'Hello kitty. That's a pretty kitty,' she told Friday.

We watched the idiot box a bit and got real friendly with each other on the couch. Finally, Tabitha and I went to bed and didn't budge until near lunch the next day. Why is it that you're usually more tired after vacation than you were before you went? Isn't the point of the vacation to rest and relax? Oh well, we had to get back to work tomorrow and from herein there would be no more resting. There was only ten months left before our scheduled launch date.

The line in Aliens where Sergeant Apone grunts, 'Okay, Marines, you know the drill. Assholes and elbows lets move it!' rang in my head as I drifted off, a big smile on my face.

CHAPTER 7

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.

Jim looked at me and said, 'Hey man, it's your dream.' Then he shrugged his shoulders and finished cleaning the whiteboard.

Of course, I was thoroughly sore at him for erasing my life's work from the slate of my life. But then, Tabitha's voice came through the haze of the dream and I saw not the clean whiteboard that Jim had left me, rather it was a different one. One that contained many solutions, which were underlined.

I woke up.

'Anson! Wake up! You're having a nightmare again,' she said as she shook me.

'Yeah, uh, I guess so.' I blinked furiously and woke up a little shaky. She helped pull me out of bed.

'Did you sleep much at all?' she looked concerned.

'I slept enough to get me through today,' I assured her. There was a knock on the door and a voice telling us that we were running a little late. We quickly showered and were down the hall for our final flight checkups. This took about twenty minutes.

For breakfast I had insisted that I would have steak and eggs just like the Mercury guys did.

'We don't do that anymore,' Tabitha ribbed me, but that didn't matter to me. I was having steak and eggs, just like I had planned it since I was eight years old.

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.

For the past three weeks I had probably slept about forty-five hours. Something had gotten my old graduate school insomnia back full fling. Tabitha promised to help me keep it a secret, although I could tell it gave her serious ethical issues, her being the mission commander and all.

The trigger for the insomnia must have been all of the intense studying that I'd been doing. The past six months was nothing but study, study, study, then practice, practice, practice, and then study, study, study, some more. A lot like graduate school in many ways, but mostly in that there is no time for sleeping. It was probably like riding a bike; my body just remembered how to stay awake for long periods of time.

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.

When that didn't work, I turned to one of the more credible alien conspiracy investigative books I've found. It's good for entertainment. All of those cattle mutilation pictures in that book confused me. Why is it that alien conspiracy folks believe that extraterrestrials would travel billions of miles just to kill cows, make neat patterns in fields, and leave pink bismuth stains on people? I've never really fallen for the whole UFO conspiracy thing myself. However, the thing that has always bothered me most is, who, what, and how is all of this stuff getting done? Are there that many nuts who need attention out there or is there more to this thing? I don't know.

And how did all the UFO stuff impact religious beliefs? I mean, aliens or gods? I had asked Tabitha what she thought about it the next morning. She looked at me with a sour look on her face.

'Anson, don't you have flight hardware manuals that you should be studying?' she said.

'Really, I need to know,' I asked her.

'You're asking about what I believe. Well, I'll tell you.' She paused and placed her hands on her hips.

'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.

'But, most importantly, and as your mission commander, you better hear me now. I believe that you have spent most of your life trying to get an experiment flown in space and to ride along with that experiment. And finally, I believe that you had better get back to studying your preflight, flight, and postflight checklists before you get the biggest chance of your life to really, and I mean really, screw the pooch!'

That was the last we talked about religion for a long time.

That was two nights ago. The following night I had taken her advice and studied my spaceflight hardware parameters. By the time the sun rose, I was going over the mission plans, chronology, and EVA requirements. I had

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