Space, Inc

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Joe McKay, the Shift Two foreman, stood at the entrance to the shelter. “Right this way, people!” he said, pointing to the hatch on the floor.

  Jamie mounted the ladder and lowered himself down into the tunnel. Across Maryniak, personnel were gathering in six other protective chambers buried beneath the base’s larger modules. The structures and the lunar regolith were supposed to protect the crew from the incoming stream of solar particles.

  There were already a dozen people in this shelter. Jamie found himself a spot on the bench along the chamber wall. Ten more descended the ladder, followed by Joe and Billy.

  “Is that it?” Joe asked.

  “Crenshaw’s on her way,” Billy said.

  The base manager arrived a few minutes later. “All set?”

  Billy did a head count. “That’s everyone for here.”

  “Close it up,” Crenshaw ordered.

  Joe climbed the ladder to close the outer hatch. Once he was back down, Billy slid the ladder up the tunnel before trying to close the inner hatch. The hinges creaked, and he seemed to be having difficulty engaging the latches, but he finally managed to seal the door.

  “What’s our status?” Joe asked Crenshaw.

  “We’re the last ones to lock down,” she reported. “All personnel, both in-base and EVA, are in shelters. The proton stream should be sweeping through here in about twenty minutes.”

  “Are we sure this thing is buried deep enough?” Jamie asked nervously. He looked around, and was disappointed not to see Maria Clarkson, the base physician.

  “I just hope we aren’t in here for too long,” Billy said. “I’d hate to have to eat those rations for any length of time.”

  Paul Kashiyama, a large, muscular man with a crewcut, spoke up. “Those rations are no worse than Squires’ cooking.”

  Jamie wanted to ask him which bad movie he’d stolen that line from, but said nothing.

  Jamie met Maria his first day on the job, after he’d almost gotten into a fight. He remembered it all too well. Jamie had run out of the kitchen upon hearing the clatter of dishes and cutlery hitting the floor. A wall of flesh had stopped him before he’d barely taken three steps into the mess hall.

  Paul Kashiyama grabbed Jamie by his apron. “What the hell are you feeding us?”

  “Cajun stew,” Jamie replied meekly.

  “It’s burning my goddamn mouth! What the hell are you trying to do, kill us?”

  Jamie tried to peer around Paul’s massive bulk. The diners he could see had odd expressions on their faces. “It’s supposed to be spicy.”

  “Spicy?” Paul tightened his grip. “This isn’t ‘spicy,’ it’s goddamn nuclear. What the hell did you put in this?”

  “Well, the recipe does call for hot sauce—”

  “How much?”

  “I put six tablespoons—”

  “Your idiotic recipe calls for six tablespoons of hot sauce!”

  Jamie shook his head. “No, no! the recipe calls for three, but I always double up because—”

  “That’s enough, Paul,” a female voice interrupted. “He’s new. Cut him some slack.”

  Paul released his grip. “You watch it,” he said, jabbing a finger into Jamie’s chest “You’re going to be the death of us.”

  The woman coughed. “Get yourself a drink, Paul. And clean up the mess you’ve made.” She was in her early thirties, of medium build, with long, curly light-brown hair. She turned to Jamie. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Maria Clarkson, the base physician.”

  They shook hands.

  “Jamie—”

  “—Squires. Yeah, I know. Our new cook.” Maria grimaced and swallowed. “Did you really put six tablespoons of hot sauce into that stew?”

  “Well, yeah. At my last job, everyone complained my food had no flavor. I’ve doubled up on spices and condiments ever since.”

  “Your last job was where?”

  “Canacian Pacific. Earth to L5 shuttle.”

  “There’s no spin gravity on those shuttles, right?”

  “No.”

  Maria nodded. “That explains it. I guess those terra-centric cookbooks don’t tell you that food tastes different in zero G. Weightlessness redistributes body fluids. People tend to feel congested in the head, so food seems to have less flavor.”

  “Oh …”

  “Don’t worry, new guys are entitled to one nonfatal mistake. And don’t let Paul scare you. He’s all bluster.”

  Jamie could see Paul cleaning up his mess.

  “Welcome to Maryniak Base, Jamie.”

  “Thanks.”

  Maria covered her mouth and coughed again. “By the way, may I have another glass of water?”

  Maryniak Base was a mining facility on the lunar farside owned by the Alamer-Daas Corporation. Headquartered in Montreal, ADC’s properties included three other commercial Moon bases, half a dozen Earth orbiting stations, and an industrial unit aboard the L5 colony. Maryniak produced titanium and iron extracted from lunar ilmenite for export to the burgeoning Lagrangian point settlements.

  The solar storm lasted eleven hours before the United Nations Space Development Agency gave the all-clear signal. Jamie returned to the kitchen to find things exactly as he had left them. Using the back of a knife, he scraped the diced onions into the trash, and dumped the liquid eggs. He then got some garbage bags from the cabinet and walked to the refrigerator, a secondhand unit purchased by ADC at a former rival’s bankruptcy auction.

  There was a knock on the doorframe.

  “Mind if I come in and pick up the TLD?” Billy asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  Billy walked to the wall beside the refrigerator and pulled the thermo-luminescent dosimeter from its bracket. The TLD was a stubby fat tube, about the size of a fountain pen.

  “It’s a shame to waste all this food,” Jamie said as he surveyed the refrigerator’s contents.

  “Yeah.” Billy held up the TLD. “But until I’ve had a look at these, we don’t know if the food in the shielded logistics module is compromised. If it is, we’ll be eating those disgusting rations from the shelter until the company bothers to send up a shuttle.”

  Crenshaw broadcast a briefing on the status of the base at the end of the workday. Being one of the largest common areas, the mess hall was a natural gathering place. A large post-dinner crowd gathered to watch the monitors.

  “On behalf of the company, I want to commend everyone on the manner in which we handled this emergency.” Crenshaw’s image was dotted with dark spots, indicating pixel dropouts from the radiation-damaged CCD elements in her office camera. “The good news is that the impact on production will be minimal. The total dose in the shelters was less man twelve millisieverts, and the reading in the logistics module was also within limits.”

  Jamie let out a bream. The food supply was okay.

  “Now, the bad news. The proton degradation of the solar arrays was severe. Output from the power farm is down almost twenty percent. In order to maintain production levels and have adequate battery margin for lunar night, there will be unscheduled brownouts of nonessential systems over the next several weeks.”

  Jamie spotted Paul talking to Maria. She seemed to be grinning at something he said. Jamie frowned.

  “The other major loss is the greenhouse. All the plants will have to be destroyed. This will impact atmospheric regeneration, requiring increased duty cycles of the metox canisters for CO2 scrubbing …”

  Jamie tried to push Paul and Maria out of his mind, shifting his thoughts to the loss of fresh fruits and vegetables. He would have to adjust the menu to meet the nutrition requirements while maintaining variety.

  “… other than that, we fared well. Some of the essential electronics we couldn’t power-down suffered single-event upsets, but the redundant systems kicked in as designed. We should be fully back on our feet when the supply shuttle comes through next month. In the meantime, we have a business to run.”

/>   Crenshaw’s image faded to black.

  The people in the mess hall began to disperse. Jamie managed to recruit two of them to help transfer supplies from the logistics module. He’d asked their names, but promptly forgot them, and they took off immediately after the job was done.

  Jamie activated his organizer to plan next evening’s dinner. Suggested menus, based on UNSDA food guidelines, were uplinked by the company nutritionist in Montreal. But on-site cooks had wide latitude in meal preparation to accommodate local preferences and nutritional needs. Jamie scanned the proposed choices: macaroni and cheese, quiche Lorraine, or fish and chips. He called up the nutrient specs for the shelter rations. They were short of the 150 microgram UNSDA RDA for iodine, so that would have to be made up.

  It would be fish and chips tomorrow night.

  The stethoscope felt cold against his chest.

  “Breathe in,” Maria ordered.

  Jamie inhaled.

  “And exhale.”

  Maria removed the stethoscope from her ears. “How do you feel overall? Sleeping well, eating okay?”

  “Sure, same as always.”

  “Most people were due for a checkup in a couple of weeks, but because of the storm Crenshaw and I thought it would be wise to do it now.” She took his arm and wrapped the blood pressure cuff around it. “How do you like Maryniak so far?”

  Jamie normally hated medical checkups, but being able to spend some time with Maria made this one more than tolerable. “I’m having some trouble fitting in. Everybody seems to be in a clique or circle, and I feel kinda left out.”

  Maria inflated the cuff, opened the valve, and slowly released the pressure. “I felt the same when I first got here. Maybe it’s the corporate culture. ADC doesn’t have the best reputation. You’ve only been here a month. Give it time. Look at the chart on the far wall, please.”

  Jamie stared ahead as Maria shone a light into his eye. “I guess you’re right. Maybe it’s me. I’ve had trouble fitting in all my life.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My parents divorced when I was small,” Jamie said, “but neither of them wanted permanent custody of me. So I grew up getting shuffled around between them and various relatives and family friends. I guess that conditioned me not to settle down anywhere. Even for college, I ended up quitting and reapplying at three different schools before I finally got a degree.”

  Maria turned off the light. “What was your major?”

  “Business.” Jamie blinked. “I hated it. My classmates were arrogant snots who liked to hear the sound of their own voices, and the profs were eggheads who never left campus but still felt qualified to lecture us on how the ‘real world’ works.”

  “I see.” Maria handed Jamie a cup of water. “Swallow when I tell you to.”

  She stood behind him and placed her fingers on his neck. “Take a sip now, please.” As he swallowed, she felt his thyroid for tenderness.

  Maria took the cup and disposed of it. She then went to a cabinet and got a syringe. “I need a blood sample. Please put your arm on the side rest.”

  Jamie felt a prick as the needle went in.

  “How’d you get from business school to cooking?”

  Jamie sighed. “I met someone in college, but she wanted to stay in town after graduation and I wanted to try something else in another city.” He shook his head sadly. “Maybe it was the way I grew up that made me feel so compelled to move all the time, but it broke her heart. Took me two years to realize I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, but by then it was too late. Next thing I knew, she was married.”

  “I know how you feel,” Maria said as she withdrew the needle. “But how does cooking come into this?”

  “It just reached the point where I figured the only way to make the hurt seem worthwhile was to keep moving, to go as far away as I could. Can’t get much farther away than space, right? Every facility out here seemed to need engineers, doctors, and cooks. I’m not an engineer or a doctor, but I like to think I became a pretty good cook back at the college co-ops, so here I am. A man’s place is in the kitchen, right?”

  Maria labeled the blood sample. “Well, I think you’re doing a great job, especially with the crappy food the company makes you work with.” She smiled. “You’re fine. I’ll call if there’s anything you need to know about in the blood work.”

  A few years ago, Jamie’s list of jobs in the commercial space sector would have been shorter by a third. Companies believed the only purpose of food was physical nourishment, so having a dedicated cook was considered an extravagance. But food provided psychological as well as nutritional sustenance. Many corporations, including ADC, learned the hard way when productivity dropped by almost forty percent. Taking a lesson from terrestrial oil platforms, space companies began hiring full-time cooks, and worker morale improved immediately.

  Such was the importance of Jamie’s role in psychological support that Crenshaw granted him a power rationing waiver to use the oven. Tomorrow was the birthday of Fred Sabathier, the Shift Three foreman, and coffee cloud cake was his favorite.

  Jamie had just poured the batter into a tube pan and put it in the oven when he got a call from Maria.

  “Jamie, do you have a minute?”

  He glanced at the timer. “Sixty-five, actually What’s up?”

  “I need to talk to you about something.”

  Jamie frowned. It had only been a few hours since his blood test. She wouldn’t be calling him unless something was wrong.

  “Thanks for coming.”

  Nervously, Jamie took a seat. “So, what’s wrong with me?”

  Maria laughed. “Nothing’s wrong with you! I just needed your advice on something. This is confidential, of course.”

  “Of course,” Jamie repeated, visibly relieved.

  “I just examined the rover crew. They were out on a two-week helium-3 assay at Mare Marginis, but got back to base just before the solar storm.”

  Jamie nodded. He’d heard that ADC was studying the economic viability of Maryniak harvesting helium-3 isotopes from the lunar regolith, in response to demand to feed the new generation fusion reactors on Earth. “Are they all right?”

  “They’re all complaining about being … constipated.”

  “Really.” Jamie raised his eyebrows. “When did this start?”

  “A couple of days into their expedition.”

  Jamie thought for a moment. “Well, they’ve been eating the same things as everyone else since they got back, and I stick religiously to the UNSDA guidelines. Anything I make has enough fiber, believe me, and the rover rations are also supposed to meet UNSDA standards.”

  “Maybe they weren’t eating regularly,” Maria suggested. “That and stress can be causes as well. I mean, the stupid rover broke down halfway through their mission.”

  “Maybe …” Jamie rubbed his chin. “Do you have the serial number for the rover rations?”

  Maria consulted her organizer. “51800-8493227.”

  “Can I use your connection to tie-in to the company logistics database?”

  “Sure.”

  Jamie linked in. “That’s odd. Give me mat number again?”

  Maria repeated it.

  “That can’t be right. It looks like the number you gave me is for an EVA ration. Let me do a search.”

  A few moments later, Jamie put down his organizer, slowly shaking his head. “You’re not going to believe this. I think they stocked the rover with the wrong rations.”

  “What?”

  Jamie read the screen. “8493227 is a type of EVA ration. According to this, they’re eaten by crews on ships without spin gravity before spacewalks. They’re high in iron and sodium but low in fiber, so they won’t have to take a dump when they’re outside. The correct ration for the rover should have been 8493277. Somebody screwed up.”

  Maria rolled her eyes in disbelief. “All right, I’ll let them know.”

  “I can do up a high fiber menu for the next few days. How
do garbanzo pitas sound?”

  “Yummy. While you’re at it, make some of your blueberry oat bran muffins for the next rover expedition.”

  “I’ll ask for a power waiver for those muffins.” Jamie looked at his watch and stood. “Gotta go. Fred’s cake needs attending.”

  “Thanks for your help.”

  Upon returning to the kitchen, Jamie immediately knew that something was wrong. It should have been filled with the smell of freshly baked cake. Instead, there was nothing.

  He turned on the oven light. “Oh, no …” He opened the door. The cake was flat. “Damnit!” A brownout must have hit the kitchen while he was gone. Fred Sabathier’s cake was ruined.

  Jamie was in a bad mood.

  Crenshaw had denied him another power rationing waiver to use the convection oven, so for the birthday party they had to make do with a prepared microwave pie. Fred seemed not to mind, but Paul had made endless jokes to Maria about Jamie not being able to “get it up.” Jamie ground his teeth as he stirred the pot of pea and broccoli soup. Given ADC’s miserly pay scales, Jamie thought it was a miracle there weren’t more people like Paul at Maryniak. He briefly considered trying to slip something disgusting into Paul’s serving.

  Jamie could hear snippets of conversation from the doorway to the mess hall. He thought he heard someone say “explosive decompression.” Instinctively, he glanced at the red ceiling light. It. was off. He turned down the heat, covered the soup, and made his way outside.

  Nobody was eating. In addition to those in the mess hall for their scheduled dinner slot, others had come in from the corridor and were standing. They were all watching the monitor, which was turned to CNN Interplanetary.

  “… details continue to emerge on the accident that occurred at Banting Station just under an hour ago …”

  Banting Station was one of ADC’s Earth orbiting research labs that used the microgravity environment to develop new pharmaceuticals. Jamie stepped closer to the monitor.

  “… explosive decompression of the laboratory module …”

  The mess hall lights suddenly flickered, and the screen went momentarily dark. When the image returned, it showed a gash along the end cone of the lab module. Around the edges of the opening, serrated aluminum was bent outward like a twisted, metallic flower.