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The Earth and stars wheeled by slowly, and when the rotation had brought them
back around again, Jim hurled the Pope back toward the ladder, not hard but
firmly. Dave floated back in a straight line, sans rotation.
"Aaah, grab on tight!" Jim commanded, repeating that several times to make
sure it got through. And whether Dave heard or not, he surely complied,
grabbing the ladder hard in his gloved hands the very moment he could reach
it. He then surprised Jim by retrieving and inspecting his tether cord,
sliding his hand up to the end, and clipping the carabiner back on the guide
wire again.
"--you all right up there?" someone asked around a burst of static.
"Just shut up for a minute!" Jim snapped. Per Isaac Newton, that push to Dave
had just added half a meter a second to Jim's own velocity; he was getting
farther, faster. Still, there was little question what to do next. Working
slowly and carefully, he got out his jet bottle and took a very firm hold of
it against his center of mass. If he lost it now he was screwed, so he cradled
it, aimed carefully, and waited for his moment. When it arrived, he pulled the
trigger for nearly a full second.
Jim had never seen the plume of a jet bottle in hard vacuum before. It
surprised him, blowing in all directions like a fountain made of white fog.
Some of it even came straight backward, striking his faceplate and bouncing
away in straight lines. But it did the job; his rotation sped up a little, but
his linear motion had reversed.
The floodlights were finally on, so even with his lamps pointing off to
nowhere, he could clearly see he was just twenty meters from the
station--still too close to take in the whole thing at a glance--and he was
moving toward it. Almost exactly toward it.
He was going to hit with his back, though, so he pulled his knees in and
rotated his arms, swiveling like a high diver or a dancer. Or an astronaut.
This did nothing to kill his rotation, but it turned him around so the timing
was right: he would hit the ladder arms-first.
"Bravo!" said the Pope, looking up at him.
Jim said nothing, waiting for the slow-motion collision that would bring him
back in contact with the ladder. When it came, he grabbed on and, like Dave,
got clipped to the wire again as quick as he could.
"So calm. We were never in danger at all," the pontiff marveled.
At which point Jim disappointed himself by answering, "Bite me, jerk. You just
about screwed us both.
Don't ever do it again."
To the Pope himself, yeah. Not the sparkliest moment in his lifetime, that. He
clung there for half a minute, getting his breath back.
"Aaah, I can see you," Lisa said from the command cupola. "Looks like you're
all right. Can you confirm?"
"Roger that," Jim puffed.
"You still have the other dosimeter to retrieve," she said apologetically.
Surprisingly, it was the Pope who answered that one: "I'm up for it if you
are, Jim. It's gorgeous out here.
Is that Madagascar? Who'd've thought it would need so many lights!"
4.
The Human Element
So far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain. And
so far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
--Albert Einstein, 1947, "Geometry and Experience."
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ABC Amber Palm Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abcpalm.html
In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice
there is.
--Yogi Berra, circa 1980
* * * *
They had a big feast that night, with Chip and Robert doing most of the
cooking and Jim doing most of the cleaning up. Dave and the Swiss Guard were
still looking a bit green and didn't eat much, and at first the setting was
quiet. Having the Pope over for dinner had made everyone shy, and the
near-accident this afternoon had knocked a bit of the stuffing out of them,
too. It could have happened to anyone, and it could have been bad.
But the silence ran deeper than that. For six months, Dewey Park Station had
been home to five people--its very first tenants--and though they'd enjoyed
good contact with the ground--by email, by phone, by video conference--they'd
become a pretty tight little society up here. More so than Jim had realized;
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