Besides, a body was not something to show off — it had always been something to work on, to operate. She had exercised hard all through high school and college, not because it was the thing to do but because she wanted to excel at one thing — running. She had trained her body to perform well in track and field events, not to win beauty contests. She even had a few trophies on display at her parents' house. The results of her efforts were a healthy if less than spectacular body, a daily running habit — and dates too few and far between. Who was it who said you couldn't be too thin or too rich? Half-right, whoever it was…
She unwrapped clear plastic from a drinking glass, filled it with lukewarm tap water and took a sip. She could feel the liquid go down, then seem to solidify in an acid lump in her throat. Wouldn't go down and it wouldn't come up. Great way to start the day. Strange, she hadn't thought about high school or college or her social life in months. Even the shuttle pilot who'd popped into her dream had been a long-forgotten high school boyfriend. On a day like today she'd better be thinking of something else.
She took her time after her shower, drying herself and combing her long red hair, and still found herself with an hour to go before her planned wake-up time — two whole hours before her taxi was due. She dressed in thin cotton long underwear, cotton gym socks, and her powder blue NASA flight suit. She put up her hair in her trademark ponytail, redid it twice to kill time. It didn't help. Still an hour and forty minutes until the taxi was to arrive. Nothing on TV at three in the morning.
Once again her stomach started to gnaw at her… To hell with waiting for the taxi. She slipped on her black flying boots, left the room key on the bed, turned out the lights and closed the door behind her.
In the lobby of the Vandenburg Air Force Base Visiting Officers Quarters, she had to cough twice to get the clerk's attention. "Can you call the base taxi and get me a ride to the Shuttle Flight Center?"
The clerk stared at her shuttle crewmember flight suit and did a double take — even with one-a-month shuttle launches from Vandenburg, a shuttle crewperson was an unusual sight. "Transportation is swamped on a launch day," the clerk said. "The Shuttle Flight Center will pick you up—"
"At four A.M. I want… I have to go out there now."
The clerk caught the hesitation in Ann's voice, and her expression changed from bored to irritated. "I'll check."
As the clerk dialed a desk phone Ann wandered through the lobby and over to a wide, floor-to-ceiling window facing the Pacific Ocean. Washed clean by the night air and lingering Santa Ana winds, the predawn sky glistened with hundreds of stars. A tiny sliver of moon was about to dip a horn into the cold water, and the big bright planet Jupiter sparkled brilliantly. "Miss?" The clerk had to raise her voice to get Ann's attention. "Transportation says they can't get out earlier than four-thirty."
"Never mind," Ann said, heading for the door. "I'll walk."
"Walk? To the Shuttle Center? That's ten miles." But Ann was already out the door…
Ten blocks later she had left the main base behind. Ahead was miles and miles of emptiness — abandoned thirty-year-old wooden barracks, parking lots, crumbling buildings and athletic fields giving way to occasional sand dunes and grassy meadows.
As the bright glow of civilization behind her melted away, the feeling was electric, and she found her pace quickening. The ocean breeze was like an amphetamine. To the west the stars appeared so bright and near they seemed to cast a reflection off the gentle ocean waves, To the east the first faint outlines of the San Rafael Mountains could just barely be made out.
She found herself now in a gentle, easy jog… the butterflies, the nightmare, even the grouchy desk clerk, all seemed part of some happy conspiracy to make her experience this rush, this mysterious communion with earth and sky. Her boots crunched on hard sand, and her cheeks stung from the cold breeze as she stepped up her pace, the chill air seeming to flow into her veins and through her whole body.
This was her place, all right. Free. Open. The thought of being cooped up, strapped in, locked in place seemed scary, repugnant.
She had reached the top of the small rise, and abruptly found herself a few hundred yards from a tall fence illuminated every fifty yards by powerful searchlights. A concrete guard shack blocked the road in front of her. Air force security guards with rifles and dogs patrolled the fence; the dogs were barking, straining against their leashes, their supersensitive noses picking up the intruder.
Three miles beyond the twelve-foot-high fence stood a massive structure, brilliantly illuminated and clearly visible in spite of its distance. It looked like a skyscraper sitting in the middle of nowhere. A few hundred yards from the building was a squat, ungainly shape dwarfed by the skyscraper, surrounded by open-skeleton towers on two sides and also illuminated by large banks of super-powered spotlights. She was looking at the ultimate, the rebuilt space shuttle Enterprise. And the skyscraper-like building to the right of it — the one she had first seen when she had come over the rise — was the new Vandenburg Vehicle Assembly Building. There was movement of the men near the front gate and the concrete guard shack but it didn't register in her mind. Her attention was all on the ungainly, squat machine sitting on top of a tall concrete pedestal in the distance.
From a distance it looked so small. She had seen many shuttles, of course. She had been in Enterprise numerous times on dry-run rehearsals, emergency egress training, orientation walkarounds. From up close at the shuttle's base or on the access tower the thing looked huge. She had never felt confined or claustrophobic around the shuttle — until now. From this vantage point it looked like a toy model.
And she was going to strap herself in that toy and let someone ignite four million pounds of propellants and rocket fuel under her, blasting her at twenty-five times the speed of sound hundreds of miles into the sky. Was she crazy?
Even crazier was that she had had to work to get aboard that thing. She had to apply, be interviewed, beg, plead, cajole just to be considered. After that there had been months of waiting, then six months of training, study, simulators, tests, exercises, presentations — all so she could live hundreds of miles above the earth's surface, breathing recirculated air, eating irradiated food, drinking chemically produced water and coping with microgravity.
She was so caught up in conflicting emotions that she didn't notice the air force security police jeep drive up alongside her. It was the heavy breathing of a huge Doberman pinscher that pulled her back. "This is a restricted area," one patrolman said as he approached, shining a flashlight into Ann's face, his M-16 automatic rifle at port arms. "Identification. Now."
She absently reached into a right thigh flight-suit pocket to retrieve her ID card. It wasn't until she had unzipped that the guard recognized her. "Dr. Page?" He took the ID card from her, scanned it, handed it back. "Saw your picture in the paper, You're going on this morning's flight…"
"Yes, right," she said, hoping she sounded more official than she felt.