“It will be, in a month.”
“Well, I just wanted you to know. Dad, I’ve buried Mom. At last.”
Kip studies his son’s eyes and Jerrod can see he’s stunned that another taboo subject has been softly opened. Kip’s hesitation is lengthy and Jerrod wonders how his father will respond. But there’s no squaring of his father’s shoulders, no edge-of-the-seat prelecture stance. What would have once been a small incendiary bomb—an invitation to be enraged by what he’d always considered his father’s infidelity to his mother’s memory by even dating Sharon—is now defused.
“So… should I accept one of those marriage proposals I’m getting daily from desperate women all over the globe?”
Jerrod laughs. “Yeah, at random, Dad. That would be real smart. Man, I can’t believe those women.”
“It’s embarrassing, son. I can’t even read them, some are so lurid. And the pictures they send…”
“Who’s answering them for you?”
“Diana Ross, I think. Or a secretary.”
“By the way, she likes you a lot.”
“Who?”
“You know who. And I think she’s cool, too. I like the way she treated me in the first weeks after you got back.”
Kip nods. He’s thinking about the awkward visit from Diana a few hours after his landing, when he wasn’t even sure he’d come back to the same planet. The trip from obscure contest winner to perhaps the most famous living human on Earth scared the hell out of him, and it had been calming to hear her voice down the corridor and see her swing in the door and look so relieved, actually hugging him and hanging on. Kip marked it off to raw emotion and the intensity of the moment, but in the months since, she’s become the scheduler for the media demands for his time, and their phone calls and meetings have grown constant.
The call of a nightbird snags their attention. The windsong through the pine needles rises as Jerrod looks at him quizzically.
“You were suffocating with Sharon, weren’t you, Dad?”
“I was suffocating myself, son. Denying what I felt. Following my father’s script. Life with her the way I was living it was like losing the last oxygen in orbit. At least up there I knew what was happening. In Tucson it was a slower death.”
“You going to write that book? Have they finalized the contract?”
“I have to. No, wrong answer. I wantto. That and the fact that I need the money, now that I’ve quit selling pharmaceuticals.”
“So, what are you planning after that?”
“The same thing I want you to do, son. Something I didn’t know how to do. I’m planning to appreciate every minute of this life.”
For some reason he can’t explain, Kip closes his cell phone and finds a phone booth instead. Maybe it’s too many old movies featuring the grand old railway station, or maybe just a need to touch something corporeal, something connected by actual wires. Never mind the fact that his voice in digits is probably bouncing through satellites to reach her phone in California.
“So, what are you up to?”
Diana’s laugh is like music, especially when she’s feigning stress.
“Drowning, I am, in the process of setting up the next Internet contest.”
“How many this time?”
“Four winners.”
“And let me guess, this time ASA is guaranteeing at least four days of stark terror for each one while the world watches?”
“Well… I did take one of your ideas.”
“Which is?”
“They get their own laptop while on orbit and can type directly into their own Web site during the flight. Of course, we just can’t guarantee a two-billion-strong audience like you got…”
“Lucky me.”
“Is the disguise working, by the way?”
“You mean the baseball cap and mirrored dark glasses you FedExed? No. I tried them in Denver two days ago. Four people came over immediately to say they really liked my new look.”
There is a moment of silence.
“You said in your text message you had something serious and professional to ask me?” Diana says.
“I do. But first I want to know when I’m going to see you again.”
“I could e-mail you a picture.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I get a lot of offers, too, Mr. Dawson, thanks to everything you wrote about me.”
She pauses. “How about this evening?”
“Diana, I’m in New York.”
“I know. So am I.”
“ Really? Where?”
“Turn around.”
The grin on her face as Kip realizes she’s standing right behind him is infectious, and he pulls her to him for a hug that becomes a tentative kiss.
“How did you…”
“I followed you from the publisher’s office. You know, jumped in a taxi and had fun saying, ‘Follow that cab!’”
“This is great.”
“But…” she says, holding him back. “I need to know what that important professional question is you were so hot for me to answer.”
“It’s a serious one.”
“Okay.”
“I mean, considering all I went through up there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“And because I’ve been your poster boy ever since.”
“You’ve done very well for us, Kip, especially considering the various ways we tried to kill you.”
“I’m glad you appreciate the danger I was in.”
“I do. Wedo. So, what’s the question?”
He glances skyward, then back to her, eye to eye.
“So, when can I go up again?”
Also by John J. Nance
Saving Cascadia
Fire Flight
Golden Boy
Skyhook
Turbulence
Headwind
Blackout
The Last Hostage
Medusa’s Child
Pandora’s Clock
Phoenix Rising
Final Approach
Scorpion Strike
What Goes Up
On Shaky Ground
Blind Trust
Splash of Colors
Copyright
Rockefeller Center
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New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright (c) 2006 by John J. Nance
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Designed by Davina Mock
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nance, John J.
Orbit / John J. Nance
1. Space flights—Fiction. 2. Space vehicle accidents—United States—Fiction. 3. Space rescue operations—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3564.A546O73 2006
813’.54—dc22 2005057553
ISBN: 0-7432-8909-9
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