Robert J. Sawyer - Above It All

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Above It All

by Robert J. Sawyer

First published in the anthology Dante's Disciples, edited by Peter Crowther

and Edward E. Kramer (White Wolf, February 1996).

Winner of the CompuServe Science Fiction and Fantasy Forum's Sixth Annual

HOMer Award for Best Short Story of the Year.

Rhymes with fear.

The words echoed in Colonel Paul Rackham's head as he floated in

Discovery's airlock, the bulky Manned Maneuvering Unit clamped to his back. Air

was being pumped out; cold vacuum was forming around him.

Rhymes with fear.

He should have said no, should have let McGovern or one of the

others take the spacewalk instead. But Houston had suggested that Rackham do it,

and to demure he'd have needed to state a reason.

Just a dead body, he told himself. Nothing to be afraid of.

There was a time when a military man couldn't have avoided seeing

death -- but Rackham had just been finishing high school during Desert Storm.

Sure, as a test pilot, he'd watched colleagues die in crashes, but he'd never

actually seen the bodies. And when his mother passed on, she'd had a closed

casket. His choice, that, made without hesitation the moment the funeral

director had asked him -- his father, still in a nursing home, had been in no

condition to make the arrangements.

Rackham was wearing liquid-cooling long johns beneath his spacesuit,

tubes circulating water around him to remove excess body heat. He shuddered, and

the tubes moved in unison, like a hundred serpents writhing.

He checked the barometer, saw that the lock's pressure had dropped

below 0.2 psi -- just a trace of atmosphere left. He closed his eyes for a

moment, trying to calm himself, then reached out a gloved hand and turned the

actuator that opened the outer circular hatch. "I'm leaving the airlock," he

said. He was wearing the standard "Snoopy Ears" communications carrier, which

covered most of his head beneath the space helmet. Two thin microphones

protruded in front of his mouth.

"Copy that, Paul," said McGovern, up in the shuttle's cockpit. "Good

luck."

Rackham pushed the left MMU armrest control forward. Puffs of

nitrogen propelled him out into the cargo bay. The long space doors that

normally formed the bay's roof were already open, and overhead he saw Earth in

all its blue-and-white glory. He adjusted his pitch with his right hand control,

then began rising up. As soon as he'd cleared the top of the cargo bay, the

Russian space station Mir was visible, hanging a hundred meters away, a giant

metal crucifix. Rackham brought his hand up to cross himself.

"I have Mir in sight," he said, fighting to keep his voice calm.

"I'm going over."

Rackham remembered when the station had gone up, twenty years ago in

1986. He first saw its name in his hometown newspaper, the Omaha World Herald.

Mir, the Russian word for peace -- as if peace had had anything to do with its

being built. Reagan had been hemorrhaging money into the Strategic Defense

Initiative back then. If the Cold War turned hot, the high ground would be in

orbit.

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