Trojan Orbit

by Mack Reynolds

  Mark Donald was a man of his word. He had promised to fix the IABI man up with Irene. Somewhat to Pete’s surprise, the waitress had attended the party and, before it was over, Donald had gotten them together. Pete had memories of too much guzzle and too much rich food after more than a week spent in deep space under austere conditions. And evidently it had never occurred to the girl not to come to his room when the party broke up. It couldn’t be his good looks and he rather doubted it was his charm. Peter Kapitz had few illusions about himself as a romantic figure.

  She came awake at almost the same time he had and was the type who could smile as though meaning it at the first sight of the new day. A repulsive characteristic, in Pete’s estimation.

  She said, “Good morning, darling.”

  “Good morning?” he repeated. At least she looked as attractive the morning after as she had the night before. Which didn’t always apply. In fact, it rarely did. She was one scrumptious mopsy, he told himself. One of her coral-tipped melons popped up from under the bed sheet and it came back to him that they’d tumbled into bed nude and that her figure was as gorgeous as her piquant face.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why’d you bother to come to bed with me last night? I’m not exactly a Tri-Di super-jock.”

  She grinned at him. “It all comes under the head of public relations. Mr. Moore said that you were to be given VIP status.”

  “You mean that you work all day in that restaurant and then at night you perform, ah, public relations duties? You need a union.”

  She shrugged shoulders that were as round as her heels, brought her arms up, and stretched hugely, revealing the other melon as the sheet slipped. “Extra pay,” she said. “A girl’s hard-put at Lagrange Five to afford any of the goodies unless she takes every opportunity to, uh, improve herself.” She took a deep breath. “Besides, they never would have let me come up if they hadn’t known I was cooperative.”

  He took her in, all over again, and said, “You don’t exactly look like a space construction worker, or even some scientific type. Why did you come to Island One? I’d think a girl like you could make a small fortune in Vegas or the Bahamas. In Lagrange Five, it must be a little rugged for a girl who likes her goodies.”

  She hesitated momentarily, then shrugged the magnificent shoulders again. “I was in the Bahamas, but I got a little warm and, uh, a friend made arrangements for me to come up here.”

  “A little warm?”

  “I shot a man a little.”

  “How little?”

  “He’s a little bit dead. He was my husband, the bastard.”

  He fixed his eyes on her. “Didn’t you know I was a cop? I’m an IABI operative.”

  “Oh, yes. Mr. Donald mentioned that,” she said carelessly.

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, girl, suppose I arrested you? If you’re on the run it wouldn’t be very hard for me to check with the Bahamas police, get the details, and haul you back down.”

  Her blue eyes widened a little, but there was a touch of mockery there. “You have no jurisdiction in Island One, Mr. Kapitz, darling. You’re from the United States of the Americas.”

  He was indignant at her. The damn fool, letting him know she was a fugitive. He said severely, “I could work through the Reunited Nations.”

  “They don’t have any jurisdiction here either. Neither has any Earthside government. Only Lagrange Five Security has. And there’s no extradition from Island One, Mr. Kapitz.”

  “Pete,” he told her in disgust. It hadn’t occurred to him before, what she had just revealed. But she was obviously right.

  He said, a certain amount of compassion in his voice, “Then you’re up here for good? Not just a five-or ten-year contract.”

  She sighed. “That’s right. I’m a colonist, not just a contract worker. And after a few years, when my looks have gone, I’ll be limited to my income as a waitress. It’s not much of a prospect. Perhaps I can get one of the big shots to marry me, or at least take me on a full-time basis.”

  Pete scowled. For all he knew, Irene’s husband had deserved the shooting. He said, “I suppose, at least, when they’ve finished the larger islands, say Island Three, you’ll be able to move over there and living won’t be so rugged.”

  She gave a little snort. “I’ll believe Island Three when I see it. Who do you think’s going to populate the place and run it?”

  Bruce Carter and Rick Venner had come up against this aspect before, but Pete Kapitz hadn’t. Scowling still, he said, “All those people down Earthside who want to become space colonists.”

  “Anybody who wants to become a space colonist has solid bone in his head where brains ought to be,” she told him sarcastically. “When it comes to living the good life, this is the end of the line.”

  Pete Kapitz still largely had the space dream, as he’d explained to Roy Thomas before taking the assignment. He said, “It’ll be different when the big islands get underway. With all that high pay the colonists get, life’ll be pretty rosy.”

  Her snort was more definite this time. She said patiently, “Look, suppose you have some engineer who makes maybe 40,000 dollars a year, tax free, and a wife who’s a doctor, and makes the same. A family income of 80,000 a year up here. Fine. What do they spend it on?”

  He eyed her blankly.

  She spelled it out for him. “If you had eighty thousand a year, tax free, Earthside, you could live it up. Nice home, a maid maybe, gardens, a boat, nice cars, vacations. The works. But you’ve got to remember that in Island Three, if it’s ever built, everybody else is going to be making big pay, too. So who’d want to be a servant? That big house is out unless you’re willing to do all the work yourself. So are the gardens, unless you do your own gardening. The boat is out, unless it’s so small you don’t need to crew it. Cars, big or otherwise, don’t make sense in an island. There’s no place far enough away to call for them; besides, it’s one of the few real reasons for going into space at all—getting away from the automobiles that have loused up Earth. Vacations? To where? Other islands all but the same as yours? Or back to Earth? If you want to be on Earth, why leave? If you’ve got enough on the ball to work in space, you can make a good living Earthside. The second-raters are all on the ‘nit,’ Negative Income Tax, or the equivalent in other countries, but if you’ve got any real ability, you can earn a good living.”

  “Wizard, I get the message,” Pete said. “You don’t think anybody in his right mind would become a space colonist.”

  “I sure as hell wouldn’t, darling,” she said. She smiled again. “Would you like a repeat this morning or did you lose your repeater?”

  He looked at his wrist chronometer, which was all he wore, and said, “Don’t think I don’t appreciate the kind offer, lady, but after that hectic party…” he cleared his throat, “…and what happened after, I find it’s getting late and I have a lot to do. Besides, I’ve got a slight hangover.”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said, her smile inverted. “I assume you didn’t arrive in Island One just to see the sights. There aren’t any. Did you want me to come again tonight?”

  “At least half a dozen times,” he said, swinging his feet to the floor.

  Irene laughed. “It’s a date,” she said. “See you here tonight then, if not sooner in the restaurant.”

  Pete was on his way to the dossier files in the Security offices on the ground floor. He was going to make a policy of checking out everybody he met and, on the excuse that he was in the files looking for Rocks Weil, no one could complain. However, on his way he stopped off. Peter Kapitz was a strong believer in the fallacy that a hair of the dog that bit you was a cure for hangover.

  The main bar of the L5 Hilton was immediately off the lobby and Pete made a beeline for it. At this time of the morning, it was empty save for a single customer and a bartender. Peter took a stool.

  He looked hopefully at the bartender and said, “I don’t image you’d have a very c
old beer. Too much weight involved in sending up such an item.”

  “Why not, sir?” the barman said briskly. He turned and went to a refrigerator.

  The other customer, a middle-aged, rugged-looking type, said sourly, “Nothing too good for the Hilton. Most construction workers can’t afford twelve ounces of straight alcohol a month. Here, you drink the same amount of beer in one go. What’s more, you don’t even have to pay for it.”

  Pete looked over at him again. The other was wearing space coveralls and on the pocket was stitched, Fred Davis, and under that, Supervisor. He didn’t look the type that would be in the L5 Hilton. The bartender returned with a chilled, beaded bottle of Tuborg and a thin pilsen glass. He poured carefully down the side of the glass until it was a little over half full, then more steeply to bring up a beautiful head, and then set the glass and beer bottle before Pete.

  “Cheers, sir,” he said and began to return to the place down the bar where he had been polishing glasses that already sparkled like crystal.

  “Here,” Fred Davis said, holding up his empty glass. “Let me have a refill.”

  The bartender frowned just a bit and ungraciously came back. He took up a bottle of twenty-year-old rye whiskey from the well-stocked shelves behind the bar and poured and served the drink before returning to his job.

  Fred Davis grinned at Pete and 6aid, “Ever notice what snobs waiters and servants are? He calls you sir, but he knows damn well I don’t belong in here and he hates to have to serve me, even though it’s no skin off his nose. Everything’s free in the hotel.”

  This was a new one to Pete. After taking a life-giving pull on the brew, he said, “How come you’re in here if you don’t belong?”

  “I’ve got an appointment with Sol Ryan and I’m waiting to see him. As long as I have a legitimate pass to be in the hotel, I rate the same things as everybody else.” He laughed a hard-hat construction worker’s laugh. “I hope the hell he doesn’t get around to seeing me for hours. You know what this guzzle would cost me in the Luxury Bar, across the street?” He grimaced. “Hell, they wouldn’t even have it there, no matter what you’d be willing to pay.”

  Pete said, “You’re a construction worker?” Thus far, he hadn’t met any of the rank-and-file employees in Island One.

  “That’s right,” the other said. He grinned. “And poor Sol Ryan hates to see me enter his door.”

  Pete took down some more of his beer. This was interesting. “How’s that?” he said.

  The other had obviously already had enough of his unaccustomed rye to be on the loose-tongued side. He winked broadly, a burlesque of a wink. “Because I’m bad news. I’m one of the real space construction men. When I show up, it’s because something’s gone plenty wrong.”

  The IABI man held out his hand. “Pete Kapitz,” he said. “I’m temporarily up from Earthside.”

  The other shook gravely. “One of these one-only special jobs, eh? I’m Freddy Davis. I’m one of the supervisors working in space on the hull.”

  “Glad to meet you,” Pete said. “What’s the emergency now?”

  “I got several of them,” the other said owlishly. “But this one involves one of the basic impossibilities of this whole fuck-up of a job.”

  “Such as what?” Possibly, Pete realized, here was some of the material of the type Roy Thomas had sent him up to get.

  “Such as the vanes, the mirrors on the outside that reflect the sun’s rays into the island. You know anything at all about the vanes?”

  “Well, vaguely,” Pete told him, taking another grateful pull at the Danish beer. “I remember one of the articles Doctor Ryan had in a magazine. He was describing changing the weather by opening and closing the mirrors. He said you could control the average temperature, even chilling it down to the point where there’d be snow.”

  The other grinned and sipped at his whiskey. “Snow is right. I’ll never forget the damn freeze when the mirrors got stuck a couple of years ago and it took us several days to repair the whole complicated shebang. Froze every body of water in the island solid. That was back when they were still trying to introduce fish and wildlife, birds and all. The houses, of course, are all without heating and air conditioning. We weren’t expecting to need them. The only way we colonists and contract workers stayed alive was by wearing every stitch of clothing we had and jerry-rigging heating devices.”

  “Holy smog,” Pete said. “I never heard about that.”

  Freddy Davis smirked in deprecation. “Ron Rich doesn’t release that kind of news,” he said. “At any rate, here’s the thing about the vanes. When the cylinder is revolving at speed enough to get centrifugal forces equal to one G on the inner surface, the movable vanes also feel the one G folded flat. Fully extended, they experience forces averaging over one G. And these vanes are supported only at the hinge end. To give you an idea, you only have to ask what is the longest structure that we can make down Earthside, parallel to the surface and supported or cantilevered at one end. Maybe fifty yards. So, the way the original plans went, if you built the island and started it rotating, it wouldn’t be long at all before the vanes would begin to bend, fan out, and soon break off.”

  Pete was ogling him. He said in protest, “But those mirrors. They’re one of the basic things. Can’t the vanes be supported by cables or something?”

  “It’s bad enough in this island,” the other told him. “It’s only half a mile long. But when you start talking about the big islands, which supposedly we’ll start building shortly, then you’re talking about vanes that are miles long. You’re not going to be able to support them without a whole new design to support many miles of their own length against such forces, to say nothing of the weight of the vanes. It’ll be back to square one—or almost.”

  Pete said, “Wizard, but the fact remains that they are working. All you have to do is look out the window and see. And last night it got dark, just as though we were Earthside.”

  The space construction engineer and supervisor chortled and said, “For that you can thank yours truly and a couple dozen of my lads who have been improvising, jerry-rigging and patching things up with stickum paper and baling wire. Right now we’re working on the possibility of building the mirror support structures as fixed assemblages on which the mirror panels are mounted in the fashion of Venetian blinds. But, like I said, it’s one thing chasing our tails around like crazy trying to keep this little island more or less operating. But it’d be another thing with any structure as large as Island Two, not to speak of Island Four or Five with their supposed hundreds of square miles of interior area.”

  Unbeknownst to either Pete Kapitz or Freddy Davis, the bartender, supposedly intent on his glasses, had been taking most of this in. Now he went down to the far end of the bar, flicked a stud and spoke softly, unheard by the two, into a mike set into the wall. Then he returned to his glasses and resumed polishing.

  Pete said, finishing his beer, “Being on the practical construction end must give you a viewpoint we laymen can’t even comprehend. But you mentioned that this was just one of the basic problems involved. What’d be another one?”

  The other looked down into his glass as though pondering the desirability of ordering another, and evidently deciding against it, at least for the time being.

  He said, “With Murphy’s Law operative, I have a certain misgiving about our island gravity machine, as you’d probably call it. It’s not my particular responsibility, but one hell of a lot of things are going to start getting all jolted and fucked up—people, bicycles, soil, water, compost heaps, and what not—when the spin equipment that maintains exact pseudogravity gives a big burp because of some defective parts, or whatever. I’m not saying it’s going to happen today, or tomorrow, but given time, any machinery throws a red light.”

  It was then that Annette Casey and Bruce Carter entered the bar. Ryan’s Person Friday raised her eyebrows at the sight of the construction supervisor and Pete Kapitz chewing the rag at the bar. The two newcomers
came over.

  Bruce said to the IABI agent, “Hitting the bottle already, at this time of day, eh? Once a cop, always a cop. Any chance to freeload…”

  Pete said, “Hi, Bruce. What spins?” He waved at the bartender for another beer.

  Annette said to Davis, “Hi, Freddy. What’re you doing off the job? I thought you were the only really reliable man we had in this tin can.”

  Freddy grinned at her. “I’m not playing hooky, Annette. I have an appointment with Sol. Maybe he’s forgotten me. Not that I mind. I have a chance like this at decent guzzle about once in six months. How about having one with me?”

  “Before lunch? Heaven forbid. My sainted father died of the shakes. Come along, I’ll take you up to the office. Without me on the scene, you’re probably right; he’s forgotten the appointment.”

  She turned to Pete, smiled, and said, “You must be Peter Kapitz. Doctor Ryan has been trying to fit seeing you into his schedule, but we’ve been rather busy.” She put out her hand.

  They shook, Pete appreciating her brunette beauty. “I’ve been kind of busy myself, not that I’ve accomplished much. I saw you and the doctor at the party last night, but you were always so occupied, I didn’t want to intrude.”

  She bent a smile on the IABI man and said to him and Bruce, “I’ll see both of you later. Meanwhile, let’s go, Freddy.”

  After they had left, Bruce said to the bartender, “Is it possible to get a cup of coffee in here?”

  “Certainly, sir. Right away.” He went down to his mike at the end of the bar and spoke into it.

  Bruce said to Pete, “Let’s go to a table. If I sat here, staring at those bottles, I’d probably succumb and start drinking myself.”