Page 1 of Space Crush
ONE
BALL BEARINGS
Evan
I’m drowning in balls.
Not the way I wanted to show off to the group of elementary students at the NASA Youth at Work Festival, but then again, that’s what I get for trying to show off to a group of elementary students.
I’d been overconfident.
Seeing as I believe my job as the EVA and Human Surface Mobility Program’s lead systems engineer to be the coolest job ever, I naturally thought the kids would too.
To be fair, I hadn’t known the EHSMP booth was going to be set up next to the two-thousand-square-foot bouncy house/ball pit that NASA rented for the outdoor festival.
Or that there would be cotton candy, face painting, and astronauts riding around on a legit lunar terrain vehicle— aka moon rover.
NASA doesn’t do anything by halves. That’s been proven over the years.
So when they decided to open up the normally closed-off Johnson Space Center campus to put on a family-friendly event with the goal of teaching youth about the various jobs in space exploration in the hopes of inspiring and recruiting said youth in the future—I should’ve known they’d go all out.
No wonder that, not even halfway through explaining what a systems engineer does, I started losing them.
I had to bribe the kids with the freeze-dried ice cream bars I arranged as a thanks-for-listening gift to get them to refocus. That got me five minutes. Just long enough to ask them if they wanted to see what an astronaut looks like walking on the moon.
Cut to me strapping a Simplified Aid for EVA Rescue (aka SAFER, aka jet pack) on my back and hefting myself inside the bouncy house.
I mean, this inflatable jungle gym is called amoonbounce.
And, honestly, my impromptu re-enactment—aka weeble-wobbling—was going great, if the kids’ oohs and aahs were any indication.
That is, itwasgoing great—until I was thrown off balance by a cannonballing ten-year-old.
And now thanks to the legit eighty-five-pound pack I strapped on my back instead of the lighter demo model (thanks to my moment of I’m-a-man stupidity) I’m now more of a turtle on its back than an astronaut in space. A turtle three feet under a rainbow of plastic spheres, who’s contemplating its intelligence.
Or lack thereof.
But it could be worse.
At least I don’t have to worry about my own personal set of balls being crushed thanks to a little girl who was smart enough to tell all the other kids to stay out of the ball pit because an astronaut had an accident.
Did she make it sound like I peed myself? Yes.
But did she call me an astronaut? Also, yes.
Meaning there’s a chance therealastronauts will get credited for getting stuck in a children’s ball pit rather than the engineers.
Not very mature of me, but considering I’m balls-deep in a pit that smells like dust, sweat, and socks, I’m gonna go ahead and cut myself some slack as I facilitate an exit strategy.
But before my brain can strategize any such plan, the floor beneath me undulates, signaling that someone else has entered the ball pit.
“Where are you?” The clipped, feminine voice sounds familiar, but it’s hard to think between my stomach lurching with each footstep she takes and the loud hum of the air compressor.
Resigned to playing an astronaut in distress, I stick my arm straight up and out of the balls like a flag marking my location.
A second later, a small but strong hand grips mine, yanking me upright and topside. “Up you go.”
Blinking into the afternoon sunlight filtering through the ball pit’s side netting, my eyes first focus on the NASA patch stitched on to the polo shirt of my rescuer before drifting up into a very familiar, very attractive, and very indifferent face.
