Up and Down (35 page)

She reached out, took both Eugene’s arms and wrists, and positioned them close to his body and against the inside edges of the chair arms. Similarly, she then positioned his feet so they were flat on the floor but against inside edges of the chair legs.

“Okay, when the centrifuge starts up, I want you to push your arms against the frame of the chair as if you’re trying to break the arms off it. Do the same with your feet and legs. Push for all you’re worth against the inside surface of each chair leg. Strain
yourself. Tighten up all your muscles. This will help keep the centrifugal force from pushing the blood from your brain into your extremities. Do you understand?”

Eugene had actually started listening early on and now nodded his understanding.

“Okay. Show me. Give me a red face, Eugene.”

He stayed perfectly still, but his arms and legs strained against the confines of the chair. Soon he was vibrating and his facial hue was changing.

“Like this?” he grunted.

“Just like that,” Landon agreed. “One more thing. To sustain positive pressure in your lungs, press your lips tightly together, and open them just a bit to breathe in and out. Show me.”

Eugene went back to straining against the chair while pursing his lips, turning red, and vibrating. He looked like he was in the throes of the final confrontation with a severe case of acute constipation.

“So how can Eugene sing Broadway show tunes if his lips are pressed together?” I asked.

“David. Eugene is still a rookie. It took me years of practice before I could add Rodgers and Hammerstein to
AGSM
.”

We stayed with Eugene and worked on his “straining training” for the next two hours. We had to stop a few minutes early when he actually did snap both arms off the chair. Landon took that as a good sign. Just before we left him, Landon handed him one the large plastic Ziploc freezer bags she’d handed
me during our return flight to Mackenzie so many weeks ago.

“Try to hold it all together until you get out of cabin. Swallow a lot. Then you can use this if you need to, but try to be subtle about it.”

At 4:00 p.m., we were all back in the 20 G Centrifuge control room. I can’t imagine what happens to the human body at 20 Gs.

“Ready, Mr. Crank?” asked Scott Chandler.

“Ready!” grunted Eugene, already strapped in and in full straining mode.

Landon and I watched the numbers on the digital readout as the arm began to rotate. Eugene wasn’t singing, but he was humming something indecipherable.

The red digits on the G scale moved upwards quickly, 1.5, 1.7, 1.9. Eugene was still with us, his face moving through various shades of red as he pushed his arms and legs against the seat frame.

2.0, 2.1.

“Okay, he’s there!” shouted Landon. “Shut it down.”

Scott Chandler raised his hand to countermand Landon’s order.

2.2, 2.3, 2.4. Still, Eugene was with us, his face now shaking with the effort of keeping the blood in his head where it belonged.

“Okay, I think that will suffice,”
NASA
chief of astronaut training said before the tech slowed the big arm. Chandler hit the
mike button. “I don’t know how you did it, Mr. Crank, but you’ve passed the G test and are cleared for the mission.”

When Eugene made it back into the control room, I noticed the corner of the Ziploc bag peeking out from the now bulging pocket of his coveralls. His face was slowly returning to its natural complexion. He ignored Scott Chandler and walked directly over to Landon. Then he hugged her. He kindly averted his face.

We landed back in Houston at 7:30. I was exhausted, even though I’d just sat on my ass all day watching Landon and Eugene scrambling their insides in a giant blender. Watching Eugene strain against the chair in his room for two hours seemed to have taken its toll on me. After dinner, Landon dragged me over to the library and archives at the Johnson Space Center. I had no idea what we were doing there until the friendly librarian set us up on a computer with a large and crystal-clear monitor beneath a sign that read
LandSat Images
.

“You can input a precise latitude and longitude here, and then the database will give you a listing of the dates and times of each satellite shot. Just click on the ones you want to view, and they’ll come up on the screen. Hit Escape to return to the listing.”

I thought I had an idea what Landon was up to, but watched in silence to be sure.

She punched in a latitude and longitude, obviously from memory, and hit Enter.

The listing of satellite photos spewed onto the screen starting with a date from late last year, and moving back in time. The satellite, one of the earliest to photograph the Earth, shot photos from the time it was launched in 1970 until last year when it had burned up in the atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. Landon scrolled down, down, down, through several screens. Yes, I knew what she was doing.

She stopped the cursor at October 16, 1970. She clicked the mouse button. The screen was filled with a black and white satellite photo. I didn’t recognize what I was looking at until she zoomed in to the top right corner. A tiny lake, shaped like a cigar, grew larger and larger as she clicked the Magnify arrow on the screen. Soon, only the east end of the lake was visible as it filled the screen. Her hands were trembling.

“Is that your father’s Beaver at the dock?” I asked.

She nodded. I could see the same cabin I’d recently visited. But it was a photograph from forty years or so earlier.

“This was taken just one day before my father disappeared.”

I knew where she was going. I helped her split the screen so we could open next to it the same aerial shot from the fateful day following. I could see only two differences in the second photo. The surface of the lake looked a little darker in the second photo. And Hugh Percival’s Beaver was no longer moored at the dock.

“The satellite takes the shot at 3:46 p.m. each day,” Landon said in hushed tones. “This photo we’re looking at was literally
snapped about an hour and a quarter after my father took off and was never seen again.”

I confess it was eerie and moving just to look at it. For the next five hours, we scoured the satellite shots of the surrounding area taken over several days following his disappearance, hoping to see some evidence of her father’s fate. In a few hours, we used satellite photos to cover the same ground that had taken Landon the previous forty years to search. But still, we found nothing. Not a single trace. Nothing at all. The satellite photos told a simple story. Hugh Percival and his plane were there on Cigar Lake on October 16, 1970. Then, one day later, on October 17, 1970, they just disappeared from the face of the Earth.

Now that Landon had been cleared for the mission, she enjoyed some well-earned downtime. For Landon downtime tended not to involve anything a normal person might consider relaxing. But she was on a mission that did not involve the space shuttle. She spent our last few days in Houston sequestered in the library, immersed in satellite photos at the
LandSat Images
terminal. She could cover so much more ground so much faster than she could flying the Beaver. She was actually mad at herself for never having thought to research this angle before. I reminded her that being an official astronaut granted her privileges not accorded to average citizens, let alone to reclusive doctor bush pilots living on a remote wilderness lake in the wilds of Canada.

I brought her coffee and sandwiches. I used a second terminal to explore the terrain just beyond the potential flight range of Hugh Percival’s Beaver, just in case. Several times we found a grouping of trees that were standing one day and lying flat the
next. They could have been hit by a plane, but further investigation dashed the theory. In each case when we looked at the same site the day after, more trees were down. It was loggers cutting down trees, not a Beaver knocking down trees. The librarian was sympathetic and let us stay well past closing time. But the hours of searching still yielded nothing, beyond cramped legs and a tender tush.

Eight weeks and three days after arriving in Houston, Landon, Eugene, Kelly Bradstreet, and I boarded a flight for Orlando. We were headed for the Kennedy Space Center, the shuttle’s launch and landing site. It was real. This was actually going to happen. In a few days, Landon Percival was going to blast into space and orbit the Earth aboard the International Space Station for more than a week and then land back at Kennedy. When I’d first concocted the idea of putting citizens in space, I was just trying to survive my first day in a new career. I never dreamed it might actually happen. I looked over at Landon in the window seat. She looked every one of her seventy-one years, until she smiled. Then she looked about eighty-three as the smile animated her face, revealing smaller creases nestled into their larger host wrinkles. It was a veritable wrinkle-fest. But she just beamed all the time. I glanced at Eugene, sitting on the aisle. He had come a long way in eight weeks, too. He’d started out as an arrogant, right-wing, conceited jerk who viewed Landon, and everything
about her, with undisguised disdain bordering on contempt. Now, as the launch approached, he seemed to have evolved into an arrogant, right-wing, conceited jerk who had come to accept, respect, and even enjoy Landon, largely through her own generosity towards him. I still thought he was an ass, but Landon would hear none of it.

I’d met regularly with Kelly Bradstreet throughout the eight weeks, and we always seemed to be on the same wavelength. I thought very highly of her and had actually grown quite fond of her. She was tough, intelligent, and committed, and had little time for politics and game-playing. The Citizen Astronaut program would never have flown without her dedication and patience.
NASA
would not have touched this idea with a ten-foot booster rocket without her formidable powers of persuasion. Lately, she’d taken to calling me
DS
. I’d never had a nickname, other than Dorkpants back in public school, and it kind of made me feel like a big shot (the
DS
I mean, not Dorkpants).

As I sat on the plane flanked by Landon and Eugene, my thoughts eventually turned to Amanda. She’d been on my mind a lot, recently. Yes, we’d gotten off on the wrong foot on that first day in the boardroom, for which I felt responsible. But we were now well past first impressions. We “liaised” professionally nearly every day, ostensibly to coordinate the ongoing media relations and social media programs. But in the last few weeks, we seemed to have moved beyond “liaising” to actually talking, like normal human beings. Our conversations had grown longer and longer,
and further and further away from the Citizen Astronaut program. We were no longer two
PR
professionals “liaising” about work. We seemed to have become just two friends yakking with one another about whatever was on our minds. It happened so gradually that I barely noticed. I wondered if she had. It had all become so comfortable. I chatted to Landon about it all, and she listened patiently as I tried to work out if something was, you know, going on. She posed a few questions that helped focus my thinking, but I really wasn’t very good at picking up on signs and interpreting signals. Given my limited experience in matters of the heart, apart from a few short-lived romances in Ottawa, I missed everything subtler than a two-by-four to the forehead.