Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  He was almost on top of the rip and was reaching for the sealkit where he had strapped it to his right thigh, when he noticed something peculiar: a jagged piece of metal, glinting in the light, slowly tumbling away from the rip. It was obviously a piece of the fuel cell which had exploded—he could tell from its general shape and form—but if it was, why had it not lodged itself in the hotdog when it had come so close? Indeed, why was it drifting away from…?

  Oh, my God, he thought. It’s the piece that was lodged in the skin. It had to be. But if it had become dislodged, then why wasn’t the hotdog exploding?

  He looked down at the rip, and saw a stubby white cylinder sticking out of the hole. It was effectively stopping the rip like a cork in a bottle. Amazed, he stared at the object for a long moment under the glare of his helmet lantern’s beam. There was something familiar-looking about that thing, yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on it….

  Suddenly, he began to laugh. He heard Luton’s voice in his headset: Neiman, listen, it’s okay. Mike Webb’s inside the hotdog and….

  “I know, Hank, I know!” he nearly shouted. “I can see it! It’s his damn finger!”

  11

  Huntsville

  SKYCORP’S CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS WAS located in Huntsville, Alabama, in that part of the western side of the town where the aerospace contractors traditionally nestled up against the George C. Marshall Space Center. That part of the little Southern town had begun to grow in the 1960s; the boom had continued into the 1990s, when NASA and the U.S. government had been the western hemisphere’s largest purchaser of aerospace goods and services. The facilities of Boeing, Rockwell, and General Electric constituted their own city-within-a-city, a high-tech enclave on the doorstep of Marshall Center, waiting for the next major contract.

  But by the last years of the twentieth century, the contractors had begun to go into business for themselves instead of for NASA. McDonnell Douglas started it first, when it followed the early success of its Project EOS space experiments to develop a space-manufactured pharmaceuticals industry. North American Rockwell and several smaller companies began to launch their own rockets as the result of Government deregulation and White House encouragement, and soon private launch services in the United States were able to successfully compete not only with the original commercial space-carrier, Europe’s Arianespace, but even with NASA and the Soviet Union, in providing reliable, economic launch facilities for commercial industry.

  It was only a matter of time before someone in the space business took the big jump. It turned out to be McGuinness International, the Atlanta-based firm that had established itself as a leader in nuclear technology and experimental aviation. McGuinness started a branch company, Skycorp, which would be dedicated exclusively to space development. The parent company immediately sank over $50 billion into the company, building state-of-the-art facilities in Huntsville and combing the aerospace industry to hire the best management, scientists, and workers in the field.

  Early on, Skycorp announced that its first major goal would be establishing permanent quarters in high orbit to house over a hundred space workers and construction facilities in both space and at the site of the tiny U.S. lunar base. In the industry—behind closed boardroom doors, on the golf links, in the pages of Aviation Week and Space Business News—it was rumored that Skycorp’s second major goal was to build a network of solar power-plants in space, to operate themselves and sell the electricity to American utility companies. In New York, Chicago, and London, some boasted that Skycorp’s upper management would soon be taking swan dives off the Cape Canaveral launch towers, while other quietly instructed their brokers to buy Skycorp stock and get ready to sell it at once if things got too weird.

  So far, Skycorp’s stockholders had remained happy with their decisions and no one had gone high-diving on Merritt Island.

  The Skycorp compound on Saturn Boulevard in Huntsville consisted of the main administration building—an enormous, eight-story A-frame made of white granite and stainless steel-surrounded by dome-shaped laboratory and test buildings and small, squat hangars. The complex included a private airstrip and its own telemetry field, a grove of dish antennae that maintained the communications links with Skycorp’s offworld holdings. The complex was located prestigiously close to Marshall Center, close enough that the tops of the Atlas and Saturn boosters on display at the Alabama Space Museum could be seen over the treetops from the administration building windows.

  A bronze plaque set in a marble slab by the entrance drive bore the corporate logo, a sphere traversed by a stylized spaceship flying past on a cometlike path. Golden letters below the logo read “SKYCORP A Division of McGuinness International.”

  Two basement sublevels beneath the administration building was the company’s own Orbital Operations Center, which closely resembled the spacecraft-tracking centers at NASA’s Houston facility and the Air Force’s CSOC facility in Colorado Springs. In some ways, Skycorp’s SpaceOps was superior to the Government’s centers. The computers represented the latest, fastest advances in artificial intelligence. The work station displays, through satellite relays, gave OOC techs the same information available to Olympus and Vulcan commands. The electronics had EMP protection and the center itself could be sealed off and maintained independently in the case of nuclear war, a major consideration when the center had been built, although that was no longer quite as important.

  The center was designed for comfort as well as efficiency. The chairs in front of the tiered consoles were leather upholstered, the temperature in the room maintained at a comfortable 72 degrees. The lighting was dim enough to allow the red and blue light from the computer and TV monitors to stand out, yet not so dim as to make one squint in order to read a printout. On busy days there were polite young men and women working as gofers, gathering hard-copy from the line printers and fetching coffee and sandwiches from the commissary.

  It had been one of those days. The blowout of the Vulcan hotdogs had electrified the thirty men and women manning SpaceOps that afternoon. In the hours that followed those critical few minutes of the emergency they had been trying to figure out the exact circumstances of the accident: running simulations through the computers, gathering what scant data could be gained from Olympus and Vulcan, communicating with eyewitnesses in orbit.

  The team had, after four hours of feverish work, come up with little more than they had initially learned. No one knew exactly what had caused construction pod Alpha Romeo’s fuel cell to explode, and it would not be until Hotdog One was dismantled and shipped back to Earth that a lab team could analyze the wreckage to determine exactly how a piece of shrapnel managed to cause the explosive decompression that had killed the two crew members. Now, as the long twilight of a summer evening settled in, most of the team had gone home for the day, leaving a skeleton crew of five technicians to monitor the boards and a few tired gofers to clean up the mess of coffee cups, crumpled sandwich wrappers, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

  Kenneth Crespin found Clayton Dobbs in the operations supervisor’s glass-walled cubicle at the rear of the operations center, staring at a long sheaf of printout which trailed from his hands into a pile on the floor next to his desk. Crespin stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at Dobbs and wondering how long it would take the young man to notice his presence. Probably never, or at least until Dobbs decided it was time to get up and go home, which from the reports that had filtered to Crespin’s attention would be sometime in the wee hours. Like many geniuses, Dobbs apparently had an infinite concentration span, and like many ambitious young men of his caliber, he slept only when it was absolutely necessary.

  After a moment Crespin cleared his throat; ten seconds later, Dobbs noticed, his angular head jerking up from the printout. “Oh,” he said. “Hello, Kenneth.”

  Crespin smiled and took a couple of steps into the cubicle. “I’m surprised you’re still here, Clay. I understand your team has figured out everything which led up to it. Are
you still trying to find something else?”

  Dobbs said nothing for a moment, then dropped the printout on his desktop—the surface of which was invisible, buried completely by paper—and leaned back in his armchair, knitting his fingers together over his negligible stomach. “So how did the press conference go?” he asked mildly.

  Crespin shrugged. His eyes wandered to framed pictures on Dobbs’ walls, of shuttles lifting off from the Cape, and Olympus Station being built in high orbit. “Well enough, I suppose, considering. I didn’t participate, but I spoke with our reps afterwards and was told that it was rough, but at least not quite as rough as when we had that worker killed on Olympus two years ago. The press has come to expect that people can and do get killed in space just as they can and do on Earth. They came away satisfied.”

  “They came away satisfied.” Dobbs blew out his cheeks in a great sigh. “I’m sure those guys’ families have also come away satisfied. For Christ’s sake…”

  “Clay…”

  “You know what I’m looking at here?” Dobbs continued, tapping a finger on the computer printout he had been studying. “These are the results of a computer projection my guys ran on the blowout, taking what we found out about the event and letting the machine run a simulation.” He nodded his head toward the terminal beside his desk. “I’ve compared it with a similar profile I did before we had decided to attach hotdogs to Vulcan, and the numbers match almost exactly. I remember a couple of years ago waving the earlier projection in front of the Board and telling you guys that inflatable crew modules, especially in a construction zone, wouldn’t cut it.”

  “Clay…”

  “Don’t ‘Clay’ me, Kenneth. We both know the score here. The board pooh-poohed my objections. That horse’s ass Roland said that the risk was well within the limits of acceptability, that making temporary crew habitations on the shack was more economic than shipping up a couple of additional hard modules.”

  Dobbs stood up and shook his head. “I’m sure you didn’t do it, but if there was any justice in the world you would have had Roland make the phone calls to those families to tell them that their husbands or sons were dead.”

  “What do you want me to say, Clayton? That you were right all along? That we should have listened to you, and that we’re sorry that this happened, and that next time we’ll take the bluster of our resident boy-genius seriously?”

  Dobbs grinned wryly and ran his hands through his uncombed mop of curly black hair. “Yes, that would be nice. You could also add, ‘And, Clayton, we’ll make sure that it never happens again.’”

  “Your ego is amazing.”

  “You know what I think is amazing?” Dobbs turned his head to gaze with wide, angry eyes at Skycorp’s vice-president. “That you hired me to be your resident boy-genius with one attitude and are now treating me with this attitude. I remembered you telling me that you wanted a trouble-shooter, how space was still a big unknown environment and what Skycorp needed was someone who knew the problems intimately and wouldn’t be afraid to buck the system when it was going wrong. ‘Don’t be afraid to raise hell, Clayton.’ You said that. Well, that’s what I did, and everyone told me to shut up, and now two men are dead and you’re carrying on like this is business as usual. Boy, that sucks.”

  Crespin closed his eyes and leaned against a wall. Lord help him, he was beginning to regret hiring Clayton Dobbs. The kid—Dobbs was only twenty-seven—had made a name for himself at MIT as one of the foremost experts in the nitty-gritty details of space engineering. Crespin had first met him when Dobbs joined NASA’s civilian Space Advisory Board: an unkempt young man wearing jeans, an unironed shirt, and a clip-on tie, who slouched in a chair in the back of the room and systematically pounced on and deflated the wild-eyed extrapolations made by NASA’s section chiefs. Dobbs was a hardheaded pragmatist in a field often dominated by hazy-minded dreamers. It was an indication of Dobbs’ attitude toward space that he claimed to loathe science fiction, an oddity when one considered that the average Skycorp employee had at least one novel by Clarke or Niven or Brin on his or her bookshelf.

  Crespin had recruited Dobbs, offering him salary and responsibilities far and above anything he could have earned in academia. Unlike many child prodigies (and, indeed, Clayton Dobbs had displayed his genius at an early age, first entering MIT as an honors freshman at the age of fourteen), the young man was not shy of the world outside the ivory tower. Dobbs had taken the job because, he claimed, he wanted to make his ideas work, and he dreaded having to teach classes to underclassmen.

  But it was at times like these that Crespin felt as if he should have left the rebellious young engineer in Massachusetts, where he belonged.

  “Okay, Clayton, okay. Mea maxima culpa. We should have listened to you, we shouldn’t have sent up untested equipment, we should have heeded your warnings. I can’t say that it won’t happen again, though, especially concerning men getting killed up there. Three guys have died now on this project, and you know damned well that three more, or three hundred more, may die before those powersats are completed. But what the hell else do you want me to do?”

  Dobbs stared down at his desktop, then looked out over the floor of SpaceOps. “Shit, I dunno. I dunno what any of us can do. I just dread having to lie to the union boards and the NASA inquiry boards over the next couple of days.”

  “You mean you won’t tell them what you know about this?”

  “No, I mean I won’t blow the whistle on Skycorp. I guess I’ve become too much of a company man to let something stand in the way of the powersats getting completed.” He shot a glance at the older man. “Relieved?”

  “Yes, though I didn’t think you’d blow the whistle, anyway.”

  “Think of it as a testimony to my own cynicism and character corruption. So what did you want to talk to me about, Kenneth?”

  He’s sharp, Crespin thought. He knows I don’t make social calls at times like this. “Big Ear,” he replied.

  “What? Oh, that.” Dobbs settled back down in his chair and propped his feet up on the desk. “What about it?”

  “Have you been keeping up with it?”

  Dobbs shrugged. “They had another test today. The NSA boys on Olympus managed to track down and identify a couple of phone calls which contained key phrases. The Fort Meade computers were able to trace the calls to their correct locations. So far, it seems like the system works, which should please the Senate Select Intelligence Committee no end.”

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “Well, besides thinking that they should rename it the J. Edgar Hoover Memorial Spy Satellite Network, I have the typical soulless scientist’s reaction of ‘okey-doke with me.’”

  “Funny to hear that from one of the men who designed the system, to compare it to J. Edgar Hoover. Why, I think it was even you who dubbed the thing Big Ear.”

  “What can I say? The idea of total social breakdown in this country scares me. Global terrorism scares me even more. I think it’s time we started trying to take preventive measures, and if it means compromising the First and Fifth Amendments, hey, Tom Jefferson and James Madison didn’t live in a time when Presidents got shot by rifles with laser sights and high school kids were able to build nuclear devices in their basements.”

  Crespin folded his arms over his chest and gazed thoughtfully at Dobbs. “You have an interesting set of morals, young man.”

  “Fuck morality,” he replied, staring up at the ceiling, “I want to survive in this century.”

  Fuck morality, he said, Crespin thought. Is this the result of our new age, of our enlightened approach to high technology? Would Dobbs say something like that if he wasn’t a pampered, loudmouthed intellectual, or is my son the jock going to come home from Texas A&M next weekend saying the same things? “Sometimes I think you say things simply for shock value,” he said aloud.

  Dobbs laughed. “Yeah, okay, maybe so. So what’s the point? Why are you asking me these things?”

  “Well, you kn
ow of course that they’re completing the Ear’s command and control module.” Dobbs nodded. “It will probably be launched within schedule, sometime before the end of the summer. Because of this accident, though, we can probably expect closer scrutiny by the press, as well as the labor unions, over what Skycorp’s doing, including what we’re sending up at the Cape.”

  “So you’re now reluctant to launch this thing from Cape Canaveral,” Dobbs finished. “So what? Ship it over to Vandenberg and launch it there.”

  Crespin shook his head. “We’ve already checked with the Pentagon. The manifests for their shuttle launches are full until early next year, and there’s too many military cargos for remanifesting. The solution we’ve arrived at, tentatively, is to subcontract Arianespace and have the thing sent up on one of their boosters from South America.”

  “Ah, so. And since I’ve done some work for the ESA in French Guiana, you’d like for me to go down to Kourou to oversee things.” Dobbs shrugged offhandedly. “Sure. No problem there.”

  “Well, there’s more. Some of the Board also thinks that the resident boy-genius who helped design the system should follow the module up, and participate in the shakedown on Freedom. That is, in outer space.”

  Dobbs stared at him, unblinking, for a full minute before he answered. “The Board of Directors is out of its fucking mind,” he said at last.

  Crespin stared back at the brat for as long as it took him to make up his mind whether to kick over his chair. Too much of a waste, he decided; Dobbs would probably just tell the story around the lunchroom for kicks, and Crespin would only get embarrassment for his trouble. Dobbs knows you’re trying to work your way onto the Board, he reminded himself. Don’t give the ungrateful little bastard anything to screw you with. “What makes you say that?” he asked stiffly, never taking his eyes off Clayton’s.