John Nance - Orbit

She turns to the door and stops to look back.

“Richard, is it truly unavoidable?”

He nods sadly. “Unless we can talk to them or they light off the rocket or unless NORAD is wrong. There’s just nothing we can do.”

“I guess we can pray. I haven’t done a lot of that for a very long time.”

For just a moment several hours back Kip saw a glimmer of something on the horizon, a momentary flash just enough to convince him that he isn’t yet resigned to his fate. During the next entire orbit he’d strained to see it again, whatever “it” had been, his hopes telegraphed through a pounding heartbeat that maybe, just maybe it was a rescue craft. But by the fourth hour after the flash, his hopes evaporated.

This time his sadness and the letdown are muted, as if he should be embarrassed for even raising the possibility of deliverance again, and especially for crabbing backward along the emotional arc he’s tried to travel to reach a state of acceptance.

Before that flash—that glimmer of hope now dashed—he’d slept some more, shaken by the realization that more than a day has elapsed since launch.

The laptop has been opened and closed several times, but the words he wants to type seem stuck in his heart. Yet, once again he pulls the weightless machine to him, secures it to his lap, and stares at the keyboard for the longest time before his fingers move to the keys.

A strange message pops up asking his approval for some sort of connection and he answers yes without thinking, then can’t get it back.

What the heck was that? he wonders, taking a quick detour into the Windows Control Panel to see if something’s unusual. But nothing jumps out and the connection utility shows the computer connected to nothing, no networks, no modems, no other humans.

He calls up a word processing window and begins anew.

Anyone out there?

Of course not. At least not in my lifetime, which will be short.

But let’s pretend you are there, whatever year it is when you finally read these words.

For the record, I suppose I should yell Mayday, Mayday, Mayday! ( At least I think that’s the right phrase.) I’m a passenger on the private spaceship Intrepid, which launched from Mojave, California, and we were hit by some sort of small object which came right through the cabin and right through my pilot’s head, killing him instantly. No one can hear me on the radios, and apparently I only have four days of air left.

And this isn’t fun anymore.

I probably had more days of air than five at first, but I used it the first day panicking, crying, raging, and generally acting like an idiot. But it’s okay now. Death happens. I know intellectually that there’s no chance of rescue or survival, and I realize that there will be no reprieve, no heroic stretching of the available air supply, and no magic solutions derived by teams of sweating scientists below in the eleventh hour. This won’t be. Apollo 13

When I won this private spaceflight, they warned me very carefully that if anything happened, neither NASA nor any other country’s space program was going to attempt to save me. I accepted the risk, and I’m sure what happened was beyond anyone’s ability to foresee, as far as I can tell. But now… here I sit, knowing I have four days left to say something to a mute disc drive, and the worst part is I can’t even say good-bye to my family and friends or anyone else, even though I’m passing over their heads every hour and a half.

What’s wrong, by the way, is that because of the thing that hit us, the retro rocket won’t fire. So I’m stuck in a stable orbit and sick with guilt over the fact that my wife, Sharon, begged me not to take this risk. Turns out she was dead right, pun intended. It was an unforgivably selfish act. I expect my son, Jerrod, will never forgive me either, since he already continues to blame me for his mother’s death, and my little girls will never have the chance to hear directly from me why this all happened, and why I decided to come up here and ended up depriving them of a father.

Then he considers addressing his words to Diana, and the thought surprises him. She’s the first name that pops into his head, and he decides it has something to do with hers being the last smiling female face he saw before launch.

For the tiniest moment, the idea of her feels like a focal point, an inspiration, a reason to struggle hard to come back.

And just as quickly that sparkle of thought evaporates.

At my ripe old age of forty-four, I’m that worst of all white Anglo males, the middle-aged dad with a mid-life crisis, and I’ve been feeling for a long time like I’ve wasted the last twenty years, or at least that I went down the wrong road somehow.

No, no, no, he thinks. I’m not going to sit up here and whine in print.

He pauses, aware of a vague pain in his stomach, at first not recognizing the symptoms of simple hunger. There’s a selection of protein bars and other packaged food in a side compartment that he’s already raided, and he pulls one of the stowed bars out of the ankle pocket of his flight suit and wolfs it down with a water chaser from his squeeze bottle. Food is one of his lowest priorities.

He’s distracted by the sun disappearing over the horizon again, the beauty of the rapid change from ruddy red to deep purple and inky, star-studded black absolutely amazing. He wonders whether, when it’s all over and he’s… wherever… beauty like this can still be perceived. Maybe it’s even prettier there. Wherever “there” is.

Heaven. He has his own definition, probably born of too little intimacy in the last few years. He’s enjoyed poking fun at straight-laced male friends who still think sex is a four-letter word. “Heaven’s right here,” he’s fond of saying as he enjoys the shock value, “In the arms of whatever pretty female you can find.”

But in his early years he’d occasionally fallen in love so deep he couldn’t eat or think for weeks.

There was, for instance, Linda Hammel, and he smiles at the warm memory, wondering where she is. He has never discussed her with anyone. His folks would have been scandalized, and her father would have killed him. But now…

He looks at the keyboard, suddenly excited at the prospect of reliving those moments, even if only through a dreamy window of words.

All right, let’s begin unconventionally. I’ve got to start somewhere, and both I and whoever I mention will have been long dead by the time you, my reader, find these words, so I think I’ll tell you about my happiest times, my teen years, and my first real love.

The President pauses before unlocking the bathroom door and walking back into the world. He shakes his head to think that the only privacy the most powerful leader on the planet can have is in his private water closet, but too often it’s true.

He rummages through his pants pocket for a breath strip, aware of his growing case of coffee breath, and does a quick reassessment of his image in the mirror before drying his hands and opening the door. As usual, several people are hovering right outside and waiting for him, this time the number includes the White House Air Force liaison officer.

“Ready, Mr. President?” she asks.

“Yes, Kim. Lead the way.”

They quickly move into the inner chamber of the Situation Room, a small conference room festooned with communications equipment and liquid crystal screens.

Colonel Kim Wallenda lights up one of the screens, a real-time image of an Air Force hangar complex in Nevada undulating in the morning heat. One of the hangar doors is open, with nothing but black visible inside.