by Allen Steele
Speaking from a strictly aesthetic viewpoint, it makes sense that an old SF television series had something to do with the christening of Skycorp’s construction shack. Of all the big structures built in space, Vulcan Station alone had that funky, semi-streamlined, designed-by-committee look that typified the spaceships on Star Trek, a look which reminded one of common household objects. The TV Enterprise looked like an old Whammo Frisbee with a toilet-paper core and two crayons attached; the Romulan battle cruisers looked like dinner trays; the Klingon ships were reminiscent of the plastic mallards your uncle the duck hunter used to have hanging over his cabin fireplace.
Vulcan Station looked like a telephone receiver. Not the ones which came into common usage by the end of the 80s; the big ones with round ends that Bell Telephone put in every house and office after the end of World War II. It might have been strictly a coincidence of design, but I rather think an engineer, sitting up late in his office, trying to come up with a practical design for the construction shack, stared at an old phone on his desk and went—“Eureka!”
Essentially, Vulcan was an elongated bar between two hemispherical modules. The modules, called Module A and Module B, were flattened at the bottoms. Most of Vulcan was unpressurized except for the command deck in Module A and the inflated modules that were strapped on the outer skin of Module B—colloquially called “hotdogs” because of their sausagelike appearance—which served as temporary areas for the beamjacks to suit up and rest in.
The rest of the shack was uninhabitable, exposed to hard vacuum, including the main construction bay between the two modules, where much of the work was done. In contrast to the designs made for construction shacks by earlier designers, though, these areas were not skeletal, open areas; a thin aluminum skin, not much thicker than tinfoil, was stretched over the whole superstructure. The point was to protect the construction supplies—including the aluminum sheet rolls sent from the Moon at great expense—from micrometeorite damage. This gave Vulcan its unexpectedly streamlined appearance.
The underside of Vulcan, in the long cross section between Modules A and B, contained a wide-open hatch, the main construction bay. The shack hovered above the powersat, tethered in place by cables, with the hatch over the unfinished end of the powersat’s structure.
The beam builders were contained in the main bay. They were like the ones designed by Grumman and NASA in the 70’s: big rectangular machines each weighing nearly a hundred tons on Earth. Their mass alone was formidable in space, when it meant lowering and raising the fat bastards in and out of the bay. Three large rolls of aluminum sheet, made on the Moon, were loaded on rollers on the outside of a beam builder, one on each of the machine’s three sides. The sheets were fed in and molded into spars and joined with cross-spars with laser welders. What came out was a perfect tetrahedral beam, a hundred feet long, which could be joined with other beams to form one of the main spars.
To join the beams together, beamjacks in MMU backpacks and in pods would glide between and under them, inserting trusses and reinforcing seams. It was long, slow work, because guidance lasers in Vulcan were focused down the length of the satellite. With them, Command could tell whether the giant structure was being built straight. If it wasn’t—a common occurrence—then beamjacks would have to get it straight. Imagine trying to build something several miles long as straight and even as a laser beam, and you can see one of the reasons building the thing was such a heartache.
On the end of Module A was a ramp where more guys worked at assembling the two microwave transmitting dishes which would eventually be fixed to rotary joints at each end of the completed powersat.
The construction pods were housed within Module B, near one of the two freighter loading bays on the upper half of the shack, just across from the main airlock leading to the hotdogs. During changes in the work shifts, which occurred three times daily, this area was always the most crowded. One shift coming in, one shift going out, pods maneuvering in through their bay adjacent to the main construction deck for refueling and taking on relief pilots, sometimes with the added confusion of a freighter from the Moon or Earth unloading materials. Every eight hours it looked like a Chinese fire drill performed in zero-g.
The focus of all the activity—when there was a focus—was the massive structure floating underneath Vulcan. When the White House and Skycorp and NASA announced its inception, they called it Project Franklin, after old Ben who allegedly discovered electricity by flying a kite with a key on the end into a thunderstorm. This name was almost as pretentious as if they had called it Project Prometheus, and so most people forgot about it as one of those names a Republican administration in the White House would devise.
SPS-1, or the powersat as it was more conveniently called, was planned to be about 13.3 miles long and 3.3 miles wide. It resembled a vast flat gridwork, with the construction shack hovering over one end, men and work pods skirting around it like tiny white insects. Eventually it would be covered with sheets of protovoltaic cells manufactured on the Moon, transforming it into a massive, rectangular mirror.
You know the rest. The cells capture sunlight, transform it into electricity which in turn is transmitted through microwave beams to rectennas in the Southwest, supplying five gigawatts of electricity to the U.S., the cost of which shows up on your electric bill each month. Frankly, I don’t think it’s my place to say whether that cost is high or low, except to say that the forests in the northeastern states and Canada look much prettier since the acid rain problem has been obviated and school kids in Pennsylvania history classes have to struggle to remember what the fuss in the 70’s over Three Mile Island was all about.
Since grabbing the sun’s energy was what all of the expense and R&D and manpower had been for, perhaps the government and Skycorp should have called the whole shebang Project Prometheus. It fit with the rest of mythology, but… well, it wasn’t used after all. All the science fiction writers had already overused the name.
8
The Whiteroom
HOOKER’S REMINISCING WAS INTERRUPTED by the inaudible yet tactile thump of the ferry docking with Vulcan Station.
“All right, coffee break’s over!” someone up in the front of the narrow compartment said loudly. “Everybody, back on your heads!”
There were just as many crewmen asking what was so funny as there were who were snickering at the punch line of the old joke. Seat belts were unbuckled and the men in the spacecraft began to float out of their couches, each reaching up to grab the rail running the length of the compartment’s ceiling. It took a moment for Hooker to bring himself back from the remembered evening in the bar. For an instant, as he took in the weird sight of crewmen gently floating above his head, he found himself weighing this reality against that mind’s eye vision. The former was sorely lacking in appeal.
Unfastening his own seat belt, he pushed himself up with the toes of his sneakers and grabbed the overhead rail. He bumped into Mike Webb, the beamjack who had been sitting next to him, and muttered an apology. From the front of the cabin he could hear the slow hiss of the hatch being undogged and opened. The line of crewmen began to ease toward the airlock hatch, pulling themselves hand over hand along the rail. It was then that Hooker realized he had made a slight mistake upon boarding the ferry.
The problem was that he had been one of the first to board the spacecraft at Olympus. It was something most of the men who worked shifts at the powersat project tried to avoid; he could only blame his lack of forethought on the crummy day he’d already had.
The first crewmen to board the ferry had to go to the back of the cabin to get seated. Because there was only one hatch in the ferry, at the bow, it meant that the last beamjack aboard at Olympus was the first to get out at Vulcan. It made no difference when the ferry was returning to Olympus from Vulcan; one simply crawled out into the Docks and headed for the rim modules. But the crews coming aboard Vulcan had to be processed through the whiteroom, and there lay the rub.
The whiteroom
was in the second hotdog affixed to Vulcan’s outer skin; four such modules were attached to Module B, joined together by metal sleeves, and anchored near an airlock in the construction shack. Vulcan had been designed so that the modules could be moved about the space platform as necessity dictated, since pressurized areas were a secondary consideration aboard the construction shack.
The whiteroom, like the rest of the hotdogs, was a narrow compartment in which only a few crewmen could fit at a single time. It was where the beamjacks climbed into their suits and replenished their oxygen tanks before going to work on the powersat. Suit-up was a long, clumsy procedure. Even the comparatively lightweight suits worn by the pod pilots took five or ten minutes of work to don; the bulky hard suits worn by the men doing EVA jobs took as long as twenty minutes to struggle into, depending on the dexterity of the individual.
Which meant that the last guys aboard the ferry when it came over from Olympus sometimes had to hang around—literally—for up to an hour, waiting for the persons ahead to suit up, pressurize, check themselves, clock in and cycle through the airlock. Once, Command had tried to control the situation by giving beamjacks revolving numbers for their boarding rank and docking work—time for the minutes wasted in the whiteroom; but the first part of this arrangement fell apart when crewmen started ignoring the boarding rank (because of apathy, or feeling as if they were getting the same bad seats over again). The second part fell through when the union found out about it and raised hell with Skycorp.
Popeye had forgotten to arrive late to get aboard the ferry. It was a game the beamjacks sometimes played: Who could find an excuse to board the ferry last? Popeye winced at his dumbness. Hang around indeed, while your arm muscles got cramped from holding the rail and your eyes got tired of looking at the back of your buddy’s head… or ass, if he was turned upside down.
He looked around and saw his own expression mirrored on Webb’s face. Webb grinned painfully and rolled his eyes up in his head: Boy, I guess we fucked up again. Popeye nodded and looked away, never dreaming that his luck had just changed.
He had had a lousy day up to now. But while space does not often forgive mistakes, sometimes it may let one slide your way. Because of his error, Hooker was given the opportunity to make more during the rest of his life.
9
Zulu Tango Approach
FOR ONCE, VIRGIN BRUCE felt good. Absolutely on top of the whole damn world. Not only that, but he was feeling good he was on the clock, a miracle in itself because he hated to work. He felt so good he could sing, and so he did:
“What in the world ever became of sweet Jane?
“She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same;
“Livin’ on reds, vitamin C and cocaine;
“All a friend can say is ain’t it a shame.”
When he received the cassette recorder Doc Felapolous had promised him and had it installed in the instrument panel of his pod, he wouldn’t have to sing Grateful Dead songs to himself. He would get some tapes shipped up to him—surely one of his few remaining friends in St. Louis or Kansas City wouldn’t begrudge him that small favor—and then he could ride in style and never mind the syrupy versions of “Moon River” everyone else was subjected to day in and day out.
“Truckin’, like the doo-dah-man,
“Once told me ‘Gotta play your hand.
“‘Sometimes the cards ain’t worth a dime
“‘If you don’t lay ’em down.’”
As he sang he glanced through the canopy, checking his trajectory by eyeball-reckoning his distance from the powersat. The computer screen in front of him, which displayed a graphic simulation of his approach angle to the huge satellite, told him that he was just under a mile away—of course, the numbers were actually in metric figures, but he had long ago become used to making the mental conversion to yards and miles, because he was an American, goddammit—yet for an experienced pilot nothing could replace eyeball navigation. Bruce pushed the yoke forward a tad and gave the throttle a little push, and one of the RCR’s on the fuselage fired, braking his approach. The powersat floated upward a bit. He glanced down at the screen, making sure that the navaids computer agreed with what his eyes told him, and confirmed to himself that he was on a steady course for the construction shack. Nice shooting, guy. Who needs the computer? Satisfied, he grinned and resumed singing.
“Arrows of neon and flashing marquees down on Main Street…”
Another construction pod passed before him, carrying a load of rebars in its claws, its spotlights dazzling him briefly with their glare.
“Chicago, New York, Detroit, and it’s all on the same street.”
Chicago, he thought. What a hell of a town. I used to love cruising my bike down Lakeshore Drive, checking out all the rich dames in their spiffy threads. What a trip that was.
“Your typical city involved in a typical daydream,
“Hang it up and see what tomorrow brings…”
Vulcan Control to Pod Zulu Tango. What the hell do you think you’re doing, Neiman?
Virgin Bruce sucked in his cheeks and widened his eyes, the way he remembered Eddie Murphy doing when Bruce was a kid watching Saturday Night Live on TV: “Uh, oh, it’s the landlord!”
Virgin Bruce reached up to his chin and made sure his headset mike was adjusted, then reached to the communications panel to switch it on. To his chagrin, he found that it had already been switched on. Oh, hell, he thought. I must have been singing to the whole shift!
Recklessly, his lips stretched away from his teeth in a huge grin. Nothing to do but brazen it out. He started in on the next verse.
“Dallas got a soft machine;
“Houston too close to New Orleans;
“New York got the ways and means…”
Neiman, we got the ways and means to can your pay for the week if you don’t shape up and fly right. Now you come back with something other than sing-a-long or you and me are going to have a major disagreement, if we don’t already have one. Do you copy?
“I copy, Hank, I copy,” Bruce snarled into the mike. “And what’s this crap about flying right? My trajectory is as clean and regulation as you’re gonna get, man.”
Bullshit, Neiman. Take another look at your screen. You just cut off a Big Dummy coming in on final approach to Vulcan. The pilot had to waste fuel braking so he’d keep the safe minimum distance from you and your hotdogging.
Neiman frowned. Hank Luton, the construction supervisor, wasn’t fooling this time; he was mad. Virgin Bruce punched a couple of keys on the computer and got a wide-angle display of the space around his pod. Sure enough, it showed an HLV from Earth on an approach trajectory to the construction shack. A quick glance at the coordinates told him that his pod had zipped straight in front of the big freighter. He felt instantly sorry; he, too, had been forced to make unnecessary firings to correct for careless flying by other space pilots in the crowded sphere of space surrounding Vulcan Station.
“Hey, Hank, I sure as shit am sorry about that,” Virgin Bruce said, genuinely apologetic. “I just didn’t see that guy. Tell him I’m…”
I don’t give a goddamn how sorry you are, Neiman!
Virgin Bruce winced. Luton must be mad; no one shouts into a mike like that unless he’s full-fledged furious. It was enough to make his ears ring. The construction supervisor kept on, in just a slightly quieter tone of voice. I don’t like this crap you just pulled; you got that? I don’t like you taking off to Olympus without getting authorization, and I don’t like what you just tried to pull over there! You’re nothing special to us, Neiman, and you put on your pants the same as the rest of us! You think you got a problem, you take it to me, I’m your boss and not Henry Wallace! You got that, pal? I mean do you got that?
“Loud and clear, Hank,” he murmured. Hell, this was on an open channel. Everyone on the shift, and on Olympus—even on Earth, if they were hooked up with the right equipment—must be hearing this chew-out. “How many times do you want me to say sorry, Hank?�
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Silence for a minute. Then Luton’s voice came back, authoritative and cold. Neiman, you’re relieved of your shift. I want you to dock at Vulcan and meet me in the hotdogs. You and me are going to have a talk about your job, pal.
“Job? What do you mean, talk about my job?” Bruce almost yelled back. “Listen, Hank, who’s done the most shift-hours up here? Who’s…”
Zulu Tango, this is Vulcan Traffic. Luton’s Alabama-accented voice was replaced by Sammy Orlando’s Brooklyn nasality. We have you on course for docking at Vulcan. Do you acknowledge? Over.
Virgin Bruce checked his own bearings. No, he was not on course to dock at the construction shack; in fact he was heading a mile away from Vulcan, out to a section of the powersat most of the shift’s crew had been working on all day. Sammy was too good a traffic control officer to miss that; he was subtly letting Bruce know that he didn’t have a choice as to his destination. Not if his job mattered.
“Roger, Sammy, that’s an affirmative,” Bruce growled back. “Request docking at Vulcan Beta. Over.”
We copy, Zulu Tango. Proceed for docking in the garage. Vulcan Traffic out.
“‘Ride to live, live to ride,’” Virgin Bruce said, his customary sign-off. “Tango out.” He snapped off the comlink, squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, and murmured, “Oh, shit.”
He would have to handle this carefully, as gently as laying down a bike at sixty in a cow pasture, otherwise that was what he was going to get up smelling like: shit. He opened his eyes and began to make the necessary course corrections that would bring him in toward Vulcan Station. The long, huge grid of the powersat began to glide past the top of his windows. He could see the tiny forms of spacesuited beamjacks clinging to its underside, their helmet beacons making tiny moving spots of light along the silver girders. Very carefully, he reminded himself as he flipped to autopilot. Otherwise it was goodbye space and hello Missouri.
