“Ah, there you are! You made it.”
Jamie turned at the sound of the voice behind him and instantly wished he hadn’t as his stomach lurched uneasily.
It was Tony Reed, smiling as if he had been born in zero gravity, gliding effortlessly along the passageway like a grinning dolphin.
Jamie tried to smile.
“Glad to see you here,” Reed said, extending his hand as he rose to Jamie’s level, “even though you do look a bit green.”
“I’ll adjust,” Jamie said, hanging on to one ladder rung while his feet floated free.
“Of course you will. We’re all delighted that Brumado talked the powers that be into giving you the geology slot.”
Reed started off along the passageway again and Jamie pushed against a rung to keep up with him. “I’m still kind of dazed… it all happened so fast.”
With his slightly crooked smile Reed said, “You can thank Joanna for it. She led the revolt against Hoffman.”
“Joanna did?”
“Yes. Got her father to support it, actually. She can be quite the little jaguar when she wants to be.”
There were others gathering at the far end of the long passageway, Jamie saw. And more coming behind (below?) them.
Lowering his voice, Jamie asked, “You mean Joanna was the one who forced Hoffman out?”
“She was the ringleader. We all had something of a hand in it. Once it was clear that DiNardo was gone, we suddenly realized that we were facing two years locked up with that Austrian martinet.”
“He wasn’t so bad,” Jamie mumbled.
“Most of us thought he was, rather. And Joanna apparently wanted him off more than any of us.” Reed’s expression turned canny. “Or perhaps she wanted you to be on with us. I feel rather jealous, you know.”
Jamie bit back a reply. They were too close to the others now to continue the conversation. He wondered how much truth there was in Reed’s words and how much of what he said was joking exaggeration.
The scientists were not expected to do any work for the first few days in orbit; the mission planners had expected them to be suffering and useless for that long. But they could attend briefings. The psychologists even claimed that activities that required mental rather than physical exertion would take their minds off their queasiness.
Jamie followed Reed through a hatch set into the bulkhead that ended the long passageway. He found himself gliding weightlessly into a large open area, rising like a bubble into a cavernous chamber in the nose of the former propellant tank. The briefing center’s domelike interior had been painted with stripes of black and white that converged on the point of the nose cap. Jamie hovered in midair, blinked several times, and realized that the “wall” he had come through had become the “floor” of the briefing center.
The flat surface was studded with plastic foot loops, further defining it as the floor. The black and white stripes provided strong vertical orientation. With up and down clearly defined, Jamie felt somewhat better. He reached out a hand as he approached the curving wall and pushed himself lightly back toward the floor. Anyone can be an acrobat in zero gravity, Jamie realized. Or a ballet dancer.
Slowly sixteen queasy, faintly green scientists gathered on that floor, anchoring their boots in the foot loops, their bodies hunched forward slightly in what was called “the zero-g crouch,” their arms floating weightlessly up around chest height. Like polyps attached to the sea bottom, Jamie thought, weaving back and forth in the currents.
Dr. Li, clad in sky-blue coveralls with a stiff collar, stood on a slightly elevated platform at one side of the circular area. Not that he needed a platform, with his height. In contrast, most of the astronauts and cosmonauts gathered around him were quite short, Jamie saw; American or Russian, most of the fliers had the sawed-off physiques of fighter pilots.
Li looked pretty green himself, Jamie thought. The expedition commander waited a few moments for the assembled scientists to quiet down. Then he began, in his thin, high-pitched voice, “Believe it or not, we are now going through the most difficult part of our mission.”