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“I’m going back to get more people,” Molly says.
Smoke billows around her, and she can hear sparks sizzling from the ceiling, but she knows this building is full of people and she has never in her life shrunk from a crisis.
Because there are selfish pricks, and there are selfish fucking pricks, and Molly is the latter.
She walks the the twenty five steps back to Mission Control. It had been more steps to reach Wubbo on the moon, under the hail of radiation of the solar flare. She didn’t know how many more; she hadn’t been counting steps, then.
How many steps in her life from the first step into the cockpit of a Piper J-3 Cub to here? Molly scoffs at herself. Sentimental tripe. The fumes must be getting to her.
She hears someone pounding on the glass in the observation room, somewhere above her. Something must be blocking the door. Molly will get them out.
She orients herself, picturing her body in this warm familiar space, just as she has learned to do a thousand times since going blind, and finds the stairs up.
All her life, she has gone up.
-o-
“There is no up or down in space.”
Molly half listens to the engineer - Molly thinks his name is Ebner. She already knows all this.
She is sitting in the Multi Axis Spin Inertial Facilty, or MASTIF. She is part of the Mercury 13 pilot program, exploring the idea of sending women into space, and she the first woman ever to take this test. She is not afraid.
“This gimbal rig will test your ability to work in a disorienting situation, should your gyro oriented navigation system fail,” he continues.
“There are three concentric cages, with rotational freedom, representing pitch, roll, and yaw. We will spin each ring up to rates of thirty to fifty rpm’s. Your job is to stop all rotation, right side up.”
“All right,” Molly says.
“You might throw up,” he warns. “You might go blind.” He pauses. “Temporarily.”
He looks apologetic. He looks at her like he expects her to faint, to get up and go home and make her husband a sandwich.
Molly laughs.
She doesn’t know yet that it won’t matter. She doesn’t know that NASA will scrap the Mercury 13 program and add an impossible requirement that all astronauts be test pilots, coincidentally all male. She doesn’t know she will spend the next eight years barnstorming just to stay in the air. All she knows is that she isn’t going to fail.
She grips the control stick and settles into the seat.
“Well what are we waiting for,” she asks. “Fire it up.”
-o-
Molly is moving towards another fire.
The fire is so hot, and loud, but beneath the roar she can hear shouting. She follows the sound. A group of people are huddled in a corner, disoriented in the dark.
“Follow me,” she shouts, and two or three people stumble towards her, lost in the dark. She’s been in the dark for a long time, but she remembers how that felt.
She takes someone’s hand. She tells them all to link hands and they walk slowly down the stairs. Someone behind her, maybe a woman, is coughing. Molly tilts her head.
“Aleida, is that you?” More coughing, a few sputtered syllables, and Molly is sure that it’s her. “What are you doing here? You were in Mission Control.”
“I went… back for… Margo,” she manages. Molly takes a survey of the caravan she has assembled. Margo isn’t here. Aleida coughs again. “She’s… gone.”
”No…” It takes her a moment, then the realization that queen of darkness is actually dead hits Molly in the gut. Margo had always been here. Margo Madison was NASA. Molly still remembers that pop quiz, the re-entry equation she always understood, one more challenge answered. That bitch couldn’t die.
She shakes her head. “Fucking Margo.”
Molly leads them down away from the fire, down the hall, around a corner to the stairs. Forty seven steps.
“Straight down these steps to the lobby. Outside to fresh air,” Molly says, ushering them to the exit. They move past her as she turns to go back in. She feels hands on her.
“You can’t… go back in there,” Aleida gasps out.
Molly waves her off. “Get clear. It’s not safe here.”
Aleida is right, objectively : it’s time to stop. Wayne would tell her to quit while she’s ahead. It’s dangerous as hell. She knows this.
But she also knows there are more people trapped inside, and she knows that she alone can feel her way through the bones of this building like a river running through its own bed.
She heads back in for a third time.
-o-
The third ring begins to spin.
Now, suddenly, it is too much. She falls over and over, sideways, back, over again. There is no up or down, no left or right.
Molly feels her gorge rising, feels like her brain has come unstuck inside her skull. Her vision is a blur of color and nothingness. For the first time, she cannot see.
For a moment she does not know what to do.
Then she remembers what Ebner told her. Three concentric cages. Molly can picture a cage. Cages within cages, that’s what the world is. Molly knows how to beat a cage.
Experimentally, she shifts the control stick to the right. She feels her stomach shift, her speed increasing, and she reversed course. The spin slows, slightly, in pitch only, her yaw and roll still tumbling. Rotational freedom.
Molly pushes the control stick further, hears the nitrogen thrusters firing, feels her pitch slow. One at a time.
She takes a deep breath.
-o-
Molly can’t breathe. Her lungs are burning. She has taken a wrong turn, and she knows she has inhaled too much smoke. Inevitable, really. Molly has no regrets.
Wayne is going to break down when he hears she has done this damn fool thing, but he also won’t be surprised. She’s a selfish fucking prick.
The wall feels warm. She is in the hallway where the AssCans would check their scores each day. Where she had teased Patty just before her death, the fire swallowing her whole.
“Couldn’t have done it without you nipping at my heels, Doyle.”
She presses on, because she’s gone too far to turn back now. Her head feels light. The carbon monoxide will carry you away before the fire ever reaches you, she remembers. It bonds to your blood, blocking oxygen. Hypoxia.
She remembers her oxygen running low, drifting in the dark between Apollo 24 and 25. The world was so far away, spinning.
She can no longer tell which way is up. Molly feels herself sliding down, up, backwards, away.
-o-
She is still spinning, but slower now.
The control stick is warm in her hand, and she pushes back gently, confidently, reversing the roll. She eases into her final resting spot, and the MASTIF comes to a stop.
Molly opens her eyes. Slowly, her blurred vision returns, sliding in from both sides. She can see again. Her stomach settles.
Ebner smiles at her.
“You passed,” he said, barely hiding his surprise. “Flying colors.”
Molly grins, satisfied. She did good.