Free The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering by Jeffrey Rotter Page A

Glass?”
    â€œThat—” said Terry Nguyen; he stooped down to kill the generator. The tunnel went dark. “—is what I have invited you here to discover.”

 
    7.
    Back at the motor homes Terry handed around sharpie pens and had us write our names in block letters on the backs of our coveralls. He said to take good care of them and they would see us through ten-plus months of training.
    Pop tailored his to fit the frame of a giant. He cut slits up the sides and down the backs of the legs for his muscles, taking delight in the mutilation of a uniform that reminded him of the Cuba Pens. To Umma he said, “These might have been made in your old Pap’s factory, eh?” In her jumpsuit she looked like a bundle of rods in a broke-down tent. It did not improve her disposition to recall her father.
    Me and Sylvia wore our jumpsuits like juvies on turkey vulture duty. For their petty crimes these poor kids were court-ordered to collect dead birds for incineration. After a cull, they could be seen making the rounds of the Gables. Faron liked to tease them, but I felt bad. When I saw the juvies pushing bins of vulture carcasses, all I could think of was Pop cranking the handle on a sugarcane press.
    Faron was the only one who resembled a proper spaceman in his jumpsuit. “My, my, Little Brother,” Sylvia said to me. (Somehow she couldn’t get that we were twins.) “Look at flyboy here.” Sylvia could scarcely take her eyes off him, but it was my neck her arm was slung around.
    We would wear those jumpsuits every day for close to a year, washing them infrequently in the pond, until they were stiff with salt. Some nights, after a brutal day of training, we even slept in them. Seven days a week we endured the same routine: school in the morning, gym midday, and a sweaty long afternoon of games designed to simulate conditions on the Orion or Europa. Analogs, they were called.
    In the classroom Nguyen read flatly from the stack of wirebound notebooks that comprised The Constellation Flight and Survival Manual . We memorized every knob and toggle on mass spectrometers, seismometers, magnetometers, microscopes, and cameras. He thought it went without saying, but we were forbidden to share any classroom learning with an outsider. Terry urged us to review the nondisclosure clause in our contracts.
    Bill Reade said, “Who the shit would we disclose to?”
    On a tiny screen we watched ancient training videos in which dead scholars taught us the rudiments of Astronomy, the tangled mechanics of space flight. It was too much to learn, and they did not deliver it slowly. They hurried through the most arcane subjects, as if someone might arrive at any minute to unplug their cameras. We learned how to air-clean a pressurized suit, how to mend a broken cleat, how to reconstitute tuna salad with a spigot.
    This delicacy was not a salad at all but a gray paste extracted from a long-vanished ocean fish. Food was one thing that did not survive in the pit. In space we’d be growing our own. Three mornings a week we studied hydroponics and rabbit husbandry. Yams were farmed in a fibrous substrate that looked like previously owned wigs. We tried to grow water spinach in plastic tubs. But the spinach rotted and the sweet potatoes drew flies. The rabbits, in defiance of their nature, refused to multiply.
    Much attention was given to the pleasures and perils of Gravity. Terry said the Astronomers described this force as a mystical fiber that binds the Wanderers to our Sun. Like desire only larger. But to hear Dr. Padma Ridley of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory talk of gravity on those ancient training videos, there was nothing magic about it. Gravity’s tether, she said in her Gunt-inflected English, drew tighter as you approached a planetary body. In the vast blanks between, however, it had no claim on you. Like family, gravity was one of those things that you never miss until it’s