Titan Read Free Page B

towards Africa. The clouds piled over the equator seemed to reach down towards her, clearly three-dimensional and casting long shadows. She could see the Nile, and the ribbon development along it, surrounded by the baked-hard surface of the desert; the dependence of the people on the Nile’s water was clear.
    She was extraordinarily comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. She could hear the whir of her backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan—it sounded like a pc fan. She heard squeaks and pops on the radio, as she drifted over UHF stations on the ground. In her bubble helmet she had a hundred and eighty degree vision, and she had a great sense of freedom. She knew that when she returned to the cabin, after the EVA, it would seem constricting, absurdly confining.
    As she gazed at Earth—at all of humanity, save for the six on orbit with her on Columbia and a handful on Station—she felt some of the tension drain out of her, as if it was being drawn up to the planet. She felt lifted out of the web of concerns that dominated her life: the difficulties of her career, the frustrating pace of the space program, her unsatisfactory relationship with Jackie, her daughter, the blizzard of hassles that made up every day, mail and balky technology and her car and her apartment and accounts she had to pay and…
    No wonder people get hooked on this, she thought.
    “Okay, EV2, Houston. Coming up to your three hundred feet limit.”
    “Copy that.” Three hundred feet was as far as she could allow herself to travel. Moving away from Columbia, Benacerraf was actually entering a slightly different orbit. If she went much further, return to the orbiter would become a full-scale rendezvous, a matter of complex course correction maneuvers.
    She passed out of the shadow of the wing, and into sunlight; her EMU seemed to glow.
    “I see your light, Paula,” Lamb called.
    “I’m pleased to hear it, Tom.”
    “EV2, Houston. Confirming your ground-to-MMU direct link is operational.”
    “Thank you.”
    “And your transponder beacon is functioning.”
    “Copy that.”
    “EV2, Houston. You have a lot of green-eyed people watching you; looks like you’re having a lot of fun.”
    “Sure. This is working very nicely. Ah, I’m glad I’ve got old Brer Rabbit out here with me, out in the briar patch where he belongs.”
    She heard Lamb chuckle at that, back in the payload bay. She was aping the first words he’d spoken on the Moon.
    Most astronauts got off the active list after four or five flights. They moved out into industry, or up into some kind of program management position within NASA. What kind of man was it who would keep on subjecting himself—and his family—to the grind of training, two years for every Shuttle mission, the enormous dangers of the missions themselves, flight after flight, year after year, logging up the spaceflight hours well into his sixties, endlessly defying the survival odds?
    She’d even formulated the thought that maybe Lamb wasn’t actually good for anything else. To stay in the office you had to resist promotion, after all. You had to demonstrate sustained mediocrity. John Young, the other great surviving Moonwalker, had been taken off the active roster when he’d been so vocal in criticizing NASA safety procedures after Challenger
    Besides, all that ancient astronaut-as-Cold Warrior garbage from the 1960s, which still clung around NASA, just did not cut any ice with Benacerraf. It had nothing to do with the future of space travel as she saw it, which could only be about a steady, logical and gradual expansion of the space frontier, beyond Earth. Or even with the actions required of NASA, the space agency, to survive in a future of decreasing funding, increasing irrationality, a growing sense of military threat from China and elsewhere which was causing the ancient Cold Warriors to come rearing from their bunkers once more…
    It might take all of her career to build the Space Station; she might