A day later, they walked us three out on the gantry in baggy, white space suits. The one I’d been measured for actually fit. We carried little air-conditioner suitcases, just like old movies. Real old. They hadn’t used Canaveral’s launchpads since satellites went private. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the rusty girders. I shook. I hate heights. The narrow bridge to the capsule was latticed steel, so when I looked down between my feet the ground was 350 feet away.
In three days the ground would be 250,000 miles away. I stared ahead at the open capsule hatch, squeezed the bridge rail harder with shaking hands, and shuffled toward the capsule.
The Apollo capsule itself had just been built so it smelled like a new car inside. But it looked as old-fashioned as a laptop computer. I lay there flat on my back while technicians snapped fishbowl helmets over our heads, Howard on my right and Metzger on my left.
A tech patted my head, shot me a thumbs-up, then ducked back outside and sealed the hatch. Gray sky shone through the little capsule window. I scrunched my shoulders, hands at my sides, and tried to remember all the things I’d been taught over the last twenty-four hours, mostly what not to touch. The trip to the moon would last three days, but they had crammed me with three months’ training since yesterday. I had been nervous about learning my flight duties until they explained that I had none.
My trainer assured me, “The first American astronaut was just a monkey. He did fine.” Then my trainer eye-balled the Infantry tab on my file. “A really dumb monkey.”
My trainer taught me that the monkey wore a little space vest and diapers. My trainer never taught me how to pee in space.
Metzger’s voice and the ground controller’s rang inside my helmet. We had more room in the capsule than the old pioneers had because the old-fashioned instruments that had filled much of the capsule had been replaced by a wireless ‘puter Metzger held. It was not much bigger than a Playstation Model-40.
I sat atop history’s biggest conventional bomb. This spaceship was strictly forties, according to the briefings I’d sat through yesterday. But its ancestors had a few problems. Out of less than twenty Apollos, one incinerated its crew on the ground and another blew apart on its way to the moon and limped home. The space-shuttle airframes that had been revived to make Interceptors like Metzger flew exploded one trip every fifty. No wonder we started years ago to send robots to space instead of people.
My heart rattled like a stick dragged along a picket fence.
Metzger glanced over and raised his white-gloved thumb at me.
Pumps rumbled hundreds of feet below me and jostled my couch.
In my helmet, somebody said, “Ignition!”