by Ben Bova
The black man made no response.
“The key question, I guess … the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”
Malone snorted with disdain. “He didn’t! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a long story,” Malone said.
“That’s all right. I’ve got as much time as it takes.” Even as she said it, the reporter wished that Malone would volunteer to return back to the outer wheel, where gravity was normal. But she dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness get the better of her.
“Would you believe,” Malone was saying, “that it all started with a cold?”
“A cold?”
“Sam came down with a cold in the head. That’s how the whole thing began.”
“Tell me about it.”
Sam was a feisty little bastard—Malone reminisced —full of piss and vinegar. If there were ten different ways in the regulations to do a job, he’d find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he couldn’t abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you’d call him.
He’d had his troubles with the brass in Houston and Washington. Why he ever became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he’d be like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space. How he made it through training and into flight operations is something I’ll never figure out. I just don’t feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.
Anyway, when I first met him, he was finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head, and they couldn’t let him go back Earthside until it cleared up.
“Six billion people down there with colds, the flu, bad sinuses, and postnasal drips, and the assholes in Houston won’t let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”
Those were the first words Sam ever said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had reigned alone for nearly four years. Alpha was under construction then. We were in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station back in those primitive days. It didn’t spin, it just hung there; everything inside was weightless.
My isolation ward was a cramped compartment with four zero-gee bunks jammed into it, together with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it until that morning, Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his travel bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.
“Just don’t sneeze in my direction, Sniffles,” I growled at him.
That stopped Sam for about half a second. He gave me that lopsided grin of his—his face sort of looked like a scuffed-up soccer ball, kind of round, scruffy. Little wart of a nose in the middle of it. Longest hair I ever saw on a man who works in space; hair length was one of the multitudinous points of contention between Sam and the agency. His eyes sparkled. Kind of an odd color, not quite blue, not really green. Sort of in between.
“Malone, huh?” He read the name tag clipped over my bunk.
“Frederick Mohammed Malone.”
“Jesus Christ, they put me next to an Arab!”
But he stuck out his hand. Sam was really a little guy; his hand was almost like a baby’s. After a moment’s hesitation I swallowed it in mine.
“Sam,” he told me, knowing I could see his last name on the name tag pinned to his coveralls.
“I’m not even a Muslim,” I said. “My father was, though. First one in Arkansas.”
“Good for him.” Sam disengaged his cleated shoes from the grillwork floor and floated up onto the cot. His travel bag hung alongside. He ignored it and sniffed at the air. “Goddamned hospitals all smell like somebody’s dying. What’re you in for? Hangnail or something?”
“Something,” I said. “Acquired immune deficiency syndrome.”
His eyes went round. “AIDS?”
“It’s not contagious. Not unless we make love.”
“I’m straight.”
“I’m not.”
“Terrific. Just what I need, a gay black Arab with AIDS.” But he was grinning at me.
I had seen plenty of guys back away from me once they knew I had AIDS. Some of them had a hang-up about gays. Others were scared out of their wits that they would catch AIDS from me, or from the medical personnel or equipment. I had more than one reason to know how a leper felt, back in those days.
Sam’s grin faded into a frown. “How the hell did the medics put me in here if you’ve got AIDS? Won’t you catch my cold? Isn’t that dangerous for you?”
“I’m a guinea pig …”
“You don’t look Italian.”
“Look,” I said, “if you’re gonna stay in here, keep off the ethnic jokes, okay?”
He shrugged.
“The medics think they’ve got my case arrested. New treatment that the genetic researchers have come up with.”
“I get it. If you don’t catch my cold, you’re cured.”
“They never use words like ‘cured.’ But that’s the general idea.”
“So I’m a guinea pig, too.”
“No, you are a part of the apparatus for this experiment. A source of infection. A bag of viruses. A host of bacteria. Germ city.”
Sam hooked his feet into his bunk’s webbing and gave me a dark look. “And this is the guy who doesn’t like ethnic jokes.”
The Mac-Dac Shack was one of the first space stations the agency had put up. It wasn’t fancy, but for years it had served as a sort of research laboratory, mainly for medical work. Naturally, with a lot of M.D.s in it, the Shack sort of turned into a floating hospital in orbit. With all the construction work going on in those days, there was a steady stream of injured workmen and technicians.
Then some bright bureaucrat got the idea of using the Shack as an isolation ward, where the medics could do research on things like AIDS, Legionnaires’ disease, the New Delhi virus, and various paralytic afflictions that required either isolation or zero gravity or both. The construction-crew infirmary was moved over to the yet-unfinished Alpha, while the Shack was turned into a pure research facility with various isolation wards for guinea pigs like me.
Sam stayed in my ward for three, four days; I forget the exact time. He was like an energetic little bee, buzzing all over the place, hardly ever still for a minute. In zero gee, of course, he could literally climb the curved walls of the ward and hover up on the ceiling. He terrified the head nurse in short order by hanging near the ceiling or hiding behind one of the bunks and then launching himself at her like a missile when she showed up with the morning’s assortment of needles.
Never once did Sam show the slightest qualm at having his blood sampled alongside mine. I’ve seen guys get violent from their fear that they’d get a needle contaminated by me, and catch what I had. But Sam never even blinked. Me, I never liked needles. Couldn’t abide them. Couldn’t look when the nurse stuck me; couldn’t even look when she stuck somebody else.
“All the nurses are women,” Sam noticed by the end of his first day.
“All six of them,” I affirmed.
“The doctors are all males?”
“Eight men, four women.”
“That leaves two extra women for us.”
“For you. I’m on the other side.”
“How come all women nurses?” he wondered.
“I think it’s because of me. They don’t want to throw temptation in my path.”
He started to frown at me but it turned into that lopsided grin. “They didn’t think about my path.”
He caused absolute havoc among the nurses. With the single-minded determination of a spe
rm cell seeking blindly for an ovum, Sam pursued them all: the fat little redhead, the cadaverous ash-blonde, the really good-looking one, the kid who still had acne—all of them, even the head nurse, who threatened to inject him with enough estrogen to grow boobs on him if he didn’t leave her and her crew alone.
Nothing deflected Sam. He would be gone for long hours from the ward, and when he’d come back, he would be grinning from ear to ear. As politely as I could, I’d ask him if he had been successful.
“It matters not if you win or lose,” he would say. “It’s how you play the game … as long as you get laid.”
When he finally left the isolation ward, it seemed as if we had been friends for years. And it was damned quiet in there without him. I was alone again. I missed him. I realized how many years it had been since I’d had a friend.
I sank into a real depression of self-pity and despair. I had caught Sam’s cold, sure enough. I was hacking and sneezing all day and night. One good thing about zero gravity is that you can’t have a postnasal drip. One bad thing is that all the fluids accumulate in your sinuses and give you a headache of monumental proportions. The head nurse seemed to take special pleasure in inflicting upon me the indignity of forcing tubes up my nose to drain the sinuses.
The medics were overjoyed. Their guinea pig was doing something interesting. Would I react to the cold like any normal person, and get over it after a few days? Or would the infection spread and worsen, turn into pneumonia or maybe kill me? I could see them writing their learned papers in their heads every time they examined me, four times a day.
I was really unfit company for anyone, including myself. I went on for months that way, just wallowing in my own misery. Other patients came and went: an African kid with a new strain of polio; an asthmatic who had developed a violent allergy to dust; a couple of burn victims from the Alpha construction crew. I stayed while they were treated and sent home. Then, without any warning, Sam showed up again.
“Hello, Omar, how’s the tent-making business?” My middle name had become Omar as far as he was concerned.
I gaped at him. He was wearing the powder-blue coveralls and shoulder insignia of Global Technologies, Inc., which in those days was just starting to grow into the interplanetary conglomerate it has become.
“What the hell you doing back here?” My voice was a full octave higher than normal, I was so surprised. And glad.
“I work here.”
“Say what?”
He ambled over to me in the zero-gee strides we all learn to make: maintain just enough contact with the grillwork on the floor to keep from floating off toward the ceiling. As Sam approached my bunk, the head nurse pushed through the ward’s swinging doors with a trayful of the morning’s indignities for me.
“Global Technologies just won the contract for running this tin can. The medical staff still belongs to the government, but everybody else will be replaced by Global employees. I’ll be in charge of the whole place.”
Behind him, the head nurse’s eyes goggled, her mouth sagged open, and the tray slid from her hand. It just hung there, revolving slowly, as she turned a full one-eighty and flew out of the ward without a sound.
“You’re in charge of this place?” I laughed. “No shit?”
“Only after meals,” Sam said. “I’ve got a five-year contract.”
We got to be really friends then. Not lovers. Sam was the most heterosexual man I have ever seen. One of the shrinks aboard the station said he had a Casanova complex: he had to take a shot at any and every female creature he saw. I don’t know how good his batting average was, but he surely kept busy—and happy.
“The thrill is in the chase, Omar, not the capture,” he said to me many times. Then he would always add, “As long as you get laid.”
But Sam could be a true friend, caring, understanding, bringing out the best in a man. Or a woman, for that matter. I saw him help many of the station’s female employees, nurses, technicians, scientists, completely aside from his amorous pursuits. He knew when to put his Casanova complex in the backseat. He was a helluva good administrator, and a leader. Everybody liked him. Even the head nurse grew to grant him a grudging respect, although she certainly didn’t want anybody to know it, especially Sam.
Of course, knowing Sam, you might expect that he would have trouble with the chain of command. He had gotten himself out of the space agency, and it was hard to tell who was happier about it, him or the agency. You could hear sighs of relief from Houston and Washington all the way up where we were, the agency was so glad to be rid of the pestering little squirt who never followed regulations.
It didn’t take long for Sam to find out that Global Technologies, Inc., had its own bureaucracy, its own set of regulations, and its own frustrations.
“You’d think a multibillion-dollar company would want to make all the profits it can,” Sam grumbled to me about six months after he had returned to the Shack. “Half the facilities on Alpha are empty, right? They overbuilt, right? I show them how to turn Alpha into a tourist resort and they reject the goddamned idea. ‘We’re not in the tourism business,’ they say. Goddamned assholes.”
I found it hard to believe that Global Tech didn’t understand what a bonanza they could reap from space tourism. But they just failed to see it. Sam spent weeks muttering about faceless bureaucrats who sat on their brains, and how much money a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel could make. It didn’t do him a bit of good. At least, that’s what I thought at the time.
The big crisis was mostly my fault. Looking back on it, if I could have figured out a different way to handle things, I would have. But you know how it is when your emotions are all churned up; you don’t see any alternatives. Truthfully, I still don’t see how I could have done anything else except what I did.
They told me I was cured.
Yeah, I know I said they never used words like that; but they changed their tune. After more than five years in the isolation ward of the station, the medics asked me to join them in the conference room. I expected another one of their dreary meetings; they made me attend them at least once a month, said it was important for me to “maintain a positive interaction with the research staff.” So I dragged myself down to the conference room.
They were all grinning at me, around the table. Buckets of champagne stood at either end, with more bottles stashed where the slide projector usually hung.
I was cured. The genetic manipulations had finally worked. My body’s immune system was back to normal. My case would be in the medical journals; future generations would bless my memory (but not my name, they would protect my anonymity). I could go back home, back to Earth.
Only, I didn’t want to go.
“You don’t want to go?” Sam’s pudgy little face was screwed up into an incredulous expression that mixed in equal amounts of surprise, disapproval, and curiosity.
“Back to Earth? No, I don’t want to go,” I said. “I want to stay here. Or maybe go live on Alpha or one of the new stations they’re building.”
“But why?” Sam asked.
We were in his office, a tiny little cubbyhole that had originally been a storage locker for fresh food. I mean, space in the Shack was tight. I thought I could still smell onions or something faintly pungent. Sam had walled the chamber with a blue-colored spongy plastic, so naturally it came to be known as the Blue Grotto. There were no chairs in the Grotto, we just hung in midair. You could nudge your back against the slightly rough wall surfacing and that would hold you in place well enough. There wasn’t much room to drift around in. Two people were all the chamber could hold comfortably. Sam’s computer terminal was built into the wall; there was no furniture in the Grotto, no room for any.
“I got nothing to go back there for,” I answered, “and a lot of crap waiting for me that I would just as soon avoid.”
“But it’s Earth,” he said. “The world …”
So I told him about it. The whole story, end to end.
I had been a soldier,
back in that nasty little bitch of a war in Mexico. Nothing glamorous, not even patriotism. I had joined the army because it was the only way for a kid from my part of Little Rock to get a college education. They paid for my education, and right after they pinned a lieutenant’s gold bars on my shoulders they stuck me inside a heavy tank. Well, you know how well the tanks did in those hills. Nothing to shoot at but cactus, and we were great big noisy targets for those smart little missiles they brought in from Czechoslovakia or wherever.
They knocked out my tank. I was the only one of the crew to survive, and I wound up in an army hospital where they tried to put my spine back together again. That’s where I contracted AIDS, from one of the male nurses who wanted to prove to me that I hadn’t lost my virility. He was a very sweet kid, very caring. But I never saw him again once they decided to ship me to the isolation ward up in orbit.
Now it was five years later. I was cured of AIDS, a sort of anonymous hero, but everything else was still the same. Earth would still be the same, except that every friend I ever knew was five years distance from me. My parents had killed themselves in an automobile wreck while I was in college. I had no sisters or brothers. I had no job prospects: soldiers coming back home five years after the war aren’t greeted with parades and confetti, and all the computer stuff I had learned in college was obsolete by now. Not even the army used that kind of equipment anymore.
And Earth was dirty, crowded, noisy, dangerous —it was also heavy, a full one gee. I tried a couple of days in the one-gee wheel over at Alpha and knew that I could never live in Earth’s full gravity again. Not voluntarily.
Sam listened to all this in complete silence, the longest I had ever known him to go without opening his mouth. He was totally serious, not even the hint of a smile. I could see that he understood.
“Down there I’d be just another nobody, an ex-soldier with no place to go. I can’t handle the gravity, no matter what the physical therapists think they can do for me. I want to stay here, Sam. I want to make something of myself and I can do it here, not back there. The best I can be back there is another veteran on a disability pension. What kind of a job could I get? I can be somebody up here, I know I can.”
