The Infinite Tides Read Online Free PDF Page A

as the robotic arm came into view, its structure collapsed into a loose stack of overlappingangles as if some thick white straw had folded in upon itself, the terminal end nearly touching the outer skin of the Kibo Module. Before him, the white base of Eriksson’s boots waved in parallel like floating quotation marks as he pulled himself forward over the curve of the Unity Node and across the trussworks, hand over hand, the tether following, up through the white padded girders where the dark interior of the truss opened in shadow like the hidden superstructure of a skyscraper.
    An occasional word from Eriksson to Mort Stevens inside the station and the CAPCOM in Houston but otherwise silence. Silence everywhere. Only the sound of his breathing and the occasional click as Eriksson’s microphone activated and deactivated. The curves and angles of the structure over which he moved. Perhaps the whole compass still turned in its twisting helix, yet to find its northpoint, all possibilities fluxing out into the darkness around him.
    That had only been a season ago and yet was gapped now by a distance he could hardly believe, the curved glass of his helmet replaced by the curved glass of the rental car’s windshield so that, instead of the clean compact functionality of the ISS, his current view was of the back of the car that preceded him. He had been home for two days and had awakened with a familiar feeling of weightlessness, a feeling that faded almost immediately but the memory of which continued to cling to him. Even now, parking the car and entering a vast hardware store, he could feel its shape in his mind: a sphere, a lit globe, a clear sparkling star that floated amidst the endless aisles of gray industrial shelving, fading slowly until it was gone.
    He returned home with a single five-gallon bucket of satin finish eggshell white and all the related supplies necessary to begin painting the living room and kitchen, a project he began immediately, taping off the cabinetry and the kitchen window and sink. His progress was slow and meticulous but soon the window and the bottom edge of the kitchen cabinets were framed in bright, almost luminescent blue.Then the kitchen island: he unrolled a sheet of clear plastic to drape over that surface and sealed it by taping the circumference of the plastic to the linoleum floor.
    The activity was meant to keep himself occupied but already he could feel his mind wandering, not to his memory of the International space station or to engineering tasks but rather to Barb and, yes, to Quinn. In the midst of such wandering thoughts he would pull free the last strip of tape he had placed and would reposition it or would physically grasp the refrigerator to wheel it out or back a few additional inches and then would return to the task before him, each track as defined and precise as a line on a graph: this singular ray pushing out along a trajectory that mapped the edge of one plane against another, the line of blue tape marking out a set of answers clear and simple and predictable, all things reduced to numbers, angles, vectors, equations.
    The cabinets rose nearly to the ceiling but there was a short space above them of bare wall too high to reach and so he returned to the hardware store and bought a folding aluminum ladder and several additional rolls of tape and plastic sheeting, placing all these items in the trunk of the car, the ladder extending a foot or more from its interior so that he had to reenter the hardware store once more to retrieve a scrap of plastic string to tie down the trunk lid.
    Across the parking lot he could see the green awning of Starbucks. He knew he had passed at least one similar awning nearer his house and it might have been that he had passed many more. The mathematics repeating. Everything here identical to itself, a grandeur of sameness framed by the black asphalt of parking lots and the lighter gray of sidewalks, all things within his sight enormous and clean