6

      Cape Canaveral

      Through the open window of his rental car, Jack inhaled the humid air of Merritt Island and smelled the jungle odors of damp soil and vegetation. The gateway to Kennedy Space Center was a surprisingly rural road slashing through orange groves, past ramshackle doughnut stands and weed-filled junkyards littered with discarded missile parts. Daylight was fading, and up ahead he saw the taillights of hundreds of cars, slowed to a crawl. Traffic was backing up, and soon his car would be trapped in the conga line of tourists searching for parking spots from which to view the morning launch.

      There was no point trying to work his way through this mess. Nor did he see the point of trying to make it through the Port Canaveral gate. At this hour, the astronauts were asleep, anyway. He had arrived too late to say good-bye.

      He pulled out of traffic, turned the car around, and headed back to Highway AIA. The road to Cocoa Beach.

      Since the era of Alan Shepard and the original Mercury seven, Cocoa Beach had been party central for the astronauts, a slightly seedy strip of hotels and bars and T-shirt shops stretching along a spit of land trapped between the Banana River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Jack knew the strip well, from the Tokyo Steak House to the Moon Shot Bar. Once he had jogged the same beach where John Glenn used to run. Only two years ago, he had stood on Jetty Park and gazed across the Banana River at launchpad 39A. At his shuttle, the bird that was supposed to take him into space. The memories were still clouded by pain. He remembered a long run on a sweltering afternoon. The sudden, excruciating stab in his flank, an agony so terrible he was brought to his knees. And then, through a haze of narcotics, the somber face of his flight surgeon gazing down at him in the ER, telling him the bad news. A kidney stone.

      He’d been scrubbed from the mission.

      Even worse, his future in spaceflight was in doubt. A history of kidney stones was one of the few conditions that could permanently ground an astronaut. Microgravity caused physiologic shifts in body fluids, resulting in dehydration. It also caused bones to leach out calcium. Together, these factors raised the risk of new kidney stones while in space—a risk NASA did not want to take. Though still in the astronaut corps, Jack had effectively been grounded. He had hung on for another year, hoping for a new flight assignment, but his name never again came up. He’d been reduced to an astronaut ghost, condemned to wander the halls of JSC forever in search of a mission.

      Fast-forward to the present. Here he was, back in Canaveral, no longer an astronaut but just another tourist cruising down AlA, hungry and grumpy, with nowhere to go. Every hotel within forty miles was booked solid, and he was tired of driving.

      He turned into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel and headed for the bar.

      The place had been spiffed up considerably since the last time he had been here. New carpet, new barstools, ferns hanging from the ceiling. It used to be a slightly shabby hangout, a tired old Hilton on a tired old tourist strip. There were no four-star hotels on Cocoa Beach. This was as close as you came to luxury digs.

      He ordered a scotch and water and focused on the TV above the bar. It was tuned to the official NASA channel, and the shuttle Atlantis was on the screen, aglow with floodlights, ghostly vapor rising around it. Emma’s ride into space. He stared at the image, thinking of the miles of wiring inside that hull, the countless switches and data buses, the screws and joints and O-rings. Millions of things that could go wrong. It was a wonder that so little did go wrong, that men, imperfect as they were, could design and build a craft of such reliability that seven people are willing to strap themselves inside. Please let this launch be one of the perfect ones, he thought. A launch where everyone has done their job right, and not a screw is loose. It has to be perfect because my Emma will be aboard.

      A woman sat down on the barstool beside him and said, ‘I wonder what they’re thinking now.’

      He turned to look at her, his interest momentarily captured by a glimpse of thigh. She was a sleek and sunny blonde, with one of those blandly perfect faces whose features one forgets within an hour of parting. ‘What who’s thinking?’ he asked.

      ‘The astronauts. I wonder if they’re thinking, “Oh, shit, what’d I get myself into?”’

      He shrugged and took a sip of scotch. ‘They’re not thinking anything right now. They’re all asleep.’

      ‘I wouldn’t be able to sleep.’

      ‘Their circadian rhythm’s completely readjusted. They probably went to bed two hours ago.’

      ‘No, I mean, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all. I’d be lying awake thinking up ways to get out of it.’

      He laughed. ‘I guarantee you, if they’re awake, it’s because they can’t wait to climb on board that baby and blast off.’

      She looked at him curiously. ‘You’re with the program, aren’t you?’

      ‘Was. Astronaut corps.’

      ‘Not now?’

      He lifted the drink to his lips, felt the ice cubes clink sharply against his teeth. ‘I retired.’ Setting down his empty glass, he rose to his feet and saw disappointment flash in the woman’s eyes. He allowed himself a moment’s consideration of how the rest of the evening could go were he to stay and continue the conversation. Pleasant company. The promise of more to follow.

      Instead he paid his bar tab and walked out of the Hilton.

      At midnight, standing on the beach at Jetty Park, he gazed across the water toward pad 39B. I’m here, he thought. Even if you don’t know it, I’m with you.

      He sat down on the sand and waited for dawn.

      July 24

      Houston

      ‘There’s a high-pressure system over the Gulf,