The View From the Top

by Jerry Oltion

The picture of his son caught Michael by surprise. He’d been reading Melissa’s email, smiling at her account of another day spent answering school kids’ questions about the International Space Station, when he’d paged down and there was David looking out of the screen at him. He’d clearly been playing; his hair was tousled and his cheeks were flushed red in the autumn chill. It was such a wonderfully stereotypical photo that Michael laughed, but his laughter caught in a lump in his throat and before he knew what was happening he was in tears, crying quietly there in his corner of the Zvezda Module.

He turned toward the bulkhead so neither Larisa nor Quentin could see him. Thank goodness there weren’t any cameras in the crew quarters. He could see the headlines now: NASA Sends Crybaby to Space; Blubbering Biologist Embarrasses Entire Nation.

He sniffed his suddenly runny nose and dabbed at his eyes with his shirtsleeve. Tears didn’t run in free fall; they built up into big globs that eventually broke free and quivered their way around the hab module until they eventually got sucked into one of the myriad circulation fans. Not a problem if the fan was just blowing into an air recycler—those were designed to deal with high humidity—but most of the fans on board cooled electronic equipment. Splashing salt water on a live circuit could make more than just Michael cry.

He looked at David once more, then closed the lid on his laptop computer. He could read the rest of Melissa’s email later, after he’d regained his composure.

Deep breaths helped a little. It was an old trick he’d learned years ago, back when he’d been teased mercilessly in grade school for his emotional outbursts. His unfortunate last name, Bebe, had provided the perfect nickname for his tormenters—”Baby Bebe”—and try as he might to suppress the tears, it wasn’t until he’d learned to fight that they finally left him alone.

Exercise had helped him then. Maybe it would help now. He pushed himself over to the stationary bicycle and strapped in, set the resistance to “10,” and began pedaling his way around the Earth. Maybe if he worked up enough of a sweat, Larisa and Quentin wouldn’t notice his tears.

Half an hour later he was exhausted enough to have an excuse for weeping, but though he could still feel the outburst lurking there beneath the surface, he seemed to have beaten it into submission for the moment.

Showering in space was both a luxury and a pain. No matter how well you sealed the compartment, water always got loose and you wound up chasing it around with your towel. In the month he’d been on board, Michael had learned to scrape himself clean with a wet cloth instead. He was toweling off when Quentin drifted into the module.

“How’s it hanging?” Quentin asked, the same question he always asked, no doubt because it was even more inane than usual in free fall.

“Good,” Michael answered automatically. Both of them spoke loudly, not with macho bravado but out of necessity. All the cooling fans and circulation fans on board the ISS gave it the background ambience of a railroad yard.

“Yeah?” Quentin let the word hang between them for a moment, an invitation to talk if Michael wanted to.

“Yeah, things are actually… actually just about perfect. I’m in space! It’s been my dream for as long as I can remember.”

Quentin grinned. “Mine too. It’s not quite the Buck Rogers scout ship I imagined as a kid, but here we are. I’m kind of sorry to be going home next month.”

He’d been on board for five months already. Duty tours had settled down to a regular six-month schedule now that the Russians were responsible for all the flights. Michael had come up with the last supply rocket, and the cosmonaut he’d replaced had ridden it back down. Quentin would go on the next one. Two months after that, Larisa would go, and Michael would be the old-timer on board until his replacement came.

Quentin gestured at the walls, festooned with equipment Velcroed, tied, or simply wedged into place against every available surface. “Good thing the place looks like such a dump in the photos, or the competition for space up here would be even worse than it is, eh?”

“Right, good thing,” Michael said.

“Enjoy it while you’ve got it,” Quentin said.

Michael tried. He succeeded, too, but the problem was, he seemed to be enjoying it too much. In the days that followed, he teared up over the most trivial things. The sight of Earth curving away from him out the window, the smell of dinner in the otherwise nearly antiseptic space-station air, even the sight of the tiny crocuses in the Ukrainian high-school experiment that he, as both the biologist and the low man on the totem pole, had to tend each day.

It was a simple experiment. The high school class had decided to watch one of their country’s native plants through an entire growth cycle and see how the lack of gravity affected it. They had chosen Crocus angustifolius, the “cloth of gold” crocus, because it was small, responded well to cultivation, and had pretty yellow blossoms. They had sent up a cylinder about a meter long and a third that wide, already planted with half a dozen corms that had sprouted within days after Michael had watered them and switched on the light.

The whole experiment had nearly come to an early end. On his first full day on board the station, when he was still getting used to maneuvering in free fall, Michael had underestimated his inertia and had careened into the experiment rack, busting a big chunk out of the Plexiglas cover with his elbow. He had duct-taped it back together, but it didn’t fit tight anymore, so he had to be extra careful when he watered the plants.

Nobody had said anything, but he could imagine what went unsaid. The hotshot biologist had nearly blown the simplest experiment on the station. Wonder how he’ll do on the DNA sequencer?

Not half bad, it turned out, except for the day when he burst into tears at the sight of a zebrafish genome. One of the fish strains that had been on board for nearly five years was developing longer, lacier fins, and he had found the genetic sequence that controlled it. Researchers on the ground had long ago shown that the fgfr1 gene affected fin growth and regeneration, but this was the first proof that evolutionary pressure could switch it on. When Michael had realized he was looking at the very blueprint of evolving life, he’d lost his self-control and the next moment he was crying like a mother at a wedding.

Fortunately, he was alone this time. Larisa was asleep in the crew quarters, and Quentin was across Node 2 in the Kibo module. Michael sniffed and dabbed at his eyes and bit his lip and clenched his fists and took deep breaths, and he eventually brought himself under control again, but later that day he got out the medical kit and self-prescribed an anti-depressant. He was supposed to confer with Mission Control first, but like any astronaut from Alan Shepard onward, he had learned not to involve the flight surgeon’s office in anything he didn’t have to. The only thing those guys ever did for astronauts was ground them if their health wasn’t absolutely perfect. And an astronaut who couldn’t control his emotions was sure to be grounded. If word of this got down to Mission Control, it would be Michael, not Quentin, who would be headed back to Earth on the next supply ship.

Antidepressants didn’t just stop depression. They also moderated highs. They clipped both ends of the emotional spectrum, so Michael figured they might help him cope with his overwhelming feelings of joy. For several days they seemed to do so, which was probably the placebo effect since the package insert said it usually took at least a week for anti-depressants to kick in. Then one of the crocuses bloomed, and Michael dissolved at the sight of its pale yellow blossom reaching out toward the grow-light and just touching the top of its Plexiglas dome.

There was no hiding it this time. Larisa was just three feet away on his left, tending to her cryomanufacturing test equipment.

She looked over at him. “Problems?”

He sniffed and rubbed his eyes while he considered what to say. She had been all business with him from the moment he came on board. There had been moments of candor and mirth, as with any colleague, but never any real warmth. How much did Michael want to tell her?

She was the commander of the station. She had a right to know when one of her crew was compromised. So he said, “I’m having trouble controlling my emotions.”

“In what way?” she asked.

He gripped the edge of the crocus experiment for support. “It’s weird.” Sniff. “Normally people have trouble with negative feelings, but I keep becoming overwhelmed by joy.” Sniff. “I burst into tears at the slightest provocation.” His voice cracked.

“I see.” The corners of Larisa’s mouth turned up in a hint of a smile. Michael instantly felt his fists and jaw clench in anticipation of the mocking laughter of his childhood, but Larisa merely said, “How long has this been going on?”

“About two weeks.”

She considered that for a moment. “You are unable to control it?”

“Most times I can,” he said. “It’s just when something catches me by surprise that I—” Sniff “—I go over the edge.”

“You have tried antidepressants?” She didn’t even pretend that a career astronaut would ask anyone first.

“Yes. They help, but apparently not enough.”

Quentin drifted into the lab module, twisting to orient himself heads-up with the others. Then he saw the expression on his crewmates’ faces.

“Am I interrupting something?”

“No, this involves you too,” Michael said. “I’m having trouble keeping my emotions under control. I’m afraid if I can’t get a handle on them, Mission Control is going to send me back down.”

Quentin’s face betrayed his first thought. If Michael went down in his place, Quentin could stay in space for two more months. But to his credit that expression came and went in an instant, replaced by genuine concern. “Something wrong at home?”

“No. Nothing’s wrong anywhere. Maybe that’s the problem. I’m at the pinnacle of my life, right here at the apex of my dreams, and the sheer magnitude of it all is apparently more than I can handle.” He wiped away tears with his fingers, transferring them to the absorbent fiber of his flight suit before they could drift loose.

Larisa said, “There are techniques for controlling emotion. Breathing exercises, thought stopping, aversion—”

“I’ve tried all that. I used to have this problem when I was a kid. I tried every trick in the book and invented some of my own. I beat it, too, until the last couple of weeks.”

“You will have to beat it again,” Larisa said. “We can’t have you crying in a spacesuit.”

“Thanks for being so understanding,” he said.

She snorted. “I understand exactly. Men tell women all the time that we’re too emotional. Unfit for command because we might burst into tears at a crucial moment. Every woman in Russia since Catherine the Great has learned to lock her emotions away if she is to succeed at anything. The fact that I’m here proves it’s possible. You can do it as well.”

Michael bit his tongue. For Larisa, that was a pep talk.

He turned to Quentin, who shook his head sadly. “Man, I wish I knew what to tell you. I’ll cover for you however I can, but…” He left the statement hanging, either unable or unwilling to state the obvious.

“But I can’t do EVAs,” said Michael, “and I can’t do interviews, and I can’t be depended on in a crisis.”

“We don’t know that,” Quentin said. “If the shit hits the fan, you’ll probably be too busy tryin’ to survive to worry about how you feel about it.”

“That’s a comfort.” Sniff.

Larisa’s cryo unit beeped at her. “We’re falling behind,” she said. “Let’s get back to work.” To Michael, with as much tenderness in her voice as he’d ever heard, she said, “Try to concentrate on the job in front of you and not think about how you feel.”

“No pink elephants. Roger, captain.”

She wrinkled her brows. “Pink elephants?”

“Pernicious cultural referent,” Quentin said. “Once it’s in your brain…”

“Pink elephants. Thank you for that image.” She turned away.

Michael got through his shift without another outburst, but he felt on the edge every second. The watery eyes, the catch in his throat, the shortness of breath; all hovered just inside him, ready to break free at any moment. He concentrated on zebrafish genes and crocus plants and bacterial cultures until his mind felt so packed with data there was no room for emotion, yet the moment he relaxed at the end of the day it all rushed back on him and he spent half an hour soaking his sleeve in the deepest corner of the Kibo module before he brought it under control and headed for the crew quarters.

Larisa was fixing her dinner. “Pink elephants,” she said when she saw him. “All day with the pink elephants. Some of them were dancing. What have you done to me?”

“Were the dancing ones wearing tutus?” he asked.

“Tutus?”

“The frilly short skirts that ballerinas wear? Dancing pink elephants in tutus are the most common form of hallucination in America.”

“Stop!” She held her hands over her ears.

“Better than—”

“Stop!” she yelled again, but she was smiling.

And a moment later Michael was weeping like a father at his son’s graduation. He couldn’t control it any more than he could have breathed vacuum. He pushed past Larisa, grabbed his towel from his sleep station, and dabbed at his eyes, but the harder he tried to bring himself under control, the worse it grew until he was sobbing uncontrollably, the towel wrapped around his head to muffle the sound and possibly, hopefully, smother him before he died of embarrassment.

The realization that Larisa was holding him in her arms shook him out of it, shut off the waterworks like a switch. The universe was seriously out of kilter if Larisa was acting motherly.

Michael took a couple of deep breaths, wiped his eyes and nose on the towel, and slowly extricated himself from both the towel and Larisa’s embrace. “I’m okay now,” he said. “I’m… thanks.”

They looked at one another for a moment, then she turned away and busied herself with her meal.

“I’ve got to let Mission Control know about this, don’t I?” he said.

She nodded. “It would be better coming directly from you.” The implication was clear: If he didn’t, she would.

“And thus ends my career as an astronaut.”

“Nonsense,” she said. “Valentina Tereshkova was an astronaut to the end of her life, and she only spent three days in space. Deke Slayton was an astronaut even when he was grounded due to a heart irregularity.”

“Neither of them went psycho.”

“You’re not psycho. You’re emotional. There is still much you can do within the space program.”

“But not up here.”

She looked at him for a long moment before she said, as softly as she could and still be heard over the background of the circulation fans, “No. Not up here.”

The conversation with the flight surgeon went just as he expected. The doctor offered a great deal of sympathy, but no magic cure to flatten Michael’s emotional roller coaster. Anti-depressants were the only medication on board the station for that sort of thing, and if they weren’t working, then nothing else could be done besides bringing Michael home on the next supply ship.

He switched the radio to standby and looked up at Larisa and Quentin, who looked back at him as they might look at a ghost. Surprisingly, he felt no urge to cry now. He thought he might throw up, or perhaps suffer a debilitating stroke if his heart wouldn’t quit pounding, but the enormity of his downfall had knocked him so far past emotion that he could have attended Melissa’s funeral without a sniffle.

He wrote her an email, trying to soften the blow with the news that they wouldn’t have to be apart for six whole months after all, but he couldn’t help wondering if she would still want to spend the rest of her life as Mrs. Baby Bebe.

He sent pictures of the crocus flower to the Ukrainian students and added a p.s. that he wouldn’t be running the experiment for the full six months after all. He wrote a weaselly explanation full of vague references to personal problems that required his presence on the ground, then deleted it in disgust. If he started lying to high school kids just to save himself from embarrassment, then he had truly lost everything.

So he explained exactly what was happening to him, putting it in as scientific a context as he could manage. Something was clearly wrong with his mind, something apparently congenital that might even provide more insight into how the brain worked if he could find a doctor interested in studying it, but the space station was not the place to be experimenting with emotional instability. For the safety of the other crewmembers, and himself, he would be going back to Earth in a little over a week.

He sent the email, then for lack of anything better to do, started cleaning up his personal space. He could probably have waited until half an hour before his departure if he wanted to, since all his gear would barely fill a duffel bag, but he needed something to keep his mind occupied.

He didn’t expect a response from the high school class. It was the middle of the night in the Ukraine. But a couple of hours later he checked his email and found a reply from one of the students:

“Dear Mr. Bebe,

“I think not you have the mental problem. I think you have allergy. I have same problem with crocus, also iris and freesia. Is growth canister leaking airs?

“Wishing you luck the best,

“Anita Yelokovna”

He stared at the screen for a full minute, trying to wrap his brain around the concept that he might not be damaged goods after all. An allergy? How could it be an allergy? Tears were an emotional problem, not a chemical imbalance.

A little voice said, Tell that to a chef slicing onions.

But slicing onions didn’t lead to emotional instability. Being teased about crying, on the other hand…

His mother had grown crocuses. And irises too. They’d been all around the house when he’d been growing up.

The space station had emergency oxygen packs in every module. Michael removed the one beside his bunk space from its Velcro harness and slipped its mask over his face. He cracked the valve and made sure oxygen was flowing, then clipped the tank to his belt and pushed his way out of the Zvezda module and down the station’s long central axis to the science modules.

Quentin was in the Columbus lab. He looked up when Michael came in, saw the mask, and flinched as if he’d heard a meteor strike. “Is something wrong with the air?”

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” Michael said. The mask muffled his voice, but not so badly that Quentin couldn’t hear him.

He disconnected the crocus cylinder and pushed it ahead of him across Node 2 and into the JEM module, where he opened the inner door of the airlock that led to the vacuum exposure facility.

Quentin had followed along behind him. “Dude, you’re going to space the flowers?”

“No,” Michael said. “I’m going to seal them up in their own atmosphere, and you’re only going to open the lock to water them when I’m on the opposite side of the station breathing through an oxygen pack.” While he attached the canister to a tie-down inside and closed the airlock, he told Quentin what he’d read in the Ukrainian girl’s email.

“Allergies?” Quentin asked when he was done. “That doesn’t seem like—”

“I didn’t buy it at first, either, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. What if the allergy gives me all the symptoms of crying—the sniffly nose and tears in the eyes and tight throat and all that—so I’m right there on the physical edge of it already when I get an emotional trigger. Normally the trigger would just push me a little bit toward tears, but not enough to actually bring them on. But if I was already near the edge, it could push me right on over.”

Quentin nodded. “Yeah, okay, I could be convinced.”

“And I could stay up here for four more months if it’s true. Sorry, buddy.”

“Hey, it’s your tour if you can beat this thing.”

“Consider it beaten,” Michael said.

It took three days to convince the flight surgeon, but after breathing pure oxygen for two hours to flush his system and changing all the air purification canisters on the station, Michael knew. He could feel it. Where before it had seemed like he had an unseen companion looking over his shoulder, ready to attack him at any moment—exactly the way he had felt in grade school too—now he felt the security of a teenager in a shopping mall. He was in his element again, with a huge buffer zone between his emotions and trouble. He could look straight out the window at the Earth, watch the clouds swirling past beneath him, and not even blink.

For the acid test, he pulled up the picture of his son, David, his cheeks flushed red from playing among the autumn leaves. He smiled and wished he could reach out and run his fingers through the boy’s hair, but he felt nary a sniffle. Not even when he went down to the JEM airlock and looked through the porthole at the yellow crocuses—three of them in bloom now—did he feel the slightest urge to cry.

At the end of the week he watched Quentin leave on the supply ship and welcomed Quentin’s replacement, Olivia Rhodes, on board the station. She was everything Larisa was not: exuberant, friendly, talkative, and full of questions. Michael gave her the tour, but as he showed her through the station, he realized that she was everything he was not as well. A lifetime of fearing his emotions had given him more self-control than he’d realized, to the point where he must have come off as cold and distant to her, and probably to Larisa too.

He floated awake that night in his sleeping harness, wondering if he actually had the capacity to feel emotion like a normal person anymore, or if his lifelong overreaction to a simple allergy had robbed him of something basic. Maybe he needed to cultivate crocuses and keep one on hand in a sealed baggie for those moments when emotion was appropriate.

He was still wondering a week later when the Moon slid in front of the Sun, causing a total eclipse for people on the ground in a line running from Oregon to South Carolina. The space station raced through the shadow in less than a minute, but the real show was below, as the fuzzy pool of darkness slid across the face of the Earth, blotting out clouds, mountains, cities, and lakes in its relentless eastward sweep.

Olivia was snapping pictures through the cupola windows and squealing with delight. Larisa and Michael shared another window, quietly watching the display of celestial mechanics unfold beneath them. He wanted to take her hand in his, just for the human contact in such a once-in-a-lifetime moment, but he was afraid of how she would interpret it.

Then he heard her sniffle and looked over to see her rub a tear from her eye.

“Eta prekrasna,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it is.” Something blurred the view for a moment, and it wasn’t until he blinked and it cleared that he understood what it was.

Throwing caution to the winds, he held out his arms in invitation. Larisa arched her eyebrows in surprise, but she smiled and snuggled in next to him. Arm in arm, they watched the shadow recede behind them.

Content

The View From the Top
by Jerry Oltion