There was no hiding it this time. Larisa was just three feet away on his left, tending to her cryomanufacturing test equipment.
She looked over at him. “Problems?”
He sniffed and rubbed his eyes while he considered what to say. She had been all business with him from the moment he came on board. There had been moments of candor and mirth, as with any colleague, but never any real warmth. How much did Michael want to tell her?
She was the commander of the station. She had a right to know when one of her crew was compromised. So he said, “I’m having trouble controlling my emotions.”
“In what way?” she asked.
He gripped the edge of the crocus experiment for support. “It’s weird.” Sniff. “Normally people have trouble with negative feelings, but I keep becoming overwhelmed by joy.” Sniff. “I burst into tears at the slightest provocation.” His voice cracked.
“I see.” The corners of Larisa’s mouth turned up in a hint of a smile. Michael instantly felt his fists and jaw clench in anticipation of the mocking laughter of his childhood, but Larisa merely said, “How long has this been going on?”
“About two weeks.”
She considered that for a moment. “You are unable to control it?”
“Most times I can,” he said. “It’s just when something catches me by surprise that I—” Sniff “—I go over the edge.”
“You have tried antidepressants?” She didn’t even pretend that a career astronaut would ask anyone first.
“Yes. They help, but apparently not enough.”
Quentin drifted into the lab module, twisting to orient himself heads-up with the others. Then he saw the expression on his crewmates’ faces.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“No, this involves you too,” Michael said. “I’m having trouble keeping my emotions under control. I’m afraid if I can’t get a handle on them, Mission Control is going to send me back down.”
Quentin’s face betrayed his first thought. If Michael went down in his place, Quentin could stay in space for two more months. But to his credit that expression came and went in an instant, replaced by genuine concern. “Something wrong at home?”
“No. Nothing’s wrong anywhere. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m at the pinnacle of my life, right here at the apex of my dreams, and the sheer magnitude of it all is apparently more than I can handle.” He wiped away tears with his fingers, transferring them to the absorbent fiber of his flight suit before they could drift loose.
Larisa said, “There are techniques for controlling emotion. Breathing exercises, thought stopping, aversion—”
“I’ve tried all that. I used to have this problem when I was a kid. I tried every trick in the book and invented some of my own. I beat it, too, until the last couple of weeks.”
“You will have to beat it again,” Larisa said. “We can’t have you crying in a spacesuit.”
“Thanks for being so understanding,” he said.
She snorted. “I understand exactly. Men tell women all the time that we’re too emotional. Unfit for command because we might burst into tears at a crucial moment. Every woman in Russia since Catherine the Great has learned to lock her emotions away if she is to succeed at anything. The fact that I’m here proves it’s possible. You can do it as well.”
Michael bit his tongue. For Larisa, that was a pep talk.
He turned to Quentin, who shook his head sadly. “Man, I wish I knew what to tell you. I’ll cover for you however I can, but…” He left the statement hanging, either unable or unwilling to state the obvious.
“But I can’t do EVAs,” said Michael, “and I can’t do interviews, and I can’t be depended on in a crisis.”
“We don’t know that,” Quentin said. “If the shit hits the fan, you’ll probably be too busy tryin’ to survive to worry about how you feel about it.”
“That’s a comfort.” Sniff.
Larisa’s cryo unit beeped at her. “We’re falling behind,” she said. “Let’s get back to work.” To Michael, with as much tenderness in her voice as he’d ever heard, she said, “Try to concentrate on the job in front of you and not think about how you feel.”
“No pink elephants. Roger, captain.”
She wrinkled her brows. “Pink elephants?”
“Pernicious cultural referent,” Quentin said. “Once it’s in your brain…”
“Pink elephants. Thank you for that image.” She turned away.
Michael got through his shift without another outburst, but he felt on the edge every second. The watery eyes, the catch in his throat, the shortness of breath; all hovered just inside him, ready to break free at any moment. He concentrated on zebrafish genes and crocus plants and bacterial cultures until his mind felt so packed with data there was no room for emotion, yet the moment he relaxed at the end of the day it all rushed back on him and he spent half an hour soaking his sleeve in the deepest corner of the Kibo module before he brought it under control and headed for the crew quarters.
Larisa was fixing her dinner. “Pink elephants,” she said when she saw him. “All day with the pink elephants. Some of them were dancing. What have you done to me?”
“Were the dancing ones wearing tutus?” he asked.
“Tutus?”
“The frilly short skirts that ballerinas wear? Dancing pink elephants in tutus are the most common form of hallucination in America.”
“Stop!” She held her hands over her ears.
“Better than—”
“Stop!” she yelled again, but she was smiling.
And a moment later Michael was weeping like a father at his son’s graduation. He couldn’t control it any more than he could have breathed vacuum. He pushed past Larisa, grabbed his towel from his sleep station, and dabbed at his eyes, but the harder he tried to bring himself under control, the worse it grew until he was sobbing uncontrollably, the towel wrapped around his head to muffle the sound and possibly, hopefully, smother him before he died of embarrassment.
The realization that Larisa was holding him in her arms shook him out of it, shut off the waterworks like a switch. The universe was seriously out of kilter if Larisa was acting motherly.
Michael took a couple of deep breaths, wiped his eyes and nose on the towel, and slowly extricated himself from both the towel and Larisa’s embrace. “I’m okay now,” he said. “I’m… thanks.”
They looked at one another for a moment, then she turned away and busied herself with her meal.
“I’ve got to let Mission Control know about this, don’t I?” he said.
She nodded. “It would be better coming directly from you.” The implication was clear: If he didn’t, she would.
“And thus ends my career as an astronaut.”
“Nonsense,” she said. “Valentina Tereshkova was an astronaut to the end of her life, and she only spent three days in space. Deke Slayton was an astronaut even when he was grounded due to a heart irregularity.”
“Neither of them went psycho.”
“You’re not psycho. You’re emotional. There is still much you can do within the space program.”
“But not up here.”
She looked at him for a long moment before she said, as softly as she could and still be heard over the background of the circulation fans, “No. Not up here.”
The conversation with the flight surgeon went just as he expected. The doctor offered a great deal of sympathy, but no magic cure to flatten Michael’s emotional roller coaster. Anti-depressants were the only medication on board the station for that sort of thing, and if they weren’t working, then nothing else could be done besides bringing Michael home on the next supply ship.
He switched the radio to standby and looked up at Larisa and Quentin, who looked back at him as they might look at a ghost. Surprisingly, he felt no urge to cry now. He thought he might throw up, or perhaps suffer a debilitating stroke if his heart wouldn’t quit pounding, but the enormity of his downfall had knocked him so far past emotion that he could have attended Melissa’s funeral without a sniffle.