Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  Hamilton nodded, and carefully followed the crewman as they pulled themselves up—or down, according to one’s own personal perspective—a pole’s rungs to a tier that was two half-levels up and a third of the way across the deck. Hamilton found himself at the largest tier, fifteen feet long, with a long console wrapped concave inside a bulkhead wall. There were three chairs fixed to the floor in front of the console, facing a set of computer and television screens, and in the middle one was seated Henry George Wallace, the project supervisor for Olympus Station and the Franklin Project.

  Hamilton nearly did not recognize him.

  When he had applied to Skycorp for work and when he had been in training—not to mention when the lunar expedition had happened and when Olympus was being established—Hamilton had gotten used to seeing pictures of Henry G. Wallace. TV interviews, magazine and newspaper photos—all had shown a handsome, smiling man in his mid-thirties, with thinning, stylishly cut blond hair and an athletic build—so good-looking and square-cut, he was almost a throwback to the NASA astronauts of the 1960s, a modern space hero.

  This was not the same person. H. G. Wallace had physically changed: His eyes, under which there were now heavy bags due to body-fluid shift in weightlessness, seemed more intense, staring bleakly ahead; he had gained more weight than could be accounted for by fluid shift, and had a pot belly; his hair had been cut back until it was a thinning crew cut. Wallace crouched forward in his chair, his neck tucked down almost parallel with his shoulders. The smile was gone as if it had never existed, leaving only a gaunt, dissatisfied pout.

  Wallace looked over his shoulder and saw Hamilton hovering behind him, but instead of saying anything, the project supervisor simply turned his attention back to the station in front of him. A couple of TV screens showed pictures of the SPS-1 powersat from angles Hamilton guessed were shot from the construction shack. An LCD between the screens showed a computer-generated animation of the powersat’s gridlike structure, a simulation that periodically changed at the touch of a nearby crewman’s fingers on a keyboard. Wallace leaned forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on the TV display, his right hand absently stroking his headset mike, ignoring Hamilton.

  Suddenly he snapped, “Hold it!” The crewman seated at the keyboard tapped a command and the animation of the powersat stopped its procession across the screen. “Zoom in on the bottom half of the truss section in the center,” Wallace said. “That one there.” The crewman glanced at Wallace’s pointing finger and at the screen, then quietly tapped out a new command. The animation expanded and rotated until the truss was magnified several times.

  “Gimme the specs,” Wallace said in a rasping voice, and a cluster of numbers appeared on the left margin of the screen. Wallace peered closely at the figures, then said, “Hank, that truss is off, dammit. Who was doing that section?”

  A voice came from an audio speaker above the console. It’s off, Henry, but not by much. Our instruments say it’s only .057 centimeters. That’s within the acceptable limits of…

  “Bullshit!” Wallace snapped with an anger that made Hamilton step back a little. “That’s not goddamn acceptable, Luton! Why do you think we’ve got lasers to make measurements if it isn’t going to be perfect!”

  Wallace calmed down. He rubbed his hand across his forehead in exhaustion. “That section was done on the twentieth?” he asked, addressing no one in particular. He reached to his own keyboard and tapped in a complex command, and a screen to his far right lit with a list of names and numbers. The project supervisor studied it for a moment. “It was either Harwell or Hooker,” he muttered. “Figures. Harwell was probably carrying on about baseball and Hooker was probably daydreaming again. Hank, warn both of those dummies that if they don’t get it together, we’ll start deducting the time wasted in fixing their mistakes from their paychecks.”

  I’m telling you, there’s no mistakes on that section…

  “And I’m telling you that there is and that when we get off of this shutdown it had better get fixed.”

  Roger, Command, the voice said after a barely perceptible pause.

  As if he had suddenly remembered Hamilton’s presence, Wallace turned halfway around in his seat to gaze silently at the hydroponicist. He didn’t say anything, only stared at Hamilton with an expression which seemed to mix hostility, curiosity, and fear. It was unsettling, and Hamilton knew of nothing else to do but to lock eyes with Wallace and try not to display any emotion.

  There was something singularly disturbing about Wallace’s eyes. They reminded Hamilton of the eyes of a drug addict who had been driven insane by junk; of a lion he had seen in a zoo, which had restlessly prowled its cage, looking straight ahead, driven crazy by the loneliness and the austerity of its existence; of old, nineteenth-century English engravings of the caperings of the inhabitants of Bedlam.

  In a word: madness. Wallace had crazy eyes. C’mon, now, don’t jump to conclusions, Hamilton thought as a chill crept down his back. He’s overworked, under pressure. Stress. He has a lot of responsibility. He looks that way because it’s been a hard day of chewing out people for making fraction of a centimeter mistakes. He can’t be crazy, because Skycorp wouldn’t let a crazy man run this operation.

  Suddenly, H.G. Wallace unbuckled the straps holding him into his chair and gently rose, floating upward only a few inches. His mouth suddenly arced into a smile, although his eyes remained wary. “So you’re Mr. Hamilton, our new hydroponics chief,” he said, extending his hand. “I was wondering when you would arrive. Welcome to Olympus Station, son!”

  Son? Hamilton tried to not smile as he clasped Wallace’s hand. At the age of twenty-eight, it had been many years since anyone had called him “son” unless they were in their sixties or older, and Wallace was no more than forty. “I was a little held up at the, ah, docking area,” he explained, deciding not to tell Wallace about his welcome at the Docks by Webb and Virgin Bruce. “I was just shown to my bunk by a couple of your crewmen and dropped off my…”

  “Who met you?” Wallace asked, in a less than demanding tone.

  “I believe their names were Webb and… ah, Virgin Bruce?”

  Wallace’s face clouded at the mention of their names. For a moment he simply stared at Hamilton, and this time Hamilton turned his eyes away; that lunatic gaze was a bit much to take at close range. Lord, what was going through this man’s mind?

  Abruptly, Wallace gave him a slap on the arm and laughed out loud. Hamilton was forced to fumble blindly above his head for a handhold, but he had already sailed five feet away from the project supervisor before he managed to stop himself, colliding backwards with a passing crewman as he did. The scientist mumbled an apology and caught a dirty look from the crewman. “Well!” exclaimed Wallace, as if he hadn’t noticed the accident. “I suppose they didn’t give you a proper orientation to your new home, did they? Come on then, Mr. Hamilton, let me show you Olympus Station!”

  Without waiting for a reply, he did a neat somersault, grasped the rungs of a pole and started descending headfirst toward the lower levels of the compartment, leaving Hamilton to clumsily follow feet first. Son of a bitch, the hydroponicist thought as he tried to catch up with Wallace, who gave no sign of slowing down for him. He meant to slap me across the compartment. He might have even hoped that I would run into that guy. There’s no way he could not have known what he was doing, if he’s that seasoned to zero g. Hamilton realized that, in his own way, H.G. Wallace had just given him some kind of rebuff, and a warning. But for what?

  Once out in the hub’s passageway, Wallace began to reel off a lecture about the station as he led the way toward the spoke shafts. Some of it Hamilton had heard before, from the two who had met him at the Docks. It seemed to him that Wallace was deliberately ignoring the fact that he must have already learned some of this, since Hamilton had told him that he had been to the rim already. For instance, Wallace seemed compelled to tell him just how he should descend the east spoke ladder and how to cope with the gravity gra
dient.

  It seemed to Hamilton that Wallace was determined to be the first person to show the new man around the space station, even if simple logic dictated otherwise. It was enlightening to hear Wallace’s description of things: the Muzak coming from the speakers (“Rather pleasant, don’t you think? It’s a little unorthodox, but it’s soothing and improves efficiency… and the men just love it.”); the food (“Skycorp has a contract with one of the companies which supplies in-flight meals to the major airlines. They’re balanced meals, very tasty, and can be sent up with maximum efficiency. The men love it!”); and the shortage of water for hygienic purposes (“Most of the time, of course, we have to settle for sponge baths with cold water, but we do try to allow everyone a hot shower at least once or twice a week. The men don’t mind.”) None of this matched what Bruce and Mike had expressed about annoying music, tasteless food, or the fact that most of the crew stank from having washed infrequently.

  They were halfway around the station’s rim when they came upon a crewman who was coming the opposite way. Hamilton took one look at him, and realized that he was the saddest example of the crew’s morale he had seen so far. Blond hair growing long and unkempt, circles under his eyes, hollow-chested, shoulders bent. When he looked up and saw them coming, the crewman’s eyes darted to the floor, but instead of walking past, Wallace abruptly descended on him.

  “Hello, Popeye!” Wallace exclaimed grandly. He wrapped an arm in a buddy-buddy way around the crewman’s shoulders and turned him around to meet Hamilton. “Mr. Hamilton, allow me to introduce you to one of the best construction specialists we have aboard: Claude Hooker.” He looked condescendingly at Hooker. “Claude used to be a shrimp fisherman before he came to work for us, so that’s why we call him Popeye!”

  The poor wretch winced as Wallace said that. Hamilton looked at him and realized that it had been a while since he had seen a more unhappy-looking person. Not noticing—or, perhaps, choosing not to notice—Hooker’s discomforture, Wallace went on. “Popeye is one of our old-timers here on Olympus,” he said. “Not only has he been here for one two-year shift already and just signed up for another tour of duty, but he’s even turned down the one-week vacation the company offered him when he agreed to sign on again. He’s a real professional, hardworking spaceman, aren’t you, Popeye?”

  “Yeah,” said Popeye Hooker, staring emptily at a space somewhere around Hamilton’s knees. Hamilton recalled seeing Wallace on the command deck inspecting recent work on SPS-1 and wondered if this man was the same Hooker that Wallace had accused of wasting time and daydreaming.

  “This is John Hamilton, Popeye,” Wallace explained. “Why don’t you tell him a little about life here on Olympus.”

  For a moment it was as if the crewman had not heard Wallace, and Hamilton thought he was going to mumble off something meaningless. Then, as if a notion had passed into Hooker’s mind, he raised his haunted eyes and looked straight at Hamilton.

  “It sucks,” he said in a hollow voice, without any emphasis or inflection. “It’s a fucking purgatory. If I had anything to go back home for, any reason to go back to Earth, I would go, but I don’t and that’s why I’m here. We’re all bored out of our minds, and this guy here is a goddamn maniac, and a couple of weeks ago I had a couple of friends killed out in space, so don’t listen to anything this fucker has to say about how swell our lives are up here. It’s shit, and the only reason why I’m still here is because I’m just a little crazier than he is, and if I were you, I’d get on the next OTV out and go home before…”

  Wallace took the arm he had wrapped around Hooker’s shoulders and used it to hurl the crewman against the far wall of the corridor. The one-third gravity lessened the violence of the shove, but Hooker still hit the hard plastic wall with enough force to make him crumple to the floor.

  Hamilton immediately started toward him, and Wallace roared, “Let him alone! Let that coward alone!”

  Hamilton stopped and stared, first at Hooker, then at Wallace. Hooker, holding his neck and chest painfully, got up off the metal grid floor slowly. He glanced first in Wallace’s direction, then looked at Hamilton and gave a weak grin, which seemed to make him a little stronger than he had been when Hamilton had first laid eyes on him. He didn’t say anything else; he simply turned and hobbled his way down the upward-sloping corridor.

  Wallace had been staring at Hooker with inflamed eyes. He shut his eyes now and slumped against the catwalk wall. He raised his right hand to cover his face and his chest rose and fell as if he were sobbing silently to himself. Hooker was gone by the time he exposed his face again.

  Hamilton saw that the project supervisor had composed himself again. More than that; it was as if Wallace had blocked the incident from his mind. The hydroponicist thought he heard footsteps coming from the direction in which they had been walking, but when he looked he didn’t see anyone there. Someone had witnessed this savage episode, and, probably wisely, had decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

  “Well,” Wallace said. He straightened his shoulders and smiled brightly at Hamilton. “I suppose you want to see where you’re going to be working, eh?”

  Oh, don’t mind me, Hamilton thought as he forced himself to nod his head. I only get like that sometimes. Wallace said nothing more but simply turned and started striding down the catwalk. Back straight, eyes ahead. As if nothing had just happened.

  He stopped after a moment and looked inquisitively over his shoulder at Hamilton. “Coming?” he asked.

  Right, Hamilton replied silently. He started following the project supervisor—and deliberately kept a few paces behind.

  “Of course, you realize that this is a difficult environment. We’re isolated from everything we’ve grown up with, in a place where danger lurks at every step, with the crew working eight-hour shifts each day. No one ever said that this was a safe environment, but then, when you think about it, when has there ever been a safe environment for man?”

  They had been in the five-module Hydroponics section for the past fifteen minutes, and Hamilton had still not seen much more of his workplace than when they had first come down the ladder. He was anxious to give the section a thorough inspection, particularly the rows of tanks which held the station’s vegetable crops, but Wallace was apparently deaf to all the subtle hints he had dropped. This was Wallace’s chance, it seemed, to twist his new senior crewman’s ear and lecture him interminably about the promise and perils of life in space.

  “As you’ve noticed, Skycorp doesn’t have a uniform, although I’ve requested that the men aboard this space station maintain a decent wardrobe. But the thought remains the same. There must be discipline, or everything goes to hell, excuse my language. Otherwise things become lax, and it leads to carelessness, and carelessness kills, Mr. Hamilton, carelessness is the murderer in space.”

  “Right,” Hamilton said, for the fifth or sixth time during H.G. Wallace’s monologue, hoping again that making sounds of agreement during Wallace’s spiel would ease him out of the compartment.

  “Absolutely!” Wallace said, smiling broadly with the knowledge that Hamilton agreed. “It was carelessness that killed those two unfortunate men a couple of weeks ago. Someone on Earth was careless in making the fuel pod for the FFWS that was near Vulcan Station at the time of the accident, so it exploded. But more importantly those two men were killed because of their own carelessness, because they shouldn’t have been there… I mean, they shouldn’t have been… they shouldn’t have put themselves into that position in the first place, do you know what I mean?”

  No, not at all, Hamilton mutely responded. “I see what you mean, sir,” he said aloud.

  “Right!” Wallace exclaimed. He slapped the rung of the ladder with his palm. “Yes! Right! It’s a question of discipline! If we’re ever going to conquer the final frontier, we’re going to need to maintain discipline. We’re building a bridge between the heavens and the earth, between America and the stars. We’re on the edge of the greates
t adventure that man has ever known, and the adventure is only beginning, Hamilton! This requires perfection, it requires discipline, oh, and yes, it requires carelessness!”

  Wallace stopped. He face turned red. “I mean…” he began.

  At that moment two things happened at once. First, the overhead hatch leading up to the catwalk opened and a pair of feet in sneakers stepped onto the ladder leading down into Module 42. “Hello!” a voice called. “Anyone down there?”

  Then another hatch in the right wall of the compartment opened and a thin man with a mustache stepped through. He stopped and looked first at Wallace, then at Hamilton. “Hi,” he said. “You must be the new hydroponics man.”

  “Yeah, I do believe that’s who he is.” Doc Felapolous climbed down the ladder and walked over toward Wallace and Hamilton. “Pardon me for interrupting your conversation,” he said amiably to H.G. Wallace, “but I encountered this gentleman while he was being piped aboard at the Docks, and I didn’t really have a chance to introduce myself.” He held out his hand to Hamilton. “Edwin Felapolous, son. Chief physician. I hope you’re over your bout with spacesickness by now.”

  Hamilton took Felapolous’ hand, but before he could say anything, Wallace butted in. “I’m sure he’s over it by now, Edwin,” he said somewhat stiffly. “I was just giving him his orientation tour of the station….”

  The thin man who had come in from the next compartment walked forward, also holding out his hand. “My name’s Sam Sloane,” he said. “I’m chief programmer at the data processing center next door. I heard you come in, and I just wanted to…”

  “I’m certain you’ll have ample time in which to introduce yourself, Mr. Sloane,” Wallace said quickly. “As I said, I was giving Mr. Hamilton his orientation tour of the station, and I…”

  “Oh, now, Henry, I’m sure Mr. Hamilton knows his way around here.” Felapolous waved his hand expansively toward the tanks of algae arranged in rows down the length of the module, with feeder lines dangling from nutrient tanks suspended from the ceiling, and bright growth lights shining on them from overhead tracks. “After all, as I understand his record, Jack… may I call you Jack?… holds a Ph.D. from Yale in space bioengineering and is a former fellow in hydroponics with the Gaia Institute at Cape Hattaras.” He turned and patted Hamilton’s shoulder. “One of Vishnu Suni’s former students, are you not? I seem to recall a paper you had published in the Journal late last year…”