(Story note: This month's selection has been checked out by an actual astrophysicist.  He says the idea is just barely possible.)

        "What the hell is going on up there, Jack?" said the scratch-edged voice.
        Dr. John Lectern, late of M.I.T. ran a hand through the heavy, dark hair on the top of his narrow head and thought about that.  His glance strayed to a port.  Africa was just sliding by.  He could see the Rift Valley.  Man had begun as a species somewhere in that region.  What the hell was going on up here?  He wasn't an astronaut, although they called him one.  Payload Specialist was the specific sub-category.  In fact, about all he knew about payloads was that he was part of one.  In addition to the Hubble II, a few thousand pounds of food and water and three other scientists, he had been the payload this trip.
        "Well," he said, "eight people are dead and one is severely injured.  She's got maybe two days to live, at most.  Probably less.."
        He listened to himself saying it.  He sounded like a stranger.  Flat, declarative.  Brutal, almost.  He decided he was suffering from shock, himself.  There was a long pause, registering as background static on the radio.  He didn't care.  He hadn't cared about much for years.
        "What happened, for God's sake?" said the radio.
        He sighed. "I don't know.  They were undocking the shuttle.  It was your operation!   How the hell should I know? Something went wrong."
        "Damage to the station," said the radio.  It wasn't a question
        "Yes.  Quite a bit.  To the shuttle, too.  Even if I could fly it, one wing is half gone.  It's tangled in the framework of the aft solar array."
        More crackling silence, then, "Who's the other guy?"
"Jane Westbrook.  Dr. Westbrook," he answered.  "A panel shifted and took her arm off between the elbow and the shoulder.  She's lost too much blood."
        He didn't mention the globs of her blood that had formed wobbly spheres and floated around  the compartment like tennis balls.  He had seen blood before.  Traumatic amputations, even.  In Cuba, during La Revolucion Segundo.  He felt cold.  Memories that he thought had been buried beyond recollection began to stir.  He shook his head, as if the effort would send them back down where they belonged.
        "Jack ...are you ... is the module tight?"
        "No," he answered. "It's a slow leak, though.  Twenty hours left using the one backup bottle we have."
        "Christ ... " said the radio.
        "Yeah," he agreed, nodding his head. 
        More crackle.  "Can you stretch it?  Use a suit?"
        "They got Environment.  You can see it from where I am.  The door's blocked by one of the rocket nozzles.  I thought we had two spare bottles, but it's hydrogen for the backup fuel cells.. We have ... one suit.  The others were in the crew module.  That went with half the shuttle wing.  Ought to be over Pitcairn Island about now. Dr. Westbrook and I were, uh, lucky.  We were in Observation."
        "Stay quiet, Jack.  Use as little oxygen as you can.  We're on it.  Mission Control out."
        "Roger," said. Lectern.  "ISS out."
        So, he was the new commander of the International Space Station, and was about to go down with his ship.  Around with his ship.  Forever.  He looked at the Observation deck chronometer.  It seemed to be advancing more quickly than it should.   Clocks were supposed to run more slowly on orbit.  St. Albert had said so.

        "How do we know his guess is right?" said a man.  Robert Benson, the mission ground control chief, couldn't remember his name.  Jake something.  Hell, he had had lunch with the man just last week.
        "Lectern knows," said another man.  Benson remembered his name.  Pete Willliams.  An environment specialist.  "He has a Ph.D. in chemistry.  He's a specialist in the molecular characteristics of gasses.  He could figure this one out in his head."
        Benson's training took over.  "Get me a trauma medic.  And, somebody who can tell me if there's another bottle somewhere up there.  And, get that backup shuttle on the ramp."

        Dr. Westbrook died before Lectern could even try any of the suggestions from mission control.  Shock, he supposed.  She had smiled once at him, then grimaced and stopped breathing.  He couldn't recall the last time he had cried.  Her experimental supplies were sitting in the next module.  He ignored the two big packages and went to the third one.  Inside was the smallest of her three balloons, along with some tanks that looked like portable propane supplies for a camp lantern.  They were small enough to grasp with one hand.  One of them was filled with oxygen. 
      He smiled grimly.  That should extend his life by ten minutes.  He ignored it and pulled out the fabric.  He wrapped her in the ceramic fiber material, then put her in the airlock.  He didn't retain the airlock oxygen, but rather opened the outer door from inside.  The escaping gas carried her into space.  Not being a religious man, he didn't know the proper words to say, so all he said was, "I'm sorry."
      He returned to the Observation module and watched her body slowly spin as she drifted away.  She had family.  A husband and children.  That's all he knew, even though they had mission-trained together.  He had never paid much attention to such things.  He had an ex-wife.  She had come to the launch, in fact.  He didn't have the faintest idea why.  She had been very angry when she had left him, three years previously.  He hadn't' known why, then, either.
      "How's it going down there," he said to the radio.
      "On schedule," said the ground chief.  "With the, uh, extra oxygen in the module and the suit as backup, we'll be there with a couple of hours to spare."
      "Thanks," said Lectern.  "I think I'll get some sleep."  He switched the radio off and sat in the chair, staring at the moon rising over the crescent Earth. 

      Fifteen hours later, Robert Benson listened to the final countdown from the Cape.  The shuttle was like a fat spear about to be thrown at the stars.  He had worked at the Cape during his early years with NASA.  There would be thousands of people parked across the water from it.  They were always there, eager to be buffeted by the thunderous crackling waves of sound from the boosters and thrilled by the sight of the roiling waves of flame and smoke.
      But, he had heard, this time it was different in those temporary camps.  People weren't barbecuing steaks on their grilles. They weren't drinking too much and singing ballads.  What they were doing was standing quietly, some of them with their heads bowed in prayer.  An entire nation, even much of the world, was silently urging that shuttle on.
      The thought that now came into his head was a bothersome one.  He had known an engineer from the earlier days.  The man's name was Emerson.  They had used cheap timers from a local hardware store for staging.  Two dollars and ninety-eight cents they had cost, he remembered.  One day, one of them had been replaced with a built-for-the-purpose four hundred-dollar timer and it had malfunctioned. 
      The rocket, an Air Force model that was tiny by today's standards, had failed.  It lifted off, and instead of shutting down after first stage, had allowed the other two stages to go.  The test had been intended to determine what would happen to the fully loaded and operational second and third stages during the vibration of first stage liftoff.  They didn't fall into the ocean, as planned.  They detached and fired in their turn, producing a full launch sequence.  The rocket left the Earth and just kept going.
      It had been the first vehicle to travel beyond Earth orbit in history, and the whole mission had been covered up by the public relations people because it was a failure, instead of a success.  As far as the press knew, the rocket had dropped into the Atlantic down range.  The test had been successful.  But, because of that high-tech oven timer, it had been the most spectacular failure in the history of technology.  Shit happens.  For want of a nail.  Probably some ten dollar gasket had folded on the shuttle.  Killed them all.
      The countdown continued.

      “Houston --STS 243 looks like a go for launch at T minus 9 minutes. Weather's good, No technical  problems, count down normal. Access arm pulling away from the launch vehicle.

                    T-7 Go for Launch
                    APU's prestart.. 
                    T-6 and counting.
                    T-5
                    APU's start.

                    T-4
                    Final purge of main engines
                    flight control surface check
                    all systems GO
                    T-3 and counting
                    LO2 pressurized for flight
                    vent hood retracted.
                    90 seconds to launch
                    liquid hydrogen tank pressurizing.
                    T-1 and counting.
                    45 seconds
                    35 seconds
                    30 seconds
                    25 seconds
                    20 seconds
                    15 seconds
                    10 
                    igniters 
                    engine start
                    We have a problem.  Abort!”

      John Lectern had heard it all, piped up from Houston.  After the silence, Bob Benson had said, "Sorry, Jack.  We'll fix it and get up there."
      "When's your next launch window?" asked Lectern.
      "Four days.  But, you can make it, Jack.  Stay quiet, sleep as much as you can.  You can make it."
      "Yeah," said Lectern. "Sure, Bob." 
      He turned the radio off.
      The suit was in the next module, with his own experimental equipment.  He thought he might put it on, step out the door and after a while, somewhere over Oregon, just let go of life.  It was while he was suiting up that a new idea came to him.  He was looking with sadness at the carefully packed balloons the woman had brought to test a proposed communication system.  Bouncing signals off a sphere?  It was not his field. 
      Then the thought struck.  It was so ridiculous that he laughed out loud. 
      The sound echoed in the module.  It was a human sound, somehow out of place in this mechanical artifact.  He pushed off against the box of balloons and floated back into the Observation module.  There, he checked the computer.  It still had power.  He began a series of calculations.  This was his field, which was all to the good because the formulae had to be retrieved from memory.  It took three tries to get them all in order.  He smiled grimly at the final figures. 

      "You're not serious, are you, Jack?" said Bob Benson.
      "I'm serious," said Lectern.
      "But, you can make it.  We can get there."
      "My specialty is the properties of gasses, Bob," said Lectern.  "I'm no physician, but I know enough about the consumption of oxygen by even a body at rest to calculate what's left up here.  If you make a perfect launch without any holds, you'll get here about three days after I die."
      There was silence, so Lectern went on..
      "Now, please answer my original question.  Is there one there?  I thought it was a joke when he told me it was.  I thought it was one of those stupid things people say to frighten rookies.  Seemed a strange use of fuel."
      More silence, followed by, "Yes.  It's in a compartment just below the shuttle flight deck.  It's from the old Mercury program.  He was going to throw it out the door.  But ..."
      "Thanks," said Lectern, ending the transmission with a stab of a finger. He finished suiting up, then cycled the airlock and, holding on to the frame of the outer portal, swung himself into space.  The sight of the Earth unnerved him for a bit.  He hung on like a human flag, staring at the endless miles below.  His guts turned over and he almost threw up in his helmet.  Then, his hands shaking so hard that he almost lost hold with each grasp, he began to handwalk himself along the module aft toward the shuttle.  There was the sound of his labored breathing and a scraping noise as his gloves touched the metal.  After he forced his eyes from the terrible chasm below, he felt a little better.  Ten minutes later, he reached the shuttle.

      There was no need to try the door.  One of the observation windows was broken, along with three feet of the metal that had surrounded it. .  He pulled himself through and drifted by the dead bodies, to the ladder that dropped down to the crew hatch.  He went down, then forward.  It took a while in the clumsy gloves to operate the dual storage bin fasteners, but in the end he managed.  Inside, he found what he was looking for.  The stale air that left his lungs at the sight of it told him that he had been concentrating so hard that he hadn't breathed for some time. 
      In spite of himself, he glanced at the shuttle pilot on the way out.  He instantly wished he hadn't, but was also glad he had.  What he had in mind, even if he failed, which was likely, was a better way to go than that.  Back in the station, he got out of the suit and set to work. Afterwards, he strapped himself to the Observation deck chair and stared at the passing Earth. 
      When he was a child, while other children had played cowboys and Indians, or raced their bicycles to a trout stream to go fishing, he had looked elsewhere for entertainment.  It all began one day when a great typhoon had come in from the Pacific and ripped the hell out of his Pacific Northwestern corner of the United States.  Without his parent's knowledge he had slipped out of the basement and stood behind a concrete well house and watched the countryside take flight.  Trees, fence posts, barn roofs, convertible tops, garbage cans and blizzards of hay bales and stripped foliage went by - all of it driven by nothing more than air.
        From that point on, the sky had a different meaning for young Johnny Lectern than it did for other people.  As soon as he could, he went to the library and began to read about the Earth's atmosphere.  He discovered how shallow the life-supporting portion was.  He learned the names of the layers from the troposphere to the exosphere.  He learned the names of the gasses of which it was made.  Some of them were called inert gasses.  He wondered how something that could make a great wind could be called inert. 
      When other children cried with delight at the helium filled balloons they got at the carnival, he wanted to know why helium made them float.  When other teenagers scouted the neighborhood for potential gas tanks to siphon for their hotrods, he wondered why the fumes powered their engines.   While others enjoyed a camping expedition in the Oregon woods, he pondered the fact that they all survived by breathing a poison called oxygen that was a waste product of the plants around them.
        It was an unusually strong aurora borealis that distracted him on prom night, causing him to leave his date sitting and waiting at home.  He had pointed out that it seemed a lot of fuss to make over a missed dance, then went on to describe to her the solar interactions with the Earth's magnetic field that turned the sky into a neon sign.  They got married after he finished his Doctorate at M.I.T.  They had two kids, one of each, who seemed like decent humans to him.  One of them, the girl, had become a marine biologist.  He was in the Antarctic drilling glacial core samples for an analysis of ancient atmospheric conditions when she graduated, but they talked by amateur radio.
        His son was a poet somewhere in the Midwest.  Jackson State College in Mississippi.  He reminded Lectern of his wife.  The two of them seemed to know something he didn't.
        Now, staring down at the atmosphere that had been his teacher and his friend for all of his life, he realized it was probably going to kill him in the next few hours.  Perhaps his son could write a poem about it.  The epic of Lectern.  Dragon's Aires.  He smiled.  Somehow, he still couldn't think of it as an enemy.  He wondered if an expert on early reptilian species would mind if a Tyrannosaurus Rex ate him.  In spite of his predicament, he smiled at this thought, as well.  The guy would use the chance to inspect the incisors, probably.  Then it came to him that dinosaurs weren’t reptiles.  Where had he read that?  The public was right.  Scientists were crazy.

        "He's going to what?" said the president of the United States.
        "Jump," said Robert Benson.  The televideo connection showed most of the room.  He didn't like this president.  He spent money on the wrong things.  The space program had been scrimping for years, and this clown had gotten into office in part by doing a JFK-type inspirational speech in half the towns and cities in America.  The moon would have people living on it.  We would colonize Mars and beyond.  It would push technology so far ahead that cancer would be cured and everybody on Earth would have a wrist radio.
        Then, he had cut the NASA budget and spent every dime in wars all around the world.  Thirty seven times he had sent the military out to bomb enemies of his friends.  To Robert Benson, this man was in part responsible for the fix John Lectern was in.  If they had had the two extra shuttles they wanted, or the space plane, Lectern would be sucking down a Coke while waiting for pizza to be delivered.  No, he didn't like this man.
        "Jump," said the president in his flat twang.  "Jump?"
        "Sir," said a smooth looking aide in an expensive suit for which she must have paid five hundred dollars.  "It doesn't look like ---"
        "Shut up," said the president, without looking at her.  Each word came out like it had been cut from southern schist.  "Fred, what is this?"
        Fred was the president's science advisor.  Benson had known him at Stanford.  A BMOC who shifted from science to law when he couldn't grasp college level mathematics.  His father owned a defense company that had made a fortune from sales of missile technology to foreign countries..  LoMark Industries was the president's largest corporate political campaign donor. 
      "My people," said Fred, smoothing back his straight, shiny brown hair, "say it's suicide, sir."
        The president stared at him for a moment, then looked at Benson.  The frown turned into the famous smile.   Women melted under that smile.
        "Mr. Benson," the president began, "it was our understandin' that you folks were goin' up to get him."  Benson wondered if the "our" was in the third person royal.
        "Sir," he said, "we are working around the clock to do just that.  But, Lectern is correct.  Even if everything goes perfectly, there is very little likelihood that he will be alive when we get there."
        "Very little?" said the president.
        "None," said Benson.
        The president sat back.  His eyes lifted to look out the window of the Oval Office.  There were some crank demonstrators from a political website marching back and forth in front of the fence.  "Phil," he said, still staring out the window, "what do our test groups say?"
        A small man wearing round glasses spoke from a chair at the end of the president's desk.
        "We've tested three scenarios, sir, including this latest one.  I just finished with the group a few minutes ago.  This approach has strong negatives, particularly if he enters the atmosphere over America at night.  They think he'll look like a comet as he burns up.  It fills them with horror."
        "All right," said the president.  "I've made up my mind."

        The radio called him from his sleep.  He had planned to go earlier, but the scene below, and the shock of what had happened had taken its toll.  By the clock, he had slept for six hours.  He was hungry.  Well, nothing to be done for that.  He hit the button on the panel and said, "Yes?"
        "The president said it's thumbs down, Jack.  No go."
        "Tell him I thank him for his thoughtful consideration of the matter, Bob, but he can go piss up a rope.  I'm going.  Was there anything else?"
        He heard a chuckle.  It struck pain through his chest.  It was a beautiful, human sound.  He hadn't paid enough attention to such things during his life.
        "Nope.  Nothing else.  When?" said Benson.
        "It's, what, twenty-three hundred Universal?  In about two hours, Bob."
        "Any messages?"
        "Well, you could tell my ex-wife that - no, she wouldn't believe it.  No, no messages, except to you and your crew.  Tell them I wish them all the best."
        "Right," said Benson. " We’ve gone over the burn figures five times.  Every radar installation and telescope in the world will be watching for you.  Godspeed."
        Lectern laughed.  "Damn straight," he said. 
        He turned the radio off for the last time, then released his chair straps and floated upwards.   In the next module he pried open the box that contained one of  Dr. Westbrook's two great communications balloons.   Because of the internal structure it contained, it was awkward to work with, but eventually he had it placed near the equipment docking airlock and connected to the tiny rocket engine.   He removed most of the experimental gear from inside, leaving just the nozzles and their tanks, plus the round-cornered cube to which they were attached.   What was left would serve his purpose.
        In the end, Lectern was forced to decompress the big equipment bay and pry the engine out the door behind the collapsed balloon.  On Earth, it must have weighed a few hundred pounds, including its fuel tank, though he actually didn't know.  But, once he got it slowly moving, it kept moving.  Watching it crawl over the edge of the bay floor, he was entranced by the fact that it didn't drop toward the Earth below.  One knows these things, but when one sees it ...
      He was suddenly reluctant to leave the station.  Doing so was a commitment.  If he stayed, it would be hours before he would have to make his choice.  And, he would have a little more time than before, he thought, recalling the tiny bottle of oxygen that he had noticed when he had gotten Jane Westbrook's burial shroud.  It was on top of the package next to his right hip.   He picked it up and stared at it, then glanced out the door.  It was too late.  The big balloon and its rocket engine were almost thirty feet away.  The decision had been made for him.
        He launched himself boldly and with the bravado of the ignorant, right out the door.  Whichever god is assigned to the brilliantly stupid was watching over him and he floated  past the rocket engine, right up to the balloon sphincter.  Only when he was crawling into the balloon, the tiny oxygen canister still in his hand, did it occur to him that he should have tied a line between himself and the engine framework before he pushed it out the bay door.  If he had made the slightest mistake in direction when he followed after it, it would have sent him on an informal and eternal tour of near-Earth space.  He had to stop for a moment and wrap his arms around a brace.  His heart was pounding, and the shock of the close call was in him.  He called himself several uncomplimentary names.
        After regaining his composure a bit, he continued on into the balloon, pulling the sphincter closed behind him.  It was pitch black inside.  Afraid to use his suit power pack too much, he crawled along the framework toward the box at the end.  It was difficult to do because he didn't have both hands to use.  He almost threw the oxygen canister away, but then thought that floating around in the balloon it might create a problem.  So he hung on to it and moved forward. 
      He entered the box, pulling the small door closed behind him.   The box was roomy.  Perhaps two meters on a side.  Now, for several precious minutes, he used his helmet light so he could see to activate the inflation mechanism.  Jets of pure white liquid shot out of the eight nozzles.  Outside his box, the silver ceramic fiber balloon unrumpled into an astrogel-filled sphere thirty meters in diameter.  The fluid congealed, then coalesced into a giant crystal of moderate hardness.  It was the finest insulator in history.
        He chinned his helmet light off, braced himself as best he could against the door sill, and, trying to breathe normally, began, for the first time in his life, to pray.  His son had once told him that one of the bravest of history's men, General George Patton, had been a poet who prayed.
        If it was good enough for Patton, it was good enough for Johnny Lectern.  And, it was rewarding to discover that some old maxims are correct.  "There are no atheists in foxholes," he said to the faceplate of his helmet.

        "Do you think he's clear?" said the voice in Robert Benson's ear.
        He had been trying to imagine the process that was going on up there.  There was a kind of window here, he reflected.  They didn't have any ships in the middle of the Pacific, if that's where the poor bastard ended up coming down.  And, he didn't have any floatation gear.  A panel light blinked.  He punched a button and said, "Yes?"
 "We have a ground fix.  It's optical.  He's too close for radar to register him as a separate image, but unless the shuttle has broken away, it's the balloon."
 "Thanks," Benson said. "Keep trying with the radar."
        The mass was different.  Lectern was inside the balloon.  And, the burn was different for another reason, as well..  Re-entry instead of moving to a higher orbit.
        But, oxygen was limited.  All Lectern had now was the suit. An hour left, perhaps.  They had to do it now.  He punched another button.  Another LED sparkled. 
        "Burn," he said.

        There was no jolt, as Lectern had expected.  It was a gentle push that didn't seem to last more than a couple of minutes, although it could have been longer.  Until it quit, he had the distinct feeling that he was lying on his back on the floor.  After it stopped, he was in zero G, again.  In his mind's eye, he saw the giant sphere settling slowly towards the boundary of the exosphere.  The praying had seemed to help, so he did it some more.

      "I'll kill the bastard even if he lives!  I ordered him to wait for the rescue shuttle.  It's my space program!" cried the president of the Unites States.   Even in his anger he noticed the lovely intern who had just walked in with a pizza.  "Phil!  You, whatever your name is, get the hell out of here and find out what's going on!  No, not you, miss.  What kind of pizza is that?"

      In Houston, a young engineer fresh out of the hospital and just returned to work said, "This is a joke, right?  Nobody would actually do a thing like that, right?"
      Robert Benson sat in his chair and stared blankly at a television image that was being beamed in from an aircraft that nobody knew existed unless they had a Top Security clearance.  It was on the dayside of the planet, but was so high that Benson could see stars.
      "Bob," said the man peering over his shoulder, "what's that balloon made of?"
      "Ceramic fibers," said Benson.  "Like the lining of a kiln."
      "It'll take that kind of heat?  Reentry heat?"
      "Doc thinks so, I guess.  Damned if I know.  He's got to shed eighteen thousand miles per hour, somehow.  Our guys ran his numbers.  They say the cross section is tremendous, like an upside down parachute.  Good heat dissipation characteristics.  The drag forces go as the cross section, increasing with the air density and the square of the velocity.  A skydiver tops out at a hundred miles per hour in the troposphere, but Doc's figures say air resistance on the balloon farther down will cause it to descend like a snail.  If it doesn't flame higher up, it could end up descending at less than ten miles per hour.  The whole damned thing is as light as a feather."
      "Where is he?" asked the man.
      Benson looked at him.  "You want his coordinates?  He's up shit creek without a paddle."

        A new star appeared in the firmament over Africa.   People could see it with a good pair of binoculars, reflecting the afternoon sun.  Some of the people of Johannesburg said, "There's the poor bastard."  Others laughed nervously, then quickly glanced around to see if anybody had heard.  Others prayed.

      There was a jolt. 
      "Well, I'll be damned," said Dr. John Lectern , his voice echoing in his helmet.   It meant that he had hit the atmosphere.  When he had been a youngster, like most people, he had envisioned the blanket of air surrounding the planet as being a perfect sphere, like a billiard ball.  In fact, It was not.  It was lumpy, bulging in places.  He had caught one of the lumps, and it had slowed his velocity.  His first fear was unfounded.  He had broken out of orbit. He was probably only about fifty miles from terra firma, as the crow flies.  Or the Stuka.

      Some of the president's men knocked on the door of the Oval Office.  They knocked lightly.  There was no response so they went away. 

    In Houston an entire cavernous room that usually rattled with noise, was dead silent.  Only electric sounds pulsed the air, along with the occasional cough.  Bob Benson stared at his monitor screen.  Someone brought him a cup of coffee.  It sat there and grew cold.  After about three-quarters of an hour, the monitor view shifted because the aircraft shifted.   It tilted in the thin air and turned southwest, then began to climb.
      "Got it on radar," said a voice.  "I think ... there it is.  You should see it, now."
      Benson  assumed the voice was the pilot's.  Then, he saw it on the screen.  A thin streak of flame coursing across the faintly starred, deepest blue sky.  He leaned forward, as if to get closer to the object on the screen.  The balloons, he suddenly recalled, had been a metallic silver.  Or was it yellow?  It didn't matter in the end, because the object exploded before his eyes. 

      John Lectern felt the explosion through his suit.  From the far end of the box, where he had slid upon entering the atmosphere, he looked up at the door.  It was lighter out there.  He needed to get out of his suit, but he was sitting in a near vacuum.  He suddenly realized that because of that, as the pressure built outside that door would get harder and harder to open.  He needed some air in there, and soon.  He did some quick calculations in his head.  The suit used pure oxygen at a fraction of sea level pressure. What, five psi?  It had perhaps an hour's supply left, at best.  The volume of the helmet compared to a cube six feet on a side?  His mind fidgeted. 
       He made several stupid mistakes and had to go back over his figures.  Then he realized he was estimating the volume of oxygen as though it were air in a bottle.  The suit used a partial rebreathing process.  If he released it into the box, he would have perhaps a tenth of a pound psi.  He would explode.
      But, then he looked at the oxygen bottle he had accidently brought along.   Whatever remained of the astrogel foam outside was probably airtight.  Sitting back, he twisted the canister valve, releasing the contents.
      How much?  A quart of condensed gas in a cube with a volume of roughly two-hundred cubic feet.  The numbers wouldn't come.  He couldn't do it.  Shock?  His rebreather malfunctioning?  God knew. 
      "The hell with it," he said out loud.  He swung his visor up, releasing his suit's oxygen, as well, into the box.  A wave of dizzyness swept over him.  Pure terror crouched in his chest.  If he lost consciousness, he was a deader.  But, he didn't.  The vertigo passed, leaving something wet dripping on his lip.  He touched it, then lifted his finger to look at it in the helmet lights.  A nosebleed.  He had instantaneously decompressed into an atmosphere as thin as somewhere up the side of Mt. Everest.  But he had been at five psi to begin with.  Not that big a difference, probably.  And, it was pure oxygen, so he was alive.  His hands shaking, he went through the laborious process of taking the suit off. 
      He knew what had caused the explosion.  Re-entry heat had ignited some impurity in the astrogel foam.  Probably the balloon's cloth had torn.  The ball itself was being ablated away, now.  How long would it last?  When it finally broke up, as it must, would he be traveling at supersonic speed in the thermosphere where temperatures increased with altitude, reaching levels that would broil him in ten seconds? Or would he be in the stratosphere lower down, where temperatures decreased with altitude and where he would most likely freeze to death just after he suffocated from a lack of oxygen?
      There was another bump.  A big chunk of the astrogel had obviously sloughed off.  There didn't seem to be much spin.  It must be peeling off like an onion.  Then he remembered the engine and its frame.  Probably acting like a rudder. With a smaller cross section, the drag would be reduced, but that might be compensated by increasing air density.  Where was he?   His hand unconsciously tightened on the canvas strap he was holding.  Time to put it on.  Soon.  He would go soon.  He had no hope, of course. 

      "It's like a small sun.  The guy's toast in there." 
      "Altitude?"
      "It's about to enter the stratosphere.  There it goes!  It just came apart."
      "Can you see ... anything?"
      "Chunks of flaming crap.  God damn near perfect insulation, on fire.  The storm'll put them out."
      "What storm?"
      "Thunder boomer.  Big baby right over the plains.  Goes up maybe forty or fifty thousand feet."
      "You don't see anything else?"
      "He's in a box six feet on a side, and entering an anvil cloud.  I doubt if God can see him."

   John Lectern  braced his hands against the back of the box and kicked the small door hard.  It came free of the remaining foam.  It was pitch black out there.  Was he nightside?    The box twisted violently.  He banged around inside like a tennis ball in a dryer.  Before he knew what had happened he was outside.   He had hyperventilated as best he could inside the box,  but had cried out as he swept past the rocket engine.  But, that might be for the best.  If he was too high and the pressure too low, it might keep his ribs from breaking - and  the breathing reflex might save him if he passed out.  He had two minutes, perhaps less, before he would need air.  Everything was black.
      Then he saw the lightning flash.  He was in a thunderstorm!  The crack was deafeningly loud.  The lightning split the sky all around him.  He was looking up when the next  flash came.  The balloon box was disappearing into the distance.  There was a powerful side draft inside the cloud, then.  Besides dropping like a rock, he was flying sideways at a speed he couldn't guess.  Another flash.  Things were fuzzy.  He shut his eyes tight.  Maybe they were freezing. 
      He drifted into a strong updraft.  Although the increased wind velocity suggested he was falling faster, he knew that was impossible.  The extra wind meant he was falling more slowly. .   Something hit him.  He opened his eyes.  The next flash showed him that he was in a cloud of perfectly round pellets of ice the size of ping pong balls. They banged against his legs as he fell.  Except that he was deathly cold, and there were no flying cattle or wicked witches on brooms, he might as well have been in Dorothy's house inside the twister.  He reached out and grasped one of the tennis ice balls at the next flash.  It didn't feel cold.  If this went on five minutes longer, he'd break up into chunks when he hit the ground. 
      Time slowed to a crawl. 
      There was no reference point inside the great black cloud.   Now, he felt the crotch and chest straps of the parachute he had retrieved from the shuttle locker and donned inside the box.   It  had been worn by one of the first astronauts on his first freefall training jump. It was supposed to have been thrown from the International Space Station as a memorial to the first man to die in space.  A parachute his soul could use to return to the green hills of Earth.
It no longer seemed to him a silly fairy tale gesture.
      The chute was forty years old and hadn't been used since that jump.  The odds were that when Lectern pulled the ripcord, shreds of cloth and dead mice would fly out of it.  He had considered checking it out after bringing it back to the station, but decided against it.  If it was no good, he was already dead.  If it was good, because he didn't know how to pack a parachute, and because the folds are packed under pressure, all he had to do to ruin his chances was open the wrong flap. 
      He spread his arms and legs and began to control his fall.  He had seen skydivers do this in films.  He had seen them do much more than that, in fact, but this simple basic position was all he had hoped he could perform.  He could.
      How close to the ground?
      He had to breathe.  He expanded his lungs.  There was air!  It was thin, but it was there!  When did pilots go on oxygen?  Ten thousand feet, wasn't it?  How close was he to the ground?  Inside the storm, there was no way to tell.  How long had he been falling?  He should have counted.  At what rate?  A hundred and fifty feet per second.  Starting from where?  Thunderstorms climb into the stratosphere.  Twenty thousand feet is a walk in the park for some of them.  Say four miles.  Falling at perhaps a mile every half a minute.  He could breathe.  Maybe ten or fifteen thousand or less to go.  Count to thirty and pull if the cloud didn't thin out?
      He had parachuted twice in his life, but had never done a free fall, let alone one in the violent wind currents of a thunderstorm..  For all he knew, he would slam into the ground before he finished the present breath.  But, if he opened the chute too early, the gale forces around him might tear the old cloth to shreds, twist and tangle the lines or even rip the whole thing off his back.
      He decided on the count
      At twenty-eight, he broke through the bottom of the cloud    He was no more than four thousand feet up.  Maybe three thousand. He pulled the ripcord.  Nothing happened. The ground was rushing to meet him.  He pulled again.  Then a third time.  There was a report, like a popgun, then a rustling sound and another report.  The straps dug into his groin and armpits.  He looked up.
      The son of a bitch had opened!  He kicked his legs and waved his arms and whooped over and over again, like a madman.
      He landed on the plain, in a grassy field next to a two-lane blacktop road.  Cattle had been in the area and had softened the turf with their hooves.  He didn't even sprain an ankle.  He was soaking wet, and his legs were so weak that he sunk to his knees and remained there shivering so violently that his teeth rattled.  It was several minutes before he could get to his feet again. 
       As he removed his chute harness something strange happened.  He looked down, and his heart filled with love for the ground.   The enemy had become his friend.  Suddenly, to him, the earth was as beautiful as the northern lights.  It smelled wonderful!  Rich and pungent.   It seemed odd to him that he had never before been aware of this beauty below him.  As such things always go, it prompted him to wonder what other beautiful things had failed to gain his notice in this life.  He decided on the spot that he was going to find out the answer to that question.
      A sound drew his attention to the nearby road.  An old pickup with Kansas license plates and a load of fireplace bricks stopped on the road.  An even older man, of  Japanese descent, stuck his head out and said, "Did you hurt yourself, son?"
      "No," said Lectern, wiping the blood from his grinning mouth. "I'm just fine."
      "Can't see your plane," said the man peering upwards.  "You must have been half way to the moon when you bailed out."
       Lectern laughed, reveling now in the elation of survival, the intensity of just being alive.  The old man got out of the pickup and helped him roll up the chute.  A short while later they drove off into the approaching evening.   On the pickup radio, the local station, in honor of a twister that had been spawned by the thunderstorm, but which had done no local damage, was playing Somewhere Over the Rainbow.  Lectern laughed at that, too.
        "Speaking of bailing out," said the old man, "did they ever find that poor fellow who jumped off the space station?  They said he'd be coming down over there in Oklahoma somewhere.  They say the sky is so full of choppers looking for him that he'll be lucky to come down in one piece!"
        "Yes, somebody found him, and he is in one piece," said Lectern.  "But, he did not land in Oklahoma.  He rode that thunderstorm like a bronco and came to ground right here in Kansas."
        "He really made it?" said the old man in astonishment.
        "Yes he did," said Lectern.  "I was there."

                                          ***