Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  “Yeah, I remember the feep. What about him?”

  “He doesn’t just guide. I hear he’s a drug dealer.” Whitey lowered his voice. “He sells the stuff from a place out near the beach. Someone told me that Laura’s one of his regular customers. You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean. You’re a real asshole for not telling me. Don’t say anything,” he added coldly. “Just tell me where he lives.”

  “I don’t have anything on my mind. I just like to be by myself. What’s wrong with that?”

  “Not a thing. Unless it starts to get to you.” Hamilton gobbled down the rest of his brownie. “It’s like cabin fever. I once heard a story about a trapper who lived alone in a cabin up in Alaska. As the story goes, the guy would only come down out of the cabin once or twice a year, to this little town to buy a truckful of groceries and supplies, then head back to his cabin. He had a radio, but rarely did anyone ever hear from him. Nobody even seemed to know his name. Well, a winter passed and no one saw this guy, so a state trooper or a friend or somebody went up into the mountains to try to find him. He found the cabin, and…”

  “He found the guy hanging from a rope from the rafters,” interjected Virgin Bruce. “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  A flash of gold disappearing… gone… gone, forever gone…

  Hamilton looked at Virgin Bruce balefully. “No. The trooper, or whoever he was, found the guy in his cabin. He stopped outside the door and listened to him talking to himself. He was telling a joke, and at first it sounded like he was telling it to someone, except that the trooper knew that the guy was alone. The guy told this long, complicated joke, and when he got to the punch line, he cracked up. He broke up laughing, but he didn’t finish the joke… and then he started to tell it all over again.”

  “Weird,” Virgin Bruce said flatly. “Gimme another brownie and promise you won’t tell us any more bullshit stories.”

  “I promise I won’t tell any more bullshit stories,” Hamilton said, reaching into the bag for another brownie. “But do you see what I’m getting at, Popeye? You’re setting yourself up to be like that trapper. All you’re doing is telling yourself the same thing over and over, whatever that thing is. But you’re not in a cabin in some godforsaken part of Alaska, man, you’ve got a hundred people here with you. There’s no reason for you to hide. Tell us what’s bugging you, Popeye.”

  Popeye didn’t say anything. He put his back against the bulkhead behind him and gazed through the canopy. Olympus’ rim was coming into view, a ring of cylinders reflecting the sunlight off their sides. When he looked closely, he could see the ring moving. In the background he could see the Moon coming into view from the far right, one-quarter in shadow. He felt lightheaded, and wondered dully if something was wrong with the oxygen-nitrogen mix in the pod’s atmosphere, but almost as quickly as the thought occurred to him, it went away. He was beginning to feel good, whatever the reason.

  “I don’t like my nickname,” he mumbled.

  Virgin Bruce whooped. “You don’t like your nickname! Jesus H. Christ! You think I like mine?” His head went back and he howled with laughter. “Do you know what it’s like to be called a virgin all the time, when you probably qualify for a gold medal in the Sex Olympics?”

  Hooker saw what Bruce did, even though Bruce himself didn’t realize what he was doing; he saw Virgin Bruce’s finger punch the activation button on the communications board. He howled into his headset mike: “Sex! I want sex now!”

  A second later his eyes went wide and he settled back into his seat. “Ah, negatory on that, Olympus Control,” he intoned. “I think we have a communications dysfunction, ah, malfuck, um, malfunction here. No, we’re… I mean, I’m in good shape, Beta House over.”

  He punched out of the comlink, closed his eyes, and let out a sigh. “For the love of Mike,” he murmured, rubbing his eyes while the others laughed, “we must be getting stoned on that stuff.”

  Hooker laughed for a few more seconds until what Virgin Bruce had just said sank in. “Getting stoned on what stuff?” he asked.

  “Don’t change the subject,” Hamilton said. “C’mon, Popeye. It’s just between the three of us. Virgin Bruce told everyone in the rec room last week about his sordid past. Now it’s your turn. You used to be a shrimp trawler, right?”

  “I was never a boat,” Popeye said, laughing. Remarkably, he was feeling good. For the first time in weeks, maybe months, he felt relaxed. It was an easiness he used to feel when he looked through the telescope in Meteorology, until he gave that up, following the blowout of the hotdog. As the pod rounded the rim of the space station, Earth swam into view, half in shadow, half in light. Automatically, his eyes sought the Gulf of Mexico.

  “C’mon,” Hamilton prodded. “Tell us about it and I’ll let you in on the secret ingredients for that brownie you just ate.”

  “My wife,” Popeye said. “My ex-wife, actually, though I kept on sleeping with her after our divorce.” Somehow, he felt detached from himself, as if he were standing outside his own body, looking in, listening to himself speak. “I loved her a lot, even after I found out she was stealing money and using it to buy cocaine.”

  He was sure the fat man had cheated him on the deal, though he couldn’t be sure. He had never bought coke before; it was one thing he had always tried to stay away from. But it didn’t matter, even if you could prove the little cellophane wrapper in his hand contained less than the two grams Rocky had promised or if it was considerably less pure than claimed. It didn’t matter.

  “To be honest with you, I’m surprised that you’re buying from me,” Rocky said as he counted the tens and twenties Hooker had just handed him, “but if you’re interested in trying it, I assure you that you’ll like its quality and tell you that it’s always available from me. However, if you’re just trying to set me up for a bust, I’ll also be candid and let you know that’s a foolish thing to do. The cops have been bought and paid for, and if you go to them with an accusation, my friend behind you will gladly visit you at home and break your arms.”

  “That’s bad news,” Virgin Bruce said sympathetically. “It’s that shit which got me in trouble, too. So what’d you do?”

  Hooker flipped the packet around a couple of times between his fingertips, then slipped it into the breast pocket of his denim jacket. “I don’t plan to do either. It’s for her.”

  “Ah.” Rocky smiled at him. “It’s a present for her. I can dig it. I’ll give you a little bonus, then, since you’re a new customer. She hasn’t been here yet. If you want to give her your present, I’ll let you wait here.” He smiled his treacherous, hungry smile, which had probably made little girls smile and made their mothers wonder if he should be reported to the police for suspected child molestation. “I have everything you need right here,” he added.

  “Did you bake pot into those brownies?” Popeye asked. From the smiles he got from Hamilton and Virgin Bruce, he knew he had pegged the funny consistency and taste of the confections correctly. “Thought so. They’re not bad.” He sighed and settled his back against the rear bulkhead again. “Man, I used to enjoy smoking pot. Got into the stuff some nights when I’d be out on the ocean alone. Midnight on the Gulf, letting the nets drag with the Jumbo Shrimp at one-quarter throttle, drinking beer and smoking reefer, listening to jazz on the radio. Watching the Coast Guard boats’ lights going back and forth along the eight-mile mark, looking for smugglers or immigrants. That was a lot of fun.”

  “How long were you a fisherman?” Hamilton asked.

  “Most of my life, I guess. Parents died when I was young, in a jet crash at Miami International. I barely remember them, I was so little. Spent a few years in the orphanage before being adopted by a shrimp fisher who lived on St. Simon’s Island in Georgia. When he died, I took over his boat, the Jumbo Shrimp. Second biggest boat in the state, next to the old Georgia Bulldog. A couple of years later I sold it and used the money to buy a smaller boat I could handle by myself without having to hire a crew. N
amed it the Jumbo Shrimp II and moved to Cedar Key, Florida.” He smiled at the fond memory. “Those were good days. My wife was a bitch, that was the only problem, but I enjoyed myself.”

  “So why did you give it up?” Hamilton asked.

  He sat on the gunnel on the aft deck, drinking beer and watching the other sailors getting ready to head out for the evening. At four o’clock the sun was still high in the summer sky. She’d be there soon. Unless she still wanted to blow his money away on Rocky’s trash. It was hot, so he unbuttoned his shirt.

  “I just got sick of it,” he lied.

  Now the station’s south pole was coming up. Looking at it, he could make out the telescope fastened to the hemispherical bulge of the Meteorology section, the rectangular casing pointed toward Earth. “Wonder what those CIA guys are looking at today,” Virgin Bruce said, as if reading his thoughts.

  “Submarines off Cuba. Troop movements near the Canal. A spaceport being built in Haiti.” Popeye shrugged. “Go in there sometime and look over their shoulders at the reports they’re filing back home. You’ll wonder about this Century of Peace everyone’s proclaiming.” He raised his knees an inch or so up the back of the pilot’s seat, trying to relieve the growing cramps in his legs. “So where did this pot come from, Jack?” he asked. “Did you smuggle some up or what?”

  “Well, yeah, I did, but I smoked that stuff up a little while ago. Ah, you promise not to tell anyone else?”

  “I promise.”

  “Well, I also brought up a little stash of seeds and I planted them in the hydroponics bay. What you’re smoking now… I mean, eating… is from the first crop. How do you like it?”

  “Pretty good.” Actually, it had been so long since he had last smoked marijuana that even lousy pot could have made him high, but this stuff was good. He found himself staring at the Earth again. Down there is the Gulf of Mexico, and on it is a boat, he thought. And on that boat is a woman. She’s lying on her back under the sun, and there’s a little bead of sweat running down her left breast, down under the cup of her bra where the sun hasn’t turned her skin brown, and the warm sun feels like a lover’s hand so she arches her back slightly, her flat stomach rising up and her round buttocks pushing flat against the wooden deck. Her lips part slightly and her eyes open, and she sees me walking toward her; she smiles, so I push my thumbs underneath the waistband of my trunks and push them down, and she sits up and reaches for…

  “Hey! Popeye!” Hamilton snapped. “Come back here!” Instantly he was back in the spacecraft. Hamilton was grinning at him and offering another brownie. Hooker stared at it for a moment, then shook his head. “I just asked you a question,” the hydroponicist said, putting the brownie back into the plastic bag.

  “I asked you when was the last time you saw your ex-wife.”

  Gold disappearing…

  “I haven’t seen her in a while,” he said shortly. He thought for a moment, then quickly added, “I don’t know where she is.” Another lie.

  “You mean she hasn’t written to you or called or nothing?” Virgin Bruce asked.

  “No, I don’t want to stick around,” he told Rocky. “Just tell her that I’ve been here and I’ve got something for her, and if she wants it, she can come down to my boat. I’ll meet her there.”

  “No, I haven’t heard anything from her since I’ve been here,” Popeye replied.

  Virgin Bruce snorted. “Ain’t that like women? I swear, sometimes I think they were put here just to drive men crazy, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah,” Popeye agreed most sincerely, “I know what you mean.”

  Just then, Virgin Bruce sat forward intently and cupped his hand over his headset’s earpiece, waving his other hand urgently for silence as he listened to the comlink. “Keep it down,” he half-whispered, then jabbed the transmission button on the communications board. “Ah, yeah, we copy, Olympus Traffic. I’m winding up my first orbit now. Everything looks good. Do you want me to continue? Olympus Beta House over.”

  He listened for another second, then his lips pulled back into a grimace. He looked over his shoulder at Hooker and Hamilton and shook his head, then said, “We copy there, Olympus Traffic. Beta House proceeding for docking at Olympus a-sap. Beta House over and out.”

  He punched off, then sighed. “Son of a bitch. They want us to come back in. One of the hub antennae has gone out of alignment and they need this pod to send a guy to go fix it. Fortunately I don’t have the right equipment and they know it; otherwise I’d have to come up with a reason quick to stop them from sending me.”

  Popeye nodded. There would have been no possibility of Virgin Bruce doing the errand; to fix the antenna on the south pole of Skycan’s hub, he would have necessarily had to have gone EVA, which meant that he would have had to depressurize the pod. There was only one suit in the pod, though. Not that Bruce could have pulled off such a delicate mission, in his present state of mind…

  “Bruce,” he asked, “Are you sure you can dock this thing?”

  “‘Are you sure you can…’” Bruce repeated, then stopped and glared back at Popeye. “Popeye, son, do you know who you’re speaking to? I’m the best pod pilot in the whole company! You’re talking to the hotdog man, brother! The ace of aces himself! I can dock a pod with my eyes closed! What the hell do you mean, ‘Bruce, are you sure you can dock this thing?’”

  He turned back around, snapped off the autopilot and switched to manual, then hit a couple of switches and pushed the throttle arm forward. The pod eased forward, falling out of its orbit, but instead of going straight, it began to roll toward the left, taking a spiraling course toward the station’s hub. Red lights began to flash on the LCD simulation. Virgin Bruce muttered something unintelligible and hastily corrected his course, firing RCR’s to stop the rolling. “Nothing serious,” he said aloud.

  “Bruce,” Hamilton said in a calm voice, although Popeye noticed that the hydroponics engineer had his eyes tightly closed, “I think I should rephrase Popeye’s question. The question isn’t whether you can dock this thing. It should be, can you dock this thing stoned?”

  “Hey. Hey.” Virgin Bruce’s voice took a defensive edge. “This is no more difficult than riding my bike, and I used to do that all the time after smoking reefer. Man, they were good days. Driving down 40 on a summer day, high on good Jamaican weed, doing seventy through rush-hour traffic. No helmet, no nothing, just you and the road, man.” He giggled. “Man, I used to have fun with those big trucks…”

  21

  Strange Tales of Space

  VIRGIN BRUCE’S NEAR-CRASH LANDING at the Docks wasn’t the first indication that things were getting a little loose on Skycan, but it was the most obvious. He ended up slam-docking his pod so hard that later a repair crew had to be dispatched to the airlock compartment to patch the small leaks in the seams which he had inadvertently sprung. Bruce himself got chewed out by both Chang and Anderson… especially by Chang, who was the only one who knew that more than one person had been in the pod, or what the three of them had been doing.

  It’s worth noting that H.G. Wallace didn’t hear about the incident for a couple of hours, because the project supervisor wasn’t in the command center when Neiman, Hooker, and Hamilton took their joy ride. Lately, Wallace had not been his usual omnipresent self. He had, over the past few weeks, become a hermit, sequestering himself in his private quarters in Module 24, delegating most of the authority to Hank Luton and Doc Felapolous. Despite what Felapolous had said about Cap’n Wallace being the force which kept the SPS construction project on time and within budget, Wallace’s presence was not really missed. Work continued on the giant satellite without missing a beat; in fact, the beamjacks seemed to be enjoying themselves, now that they didn’t have to worry about Wallace constantly haranguing them over the comlink. It was possible that Wallace was still monitoring them from his cabin, but if he was, the only evidence he gave was a once-a-day whirlwind tour of the command center, during which he would harass everyone on duty abou
t the sloppy jobs they were doing, before disappearing back to the isolation of his cabin.

  Perhaps it was because Wallace was becoming invisible that things were getting looser on Skycan, but I think that there were some other factors. For one thing, there was Hamilton’s pot crop. I don’t want to give the impression that the crew of Olympus overnight became a gang of stoned-out twenty-first century hippies, but just having that stuff aboard had an effect on the crew. Hamilton tried to keep Skycan Brown—as he dubbed the particular, fast-growing strain he had developed in Hydroponics—a secret within a close circle of friends, but for how long could anyone keep anything a secret within the station? Not very damn long. He soon found himself in the position any well-known supplier of contraband materials on Earth has had to face: Crewmen started approaching him at all hours, looking for a joint or two, referred to him by “friend of a friend of a friend” connections.

  Somehow, he got lucky in that word of his crop didn’t leak to the wrong people, like Phil Bigthorn or Wallace. But before things got completely out of control he harvested the last of his crop, cured the marijuana and hid it away, and didn’t grow any more. In fact, the day after he did that, he had an unexpected visit from Doc Felapolous, who said he was just “wandering by and decided to drop in for a little socializing.” After Doctor Feelgood managed to mosey through each of the five Hydroponics modules and peer closely at everything, he left Jack in a cold sweat—especially after Felapolous mumbled something about there being “a lot of careless little accidents lately.” At that point, Hamilton decided to go out of business. Like every smart dope dealer, he decided that it wasn’t worth the risk, let alone the paranoia.