Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “How does blight get up here, anyway?” I ask.

  Marioschke shrugs. “It starts here,” she says. “We circulate water through the shielding and back here, and sterilization is good but not perfect. Millions of different kinds of microbes grow on every different kind of plant, and every so often one of them makes it all the way around the loop, takes just enough radiation to mutate it without killing it, and turns into a pathogen.”

  “Are we going to be able to grow food?”

  “Oh, sure. Every twenty-six-month orbit produces an average of—how many, Fwuffy?”

  “Seven new pathogens, but on avewage onwy thwee out of a hundwed awe sewious.”

  His gift for startling me persists. “How did you learn that?”

  “I read the tech notes to him,” Marioschke says. “We stop at everything one of us doesn’t understand, and look that up. I wish I’d taken a lot more biology back at school; I had no idea how interesting botany and microbiology can be if you pay enough attention and try to learn it instead of trying to get done.”

  I ask her about Emerald’s ship-wide tantrum that morning, and Marioschke’s smile is shy but real. “She doesn’t like it down here in the lower levels. Says there’s too much mud and her hair gets frizzy from the humidity. So she called me up on my phone and yelled, and I put the phone down on the table, on speaker, and did some re-potting, and just said I was sorry and I’d try to do better whenever she took a breath.”

  Fwuffy finds something, and the two of them are suddenly all over one little tomato plant, extracting samples to culture and examine under the microscope. I’m not sure they notice when I go.

  I call Wychee and she meets me in our usual spot to have her-lunch/my-breakfast together, sitting on a window near the tail end of the Pressurized Cargo Section, to catch up on the human side of things. This morning she’s a little out of sorts because she had to hold the food past its point of perfection while I made my emergency rounds. “On the other hand,” I say, “I just came from talking to the only two really happy people on board.”

  “Fleeta and who else?”

  “I guess that makes three. I meant Fwuffy and Marioschke. I have to visit the farm more often; it won’t make any difference to them, but it’s good for me.”

  “Tell me about it. I try to get down there every day to visit my future salads. I hope Em is at least staying off of them.”

  I explain about the mud and frizzies.

  “Like her hair matters up here,” Wychee says, gloomily. “She’s spending more and more time alone with Derlock. In the churn of our little society, the cream and the scum have both risen to the top.”

  “I don’t like it either.” I always try to be fairly gentle and neutral around Wychee, because she’s not just angry at Emerald like the others; she’s feeling deserted, and hurt, and rightly so. “I wish there were something obvious I could have a confrontation with Em about. As it is, she’s functioning as commander—”

  “Sheeyeffinit, Susan, she’s functioning because we’re functioning. Mostly we solve problems, tell her we solved them, and she says ‘good, keep doing that.’”

  “Well, you and Glisters had your argument about how much water to reserve for the farm versus the thrusters—”

  “And you worked out a compromise, Susan, and took it to Em and she made it an order. It’s so frustrating. She was great right after the accident, but now it’s like she’s just waiting around for things to happen and make her famous.” She catches herself and looks at me sheepishly. “I’m reverting to whining, aren’t I?”

  “I don’t think talking about problems is the same thing as whining. According to the Susan rules, you’re not whining if you’re trying to figure out what’s wrong and fix it.”

  “I like the Susan rules. Are you going to go over to Vacuum Cargo Section 1 and be the referee again?”

  I shrug. “Why should today be any different? I guess I should get on with it.”

  “Don’t let me chase you off with my rotten mood, Susan.”

  “It’s not your rotten mood, you borrowed it from Emerald. And probably the boys have it much worse, so I better go deal with that. Thanks for breakfast and being fairly sane company.”

  When I come through the airlock into Vacuum Cargo Section 1, I’m amazed, as always, that although you can only see faces poorly in a pressure suit visor, the boys manage to be so expressive with their bodies. Glisters is sitting cross-legged on the outer hull, looking upward like he wants something to happen, and it’s not. Meanwhile, two-thirds of the way up to the coretube, Stack is hanging by one arm from their antenna model, one hand on his hip, plainly not happy with Glisters.

  I wait while a couple breaths hiss in and out of my breathing tube. Neither one says a word. I finally say, “Why don’t you just show me?”

  Stack shrugs elaborately—if you want people to see you shrug in a pressure suit, you have to put some effort into that shrug.

  He and Glisters disconnect the antenna mockup—that piece of pipe, about the length and width of the antenna, filled with jugs of water and equipped with clamps and bolt mountings in the right places, that they had so much fun building together. They move it up into a locker almost at the coretube-top; as far as Glisters can tell from the specs, that locker is identical to an outside equipment locker. “From the start?” Stack asks.

  “Please. I need to understand the whole thing.”

  Stack climbs into the noseward airlock by the coretube. He climbs back out, works hand over hand to the locker, undoes the doors and pins them back, undoes the fastenings on the antenna, and tows it behind him to the mounting position. He does a bunch of things with the clamps, then fastens the bolts, unclips the antenna from himself, and proceeds back to the airlock door.

  “How’d he do, Glisters?”

  “Near perfect this time, a couple little things but nothing serious.”

  “Pretend I don’t know anything, because I don’t. What were the ‘couple little things’?”

  “He fastened the secondary clamp before the main one, then let it hold the antenna in place while he did the far side clamp, and then did the main clamp last. Ideally he should do the main clamp first, because if a thruster fired exactly while he had the secondary clamp, but not the main one, the antenna might break the secondary clamp and fall away.”

  “Won’t we have the thrusters locked up?”

  “Sure, but I could make a mistake in the way I lock things, or maybe there’s something I don’t understand correctly.”

  Stack says, “But the antenna went in just fine.”

  “It did,” Glisters says, “and chances are if you went out there and did that right now, it would go in just fine and we’d have you back in here before your watch started, and be calling up Mars and arranging our rescue.”

  Stack starts to say, “Then why don’t—” just as Glisters says, “But that’s not the point—” and they both stop with their hands on their hips, facing each other, like a guy arguing with himself in a mirror. I am torn between wanting to laugh and wanting to beat their heads in, and would like to compromise by beating their heads in while laughing. “I’m starting to understand some problems,” I said, “not necessarily about the antenna. Glisters, you said a couple of things? What’s the other problem?”

  “Well, it’s something that’s not that big, usually,” Glisters says. “Just another one of those things where if at just the wrong moment—”

  “Did I lose a grip?” Stack asks. He sounds scared and ashamed.

  “About a tenth of a second.” Suddenly Glisters sounds soothing, not critical. I wish I could see their faces.

  “Fill me in,” I say.

  “I keep letting go with one hand before I have a grip with the other. Glisters catches that by monitoring the pressure pads on my suit. Yesterday I was between grips just when a thruster fired, and me and the antenna fell away from the noseward wall, just like we’d fall off the back of the ship if it happened in real life. I had nightmares ab
out it all last night. It’s the thing I’m most scared of.” He sounds close to crying. “It’s making a mess out of my self-confidence.”

  “I had nightmares too, Stack,” Glisters says, taking a step toward him. He turns to me quickly, as if he were ashamed of reaching for his friend. “If that happens outside, we won’t have any way to get him back. He’ll fall forever, and suffocate in his suit, probably with the ship still in sight.”

  “But won’t Stack be on belay?”

  “Most of the time. The trouble is, if he fastens the main clamp first, his belay line tends to tangle with the one on the antenna. And the antenna masses a tonne—if a thruster fires and the antenna starts to go, he won’t be able to stop it. So it has to stay on belay, so he needs to unclip—or else do what he’s doing, do the other clamps first, then unbelay the antenna, then do the main clamp. But like I said, that could make an even bigger mess of things.”

  “So when he’s not belayed to the ship, have Stack belayed to the antenna. If the antenna gets away, he goes with it, climbs back to it hand over hand, then climbs the antenna belay. As long as he never unclips from something tied to the ship, he’s fine.”

  “Unless the antenna is only on the secondary clamp—”

  “So Stack now has an incentive to do the main clamp first, like you want him to, and he also has a safety line, because he’s belayed to the antenna that’s securely on the ship.” I’m feeling fairly smug about having solved the problem. “Let’s try it, anyway. Think how good it would feel to have a perfect run, guys.”

  At least they instantly stop quarreling, now that they have a new procedure to work through together. Stack climbs into the airlock. Glisters says “Go” in the headsets.

  The airlock door opens and Stack climbs out, belays himself to the clip beside it, works hand over hand to the locker, works its fastenings. He belays the antenna to his belt, undoes its fastenings, tows it to the mounting position, belays the antenna to a bracket nearby, undoes his own direct belay to access the main clamp, leaves all the other belays in place while he fastens the main clamp, does the secondary and other clamps, reattaches himself to his direct belay, retrieves all the other belays, and brings them all back into the airlock with himself.

  Two seconds later he’s bouncing back out saying, “How’d I do?”

  I can hear the smile in Glisters’s voice. “Perfect. No errors.”

  “So now we’ve had a perfect practice,” I say.

  Stack says, with more enthusiasm than I’ve ever heard before, “Hey, if we hurry a little, I think I can get in four more runs before my watch starts.”

  Fifty-two minutes later, we’re all checking out through the airlock. Stack’s been working much harder than we have, and he heads for the shower.

  As soon as he’s gone, Glisters says softly, “I think he can do it, now. Wasn’t that weird? One good run and he was willing to do five.”

  “Should we do it for real tomorrow?” I ask.

  “Well, it’ll frustrate him, but I’d rather ask him to do one more day of practice tomorrow, and then go the day after. But if he’s really whiny or pushy when we ask, we can always just let him go tomorrow. Anyway, it will be good to have all this taken care of.”

  Wychee has just taken the conn; Glisters and I catch Emerald and Derlock rocketing out of the cockpit, on their way to wherever it is that they go to use each other since I told them they can’t lock F.B. out of the bunk room. I do my best not to notice his glare, or the flush on her cheeks. “Okay,” she says. “Can you just tell me here?”

  “We’re ready to put up the antenna, maybe tomorrow but ideally we’d like Stack to practice for one more day.”

  Derlock says, “Keep an eye on Glisters while Stack is out there. Stack used to cover Glisters’s face with one hand, push him up against the wall, twist his nipples, and slap him in the balls to make him cry. I wouldn’t trust Glisters with a chance for revenge like that.”

  I can feel Glisters tensing into a ball of rage beside me, and I’m not much less angry myself, but I say, “I was talking to the commander, not the prisoner.”

  “Anything you have to say to me you can say to him,” Emerald says.

  “Nonetheless, it’s your business as commander, and it’s none of his.” I’m feeling sick and furious inside, but only Derlock knows why: Derlock used to brag about things like that to me in bed—only he said he did it, not that Stack did—and truthfully, it was part of the charm of evil, back when he was the guy I was hot for, and Glisters was that creepy pink big-headed pervert. Derlock knew that talking like that, about hurting Glisters and some of the others, got me going; I know perfectly well he’s reminding me now that he remembers it working on me.

  Unless he’s reminding Emerald that it works on her now.

  Glisters says, “Stack and I are friends now,” very softly.

  “Now that’s Stack being brave—or stupid,” Derlock says.

  I say, bluntly, “He wants to get home the same as all of us. In fact, Emerald, if we can get Stack to do one more day of practice, you should really come and see it.”

  “Whatever,” she says. “If you say they’re okay to go, they are. Don’t delay anything just to show me. If that’s all you had, we have things to get on with, and I’m sure you do, too.”

  Glisters says he wants to spend a few hours making sure he completely understands how to lock up the thrusters, spin adjustments, and anything else, and work though all the possible situations we might encounter. “It might sound dumb,” he says, “but I’m worried about Stack.”

  “Taking care of your friend’s life doesn’t sound dumb to me,” I say.

  Not long after, when I’m up in the bubble at the nose spire, letting myself feel the quiet and the aloneness, Stack floats in. “Hey, if you don’t mind, I’d like to have a private conversation about the antenna and stuff.” He looks around. “Wow, I never looked at this before. I guess it’s about like the view I’m going to have tomorrow.”

  “Glisters told you we wanted to wait one more day, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah, that’s some of what I wanted to talk to you about. It’s fine with me, actually, I’ll be glad to let him have an extra day to tinker, and I don’t mind running through it another ten times.” Stack sculls with his hands to float up next to me. “You’re the only person I can talk with about… well, crap, everything. I mean, there’s Glisters, but he’s worried enough about me already.”

  “Five perfect runs today,” I said. “That’s real good.”

  “Thanks. I’ve got to keep my nerve up.”

  After a little silence, I say, “I’m still listening,” which is corny, but as Pop always says, corniness is what difficult situations demand.

  “All right, the thing is, Susan, I’m such a screwup, and it’s like I’ve never really wanted to succeed at anything in my life, and now all of a sudden there’s this and it’s important. I’ve always felt like I could do great stuff. I’ve told myself stories about being, you know, heroic and calm and up for anything and all that sheeyeffinit… but I’ve always been afraid if I really tried anything, I’d find out I was kidding myself. I mean maybe I’m just stronger and better coordinated than the losers I hang with. I think I always felt like it was better not to know for sure than to lose and know. And now I wish I knew I was good enough to do this job.”

  “You’ll be fine,” I say. “It’s going to be just like all that practice.”

  “I haven’t done all that practice!” He’s clenched up, muscles tight everywhere, like he’s furious. “I’ve screwed off most of the time because it was hard, because I was afraid I’d never get it right. Now I’m going to try to make up for it with one more day of good practice. Only one more day. I could have had two weeks. And what really kills me is that if I was any good I wouldn’t need to practice!”

  “Okay,” I say, “hold it, time out, that’s just stupid. I can see being afraid to try because you’re afraid you’ll lose. I can see not wanting to practice because you�
��re too lazy. I can even see wasting all your practice time daydreaming about succeeding instead of practicing. But if you’re telling me you’re ashamed of needing to practice, well—monkey poop. Sheeyeffinit, that’s like being ashamed of needing to breathe to get oxygen. I mean, Aunt Destiny, herself, was always telling me about all the simulations and practices she did to get ready for a major eva. For that matter, Pop practices two, three times what most actors do, it takes him forever to do that ‘look natural’ thing that they pay him to do.”

  He takes a deep breath. “I’m just so ashamed of it, Susan, because it’s so childish and stupid. But I always felt like I was supposed to just be able to do stuff, do it brilliantly, you know? Like the way it was in meeds, the moves in dancing and sports that get splyctered into a hook, those people just have it—I want to be the guy that can just do it, that’s great without having to do—”

  “There never was any such guy,” I say. “You can’t be him ’cause he doesn’t exist. Of course you’re scared, silly, it’s the first real thing in your life—most people don’t have that even once. The eenies pretend we do stuff that matters, the mineys pretend they care what we do and that they’re not just n-nillion contented pets, and the meanies pretend they’re brave rebels or crazy badasses. But you’re not pretending. You’re real.

  “Win or lose, do it or die, put up the antenna or lose it, no matter what, you’re going to matter,” I tell him, “and of course you’re scared—who wouldn’t rather live in that kid fantasy where Special Wonderful You gets all that attention and affection just for being Special Wonderful You? But you’re going to do this.” I think it may be the feeblest pep talk ever given, but Stack is nodding like it was just the right thing to say.

  “Yeah.” He bounds off the floor and we glide and airswim together. “Hey, look at Earth in the window. It’s almost just a star now.”