There was barely enough room to sit, which I'd been doing for four hours without so much as an almanac to read.
"How you doin' in there," one of my crewmembers asked, banging on the door. "Everything come out alright?"
I couldn't tell them apart by voice.
"I'm okay," I bantered with him. "But there ain't no paper in here!"
"You're a real wit," he said through the door. "Listen, it's time to come bustin' out. We're gonna open you puppies up and get everyone aboard the ship."
There was a hiss, and the pressure returned to normal. The door opened, and I stepped out into the frigid air.
Hekyll add Jekyll were there, with a big guy I hadn't seen before. Hekyll handed me a dark blue jumpsuit.
"Sorry, doll," he apologized, "this is all I could find. It belongs to a missile puke, but I don't think she'll be missing it. She was already in orbit last time I saw her."
He chuckled. I wasn't sure his innuendo was intended to imply he'd left her in sexual ecstasy or that she'd been high on drugs. Or perhaps he meant it literally, and she was actually in outer space.
I took it gratefully and tried to put it on. It fit, mostly, but I had to take my boots off to get my feet through the legs.
It definitely belonged to a woman—I could smell her. She was an SRA, whatever than meant, and her last name was apparently Panderknob.
There were insignia on the collar, three stripes pointed down with a blue circle occulting their vertices. I took them off and put my single Peace Shield on the left tab.
The Flight Lieutenant gave me the once over and reached for my left breast, or where it would have been if I'd had one. I heard a rip and looked down to see he'd pulled off the nametag. I was backed with Velcro.
That made sense, I guessed. I could see how being able to change the tags, for example, if you got promoted, would be useful in the field. And it explained how these buffoons could get by with their little charades without getting caught or having to have two complete sets of uniforms.
He unzipped a little pocket on his upper left arm and took out his wallet. He pulled out his ID out of a black vinyl cover with a clear plastic window.
He handed the cover to me and put his ID back in his wallet and the wallet back in its pocket. I thought that was really cool. My jumpsuit didn't have arm-pockets.
"Put your ID in there and stick it to Vel-patch on your chest. It's got Cro on the back"
Very clever. I pulled out my own ID and affixed it to my breast.
The third man was quite old. He was sixty-five, maybe seventy, and looked like a stone statue. He had thin white hair and was stocky, with a paunch about the middle and spindly legs.
He had the most horrible gray undertone I'd ever seen, which was highlighted here and there with irregular plum-colored spots on his pallid crepe-paper skin.
His face was hollow, lined—wracked would be a better word—with signs of hardship and subsequent perseverance. His left eye was cloudy, and I wondered if he could see out of it.
I felt a little light-headed. I looked around.
It was darker now—the Moon had set and only two bright spots burned in the heavens; a bright-white one near the zenith and a smaller red one about halfway above the west horizon—but the work hadn't ceased. A couple of the ships had been moved or set upright.
A jeep pulled up, driven by a vapid looking androgyne with a crop of short dark hair and a silly grin. Heo was in the Air Force, according to a tag on hira shirt and was named Winters. Heo wore a single broken stripe on each arm, point downward like the Space Force guards had worn.
The two jokers tossed their grips in the back and climbed in. The old man took his time getting in back.
"You comin', hon," the driver asked.
I must've been gawping; the scene over his shoulder looked like something Korzak would write about. I almost expected to see Phobos and Deimos hanging overhead.
Hira nasal twang broke the spell.
"Sure," I said dully, and climbed in the back with the luggage.
Heo drove us out to the far point of the diamond, the one farthest from the chevron-shaped building, and parked behind a bank of blast fences. I could see that these were on wheels and could be towed into place.
Behind them, and towering against the relatively boring Northern Horizon, was our ship, standing fifty feet tall, at least, and fuming like dry ice.
I hadn't smelled anything before, so cold it was, but out here, I just couldn't miss it. There was the tang of ozone, and some other smell I couldn't quite identify.
Those sharp smells came and went, depending on the wind and where you were standing, but all of the equipment smelled like kerosene and industrial-strength petroleum jelly. Just sitting in the Jeep, my hands smelt like it.
The chunky old geezer got out slowly and looked it up and down, like he was here to inspect it or something, but he didn't do anything but look.
Our insane crew got out and pulled helmets out of their grips. They too were black, and covered the entire head. There was a dark faceplate that could be raised of lowered above the eyes, but there was a clear window underneath. They had a puffy seal on the rim, which fitted with a similar ring built into their flight-suits that ran around the neck. A grille at each cheek piece covered a speaker or microphone, I wasn't sure which.
They donned them and took out long gloves, dark grey instead of black, but with black panels set in their anterior surfaces. They looked a bit like hockey gloves, only not so bulky.
Now they really looked like dorks. Not exactly spacemen, but more like hydrocephalic test pilots who'd spent the last two weeks drinking Sterno and aftershave. They acted like it too.
We wended out way in through the gaps in the blast barriers and over to the craft itself.
It was enormous, and gave me the impression that it could fall over on me. I looked at the nearest fin. There was a nacelle on the end of it that was at least twice as tall as I was. There were three such holding the main hull of the ship upright, and three feet off the ground.
The fuselage was probably ten feet across at the bottom and flared to fifteen feet, would be my guess, at the top, where the cabin was.
There was a door, about thirty feet up and standing open. It was the shape I always call 'Tylenol pill" and curved to match the hull along its length. It was set on three internal hinges and there was a cranequin handle to throw the bolts that locked it shut.
There was a metal stand on wheels—the kind you saw President Ford fall down—pushed up against the rocket to serves as an ingress.
There were still maintenance folks flitting around, making last minute adjustments, disconnecting hoses, filling out forms.
The one known as Hyde went over to a loud box of lights on wheels and talked to a heavyset guy who had a plastic binder full of loose sheets. He slid one out and handed it to the Astrogator.
"How much do you weigh, sweetpea?" He was twenty feet away, and I could hear him clearly above the din.
"A hundred and five pounds," I yelled back.
"No," he said, erasing the figure he'd written down, "in metric."
"I don't know," I said, trying to remember how to convert to SI. It was roughly half your weight in pounds. "Fifty kilograms?"
It was a guess.
He stepped closer, bringing the forms with him.
"No," he repeated in a lower voice. "Kilograms is mass; you weigh in Newtons. A kilo is about 2.2 pounds—though that is completely incorrect—and a Newton is one meter-per-second-squared. One Earth gravity is 9.8 Newtons."
It occurred to me that his helmet must be projecting the sound.
He looked up and to the right, and his eyes glazed over.
"You weigh 467 Newtons, girlie."
He wrote it down.
"How 'bout you, Judge? What to you weigh, in Newtons?"
The old man gave him a Look, the kind Mother would be proud of, and Hyde leant in to him.
"I gotta have it, oldster. Tell me what it is in pounds, real quiet-like in my ear, and I'll convert it silently."
"One eighty-six," the dour man told him in a normal voice. Was he really a judge? What would a judge be doing going to space?
Hyde converted it silently as promised and wrote down the answer.
"Good enough, children. Let's get aboard and get this monkey buttoned up. The sooner, we get space-side, the sooner we can hook up with some space-age hotties. I'm for trolling the Promenade for nubiles. Maybe we can get some young honeys to induct us into the 22,600 Mile-High Club."
"Sorry, Your Honor," he finished to the Judge, who just shook his head.
"Yeah, right," the Captain replied. "And later, after we've been shot down, we're gonna attempt the World's Deepest Thump-down."
The Captain had a last minute confab with the crew chief while the Lieutenant took us aboard. The rest of the ground crew disappeared, taking tools and equipment with them.
We climbed up the stairs and entered into a wedge-shaped compartment, about three feet deep and roomy enough to stand two, if both of them were small.
The inside wall had another door, this one flat but otherwise similar to the external one. The astrogator undogged it and stepped into a hexagonal tunnel beyond.
There was half a cage, set on swivels in the floor and ceiling, to house a ladder. It could be rotated to reach any of the six doors, each set into a flat wall.
The one we'd just come from was labeled 'Airlock'. The others read R1, Galley, R2, Head, and R3.
Hyde, or Ltn. Vastis to be perfectly precise, was already half-way up the ladder, crawling through a ring set in the ceiling. On the other side was another ladder-cage like the one I was on.
I heard the Captain come in and dog the door behind himself. The Judge came into the corridor, and I followed Vastis up the ladder.
The next space was a largish cabin, cylindrical with a two-foot chamfer along the floor. There were six acceleration seats spaced along it, facing inward.
Above, the room curved inward a bit, and met a flat ceiling. From the middle of the ceiling projected a frustrum of a cone, with another thick metal ring placed inside the swivel for the ladder-cage. There were portals set in the curve near the ceiling.
"Take a seat," Vastis pointed to the chairs, and continued up the ladder.
I took one and watched the Judge, red-faced and panting, crawl up out of the hatch.
He came over and sat beside me.
I heard Captain Griffin dog the inner door and the hiss of the airlock cycling. I could already feel the pressure dropping to normal, 'normal' being what I'd just spend the last four hours sitting in.
He came up the ladder and told the Judge to sit across from me, and strapped him in.
Then he consulted a table and took two weights from a rack on the wall beside the Judge and strapped them in the chairs on either side of me.
"That oughta do it," he said and strapped me in too. "Is everybody okay? Let me know if you have a problem.
"I'm gonna give you both a mask that has a sick kit and air supply. If you get sick, remember to breathe in through your nose."
I'd been told that in the briefing already.
He pulled a mask from a compartment over my head and fixed it in place. It covered my head completely, like a gas mask, and had a single Plexiglas panel to see through. There were two hoses connecting it to air and exhalant. The sick kit was a hole that was surrounded by an inflated torus that sealed over the mouth.
I didn't like it one bit.
"Thumbs up," the Captain asked, holding out his own fist, thumb pointing to the sky. Americans always got that wrong. The Roman gesture meant opposite our modern interpretation. But I couldn't tell him that, through the mask.
I gave him a thumbs-up.
He smiled, looked at the Judge, who gave him a thumbs-up as well.
"Okay, you two. Up, up, and away."
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