Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  Virgin Bruce shook his head. “Naw, don’t bother. Henry Wallace won’t mind if he’s just a few minutes overdue.” Felapolous rolled his eyes.

  A green light flashed on a display over the hatch, signaling that the airlock was pressurized. Harris pushed himself over to the hatch, undogged it, and pushed it open, then lightly propelled himself into the cool compartment. Felapolous started to ease the drugged Honeyman through the hatch, maneuvering the beamjack in microgravity as if he were an invalid, when Mike Webb abruptly glided over toward them. Felapolous looked up at his approach. “Hey, I told you once,” the doctor warned. “Back off.”

  “Easy, Doc.” Webb’s demeanor was gentler now. He put a hand on Honeyman’s arm, then leaned forward and whispered something in his ear. No one else in the prep room could hear what was said, but they saw Honeyman’s eyes close and his lips tighten.

  Webb backed away, gently patting Honeyman on the back. “Take it easy, pal,” he said softly. “Go home and get well.”

  “Th-thanks,” Honeyman mumbled.

  “It’s nothing. It shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry for what I or anyone else said. Get well, y’hear?”

  Doc Felapolous gently pushed Honeyman through the hatch, and before he went through himself he caught Webb’s eye and gave him a small, approving nod of his head. “That was good of you, man,” Virgin Bruce said.

  “Yeah, well.” Webb shrugged as he grabbed an overhead rail and watched the two men float the rest of the way into the airlock, Felapolous holding onto the back of Honeyman’s shirt. “He’s been through a lot, y’know. Couldn’t let him go back feeling completely bad. He just wasn’t cut out for this job, that’s all.”

  Inside the airlock, Bob Harris found himself relaxing as he pulled the protective cover away from the OTV’s bow hatch and twisted the locking lever to the left. He couldn’t help it; Virgin Bruce made him nervous, even when the guy was in a jolly mood. Virgin Bruce in a good mood was like being in a small room with a cheerful maniac carrying a loaded gun; you never knew when he thought it would be funny as hell if you did a little dance for him. I’ll just get Hamilton out of there, he thought, and send him over to the prep room, where Virgin Bruce can have him. Poor guy. He doesn’t know what’s waiting for him out there.

  He pulled open the hatch and peered in. “Okay, Mr. Hamilton, you can come out now,” he said pleasantly. “Watch your head and take your time. Just be careful to… aggh!”

  A small, green plastic envelope, with the NASA logo stamped on it, sealed at one end, had floated out of the spacecraft’s interior, apparently propelled by the OTV’s passenger so that the bag drifted into Harris’ face. The kid backed off, horror registering on his face as he recognized the object for what it was. This was not the first time this sort of thing had happened to him.

  “Oh, God,” he grumbled. “Why do they always send out the sick bags first?”

  “Sorry. I was trying to hold onto it, but when we docked, uh, the jar just knocked it out of my hands and it just floated that way before…”

  “That’s okay. No sweat.” The kid was wearing baggy trousers, a T-shirt with the San Francisco Forty-Niners logo printed on the front, and a long-billed cap with the name HARRIS on the front. He reached out and plucked the filled vomit bag out of midair, taking it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger, wincing as he did so. “Happens to half the guys who arrive here. What got you, launch or orbit?”

  “Both.” Jack Hamilton floated with his back on the ceiling of the spacecraft’s compartment, waiting for Harris to get out of his way. “I’m okay, as long as I don’t move quickly.”

  “Won’t matter even if you move slowly. You’ll have it for the next couple of days.” He looked over his shoulder as he pushed himself away from the hatch. “Hey, Doc! Another case of Star Whoops for you!”

  “Know how to make a guy feel better, don’t you, Harris?” Hamilton murmured to himself. He unlatched a locker over his seat and gently pulled out his flight bag, then trailing it behind him he very carefully pulled himself along by handholds until he reached the hatch. Making sure he didn’t bash his head into anything, he wiggled through the hatch, kicking his legs and flailing with his hands, feeling like an enormous fish. He heard people laughing as he exited the OTV, but didn’t look up. I’ll maintain my dignity if it’s the last thing I do, he thought.

  Harris came back and took the flight bag’s strap off his shoulder, now that he had disposed of the bag. “Come this way,” he said to Hamilton. “Easy. Just push yourself a little at a time, and coast when you don’t need to change direction.” He reached above his head—which was to say, in the direction Hamilton’s feet were pointing—and grasped one of several rails running the length of the compartment. “Use these to pull yourself along. They’re in all the zero g sections.”

  “How do you stop?” Hamilton asked.

  “You don’t, son, you just bounce,” The speaker was an elderly, heavyset gentleman with a handlebar mustache, wearing an absurdly garish Hawaiian shirt. Surfers riding breakers and volcanoes heaving fire and smoke. He was holding onto a thin young man who, when Hamilton looked at him closely, seemed stoned to mindlessness. “And if you break anything,” the heavyset man continued, “just come see me. Modules 19 and 20, east side.”

  “That’s Doc Felapolous,” Harris said, heading for the airlock’s hatch and dragging Hamilton’s bag behind him like a toy balloon. “He’s the chief physician.”

  Nice shirt, Hamilton thought. Maybe he can lend me two next time I want to throw up. “If that’s one of your patients, I’ll… Oh, never mind.”

  Felapolous’ wide smile remained, but his gaze simmered.

  “My boy, if you get ill, don’t bother with me,” he said with an edge to his voice. “Just come up here and have Bob give you the old heave-ho.”

  “Sorry. Didn’t mean to insult you.”

  Felapolous sighed. “No more than anyone else here does,” he muttered, shaking his head.

  Harris was waiting for him by the hatch. “Ah, there’s a couple of the guys up here to meet you and help you get settled in,” he said. His voice was mysteriously low. “Let me tell you about one of them. His name’s Virgin Bruce, and…”

  “Oh, swell.”

  “Oh, no,” Harris said quickly, reading the expression on Hamilton’s face, “he’s not like that, but…”

  A long and thin yet muscular arm reached through the hatch, grabbed Harris’ belt, and yanked the crewman through the opening before Harris could do more than squawk. Someone else, wearing an unbuttoned uniform shirt with the name WEBB embroidered over the right pocket, poked his shoulders through the hatch, grinning at Hamilton. “You must be Jack Hamilton!” he exclaimed heartily. “Come on down! Welcome to the club!”

  Then probably the most singularly evil face Hamilton had ever seen looked through the hatch with an expression which the hydroponicist imagined the devils in Dante’s Inferno must have worn. “This is Virgin Bruce,” Webb explained.

  “Ah-henh!” Virgin Bruce snorted, giving Hamilton the onceover with his eyes. “He’s young! And he’s pretty! I want him, Mike! I want him NOW!”

  “Don’t worry,” Webb said to Hamilton with a conspiratorial smile. “He’s like this with all the new guys.”

  Virgin Bruce chuckled. “Ni-i-i-ice,” he said slowly. His hands were not in sight, but Hamilton could hear what sounded like Harris trying to shout something through a hand clamped over his mouth. “What I mean is…” Webb continued.

  Hamilton looked over his shoulder. Doc Felapolous was loading the drugged man into the OTV from which the hydroponicist had just disembarked. “Is that thing going back?” he asked. “Keep that hatch open, I want to…”

  Then more hands reached through the airlock hatch and fastened on his wrists and forearms. Hamilton screamed in spite of himself, and flashed to a scene from The Night of the Living Dead when George Romero’s zombies were breaking through the farmhouse door and attacking one of their victims. “Mine!”
Virgin Bruce was howling. “He’s all MINE!” Then Hamilton was pulled bodily through the hatch, and this was how he came aboard Olympus Station.

  15

  Profiles in Weirdness

  MR. ANDERSON, HAS THE OTV undocked yet?

  Anderson checked his console. “Yes, sir, one minute ago. Main engine has fired and it’s going home.”

  Its passenger, the new hydroponics chief engineer. He did arrive, didn’t he?

  “According to the manifest, he should have been aboard.”

  Yes. You did leave word with the personnel at the Docks that he was to report to me upon arrival, didn’t you?

  “Oh, yes sir!”

  Then where is he?

  Anderson looked around the Command deck and didn’t see any new faces. “I don’t know sir.”

  Well. The voice in his earphones paused. Anderson glanced over his shoulder and saw H.G. Wallace’s back was turned to him; as usual, the project supervisor was at his station, monitoring the construction work on SPS-1. He must be lost, Wallace said firmly. The new men usually are when they arrive. If he isn’t here in a few minutes, let me know. We’ll have him paged.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nice to know you weren’t serious,” Jack Hamilton said as he leaned against the door of a locker in the west terminus module. He said that just to make Bruce and Mike think that he wasn’t a complete wimp, while he was taking a few deep gasps of air.

  “Hey, if we had been serious, you’d be in a lot worse shape than you’re in now,” Virgin Bruce replied. “Are you okay there? We can get you to sickbay if you’re really hung up.”

  “I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Just let me—urrruph!” He dry-heaved spasmodically, and was glad that he had nothing left in his guts to vomit. He gasped and waved off his welcome wagon. “Just let me pull my shit together.”

  That, he realized, was going to take more of an effort than keeping some of his nerve, and humor, intact during and after Brace’s mock rape. After it was all done, he had realized that Virgin Bruce’s weird greeting had been an impromptu gag, a kind of initiation, to see how much he could take. A little sophomoric, but not unsurvivable; a good-old-boy gag he could live with.

  What had been truly terrifying was the trip down the spoke to the station’s rim. He had barely recovered from his bout of Star Whoops—cute name, he thought, very cute—before being subjected to a torture worse than the imagined horror of being molested by a sex-crazed astronaut: the gravity gradient in the spoke. His fragile sense of equilibrium had been turned inside out while climbing down the long ladder. One moment he had perceived himself as horizontal, crawling backwards in microgravity along a tunnel. In the next moment, he felt the slight but unmistakable pull of gravity, and realized he was no longer in a horizontal tunnel but in a vertical shaft. The sudden flip-flop of reality had nearly blown his guts out again, and Hamilton had only barely managed to climb the rest of the distance down the spoke shaft to the terminus module.

  He managed to catch his breath. Bruce and Mike were now eyeing him speculatively; they were trying to make up their minds whether the new guy was going to cut the mustard. Well, if I can’t, we’re all screwed, Hamilton thought. He stood up straight, willed his stomach to be still, and said, “Okay. Lead on.”

  They grinned and led him up the steps into the west catwalk, beginning a two-sided travelogue, which was both dour and enthusiastic at the same time: old boys showing the street to the new kid on the block.

  It was the details that they insisted on showing him, leaving him with many questions about operational procedures and the overall layout of the station, but giving him an idea of what the long-timers considered to be priority matters. A dappled gray cat came bounding out of an open hatch to stare at them with wide blue eyes before fleeing in the opposite direction: “That’s Asimov. They’re all named after sci-fi writers. Asimov, Heinlein, Clarke, Niven, Anderson, Bear…” The notes tacked magnetically on the walls concerning everything from the deadlines for filing income tax forms to this week’s movie in the rec room: “Hey, you shoulda met the guy you’re replacing. One day he started pointing at these signs, screaming, ‘The writing is on the wall! The writing is on the wall!’ Damifino what he was talking about, do you, Bruce?” The rec room: “This is where you spend your time off. You can lift weights or ride a bicycle. And there’s a tri-vee. We get great reception. You a baseball fan? And here’s the video game table, and here’s a bunch of books. There’s lots to do here. And, um, we’ve got video cassettes, lots of tapes. Hey, we’ve got the whole run of Star Trek and Twilight Zone and Battlestar Galactica and…”

  They had taken him down into Module 38, a compartment roughly the size and shape of a soda can, about a quarter of the way around the circumference of the station, and were showing him everything he needed to know about his bunk, when the Muzak which unceasingly floated over the speakers was interrupted by a woman’s voice: John Hamilton, will you please report to the command center, the tender voice cooed in a pillow-talk tone. John Hamilton, please report to the project supervisor at the command center. Then the canned string-section version of “Like A Virgin” resumed, and Hamilton looked up to see both Bruce and Mike staring at him.

  The expressions on their faces were so odd that Hamilton’s first impulse was to laugh out loud before he checked it. He had just arrived here, so why did they look as if he were going away? No, it wasn’t quite like that; it was as if a door had suddenly slammed shut between them. They both mumbled things about seeing if there was a ball game going on the tri-vee in the rec room, and Mike Webb forgot about showing him how his locker opened and shut, and Virgin Bruce told him how to get to the command center, which was essentially going back the way they had just come. Then they both babbled things about seeing him around and practically shuffled their way up the ladder out of the compartment. Hamilton dropped his bag in his locker, closed it, and leaned against the door for a moment, alone for the first time since he had arrived on Olympus Station. He didn’t know where or how to put his finger on it, but he had the feeling that his imminent meeting with H. G. Wallace was going to further alter his conceptions of what life for him aboard the station would be like in the future.

  Mike Webb had been right. Hamilton’s trip up a shaft ladder to the hub wasn’t so bad the second time… but it was, after all, the second time in a day he had gone from a gravity field to a state of weightlessness, or near-weightlessness, so his stomach did lurch around some. But he didn’t get sick. That was a small blessing.

  But if a return to microgravitational conditions wasn’t enough to bugger his senses, then the command center was. After Jack Hamilton slid open the hatch and entered, he snatched a handhold and paused just inside the center, trying to give himself a moment to orient himself, for the deck was unlike anything he had so far seen on Olympus.

  It was by far the largest compartment in the space station, about twenty-five feet wide and thirty feet high, arranged in a circular fashion around the access shaft at the center of the modified Shuttle Mark I external tank from which the hub had been built. The deck was divided into half-levels, like tiered balconies built onto the bulkhead walls opposite each other. Vertical poles—vertical, that is, in that they ran in the direction of the station’s polar axis; they could just as easily be horizontal, depending on one’s perspective in zero g—ran through the length of the compartment near each tier, and Hamilton noticed rungs welded onto the poles, indicating that they functioned as “fireman’s poles” allowing one to easily climb from one level to another. The floors of each level were open metal grids. Looking up, he could see through the floor above him two crewmen seated in front of a console. Fortunately the chairs were all bolted in the tiers in the same direction—there had to be some consistency here, he supposed, even within these strange gravitational conditions—but he was still a little disturbed to see a woman making her way, hand over hand on the rungs, headfirst down one of the poles, and another crewman floating calmly in a horizontal position
next to a seated colleague. All in all, Command looked as if it had been designed by the late M.C. Escher.

  After a moment, though, he realized how logically the command deck had been designed. If there’s little or no gravity to deal with, why bother with old-fashioned notions like floors and ceilings? Each tier was apparently a work station with its own separate function. The center was dimly lighted by red fluorescent bulbs, with the bluish glow from CRT’s at the work stations giving the faces of the men and women sitting in front of them a ghostly look. At least a dozen people were working at various stations on the tiers, but the noise level was surprisingly low. Each wore a headset mike, so they could speak to others at different stations on different tiers without having to shout across the compartment. There was a weird, efficient, and somewhat sterile beauty to the place that entranced Hamilton. This was what he had imagined the inside of a space station to be like.

  And, realizing that, he almost instantly took a dislike to it. A place of computers and men welded together in a fusion that took away humanity. Here there were no pegged-up notices for used cars on sale in Des Moines, no shelves of dogeared paperback books. This was a place of cool efficiency, of fingers urgently tap-tapping on keyboards, eyes straining to read quickly moving figures on glowing blue screens, everyone doing their best to make all the little systems go so that the big systems could go. Some people thrived in it, and some, like Hamilton, who disdained using electronic equipment in the growing of plants when his green thumbs and intuition could do it just as well, hated it.

  He was still gazing around at the command center when a young guy dressed—as everyone in here was—in a powder blue jumpsuit with Skycorp patches on his chest and shoulders floated up to him from a level above. “Are you the new hydroponics chief?” he asked. Hamilton nodded, somewhat distractedly. “Mr. Wallace is down here,” he said, motioning upwards with his thumb. “He’s waiting to see you now.”