(Author's Note: The story you are about to read is 100 percent true. Nothing has been added. Nothing has been embellished. It happened exactly this way, and it's one of those tales that's actually better than anything you could make up.)
It was late in the afternoon of an unremarkable day in mid November 2004 that I inadvertently walked into a fairy tale.
It was one of our dead periods, so there hadn’t been much of a crowd for Mission: Space – or anything else in Epcot – for days. The summer crowds were, of course, long gone. The annual Food and Wine Festival that dominated the early fall at Epcot had just ended. Thanksgiving was still two weeks away. For the moment the place was, relatively speaking, a ghost town.
 |
| I was working Flight Specialist |
I was in bay one, the gold bay, working as Flight Specialist. I knew there couldn’t have been much of a crowd waiting for the ride because we weren’t even running bay four and I had just placed three boys on their spots in Pre-flight for the third time in last hour.
They couldn’t have been much older than twelve, and they were too busy arguing with each other to listen to my pre-flight spiel.
“I get to be the commander,” one of them said, trying to push his friend off the center spot where he was standing.
“You were commander last time,” he said testily, pushing his friend back.
“No I wasn’t. I was pilot.”
“Were not. He was.”
And he pointed at the third boy, who was standing on the navigator’s spot. “I wasn’t the pilot,” the third boy said. “I was the engineer.”
“No you weren’t. The big guy they put with us was engineer.”
“That was the first time. Last time there was just the three of us and I was engineer.”
“Was not.”
“Was too.”
 |
| Pre-flight corridor |
I glanced at the fourth member of the team on the far right number while waiting for the debate to die down. There was a young woman I judged to be about 33 standing there. She was thin, shapely and very pretty with an oval shaped face, a thin, aquiline nose, short dark brown hair and brilliant blue eyes. She hadn’t been with the boys before, so I figured she had to be a single rider that just got stuck with them. She was oblivious to them despite the squabbling. Instead, she was totally focused on the monitor in front of her.
“Attention trainees,” a female voice from the monitor’s speaker said. “If you are prone to motion sickness or are made uncomfortable by enclosed dark spaces, simulators or spinning, you may leave the flight area now. Ask a uniformed crewmember for directions.”
She pursed her lips. She wore a nervous, pensive look I often saw on first time riders, especially those that pay more attention to the motion sickness spiels than the story line. I didn’t think the boys beside her were helping much, either.
“Okay guys, listen up,” I said. “You ready to go?”
“Who gets to be the commander?” the boy who had started the argument demanded. “I think I should be commander.”
I frowned. “Work it out, boys,” I said, shifting my gaze between the three of them.
I turned my attention to the girl. “How about you, miss?” I asked. “Are you good to fly?”
Almost reluctantly, she pulled her gaze away from the screen and our eyes met for a moment. My first thought was that she had beautiful eyes. My second thought was that she was scared to death. An oversize purse with a stuffed Stitch doll poking out from the top was hanging from her left shoulder, and she was gripping the strap so tightly that her knuckles were turning white. She started to say something but didn’t. Instead she nodded slightly.
I smiled at her reassuringly. “Don’t worry,” I said in a near whisper, leaning forward. “It’ll be okay. Just follow the instructions you’ll get on the monitor in a moment and you’ll be fine.”
She nodded again and then broke the gaze.
That was too bad. She had stunning eyes. I nodded back, not sure she saw the gesture, and then moved on. I could hear the boys continue to squabble.
Kids.
The lights had dimmed and the pre-show had already started by the time I made it to my position in front of the Re-entry doors. My counterpart, a tall guy in his mid thirties, was standing beside the control panel with his arms folded over his chest and an indifferent scowl stamped across his face. He was one of those old timers that never had much to say, never seemed to be having much fun and always seemed to have a chip on his shoulder.
Working with the old-timers is a pain in the ass. It’s not like they’re unnecessarily sarcastic or anything. They’re just a drag. Aside from a select group of other long-timers, they look down their noses at everyone, like they’re just too cool and aloof to be bothered. Somehow they’ve gotten the impression that their longevity has given them standing above everybody and everything else. So they don’t spend much time relating to the guests and they don’t performance theme at all. They’re just too cool for all that. And they certainly have nothing to say to a relative newcomer. Mostly they won’t give the time of day to anyone that hasn’t been on the ride for at least a year.
So rather than being fun like it usually is, working a 45-minute rotation in Pre-flight with one of these guys is a tedious uncomfortable experience that never seems to end.
I stood there and gave him his distance, trying to think about anything else.
Suddenly there was movement on my right, and I turned to see a lithe figure walking toward me. It was the pretty, scared young woman with the dazzling eyes I’d left on the team with the squabbling boys. Her movements were halting, as if she really wasn’t sure about something. She stopped when she saw me standing there.
“How do I get out?” she asked quietly. She spoke with a thick accent I couldn’t immediately identify, although it sounded vaguely Germanic.
I looked at her curiously. “You’ve decided that you don’t want to ride after all?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “I do. But I…”
She stopped speaking and looked down.
“What?” I prompted, urging her to speak.
“Nothing. I just need to go.”
Despite the thick accent, there was a touch of pathos – something close to anguish – in her voice. I walked her over to the door and pushed it open a little, letting light from the Re-entry corridor spill in.
“You know, if it was those boys,” I said as she slipped through the crack, “I could find another team for you. They were a bit annoying.”
“No,” she said, turning. “It wasn’t that. They weren’t bothering me.”
She hesitated just outside, looking back. I looked to my right. Mr. Too Cool for School hadn’t moved from his corner. I followed her out and let the door close behind me. It was better to talk outside, out of earshot.
“Then what’s the problem?” I asked.
She looked down at her feet and sighed. “I am frightened,” she said.
“Of what? The ride?”
She looked up. “It is all those warnings about people becoming sick,” she said.
“We kind of overdo it with those, don’t we?” I asked with a laugh.
She wasn’t smiling.
“I wouldn’t worry about them,” I added quickly. “Unless you have some sort of equilibrium problem, the chances of this thing affecting you are pretty remote.”
“But people do get sick, don’t they?” she said.
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| The Pre-Flight warning |
I shrugged, trying to make the gesture appear as casual as I could. “Sure,” I said. “I won’t lie to you. Some people do, but not nearly as many as you might think. The odds work out to maybe one out of every 7,000 riders. Those are pretty good odds don’t you think? And the people that do get sick are usually prone to things like car sickness or seasickness or something like to begin with.”
“Yes, but the spinning,” she said. “I see those warnings and I get so scared. I don’t know what will happen.”
“Actually, because of the way this thing works, you won’t even know you’re spinning.”
“I know. My friends have told me that. Then they laugh at me for being such a baby. I’ve tried to go on this three times over the past week. I’ve tried to tell myself that I am being silly. But every time I get to those warnings I can’t do it. I really want to, but I can’t and I run away. Then I feel like a fool. Today is my last day. I go back home tomorrow. So this is my last chance.”
She looked straight into my eyes. They were like melting glaciers.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
“I have come from Austria,” she said. “Vienna.”
I smiled. “I see a lot of people from a lot of places,” I said. “But you’re the first Austrian I’ve ever met.”
“I must be giving you a poor impression of the Austrian people then,” she said, her delicate mouth curving downward into a frown. “You probably think I’m stupid for making such a fuss.”
“No I don’t,” I said with a wide friendly smile. “What’s your name?”
She told me. It was a name that began with an E – something like a cross between Elaine and Ezekeal pronounced in an Austrian accent. I couldn’t hope to pronounce it, let alone spell it, so I decided to call her E.
“I’m going to have to get you to write that one down,” I said, remembering a line from a movie.
For the first time, she gave me a little smile.
“Listen, E,” I said, trying to sound as serious as possible. “I see a ton of people come in here who are as scared as you are. But that’s because they don’t know what to expect. After all those warnings they think we’re going to drop them into a washing machine and hit the spin cycle. But it isn’t like that at all.”
“No?”
“Of course not.”
“Then it is not frightening?”
“Sure it is, but not cause you’re spinning in circles. We put you in a rocket ship and fire you into space. And believe me, you’ll feel exactly like that’s what’s just happened too. Then you’ll charge around the moon until you reach Mars and land that spaceship on the surface using a joystick.”
I imitated the motion in the air as she watched, her expression turning to one of fascination.
“I tell you,” I continued. “You won’t even know the thing’s spinning. That’s not how it’s designed. You will think, and I’m not kidding, that you’re flying through space. It’s totally unbelievable.”
She paused for a second before speaking. “Do you think that I can do it?” she asked.
“Of course you can. There’s nothing to it. Trust me.”
“I do,” she said. “Maybe I could try again.”
But then came the hitch. The Re-entry doors suddenly began to swing open. Soon the riders would come flooding out while new riders clamored into the capsules behind them.
“I think I am too late,” she said, watching the first of the people coming out of the flight bay.
All at once one of the Re-entry doors to the blue bay, bay one, which stood adjacent to the gold bay at a right angle, flew open and a young girl in a Mission: Space costume burst out. She was supposed to have been standing in the Re-entry position, but she’d been inside the blue bay talking with friends instead. I caught a glimpse of the blue bay before the door shut. It was dark inside. It gave me an idea.
“Maybe not,” I said, turning back to E. I took one of her hands. “Come with me.”
Standard procedure in dealing with opt outs is that once they leave the bay, they have to go back through the queue even if they change their minds. But I decided to suspend that bit of bureaucracy. I opened one of the blue bay doors and poked my head inside. Sure enough, as I had suspected, team two, the team nearest the door, only had two riders. I pulled E inside and walked her over to the space before either Flight or Launch; who had been standing together talking in whispers could say anything.
The pre-show was about half over. But that was all right since she’d obviously seen it before. I placed her on the last circle.
“Are you sure this is all right to do?” she asked, looking into my eyes.
“Sure, no worries,” I said.
She didn’t break her gaze, and I have to admit that I got a little lost there for a moment. Then I remembered that the gold teams were probably all ready in capsules waiting for me to seal them. So I came to, patted E’s hand and said, “Just remember to keep your eyes open and focused on the monitor while you’re flying, and you’ll be fine.”
She smiled nervously at me, nodded and then turned to the screen in front of her. I left her standing there; watching Gary Sinise, and I ran out of the bay.
Mr. Too Cool for School and the Re-entry gal had already sealed the capsules when I got back inside the gold bay. She didn’t say anything as she passed me going back outside. But Mr. Too Cool for School gave me a scowl.
“Where were you?” he asked coldly.
“Out helping a guest,” I said.
He frowned at me with disapproval. “Where was Re-entry?” he added coldly.
“She was over in the blue bay,” I said.
“What was she doing in there?”
I glared at him. “How should I know?” I said defensively. “What am I, her dad?”
His look shot daggers at me. “I wish you guys would stay in position,” he said, his voice dripping with disgust. “You’ve made us late launching.”
He stabbed a finger at the flashing green button. I turned my back on him and began walking down the corridor toward the Ready Room doors.
What a dick, I thought.
When I got there, a kid named Randy was standing beside Mr. Too Cool for School, who handed me a piece of paper. It was a rotation slip. A computer program called “Cast Deployment System” or CDS decides when to rotate the positions. It was designed to move us around ever 45 minutes. It rarely works right. The powers that be don’t care. If using it meant they could save a single penny, the cheap bastards would force it down our throats whether it makes our life a misery or not. But they should change the name from CDS to POS, because that’s what it is.
Still, I was glad to see it. Randy was wearing the Nextel radio so he was taking over Launch. That meant that Mr. Too Cool was being sent to Flight, and I was taking over the outside Re-entry position. That was fine with me. I’d had enough of Mr. Too Cool for School anyway. I felt sorry for Randy, though. He didn’t say anything. He probably wasn’t any happier working with Too Cool than I was.
I gave the slip to the girl outside who giggled and literally bounced through the door adjacent to the bays that lead off stage. It was then I realized that I wasn’t out there alone. There was a girl standing beside a metal bench by the door. She was wearing tight-fitting black-leather Capri pants and a clingy, silky halter-top that exposed her navel. I hadn’t really noticed what she was wearing before. But there was no mistaking her face or those amazing eyes.
It was E.
I spread my arms in a questioning gesture. She walked over slowly when she saw me, still clutching the straps of the huge purse with the Stitch doll poking out of the top.
“What are you doing out here?” I asked. “What happened?”
“I could not do it,” she said, sounding lost and sad. “It is the warnings. They scare me so. I could not get past it.”
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe she was there again. I couldn’t believe that she was prettier than before. But I have to admit being glad at both.
“What am I going to have to do, take you on a flight personally and hold your hand?” I said.
I was only joking. But her face suddenly brightened. “Could you?” she asked, taking a step forward.
“That would be wonderful” (although it sounded more like ‘zat vould be vunderfool.’).
I hadn’t expected that. Guests will sometimes ask you to ride with them while standing in pre-flight. But they’re just kidding. E, on the other hand, was perfectly serious about it and wide-eyed with anticipation.
I was seriously flattered. But the fly in the ointment was that I didn’t really know if that was something I was allowed to do. In the two and a half weeks I’d been working at Mission: Space, I hadn’t heard of anyone escorting a guest on the ride. I had heard an awful lot about staying in position and the disciplinary actions involved in being out of position. And then there was Mr. Too Cool for School to worry about. Even if you don’t do much in Re-entry that the other positions can’t easily cover, I kind of doubted he’d do it without bitching his head off. Hell, he freaked out because the girl who had been in Re-entry was talking to her friends in the blue bay instead of blankly standing outside waiting for the gold bay doors to open. He’d start frothing at the mouth if I abandoned the post altogether to go on a ride with a pretty girl. Still, he wasn’t a coordinator, and this was guest interaction, something the powers that be are always stressing. Yet I doubted the radio call he would make once the capsule was sealed would reflect that. ‘Say mission control,’ I could almost hear him saying. ‘The guy in Re-entry just jumped in a capsule with some chick…what do we do now?’
That would – if you’ll pardon the pun – fly all right.
So I stood there shuffling my feet awkwardly wishing I’d kept my mouth shut.
“I’d love to take you on a flight,” I said. “I really would. But I’m afraid I can’t leave my position.”
E’s face dropped with disappointment. “Oh,” she said. “I understand.”
I tried to think of something clever to say. I couldn’t think of a thing. Even though I felt like an idiot, I should have left it at that. But I couldn’t take the look that came from those amazing cool blue eyes. So I half-heartedly added, “If it was my break time, I could maybe do it then.”
“Really?” she said, her enthusiasm renewed. “How soon will your break time come?”
I opened my mouth to say something, and then I closed it again because I realized that I didn’t know. The POS – I mean CDS – program assigns breaks like everything else…randomly.
When I told her I wasn’t sure, E produced a cell phone from the large bag she carried. “Perhaps you could call me when you do get your break,” she suggested.
I had to tell her that I didn’t have a cell phone.
“Well, then maybe I will come back later,” she said with a not very assuring smile, “and check with you then.”
She patted my shoulder. And then I watched her turn and walk away.
The gold bay doors opened and the passengers began flooding out. I lost sight of E as she was swallowed in the crowd. I stood there feeling very un-cool and flustered, but also flattered and a little confused by her unaccounted persistence. Part of me wished I’d jumped on the ride with her despite the consequences. Part of me wished I’d never brought the subject up at all. All of me was kicking myself for not taking her number.
I don’t have a cell phone, I’d said. What an idiot.
One way or the other, I figured I’d never see her again. The idea that she’d come back was pretty far fetched. But there was still one mystery left unsolved.
I
looked inside the bay. Mr. Too Cool for School was sealing capsules with mechanical efficiency. He looked up questioningly as he saw me watching him.
“Hey, I have a question,” I said before he could turn to the control panel.
“What?”
“Well, you’ve been here for a while, so you’d probably know. Are we allowed to ride with guests if they ask us to?”
He looked at me as if I’d just fallen out of a tree.
“Why would we want to?” he said, and abruptly turned away.
What a dick.
***
Forty-five minutes later I’d switched positions again. Now I was on the other side of the Ready Rooms,
 |
| Mission: SPACE |
loading people into them instead of taking people out. The assignment area was fairly large and open, the Ready Room doors to all four bays stood in a semi-circle around it. Each Ready Room was controlled by its own time clock. The clocks began counting backwards from five minutes when the bay-style door slid shut. They slid open again when the clock had about a minute and half left. When the clock reached zero, the door slid closed, the pre-show inside began, the clock reset and the cycle started over.
Usually there were two Assignment Directors. One loaded the blue and gold bays, the other the red and green bays. But today the crowds were light; the green bay wasn’t being used, so there was just me. This was no problem when the bays opened a couple of minutes apart. But they had the annoying habit of catching up to each other and opening at the same time. Since you only had a minute and a half to place forty people inside one, double loading was a fast and furious process that didn’t allow a lot of time for thinking or dwelling on pretty girls, cell phone numbers, assholes that take themselves and their jobs too seriously or much of anything else.
Personally, I always enjoyed the position. Splitting up groups of people – which ranged from couples to crowds of 12 or more – and getting them all placed inside ten four-seat capsules with time to spare sort of reminded me of playing human Tetris. It was usually fun; always a challenge, and the time flew.
So as I finished loading bay three, the red bay, I wasn’t paying much attention to who might be walking up behind me. In fact, I didn’t realize anyone was there until I felt someone tap me on the shoulder. It was Jason, one of the coordinators and another one of those guys that had been at Mission: Space since it first opened. Heavy-set, be speckled and usually dryly amused, he looked unaccountably annoyed. I didn’t know why, but my first guess what that he’d been talking to Mr. Too Cool for School. Then I remembered that Jason liked him less than I did. It was something to do with jealousy over the coordinators position, or so I’d heard.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“It seems you’re being taken out of rotation,” he said.
“How come?”
“Manager’s call. It seems that a guest has requested a personal ride through.”
“What?”
He pointed to the left. I turned in that direction. There was E, standing there smiling sweetly. Determined, she had actually gone through a couple of layers of management to have me taken out of position so I could take her on the flight as I’d promised. I was so shocked that you could have knocked me over with a feather.
Jason frowned as I turned back to him. “I’m taking over your position,” he said, tapping his wristwatch. “I’ll give you twenty minutes.”
He turned to load the gold Ready Room, which had just opened.
Jason didn’t surprise me. But I was absolutely astounded at E’s tenacity.
“I can’t believe you came back,” I said with a smile, shaking my head.
She shrugged. “You said you would hold my hand,” she matter-of-factly answered, looking right into my eyes.
It was as if that that simple statement explained everything.
I held her gaze for a long time. “Yes, I did, didn’t I?” I finally said.
She nodded. And then she smiled again.
I looked down, reached out and took her hand in mine. I felt her fingers curl around it. Her hand was soft. And warm. Such a simple act: holding a girl’s hand. It felt good. I looked up into her blue eyes. Now there was a moment. It was erotic, sure. But there was something else. There was a touch of confidence there along with a lot of trust. I didn’t know why. We were perfect strangers. But it was there.
“Well, then I suppose we should get to it,” I said.
She nodded. The fear I’d seen earlier was gone.
Maybe there was something to this superhero costume after all.
I lead her into the Ready Room Jason had just begun loading and stood behind a black couple on team three. I came in first, stopping on the third number in the row. E stood on the last number, hanging on to my hand like an anchor. Her eyes darted around the cramped room, stopping on the other people, the row of space suits hanging in a caged locker and the video screens arranged in a row of three just above eye level before centering back on me.
She smiled a little and then looked down almost, for the first time since I’d met her, shyly. It reminded me very much of the brief but unavoidably awkward moment everyone always experiences on a first date.
The lights dimmed and the blank monitors sputtered to life. Gary Sinise, appeared on the screen dressed in a gray jacket with an ISTC logo on the left breast. He was in a busy control center filled with similarly dressed men and women concentrating on various consoles.
 |
| Gary Sinise plays Cap-Com |
“Welcome to the International Space Training Center,” he said with a crocked, Lieutenant Dan-type smile. “I know you’re feeling a little nervous right now, but don’t worry. Every astronaut has felt that way at one time or another, even the heroes that went to the moon…”
I turned back to E and asked her how she was doing. We had, after all, seen the show before.
“I am fine now,” she said emphasizing the word ‘now’. “But you must think that I am very silly.”
“No,” I lied. “Not at all.”
“But you must. I see unreasonable fear in others all the time.”
“You do?”
She nodded. “I am a psychologist, you know,” she said. “I have a practice in Vienna. I can tell people how to deal with their fears, but I cannot deal with my own.”
She looked at her feet and frowned.
“Sometimes,” she said in that thick but somehow delightful accent, “the most professional of us are also the most fucked up.”
It was, I thought, an odd choice of words coming from a shrink. But she was northern European, and in that culture some phrases – even harsh ones – are descriptive rather than obscene. I wondered if she’d ever used it with a patient. Brutal honesty can be highly therapeutic.
“I don’t think that,” I said. “You just got yourself stuck in a loop. We’ll get you past that.”
She squeezed my hand a little and smiled gratefully.
“So tell, me,” I asked before I could get lost in her eyes again. “What’s Vienna like? I’ve never been to Austria.”
She proceeded to tell me about it and what a beautiful city it is. But she also talked about how she dreamed of coming to America, and opening a practice in New York City. She didn’t dwell on that or herself for long. Instead, she asked about me, and I told her about life in California, how I ended up in Florida and what working at Walt Disney World was like. It was just idle chatter. She never let go of my hand once.
Finally, on the screen above us, Gary Sinise turned and said, “…as for the rest of you…report to flight stations. It’s GO time.”
The screen crackled with static and went dark. The room lights came up and the two doors on either side of the space suit locker swung inward. A young girl named Courtney, who was working at Disney on the Collage Program came in and beckoned us out. It was all a routine I knew E had been through before. I lead her to our places on the numbers in the Pre-flight corridor.
Something dawned on me as we stood there. I looked into her eyes and smiled.
“What?” she asked.
“This is where we met,” I said.
She looked down and managed a slight laugh. “It is, isn’t it?” she said.
Courtney came bouncing up to give us the normal opt-out spiel. She stopped short when she saw me standing there, holding E’s hand.
“You…you’re riding?” she asked, sounding a little confused, but mostly looking at our hands.
“It is by my request,” E said.
Courtney looked taken aback. She looked at me. I shrugged. She shrugged back. “Have a nice flight,” she said, and then she moved on to the next team.
I figured that this would generate a bit of gossip.
From the monitor screen in front of us, a voice said, “…If you are made uncomfortable by enclosed, dark spaces, simulators or spinning, you may leave the flight bay now. Ask a uniformed crewmember for directions.”
I felt the grip on my hand tighten.
“Don’t worry,” I said.
She managed a weak smile. I smiled back, gave her hand a slight, reassuring squeeze and said, “This is going to be great; you’re going to love it. Trust me.”
And I meant it, too. Despite her trepidations, it was still just a ride, after all. What could go wrong?
We had been, of course, standing on numbers with two other people, a black couple I hadn’t paid any attention to since we joined them in the Ready Room. They didn’t say anything at all during the pre-flight briefing, so I’d sort of forgotten that they were even there.
But that changed when the doors opened and we entered the capsule.
 |
| The capsule |
As fortune would have it, someone on the flight before us had gotten sick, tried to use one of the motion sickness bags the capsule contained, partially missed and covered the lower half of one of the restraints with vomit – which we in the business call a ‘protein spill’. When the black woman to our right, who didn’t know our euphemism – probably wouldn’t have cared if she did – but had been unfortunate enough to draw that position, reached up and felt the wet restraint, she started screaming bloody murder.
“There’s puke all over this goddamned thing!” she cried, staring at her hands.
Then followed a long string of expletives.
It was at that point that things fell apart.
The Launch Director, a guy named Joe, came running over to see what the ruckus was, and then tried to calm the frenzied woman down after releasing the restraits. E looked like a frightened deer, since this was the sort of thing she’d been afraid of from the beginning. The black woman stepped outside the capsule, literally screaming at Joe as if the whole thing was something he’d personally planned.
“Dis is mudderfuckin’ puke,” she yelled. “I didn’t pay all dis money to get no puke all over me! Whatcho mudderfuckas goin do bout it?”
No doubt about it. She wasn’t just pissed. She was livid.
Joe couldn’t calm her down. In fact, he couldn’t manage to work a word in edgewise. A coordinator appeared out of nowhere and joined into what was quickly becoming a screaming match. We were still in our seats in the capsule along with the woman’s husband, who seemed to be trying sink into the seat low enough as not to be identified as existing. E was cringing, sitting there looking at the woman’s restraint, which was in the raised position, but was still…dripping.
She was turning pale.
I thought about the law of averages. The odds against this particular thing happening at this particular time were about as good as winning the Florida lottery. Of course, the lottery is something you want to win. This, on the other hand, was the exact thing E was afraid of happening and the exact thing I’d promised her wouldn’t. It was like wish fulfillment in reverse. This hero business was trickier than I thought. I wondered if this sort of thing happened to Batman. If it did, it was my guess he wouldn’t just sit staring at a puke-covered restraint. He’d do something heroic. Then again, he has a lot more tricks in his utility belt than I did.
All I couldn’t think to do was push E out of the door we entered through, back into the bay. But I didn’t let go of her hand. She wasn’t gripping mine anymore, and I knew if I let go it would all be over. And I don’t like to lose.
I looked around. “Come on,” I said, pulling her behind me.
Courtney was standing at the Re-entry door trying to keep from laughing. I hurried over to her with E in tow.
“Looks we’re going to need another capsule,” I said over the ruckus still going on in the bay.
A guest services manager hurried past us toward the beleaguered Launch Director and coordinator.
“Sorry,” Courtney said. “All the other teams were full. There aren’t any empty spots. But you can wait in Re-entry, and I’ll have dispatch leave an empty team on the next flight.”
I frowned. That was no good. E was a nervous wreck all ready. I doubted she’d last another five minutes waiting outside. I knew she’d never make it through another motion sickness spiel in another pre-flight briefing. But, just beyond where Courtney was standing, I could see that the doors to the blue bay next door were opened.
Maybe there was something left in the utility belt after all.
I literally pulled E out of the shouting in the gold flight bay and into the brightly lit re-entry corridor. She looked surprised. She looked confused. But at least she didn’t look scared. She did, however, look as if she were about to give up.
This had suddenly gone beyond the simple parameters of escorting a pretty girl on an amusement park ride. It seemed, at the moment, that there was much more at stake. I said, “This is not going down this way. I’m going to get us on a flight and see you through this thing if it’s the last thing I do.”
She managed a weak smile. “All right,” she said.
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| The capsules in the Blue Bay |
I lead her inside the blue bay. It suddenly seemed like déjà vu. If E recognized the irony, she didn’t say anything. Raquel, Nick’s friend, was Launch in the blue bay, and she had just sealed the last of the capsules. She was heading toward the control panel to launch the ride when we saw us. Before she could ask what I was doing there, holding hands with a guest, I asked her, with a tone of urgency, if there were two blank spots in any of the capsules.
“There was a protein spill next door,” I said, nodding toward the adjacent bay.
Fortunately, she didn’t ask for any other explanation.
“Well,” she stammered, sounding a little bewildered but pointing toward the capsule nearest the door, “This one is empty. You can have it unless you need a full team.”
An empty, private capsule – especially one that was sans vomit – was perfect. But I didn’t stop to explain. I activated the capsule controls with my left hand, since E was now clinging to my right, and led her inside. We sat in the center, at the pilot and commander positions. E let go of my hand and stuffed her oversize purse into a bin beneath the IP as she’d done in the last capsule. Only this time, she pulled out the stuffed stitch doll and hugged it in her right arm. I pulled the restraint down over her, and then pulled down my own. E watched me. As soon as the restraint was in place, she reached over and grasped my right hand again, holding on tightly. Raquel watched, still bewildered by it all.
“Okay, we’re good,” I said to her.
“I guess I’ll find out about all this later, huh?” she said.
I frowned at her. She shrugged and sealed the capsule.
There is a short period between the time the cockpit is sealed and the launch actually begins. This is usually as long as it takes for the Launch Director and Flight Specialist to leave the bay, shut all the entry doors and press the flashing green button, which is only a half a minute or so. But for first time riders, it’s the moment of greatest anticipation or apprehension, because you’re just sitting in there, surrounded by flashing buttons, display panels and ambient sounds and voices, waiting.
“Well,” I said, turning to E, who truly looked more nervous than ever, “I finally got us here. It wasn’t easy, but here we are.”
I have to admit that at that moment, watching her smile bravely back at me, I felt extremely proud of the woman sitting beside me in the dark, holding my hand for dear life. If her story was to be believed, and after all that had happened, there was no reason to doubt it, she was doing what few people are capable of, namely identifying a fear and then facing it. That I had been chosen as the hero to help her do it made me feel prouder still, because the trust she had placed in me, a total stranger, was amazing. As I said before, it was just an amusement park ride. Yet there and then, it was a whole lot more.
Suddenly, all the chatter from the myriad voices inside the capsule was replaced by the voice of Gary Sinise playing cap com (Sinise narrates the entire ride as well the Ready Room and pre-flight shows). “Congratulations, Mars team,” he said. “All of us here are proud to be part of this historic launch; the first mission to Mars!”
With that, the entire capsule tilted backwards, settling with a metallic bang. On the monitor screen in front of us, a launch gantry swung into view. A chorus of voices crying, “go,” echoed thought the capsule. A finale voice said, “Go for launch.” Then there was the roar of the engines igniting, and clouds of smoke billowed upward around the gantry.
“This is it,” I said to E, who squeezed my hand more tightly than ever. “Hang on.”
Then there was a countdown from five. I counted down along with the voice from the monitor, my voice bouncing off the capsule walls, partly to create an air of excitement for E, but also because I always get jazzed at this point, since the liftoff sort of reminds me of the sensations I always felt dropping into a really bitchin’ wave. The rockets fired, the gantry slipped away beneath us and we started to rise into the cloudy skies, our backs pressed into our seats as we rocketed upward.
Or at least that’s what we saw on the virtual reality screens in front of us. What was actually happening is that the centrifuge had begun from zero spin to its maximum velocity around the bay of 16.2 rotations per minute in a few seconds, and it was the centrifugal force of the spin pinning us to the back of the seats and stretching the skin on our faces, not that the truth of what was really happening mattered much. The reality of the spin matched the fantasy on the screen with pinpoint precision. The choice of what we perceive to be real is a task assigned to the brain. And it can be fooled.
The sensation of speed decreased when the whole capsule shook and a voice announced first-stage separation. The clouds dissipated, giving way to an inky black field roped with the stars of the Milky Way. The whole capsule seemed to just hang there for a moment, and our bodies seemed to have suddenly grown light enough to float away, if not for the restraints holding us in the seats.
“Zero G confirmed,” a distant, female voice said.
E spoke for the first time. “This is…beautiful,” she said, extending the word and sounding thoroughly amazed.
“Didn’t I tell you this was cool?” I said, turning to her. She turned for an instant and gave me a bright, delighted smile.
Then the second stage rocket fired (on the screen at least – actually what happened is that the centrifuge picked up speed again, this time to a max spin of 12.4 rotations per minute) and we went into earth orbit, passing under the Hubble Space Telescope and then over Florida, heading toward the International Space Station, which came into view from over the horizon.
“You’re looking good, Mars team,” Cap Com said. “You should be passing the ISS now and you are on course for your slingshot around the moon.”
Had the trip been in real time, it obviously would have taken a bit longer to reach the moon, even had we really been traveling at a velocity of nearly 20,000 miles an hour. But the moon seemed to come out of nowhere rocketing toward us as if it were no further away than the space station. But whatcha gonna do? Buy the premise; buy the bit.
Not that E cared much one way or the other. She kept repeating the word, “beautiful,” as if she’d never seen anything of the kind before, which she probably hadn’t.
“Navigator,” Cap Com cried. “Fire rockets for lunar orbit insertion now.”
There was a jolt as the speed suddenly increased.
“Computer override,” another voice said. “LOI confirmed.”
When the rockets fired for lunar orbital insertion and the speed increased to maximum spin once again, E actually began laughing out loud with the sheer joy of the whole adventure. Then, when the circle of the moon was complete and the earth came back into distant view, she cried, “Oh…this…is…sooooo…beautiful!”
Cap Com agreed. “Beautiful sight isn’t it?” his voice said. “Something to dream about on your way to Mars. Engineer, activate hypersleep…now.”
We didn’t, of course, have an engineer. So the second voice said, “Computer override. Hypersleep activated.”
Ice crystals formed on the screen. A soft, ghost-like voice whispered “three months…” The lighted instruments all blinked off. And suddenly the capsule went dark. There was no sound except our breathing.
But the stillness only lasted a second. All at once everything came back on with the urging of a claxon.
“Rise and shine,” Cap Com urged. “Let’s go team, we have a problem. There’s an asteroid storm right in front of your Mars landing site.”
A sea of floating, rotating, careening asteroids floated on the screen in front of us. The capsule began pitching one way or the other to avoid them jerking us around in the seats. Cap Com was shouting orders. E squeezed my hand, hugged Stitch and began laughing.
“We’re getting you out of there right now!” Cap Com cried.
Suddenly the ship was free of the asteroids, and Mars loomed before us as a large, orange sphere, pock marked with huge volcanoes and the deep gouges of canyons and topped with a white swirling ice cap.
“Oh!” E cried. “This is so beautiful!”
“Navigator,” Cap Com commanded. “Fire rockets for Mars decent now!”
The Navigator’s seat was right beside me. I reached over with my left hand and pressed the flashing white button.
“Confirmed,” a voice said.
The capsule shuddered with the blast of rockets, and the sensation of speed pressed us back against our seats as the centrifuge hit its max speed again. But on the screen we began to drop toward the surface, falling through the atmosphere barrier into a bright canopy of dusty pinkish orange.
“Two hundred miles to planet surface,” a voice trilled.
The volcanoes defined themselves into gigantic cones as we fell toward them and the gash of the canyons before them became mountainous cliffs of jagged rock.
“Commander,” Cap Com cried. “Extend the wings for landing now.”
The button flashed white in front of E. She ignored it hugging Stitch instead.
There was a clank as the autopilot took over and the wings extended. For a moment the shuttle seemed to be gliding through the air toward the canyon. Suddenly, a whole series of alarms began screaming through the capsule.
“We’ve lost autopilot,” Cap Com cried. “Pilot, activate manual control now.”
The autopilot control button lit up on the console in front of me. I pressed it.
“All hands on the control sticks,” Cap Com said.
E was too busy giggling at this point to let go of either Stitch or my right hand to worry about piloting the spaceship. I grabbed the bucking joystick in my left hand. The shuttle rocketed toward the cliffs.
“Pull back,” Cap Com ordered.
I did. We rose over a boulder, and shot toward an opening in the cliff walls. The towering volcanoes disappeared below the horizon.
“Pull left,” Cap Com shouted.
I yanked the control stick to the left. The whole capsule banked as we shot through the craggy opening and rounded a wall to the right, skimming the surface of the steep rocky face to the left. The joystick bucked. The canyon loomed ahead. We raced past dusty red rock pocked with patches of snow.
“This is beautiful,” E cried, giddy.
“Pull right,” Cap Com commanded.
I urged the stick the other way banking through another breech in the wall out of the canyon into a plane that gave way to ice fields. The base was right ahead. We dropped toward the landing strip that ran through the dark, metallic buildings on either side.
“Back to center,” Cam Com said.
Another voice followed his command. “They’re coming in too hot,” she said with urgency.
“Beautiful,” E repeated, obviously not caring.
There was a jarring jolt as the wheels touched down.
“Pull back,” Cap Com cried as we raced forward.
I jerked back on the stick. It didn’t slow us much.
“Watch the barrier!”
We rammed into it anyway, right into a snow bank.
“Hang on!”
The capsule rose snow exploded around us and then came down with a crash.
“Down and clear,” Cap Com announced.
A sensor voice followed, “Canyon perimeter alert,” it said.
Suddenly, the ice in front of the ship began to splinter and crack. It gave way to a yawning chasm. The nose dropped as dramatic music rose to a fever pitch. E gasped. Cap Com said, “Don’t move a muscle.”
The ship teetered. We hung there for a breathless moment staring down into the gorge as sheets of ice fell into it. Then, the nose began to rise as the ship righted and slammed back down on its rear wheels.
“Congratulations, team,” Cap Com announced proudly. “You made it to the landing site. Welcome to Mars, and welcome to the astronaut core.”
A fanfare blared. The lights came on. The IP lifted away and the restraints were released. The ending came so quickly that E seemed surprised.
Now, for the first time since the trip began, E let go of my hand to retrieve her large bag from the bin beneath the control panel. She stuffed Stitch back into it.
I walked her out of the flight bay and into the re-entry area. As soon as we were outside, she turned and gave me a very long hug. Then she kissed me on both cheeks (a European thing, I’m imagining) and said, “I don’t know how to thank you. I was so frightened, and now it seems silly to have been so. I guess I really am fucked up.”
“Nah, not at all,” I said. “You just needed someone to hold your hand.”
She hugged me again, and kissed both my cheeks again. Then she looked at me seriously. “Are you an angel?” she asked. “I think you must be one.”
I gave her a little smile. “Hardly that,” I said.
“A champion, then,” she said.
I shrugged. I thought about my neighbor in the hallway on Halloween morning. Maybe there was something to the superhero costume after all. I took her hand and walked her down the long corridor to the exit.
“Well,” I said, stopping. “This is where I leave you.”
She looked into my eyes for a long time. “Thank you again,” she said. Then, after a lingering hug, she turned and walked away. I watched until the crowd swallowed her.
***
I was in the break room behind the Mission: Space complex an hour later when I saw Jason again. He hadn’t been there when I returned to position I’d left to take E into space so it was the first I’d seen of him since then.
“How was it with your girl?” he said, sitting at the table beside me.
“Awesome,” I said.
He looked at me as if he had a lot of unanswered questions. He didn’t ask them, though. Instead he said, “Courtney asked me to tell you that she rode the thing again and wanted to make sure that you knew that she’d been able to do it alone.”
I just smiled and nodded.
He waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, he asked, “Did you know her before or something?”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head.
He stared at me as if he didn’t believe it. “So she was a stranger that came out of nowhere.”
“Yep.”
“And she went through all that trouble just for you?”
I shrugged.
“How come?”
“I’m a class act,” I said.
He looked at me doubtfully as if he wasn’t buying a word of it.
“Well, did you at least get her phone number?” he asked, leaning forward, waiting for something juicy.
“No, I didn’t,” I said, shaking my head.
“She wouldn’t give it to you?”
“I didn’t ask.”
I know he wanted to ask why. I also knew that I didn’t want to explain.
He stood up to leave, lingered a moment and said, almost in passing, “What an idiot.”
I smiled to myself. I doubted that Jason would understand. Phone numbers and Email addresses wouldn’t have been appropriate. What this girl and I had shared was a dyed in the wool damsel in distress knight in shining armor fairy tale, complete with dragons to be slain and a happily ever after. Anything else would have been too much. I’m sure that E must have felt the same thing. You don’t drag a fairy tale into the real world, because from the moment you do, the entire experience becomes ordinary and the raw magic disappears.
Maybe I am an idiot. But fairy tales are best left on their own.
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| The crew of Mission: Space. Center (in black) Gary Sinise. I'm extreme right, third row, the guy with the busy hair between the two girls. |
