Well folks, the suffering isn't over yet.
Chapter 7 begins with our "hero" having a dream:
They came and woke us up about four thirty. I was dreaming about my whiteboard again. Somewhere in the dream, Jim came in the study and began erasing the board.
"You just don't get it. There are other things that are more important," he said.
Then good old Albert Einstein looked at us both and said, "Mathematics sucks!" He finished the beer he was drinking and threw it at the fireplace. Then he morphed into a large purple emu and ran off trying to fly the whole time.
So even his dreams involve booze. How fitting. We then get some more of the author showing off the fact that he can Google how the space shuttle works...and I just noticed that the word count reads "40 cakes were stolen! How did Lex Luthor steal 40 cakes?" when you reach 40 words.
At about T-minus five hours and fifty minutes, out on the pad, the Space Shuttle OMS propellant tank had been repressurized and the solid rocket booster nozzle flex bearing and nozzle-to-case seals joint temperature requirements were checked off by the prep crew, while I was trying hard not to fall back to sleep in my eggs. Once, Tabitha gave me a swift elbow in the ribs to bolster my alertness.
What he DOESN'T know is that he won't be flying on the space shuttle. Oh no, they're going to be flying on one of my
Kerbal Space Program rockets...one where the main stage is surrounded by boosters, and those boosters have boosters, and THOSE have their own boosters. The whole thing is held together with duct tape and baling wire and has a 99% chance of ripping itself apart when it reaches max q...
but that's what makes riding in it so exciting!
We also learn that he's suffering from insomnia, and the author lets us know that, yes, this guy fucks:
I tried every trick I knew to combat the problem. Two nights previously Tabitha wore me out on the basketball court, then on the track, and then in (ahem) bed, and she gave me twice the normal dosage of diphenhydramine hydrochloride, which usually knocks me right out. While she dozed off I reread Feynman's QED and then L. Sprague De Camp's The Ancient Engineers.
Well, I've got my own cure for insomnia right here...a copy of Robert Heinlein's
Starship Troopers! I like to file that one in my "Why the hell is this considered a classic?" category? You'd
think about war would actually
show that war, but no, it's just a boring tract in which Heinlein lectures the reader about how soldiers and the military are awesome, and how society collapsed because parents started listening to child psychologists and stopped spanking their children.
Unfortunately, he still can't get to sleep, so he starts reading a book about UFO, and gets to wondering about how belief in UFOs affects religion. When he asks BEST FRIEND TABITHA about this she says:
"I believe that nobody has a clue what really happens after you die. Not the pope, not the preacher at my folk's church, not some Tibetan monk who has meditated and pondered all his life—no one! I believe that religion is personal and is for every individual to decide for his or herself. Mostly it's none of anybody's business what I believe. I believe that public prayer is for show. It should be done in private and kept between you and your supreme deity, whoever or whatever it may be. I believe that maybe one day we might find some of these answers through scientific experimentation and observation." She paused for air.
After this bit of totally-not-channeling-the-author, she tells him he should spend more time reading the pre-flight, flight, and post-flight checklists.
Then we come to launch day:
The six of us astronauts began the ingress into the flight crew seats. Tabitha took her place in the front right seat beside Major Rayford Donald, the pilot. After that were Carla Yeats and Roald Sveld. She is a Canadian and he is a Norse astronaut both headed for the ISS for a few months.
"Norse?" I think the word "Scandinavian" would work better, or just use the name of whatever country he's form. Calling him "Norse" suggests that he's actually a space viking. Unless, of course, he actually IS a space viking, and if that's the case, then carry on.
We then get an infodump about how no outside information could be transmitted into the warp bubble from outside, as doing so would violate causality. The reason he's pondering all this is because Anson is thinking about what would happen if some nutjob were to hurl a spacecraft at earth at FTL velocities:
So, assume this nut flies the FTL craft into the Earth. What would happen? The warp field would push anything, and I mean anything, in its path right out of its way. The warped field would be stressed by the impact and eventually collapse the spacecraft inside the bubble. Most likely, it wouldn't poke a hole all the way through the planet before it destroyed itself either. The stresses on the warp device would be tremendous—it would become a self-eating watermelon. At any rate, I wouldn't want to be either the nut in the FTL craft or an innocent unsuspecting bystander on Earth who was walking down the street of some city a hundred miles away from impact. The damage could be catastrophic. Maybe that is why my mission is classified. That led me to wondering what if it wasn't a meteorite that killed the dinosaurs. What if it was a spacecraft that ran on iridium? The science fiction story possibilities here were outrageous.
A moment of calm came over me. I was in a daze and things around me seemed like they weren't real but more of a dream. When the final jolt from the External Tank being dropped hit me, I was sure this was real. As the Orbiter made its way to a stable orbit in low earth orbit (LEO) I really had nothing to do, for the next few minutes anyway. So, I went back to sleep.
This is actually the
second time he's fallen asleep inside the shuttle. I don't know about you, mate, but sleep would be the
furthest thing on my mind if I were in his shoes.
Next up...people puking their guts out!
We helped each other with our suits as we played with the microgravity effects on things. Like my stomach for instance. I lost my steak and eggs almost immediately. Fines wasn't amused. So, I threw up on him again.
This time he was amused to the point where he lost his breakfast. We had a lot of fun repeating this procedure for the next hour or two. Finally, the nausea subsided to drunken spins
That's got to embarrassing in zero-G. All that vomit, just floating around the room...
We then learn that the warp drive prototype has been code-named "Zephram," because of
course it would be.
It was all very interesting and exciting. But, thank God he finally shut up! I presently dozed off for my first real sleep cycle in space. The nap I had previously didn't count because I'd been sick out of my mind. This time I had no trouble getting comfortable and dozing off. What a relief from the past few weeks. Tomorrow the ISS, I thought calmly.
So, all in all, this was a rather dull chapter. I've heard this book described as an "Edisonade," but the constant deluge of infodumps and scientific jargon
really starts to wear on the nerves after a while. As I said before, this book is in desperate need of an editor (that is assuming, of course, that Baen even employs them).
