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By Root 568 0

two bolts at the back of the skull looking like horns. Satan himself was riding with us. During a break in our payload work, I floated into a sleep restraint and extended my arms through the armholes, then ducked my head into the bag. Pepe and Dave taped the skull on top of the restraint so it appeared our friend had a body. (Your tax dollars at work.) They silently floated the bag to the flight deck and maneuvered me behind John Casper, who was engaged at an instrument panel. When he turned to find the creature in his face with arms waving, it scared the bejesus out of him. Later, we clamped Satan on the toilet. No doubt my desecration of the poor anonymous soul who had volunteered his body (and skull) to science has earned me a few more millennia in hell’s fires.

With STS-36 I dodged the SAS bullet for the third time. Maybe, I thought, God had given me a free pass in space because I had vomited enough for ten men in the backseat of the F-4 during my early flying career. Whatever the reason, I was happy to stow my unused barf bag. John Casper looked as if he might need it, but maybe not for SAS. It could have been his meal of eggplant and tomatoes. Gag. The NASA dietician included it because John’s other meal choices (heavy on butter cookies, M&Ms, and chocolate pudding) would leave him short of magnesium. I would have rather chewed on a magnesium flare. John hadn’t eaten the entrails-looking dish, but just rehydrating it would have made me sick. Regardless of the cause, John was feeling poorly and called on Dave Hilmers to inject him with the antinausea drug Phenergan. NASA had all but given up on patches and pills to treat SAS and had converted to industrial-strength injectable drugs. I reminded John of the warning the potion carried, “Do not operate an automobile under the influence of this drug.” He replied, “Lucky for me it doesn’t say anything about operating a space shuttle.”

Dave Hilmers was no doctor. He just played one in space. His premission training with needles had consisted of jabbing one into a piece of fruit. I would have to have been near death before I would have let a marine come near me with a needle. I expected to see blood and I wasn’t disappointed. Dave accidentally moved the needle while it was embedded in John’s ass and blood followed. A line of ruby planets shot from the wound like soap bubbles being blown out of a ring (giving new meaning to the term “airborne pathogen”). We chased the spheres with tissues. (Dave Hilmers must have been inspired by his needle work. After retirement from NASA he completed medical school and is now a pediatrician with a practice in Houston.)

While I had no nausea, I did experience the same painful backache from spine lengthening that I had encountered on STS-41D and 27. I also noticed the same Viagra effect. Every morning I would find myself painfully afflicted with a diamond-cutter erection, just like the geezers in the movieCocoon. And I wasn’t the only one dealing with this problem. On one reveille, as we all floated in our sleep restraints, Pepe looked at me and said, “I must have had a great dream about Cheryl [his “snort” cute wife]. I’ve got a terrific boner.”

I smiled and replied, “I must have had a great dream about Cheryl, too.”

Pepe laughed. “Damn you, Mullane! Keep my wife out of that filthy brain of yours.”

Someday the blood shift of weightless flight will make for some very happy space colonists.

During the last sleep period of the mission, I stayed awake in the upper cockpit to soak up the space sights that would have to last the rest of my terrestrial life. I wanted to listen to music as I did so and searched for my NASA-supplied Walkman. It took me a moment to find it. The inside of the cockpit was covered with Velcro pads, and everything we carried, from pencils to cameras to food containers to flashlights, had Velcro “hooks” glued to them so they could be anchored to a pad. The only problem was remembering where you anchored everything. On Earth, nobody ever had to look on a wall or ceiling for a misplaced item. In space you did.

I put