She gave herself a single, firm thrust with the RCS. She felt a small, definite shove in the small of her back.

She rose out of the bay towards the face of Earth; she saw the big silvered doors to either side of her recede.

A tone sounded softly in her helmet, startling her.

“Oh-two alarm, EV2,” the capcom reported.

An oxygen leak. Holed fabric, maybe. “Houston, EV2. Should I come back? I—”

“Belay that, EV2,” Lamb said. “Paula, just take a couple of deep breaths. Relax. You’re safe and snug in there.”

She became aware of her breathing, which was shallow and rapid. Her suit monitors had misinterpreted her high oxygen consumption as a leak.

Deliberately, she slowed her breathing; she tried to unclench her muscles, to relax in the warm cocoon of the suit.

“Just look at the view, kid.”

She looked at the view.

She was flying up towards Africa. The clouds piled over the equator seemed to reach down towards her, clearly three-dimensional and casting long shadows. She could see the Nile, and the ribbon development along it, surrounded by the baked-hard surface of the desert; the dependence of the people on the Nile’s water was clear.

She was extraordinarily comfortable. The suit was quiet, warm, safe. She could hear the whir of her backpack’s twenty-thousand rpm fan — it sounded like a pc fan. She heard squeaks and pops on the radio, as she drifted over UHF stations on the ground. In her bubble helmet she had a hundred and eighty degree vision, and she had a great sense of freedom. She knew that when she returned to the cabin, after the EVA, it would seem constricting, absurdly confining.

As she gazed at Earth — at all of humanity, save for the six on orbit with her on Columbia and a handful on Station — she felt some of the tension drain out of her, as if it was being drawn up to the planet. She felt lifted out of the web of concerns that dominated her life: the difficulties of her career, the frustrating pace of the space program, her unsatisfactory relationship with Jackie, her daughter, the blizzard of hassles that made up every day, mail and balky technology and her car and her apartment and accounts she had to pay and…