"Sure," Colt said, suddenly dead sober. "The Jackie Robinson bit. Anything else you want me to do, boss? Walk on water? Shine shoes?"
Tenny grabbed him by the shirt. "You stupid bastard! You wanna be an astronaut or not?"
"I want to."
Then don't fuck yourself over. There's only one man can ruin things for you and that's you. Learn some self- control."
Colt said nothing as long as Tenny held his shirt. They merely glared at each other. But when the Major slowly released him, Colt said quietly, "I'll try."
"And stop going around with that goddamned chip on your shoulder."
"I'll try," Colt repeated.
Tenny turned to Kinsman. "And you . . . you help him all you can. He's too good a man to lose." * * * 36
"How come you got the window seat?" Colt muttered.
He was lying beside Kinsman in the metal womb of the space shuttle's mid-deck compartment. Zipped into sky-blue coveralls, Kinsman lay on his back in the foam-padded contour seat next to the compartment's side hatch—and its only window.
"Lucky, I guess," he croaked back to Colt. His voice nearly cracked. His throat was dry and scratchy, his palms slippery with nervous perspiration.
Six astronaut-trainees were jammed into the mid-deck area, waiting in tense silence as the shuttle went through the final few minutes of countdown. They had no radio earphones and could hear only muffled, garbled voices from the flight crew on the deck above them.
Kinsman mentally counted the rungs on the ladder that disappeared through the open hatch to the flight deck. By the time I've counted the rungs ten times we'll lift off, he told himself. He counted slowly.
Up on the flight deck, at the other end of the ladder, the shuttle's four-man crew was going through the final stages of the countdown, Kinsman knew. They were watching instru- ments on their control panel springing into life, listening to the commands flickering across the electronics communica- tions net that spread across the entire globe of the Earth. They could see the automatic sequencer's numbers clicking down toward zero.
Down in the mid-deck compartment, strapped into their seats, the trainees could only wait and sweat.
Kinsman gave up counting and turned his head to look out the small circular window set into the hatch. All he could see was the steel spiderwork of the launch tower, frightening- ly close. Could the ship clear those steel beams when it took off? Kinsman knew that it had, hundreds of times. Yet the tower still looked close enough to touch.
He focused his vision on the distant shoreline, where the Pacific curled in to meet the brown California hills. But the nearness of the launch tower still pressed against his aware- ness.
Hell of a way to go, he said to himself. Lying on your back with your legs sticking up in the air like a woman in heat. 37
"Five seconds!" a voice rang out from the flight deck.
The time stretched to infinity. Then, a vibration, a gushing roar, a banging shock—Christ! Something's gone wrong! Abruptly the whole world seemed to shake as the roar of six million naming demons burned into every bone of his body. Kinsman caught a brief glimpse of the tower sliding past the corner of his vision, then the brown hills slipped by as he was pressed down into the seat. The force pushing against him was not as bad as the g's he had pulled in fighter planes, but the vibration was worse, an eyeball-rattling shaking that felt as if all the teeth in his head would be wrenched loose.
