Puddle Jumper

PUDDLE-JUMPER
Copyright ©2010 by RDP

      ...I was part giddy with joy, part fearful of the unknown; having dreamt of space travel since a boy. Asthma kept me out of the state funded junior space programs. Programs designed as a pipeline for the appetite of the Global Space Alliance hegemony and their Spartan styled kiddy recruitment philosophy at the age of seven.  I still felt that hurt. With the abundance of cures, why not one for Asthma? I mentally backtracked to sixth grade and Miss Dorsey. Asthma was not the only element of my life which “soured the milk,” flagging me as defective.  Always sick and absent from her math classes, she frequently branded me the class "dummy" and reported same to the GSA. Her venom circulated until college and calculus, which to my amazement, I found easy. Her poison still present but waning; her rattle silent. No longer would children be scheduled into her pit. I was alive and she, very aged at the time, was dust.

    For long moments I sat with eyes closed, absorbing the dull thumping of passenger's steps as they filed in. The short clipped, women; the random uneven, children; the longer and measured, men. Cracking itchy lids, I paired steps with their faces, watching as they entered under the royal blue glow of the cabin's mood lighting. This, teamed with a recording of a singing tenor just above the background hiss of pressurizing air, relaxed me. I sighed and decided to push the evaluations off for a while.

    Ironic. I was finally going into space! Not as a GSA commissioned pilot, rather, as a most wanted man; a branded stalker and much worse. Under the guise of a research scientist with Solar-Blue Incorporated I was on my way to DaVinci Station.  The mystery over as to what was living in me. Still, with all my supposed lethality and acute awareness, so focused was I on this last-ditch effort to reach Defense Net, I missed the idiot in the rear, the one perspiring in the cabin's chilly air, hands shaking and fiddling with...something.