Gravity by Tess Gerritsen Read Free Book Online

that she was now asking about him.
    She hung back in the node, as remote as always. Her long blond hair waved about her face like drifting sea grass.
    He turned to look out the window again. “I’m waiting for Houston to come into view,” he said.
    “You’ve got a new batch of E-mail from Payloads.” He said nothing. He just stared down at the twinkling lights of Tokyo, now poised at the knife edge of dawn.
    “Bill, there are items that require your attention. If you don’t feel up to it, we’ll have to split up your duties among the rest of us.” Duties. So that’s what she had come to discuss. Not the pain he was feeling, but whether she could count on him to perform his assigned tasks in the lab.
    Every day aboard ISS was tightly scheduled, with little time to spare for reflection or grief. If a member was incapacitated, the others had to pick up the slack, or experiments went untended.
    “Sometimes,” said Diana with crisp logic, “work is the best thing to keep grief at bay.” He touched his finger to the blur of light that was Tokyo.
    “Don’t pretend to have a heart, Diana. It doesn’t fool anyone.” For a moment she said nothing. He heard only the continuous background hum of the space station, a sound he’d grown so accustomed to he was scarcely aware of it now.
    She said, unruffled, “I do understand you’re having a hard time. I know it’s not easy to be trapped up here, with no way to get home. But there’s nothing you can do about it. You just have to wait for the shuttle.”
    He gave a bitter laugh. “Why wait? When I could be home in four hours.”
    “Come on, Bill. Get serious.”
    “I am serious. I should just get in the CRV and go.”
    “Leaving us with no lifeboat? You’re not thinking straight.” She paused.
    “You know, you might feel better with some medication. Just to help you get through this period.”
    He turned to face her, all his pain, all his grief, giving way to rage. “Take a pill and cure everything, is that it?”
    “It could help. Bill, I just need to know you won’t do something irrational.”
    “Fuck you, Diana.” He pushed off from the cupola and floated past her, toward the lab hatchway.
    “Bill!”
    “As you so kindly pointed out, I’ve got work to do.”
    “I told you, we can divide up your duties. If you’re not feeling up to it—”
    “I’ll do my own goddamn work!” He drifted into the U.S. Lab. He was relieved she didn’t follow him. Glancing back, he saw her float toward the habitation module, no doubt to check the status of the Crew Return Vehicle.
    Capable of evacuating all six astronauts, the CRV was their only home should a catastrophe befall the station. He had spooked her with his mutterings about hijacking the CRV, and he regretted it.
    Now she’d be watching him for signs of emotional meltdown.
    It was painful enough to be trapped in this glorified sardine can two hundred twenty miles above earth. To also be watched with suspicion made the ordeal worse. He might be desperate to go home, but he was not unstable. All those years of training, the psychological screening tests, had confused the fact Bill Haning was a professional—certainly not a man who’d ever endanger his colleagues.
    Propelling himself with a practiced push-off from one wall, he floated across the lab module to his workstation. There he checked the latest batch of E-mail. Diana was right about one thing, Work would distract him from thoughts of Debbie.
    Most of the E-mail had come from NASA’s Ames Biological Research Center in California, and the messages were routine requests for data confirmation. Many of the experiments were monitored from the ground, and scientists sometimes questioned the data they received. He scrolled down the messages, grimacing at yet another request for astronaut urine and feces samples. He kept scrolling, and paused at a new message.
    This one was different. It did not come from Ames, but from a private-sector payload operations