"Your inner ear isn't used to the gravity yet," Tabitha told me. "That happened to me the first couple of times." She tried not to laugh. "Can you stand on your own?"
"Sure I can." She let go of my shoulders and I fell flat on my face. This time I was able to pull myself from the water without her help. I rested on all fours for a couple of minutes. "Just give me a minute or two. How long does this take to pass?" I cupped creek water in my hands and splashed it in my face several times.
"It took me a good couple of hours before I felt okay the first time. But some people it never bothers. Motion sickness is weird that way. Take your time. What else have we got to do?"
We sat at the edge of the creek for another ten or fifteen minutes while I regained my equilibrium. I should have realized that I would be affected. I had such a hard time adjusting from gravity to microgravity that it just makes sense that I would have some difficulty with the reverse process as well.
"This is about like getting the drunk spins. Did you ever get so blasted that all you could do is just lie on the bed with one foot hanging off and stare at the ceiling? You know that if you move you'll throw up."
"I did a few times in undergraduate school and when I was accepted into the astronaut program." She replied. "I had an inner ear infection once in high school that made me just as sick. I remember sleeping in the bathroom because I was afraid I wouldn't be able to make it there if need be."
"Yeah. I had an ear infection like that once. That's exactly how this feels. It is slowly subsiding though." I shook my head hard a few times hoping to reset my inner ear. The first time I did it I thought I was going to heave again. The second time the spins stopped. I saw stars for a split second and then I was better. "That is much better," I told Tabitha.
"What are you doing?" she laughed.
"Trying to reset my inner ear gyroscope system. Friday does it whenever she falls a long distance or gets tumbled. I figured if it works for cats, why not humans?"
Tabitha laughed at me and said, "I've heard flight surgeons suggest that to folks before, but I've never seen anybody do it." She laughed again, "You're weird."
"Well, it seems to have helped." I stood up with no help.
I reached to my EMU pockets and realized that I wasn't wearing my EMU.
"Tabitha. We have to go check out the probe." We helped each other out of the creek bed. I will always remember thinking that we must have been quite the sight, two people wearing white Spandex long underwear, covered with mud, soaking wet, and traipsing practically barefoot through the woods. We basically had no survival tools other than ourselves, a wrecked spacecraft, a few multi-million dollar hand tools that would only fit the million-dollar bolts on that spacecraft, and two highly damaged spacesuits at our disposal.
We made our way through the debris, backtracking the hundred or so meters we had covered while running from the storm. Tabitha picked up a hailstone that must have been the size of a softball. It was beginning to melt in the heat.
"Have you ever seen a hailstone this large?"
"Nope. I've also never seen a tornado that size."
"Yeah," she replied. "It was an F-five I'll bet."
"Uh huh! How are your ribs?"
"I don't think they're broken. But I guarantee they're bruised badly."
As we approached the probe I noticed a very very low pitched humming sound. I found my EMU and dug out the engagement ring. I took Tabitha's left hand and put it on her ring finger. I got down on one knee.
"Marry me," I said.
"Get up idiot. I already said yes." She pulled me up. "Besides, we need to figure out where we are."
The sun poked out from behind the clouds and rays of sunlight filtered through the pine trees. It was good old Sol all right—I could tell by the color. Any fantasies about having warped off to some other planet had been parlayed.
"Earth." I said.
"What?"
"We're on Earth. That is where we are." I held up my hands as if to encompass the world.
"Smartass. I know this is Earth. But where on Earth? I never saw a pine thicket like this in New Mexico." Tabitha rested her right hand on her hip and cocked her head sideways like she always does when she is being a smartass in return.
There was a path a half of a mile wide south of us that had been cleared away by the tornadoes. I knew which direction it was now that the sun was out.
"You're right. This ain't New Mexico. Reminds me of southern Alabama," I replied.
The humming sound got louder.
Tabitha and I poked around the probe trying to determine where it was coming from. First we tried the comm system. It had been crushed completely by debris or landing—it was difficult to determine which. Tabitha pulled a limb out of ECC number three, the one that was damaged the most. The humming got louder and turned to a buzzing.
"Holy crap! The sound is coming from the ECC!" I looked a Tabitha. She looked back at me with a horrified expression on her face.
CHAPTER 11
How long, Anson?"
I plowed through the wreckage looking for the precise origin point of the sound. "Dig the batteries out of the science suite if they are still intact," I told her.
I found the general area where I thought the sound was coming from and tried to isolate a subset of circuit boards. The horrified looks we had had on our faces were warranted. The Casimir effect energy devices were oscillating asymmetrically. In other words, the Clemons D umbbells were going chaotic. Not just a few of them like the ones that destroyed the bathroom at the manufacturing facility or the handful that injured 'Becca. The amplitude of the buzzing sound implied hundreds of thousands of these things could go. I started doing the math in my head. If all of them went at one time, the explosion would be bigger than Hiroshima or if I slipped a zero or two, which I often do without paper and pencil, much bigger than Hiroshima. Of course, it had occurred to all of us working the project from day one, that we were dealing with much larger than nuclear-explosion levels of power. That is why the ECCs were to never be activated until we were in space. The conventional propulsion system on the probe was to take it up to about a thousand kilometer orbit and there we would turn them on.
"Only one of the batteries is still operational, Anson. How long till it blows? Answer me!" Tabitha implored.
"Bring it over here. And I'm working on it." I ripped some cabling from the probe. I fumbled through my EMU and found the Swiss Army knife that all astronauts are issued. I stripped off the ends of two wires and tied them to the battery poles. Then I stripped the other ends and shunted across a section of the Clemons Dumbbells. The buzzing returned back to a humming. The battery was drained completely.
"Shit! That battery wasn't enough. This thing is going to blow, in like, an hour or so. If we can't find a power source to overload the Clemons Dumbbells in the ECCs, they get stuck in that positive feedback loop and will eventually go big bang!" I said.
"There's nothing else we can do? Is there no other spacecraft power system?"
"Sure. The ECCs delivered all the power we needed, but they're fried and this one is about to go kablooie!" I shrugged my shoulders and did an explosion gesture with my hands.
"What about that one?" Tabitha pointed at good old ECC number two. The one we had used as a shield from the hail.
I ran to the diagnostic panel on the side of it and tore off the plate. Tabitha grabbed her electric ratchet and started in on the bolts. In a few short seconds we were peering at a perfectly good cube of Clemons Dumbbells. I shorted the breaker, which in turn kicked the dumbbells loose. The ECC started producing power. Then an arc jumped out of it and tossed me about four meters away from it. Smoke and sparks poured out of the cube. Tabitha ran to my side and helped me to my feet.