by Ben Bova
The passageway was a confusion of greens, browns, blues, and whites, bathed in intense light. O’Donnell shaded his eyes. The blues gradually emerged from the background as three figures dressed in flight suits. The middle figure was a stocky man with a broken nose and a red face. O’Donnell recognized him from his pictures as Commander Dan Tighe. The other two were a woman and a black man.
The last of the shuttle passengers floated into the passageway. Then the twelve newcomers bunched up around Tighe and the two others. O’Donnell noticed that all three of them had their stockinged feet firmly attached to loops set into the flooring.
“I want to welcome all of you aboard Trikon Station,” said Tighe. “I’m Dan Tighe, station commander. To my right is Dr. Lorraine Renoir. She’s the station medical officer, so I’m sure all of you will get to know her.”
Freddy nudged Lance in the shoulder. Lance choked back a belch.
“To my left is Crewman William Jeffries. You probably won’t get to know him because, unfortunately, he is due to leave with the shuttle. Unless you want to stay, Jeff.”
Jeffries smiled benignly.
“You will all be assigned sleeping compartments in Habitation Module Two. Hab Two is aft, behind me, through hatch H-Two, second hatch on the port side. That’s your right side as yon move aft, if your head is toward the ceiling. If you get confused about orientation there are big arrows on the walls of the tunnels at five-meter intervals. The red arrows point forward and the blue arrows point to the ceiling. And they glow in the dark.”
Tighe hesitated a moment. When he saw that there were no questions, he went on, “I want you to stow your personal articles in the rumpus room until the departing people finish packing. The rumpus room is located at the far end of the connecting tunnel. You can secure your flight bags to the walls with clips or bungee cords. You may see some funny-looking plants floating around in there at the ends of tethers. They are bonsai plants. Anyone who touches them will be summarily executed.”
Tighe smiled crookedly. A titter coursed through the new arrivals. Muncie did not laugh. Beads of sweat oozed across his brow. He struggled to loosen the collar of his flight suit.
“You all right?” whispered O’Donnell.
“I’m—” Lance Muncie’s stomach contracted with the force of a small cannon. His mouth snapped open and, with a loud retch, out shot breakfast. It looked like a large, greenish yellow worm, expanding and contracting as it flew on a perfectly straight track toward Dr. Renoir. She spun out of the way. The vomit worm continued past, wriggling until it finally disappeared into the pastel recesses at the far end of the tunnel.
“Any other comments?” said Tighe.
The new arrivals laughed.
“I never get sick,” Lance Muncie mumbled around the thermometer stuck in his mouth. Dr. Renoir’s infirmary was cramped, but his addled senses welcomed the tighter perspective.
“Please don’t speak, Mr. Muncie.” Dr. Renoir pumped air into the collar of the blood-pressure gauge.
“What if I think I’m going to puke?”
Dr. Renoir closed his fingers around the plastic bag she had given him. One of the station’s robots had vacuumed up the mess Muncie had spewed into the corridor and sprayed pungent disinfectant around the area. But the robot was too bulky to work effectively in this cubbyhole of an infirmary.
“Please be still and continue staring at that picture on the wall,” she said. “Occupy your mind with pleasant thoughts.”
There was kindness in her voice, thought Lance. An accent, too. German, maybe. No, French. Renoir was a French name. There was an artist named Renoir. He painted ballerinas. The picture on the wall was a small painting of a vase filled with flowers. Really pretty.
“Breathe deeply,” she said.
The stethoscope was cold on his chest. He forced a breath and felt his stomach start to churn. Instinctively, his body tightened.
“Pleasant thoughts,” trilled Dr. Renoir.
He tried, but his thoughts kept trailing back to his stomach. Thinking of the farm evoked the image of his father gunning his pickup toward a rise in the road to town. “Here we go, Lance, here we go. Your tummy. Wheeee!” Becky reminded him of a trip to Kansas City and the roller coaster that had delighted him and terrified her.
Dr. Renoir removed the thermometer. Lance gagged and hastily stuck his mouth in the plastic bag. Nothing came out, and after a moment he relaxed. Dr. Renoir instructed him to continue staring at the picture until the examination was complete.
“Haven’t been sick in more than twenty years,” he said.
“Is that so,” said Dr. Renoir.
“I had a stomach virus when I was only a tyke. Couldn’t keep anything down. I kept losing weight and losing weight. My ma and pa thought I was going to die. Then they heard about this faith healer that was going to be at a revival up near Alliance, Nebraska. Dr. J. Edward Moorhouse was his name. Pa drove all through the night to get there, with me tucked in the back seat and a throw-up pan on the floorboards.”
Dr. Renoir turned to her desktop computer and pecked out a few numbers.
“I remember a huge tent way off in the middle of a prairie and people singing hymns as we drove up. My ma carried me down past all the people and up onto the stage. I was crying like crazy. And Dr. J. Edward Moorhouse wore this thin black skullcap with a point that came down the middle of his forehead. He had crooked teeth when he smiled. My stomach was rumbling and heaving, like there was a jackrabbit inside that wanted to get out. But Dr. J. Edward Moorhouse laid his hands on my stomach and I became as cool and as calm as I ever was. That was the last time I got sick before today.”
“Sometimes we all need a little faith.”
“You think so? I sure do.”
“Psychosomatic healing,” said Dr. Renoir. “The mind/body interface…”
“Those are all fancy words for faith, aren’t they?” Muncie said.
“Perhaps.”
“Well, I haven’t been sick since then. I keep myself fit. I don’t put anything in my body I think will cause me harm. Taking care of your body is doing God’s work, isn’t it?”
“I suppose so,” Dr. Renoir replied gently.
Lance heard the ripping sound of Velcro parting. Then he felt something moist pressing against the ball of bone behind his right ear.
“What’s that?” he said.
“Time-release motion-sickness medication.”
“But Trikon doesn’t want us using pads.”
“You are under my care, not Trikon’s. This pad is designed to release diminishing amounts of medication. By the time it is exhausted, you will be completely acclimated to space. And it won’t harm your body.” Dr. Renoir tore the blood-pressure collar from his arm. “You may stop staring at the wall now.”
Lance turned his head and fixed his eyes on her. For the first time since reaching the station, his head did not continue spinning after his neck stopped.
A voice boomed over the loudspeaker:
“Attention. All new arrivals are to report to the connecting tunnel for sleep compartment assignments.”
“You’d better go along now,” said Dr. Renoir. “But don’t rush. Take it easy for the time being.”
Lance grinned at her. She’s sure pretty, he thought. For a foreigner.
Habitation Modules 1 and 2 were located directly across the tunnels from The Bakery and Jasmine. Each habitation module housed twenty individual living compartments, four waste-management-system compartments (called Whits, after their inventor, Henry Whitmore), four full-body showers, and two enclosed hand basins. The compact living compartments were designed primarily for sleeping, but also were equipped for waking relaxation. Crammed into each one were storage cabinets, a toiletry kit, a foldaway desktop, reading lamp, and power outlets for portable computers, VCRs, and other small appliances. Screens set into the back walls served as “electronic windows” to minimize claustrophobia. Many employees brought tapes of scenery so they could look out at the cool green h
ills of Earth or a beautiful sunset over a tranquil sandy beach.
The “bed” was a mesh sleeping bag hung against one wall of the compartment. It could be zippered up, and there was a restraint band for the head. In microgravity the pressure of blood surging through the carotid arteries produced a gentle but persistent head nod when a person fell asleep. It awakened most people, nauseated some.
“Three and two-thirds cubic meters of living space,” announced Jeffries as he peeled back the accordion door of an empty compartment. “That’s one hundred twenty-eight cubic feet for the Americans in the group. Sounds like a lot, huh? The typical telephone booth is only a little over one cubic meter; forty cubic feet. Well, sometimes it feels like a lot and sometimes it feels smaller than a phone booth. Depends on your mood.”
The newcomers hovered in the narrow aisle. Jeffries demonstrated the light switches, the power outlets, the sleep restraints, and how to prevent small objects from spewing out of the compartments when you opened the doors.
“Velcro, Velcro, Velcro,” he said. “By the time you return to Earth, I guarantee you that you will never want to see another strip of Velcro again. And if you do happen to lose anything, check the nearest ventilator intake grid. They’re located just above the floor along each wall. Everything ends up there sooner or later.”
Jeffries then turned a dial on the back wall. The image on the screen changed from waves breaking at Waikiki to wheat fields waving in a summer breeze to an aerial view of snow-capped Mount Rainier.
“Any pictures of the Bronx?” asked Freddy.
“Not in this sequence. If you want it, we can arrange it,” said Jeffries. “That ends the grand tour. I assume all of you learned how to operate the Whit and the showers back on Earth.”
“I didn’t,” said O’Donnell.
“Well, my man,” Jeffries grinned, “you are going to be in rough shape pretty fast without a lesson. Anybody else?”
The others answered that they were completely familiar with the personal hygiene facilities. Jeffries assigned each person a compartment, then led O’Donnell to the Whit.
“How does somebody come up here without learning this?” he said.
“I was a late addition,” said O’Donnell.
“What the hell does that mean? Did you wander onto the shuttle just before lift-off?”
“You might say that.”
“Damn. Things sure have changed since I started to fly. Time was they wouldn’t let anyone onto a shuttle without teaching you more things than you ever needed to know. Now they send people up who can’t take a shit when they got to. Pull yourself in here.” Jeffries opened the door of the Whit. The interior was a confusing array of tubes, levers, and siphons that looked like a piece of farm machinery designed at MIT. “We’re going to start with number one. You remember number one from grammar school?”
O’Donnell entered the Whit and inserted his booted feet into the loops on the floor. Jeffries closed the door all but a crack.
“You’re a Trikon scientist, right?”
“Right,” said O’Donnell.
“Now unzip your flight suit. You know what happened a few days ago?”
“I heard.”
“I thought with you being a late addition, maybe Trikon sent you up to keep an eye on these scientists.”
“Not me.”
“They can use a transfusion of common sense, the whole damn bunch of them.” Jeffries saw that O’Donnell was out of his pants and closed the door completely.
“Okay,” he called through the door. “You see that funnel right in front of yon? Pull a urinal cover out of the dispenser on top of it and put it on the end of the funnel.”
“Uh-huh,” came O’Donnell’s voice.
“Now turn that yellow switch on to start the fan and the centrifuge. Otherwise you’ll end up with a pint-sized ball of piss on your crotch. Now stick your pecker into the funnel…”
“You sure this is safe?” O’Donnell asked over the whir of the fan.
“Are you Jewish?”
“No, and I don’t want to be.”
Jeffries laughed. “You’ll be okay. We haven’t lost anybody yet.”
Feeling more than a little wary, O’Donnell did as Jeffries instructed. He relieved himself and felt the urine being whisked away by the airflow from the vacuum fan.
“Now I know how a cow feels in a milking barn,” he said.
“Wait till we move on to number two,” said Jeffries with a laugh that was nearly malicious. O’Donnell saw that there was a safety belt on the seat.
Dan Tighe watched the progress of the logistics-module transfer from the command center’s viewports. Standing beside him at the RMS console, a crewman operating the remotely controlled arm had already deftly detached the expended log module, stuck it on a temporary berthing mast, and was preparing to remove the replacement module from Constellation’s payload bay. Two other crewmen hovered outside in MMUs, manned maneuvering units, fondly nicknamed flying armchairs, ready to assist if the going got too tricky for the robot arm.
New food in, old garbage out, thought Tighe. Wryly he remembered some old soldier’s maxim: The army is like the alimentary canal. No matter what goes in one end, nothing comes out the other end but crap.
Tighe had flown slot in the Thunderbirds, the Air Force’s precision flying team. He had test-piloted jet fighters. He had commanded half a dozen shuttle missions for NASA. Now his flying days were over. Sure, he was still sailing clear around the world every ninety minutes. But as commander he didn’t fly the station; nobody did. The station sailed around the world on its own, a diamond-shaped man-made moon. Tighe would never pilot a plane or a spacecraft again. He was fighting just to stay on as commander of this station.
This job was babysitting, not flying. There was a contingency plan for manually operating the complex system of translation and attitude thrusters in the event of a major gyroscope malfunction. He had trained for over a hundred hours with the hand controller that would override the automatic system in the event of such an emergency. But that had been on a simulator. Tighe doubted that the station could actually be “flown” the way its designers claimed.
What a laugh that would be, he thought bitterly, They won’t let me fly because of my goddamned blood pressure, but maybe I could take control of this contraption and zoom her around for a while. Wouldn’t that be sweet?
He pictured the look on Henderson’s face and the frenzy at Mission Control if he suddenly started maneuvering the space station. It’d be like trying to fly a house. This station isn’t going anywhere; just rolling around the Earth, time after time, day after day. Neither of us is going anywhere, are we?
His days were monotonous. He monitored the constant stream of data generated by the station’s subsystems. He dispatched his crew to perform necessary tasks. He listened for alarms he prayed he never would hear. He refereed disputes between competing Trikon researchers. And all the while he struggled against being seduced by boredom. That was the greatest danger; not a meteoroid hit, not debris, not some weird chemical created in the labs. Simple boredom, a simple relaxation of vigilance.
Tighe frowned as he watched the two astronauts cavort in their MMUs. He missed the exhilaration of EVA. The media still called them space walks, and for once Tighe preferred the more romantic name. When he had first come to Trikon Station during the early shake-out phase, he would occasionally clamp himself into an MMU and jet outside the station. Strictly speaking he was not even supposed to do that much “flying,” but if Dr. Renoir knew about it she at least chose not to make an issue of it.
One time he had parked himself beneath the station’s nadir, where he could see nothing of the station, not the girders, not the modules, not even the shuttle that had transported him and his men to this outpost in the sky. He was completely alone and over Texas. Luminescent clouds scudded across the plains, tumbling before the wind, then curling into fishhooks where the Ozarks reared their craggy heads. He had a wife and a son down there, s
omewhere beneath those fishhooks. Three hundred miles away. Might as well be three hundred million.
He had made mistakes. Dammit, he had made mistakes. He thought he was being a good husband. When Cindy wanted to go back to school, after Bill was born, he made no objection. He was proud of her when she graduated, even if he was in the middle of a shuttle mission and couldn’t attend the ceremonies. Sure, she was upset. She had a right to be. But when NASA grounded him over this stupid hypertension business Cindy had been tremendously supportive. He saw a whole new life starting for the two of them. Three of them; Bill was finishing high school, ready for college.
College costs money. The only firm that would consider a grounded astronaut had been Trikon International. It meant going back into space. Not as a pilot, but still Tighe accepted the offer without an instant’s hesitation. When he phoned Cindy with the good news she went coldly silent. By the time he got back home she informed him that she had started procedures for a divorce. It hit him like a sniper’s bullet.
But he was reasonable about it. He had to face the fact that he and Cindy had become a pair of virtual strangers. He had to struggle hard to salvage what was left of his career. Cindy wanted to move to Dallas, where she could start her new life and her own career. He was willing to let her sell their house, willing to pay all Bill’s college expenses. There was no reason for them to fight, to snarl at each other, to drag themselves through an expensive and emotionally ruinous court battle. No reason at all. Except custody of their son.
“Commander Tighe?”
Dan’s insides lurched with surprise. He snapped his attention to the here and now.
The two new crewmen hovered between the command center and the utilities section. Lance Muncie clenched a handhold with his massive fist and unconsciously bit his lower lip. His skin was several shades of green lighter than it had been when he blew breakfast down the length of the connecting tunnel. Tighe knew that Lorraine had fitted Muncie with a motion-sickness pad. This was in direct contravention of Trikon’s policy that its people endure a few days of space sickness rather than become dependent on medication. But Trikon preferred a lot of things that just weren’t practical in space, and Lorraine was judicious in her use of medication.
