Ark Angel

Tamara and Professor Sing, feeling strange in his tracksuit, the material soft against his skin. The rocket was ahead of him. He looked at it but didn’t see it. It was as if the connection had been severed between his eyes and his brain. It was huge. The capsule that would carry him into space was at the very top of a silver tank as tall as an office block, suspended between two gantries. Water was cascading down. Was it raining? No, the water seemed to be coming from the rocket.
    He could hear the metal creaking as if it needed a huge effort just to keep it in place. There were clouds of white steam pouring out—boil-off from the propellant. Alex saw a deep trench running from the launch pad towards the sea; he guessed it would carry the flames from the solid rocket boosters. It seemed impossible to him that this oversized firework could actually rise up and carry him into space.
    In a lift, climbing higher and higher, still with Tamara and the professor. He could see the whole island, the sea stretching out an amazing blue—and there was Barbados in the distance. He was still being given advice. So many words. But they didn’t actually penetrate. They just flitted around him like moths.
    “…do everything lightly, do everything slowly. Don’t look directly at the sun. It’ll blind you. Don’t even look at the clouds around the earth. The sun reflects… Some parts of Ark Angel will be hot—some will be cold. There have been problems with the air-conditioning… You’re going to feel strange. Don’t worry if your face becomes puffy or swells up. If your spine stretches. If you need to go to the toilet. It’s the same for all astronauts. Your body has to adapt to zero gravity…”
    Who was talking? Were they really being serious? How could anybody expect him to do this?

    “You’ll need to access the observation module of Gabriel 7 to get to the bomb. There’s a hatch. You saw it on the diagram. You move it to where Ed showed you and then you get back into the Soyuz’s re-entry module. Don’t waste any time. We’ll control everything from here. You’ll feel it disengage…”
    And then he was inside. They had certainly been right about the amount of space. No adult would have been able to fit into it. He was lying on his back in a metal box that could have been some kind of complicated washing machine or water tank, his feet in the air and his legs so tightly packed in that his knees were touching his chin. There were tiny windows on either side but they were covered with some sort of material and he couldn’t see out of them. There were no controls. Of course not. Arthur the orang-utan wouldn’t have needed controls. Professor Sing was wiring him up. More monitors. Now Alex was the one who was sweating. They had told him he would sweat even more when he was in outer space. Because of fluids moving up, the body’s salt concentration being upset. Alex tried to put it out of his mind. He didn’t even believe he would get there. He didn’t think he would survive the journey.
    Tamara Knight leant over him. He was strapped into his seat. His stomach was clenched tight and he had difficulty drawing the air into his lungs. He could move his arms but nothing else. He was already cramped and he hadn’t even started. Her face was very close to his, filling his field of vision.
    “Good luck, Alex,” she whispered. Nothing more. She waved a hand with fingers crossed.
    “You will hear the countdown,” Professor Sing said. He was somewhere behind her. “You have nothing to worry about, Alex. We will guide you through it all. You’ll hear us over the radio. We’ll look after you.”
    They sealed the door. Alex felt the air inside the capsule compress. He swallowed, trying to clear his ears.
    Apart from the sound of his own breathing, everything was silent.
    He was alone.

    “T-minus thirty.” A crackle and a hiss of static. The disembodied words had come through the headset.
    What did they mean? Thirty minutes until blast-off. In thirty minutes’ time he would be leaving the planet!
    Alex tried to make himself more comfortable but he couldn’t move.
    “How are you doing, Alex?” It could have been Ed Shulsky talking. Alex didn’t know. The voices echoed inside his head and they all sounded the same.
    “T-minus twenty-five… T-minus twenty…”
    He could only sit there, doubled up on himself, as the countdown continued. The strange thing was, it felt that time had gone wrong too. A minute