Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  “Well, yes, I, ah…”

  “Oh, you were once with the Gaia Institute?” Sam Sloane interjected. “I’ve read much about that place. They were the innovators of the Ocean Ark.” He pumped Hamilton’s hand enthusiastically. “You’re simply going to have to tell me everything about that place. I once heard a lecture by Suni and I was very impressed by the things he said about…”

  “Gentlemen,” Wallace said, a glowering expression growing on his face, “I was speaking to Mr. Hamilton about this space station and its mission.”

  Felapolous turned his head to look at Wallace. “Oh, Henry, I’m terribly sorry,” he said, wide-eyed and apologetic. “I almost forgot the second reason I tracked you down. You’re needed up on the command deck at once. Huntsville needs to communicate with you about the timetable for coming off the work shutdown. I believe it’s urgent.”

  Wallace’s eyes widened. His eyes darted back and forth between the three men. Then his back straightened and his gaze became self-involved. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said formally. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me…”

  He turned, walked across the compartment, and quickly scaled the ladder up and out of the module. Sloane watched him until he had disappeared from sight, then he looked at Doc Felapolous with a raised eyebrow. “Nice improvisation,” he said softly. “I’m surprised that he didn’t ask why he wasn’t summoned over the intercom, though.”

  “He might in a few minutes,” Felapolous replied, resting his hands behind him against the edge of a tank. “But I’m sure he’ll think of a reason why he wasn’t.” He looked at Hamilton with an amused expression. “How are you doing, Jack?”

  “Fine, just fine,” Hamilton replied. He felt bewildered by the sudden flurry of conversation. His eyes glanced from the two newcomers to the overhead hatch and back to the two men again. “Would someone mind explaining to me what just happened here?”

  Sloane and Felapolous looked at each other and smiled. “It looks like we both came to the same conclusion at once,” Sloane replied. “That, ah, you might want a little relief from your talk with our project supervisor.”

  “Well…” Hamilton paused. “He is… a little intense, isn’t he?” he said guardedly.

  “A little intense.” Sloane grinned, clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Well!” he said to Felapolous. “That’s as diplomatic a way to describe a full-blown maniac as you’re going to find, right, Doc?”

  16

  Seeds of Dissent

  IS IT TOO MUCH to say that I anticipated that things would be different from the first moment I laid eyes on Jack Hamilton? I guess so. That type of foreshadowing occurs only as the cheapest of coincidences in pulp fiction, usually written in mauve sentences: Sam looked at the handsome young stranger who stood before him in the space station and thought, “Yes! He’s the one! He’ll be the one who shall redeem us!” I’ll admit, I embarrassed myself by sending short stories with shit like that to editors at Analog and Amazing, but any yo-yo—well, nearly any yo-yo—knows that revelations like that just don’t occur in real life. Even Saint Peter doubted who Jesus was until He did his little stroll across the waters….

  But I will go so far as to say that Jack Hamilton made an impression on me the moment I walked into the hydroponics section, if only because he was putting up with Cap’n Wallace’s rambling ravings while keeping a straight face. A perfectly deadpan look; nary an upturned eyebrow, a rolling eyeball, or a wry or a condescending or a humoring smile. But I also sensed at once that not only was he not buying anything that Wallace said, but he had come to the same conclusion that ninety-five percent of Skycan’s crew had long since reached: that our head honcho, chief, and project supervisor was a certifiable Daffy Duck. A Daffy Duck trying to sound like William Shatner.

  I was impressed. Not many men can look such flat-out weirdness in the eye and not blow their cool. So forgive me if I can’t foreshadow things by saying that I knew at once that our new chief hydroponics engineer would be the man who would soon take the whole apple cart and kick it down Dead Man’s Hill.

  Doc Felapolous gave me an angry glance. “Sam, don’t you think you’re stretching things a little by calling your boss a full blown maniac?” he said in a tone of voice that meant, You better watch where you’re speaking your mind, son. I’m Wallace’s friend—if you don’t remember.

  I didn’t care. “Doc, I thought the man was only eccentric, until I saw the way he treated Popeye Hooker a few minutes ago,” I said. “You spent time with Hooker after the accident, so you tell me if he deserved to be shoved and called a coward.”

  Felapolous cleared his throat and looked down at the floor. Hamilton looked from him to me. “I thought I heard someone else in the corridor,” he said. “That was you?”

  “Entirely by accident,” I replied. “Yeah, I saw what happened. Then I came back here and called Doc on the intercom, told him to get over to Hydroponics as soon as he could manage. Not a bad fib you concocted, Doc.”

  “Only a subterfuge to get Henry back to Command so we could explain things to our new arrival.” Doc stared at the floor for another moment before looking back up at Hamilton. “It’s a little difficult to explain, Jack… may I call you Jack?”

  “Call me anything you want except late to supper.” That old saw seemed to appeal to Doc’s country-boy persona, and he grinned. “Tell you what,” Hamilton added, “why don’t we talk while I check out my new workplace? I haven’t really had a chance to inspect the place while, ah…”

  We both nodded in understanding. Wallace had cornered him down here, so Jack Hamilton had not really been given the chance to see the hydroponics section. As Felapolous talked, he began to wander around the compartment, inspecting the tanks, looking at the consoles, checking readings and so forth.

  “I won’t pretend that there isn’t something wrong with Henry Wallace,” Felapolous began, “but I’ll ask you to bear in mind that his malady isn’t an unusual one for spaceflight. I’ll also ask you to remember that I’m a medical doctor and not a psychologist, or at least not much more than an armchair psychologist with a better than average knowledge of space medicine. First, you have to keep in mind the unusual physical environment in which we’re living. In effect, this is a closed universe. There are no windows or portholes because, in a spinning environment, the sense of momentum can induce vertigo.”

  “I can understand that,” Hamilton said, dipping a finger into a tank to check the water level. “I got sick on the way up when the shuttle did its rollover during launch.”

  “Happens to a lot of people,” Felapolous said. “We call it the Star Whoops.” I started to nose-hum the old John Williams movie theme, but Felapolous shushed me. “Some people get used to it, and some people never do, so the station was designed as a closed environment, without that distraction. It’s cut down on cases of spacesickness, which is good because the crewmen spend less work time in the infirmary losing their lunches.

  “Unfortunately…” Felapolous paused to collect his thoughts. “Well, there’s a side effect, and as I said, it’s not terribly unusual for spaceflight. Psychologists call it the solipsism syndrome, and so far no one has come up with a cute name for it.

  “It’s not unique to spaceflight. It’s occurred with submarine crews and with other people who stay for long periods of time in a cooped-up environment. Essentially, it means that a person loses touch with the outside, and begins to believe that the world begins and ends within the confines of his environment, that it is the entirety of his universe.”

  Hamilton looked up from a tray of carrots he had been examining. “Hey! Sort of like the crew of that starship in that old Robert Heinlein story Orphans of the Sky, right?”

  “You’ve read that!” I exclaimed. I warmed to Hamilton even more. Damn if it isn’t nice to find a person who’s familiar with the classics!

  “I don’t know the work,” Felapolous said, “but I’ll take your word for it that you’re aware of a literary paradigm. In the case of t
he syndrome, it poses a paradox for the victim, because it’s difficult for someone else to prove he’s wrong. In an acute case, moreover, the victim will not only come to believe that his environment is the length and breadth of the universe, but he will eventually come to believe that he is the center of the universe.”

  Hamilton grunted and led the way into the next of the five hydroponics modules. This one was mainly filled with growing vegetables: lettuce, onions, bell peppers, peas, more carrots. I got hungry just looking at it all. Considering that our entrees came freeze-dried from Earth, Skycan’s home-grown veggies were one of the few luxuries we had aboard. I deliberated over swiping a pepper or a carrot when the other two turned their backs. “But I saw Wallace watching TV monitors while I was on the command deck,” Hamilton said, “so it can’t be that he’s entirely out of touch with the real world.”

  “Well, no,” Felapolous agreed. “Wallace’s case isn’t quite according to the textbook. Although he knows that there’s still space and Earth and so forth, he seems to think that he’s the center of it all, that he’s the only factor which matters.”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “He seems to believe, from my conversations with him, that his particular vision is the only one which matters. You have to realize what kind of person he is. He’s not only spit-and-polish military material, he’s also the product of lifetime fantasies of becoming a… well, a space hero. Coupled with his record as a famous astronaut, of blazing some frontiers in space, it has reinforced his ego, which has in turn reinforced the solipsism syndrome, to the point where no one can disagree with what he thinks, unless they manage to make him believe that their ideas are really his ideas. Then he’ll listen. Anyone who doesn’t agree, exists outside his universe, and therefore becomes an enemy.”

  “Well, that’s paranoia, not this syndrome.”

  “Yes, well, partly that, too,” Felapolous admitted. “You would have had to have been here for a while to understand where it all springs from. From the beginning of his tour of duty aboard this station, Henry didn’t fit in with the majority of the crew. While he’s had these visions of conquering the high frontier, exploring the farthest reaches of space, et cetera, most of the crew are here mainly to make a living….”

  “To make a buck,” I threw in, breaking my silence. To hell with shoplifting carrots; this was getting interesting. “These guys are mainly blue-collar, salt of the earth, hard-hat types, with a wild-ass streak that would make them want to take on this particular job. They don’t want to hear discourses about manifest destiny among the stars, they want to make a bundle at a high-risk profession and get home alive. When Wallace tried to lecture these guys, they shut him off, alienated him. He came on too intense. Hell, I myself gave him a chance. I tried to eat dinner with him once on the mess deck, and frankly he was boring as hell. Space, space space—that was all he wanted to talk about.”

  Felapolous nodded. “Sam puts it bluntly, but that’s essentially the way that it was. It’s now come to the point where Henry spends most of his time either on the command deck or in his private cabin and is rarely seen by the crew. He has his meals brought to him there and discourages anyone meeting him, unless it’s a new crewman such as yourself, whom he’ll try to convert—without success. I’ve continued to have informal therapy sessions with him—I’m one of the few persons aboard he trusts…”

  “You’re Dr. McCoy to his Captain Kirk,” I threw in.

  “Well, I prefer to think of myself as a confessor…. Did I tell you, Jack, that I’m also a Jesuit priest?… but, um, yes, you could phrase it that way. As far as Henry now believes, he’s still the intrepid and daring commander, backed by a hundred and thirty loyal crewmen, among whom he admits there are a few bad apples whom he is willing to tolerate. Besides his mental health, my concern is also with his physical health, since he spends most of his time in the weightless condition of the command deck, as demonstrated by the facial, skeletal, and body-mass ratio changes he has gone through due to spending so much time floating, and the shift in his internal liquids and metabolism that go with it.”

  “I noticed that he looks different,” Hamilton said.

  “Said much more succinctly than Doc could ever put it,” I said, giving Felapolous a wink. “But it’s not just zero g, it’s his mental condition. I mean, his eyes, the way he looks at you…”

  Hamilton shuddered a little. “Right. I noticed that too. I guess he isn’t the only case aboard, either. Like the guy he shoved around back there. Popeye, he called him. And the guy who showed me around earlier, Virgin Bruce…”

  Felapolous stared at him. “God Lord,” he said seriously, “you’ve met Virgin Bruce? Poor devil.”

  I broke up. “No, no,” I insisted after I got hold of myself, “you’ve got it wrong with Brucie. He’s not crazy… or at least not in the usual sense of the word. I mean, he’s crazy, but he’s a sane kind of crazy. Relatively harmless, if you can expect that from an ex-biker. He intimidates everyone at first, but don’t worry, he’s a good person once you get used to him.”

  “On the other hand, Popeye Hooker is a different matter.” Doc Felapolous shook his head and shoved his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I haven’t been able to figure him out,” he said, more to himself than to either of us. “At first I thought he was simply homesick, just as we have several people aboard who are counting the hours till their contracts run out and they can ship back to Earth, but then just a couple of months ago he signed on with Skycorp for another two years. I discussed it with him, tried to talk him out of it, but he was adamant, and since he was then basically healthy in mind and body, I signed the form.” Felapolous sighed. “I regret to say I made a mistake. His mental health is deteriorating. He’s in a state of depression, and as far as I can tell, it stems from guilt, or feeling guilty, about something he left behind. But he won’t say a thing about it, and until he shows some overt sign of mental illness, I can’t recommend that he be sent back.”

  “Like the guy I saw you putting on the OTV earlier, when I arrived,” Hamilton said. Felapolous nodded. “And Virgin Bruce… Christ, what a name… Virgin Bruce mentioned something about the last hydroponics engineer you had aboard, named McHenry.”

  “McHenry, right,” I said. “He went right over the top. One day he started shouting at people in the rec room that the writing was on the wall. Pointing at the wall, screaming, ‘It’s there, can’t you read it!’ Doc had to come up and sedate him.”

  “Shipped him back two days later,” Felapolous said. “I had therapy with him up until then, and he still wouldn’t tell me what he saw written up there.”

  “Okay, okay,” Hamilton said, leaning up against a wall and folding his arms across his chest. “So here’s the million dollar question. You have guys sometimes go crazy up here from the confinement or whatever, you send ’em back. Henry Wallace, the top dog here, is crazy. You’ve diagnosed that with some certainty. So why haven’t you sent him back.”

  I looked at Doc, who was silent for a moment. Our senior physician had painted himself into a corner by explaining all this so openly to Hamilton. Now he had to answer the obvious question. I stood back and waited; Doc and I were friends, but he still hadn’t explained that to me, either.

  “First off,” Doc said quietly at last, “you have to both promise me that this doesn’t get beyond this compartment.” We nodded, and Felapolous glanced up at the overhead hatch leading to the catwalk, making sure it was closed. “I have explained to Skycorp Command about Henry’s condition, and I have recommended to them that he be replaced.”

  “So they know Wallace has gone bonkers,” I said. “Why hasn’t he been replaced?”

  “I discussed this with one of their senior planning officials, a young Turk named Clayton Dobbs,” Felapolous said. “He argued economics in return. Remember, this whole thing—the station, all the people on it, all the billions of dollars which have been invested—are geared toward one immediate goal, the construction of the Pr
oject Franklin powersats. The potential for construction holdups and cost overruns is staggering. There have been both of those, so far, but except for the recent incident of the Vulcan blowout, most of the problems have been ground-based. As far as Olympus, Vulcan, Descartes, and the other space-based operations are concerned, everything has been kept on schedule and reasonably within budget. We’re still on the production possibilities curve, as Dobbs phrased it. The economics equilibrium between costs and long-term benefits has not yet been upset. As usual with the corporate system, they have put the credit on the front-line man.”

  “Oh, shit,” I murmured, “I can see it coming.”

  Felapolous nodded. “Right you are, Sam, and in a sense, so are they. Henry’s the man in charge. He’s keeps everyone on line, keeps operations going smoothly, keeps the project alive. The investors would bail out otherwise, and that would sink the whole ship. Yes, McGuinness and Skycorp are aware that our project supervisor is unhinged, even though they keep it to themselves as a corporate top-secret. But the inarguable fact of the matter is that he gets the job done. As long as he does that, they don’t give a damn if he wears a pink bunny suit and runs around the station declaring himself the prom queen.”

  Hamilton let out a breath. “Good economic sense,” he said. “If it takes a crazy man to do the job, let the crazy man do it.”

  “You can’t argue with success,” I added. Felapolous nodded, and I knew he was right. It was scary, but it was logical.