Astronauts -- Fiction; Outer space -- Exploration -- Fiction; Science fiction; Space travelers -- Fiction
McCauley relaxed a little. He watched as they checked his reflexes. He
could tell that they looked all right, anyway. They gave him a pencil
and timed him while he did a page of IQ stuff. In the past few weeks
they'd established his personal norm for all sorts of things, and now
they were checking to see whether anticipation pushed him too far
off normal. He began to sweat when he realized that he needed to act
exactly as usual, and they knew it, and he sweated more because of it.
They checked him over as they would a guinea pig before an experiment,
only he was the guinea pig. But he was desperately anxious for all this
to be over and for the experiment to start.
Presently they finished and looked at each other and nodded. Then one
of them said, "You'll do," and McCauley went almost sick with relief.
Then, infuriatingly, he knew from their expressions that they'd looked
for exactly that reaction. He couldn't do anything they wouldn't
analyze and think about. And he burned a little, but it was all right.
Everything was all right!
When Ed came out to the main part of the blockhouse again, Randy knew
from his expression that he'd been checked out for the flight, but he
asked politely:
"Mother and child doing well?"
By that time McCauley wanted to hug somebody for sheer joy, but instead
he said sedately,
"The doc says I'm a boy."
But just the same he was almost weak from the reaction to the ending of
his fears about what the doctors might decide. He looked at his watch.
Just about on schedule. Over in a corner somebody with a headphone
and chest mike was marking off items on a list he had before him. He
said, "Telemeter circuits," and paused. A voice evidently sounded in
his headphones, because he made a checkmark with his pencil. Then he
said, "Tracker circuits," and waited, and made another checkmark. As
McCauley walked on to where his voice was drowned out, he was still
saying toneless things into his chest mike and making checkmarks after
unhearable replies.
Randy closed the door of the cubicle where McCauley would put on the
grav-suit. It was skin-tight and festooned all over with stray bits of
equipment. Randy helped him get into it.
"Lucky son-of-a-gun!" he said conversationally. "How do the Irish get
all the breaks?"
"Clean living," McCauley told him, "and a drag with the top brass."
It wasn't so, of course. Not the top brass part, anyhow.
His arm caught in the right sleeve and Randy helped him straighten
it. There were peculiar tubes built into the fabric. They were all
hooked to a grav-valve that would let compressed air into them at a
suitable pressure to tighten the suit and fight the tendency of his
blood and inner organs to be left behind when his bones and flesh were
accelerated by the full thrust of the rocket. A man wasn't built to
stand the acceleration he had to take. But the grav-suit would make up
the difference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account