Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  To his surprise, it was Dobbs’ turn to look uncomfortable. He looked away with a growing pout on his face, his shoulders slumping forward. A characteristic Dobbs pose; Crespin had once overheard someone ask aloud if that was how their enfant terrible looked while sitting on the throne. Clayton wiped the smirk off his face when Dobbs looked back at him.

  “I know it’s my design and my baby and I’ve got some responsibility for it,” Dobbs began slowly, “but—and this is going to surprise you—I have no desire at all to go up there.”

  “I know that,” Crespin said, allowing himself a small smile. “We went over that a year ago, with the construction shack.”

  “I guess I didn’t make myself clear then,” Dobbs said, keeping his cool, but just so much. “Lemme make myself clear: Going up for myself scares the hell out of me.”

  “There’s little to support a reason why,” the Vice-President of Operations said, running his finger idly along the edge of an aluminum paperweight on Dobbs’ desktop—a refined sample from the Moon, if he recognized the granular feel of its surface. “You fly just about everywhere you go, and Nicki books you on everything from commuter crop-dusters to Concordes. You’ve even done a trip on the Vomit Comet, and no one I’ve talked to told me you disgraced yourself….”

  “Hey, where did you… who said you could check my medical record?”

  It was Crespin’s turn for condescension. “Clay,” he said solemnly, “I’m a vice-president here. I can look at whoever’s record I want. Remember that. I can talk to whomever I want about you. Remember that. Clay….”

  Oh, cut the crap with him. “Clay, your job here is mine. I can get you dusted off so quick”—he snapped his fingers and put his fist down hard on Dobbs’ desk, a foot away from the engineer’s foot—“you’d be back to playing with model rockets with your MIT frat brothers.”

  “That was the International Space…”

  “Forget it. The point is, Dobbs, without my help you don’t get research support from the Board. You know that, but you don’t remember it. When I’m not around to pull strings with the Board, whom you yourself charge with insanity, you become another talented and efficient wheel-bearing here. You earn your keep as an assistant operations manager, but you got your reputation in R & D. Yet you take so long, Clay, and sometimes, people run out of faith….”

  “Okay, can the shit, will you Kenny?” Dobbs’ cool was gone, and Crespin could see the fury in his face. “You can cut the bullshit now. You know it’s true and I know it’s true, so you can quit gloating already.” He paused and shook his head, scowling at Crespin. “I don’t know why you’re doing this, though. After all, you hired me.”

  “I hired a smart young man,” Crespin replied. “It’s the spoiled little kid that I enjoy torturing.”

  “Okay, okay, I can accept that!” Dobbs shouted, throwing his arms up and staring at Crespin with wild eyes. “What I can’t figure is why you want to scare the hell out of me? Jesus Christ, haven’t I made this clear yet? I’m a space engineer! I’m fascinated with designing ships and suits and tools and better latrines, but it’s just an abstract with me, a particularly intriguing set of unique variables! I’m not a goddamn spaceman! The thought of taking off in a shuttle of any kind—myself taking off—shit, Kenneth, it scares me out of my wits. And experiencing microgravity makes me even more ill!”

  “You know there’s stuff for that—scopolamine, biofeedback, the rest. That’s if you get spacesick, and there’s no statistical promise that you’ll get that. If I were you I’d worry about it as little as I could,” Crespin said smoothly.

  “You bastard. You’re really enjoying this, aren’t you?”

  “I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t funny. Yeah, I’m enjoying this.”

  “Shit.” Dobbs looked out over the operations center. The first of the night shift was beginning to arrive, taking over their stations in the tiers. “Well, it gets me out of here, I guess.”

  “Do you mind that?”

  “I won’t miss it. Massachusetts I miss,” he said thoughtfully, “but not this Disneyworld. I’m gonna get you for this, Kenneth.”

  “You’re the best man for the job, Dobbs. That’s why they want you up there.”

  Dobbs turned his chair around, swinging his feet off his desk, and faced his terminal again, deliberately turning his back on Crespin. “Get lost. Go away. I gotta work.”

  “Happy trip,” Crespin said. Dobbs didn’t reply, but only reopened another file on his system, and Crespin eventually turned and walked silently out of his office.

  PART TWO

  Welcome to the Club

  DO YOU REMEMBER THAT rhetorical question you used to ask yourself, or your friends, in those rare philosophical moments when you were a kid: If given a choice, would you rather die by heat or by cold? Would you rather freeze or fry? At this point, the end of my life, I’m faced with that question again, and in spades, because it’s become a matter of practicality.

  See, according to the heads-up display in my helmet, the life-support batteries are beginning to wear out. I guess they’ll probably go before my oxygen supply, although as I’ve explained before it’s really a three-way drag race between air, power, and the duration of this tape. If I want to keep talking—which, frankly, seems the only way to keep myself sane right now—I should try to accommodate power failure. There’s both light and shadow in this crevasse, and the difference is within a couple of hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Continuing to sit in the shadow-side might save my batteries longer, but my toes are beginning to get cold. However, if I get up and walk to the other side and sit in the sunlight, I’ll soon suffocate and roast when the batteries burn out while trying to keep the suit cool. An added consideration is the lifetime of this tape; the recorder has its own battery, I think, but I’m afraid of the tape melting.

  I think I’ll stay in the shade. I’m made in the shade. Memo to the Almighty: You should include a note with the writers you make in the future, reading: “Batteries Not Included.”

  Ha, ha, ha.

  I think I’m losing my mind.

  Where was I? Boredom, right. It didn’t get any better after the July accident at Vulcan. Maybe it gave us all something to talk about for a while, and everyone on Skycan had their own views of how it happened, but unfortunately the upshot of the accident was that talking was all it gave us to do. Skycorp got a roasting from the press on the matter of the hazardous equipment the company was using in space, but that was nothing in comparison to what happened when NASA, the unions, and the House Subcommittee on Space Science and Technology got into the act. Between Congressional oversight hearings, NASA regulatory reviews, and the general pissing and moaning by the Aerospace Workers union, Skycorp took a lot of shit for the deaths of those two men. I heard through the grapevine that Skycorp had only barely managed to stop a New York Times reporter from taking a shuttle up to investigate first-hand the safety conditions on Vulcan and Skycan; they did it by claiming that the OTV’s had a full passenger manifest for the next three months, which was baloney. It was just as well, I suppose. If the Times reporter had not found any more life-threatening design flaws—and actually, there really weren’t any; it was boring up there, but it was still reasonably safe—he probably could have discovered enough juicy stuff from talking to the beamjacks to write one hell of an exposé, and no telling what he would have made of a conversation with H.G. Wallace, our allegedly sound-of-mind project supervisor. We didn’t need any more bad publicity, thank you.

  The problem we encountered was that, as soon as the shit hit the fan downstairs, Skycorp’s brass in Huntsville made what they saw as a prudent decision. They ordered a temporary work shutdown on the powersat project. No one except vital supervisory personnel was to be allowed on Vulcan Station, and absolutely no one was to be allowed in the hotdogs until they were deflated and replaced with Olympus-type hard modules, which were being hastily thrown together in Alabama. They called it a paid vacation for the construction crew. We called it tw
o weeks in hell.

  There was nothing to do! Actually, I didn’t mind it so much, because my work in the data processing center went on, and in the extra free time I used the chance to work on my science fiction novel, Ragnarok Night, but for the majority of space grunts living on Skycan it was the worst thing Skycorp could have done to them short of ordering Cap’n Wallace to depressurize all the living compartments. As I pointed out before, most of the beamjacks were your basic, Joe Lunchpail construction types, not intellectuals. Some of them had probably never picked up a book since they had cheated their way through high school exams on Silas Marner and The Old Man and the Sea. Fewer still knew anything about meditation or any of those other mind games one can play to zip away unwanted hours.

  Fortunately for a few, there was one guy—I can’t recall his name, except that he was a Jewish guy from Long Island who was a first-class Dungeons and Dragons Dungeonmaster. Someone had told me that he was a world-class player until something had happened which made him ship out to work in space. He had gathered a few converts to the game while on Skycan, and during the shutdown they took the opportunity to launch an extensive, wild campaign this Dungeonmaster had been spending months dreaming up. They took over bunkhouse Module 14 and chased everyone else out, and played like fanatics for several days straight until the DM either knocked off the players with his tomato-pulper deathtraps or raised the survivors so many levels that they became near-deities. They had fun.

  But for the vast majority, life during those two weeks was the epitome of dullness. Their lives had become built around an eight-hour shift of putting together that huge, spaceborne Erector Set, and without it they were lost. They hung around in the rec rooms watching either baseball games or soap operas beamed up from Earth, or fooled around with the six half-grown offspring of ZeeGee, or played blackjack or poker or solitaire, with Mr. Big checking in to make sure they weren’t disobeying Wallace’s edict against gambling. They chased after the few female crew members, and getting nowhere they closed themselves off in their bunks and masturbated. They tried to throw Frisbees on the catwalk, which was both absurd and boring. They went low-gravity jumping in the spokes until one guy sprained his ankle badly and Doc Felapolous outlawed the sport. If they had possessed knives they probably would have played mumbletypeg. They wrote long, dull letters to their families and friends, many of which were probably never sent. Sometimes you found them just sitting in chairs or lying on their bunks, staring at nothing, thinking about something they didn’t want to talk about. Popeye Hooker was that way a lot, but no one ever knew what it was about except that it vaguely involved his ex-wife.

  Maybe the Skycorp executives thought they were saving lives with their shutdown, but they didn’t save anyone’s nerves.

  Only one eventful thing came out of the godawful period, and that was the arrival of Jack Hamilton on Skycan. No one knew it at the time, but the new hydroponics engineer was destined to change life for the beamjacks, and also make history.

  12

  Milk Run

  LISA BARNHART’S ALARM CLOCK went off with a sustained whine at three o’clock in the morning just as she felt she was falling asleep. As usual for her on Thursday nights she had gone to bed at seven o’clock, just after dinner, in order to be up and refreshed before dawn on Friday. Annie, however, had decided that it was not yet time for her mother to go to bed. The baby had begun wailing about an hour after Lisa had gone to bed, and nothing Carl could do had been able to soothe her, so it had been Mommy who had to get up and walk her child around their apartment, rocking and singing to Annie all the lullabies she could remember until, an eternity later, the baby had fallen back to sleep.

  So Lisa was still fatigued, even after her shower. Talking to someone usually helped wake her up, but Carl was dead asleep on his side of the bed, and she knew better than to even contemplate waking him up. He would either be a complete grouch, or would make an attempt at having sex with her, neither of which would wear well with her for the rest of the long day ahead. And there was even less sense in waking up Annie, she thought as she poured the first of several cups of coffee she would consume that morning. One-year-olds were notorious for not keeping up their end of the conversation.

  Lisa pushed open the glass door leading to the balcony and walked outside. Even in the early morning hours it was still hot outside, a reminder of yesterday’s broiling heat and a harbinger of today’s broiling heat. The balcony overlooked the beach, and as she sipped her coffee she listened to the constant crash of the surf. Far out at sea she could see the lights of freighters prowling the Atlantic coast; or perhaps they were the spy trawlers which the Soviets, to this day, continued to dispatch to the Cape whenever a launch was scheduled.

  She turned to her left and gazed up the coast toward the old Eastern Test Range and the Kennedy Space Center. Brilliant blue-white searchlight beams lanced up into the night sky, converging a couple of thousand feet above the launch pads. She clutched her coffee cup and stared at the beams with wide eyes, feeling her pulse quicken. The beams were focused on Pad 39-A; in their center, transfixed in a chrysalis of light, was the Willy Ley.

  Lisa drank her coffee, reminding herself to hurry. I wonder if I’m treating Carl and Annie right, she thought. Annie needs a mother and Carl needs a wife, and when they need me I’m either off training pilots or in preflight sessions or taking off for another milk run. Carl says Annie cries every Friday morning, when she wakes up and finds out that Mommy’s not around to change her or feed her. How do you explain to a baby girl that Mommy’s 300 miles up in space?

  She put her coffee cup down on the railing and gave herself another moment to stare at the lights on Merritt Island. She could take that extra moment; the techs at Launch Control knew what they were doing, and so did the pad rats and her copilot and everyone else. All she had to do was fly the thing. Shit, she thought, I used to enjoy this job. I had wanted it since I was five years old and Sally Ride and Judy Resnick and Rhea Seddon and old John Young himself were my heroes. Now I’ve arrived, I’m an astronaut, and all I want to do is be a full-time mother. She smiled grimly and pushed away a tear with her forefinger. Oh, baby, what do you do when the thrill is gone?

  Half an hour later she pulled up to the security gate off Route 3 and held up her ID card. The elderly guard shined his flashlight through the windshield and peered in, closely inspecting both her pass and her face. The old guy did it the same way every Friday morning; one would have thought the senile old coot would have remembered her face by now. Finally he stepped back and waved her on. Dingbat, she thought. I wish he would at least get his eyes checked. As she drove past, the armed MP on the other side of the road swept up her arm in a customary salute, which Lisa returned with an absent nod.

  Driving down the Kennedy Parkway, she passed the darkened marshes of the wildlife sanctuary surrounding the launch facilities and the industrial area, which had blossomed over the past twenty years to become a small city of its own. She looked out for critters which might appear on the road—two months ago she had been forced to swerve for an alligator which had decided to cross the road just then—although she was sure most of the early morning traffic had already scared the critters away from the road. One day, she mused, she was going to be piloting Willy Ley for a touchdown on the shuttle landing strip and there was going to be one of those big lizards sunning itself on the concrete.

  The Vehicle Assembly Building was directly ahead, a mammoth white block standing out in stark relief under the spotlights, the American flag and Bicentennial star glowing against the huge alabaster walls. She parked in the lot beside it and walked to the Crew Prep building next to the KSC cafeteria building. Years ago, astronauts had prepared for launches at the training facility in the industrial area near the NASA headquarters building, but once the number of flight-worthy shuttles topped a dozen and the launches became scheduled on a weekly basis, the new building had been constructed. No longer were the crews given steak and egg breakfasts, paraded through the wal
k out past a battery of journalists waiting in the corridor, and driven to the pad in the company of the launch director, with an escort of security cruisers and helicopters flying overhead. I would have liked to have had that treatment just once, Lisa thought as she pushed through the glass and waved her ID at the security guard standing inside. It might have been nice to have been thought of as a VIP….

  Taking an elevator down to the basement, she went into the locker room and changed out of her civvies into her regulation blue jumpsuit with a Skycorp patch over her left breast and “L. Barnhart” on her right. After lacing up her high-topped sneakers and tucking pens, headset, flashlight, and calculator into her pockets, she pulled on her own, nonregulation addition to her uniform: a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, a reminder of her girlhood home.

  Leaving the locker room, she strolled down the hallway to the Green Room, where the crews waited until the technicians made the finishing touches on the birds.

  “Morning, Lisa.”

  “Morning, George.” She stopped at the bulletin board and pulled her clipboard off its hook. “Got my breakfast ready?”

  “In the skillet, waiting just for you, beautiful.” The old cook hobbled around the kitchenette counter to his stove, displaying the limp he had picked up many years before as a chopper pilot in Vietnam. “I’m through with that newspaper if you want it. Coffee and O.J.?”

  “Yeah, thanks.” She threw a glance at the Cocoa Today lying on the table, but decided not to pick it up; if she started getting engrossed in the Sports and Op-Ed pages, she’d never get to looking over the flight reports and her checklist. She sat down at the table and began thumbing through the sheaf of papers on the clipboard. The room was nearly empty, except for one other person in a jumpsuit sitting at the far end, a tall guy whom she barely noticed.

  George reappeared with her plate: scrambled eggs, toasted bagel, and a slice of Canadian bacon. How the cook managed to keep track of what every shuttle crewman ate before launch was anyone’s wild guess; he never had to ask twice. “So what do you think is going to happen with the Cards-Reds game tonight?”