Exo: A Novel (Jumper) (50 page)

“That sounds great,” I said. I locked eyes with her. “We’ll be
right
back.”

*   *   *

Joe didn’t throw up when we first appeared in the middle of Kristen Station, but he yelled.

“Sorry,” he said, breathing rapidly. “It’s not the jumping,” he explained. “It’s the falling.” The
feeling
of falling, he meant.

We were pretty much dead center in the sphere, the view port was “beneath” us, since our feet pointed at it. The port was no longer pointed directly at Earth, but a substantial amount of earthlight was still coming in the window and the giant, round room still looked amazing.

“Eyes on me,” I said. “Up is away from the viewport. Down is toward it.”

“Wow.”

“Look, I didn’t want to say this in front of your mom and it’s a trillion-to-one shot, but just suppose we lost
both
hulls at once and you found yourself exposed to vacuum.
Don’t
hold your breath, okay?”

He blinked and his eyes moved from my face to the sphere’s wall. “Would it really make a difference? We’d be dead in ninety seconds.”

“
I
can have us back in the atmosphere long before that. But if you hold your breath you’ll rupture your lungs, right?”

He took a deep breath, exhaled. “Embolism. Right.
Don’t
hold my breath.”

I jumped in place, adding a foot-second toward the view port, and snagging his ankle as I drifted “down.” We settled, gripping the inner frame of the view port, on opposite sides. “Okay, now you’re lying on the floor looking
down
through the window.”

He was clenching the improvised barf bag tightly but his color looked okay.

I wasn’t used to looking at the earth from this altitude, or through a window for that matter. I’d been concentrating on the work: deploying the outer sphere, then the inner, hooking them together, and filling them. I’d been a good, hardworking Space Girl and I felt justified taking a moment now.

It was late afternoon over the North Atlantic and we could see the terminator creeping across central Europe as the sun set. “Pretty cool, eh?” I said.

Joe didn’t say anything and when I looked at him, my heart melted. He was using the paper towels from the improvised barf bag, but not to vomit. He was wiping the tears from his eyes.

I swallowed. “I did that the first time, too. No matter how many times you look at it in magazines or TV or even on an IMAX screen, the real thing beats it all hollow.”

His voice was hoarse. “How high?”

“Orbital radius or altitude?”

“Uh, both.”

“The semimajor axis is sixteen thousand seven hundred seventy-one kilometers. Varies about ninety klicks between apoapsis and periapsis. Ten thousand three hundred ninety-three kilometers above sea level.”

He was holding his fist at arm’s length and using it to measure the earth’s disk from edge to edge. “Forty-five degrees?”

“Just under. Forty-four point seven degrees. Call it ninety full moons. The first time I did the calculations I was three degrees low.”

He tilted his head up to look across the view port at me. His hand darted to his mouth and he began breathing rapidly through his nose. After twenty seconds, he said, “You weren’t kidding about sudden head movements.”

“No.” I eyed the bag he was holding. In the astronaut corps they make the “emitter” clean up any “emissions,” which is fair, but I pictured vomit splattering against the view port and almost had to use the spare bag I’d tucked in my back pocket.

“Why were your calculations off?”

Thank god for distractions. “Turns out the earth is
not
a flat disk. If it were, the edge we’d see would be farther away than the tangential edges of the sphere we’re actually seeing. When you’re this close, it makes a difference.”

“I wouldn’t call over six thousand miles
close
.”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to
walk
it, but we’re less than the earth’s diameter from the surface.” I edged clockwise around the frame, moving closer to him. “Sometime I’ll show it to you from
two hundred
kilometers. That’s a whole different treat.”

“Why didn’t you put the habitat down there?”

“Not safe.”

“Oh? Orbital debris? Or atmospheric drag?”

“That. And intentional efforts.” I didn’t want the mood shattered but I hadn’t told him what happened to the cabin, yet. “Hold still.”

I eased up behind him and put my arms around his chest, resting my chin on his shoulder so I could look past his head down through the port. I pressed my body against his.

He covered my hands with his and groaned. “Oh, girl.” We started to drift away from the view port and he grabbed the frame again.

“Shhh. No head movements.” I took a deep breath. “Remember when I texted you—told you to keep your eyes open?”

“Yes. Have those guys come back to New Prospect?”

“Not that we know. But … they destroyed our home—the cabin.”

His body spasmed and he jerked his head around to look at my face, and then he had to curl up and use the bag.

I backed off and let him get on with it, breathing through my mouth. I kept an eye out for “escapees,” but he captured it all and the paper towels did a good job of keeping it
in
the bag.

Once he sealed the mess inside, I pulled him away from the smell and opened the other bag to get an unsoiled section of paper towel to wipe his mouth. Then I gave him the unused bag, still open, still ready.

“Good capture,” I told him. “You were
definitely
going to clean it up if you got the window.”

His color was already bad, but when I said that he spread the mouth of the bag and moved it closer to his head. He kept it together, though, taking two careful breaths before saying. “Everyone’s okay? Your parents? Your grandmother?”

“Yes.” Remembering that distractions are good, I told him about the missile and the drone and the embedded tracker and finally about our plans for Grandmother.

“Christ! Why didn’t you tell me this two days ago?”

I gestured expansively, indicating the sphere around us. “Busy, you know?”

“I could’ve been helping Cory with the life support!”

“You will, Joe.” I hugged him, front to front this time. “He’s going to need help both down there and up here, installing it.
Experienced
help.”

He
almost
shook his head, but stopped himself in time. “Ha.
Some
experience,” he said bitterly. He wasn’t letting go of me, though.

“More experience than
Cory
has.”

Joe’s mouth dropped open. “He hasn’t been up here yet?”

“No.” I kissed his cheek. “Only me. You’re the first.”

This time the tears came with sobs and incoherent apologies and we both had to use paper towels on our eyes.

“I want to kiss you a little more seriously,” I said. “But there’s no way I’m going to do that until you’ve rinsed your mouth out. And if I don’t get you back, your mom is going to be
sure
that you’re dead.”

He held up his hand. “And I want to kiss you but … are we back? You’ve forgiven me?”

“The short answer is yes.”

“And the long answer?”

“The long answer is there’s too much shit happening in my life right now for me to give you the long answer.”

“Why now?”

“Because there’s
too much shit happening
in my life right now. I need you.”

Returning to gravity settled Joe’s stomach immediately and he was able to stand without falling over after a few moments. I let him take the used bag outside to the trash. When I left him, the goodnight kiss was delightful and he tasted divine.

Ms. Trujeque’s was right—peppermint tea was
great
.

THIRTY-FIVE

Cent: You can’t fall

I replaced the air in the station before I brought up any more visitors, twinning between the lower end of the station (next to the view port) to a snow-covered stretch of ground next to another “station,” the upper Pikes Peak Cog Railway station, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. I only held it a few seconds, but my ears
hurt
from the sudden pop.

I should’ve worn my spacesuit.

When I untwinned, the air in the station was full of fog.

Oops.

To avoid as rapid a change when I repressurized, I twinned from lower altitudes, working down two thousand feet at a time. The water droplets disappeared almost immediately, reabsorbed as the pressure increased. I adjusted the view port so it directly faced Earth again and went for my next visitors.

*   *   *

Next was Dad, of course.

He was the one who introduced me to the ideas, the one who made me turn my attention to space in the first place.

He didn’t jerk or yell when we appeared in the middle of the sphere, but I know he’d experimented with skydiving in the past, so the sensation wasn’t alien.

I’d given him
and
Mom the same lecture I’d given Joe about sudden head movements. I’d advised them to jump to move around the volume, something Joe couldn’t do.

Dad popped around, feeling the inner hull, pushing off and drifting through the middle, then he settled by the view port, his mouth open and his eyes wet. I handed him a handkerchief.

So far, we were a hundred percent on deeply emotional initial reactions to being in space. At least this time I was prepared for it.

I went back for Mom.

She
did
yell.

The first time Mom ever jumped, she’d been falling off a cliff. It was a wonder she didn’t flinch away, but she didn’t. She breathed out and her muscles untensed and she held her head still.

“It’s
huge
,” she said.

“Like an empty house. We’ll see how it feels after we move in.” I pointed down at Dad and the window. “You should see the view.”

I gave them ten minutes while I floated nearby with a small battery-operated fan, pushing the air (and to a lesser degree, myself) around to keep our exhaled CO
2
from accumulating around us.

Then I asked, “Can you guys test if you can jump back to the Eyrie?”

Mom said, “Surely you mean the vault?”

“No. I want you to go straight to sitting on the bed. Your balance will be off. You certainly don’t want to fall over on Grandmother.”

“No,” she agreed. “We don’t want that.”

Mom vanished. Then Dad.

I looked at the stack of makeshift emesis bags in my hand, relieved. I was really glad I didn’t have to clean up anything. More important, my parents’ ability to jump back to ground side meant I could depend on them to evacuate others in an emergency, a
big
load off of my mind.

And then Mom was back.

I blinked, surprised.

When
I
jumped into Kristen Station or the Leonardo pressurized module of the ISS, I’d been looking up the orbital parameters and using the GPS as part of my destination visualization. In the ten minutes Mom had been looking through the view port, Kristen Station had moved almost three thousand kilometers. Even during the five seconds she’d been gone, it had moved almost twenty-five kilometers.

“How did you do that?” I sounded accusatory, and I softened my voice. “Jump back, I mean.”

Mom said, “Shouldn’t I have? There’s a certain smell—I think it’s from the coating on this fabric,” she said, tapping on the inner hull. “That’s what I was concentrating on, anyway.”

I didn’t know what to say. Finally I went with, “That’s good.” I certainly didn’t want to go into all the reasons she
shouldn’t
be able to. “You can help ferry people and supplies up.”

“Of course.” she nodded. “You were right, by the way. I was
really
dizzy for a moment there when I got down. Your father should have listened. He arrived standing and fell
right
over.”

“Is he okay? He didn’t throw up on the bed?”

She vanished. I checked my watch, staring at the seconds. A full minute went by and I thought,
maybe it
was
a fluke
, when she appeared again, frowning.

“Is Dad all right?”

She waved a hand. “He’s grumpy. He said I shouldn’t be able to jump back here and we had an argument about it. And since he
knows
one couldn’t possibly jump here without the precise orbital parameters, he
can’t
.”

I laughed. “Sometimes a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.”

Mom snorted. “Someone should tell him that it’s impossible to jump from Canada to Texas, too.”

“I’m going to go get Cory. Since you
can
, would you go get Mr. Grumpy Pants? Cory will have some specifications and questions about sensors and monitors.”

Mom grinned. “I would be
delighted
.”

*   *   *

Cory brought a measuring tape as well as five different kinds of Velcro and three different kinds of closed-loop hooks all with adhesive mounting pads. Down on the ground he’d been all business, talking about what he needed to find out on this trip. He thought he was all in ready-to-get-things-done mode, so when he spent several minutes at the view port tearing up, it caught him by surprise.

“Handkerchief?”

He accepted it silently.

When he did get back to his to-do list he said, “Your Ms. Wilde at BlimpWerks said that all of these adhesives are safe for the fabric and its coating, but she’s not sure which ones will stick best or stink the least.”

So we got down to finding out.

First thing Velcroed to the wall was the zippered nylon-mesh bag holding my emesis kit.

(Take one forty-count box of gallon-sized ziplock bags and five rolls of extra-absorbent paper towels. Assemble four towels each into each ziplock for forty space-sickness bags. Use the one-plus roll of leftover paper towels, an extra-large container of unscented, hypoallergenic baby wipes, and an extra-large container of medical sanitizing wipes for additional cleanup. To keep from adding to the mess, include one twenty-count package of odor-blocking disposable face masks.)