Chapter XVIII
Cracked Heads
Alone in his padded sleeping quarters, Gregil looked across seven hundred empty kilometers at a small blue, green and brown planet. His exhalation fogged a portion of the window, covering a cataract of inclement weather, a continent and an ocean. He then clarified the blurry world by wiping the glass with his fist.
An alarm lanced his equipoise. Yellow and red emergency lights glared, stinging his dilated eyes.
The strong American Russian turned away from Earth, plugged an acorn into his ear, pulled on pants and—without a shirt or shoes—ran through the living wall of his chamber, down a foam-rubber ramp, through a second living wall and onto a corrugated plastic catwalk that threaded the circumference of the space station. Yellow and red lights flashed all a
