A Most Unusual Passage
Copyright© 2026 by J&J
Chapter 48
Something was going on with Martha and Marcus, and I couldn’t figure it out. I’m not usually nosy, but I wanted to find out what was wrong, in case it was something about the trip or something I’d done. I’ve always been a light sleeper, especially when it comes to strange noises, and living alone has made me even more sensitive. I heard hushed voices coming from their room and then quiet footsteps in the hall.
Curious, I got up and looked out the window, just as they walked towards the beach. Early morning beach strolls are a favorite of mine, but a few things seemed slightly odd. First, like most farmers, Marcus has seen more than his share of sunrises and has never expressed the slightest interest in doing it for fun. Second, it was a little too early. There was a very faint glow on the horizon, but the time to actually see the sunrise was a good twenty minutes away. But the oddest thing was Martha, who was wearing the same clothes she had on last night, and that was very much out of character.
Puzzled, I went down the hall to their room. Their door was ajar. Trying to convince myself that I was being Nancy Drew, not just a nosy snoop, I peeked in. It was obvious only one side of the bed had been slept in. Because I had stayed with Martha a few nights when Marcus was in a coma, I knew it was her side that was still pristine.
Insomnia is a common enough complaint; I’m not immune myself. But I remembered a conversation we had in the hospital. She had been maintaining a nonstop vigil at Marcus’ bedside until Dr. Harley ordered her home to get some rest. He offered to give her a prescription to help her sleep, and she refused.
“Don’t worry,” she had told him. “I stay awake at his bedside, because he might awaken and need me. At home, I’ll sleep just fine. I’ve learned that staying awake worrying about something just makes you less able to deal with the problem. I never have trouble sleeping.” But something had kept her awake last night, and that concerned me.
They weren’t gone very long, nor did they go very far. I could see them on the beach talking. I couldn’t make out facial expressions, but their stance and gestures seemed to indicate something more intense than a chat. I was afraid they were having a fight, something Martha had told me was extremely rare. I was greatly relieved to see them coming back holding hands. I got back into bed and waited. The same quiet footsteps came down the hall, but now there were no voices. Not a peep, until Marcus started to snore. Whatever upset them had been worked out on the beach; I just couldn’t quite get over the feeling that somehow, it was about me.
At breakfast everyone acted fairly normal, except Martha said she felt tired and might go back to bed. I had to dash off to meet a friend down at the Medical University. She had invited me to see her class participating in a science project that sounded very exciting.
“Listen, I’ve got to scoot downtown to see what these kids have gotten into. Operating a payload on the shuttle as a school project; imagine that. You sure you won’t join me?”
“Not me; I’m going back to bed to get rested up for sailing,” Martha said.
Marcus shook his head. “Too high tech for me. Besides I’m retired, remember. I don’t have to learn new stuff just to keep up with my students. I’ll stay right here on terra firma and enjoy this Civil War tour your dad arranged.”
“Suit yourselves. Marcus, you and Dad have a nice time. Martha, I’ll be back before noon to go sailing, if you feel up to it.”
“Don’t worry about that, young lady. I’ll be ready. I’ve been looking forward to this my whole trip.”
It took as long to find a parking space at the busy medical center as it took to get there, so I was a few minutes late. I had been there before, but I wasn’t familiar with the Basic Science Building, where I was supposed to be. Fortunately someone had thought to put the name on the building in big white letters. When I got there, signs directed me to the television studio where the GeoCam project was taking place. I wasn’t sure what to expect from her brief message, but I knew that Ruth, a teacher at Wando High School, had a knack for getting involved in interesting projects.
At the door, a polite middle school student, wearing a dark blue tee shirt with a big Can Do GeoCam logo, asked if she could help me. I saw from her name tag that she was Mary, from Buist Academy, and she was apparently on the public relations staff.
“Hi, Mary, my name is Elizabeth. I am a school principal from Colorado, and I was invited to come see what you are doing.”
“I would be happy to show you around, just as soon as we get you a name tag.” I gave her the information, and she made out a name tag identifying me as an “Academic Guest.”
“If you would come with me, Ms. Manigault, we will begin our tour of the Mission Control Room.”
“I’m looking forward to it, Mary, but I insist you call me ‘Elizabeth.’ It seems more appropriate, since today, you’re obviously not a student but a working professional.”
Mary didn’t say anything, but she was obviously proud to be taken seriously. Together we stepped into the large open studio, filled with the wonderful tumult of students hard at work doing something important. The center of the room had a four sided console filled with computers and some odd looking little TV monitors that had satellite weather images displayed. The students at the console wore headsets they were talking into. The outside of the room was lined with large bulletin boards, filled with weather images and other data. There were two giant TV monitors near the center. One had what I recognized as the control room at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and the other had live images from the space shuttle. Another wall was covered with what had to be the biggest world map made. It was easily over 6 feet high and about 12 feet wide, and a familiar yellow emblem meant it came from National Geographic. I saw three clocks: one showed the time in Charleston, another showed Houston time, and a giant digital clock in the center showed a time called MET, according to the sign above it.
“Excuse me, Mary, what is MET time on that big clock? Obviously, it’s not a time zone, since I’ve never heard of 42 o’clock.”
“MET stands for ‘Mission Elapsed Time.’ It’s the total time since that split second the shuttle left the ground. We use it to tell exactly where the shuttle is in orbit and what the crew is doing, since that is all based on MET. That way, a launch delay doesn’t affect the mission.”
“I used to hear the astronauts say ‘the clock has started’ right when they launched,” I said. “Is that the clock they were referring to?”
“Yes ma’am, it is. The astronauts also use Houston time to keep track of earth time for meals and sleep. Otherwise it would be confusing, since they see a sunrise and a sunset every 90 minutes.”
“They go around the earth in 90 minutes?” I said in amazement. “They must be traveling very...”
“About 17,500 miles per hour.”
“Why, that must be faster than a bullet!”
“Yes ma’am, a lot faster; bullets travel as slow as 600-800 mph for a handgun up to nearly 2,000 mph for a high velocity rifle.”
“It’s hard to imagine such speed, Mary; do you have any concept of traveling that fast?”
“You can try something our teacher told us to do. The next time you are on the interstate traveling the speed limit, have someone time five minutes. Watch everything you pass in those five minutes. Then imagine passing them in the time it takes to say ‘the space shuttle.’”
“That’s very impressive, Mary,” I said. “Almost as impressive as your knowledge about all this.”
“Well, I have been studying and practicing for months to do this job; we all have. And we all are here on our summer vacation. Everyone in my class is here. My parents postponed our family vacation, so I could participate.”
“It must mean a lot to you.”
“Oh yes, ma’am, it’s the most exciting thing I have ever done. The PR team also gets to write a script and put on a television update each day. Now I really want to be in broadcast when I grow up.”
“You seem very grown up to me, Mary,” I said. “You have certainly shown me what the PR team does. Can you tell me what the other students are doing?”
“My pleasure. There are three other teams: targeting, weather and operations. Targeting studies the map of the shuttle’s orbital track for tomorrow and picks out targets of interest. At the moment, they are considering the tongue of the ocean in the Bahamas, the Atacama desert in South America, the Congo delta and the Skeleton coast of Namibia.”
“I don’t know exactly where any of those places are,” I confessed. “But why are there no targets in Asia, for example?”
“Nighttime, ma’am; remember half the earth is dark. Then the list of targets is sent to the weather team at the desk with the video fax machine to get weather satellite images. It’s their job to study weather patterns and estimate cloud cover over the target areas tomorrow. An awful lot of the earth is under clouds at any given moment. They also watch for interesting weather like large storms, which could be photo targets. They also noticed the Congo basin is unusually clear right now, and it’s seldom photographed because of constant clouds. That’s why the Congo was added to the target list.”
“They seem awfully young to do all that.”
“They’re first graders, ma’am, and proud of it, but don’t worry; they know their job. They arranged their own training out at the meteorology office at the Charleston Air Force Base. They’re sharp kids, and hard-working, too.”
I had to agree, because despite their age, they were focused and disciplined, working with a quiet intensity I had never seen at that grade level.
“The fourth team is OPS, which is operations. They are in overall charge. They have to take the list supplied by targeting and checked by weather, and then match it against the shuttle operations. For example, our cameras are mounted in a canister in the cargo bay. We can only take pictures when the cargo bay is pointed at the earth. They also have to check crew schedules. No pictures during sleep cycles, for example. Also no pictures if the crew is involved in a delicate maneuver like a satellite launch or retrieval. We are very low priority, compared to the main mission, but you wouldn’t know it from the crew’s enthusiasm. They have sent word through Houston several times already, asking permission to take targets of opportunity that weren’t on the list. We always give it, of course. At the end of each day, OPS prepares a target list for the next day, and the crew will follow it as their other duties permit.”
“Quite a process; how many pictures can you get?”
“The payload has four Nikon F3 cameras, two color, one high resolution black and white, and one infrared. Each camera has 250 shots, so we can get a total of 250 sets of images. That completes my tour; do you have any questions?”
“Not right now, Mary; you were very thorough and knowledgeable. I think you will make a fine journalist.”
My friend Ruth had been watching but stayed back until Mary was finished.
“Good morning, Elizabeth,” she said. “I see you got our red carpet treatment. I trust that Mary has gotten you up to speed?”
“And then some! I have never been so thoroughly briefed.”
“It’s their show,” she replied. However, I would like to take you over to meet some of the grown-ups behind the scenes.”
We walked over to a group of people, seated out of the way of the busy students but close enough to carefully observe.
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