Asimov's SF, February 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Dear God, she thought. Where was he taking her?

  * * * *

  Moser felt as though he'd forgotten something. He knew the equipment and procedures of an EVA as well as anyone could know them from books and video. He had not had access to official NASA simulators or training gear, though training at the bottom of a swimming pool had certainly given him a movement advantage.

  After rechecking everything both on the NASA suit and in the interior of the airlock, he opened the doors to outer space. If the astronauts were not panicking already, they would certainly fear the worst when they noted the doors opening. It was time to allay their fears.

  He thought this just as he discovered a new fear of his own. He swallowed hard, looking at the Earth and the Earth's sky from this angle. He could not stop thinking that an orbit was simply a perpetual fall. And it took a view like this one to show him he was afraid of heights. Perhaps everyone was acrophobic on a sliding scale, and he had just found his limit.

  "Greetings, Alpha,” Moser said into his headset. “Can you hear me?"

  The voice came back tentative. It was the male astronaut who answered. “Five by five. Please identify yourself. Are you with Esteban?” He sounded bitter, and Moser didn't blame him.

  Moser connected the hose from the ISS to his ship. The lever to unhook the hose from its dock was tighter than he'd expected, and Moser felt clumsy in the large gloves of his suit.

  He tried to think ahead about how to improvise if he broke something. The early astronauts had used a ballpoint pen to fix launch equipment when stranded on the moon. With all his equipment, inventions, and million-dollar ingenuity, he was certain that a piece of plastic accidentally snapping would end his mission straightaway. But the hose and refueling switches gave with a little more push, and they did not break, nor did he let the effort's equal and opposite reaction throw him away from the ISS.

  He breathed hard in his suit. This was it. He'd been rehearsing these actions for years. He hoped the words would not come out poisonous, because there was no way even Aaron could talk him down from here.

  "My name is Chris Moser,” he said. “I am a scientist and explorer and I mean you no harm. I have temporarily disabled all other radio communication to the ISS. I'm simply purchasing some of your reserve fuel.” He did not call himself an astronaut. But he thought it.

  Moser's greatest triumph and greatest failure was to find the sweet spot where he had just enough fuel and equipment to launch himself into orbit. A few kilograms more of fuel, and his rocket designs would have failed. A liter less of fuel and he would not have had enough power to reach even low Earth orbit.

  But orbit of the Earth was not Moser's final destination. He was still a fourteen-year-old, dreaming about Cherrygale. He still dreamed about the far side of the Sun.

  "Under no circumstances,” Moser continued, “will I take so much fuel as to put you or your crew in any danger, and NASA will this week receive a generous donation, which should more than cover the expense of getting replacement fuel up here. But my mission itself is what will be of much greater benefit to the space program. It all depends on how NASA chooses to spin this once the situation is over."

  Moser listened to his own breathing. It was loud in his suit, and he worried that he wouldn't be able to hear the response. He tried to limit his movement, to cut down all other noise. He tried to slow the sound of his breath, which just made it worse. First acrophobia, now asthma? All the more reason to move on quickly, if low Earth orbit was so bad for your health.

  "You will restore communication immediately.” It was the commander now, the little person. She punctuated each word, probably even more angry than she was when she'd threatened to kill him outside the docking bay. “You are committing an act of international terrorism and it will be seen as such by every government of the free world."

  At least they weren't laughing at him. Perhaps they had discovered their missing poet by now. He knew they would go to great lengths to protect their little tourist and avoid a public relations nightmare. He was counting on it.

  "I am sorry about the methods,” Moser said. “But history books don't tell us about what lengths Columbus likely had to go to sail around the world. Communication will be returned to you momentarily."

  * * * *

  THREE: BROKEN BIRD IN THE WINDOW

  Tara needed to think. Presently—perhaps understandably—she couldn't get past the word “kidnapped.” It was as though she'd convinced herself that “kidnapped” was an anagram for something more pressing, and her mind wouldn't stop racing until she identified it.

  If she could have done her morning freewriting without the voyeurs at Mission Control poring over her every word, if her hands weren't presently bound by cord behind her back, and if she weren't imprisoned in the tiny excuse for the kidnapper's spaceship, then perhaps she could have written the word a thousand times and found something out on the other side. Or at least she could have massaged her belly.

  She tried variations of the word and her situation, tackling the problem in her mind as she might tackle a poem. Kidnapping. Catnapping. Trapping. Hostage-taking. Piracy. Spacepirate. Like a carjacker. Spacejacker. Starjacking. Bound in orbit. Suffocation. Drowning. Tricked. Trapped. And then right back to kidnapped. How about context? Could there be a known mental disease where patients impersonated Cubans in order to hijack space stations? Bhuvana might know. This was a good enough excuse to call her, wasn't it?

  The cord binding Tara's hands behind her back was surprisingly nonabrasive, even soft. Her bonds were not loose enough to wriggle off, but she felt that if she worked at it she might be able to squeeze a hand free. She didn't want to put this much stress on any of her limbs; she knew her bones were fragile enough that she was more likely to break herself than she was to pull herself free.

  The radio had just lit up and she heard the kidnapper take credit for the station's inability to communicate with Mission Control. He'd identified himself as “Chris Moser,” not Esteban. She wondered if that was a name she should know. She had heard Pia's response, angrier than Tara would have expected, but who knew how much of it was posturing? Or could it be that Pia actually cared whether Tara lived or died?

  She saw someone in a spacesuit fly by the window. The person's sun-visor was down and she didn't know whether it was Alistair or her kidnapper behind the dark glass. The suit was so loose and undefined, it could even have been Pia. Tara screamed “Help!” and then felt stupid for forgetting the one thing she actually knew about space before training began: a lesson taught to her by an old movie poster about sound and screams in a vacuum.

  Tara felt herself flushing. She made a face that she hoped would look like and exemplify the word “help,” but she wasn't sure Alistair, or whoever it was, had noticed her before the spacewalker floated past and his field of vision no longer included the porthole.

  Screaming at the astronaut made her realize how quiet it was in the kidnapper's ship. There was the whirring of machinery she couldn't see, but it was no more disturbing than the white noise of a fan and, compared with the clanks and rumbling and chatter of the ISS, it was practically silent here.

  Esteban (or Moser or whatever his name was) had stuck masking tape on many of the console buttons, detailing their function. Tara realized she could actually understand what each button did, a far cry from her reaction to the vague, acronym-littered panels of the ISS command module, designed to confuse and keep Tara a helpless tourist, no matter how much she'd trained for the mission. Strange that a holding cell would make her feel empowered about space travel for the first time.

  Suddenly it occurred to her that there'd been no mention of her kidnapping on the radio. Did Pia or Alistair even realize she was missing? Did they even understand that Esteban and this Moser character were the same person? He hadn't promised to return her to the ISS before going off on his “mission,” whatever that was.

  Shit, Tara thought. What if he planned on taking her with him?

  T
ara pulled harder on her hand and started to think she wasn't escaping fast enough. No one was coming for her. She realized what she had to do. She would have to break.

  She took a few breaths to calm herself. Then she jackknifed off one wall as best she could with her arms tied behind her, and floated to the opposite wall only a few feet away. Before impact, she bent both legs and knees in a hunched-over squat, and, when she felt her feet flat on the wall again, she sprang backward toward the previous wall as fast as possible.

  A bird needed her freedom. She hoped she would crush only one of her hands.

  * * * *

  Moser completely emptied the auxiliary tank from the ISS as planned, but the refueling finished far more quickly than he had expected. He rehooked the hose onto its base on the outside of the station, using more liberal force this time to attach it back into position. He used his hands to walk himself back to his ship and peered inside.

  The tinted portholes were darker in the low Earth sky than he had expected them to be. He saw a hint of the lighted panel, but not the movement of the poet within the cabin. Moser had anticipated that he would need to see the fuel gauge from outside the craft, so he had created a small array of mirrors, illuminated and clear to anyone peering into the porthole.

  There was a problem.

  Moser had about 80 percent of the fuel he needed to break out of Earth's orbit and reach the approximately one-hundred-thousand kilometers per hour he required to get into orbit around the Sun in the opposite direction. His current rotational speed would only take him so far.

  He realized that they must have shut off his fuel from the inside; that was why it had stopped early! He had thought for certain the astronauts would be compliant, that they would not want to risk the life of their poet.

  "Alpha! Did you block my refueling?"

  "Negative, Moser,” the man's voice said blandly, after a moment. “You've depleted our auxiliary tank."

  They were lying. Moser knew for a fact that they had more reserve fuel in that tank. Moser needed to be more assertive. He couldn't let them stop him now. “Alpha, I cannot complete my mission without sufficient fuel. Please explain."

  "Explain what? You sure you don't have a leak? Duct tape can only handle so much pressure, you know."

  Leak? Was someone out there with him, sabotaging everything? What did he mean, leak? “Alpha, what did you do to my vessel?"

  "Not a damn thing. Our emergency fuel was low from repairs we had to do last week. Maybe if you stopped blocking our communication, our boys on the ground could help you with your little problem."

  Moser wanted to hit something. He couldn't fail when he was this close.

  He went over the numbers in his head. With the amount of fuel he had at his disposal, he would need to drop more than thirty pounds. But he'd already cut everything he could. Every food substance on the ship was even the maximum calorie-per-ounce. The few redundancies he'd allowed himself in emergency heat sources, paper, and oxygen candles amounted to barely five pounds.

  And Moser dared not steal any of the space station's primary fuel, for fear of dooming the astronauts on board. If he killed three innocent people it wouldn't matter how important his mission was. No history book would forgive him. Would he be able to forgive himself ? Moser couldn't imagine a joyride around the Sun, six months alone with just his guilt for a copilot. And NASA wouldn't go out of their way to catch him when he returned to Earth's atmosphere six months later.

  As Moser made his way back to the airlock, he felt his pulse throbbing in his temple. He'd have thought such a rapid heartrate would come bundled with exhilaration rather than despair. He looked down between his feet so he could see the Earth, possibly for the last time as a free man.

  But it wasn't there. Moser's body tightened up. He looked frantically left and right. His suit movement was too slow for his panic. He would suffocate and fall and fail in all other ways it was possible to fail.

  Then he realized he was upside down. Or the Earth was. He looked up at the world above him, and in his head he felt its immensity crashing down upon him.

  Perhaps it was not too late to ask for help. He had no alternatives, and he could still bargain with them. He had a hostage, as well as control over their ability to communicate. Perhaps they would find an error in his calculations, some metric-to-standard conversion he'd failed to make properly on his own. Perhaps he could work this out.

  "I ... have an engineering problem, Alpha. I need to lose thirty nonessential pounds to complete my mission."

  "You tried cutting off your head, asshole?"

  Moser turned himself around awkwardly to look back at his ship. A light was on in the cabin. He could see quite clearly into the porthole now.

  He saw the poet's middle finger pressed against the inside of the tinted glass. Her finger looked crooked, bent, but it might have just been light distorting through the glass. They were laughing at him.

  Moser looked again at the enormous Earth above him. He was beneath it. He was in hell.

  * * * *

  TWO: A ROOM OF HER OWN

  They locked the pirate outside the airlock while deciding what to do. Even with Tara free, this Chris Moser character insisted he wouldn't restore communication with Mission Control until they helped him figure out how to launch his toy rocket around the Sun. He had a few hours of oxygen left to suck on while they let him reconsider.

  Tara remembered a scene in a space film where stranded shuttle passengers communicated with Houston using Morse code and some long forgotten switch or another from a previous mission. Pia and Alistair stared at her blankly when she suggested this. “Well, if we knew about the switch,” Tara snapped, “then it wouldn't be long forgotten, now would it?"

  Tara's left hand stung much less than she felt it should. All her life she had been scared of breaking a bone. Now she'd found that it wasn't so bad. She'd only seriously injured a finger and a thumb, and Alistair had set and wrapped them for her. This experience, too, wasn't so awful; in all the excitement, Alistair had forgotten to reapply his body spray.

  She felt extroverted and elated after her kidnapping and escape, and the ISS felt less confined. She wasn't going to be treated like a kitten anymore. She was a bird, damnit.

  "Does it hurt when I do this?” Alistair asked, suddenly with a legitimate reason to poke her with his finger.

  "No,” Tara said. “But I don't think I'll be flying again anytime soon."

  Tara realized that with communication down, Mission Control must not be monitoring her palmtop tablet. The realization was bittersweet. Now that she could finally write her poetry unobserved, there was an emergency that demanded her assistance. She stared at her tablet, thinking she would never get a chance to write another poem.

  But if Moser had left a frequency open so he could communicate with the ISS, he couldn't be blocking everything, right?

  "Anyone down there still read poetry?” she wrote. She thought a moment about how they could respond to her. Upload a file maybe? She added, “Golly, I would love to read some D.H. Lawrence, if only someone somewhere knew how much I would."

  She refreshed her file browser every few seconds. After a minute, a new file appeared on her tablet called “DH.” She opened it and it said simply:

  "Working on the Lawrence. You guys okay up there?"

  They communicated this way for a few rounds. She shared with Mission Control the names “Esteban” and “Chris Moser.” Mission Control came back with some info about him. They'd already started an investigation because they'd received some sort of manifesto-letter in the mail, along with the biggest independent donation to NASA in decades.

  Chris Moser was an inventor. He'd had a few publications in academic journals and they were trying to find copies. (Tara wondered if NASA had scrambled like this to read any of her more obscure publications.) But one of Moser's more successful patents was a pen-sized transmitter that blocked cell phone signals within a short range. Could he have modified it to disrupt certain
radio signals as well?

  Tara remembered how her kidnapper had touched the wall of clutter outside the docking bay before taking her to his rocket. She told the astronauts to look for pens, somewhere in the middle of the wall, or maybe something that could contain a pen. Alistair scoured the Velcro wall and found the transmitter tucked in with a pouch full of pencils.

  A push of a button restored communication to the station.

  * * * *

  Though Moser insisted he was no threat, the astronauts kept him tied up in a side chamber. He was fairly certain he could break free of his bonds if he so chose (if the poet could do it, then certainly he could), but he decided to stay submissive if only to keep from angering them more than he already had.

  He wondered though if his inability to put their lives at further risk was a lack of drive, a lack of the kind of spirit that put great men in history books. Surely Columbus knew some of his own crew wouldn't survive, even if they had followed him willingly.

  The tourist—the poet—visited Moser regularly, which surprised him. Of all the three, he'd expected her to be the least forgiving. He had never wanted to hurt anyone, and he was thankful he had used a non-abrasive cord to bind her wrists. It hadn't been an act of kindness to choose that particular cord; it was simply the lightest binding material he could find.

  When he asked her why she came to talk to him, she showed him the stash of blank paper she'd stolen from his ship, now all scribbled over with sentence fragments that made little sense to him. She said she'd forgotten how wonderful rough drafts could be.

  It was like talking to a child sometimes. Still, she seemed to like him. Maybe if his dream was truly over, it was time to start thinking about dating again. They had more than eight months to get to know each other, after all.

  The poet asked him if it would be possible to modify his pen-shaped transmitter to block the signals coming from her tablet. It would have been easier to remove the internal antenna from the tablet itself, but he chose not to tell her this. He was in enough trouble as it was.