't be serious," Haley said as they zoomed in to see space-suited workers welding the wingtips together. Steel cables were strung from attach points on the dorsal centerline of the planes to every other plane. Zooming back out to a thousand feet distance, they watched as the reaction motors slowly imparted a spin to the tethered 747's until the unit became a bizarre rotating space station wheeling through Low Earth Orbit. A blazing red and orange logo flamed into the black sky reading

SPACE STATION GRANT-ONE

"I'm quite serious," Grant replied. "Jet aircraft are cheap, plentiful, and made to withstand nearly an atmosphere of negative pressure. With just a few modifications and the addition of either internal or conformal external boosters, we could have a functioning space station in operation within a week of launch. Moreover, nobody in the spy satellite biz will notice anything on the ground, since we can work in existing hangars at remote airports worldwide. We don't even have to launch them together, but could launch from different parts of the globe and rendezvous for maximum secur--"

"You didn't just come up with this, Marc," Donahue said, removing her goggles. "This isn't some sudden inspiration." Her voice possessed an angry edge that mystified Haley.

"It's an idea," Grant said, slipping his goggles off to gaze at her, "that's been percolating in my head for --"

"Ever since I've known you, you've never given a thought to Space. You even seemed to hate it, or fear it or something. Yet you've been thinking about this!"

Grant spoke in a calm, quiet tone, as if explaining to a child. "I'm a planner, Jo-Don. I've always kept my mind on possible profit centers. Space is just one of the places I've entertained over the years, holding back because I could not see a short-term profit. Now -- with Haley's and your input -- I'm beginning to see the light. So I'm dusting off an old idea and seeing if it flies."

Donahue slung the goggles on her chair arm and peevishly removed her glove. "I could have told you it was a brilliant idea," she said. "Years ago, if only you'd confided in me." She rose from the chair. "I move that we implement this plan immediately. If you have nothing more for me, I'd like to start working on it. We'll need to study the market for used aircraft and pick the best six--"

"Jo-Don." Grant's voice sought to soothe.

It failed to remove the bite from her tone. "Yes, boss?" she said.

Grant glanced at Haley, then back at her. "We'll discuss this later. Thanks for your... positive response."

She strode out of the office without a word of reply.


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