The Galactic Rover Spacecraft breaks down in the same manner as the old subway cars: the fluorescent overhead lighting clicks off, something hisses, and the dull glow of the back-up lights strain to illuminate the worried looks of the passengers. But instead of fretting about being late to work, (a memory some forty-years in my past), I think about oxygen. I think about the blackness of the final frontier, about a perpetual orbit of the noxious Venus. I look at Darla for an answer. We all do.

“No one say a word,” she says. Darla speaks with the authority and annoyance of a grade school teacher. She is our fearless leader, ex-astronaut and current baby-sitter. She can see the looks on our faces. She knows how little we know: the six of us, all of us senior citizens that shelled out the two-hundred thousand for a brief soiree into the old final frontier. (The fee includes three days of astronaut training, one week in space--all meals included.)

Darla unfastens her seatbelt, stands, and then space-glides towards the pilot’s bridge. I know the word bridge from the old episodes of Star Explorer. Both times when I used the word Darla corrected me, “That’s nautical. Does this look like a boat?”

“We’re doomed,” says Eleanor, funeral dust on her breath. She is startlingly old, a crone with knobs everywhere, and a recently dead husband’s money to burn on endeavors such as space cruises.

“If there was a garbage hatch, I’d push you into it, Eleanor,” I say.

I consider the possibility that this is all a rouse, and that soon red alert lights will flash on and spin, gas will spew from the overhead valves. “Mayday, mayday, prepare for evacuation,” the captain will say, or something equally terrifying.

When the door opens again, Darla walks in and sits in the seat next to Andre. She bites one side of her lip, and the other side puffs out in hesitancy.

We trusted her, the pilots. We trusted the brochure that spouted off about The Space Commandoes and their five-thousand successful voyages. We signed a waiver.

“It was a manual shut down,” she says. “To stop the buildup of pressure from the exhaust, they shut down the forward power. They don’t know where the gas is coming from.”

“Is coming from?” says the crone.

Whether it is a farce or the real thing, I decided a long time ago to face the final countdown head on. I am Pecos Bill riding a T5 tornado. I’m a bridge jumper with my eyes peeled back wide so I can see what the devil’s face looks like, smell the grassy tang of souls on his breath. I have come this far and there is not much farther to go.

We hear a loud pop, like the inner tube of a giant bicycle being over-inflated until it finally explodes. The ship begins to spin. It is not dizzying. It is blindingly chaotic, and through the viewing window we see the murky grey of planet Venus, and then the sun, burning blowtorch white. And then each other’s faces, heads pinned back to the rests.

“We are headed for the sun,” says the crone.

“No we’re not,” says Darla. And then something rips. It is the side of the Galactic Rover.

I see my next life before me. It is spinning white light across the universe. I laugh out loud. I don’t know what my stewardess is doing. Her name is Darla and I love her. She first went up into space in nineteen ninety three. She winked at me two times, called me darling and touched my arm as she buckled me into my chair. She is terribly attractive. I wish I had been an astronaut and that Darla had been my wife. Maybe we would never have gotten along, Darla and I. But who knows.