Out of Orbit by Chris Jones Read Free Book Online Page B

who had beaten him into space. As well as offering a few salient tips on how to use the toilet—something along the lines of the best defense is a good offense—he had told Pettit that he might want to have his first ten minutes in orbit rehearsed, blocked out the way stage actors waltz through a play. Otherwise the experience and discomfortwould overwhelm the necessities of it. No time was allotted for breath-catching. There was so much work to be done.
    Pettit had taken in the advice. He had memorized a short, opening to-do list down to its tiniest detail, and now he began working through it, and his upset stomach, step by step. First, he raised his visor. Next, he took off his gloves and, after losing hold of them for a split second, he pushed them under a strap that was wrapped around his knee, making sure that they couldn’t float away. Then he popped off his helmet and his headset, tucking the second inside the first. He churned his way toward the rows of storage lockers and found the bag that had been earmarked for his gear, labeled not with his name but with his mission designation: MS5. He slipped the helmet, the headset, and his gloves inside the bag, sealed it up, and put it away. As though he was following a recipe, he continued the process until he was down to a comfortable set of clothes that he might have worn to the gym. Come the end of the personal dismantling, he still felt sick, but at least he had made it through the opening act without a stumble.
    The rest of the crew had also freed themselves from their bulk, and now they began working through checklists and itineraries dictated by the ground, timed down to the minute. For the first few hours in orbit—“post-insertion,” it’s called—the crew’s cabin is abuzz. For Expedition Six, still isolated down below on mid-deck, their principal job was to turn their cold, sterile surroundings into something that looked more like a train’s sleeping car. They folded away the seats, activated the cooling system, set up the exercise machines, fired up the galley, and rolled out their sleeping bags. It was like those frantic few hours after you pull into a campsite, and the tent needs to be pitched and wood needs to be gathered before dark. Unrolling the sleeping bags gave each of them that feeling especially.
    But this was no ordinary wilderness they were in. After about ninety minutes of yeoman effort, Pettit had lost himself and his sickness in the hurry. He had maybe even forgotten where he was, exactly, at least until he visited the cockpit for the first time. He laughed when instinct still made him grab hold of the ladder that pointed the way, even though it was now about as useful as a paperweight.And then, with the space shuttle turned upside down, and with two large windows making up most of the cockpit’s ceiling, he floated into what felt like a bubble of Heaven. There, filling his eyes with a warm, soft light, was a panoramic view of earth, of white clouds and blue ocean, half of it bright with sun and half of it dark with night.
    He blinked once, twice, three times. For maybe ten seconds, he stopped, losing hold of everything he had left to do, instead caught stealing a look at everything else that had opened up for him. A big part of him wanted so badly to press his nose against the glass, but the rational rest of him—not to mention Bowersox and Budarin, still plugging away—called him back to work. He pulled himself from the window, telling himself that he would have all of the time in the world for staring.
    The rest of the trip passed as though in a movie, projected on the giant blue screen stretched out underneath them. Everybody took his turn in a front-row seat. They could see the Blue Nile meeting the White Nile at Khartoum, boat wakes and vapor trails, the northern and southern lights in the same shift, cloud shadows that stretched for hundreds of miles.
    The rapture was tempered only by the still-haunting specter of absent