The Orion Protocol Read Online Free Page A

listening to his own voice as if it were on automatic pilot, feeling his own smile waxing and waning as he took the children’s soft small hands into his own.
    Then another unbidden sensation washed through him, like the apex of a wave, taking him to yet another subtle state of being where he could literally see himself from outside his body. Along with a heightened perception of sound, Augie began to experience a luminous color sense, as if everything and everyone around him were somehow lit from within.
    But strange as it was, he felt no apprehension or anxiety. Only wonder.
    If this is me , he thought, seeing himself signing a program, and this is me watching myself, then who is it that’s watching me watch myself?
    It’s me , he answered his giddy tri-located self. Out of my fucking mind .
    Then this experience, too, was over. And he was wholly and completely back inside his body, with the winter sun warming his face and a slight tremor in his left hand that hadn’t been there before and caused the first stab of real fear.
    Stroke ?
    He imagined his biannual NASA physical and seemed to remember reading that signs of stroke could still be detected months after theyoccurred. Being forced to retire was his worst nightmare. There was so much he still hadn’t done and needed to accomplish.
    If they catch it, they’ll sit you down, son. But there’s nothin’ you can do about it. So, just let it go, let it go.
    Augie willed his hand to be steady; and it seemed to work. He then found himself looking up into the eyes of a sun-bleached Space Camp mom thrusting a notepad in his direction, a pretty blonde with a trim athletic body and one got-to-be-illegal smile.
    “Colonel Blake? Would y’all mind makin’ that to Bonnie Jean?”
    He recognized the Texas lilt riding Western-style in her voice and thought that smile was like a “Welcome Home” banner strung across his own front door.
    “Would that be Houston I hear, ma’am?”
    “First-word-heard,” she said, beaming with honest pride over the historic first message transmitted from the Moon: “Houston, the Eagle has landed.”
    “Yes, ma’am, it surely was. Is that Bonnie with an i-e ?”
    And in his jaunty NASA baseball cap and top-gun mirrored shades, Colonel Augie Blake was now every inch his old self, laughing and teasing, taking pleasure in the familiar cadences of a down-home flirt.
    With two quick beeps a white GM sedan emblazoned with the NASA logo pulled up to collect him. He waved his good-byes, slipped into the backseat, and was spirited away.
    But not to his scheduled rah-rah at Johnson Space.
    “Change of plans, Colonel,” the driver in the blue blazer said, glancing back over her shoulder and making the turn marked for Putnam Air Force Base.
    “McMurdo?”
    “An evac crew’s going in tonight, sir. Langley’s got equipment at Putnam Field deadheading to San Pedro. They’re holding it for you.”
    Augie knew about the deteriorating situation in Antarctica: he had astronaut candidates down there on Extreme Environment Training.
    “Pass me that thing, would you, darlin’?” He indicated the cell phone lying on the front seat.
    Dialing the area code for Washington, D.C., Augie found himself imagining all the ways that things could be going seriously south at thePole and felt an odd sense of release. Though concerned for his people down on the ice, if he had to choose between glad-handing journalists or jumping into a full-blown operational crisis, he’d take the crisis. It made him feel more alive.
    “Where are we?” he said to whoever answered the phone, and then listened without comment. “Hell, yes. Tell them I’m filling my pockets with salt.”
    Augie hung up and stared straight ahead as the NASA driver gave him a puzzled look and then put the hammer down for Putnam Field.
    She didn’t know what the hell he meant about salt and wasn’t about to ask. But in the rearview mirror she noticed that Colonel Blake seemed younger than he had