The launch-entry suit has a smart visor that syncs with my other devices. Those in addition to sophisticated avionics, and I should be fine, he assures me. There’s no point in bringing my phone, ART reminds me. It won’t be any good in space, and he can connect me to calls and other communications without it.
Covering my feet with clean room booties, I’m out the door in my peculiar skinsuit, my feet whispering on carpet. Passing the dining room, the gym, I find the door to the small medical exam room open wide as I hear the sound of water running. Inside, the flight surgeon is washing his hands, an older man with wild hair and shy eyes, something about him reminding me of Dad.
“Hi,” I knock on the open door.
“Come in,” he turns off the water, the sleeves of his splashed denim shirt rolled up, and he’s wearing khakis and sneakers.
“I’m Calli Chase.”
“I know who you are,” he grabs paper towels to dry his hands. “If I didn’t, neither of us should be here. I’ve been given the scoop.”
He looks me in the eye as if he’s peering into my mind.
“How are we feeling?” he removes the stethoscope from around his neck. “I’m Dr. Helthe,” he says, pronounced like health with a slight tongue thrust, I decide.
“An unusual name,” and sometimes I’m no better at small talk than my dad.
“I frankly think it got misspelled along the way,” Dr. Helthe replies, finding a digital thermometer. “Likely it originally was Helth and an e was added, probably by whoever was taking the census at Ellis Island back in the 1880s.”
“I don’t need to take this off, do I?” and I mean my skinsuit.
“No,” he inserts the thermometer into my mouth. “By all accounts, you’re going to have nice weather,” as if I’m looking forward to a sailboat ride or a stroll. “But then thunderstorms will be building by late morning. You’ll be long gone by then. I understand you’re from Virginia. Never been to Langley but have visited Wallops a number of times.”
He talks quietly, quickly, almost breathily and nonstop, sort of what Dad does when he’s nervous and ill at ease with people he doesn’t know. The thermometer beeps, and Dr. Helthe is happy to inform me my temperature is 97.9, in the normal zone, and I could have told him that.
ART lets me know everything before the flight surgeon finds it out as he busily takes my blood pressure, taps my knees with his little rubber mallet, listens to my heart and breathing. None of it is necessary when I have an implanted network of devices downloading the data and a lot more. But no longer having a need for certain protocols in life doesn’t mean you are exempt from them.
Even if Dr. Helthe knows about my secret SIN, he’d examine me as usual, filling in the blanks, checking off the boxes. He very well may be part of the Gemini project, and in fact, I’m getting more suspicious by the moment. Dick has his own pied-à-terre in Kennedy’s sacred astronaut crew quarters, therefore I think it’s reasonable to conclude that NASA personnel and those at Space Force are merging.
Certainly, I sense something in Dr. Helthe’s demeanor that makes me suspect he knows darn well what’s going on, who I am and that I might not live to tell the tale. At the very least, he has to know it’s not business as usual when I show up to launch in a rocket that supposedly has nobody inside, just a weather satellite with a special knack for tracking fires.
“We feeling up to snuff?” Dr. Helthe bends over me, moving the stethoscope around. “Your ticker’s sounding strong as a horse,” and in the past I’d be offended by the comparison.
All my life I’ve been called strong as a horse or as healthy as one. I never saw it as a compliment, more as an insinuation that I look something less than fine, maybe common or thick.
“Breathing’s normal,” he decides. “Anything going on I should know about before you rocket into space for the first time, young lady?”
“I’m feeling fine,” I let him know as he holds up a finger, telling me to follow it with my eyes, moving it in an H pattern.
Finding a tongue depressor in a glass jar, he tells me to open wide and say ahhhh.
40
NEXT STOP is the suit-up room with its padded brown recliner chairs, long tables and big panels of pressure valves that go back to the late ’60s.
There’s scarcely any legend who hasn’t passed through here, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, John Young and Sally Ride to name a few, and also those less fortunate, the crews on the Challenger and Columbia.
All of them made their final stop in this room, each with a suit technician who might be the last person they’ll see on Earth, depending on how things turn out. My tech is about Mom’s age, I’m guessing, all in white with a headset on. She tells me to come in, looking me up and down.
“You’re wearing everything I left on your bed?” her eyes are bright like a bird’s, and she’s kind but no-nonsense.
“Thank you, and yes,” I reply, imagining myself on the bathroom floor, sincerely hoping she didn’t walk in at the wrong moment.
“You can sit down,” she indicates the recliner next to a sanitized plastic-covered table where my blue launch-entry suit is broken down into its components.
The pants, the torso, gloves, boots and helmet attach with plastic zippers, and missing are the usual metal rings, the clunky metal clasps, the dreadful rubber dam around the collar, the comm cap that causes hotspots. I’ve tested all sorts of spacewear, including the Advanced Crew Escape Space Suit System (ACES), what most call a pumpkin suit because of its color.
But it would seem that blue is the new orange, and my crash dummy Snap has tried out my new getup but I haven’t.
“I’m Stella, by the way,” my suit tech says, and of course she’d work for NASA and have a name like that. “No more need for long johns with their 300 feet of water-cooling tubes,” removing my paper booties, she begins helping me into the bright-blue pants. “It kind of makes me sad to think.”
“Don’t be too sad,” I reply, “I still have a diaper.”
“It’s really not that bad unless you have to wear it very long.”