Rocket to Luna

Ted felt his stomach curl around his spine. He listened to the speaker on the bulkhead, and his skin erupted into goose-pimples. His lip began to tremble, and he clamped his jaws shut against his rattling teeth. This was no hop to the Station. They were shooting for the Moon. The Moon...

“Four, three...”

“Get set,” Merola shouted.

“Two...”

“This is it,” Forbes said, and his voice was peculiarly tight.

“One!”

Chapter 7 One Alone

Two minutes can be a very short time. It can zip by with lightning rapidity when your team is behind in the last quarter of a football game. It can seem like two seconds when you’re rushing to class before the bell rings. It can be gone before you realize it when you’re in the middle of an interesting discussion and you suddenly learn it’s time to go home.

Or it can be a very, very long time.

When you’re tight in the grip of acceleration, it can be a lifetime.

Ted fought it this time. He struggled against it with every muscle in his body. His teeth clenched tightly, and the cords in his neck stood out like thick wires. His eyes were squeezed shut, filled with a searing pain that threatened to push them through the back of his skull. The force pressed against him, and he retreated back into the depth of the cushion, his mind fighting the blackness that lurked on the fringes of his consciousness.

Two minutes, he kept repeating to himself. Two minutes and it’ll be all over. Two minutes minutes minutes minutes...

The pound of the jets picked up the chant in his head, echoed it back to him in a thousand roaring voices that filled the cabin of the ship. The bulkheads vibrated in response to the unleashed fury of the rockets.

The pain reached deep into his skull, probed at his brain, curled along his spine.

Two minutes. Two minutes.

It was easier to black out. It was far easier to succumb to the incessant force. He fought it tenaciously, like a man holding to the tail of an enraged tiger.

And then it was over. The two minutes had passed. They were dead, and the trail of fire that had lanced across the sky had died with them.

Ted lay back on the couch, his eyes still closed, his body covered with a fine sweat. His breathing was coarse and uneven. He lay there and rested, feeling the strength seep back into his exhausted muscles. He thought briefly of Jack, wondering if the acceleration would have finished his collarbone. He did not think of the Moon. The Moon was a distant sphere in the sky, something cold and bleak, something inaccessible. He did not think of it at all, and it never even remotely occurred to him that he was now speeding for the Moon with fantastic rapidity.

It seemed hot in the cabin, and he knew this was ridiculous because the temperature was undoubtedly controlled by air conditioning. Still, it seemed hot. He knew he was drenched with perspiration, but he made no move to wipe the moisture from his face; he lay there, instead, with one arm dangling over the side of the couch, his legs widespread, his mouth open.

The silence seemed to press on his ears like a physical force, and his mind toyed idly with the idea of lack of sound being noisier than the noisiest noise.

Merola’s voice cut through the silence. “Everybody okay?”

“Forbes here.”

“Gehardt here.”

“Phelps here.”

Ted hesitated, wondering if he had the strength to speak. He reached for his voice as a man would reach for a life raft in a raging sea. “B-Baker here, sir,” he said, surprised at the sound that came from his throat.

He made no attempt to change his position. He lay there like a dead man, his eyes still closed, his body motionless.

He heard a faint rustle from somewhere below him and then Merola said, “Don’t try to get up yet, Dr. Phelps. Rest awhile.”

“I thought I might give everyone a quick check,” the physician replied.

“That can wait. Rest for now.”

The voices came to Ted from somewhere far below him, like voices partially realized in a fragment of a dream.

Merola cleared his throat, and his voice sounded in the cabin like the monotonous roll of a solemn drum. There was no emotion in it, no attempt at rhetoric.

“We’re on our way to the Moon,” he said. “Anything can happen from this point on. If we reach the Moon, half our battle is over. If we don’t...” He paused, and the stillness crowded its way into the cabin again. “If we don’t, there’ll be others after us. We’ve had a bad start, and that puts one strike against us.”