A moment of calm came over me. I was in a daze and things around me seemed like they weren't real but more of a dream. When the final jolt from the External Tank being dropped hit me, I was sure this was real. As the Orbiter made its way to a stable orbit in low earth orbit (LEO) I really had nothing to do, for the next few minutes anyway. So, I went back to sleep.
When Fines finally woke me up we were at stable LEO and were given the okay to get out of our flight gear. We helped each other with our suits as we played with the microgravity effects on things. Like my stomach for instance. I lost my steak and eggs almost immediately. Fines wasn't amused. So, I threw up on him again.
This time he was amused to the point where he lost his breakfast. We had a lot of fun repeating this procedure for the next hour or two. Finally, the nausea subsided to drunken spins. I wished that I had some of my grandmother's "dizzy pills." I hadn't spun like that since playing quarters with tequila that night in undergraduate school after we won the Iron Bowl.
After several hours of the spins followed by nausea followed by a severe pain in my ego, all of the symptoms disappeared and I felt wonderful. I even offered to help clean up but the flight surgeon had ordered both Fines and myself to take a shot of motion sickness medication and try to take a nap. I slept like a baby. In other words, I pissed and moaned the whole time.
A few hours later Tabitha wandered, or drifted rather, back to see me. I was absolutely fine at this point, showing no symptoms other than feeling like a kid on his birthday. In fact, I was near the aft viewport looking down at the Earth in awe. She actually startled me when she came up behind me.
"Feeling better?"
"Yeah, lots!" I assured her. She put her hand on my shoulder and steadied herself. I still hadn't been able to do that. What a pro this Colonel Ames was.
"Beautiful, isn't it? I'll never get tired of seeing that." She looked at me with her puppy-dog eyes then kissed me on the cheek. She whispered in my ear, "Feel better." Tabitha kicked of the wall and did a backward flip into a Superman style flight in the other direction. She looked back over her shoulder at me. "Since you seem to be feeling up to it, why don't you contact your ground support console and go through a postlaunch and preflight check of your experiment hardware as per the mission schedule? You're about four hours behind. And do me a favor."
"Yeah, sure. What do you need?" I asked.
"Stop looking out the window until you're caught up and back on the mission timeline," she scolded me with the Colonel voice. I was tempted to say, "Yes, Colonel!" but thought better of it.
I found my way to my laptop and brought it online for check-lists. Velocroing in and donning my headset, I punched up the frequency for my ground support console operator. We were somewhere over the Indian Ocean at the time but either ground relay or TDRS would patch the signal back home. Jim was riding the console back at the Huntsville Operations Support Center or HOSC as it is affectionately referred to.
"Hi Jim! I guess I need to make up some lost time here and get the postlaunch and preflight started," I told him.
"I hear you are bulimic these days, trying to fit in a new prom dress," Jim kidded me.
"Just trying to watch my girlish figure. You know how it is. Actually, I think the colonel slipped some ipecac into my steak and eggs. How's everyone dirtside?"
"For the most part better than you. Let's get started."
"Roger that, Jim. Okay, I've got no outside tolerance range parameters from my sensor suite here. Does your telemetry agree?"
The postlaunch and preflight took the next three or so hours to assure each of us that the components of the warp drive demonstrator, we had been calling Zephram, had indeed survived the launch and the exposure to the space environment at LEO. No powered tests other than the motherboard of the spacecraft bus and the sensor suite could be made because the fields created by the ECC devices would be so large that the internal instruments of the Orbiter would be affected. That would be bad. Also, the device was in five separate pieces in the Payload Bay and wasn't an integrated spacecraft at this point. Jim and I wished Zephram a good night and I said I would chat with Jim in two sleep cycles.
We had to make a pit stop at the ISS before construction of Zephram could begin. I had completed my checklists and I was now a fifth wheel. I located Colonel Ames in the middeck eating area.
"Payload Specialist Clemons on schedule Colonel," I saluted her and laughed. She didn't seem amused.
"Can it, Anson. Have you eaten anything?"
"Uh, not sure that's a good idea." I hesitated at the thought of nausea and spins coming back.
"We don't need you passing out from low blood sugar. Eat!" she more or less ordered me. I wondered if she was giving the other astronauts as much of her attention or if I was just being a big baby—the word rookie came to mind.
"Okay, I'll eat. Just stop pampering me, okay."
"Anson." She clenched her jaw and I could tell she was changing her mind about what she was going to say. She started over.
"Listen. Just do your job, okay? No ego. If you feel the least bit funny, I don't want you on an EVA barfing all in your suit. Just do your job. I am doing mine by telling you this."
"We have nearly two days. I have acclimated almost completely now. I'll be fine," I told her. To prove it I squeezed out a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched it float in front of me at over eighteen thousand miles per hour. Since I was moving along at the same speed and Newton's First Law—or in General Relativity speak, we were on the same geodesic—was working as expected, I leaned forward and then gulped it down. No problem. I finished my first meal in microgravity and prepared for a sleep cycle. Tabitha didn't say two more words to me that day.
Fines, on the other hand, must have been feeling better, too. He must also have been bored. He talked endlessly about his super polymer that when super cooled allowed for state-of-the-art piezoelectric micromotion control. His work would enable a whole new era of pointing accuracy. Not only would it be beneficial to military applications but to any space based platform. A modification of the Next Generation Space Telescope with his device would increase the camera long-term exposure times by a factor of ten to a hundred. This in turn would increase the number of objects that deep sky astronomy would be able to image by orders of magnitude.
It was all very interesting and exciting. But, thank God he finally shut up! I presently dozed off for my first real sleep cycle in space. The nap I had previously didn't count because I'd been sick out of my mind. This time I had no trouble getting comfortable and dozing off. What a relief from the past few weeks. Tomorrow the ISS, I thought calmly.
CHAPTER 8
I was looking out the window whether Colonel Ames liked it or not. The International Space Station loomed over as we approached the Universal Docking Module. Television just doesn't give you a feel for how immense the ISS really is. As you get closer you can tell that parts of it were made by different countries. The Russian components are either black or shiny. ESA and NASDA modules are shiny. The majority of the space station is white, these sections being made by the United States of America. Although the space station looks like a jumbled mish mash made by several different manufacturers, it does look like it was designed with some sort of madness to its designer's method.
I held on to a computer terminal stand as we docked, expecting a jolt. I never felt a thing. Ray and Tabitha knew what they were doing up front. A period of protocol passed (I assumed pressure equalization) and we were all allowed access to the station. I roamed wherever I could go. I bumped into a fellow from Japan and I realized that I was in the Japanese Experiment Module. I asked if there were any experiments going on outside mounted to the "back-porch."