Voyage by Stephen Baxter

Author:Stephen Baxter [Baxter, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 0002246163
Published: 1996-10-31T21:00:00+00:00

Thursday, December 4, 1980

APOLLO-N; LYNDON B. JOHNSON SPACE CENTER, HOUSTON

The pain was everywhere, unbelievably intense, a huge cellular agony that went on and on until he couldn't bear it, and then went on some more. It felt as if every soft surface of Priest's body, inside and out, had been coated with acid, as if he was rotting away from the outside in.

He still wore his pressure suit, and that was maybe just as well, because the pain was like one immense itch; he'd probably have rubbed himself raw if he could have gotten to his skin. But the suit had its disadvantages. His bowels had been loose for hours, and he'd thrown up inside the helmet, which was every aviator's nightmare. But at least the floating globs of vomit had stopped drifting about in front of his face, and had stuck to something: the helmet's visor, or maybe his hair and skin; he didn't really care, as long as he could forget about the damn stuff.

He couldn't seem to smell anything, and that was probably just as well.

He tried to turn his head to the left, to see Chuck and Jim. But he couldn't move. Anyhow, they hadn't answered the last time he'd spoken to them. They'd looked surprisingly composed, sealed up inside their pressure suits, as no doubt he did himself; all the vomit and shit and human pain was neatly confined to the inside of the suits, leaving the Command Module cabin antiseptic and efficient, save for the banks of glowing warning lights on the instrument panel.

Anyway, he didn't really want to turn away from his window. That window was very, very important to him, because it framed the nightside of Earth. He could see the auroras: colored waves surging down from the poles, high layers of air glistening red and green under the impact of the particle wind from the sun. And he could see flashes, high in the atmosphere, and sometimes straight streaks of light that lingered in his retina for long seconds -- meteors, specks of extraterrestrial dust plunging into the atmosphere...

Priest used to sit with Petey, when his son was small, gazing up at the meteor showers caroming into the roof of the air. And then, he was watching meteors burning up beneath him. This is one hell of a trip, Petey.

There were other lights in the night.

At the heart of South America, he saw a huge, dispersed glow: a fire, devouring trees at the center of the Amazon rain forest. And as Apollo-N sailed over deserts, he would spy oil and gas wells sparkling brightly, captive stars in all that darkness.

Cities stunned him with their night brightness. If there was cloud, it would soak up and diffuse the illumination, and he would see the shape of the city as a huge, amorphous bowl of light. And if the sky was clear, he seemed to be able to make out every detail as clearly as if he were taking a T-38 on a buzz just over the rooftops.

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