by Allen Steele
We were quiet for a moment, each of us immersed in his own thoughts. After a minute Felapolous straightened himself, clapping his hands together. “Well!” he said. “I’m sure you’ve been given quite an earful, Jack, and I’ll trust that you’ll keep it all to yourself. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ll go attend to one of my principal duties aboard the station.”
“What’s that?” Hamilton asked.
“Feeding the cats.” Felapolous turned and walked to a ladder. “Sam here named them all after science fiction writers,” he said as he began to climb. “He’ll explain it to you. See you later.” Doc opened the hatch, climbed out onto the catwalk, and dropped the hatch shut behind him.
“See, it’s like this,” I started to explain. “I’m a science fiction writer myself, and…”
But Hamilton just waved his hand. “Never mind. Virgin Bruce explained it to me already. Nice guy, that Felapolous, isn’t he?”
“One of the better people we have aboard,” I agreed. “He keeps us sane.”
Hamilton crossed his arms and peered closely at me for a moment, as if sizing me up. “Y’know, I don’t think neurosis is the biggest problem here,” he said. “No one has come straight out and said it to me, but I think your problem—everyone’s aboard the station, not you personally—is that you’re bored.”
I let my eyes roll up. “Oh, gee, what a surprise,” I replied sarcastically. “I’ve been here for almost a year now, working in this can day after day, but I didn’t notice that until a new guy came aboard and pointed that out to me on his first day in orbit. Thank you, Jack, for that astute observation.”
Well, it was astute for someone to pick up on that upon arrival, and perhaps I should have given Hamilton credit for that quick bit of observation. But it was a little like telling the man who’s dying of leukemia that he’s looking a little anemic. Jack continued to gaze at me, and I shrugged. “I dunno, man. I manage to keep myself busy and entertained, but the guys who have to really face it are the beamjacks. From what I hear, their life isn’t all that great. Eight hours a day they take a lot of risks, and then they get to come back here, eat freeze-dried plastic crap, watch TV, and try to get some sleep before doing it all over again. This place reinforces boredom, y’know, and anything that’s really fun to do is either discouraged or outright forbidden. Yeah, they’re bored. We’re bored. What can you do, though, right?” I shrugged.
Hamilton returned the shrug. “There’s lots of ways you can beat boredom, Sam,” he said blandly, “if you’re willing to take a few risks.”
He had a wry smile on his face and a gleam in his eye as he said that. He was getting at something. “How so?” I asked casually. “You have an idea?”
“Well, what I mean is doing something you’ve maybe not considered doing before,” he said. “Cutting up a bit. Getting a little crazy. Taking a little risk. Know what I mean?”
“No, I don’t know what you mean,” I challenged. “Tell me about it.” He was baiting me, and it was working.
He hesitated. “Depends how much I can trust you,” he said. “Do I have your word that you won’t let the cat out of the bag?”
“Cat’s already out of the bag. Has been ever since Lou Maynard brought Spoker and ZeeGee aboard. No, no, never mind. Stupid joke. I promise, mums the word. What’s your idea?”
Jack studied me for a moment longer, then kneeled down and unfastened a pocket on the left leg of his coveralls. Without standing up, he handed me a plastic bag rolled up and secured with a rubber band.
I pulled off the band and unrolled the bag. Inside were a couple of hundred tiny, nut-brown seeds. “Okay. Seeds. So what?”
He looked up at me with a raised eyebrow—a characteristic expression I was soon to become familiar with—but said nothing as he shifted to his left knee and unsealed the pocket on his left calf. He pulled out and handed me another bag, this one bulkier than the first, also secured with a rubber band.
I unrolled that bag and stared at the contents. For a moment I didn’t recognize what was inside, but when I did, I almost dropped the bag. I glanced at the bag of seeds, then just to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me, I opened the second bag, stuck my nose into the opening, and took a big sniff.
What I smelled brought me instantly back to old college days, of sitting around in the dorm after classes and late at night; of cigarette papers and funky-looking plastic pipes with huge briar-and-aluminum bowls caked with dark brown resin which had never known the taint of tobacco; of a funny tingling at the top of my scalp and a loosening of my bowels in a way which made going to the john an unspeakably delightful experience; of finding rare humor in late-night news shows, and revelations on the nature of the universe in the way that the New England rain drizzled down my window pane; of wearing, as John Prine had once aptly phrased it, an illegal smile.
One bag was full of marijuana; good stuff, if my nose told me true. The second bag was full of marijuana seeds. My mind at once made the obvious connections. “My God,” I whispered, “you can’t be serious.”
“I’m serious,” Jack whispered in reply. “That’s just a sample. It won’t last long, but by that time the crop will have grown and we’ll have much more like it.”
“In here?” My eyes wandered over the hydroponics tanks.
He nodded. “In here. In this section. The sample you’re holding was raised in a greenhouse, in a hydroponics tank almost identical to these. The conditions were virtually the same, except of course for the higher gravity.” He smiled. “The crop I cultivated there grew to maturity in half the usual time, and I’m curious to see what growth rate will occur in reduced gravity.”
I took a deep breath and handed the bags back to Hamilton who neatly rerolled them and put them back into the pockets from which they had come. “You know what could happen if Wallace or Felapolous or Phil Bigthorn stumbled across this? You’ve got to be careful, Jack.”
“I’ll be very careful. I’ve already figured the whole thing out. If you’ll trust me, and keep your lips tight about it, I’ll show you how to beat boredom.” He smiled again. “I could tell by the look on your face you’ve smoked the stuff before. Are you in with me?”
A little bag of marijuana and a little bag of marijuana seeds. Recollections of summer afternoons and irresponsible years, discarded along the road to responsible adulthood. Tantalizing criminality of the past. I recalled that moist, thick, musky scent I had whiffed from the bag. How could I, in my approaching middle years, with the first streaks of gray already appearing in my hair, possibly consider getting into this type of thing again, here on a space station thousands of miles above Earth?
“Do you seriously believe you’re going to get away with this?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“How are we going to smoke it without anyone catching on?”
“Come back here at 1800 hours tomorrow and I’ll show you,” he said.
“Okay. I’m in.”
“That’s great,” he said. “Don’t worry. You’ll love it.”
That was the beginning. I believed everything he said.
PART THREE
High Up There
NO RESCUE YET.
I’m not surprised. Like I said before, it will take the guys back at Descartes Base a while to miss me, longer to get worried, and much longer than that to think about sending out a search party. Virgin Bruce would have fit right in with that crowd; a huge tapestry picture of Jerry Garcia on the wall of the rec room, and hours of loafing around telling themselves what indispensable jobs they were doing and complaining about the overtime hours. I would have liked to seen the look on Henry Wallace’s face had he seen Lester Riddell, the Skycorp project supervisor on the Moon and Wallace’s co-commander during their lunar expedition back in ’01. As opposed to clean-shaven, squeaky-clean, honor- and duty-first Wallace, I remember Lester: long hair, unshaven, lying on the floor of the wardroom, wearing a pair of Bose headphones plugged into a tape deck blasting oldies by Black Flag
into his cheesecloth brain. I’m supposed to depend on guys like that to save me?
Actually, I suspect, upon examining my feelings closely, that I would actually be disappointed if someone showed up now to get me out of this crevasse. It’s not like I welcome death, but… well, I’m not scared. I’m rather resigned to the fact that my air will go out in a little while and that I’ll perish here. I don’t welcome death, but what comes around goes around. We all buy Boot Hill sooner or later, and frankly there’s worse ways to go. Besides, I’m down here alone with the Greatest Discovery Ever Made, capitalized, and let me tell you, the view is wonderful.
My only wish is that Doc Felapolous was here with me. No, I don’t mean stuck in this fatal situation. I have no reason to wish that on Edwin. He was always good for conversation, for letting you get things off your chest, and the fact that he was a priest would have made things easier concerning my eventual funeral.
Oh, hell. Thinking about that aspect of my demise has made me morbid again. I’ll tell you what else I could use now: a joint of Jack Hamilton’s weed. Mighty good smoke, that Skycan Brown. The choice of spacemen across the galaxy. Two hits and you achieve free fall even in a gravity area. Three, and you unhook your tether. Smoke it in a water pipe or bake it in brownies, makes no difference; Skycan Brown’s damn good weed.
Jack got that stuff going the same week the construction crew came off the company’s work shutdown. The Senate Subcommittee on Space Science and Technology and the NASA review boards admonished Skycorp for utilizing flimsy engineering practices on the Vulcan station, but at the same time agreed that it was a freak accident that killed those men. They gave Skycorp three months in which to replace the hotdogs with hard modules, and let the company off with a warning not to let such a tragedy happen again. The political maneuvering that occurred behind the scenes can be left to the imagination. Wallace got word that the shutdown was officially over, and he sent the beamjacks back to work on SPS-1 with an enthusiastic address over the intercom system which barely made the guys lay down their cards or look away from the National League game on the tri-vee set. They all knew it would end sooner or later, and they were a little disgruntled; they had become used to loafing around on company time.
Meanwhile, Jack Hamilton was secretly germinating his little pile of marijuana seeds in an incubator, while taking measures to assure that his privacy in the hydroponics section would not be disturbed. Asserting that a constant temperature had to be maintained in his five modules, he ordered the access hatches to the catwalk sealed at all times. He installed disinfectant mats at the bottom of the ladders to make a hassle for those who did come down, forcing them to rub their feet in the mats for a minute before trodding on his decks. He planted corn in the tanks in Module 2, to grow high and act as shields for the eventual pot stalks, and had the lateral hatch leading from the rec room in Module 39 to Hydroponics Module 40 sealed by Phil Bigthorn, again to maintain the hydroponics section’s temperature and humidity on the beam. In this way, Hamilton managed to secure a small spot for a pot crop in a place with closer confines than a men’s room john, yet safer than a mountainside in east Tennessee. The boy had genius.
I knew Jack was going to upset things. I knew that the pot crop was the beginning of something big. I just didn’t forsee how far things would go, and I know Jack didn’t, either. So much for the myth of science fiction writers being able to foretell the future.
Shit, it’s getting cold down here.
17
Space
HE FELT HIMSELF SLIPPING, so he grabbed tight to his tether line with his right hand and with his left hand grasped the thin edge of the girder he had been welding, letting the laser torch dangle free, drifting away from his body by its power line. He had already shut his eyes when the first sensation of vertigo hit him. With his eyes tightly closed, the darkness was interspaced only by the faint, retina-remembered red and blue glow of the telltale lights on the inside of his helmet, ghost lights which still danced softly in his field of vision.
There was darkness, but there was also sound. He kept the comlink open for safety’s sake; if he started to pass out, he could always shout something and he would be rescued. The selector continued to scan across the channels.
Freighter on approach, X-ray forty-five, Yankee minus two, Zulu minus ten, over Vulcan Command.
We copy, Goddard, you’re cleared for final approach, over.
The channel switched to static, then: Lemme see if I can reach that, Mick, just lemme get a little more… hell, this is a bitch, why don’t you…?
Hold it, hold it, hold it—! Nyaagh, got it! This sucker won’t slip! Here, gimme the torch and hold it and kinda push it… yeah, that’s right, right like that…
Team Two-ten, you’re not on the beam and we’re not reading a joint lock. Bring it down a couple of inches and try it again.
For Christ’s sake, Vulcan, I’m looking at the thing and it’s in the right… oops, yeah, let me swing it back this way, how’re you, I mean we, set now?
Looking better, two-ten. Move it another ten feet and you’re there almost.
Static; the channel changed: I mean, could you believe that inning? Vincenti was on the fucking base, the cameras caught it from three angles, man; and the ump still called him out. I mean, did you hear those Jap fans cheer?
A-right. Give ’em a smaller field and they think they invented the game. Wanna hand me my wrench? Oops, thanks. I know. Mets blew it on this one after that, ’cause Moto got on third and that broke it, but they’re still a long way from the play-offs and they got the Cards to handle next.
Yeah. Hey, you know anybody who has tickets to the play-offs? I’m going home around then.
If it’s going to be in St. Louie, ask Bruce. He’s from there.
Popeye wasn’t spinning so badly by then. The unexpected torque from the clockwise spin he’s accidentally gone into when he had hit the MMU’s control handles incorrectly had stopped when he grabbed the tether and the girder. But he still kept his eyes shut, took deep breaths, and forced himself to concentrate on the cacophony of voices coming through his headphones. There was a burst of static and the pitch of the voices subtly shifted again.
Truss E as in Edward twenty-two-five finished, we’re holding Vulcan, waiting for the load, over.
We copy, boys, hold on for another load by Zulu Tango. Pod Zulu Tango, do you copy, over.
Switch, then: weird, something in the background, which made him listen hard—music that seemed to be coming from a pocket radio turned down low several yards behind his head. A gentle, lilting rhythm, with a breath of electronic pedal steel guitar blowing in like a summer breeze off the Gulf.
Zulu Tango, we’re getting interference, over.
He opened his eyes for an instant, saw the absolute blackness of cislunar space, the starlight blotted out by the shining hemisphere of Earth swinging into view from the right. The last time he had looked at Earth, it had been to his left and below him. Feeling his senses lurch, he quickly shut his eyes again.
Static. A voice called to him. Station one-Betty, you copy, over?
Zulu Tango, acknowledge, over.
Static, channel change: Zulu Tango here, we’re in visual range of Eddie twenty-two-five, this is nice, boys, listen.
Then suddenly the music rose, and it overcame the static and flowed into his mind with a backbeat, and a gentle, nasal voice sang to him words whose meaning become apparent at once:
“The Wheel is turning and you can’t slow down,
“You can’t let go and you can’t hold on,
“You can’t go back and you can’t stand still,
“If the thunder don’t get you then the lightning will.”
His eyes opened, and there was space, stretching out to eternity, a vast carpet of fathomless darkness, starless and black as sleep, nothingness that was at once impenetrable and transparent for light-years. Part of him instantly recoiled, and part of him stared at the wonder, saying softly, look, look, this is the tr
ue reality, nothing else matters, this is everything, this is God, don’t blink or you’ll miss the show….
“Won’t you try just a little bit harder,
“Couldn’t you try just a little bit more…?”
Static. Then a loud, overpowering voice: “Neiman! Can it!”
Snap! There went the music, gone like that. Popeye blinked a few times, relaxed his vision. He looked at his hands, and was surprised to see that he wasn’t holding anything. The tether line was floating several inches away from his right hand, and the edge of the girder was many feet from his left hand. He had let go of the powersat, and was held to it only by the tether, and he hadn’t noticed that he had let go.
Glancing upward, he saw the powersat stretching away above his head as a silvery grid several miles long pointed almost directly at the three-quarters-full Earth. Not far away to his left, a pair of beamjacks hovered underneath a truss section; he could see the brilliant white flash of a hand-held laser torch spitting against a joint as one of the pair welded in a section held in place by the other worker. Much farther away, another beamjack gently guided himself toward a long stay which was being maneuvered into place by a work pod. Through the grid’s square openings, he could see another pod coasting above him and the powersat, carrying long aluminum sections from Vulcan’s stores out to another point of assembly on the gargantuan structure.
Neiman, I’m not telling you this again. You got permission to play your damn tapes in your pod, but you’re not going to broadcast them over any of the comlink channels. It screws up communications. Do you copy?
Yeah, right, I copy, Hank. Don’t get upset. The music abruptly ceased.
Station One-Betty, this is Vulcan Command. You copy there, Popeye?
Oh, hell. Hooker thought, they must have missed me. “Vulcan, this is One-Betty, we read you.”
What’s going on, Hooker? I called for you a minute ago.
“I’m okay, Sammy. I just had a slight case of vertigo, so I shut my eyes till it went away.”
