I woke screaming, bathed in perspiration, tangled in my bed-sheets. And I realized that in the last moment of my nightmare the man who reached toward me was not Spence after all. It was Ricardo.
Dawn was breaking. Time to get up anyway.
I was applying the final dab of mascara when the apartment’s intercom chimed. I called out to it and Sam’s voice rasped, “Arise Esmeralda. Your knight in shining armor is here to whisk you away to the promised land.”
I had seldom heard such a mixture of metaphors.
We drove to the Cape in Spence’s reconditioned antique Mustang, gleaming silver, with me crammed into the tiny rear seat and the top down. My careful hairdo was blown to tatters once we hit the highway but I did not care; it was glorious to race in the early morning sunlight.
Despite my VR orientation, I gulped as we strapped ourselves into the contoured chairs of the Delta Clipper. It was a big, conical-shaped craft, sitting in the middle of a concrete blast pad. It reminded me of the ancient round pyramids of Michoacan, in Mexico: massive, tall and enduring. But this “pyramid” was made of lightweight alloys and plastics, not stone. And it was intended to fly into space.
After all my fears, the actual takeoff was almost mild. The roar of the rocket engines was muffled by the cabin’s acoustical insulation. The vibration was less than my orientation simulation had led me to believe. Before I fully realized we were off the ground the ship had settled down into a smooth, surging acceleration.
And then the engines shut off and we were coasting in zero gravity. My stomach felt as if it were dropping away to infinity and crawling up my throat, both at the same time. The medicinal patch Sam had given me must have helped, though, because in a few moments my feeling of nausea eased. It did not disappear entirely, but it sank to a level where I could turn to Spence, sitting beside me, and make a weak grin.
“You’re doing fine,” he said, treating me to that dazzling smile of his. I did not even mind that the loose end of his shoulder belt was floating in the air, bobbing up and down like a flat gray snake.
Sam, of course, unclipped his harness as soon as the engines cut off and floated up to the padded ceiling.
“This is the life!” he announced to the ten other passengers. Then he tucked his knees up under his chin and did a few zero-gee spins and tumbles.
The other passengers were mostly experienced engineers and technicians riding up to Alpha for a stint of work on the space station. One of them, however, must have been new to zero-gee. I could hear him retching into one of the bags that had been thoughtfully placed in our seat-backs. The sound of it made me gag.
“Ignore it,” Spence advised me, placing a cool, calm hand on my arm. With his other hand he pointed at the acrobatic Sam. “And ignore him, too. He does this every trip, just to see who he can get to throw up.”
Once we docked with Alpha and got down to the main wheel of the station, everyone felt much better. Except Sam. I believe he truly preferred zero-gee to normal gravity.
Alpha station was a set of three nested wheels, each at a different distance from the center to simulate a different level of gravity. The outermost wheel was at one g, normal Earthly gravity. The second was at one-third gee, roughly the same as Mars. The innermost was at the Moon’s level of one-sixth gee. The hub of the station was, of course, effectively zero gravity, although some of the more sensitive scientific and industrial experiments were housed in “free flyers” that floated independendy of the space station’s huge, rotating structure.
Much of the main wheel was unoccupied, I saw. Long stretches of the sloping corridor stood bare and empty as Sam and I walked through them. Nothing but bare structural ribs and dim overhead lights. Not even any windows.
“Plenty room for hotel facilities here,” Sam kept muttering.
Spence had disappeared into the area on the second wheel that VCI had leased from Alpha’s owner, Rockledge Industries. He had come up to work on the satellite repair facility we had established there, not merely to chaperone me.
“But Sam,” I asked as we strolled through the dismally empty corridor, “why would anyone pay the price of a ticket to orbit just to be cooped up in cramped compartments in a space station? It’s like being in a small ocean liner, down in steerage class, below the water line.”
He smiled as if I had stepped into his web. “Two reasons, Esmeralda. One—the view. You can’t imagine what it’s like to see the Earth from up here until you’ve done it for yourself.”
“I’ve seen photos and videos. They’re breathtaking, yes, but—”
“But not the real experience,” Sam interrupted. “And then there’s the second reason.” He broke into a lecherous leer. “Making love in zero gravity. It’s fantastic, lemme tell you.”
I did not respond to that obvious ploy.
“Better yet, lemme show you.”
“I think not,” I said coolly. But I wondered what it would be like to make love in zero gravity. Not with Sam, of course. With Spence.
Sam’s expression turned instantly to wounded innocence. “I mean, lemme show you the zero-gee section of the station.” “Oh.”
“Did you think I was propositioning you?”
“Of course.”
“How could you? This is a business trip,” he protested. “I even brought you a chaperone. My intentions are honorable, cross my heart.” Which he did, and then raised his right hand in a Boy Scout’s salute.
I trusted Sam as far as I could throw the cathedral of Quito, but I followed him down the long passageway to the hub of the space station. It was a strange, eerie journey. The passageway was nothing more than a long tube studded with ladder-like rungs. With each step we descended the feeling of gravity lessened until it felt as if we were floating, rather than climbing. Sam showed me how to let go of the rungs altogether, except for the faintest touch against them now and then to propel myself up the tube. Soon we were swimming, hardly touching the rungs at all, hurtling faster and faster along the long metal tube.
I realized why the standard uniform for the space station was one-piece coveralls that zippered at the cuffs of the trousers and sleeves. Anything else would have been undignified, perhaps even dangerous.
The tube was only dimly lit, but I could see up ahead a brighter glow coming from an open hatch at the end. We were whipping along by now, streaking past the rungs like a pair of dolphins.
And then we shot into a huge, empty space: a vast hollow sphere with padded walls. Sam zoomed straight across the center and dove headfirst into the curving wall. It gave and he bounced back toward me. I felt as if I had been dropped out of an airplane. I was falling and there was no way I could control myself.
Then Sam grabbed me as we passed each other. His hands gripped my flailing arms and I was surprised at how strong he was. We spun around each other, two astronomical bodies suddenly caught in a mutual orbit. I was breathless, unable to decide whether I should scream or laugh. Slowly we drifted to the wall and nudged against it. Sam flattened his back against the padding, gaining enough traction to bring us both to a stop.
“Fun, huh?”
It took me several moments to catch my breath. Once I did, I realized that Sam was holding me in his arms and his lips were almost touching mine.
I pushed away, gently, and floated toward the middle of the huge enclosure. “Fun, yes,” I admitted.
We spent nearly an hour playing games like a pair of school children let loose for recess. We looped and dived and bounced off the padded walls. We played tag and blindman’s bluff, although I was certain that Sam cheated and peeked whenever he felt like it.
Finally we hovered in the middle of the empty sphere, sweating, panting, an arm’s length from one another.