“No, I don’t mean as in writing poetry, but as in looking at things as if through the eyes of someone who can appreciate the ethereal, the beautiful aspects, the emotional impact, and then put it into words.”

“That’s a tall order for a mere salesmen of pills.”

“But you can do it.”

“I’ll try.”

“Good.”

Their eyes are locked for a few intimate moments of pregnant silence and she sees the sparkle of panic mixed with interest again as he suddenly looks away, as if embarrassed.

She gets to her feet suddenly. “Well, I’ve got to go and let you get… ah…”

“Sleep. Yeah, I’m pretty tired.”

She looks at his eyes again, a smoky aquamarine color. She realizes for the first time that she’s holding his arm to steady either herself or him, she’s not sure which.

He smiles.

She sees the smile at close range and cocks her head unconsciously, forcing herself to release his arm as if it had suddenly become dangerously hot.

“Well… I’d better go,” she says.

“I appreciate your coming by.”

“And thanks for letting me in.” She pulls herself away from his eyes and opens the door, hesitating as she turns.

“See ya. Have a ball up there tomorrow.”

And she’s back in the hallway, walking with careful dignity in her heels until she’s through the outer door.

There’s a bench just outside and she sits on it for a moment, wondering what just happened. That moment of eye contact had transmitted something between them, something exhilarating if indefinable, and she gets back to her feet with a smile she can’t completely explain, wholly unaware that she’s left behind a deeply confused male, who’s also smiling inexplicably.

Kip knows it isn’t so, but the interior of the spaceship named Intrepidappears to have shrunk, and it scares him.

He sat in this very seat just last week in the hangar, with Anna Altavilla on his left and Tommy Altavilla and Tariq in the back row—the seating order a result of drawing straws. It was bigger then, the interior. He’d swear to it. But on the day of his actual flight he was too excited to even think that it was going to feel like being crammed into an oil drum with windows.

Can this thing really fly?

His thought is accompanied by a nervous laugh, but he’s having serious doubts. It seems as flimsy as a toy, moving in all directions at once whenever either of them moves an arm.

He tries scooting his rear around in the seat he’s been carefully strapped to, but real sideways movement is all but impossible, and with Bill Campbell—his pilot/astronaut companion—already belted into the command seat in front of him, Kip can barely even lean forward.

A one-two-two configuration, they call it, with the pilot/astronaut in the forward center seat, his head in the low curvature bubble canopy, and the occupants of the second and third rows given small windows on each side perfectly aligned with their eyes by seat height adjustment.

The other three seats are gone now, removed to reduce weight, which should make it look more roomy but doesn’t. He can smell plastic and cleaning chemicals and something else he finally realizes is the evaporating remnants of his own cologne.

He looks to the right, checking his window alignment, aware that his eyes are squarely in the middle of the small, thick sandwich of glass and plastic that will have to protect him from the vacuum of space and the incredible speeds which will be mere inches away at the peak of their flight.

An amusement park-style retention bar would complete this feeling,he thinks with a laugh, recalling the first time he agreed to take Jerrod on a modern roller coaster—a steel monster engineered for upside-down excursions and three-g turns. The thought that he wasn’t going to survive the experience had coursed through him when the retaining bars were clicked into place, but he sat there anyway, as if chickening out in front of his boy was a worse fate than being tossed out upside down and dying.

This feels pretty much the same, he thinks, this feeling of needing to see it through, despite the gut level scream from his body and mind that no way could any human survive an attempt at spaceflight in such a tiny, flimsy, punycraft.

But Bill Campbell has logged thirty-nine successful missions, he reminds himself. That means no unsuccessful ones.

Yet.

“So how’re you doing, Kip?” Bill is asking, grinning as he glances over his right shoulder at his only passenger.

“Just fine.”

“Yeah, right. You look green around the gills. Relax.”

“No, no! I’m… fine. Really.”

“It feels like a science fair project when you first strap in, doesn’t it?” Bill prompts, familiar with how a tiny spacecraft designed to be lightweight can feel, well, lightweight. He’s also aware that without any other passengers to talk to and identify with, thispassenger is feeling really isolated.

“It just seemed far bigger and more substantial the other day in the hangar.”

“It was. Something happened on orbit and it came back like this.” Campbell is waiting for him to laugh but for a few embarrassing seconds Kip is actually processing the statement. He catches on and winces. “Oh, jeez, okay.”

“You’ll be fine. This is an amazingly good piece of engineering. Best I’ve ever flown. But here’s the thing. This is a ship you strap on, not one you get into.”

“I believe it.”

“Say, Kip. Did you tell me you were a licensed pilot back in class?”

Kip laughs at the aeronautical gulf between them. “No, unfortunately. I’ve taken glider lessons and soloed, so I know basic stick and rudder, but I never quite got time to finish my license.”

“Just wondered how much to explain and that tells me. Relax for a few, or you might even want to take a brief nap. I just heard Mission Control say we’re delayed fifteen minutes.”

“A problem?”

“Yeah, one of the mothership pilots forgot his lunch.”

“Another joke?”

“Yes, Kip,” Campbell chuckles. “Boy, you need to get loose, buddy. It’s all okay. They just need a bit more fueling time.”

“Bill, have time for a question?”

“You bet.”

“Everyone keeps saying ‘on’ orbit instead of ‘in’ orbit. Is that a space thing?”

“Yep. Mainly started at NASA, but there’s good scientific reason to call it that. In brief, we have to get on speed and altitude to be there, so we’re on orbit, like being on a perch.”

Campbell returns to his preflight duties as Kip lets himself think back through two weeks of ground school, wondering what he’s already forgotten.

It was amazing how efficient the ASA ground school had been in prepping people like Kip. Within an hour of reporting for class, he’d had his new name tag clipped to his shirt and been greeted, briefed, equipped, supplied, introduced, and seated in ASA’s version of Astronaut 101, taught by the various astronauts themselves. American Space Adventures had accomplished the impossible in less than five years, they were told, and they had no intention of being shy about telling their story.

The company’s chief astronaut, George Andrews, opened the first day. A former NASA astronaut with one shuttle mission, he moved around the classroom with the ease of an experienced professor, inspiring confidence by his just standing there, his youthful appearance the result of keeping a fifty-year-old body in top condition, though his hair was clearly graying.

America’s Space Prize, Andrews explained, was created after the first private suborbital flight won the Ansari X prize in 2004. Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composites had teamed with Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen to pull it off, using a Rutan-built air-launched craft called SpaceShipOnecarried aloft by a mothership from the same Mojave airport. Once the realization had sunk in that private spaceflight was a new, fledgling reality, another prize, ten times larger, was announced. The Bigelow Aerospace Corporation—a start-up organization with big dreams to orbit and operate space hotels—would need a way to get customers to and from their inflatable space stations. The fifty-million-dollar prize they posted came with a stringent list of rules. To win, a privately funded company had no more than five and a half years to figure out how to build, with no government money, a private spacecraft that could fly at least five people into a two-hundred-fifty-mile-high altitude for a minimum of two orbits, and do it a second time within thirty days.