I, Kerbonaut

[Lar-E]

I, KERBONAUT

diary of a grey-suit

by Lar-E (me)

(not to be a major motion picture any time soon, and definitely not starring Sylvester Stallone, Tom Hanks, or Jean-Claude Van Damme; and certainly not featuring a guest appearance by Arnold Schwarzenegger as ‘Mech Jeb’)

*

My name is Larry Kerman and I’m a kerbonaut. It’s been two years now since my last launch. Thank you. I should probably start from the beginning. It all started when I was still a teen, a bright-eyed, green-skinned young kerbal, fresh out of Boy Sprouts…

“You should apply to be a kerbonaut.â€Â

“Really?†I said, “Do you think I’m qualified? Do I have the right… um, stuff?â€Â

“Well, according to this…†My high school guidance counselor opened my permanent record. “It’s either kerbonaut or gas station attendant. And the market is kind of flooded with gas station attendants these days…â€Â

So I packed my bag and got on a bus to Kouston. About sixty kilometers out, I started hearing explosions, like thunder over the horizon. Once in a while, a piece of spaceship debris fell to earth within sight of the bus, kicking up a little dust cloud. To say I was excited does not begin to describe it!

There was a long queue of applicants ahead of me at the Kerbal Space Center. But the line moved pretty quickly.

We were given exhaustive training. By which I mean virtually no training at all. Basically they handed us each an old seat-back safety card from a Koeng 707 and wished us good luck. My first paycheck bounced, and my space suit smelled of wet socks. I was a real kerbonaut!

My first assignment was to be test pilot for the Hubris XIII, the spacecraft that Jebediah Kerman would fly his historic Mun mission in. When I saw it, I laughed out loud. It looked like it had been taped together out of cardboard boxes by a bunch of overly ambitious junior Boy Sprouts. The thing was leaning heavily against the launch tower; it was swathed liberally in duct tape, and it reeked of Bondo. It looked like a science fair project gone horribly wrong.

Then I realized they actually expected me to fly in that thing! It took four beefy kerbals to haul me up the gantry and stuff me kicking and screaming into the command module.

Bill Kerman was Capcom that day. He gave me my pre-flight briefing over the radio:

“Ok Larry. Fasten your seatbelt, fold your hands together and place them in your lap, and DON’T TOUCH ANYTHING. If you follow these instructions, there is a very good chance… well, a reasonable chance… well, honestly, there is a fairly negligible chance you might survive this mission. But hey, the first twelve versions of the Hubris blew up on the launch pad. We’ve got to get it right sometime. The way I see it, the odds are actually in your favor!â€Â

At this point, the spacecraft started shaking violently. “Hey Bill,†I interrupted, “What does 'Structural Failure on Linkage Between Clamp-O-Tron â„¢ and Jumbomax Fuel Tank' mean?â€Â

“Don’t worry about that Larry. Do you see that big flashing red button on your control button? The one that says ‘Launch’?

“Yes, I see it. The one directly above the sticky note that reads ‘Do not touch EVER (this means YOU)’?â€Â

“Yeah, that’s the one. Push it.â€Â

The Hubris was now listing hard over to one side. Giant clouds of white smoke were billowing up past my tiny windows. “You specifically told me not to touch anything…†I said.

“Just push the stupid button!†Bill yelled. I pushed the button.

I was squooshed back in my seat. There was a noise like Aerosmith doing their sound check right next to my eardrums.

“Engage SAS!†Bill bellowed over the crackling radio.

“Which one’s SAS?â€Â

“Just do something!â€Â

I reached out and stabbed a button at random. Immediately the motion of the spacecraft settled down, transforming from an epileptic rhinoceros to a jittery falcon. The roar of the engines rattled my molars. I felt a keen thrill of adrenaline. I was flying!!

“Stand by for stage separation…â€Â

There was an ear-splitting crash, the screech of metal being ripped forcibly from metal. The Hubris shuddered and shimmied, and failed to explode.

“OK Hubris, minor hiccup there, but it looks like you’re still GO for an orbital trajectory. Stand by.â€Â

Flying higher and higher into the blackness of the near void, strapped tightly into my gravity couch, terrified, but no longer crushed breathless from the g-forces, I heard mission control debating with each other over the radio. (“What do we do now?†“I don’t know, we’ve never had a rocket go this high before without exploding. Check the flight manual.†“We have a flight manual?!?†… … “OK, it says ‘To achieve a stable orbit, initiate a prograde burn just prior to achieving apoapsis.’ Prograde? Apoapsis?? What the heck does that mean?†“Get a dictionary and look it up.†“Hey, we’ve got an open mic here…â€Â) There was a crackle, and then silence.

“Hubris, Bill Kerman here. As you approach your ‘apoapsis’ (that’s the highest point in your trajectory), we need you to do a ‘prograde burn’. (That means to point the nose of your craft at the horizon and pull back hard on the throttle.â€Â

“Remember how you told me not to touch anything, ever?â€Â

“Don’t worry Larry. Everything is going to be OK.â€Â

Finally the engines cut out, and I was floating weightless. The Hubris was silent except for the hum of electronics, the whir of cooling fans, the muffled whub-whub of the air scrubbers, the intermittent beep-beep of the guidance computer, and the worrisome-but-apparently-not deadly creaking and groaning of the metal walls of my ship expanding and contracting as the Hubris was alternately baked by unshielded solar radiation and frozen in the shady void.

“Mission control, I am floating in a most peculiar way. I can see Kerbin. It’s beautiful! I’m going to be space sick…â€Â

I orbited the globe three times, and vomited six.

Over the radio, I once again heard Mission Control debating what to do next.

(“What do we do now?†“Go get lunch, that’s what!†“No, I mean about Larry and the Hubris.†“OK, so lunch and drinks.†“How do we get him down again?†“I dunno… doesn’t that thing have brakes?†… … “Why don’t you just turn the capsule around and have him blast off in the opposite direction from the one he’s going?†“Good idea Jeb. Hey, who left that mic hot again?â€Â)

“OK Hubris, this is Mission Control. We’d like you to turn the craft around and perform a ‘retrograde burn’. That’s just like a prograde burn, only different.â€Â

I did as I was told, and a few minutes later, the sticky fingers of gravity were tugging at my sensitive parts. The parachutes (cut at the last minute due to budgetary restraints, and then restored after loud protests from the otherwise docile and well-fed KOSHA representative) opened like a dream, and soon enough I was bobbing in the ocean, my awful space-sickness transformed into unpleasant sea-sickness, waiting for the rescue ship. It seems they’d forgotten to rent one.

Friends, never vomit inside your space suit. It is just all kinds of bad.

Well, they didn’t know what to do with me. I was a first, a test-pilot who survived his test. For a while they tried using me for P.R., but then they discovered that a life-sized model Kerbal with a hinged jaw was fairly believable and much less likely to make embarrassing statements on live TV. So they stuck me on the flight roster and tried hard to forget about me. I was sitting around the kerbonaut ready room when Jebediah Kerman landed on the Mun in the Hubris XIV, marking the moment with his historic words (“Hey, did you know my space suit has a built-in bathroom?!â€Â).

The turning point was the Eve mission. Bob was on vacation, Jebediah was on a bender and couldn’t be located, and Bill had just developed a sprained elbow, thrombosis, and a wicked case of lumbago. That left me at the top of the flight roster.

My ship, the Phallic I, was absolutely enormous. It looked something you might purchase in an adult bookstore and promptly stuff into a brown paper bag, and it appeared to be held together entirely with bailing wire and duct tape. A sign affixed to the bottom stage, near a shoddy-looking winglet read ‘FOR AMUSEMENT PURPOSES ONLY. NOT FOR ACTUAL SPACEFLIGHT’.

“Don’t look so worried,†Bill Kerman rasped weakly as he limped along next to me. The cast on his ankle had an odd habit of switching legs when I wasn’t looking. “This is just an exercise. It’s only a mock-up.â€Â

For a mock-up, the inside of the command module was awfully realistic. The whole craft was vibrating in a manner that made my buttocks tingle. I strapped myself in, and Bill sealed the capsule door. I twiddled my thumbs, waiting for the simulation to start.

Without warning, the main engines fired, making a noise like a thousand metal drums inside a thousand dump trucks colliding with a thousand freight trains.

Over the radio, a much-healthier sounding Bill Kerman said, “Congratulations Larry, you’ve won the booby prize. We all took a vote and you were nominated. We figured this way would be easiest.â€Â

‘When I get back,’ I thought, ‘I am going to kill Bill.’

I spent the next two month in space. I suppose I should have used my time productively, studied a foreign language or orbital mechanics or something; but mostly I spent the time sleeping a lot and playing Ketris. Oh, and getting space sick. Every single day.

Finally, the Phallic I slipped smoothly and seductively into Eve’s gravity well. I peered anxiously out the porthole. Eve hung suspended in space before me, a great purple poison apple. The planet Eve! I had come far, and through many adventures to see it, and now I did not like the look of it in the least!

Re-entry (why do they call it re-entry? I’d never entered before!) went as smoothly as one could expect: raw terror punctuated by moments of nausea and sphincter-clenching anxiety. My transfer stage peeled away like a prom dress as I penetrated the atmosphere. I discovered new heights of motion sickness as the Phallic tumbled through the viscous, smarmy air. I caught a brief glimpse of livid, purple clouds racing by, and then the windows got all steamed up. The parachutes performed perfectly, the retro-rockets did not, and I nearly forgot to deploy the landing legs. Thank goodness for sticky notes!

Finally, the Phallic settled onto a fairly flat spot on the surface with a soft crunch and an exhausted wheeze. I shut down my craft and stepped out to have a look around.

The place looked like some nightmare vision of a meltdown at a cough syrup factory. Twisted purple rock met goopy, sluggish purple ocean at a rather nasty looking purple beach. The thick purple sky above loomed heavy with purple toxic clouds. I shuddered, planted a flag, and collected a few purple rocks, eager to get back into my non-purple spacecraft and get back home. Much as I hate spaceflight, I was more than ready to blast off and get my green butt off this purple nightmare planet.

The Phallic I was much reduced from its travels: charred and dented and slightly droopy, and notably shorter than it had been at Kerbin. Inside the command module, the ‘stage’ indicator light was flashing in a forlorn, lonely sort of way. I pressed it and nothing happened.

“Kouston, we’ve got a problem.â€Â

“What do you mean ‘we’ olive-face?†was the response.

I checked the flight manual. At the end was a sticky note that read ‘I.O.U one return stage. (signed) Wernher Von Kerman’.

“Kouston,†I radioed, “It would appear that I’m a little stuck. When can I expect a rescue?â€Â

“Standby Phallic,†came the laconic response.

And that was the last I ever heard from mission control.

I should have been a gas station attendant. Or, better yet, a guidance counselor.

END

[Kialar]

Thank you. That was fun to read. ^^

[Mr. Pseudonym]

Part 2 please! That was great!

[Patupi]

Hmm, from the way he worded the ending I was assuming that was it. Well, I guess if we all pester him enough he could do a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and bring him back from the dead? I mean from Eve.

[Javster]

"boy sprouts"...

[TheGizimboGamer]

I loved it, a part two would be amazing. Maybe a rescue ship crashes and Larry has to rebuild his spaceship plus a return stage. I dunno but I want more

[Helix935]

that was great! have part 2 like what TheGizimboGamer said but have the person flying the rescu craft be bill an larry gets into a fight with him that results into them crashing into moho...

well at least something along those lines i mean it is your awesome work so you have the final say anyway