Forecast by Chris Keith

by steel frames mounted in the earth. Manually activated squibs joined the gondola to the frame.

 
    The momentous cliff - top event ran on a live feed into Sutcliffe’s laptop computer connected to satellite internet. Inside the White Room sitting beside Sutcliffe on the bench were Claris Faraday and Jen Hennessey watching the screen in a pensive silence. The launch was not for another hour, but time was moving fast. The time told seven already, the launch scheduled for eight. The tension in the room was visible.
    “It doesn’t look like the world’s largest balloon,” Hennessey commented.
    Sutcliffe nodded. “When a story this big is represented through the reductive lens of a camera, the image is always translated less effectively.”
    Much to Sutcliffe’s disappointment, the White Room had not been painted in time, as promised, and the presence of paint and a stepladder in the middle of their preparation made the expedition seem a touch unready. That was not the only thing that disgruntled him that morning. Just three weeks earlier, NASA had announced a change of plan in the Chandra project. There was to be no Chandra project. The observatory telescope had ‘malfunctioned’ according to Hennessey, passing on the information from her superiors at NASA. Instead, a new project had been approved. The payload: a cosmic dust collector nicknamed Akroid. Akroid, which would be attached to another balloon, would capture cosmic meteoroids whipping about in the stratosphere. It included several xerogel samples strategically placed to capture microscopic meteoroid particles and would be remote controlled through radio frequencies by operators from NASA. That was all Sutcliffe knew about it. Hennessey and Thorndike and just about everyone else he’d spoken to at NASA were being very secretive about the details.
    The sudden, inconvenient change had left him peeved. He had been resentful of the Chandra project but had prudently bitten his tongue. Then his opinion changed when he learnt what Chandra II had to offer and after he’d learnt that Hennessey was as nice as she was good - looking. Now his opinion had changed again because the NASA - Hennessey package was causing more trouble than it was worth and last minute modifications to the gondola to accommodate the new project had caused unnecessary stress and cost.
    Sutcliffe shut down the power on his computer, folded down the top, picked up his morning newspaper and read the front page. The headlines were about foreign immigrants in Great Britain, as usual, though the words were not registering in his brain. Just letters in combinations. He was thinking what it would be like as soon as they made their way to the balloon outside. Restless, he discarded the paper on the bench. So much was at stake. They were under a lot of pressure. A lot of pressure.
    Around the room, the crew used their own rituals to combat nerves. Matthews sat with his back against the wall tapping his foot on the floor in a rhythm. He looked calm and prepared because he relished the celebrity spotlight. Sutcliffe, on the other hand, hated being recognised; the unsought gazes in the street, the finger-pointing, the nitpicking. He disliked people chatting to him as if they knew about every department of his life when they knew nothing at all. While he appreciated the support of strangers, he didn’t feel comfortable with the constant attention. Beside him, Hennessey and Faraday made conversation. They were discussing the cost of domestic flights and fuel tax, comparing prices in their respective countries. Hennessey was nervous about the launch. She had spent most of her career risking her life for the evolution of flight. That did not shake off the images of the three astronauts who perished in a fire that consumed their Apollo 1 spacecraft while it sat atop its launch pad in 1967, the seven crew of the space shuttle Challenger who died in 1986 when it blew up just seventy three seconds after liftoff,