When Ed came out to the main part of the blockhouse again, Randy knew from his expression that he'd been checked out for the flight, but he asked politely:
"Mother and child doing well?"
By that time McCauley wanted to hug somebody for sheer joy, but instead he said sedately,
"The doc says I'm a boy."
But just the same he was almost weak from the reaction to the ending of his fears about what the doctors might decide. He looked at his watch. Just about on schedule. Over in a corner somebody with a headphone and chest mike was marking off items on a list he had before him. He said, "Telemeter circuits," and paused. A voice evidently sounded in his headphones, because he made a checkmark with his pencil. Then he said, "Tracker circuits," and waited, and made another checkmark. As McCauley walked on to where his voice was drowned out, he was still saying toneless things into his chest mike and making checkmarks after unhearable replies.
Randy closed the door of the cubicle where McCauley would put on the grav-suit. It was skin-tight and festooned all over with stray bits of equipment. Randy helped him get into it.
"Lucky son-of-a-gun!" he said conversationally. "How do the Irish get all the breaks?"
"Clean living," McCauley told him, "and a drag with the top brass."
It wasn't so, of course. Not the top brass part, anyhow.
His arm caught in the right sleeve and Randy helped him straighten it. There were peculiar tubes built into the fabric. They were all hooked to a grav-valve that would let compressed air into them at a suitable pressure to tighten the suit and fight the tendency of his blood and inner organs to be left behind when his bones and flesh were accelerated by the full thrust of the rocket. A man wasn't built to stand the acceleration he had to take. But the grav-suit would make up the difference.