And so it was for Jillian and Spencer Armacost. She dutifully sent her husband off to space—a place she could never follow—and when he returned he was still her husband. But he was always slightly different, as if he knew secrets now—secrets he could never share with her or with, any of the uninitiated. It was a tiny, small brother-and sisterhood, one which excluded the vast majority of the population. A Russian cosmonaut, grimy and exhausted after six long months on the Russian space station Mir had more in common with Spencer Armacost than Jillian could ever hope to have.
These complex feelings she rendered down to their most simple parts. “I miss you so much when you’re gone,” Jillian said with a sigh. “It’s horrible. I never get a full night’s sleep.”
Spencer nodded and mussed her short blond hair. “I miss you, too, Jill. Last time we were up, Streck said that if I bellyached about you one more minute, he was going to toss my ass off the ship.” Spencer smiled crookedly. “I don’t think he would really have done it… Someone would be bound to notice that I went up but somehow failed to make the trip down.”
Jillian harrumphed. “You can tell Streck that your ass is mine and he can keep his hands off it, thank you very much.”
“Aye, aye, ma’am. Understood,” said Spencer briskly. “I will see to it that the commander is given the orders as to the disposition of my ass post haste, ma’am.”
Alex Streck was Spencer’s immediate superior and mission commander. Both he and his wife Natalie were good friends of the Armacosts, despite slight differences in age and the subtle distinctions of rank.
“Good,” said Jillian with a little laugh. She snuggled in closer, burrowing under his arm and pushing up against his body, as if to absorb warmth from it. “My class wants you to come in when you get back. I think they only tolerate me to get to you.” Jillian Armacost was being unduly modest. She was a wildly popular second grade teacher at a local Florida elementary school. Though she did have to admit that having a husband who was an astronaut with flight status probably gave her a little edge when it came to engaging her boisterous and rambunctious pack of second graders.
Spencer stretched in the bed. “I might be able to arrange a visit,” he said cagily, like a gambler trying to make the most of a less than perfect hand. “It’ll take a little bit of doing, though,” he added.
“What will it take?” Jillian asked.
“Well, it wouldn’t hurt for you to be a little nice to me,” said Spencer, smiling.
“How nice?” Jillian asked, as if weighing her chips before she bet anything.
“Oh, you know,” said Spencer airily. “You know me… I’m just an old married man, a little kindness goes quite a long way with an old coot like me.”
Jillian brushed her lips against his and reached down under the sheet, her hand closing around what she discovered there. Jillian’s eyes went wide, as if she were the virginal heroine of a nineteenth century novel.
‘Why, Mr. Armacost, whatever do you have there?”
Spencer said through a stiff upper lip, “Why, Mrs. Armeacost, whatever do you mean?”
As they melted into each other’s arms, Fred Astaire’s singing of music and dance provided the only possible answer.
1
The firm and authoritative voice came through a crackling cloud of static.
“Victory, we are at T-minus thirty-one seconds, your onboard computers are functioning. Start auto sequence.”
Mission Control was talking to the space shuffle Victory. The great pile of vehicle was standing straight up on the launch pad, ready to blast off and head for space. The whole machine was made up of several components: the familiar and elegant winged orbiter, two solid rocket boosters, and a giant external tank.
Despite all the talk about onboard computers, for the next few minutes the Victory would be dealing with a technology as complicated as an ordinary bottle rocket. Spencer and Alex Streck and the rest of the crew were strapped into the orbiter fifteen stories above the ground, the larger portion of which was stuffed with hundred of tons of volatile fuel. In a moment or two, someone would set fire to it and they would be on their way.
The voice of Mission Control seemed to pervade the very air of the Cape. Jillian Armacost had been through it so many times she could imagine every order, every check, every response as they went over the air between Mission Control and the shut-de itself.
Jillian stood at the open French windows of her house. Far on the horizon, thrusting up into the blue of a Florida morning sky like a skyscraper, was the shuttle and the ugly steel fretwork of the attendant gantry. She stared out through the humid air, not quite able to believe that her beloved husband was strapped into a seat atop that strange, rather alien contraption.
The countdown to liftoff had started and was well along. Jillian could imagine the voice. “T-minus 14, 13, 12, 11…”
Suddenly Jillian felt a chill and she wrapped her arms around herself. She trembled slightly.
“Ten, ignition on. T-minus 9, 8, 7…”
From far off came the sound of a low rumbling. “Six… Engine start…” The rumbling grew in intensity as the sound waves moved across the flat landscape.
“Four, 3, 2, 1. Zero and liftoff…”
The window in front of Jillian vibrated slightly as the sound ricocheted off the thin panes. She reached and touched the trembling glass, as if connecting herself to the sound connected her to the craft quivering on the horizon. It was as if the shuttle was anxious to be gone, desperate to shake off the bounds of tiresome gravity.
Spencer spoke for the first time. “Mission Control, this is Victory. We have left the pad…” It was a remarkably prosaic way of saying that tons of volatile fuel were burning up, pushing another huge hunk of metal into the sky.
“Roger that, Victory,” Mission Control responded. “You are go for throttle up…
“Mission Control,” Spencer answered, “we have throttle up. It is a fine day for flying, Houston…”
Jillian watched as the shuttle emerged from the vast blizzard of smoke, its snub nose pointed straight toward the sky. No matter how many times Jillian had seen a launch, this great eruption of smoke and steel, she always felt that the module rose out of the dramatic upheaval slowly and tentatively, as if straining to make it into the sky like a weak fledgling new from the nest. It seemed to move so slowly that she half expected the entire contraption to fall over, sloping to one side like a tottering drunk, unable to stand the forces of staying upright for another second. She did not know she was holding her breath, but she was.
Two minutes into the flight, the boosters were used up and separated from the craft. Whle they appeared to float gracefully away from the main body of the vessel, the separation was actually a gut-wrenching yank that no matter how many times Spencer felt it, it seemed as if the whole ship was being ripped apart. You never got used it.
“Mission Control, we are standing by for SRB separation,” said Spencer, bracing himself for what came next.