Page 7 of To the Moon
He ignored me, but he was all I could see, hear, and smell. I swore I heard the whisper of his hair growing. His pupils dilated and shrank as he flipped from one screen to the next, but I shouldn't have noticed that. What was wrong with me?
Sweat rolled down my temples beneath my helmet.
My helmet. I dropped the face shield. At least this way, I would smell myself first. I kept the airlock open to the cabin air. I needed to save my suit's canisters forour experiments in the shuttle's airlock. It would be like we were in space, only not.
"Are you all right?" Sebastian asked without looking at me.
I withheld my immediate snappy response,"Like you care,"and gave myself a mental pat on the back. I could act like a rational adult around this man, after all. "I'm fine."
"Then do your preflight checks."
I mentally kicked myself for being forgetful. It was as easy as pressing a button and letting my console run through our flight plan code, projecting the path on the shuttle's dashboard.
I tapped the key with my knuckle and watched as the display between us lit up with our trajectory. The shuttle's path followed the green line, marking the optimal path around the moon and back toward Earth.
The events on screen took only a few minutes, but we would be trapped in the tiny shuttle together for over two days before we touched down in the Atlantic Ocean. That seemed like endless torture while I fought off the strangest illness I'd ever had. I loved not wearing contacts anymore, but the changes in my senses of smell, taste, hearing, and touch, all at once, were overwhelming.
Sebastian paused, his thumb hovering over the remote for the space station's ejection booster. "Are you sure you're ready? You look like shit."
"It's nothing."
He pursed his lips into a tight line and nodded. "Nothing we can fix, anyway. If we don't leave now, we'll miss the trajectory."
I nodded. "Let's do it."
Sebastian pushed the ejector button. It seemed so strange to hear nothing happening outside the craft. In the training lab, I'd practiced for this moment with the metallic whir of gears and the solid clank of the clasps unlocking before a small explosion rocketed us across the pool meant to imitate space.
The silence reminded me of the tagline from my favorite science fiction movie."In space, no one hears you scream."
The shuttle rocked from side to side as we catapulted away from the space station. I glanced over at Sebastian to find him gripping his armrests, eyes closed, sweat beading across his brow.
"You all right?" I asked. I hoped we hadn't both caught the weird space bug.
"I hate that part," he said. "It seems like we should hear something."
Plain old fear of sudden movements. I couldn't judge him for that, though. I'd tried to time it by counting the seconds between the clamp release and the controlled explosion, but it was never the same. To top it all off, it happened even faster in space, with no gravity or air resistance.
"I wish we could see," he continued. "That would help a little."
"We'll be in the airlock soon enough." Each of the doors had small windows, though the outside window was far thicker than the one behind our heads. From my seat, I only saw the white insulated panels that made up the airlock's interior. Sebastian wouldn't be able to see into space from his seat, either.
"Twelve hours." He huffed a frustrated sigh. "Might as well do what we can to prepare. Walk me through the experiments."
He was testing me, but I didn't mind. It would pass the time. I went through the process from unbuckling my seatbelt to completing the experiments and returning to our seats afterward. The activities would take us all of fifteen minutes. Describing them took less than five.
Sebastian unhooked his seatbelt and unzipped the top of his suit, exposing a V of wet t-shirt beneath. "It's hot in here," he muttered.
"It's supposed to be cold," I said. "Doesn't seem right."
"It was like this the first time." He fanned his face with his equally sweaty palm.
"How many times have you been up here?" I asked.
"This is the second," he said. "I'm surprised Bunting didn't tag along."
I swallowed hard at the name and double-clicked on the Paskal logo at the top right of my screen. I'd recognized the strange blue glow, like a link, during our flight to the space station. The link opened a new window, displaying a camera feed from the airlock behind us.
Dr. Bunting was tagging along on our flight, in a sense. I assumed he was the one who had installed the secret camera in the airlock. It didn't seem to go anywhere, though. It wouldn't take much to bounce the feed off a private Paskal satellite once we were back in range. We still had our privacy in the cabin, but oncewe were in the airlock, the camera would capture our every move.
