Free Gravity by Tess Gerritsen

silence, as though not recognizing her own daughter. Dr. Salomon placed his hand on her shoulder and said gently, “It happened so quickly. There was nothing we could do.”
    “He should have been here,” said Margaret, her voice breaking.
    “We tried to keep her alive,” said Dr. Salomon. “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s Bill I feel sorry for,” said Margaret, and she took her daughter’s hand and kissed it. “He wanted to be here. And now he’ll never forgive himself.” Jack walked out of the cubicle and sank into a chair in the nurses’ station. Margaret’s words were still ringing in his head. He should have been here. He’ll never forgive himself.
    He looked at the phone. And what am I still doing here? he wondered.
    He took the Yellow Pages from the ward clerk’s desk, picked up the phone, and dialed.
    “Lone Star Travel,” a woman answered.
    “I need to get to Cape Canaveral.”
     
    Cape Canaveral Through the open window of his rental car, Jack inhaled the humid air of Merritt Island and smelled the jungle odors of damp soil and vegetation. The gateway to Kennedy Space Center was a surprisingly rural road slashing through orange groves, past ramshackle doughnut stands and weed-filled junkyards littered with discarded missile parts. Daylight was fading, and up ahead he saw the taillights of hundreds of cars, slowed to a crawl. Traffic was up, and soon his car would be trapped in the conga line of searching for parking spots from which to view the morning launch.
    There was no point trying to work his way through this mess.
    Nor did he see the point of trying to make it through the Port Canaveral gate. At this hour, the astronauts were asleep, anyway.
    He had arrived too late to say goodbye.
    He pulled out of traffic, turned the car around, and headed back to Highway A1A. The road to Cocoa Beach.
    Since the era of Alan Shepard and the original Mercury seven, Cocoa Beach had been party central for the astronauts, a slightly seedy strip of hotels and bars and T-shirt shops stretching along spit of land trapped between the Banana River to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Jack knew the strip well, from the Steak House to the Moon Shot Bar. Once he had jogged the same beach where John Glenn used to run. Only two years ago, he had stood on Jetty Park and gazed across the Banana River at launchpad 39A. At his shuttle, the bird that was supposed to take him into space. The memories were still clouded by pain. He remembered a long run on a sweltering afternoon. The sudden, excruciating stab in his flank, an agony so terrible he was brought to his knees. And then, through a haze of narcotics, the somber face of his flight surgeon gazing down at him in the ER, telling him the news. A kidney stone.
    He’d been scrubbed from the mission.
    Even worse, his future in spaceflight was in doubt. A history of kidney stones was one of the few conditions that could permanently ground an astronaut. Microgravity caused physiologic shifts in body fluids, resulting in dehydration. It also caused bones to leach out calcium.
    Together, these factors raised the risk of new kidney stones while in space—a risk NASA did not want to take.
    Though still in the astronaut corps, Jack had effectively been grounded.
    He had hung on for another year, hoping for a new assignment, but his name never again came up. He’d been reduced to an astronaut ghost, condemned to wander the halls of JSC forever in search of a mission.
    Fast-forward to the present. Here he was, back in Canaveral, no longer an astronaut but just another tourist cruising down A1A, hungry and grumpy, with nowhere to go. Every hotel within forty miles was booked solid, and he was tired of driving.
    He turned into the parking lot of the Hilton Hotel and headed for the bar.
    The place had been spiffed up considerably since the last time he had been here. New carpet, new barstools, ferns hanging from the ceiling. It used to be a slightly shabby hangout, a tired old