Stories That Crawled From My Brain

Radio Silence

“OK Major, you're clear for spacewalk.” 

The airlock opened, and I hovered in the open portal. 

I gulped, tried to steady my heartrate. Although I was fastened on, stepping off into nothingness as the Earth spun rapidly below was still scary as hell. 

“Everything OK, Major?” said Houston's voice in my helmet.

“All… all good,” I said, breathing in deeply.

“You sure, Major?”

I looked at the shimmering blue jewel below me. The sense of fear began to ease: my awe was too great for me to feel any other emotion simultaneously. 

“It's everything they ever said it would be, and more,” I said.

“You'll get used to it,” said Commander Janet Thompson with a little snigger, as she watched safe from her seat within the space station.

“I just can't believe that would ever happen,” I said. And, at that time, I couldn't.

It was a small mission, just me and Janet up there, going up to adjust some of the instruments and install some components so a few experiments recording deep space could be done, then, we'd uninstall them, pack them up and go home. Easy stuff, really, a few weeks at most.

I checked my tether one more time, breathed in deeply one last time, and, holding my breath, I stepped out into the void. 

I wasn't used to the weightlessness yet and had overstepped, and, missing the platform, I drifted out, out, out, until my tether became taught and I was just floating out there, no sense of orientation whatsoever. 

Out of nowhere, I just started laughing, full on belly laughs of sheer joy.

“Don't use up all your oxygen,” joked Janet.

“How do you feel Major?” asked Houston.

“Out of this World,” I said, and both Houston and Janet joined in with my laughter.

After I had my fill, I reeled my tether back in to get me back to the outside of the USSS, the United States Space Station, and installed the additional sensors to the array without incident.

I crawled back across the outside, over and into the main body of the space station with a sense of elation.

“That was amazing,” I said, when I was safely out of my suit and inside the station.

“As I said, you'll get sick of it before long,” said Janet, throwing a wink at me.

“I doubt that, somehow, Janet.”

I couldn't wait to talk to my wife, which I was scheduled to do later that evening, and tell her how it was. She'd been nervous about me going up here, so the sooner I could reassure her and tell her how awesome it was, the better.

I impatiently wolfed down a small amount rehydrated food and a few floating drops of water.

“Don't skip on food, you'll need to keep your strength up,” chided Janet.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I said, leaving half my food in its packaging, uneaten.

I ran off and dialled my wife as fast as my fingers could press the buttons. Her smiling face immediately popped into the screen, and I was as happy as I could ever be. 

Unless she and the kids would have been up here with me, of course.

She junmped straight into it: “I was so nervous watching the launch, I could barely look through my fingers. The girls, well, you know the girls were excited throughout the whole thing, they let the kids watch it at school. ‘That's my daddy,’ the girls were telling everyone, pointing at the big screen. They were so proud of you. I'm so proud of you.”