Battle Station

by Ben Bova

  “She’s staying here for a few more days,” Sam mumbled. It was like he was talking to himself instead of to me.

  But there was a happy little grin on his face.

  Everybody in the Shack started to make bets on how long Sam could hold out. The best odds had him capitulating in three nights. Jokes about Delilah and haircuts became uproariously funny to everybody —except me. My future was tied up with Sam’s; if the tourist hotel project collapsed, it wouldn’t be long before I was shipped back Earthside, I knew.

  After three days there were dark circles under Sam’s eyes. He looked weary. The grin was gone.

  After a week had gone by, I found Sam snoring in the Blue Grotto. As gently as I could I woke him.

  “You getting any food into you?” I asked.

  He blinked, gummy-eyed. “Chicken soup. I been taking chicken soup. Had some yesterday … ! I think it was yesterday …”

  By the tenth day, more money had changed hands among the bettors than on Wall Street. Sam looked like a case of battle fatigue. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes haunted.

  “She’s a devil, Omar,” he whispered hoarsely. “A devil.”

  “Then get rid of her, man!” I urged.

  He smiled wanly. “And quit show business?”

  Two weeks to the day after she arrived, the Blonde packed up and left. Her eyes were blazing anger. I saw her off at the docking port. She looked just as perfectly radiant as she had the day she first arrived at the Shack. But what she was radiating now was rage. Hell hath no fury … I thought. But I was happy to see her go.

  Sam slept for two days straight. When he managed to get up and around again, he was only a shell of his old self. He had lost ten pounds. His eyes were sunken into his skull. His hands shook. His chin was stubbled. He looked as if he had been through hell and back. But his crooked little grin had returned.

  “What happened?” I asked him.

  “She gave up.”

  “You mean she’s going to let you go?”

  He gave a deep, soulful, utterly weary sigh. “I guess she figured she couldn’t change my mind and she couldn’t kill me—at least not with the method she was using.” His grin stretched a little wider.

  “We all thought she had you wrapped around her … eh, her little finger,” I said.

  “So did she.”

  “You outsmarted her!”

  “I outlasted her,” Sam said, his voice low and suddenly sorrowful. “You know, at one point there, she almost had me convinced that she had fallen in love with me.”

  “In love with you?”

  He shook his head slowly, like a man who had crawled across miles of burning sand toward an oasis that turned out to be a mirage.

  “You had me worried, man.”

  “Why?” His eyes were really bleary.

  “Well … she’s a powerful hunk of woman. Like you said, they sent her up because you’re susceptible.”

  “Yeah. But once she tried to steal my idea from me, I stopped being susceptible anymore. I kept telling myself, ‘She’s not a gorgeous hot-blooded sexpot of a woman, she’s a company stooge, a bureaucrat with boobs, an android they sent here to nail you.’”

  “And it worked,” I said.

  “By a millimeter. Less. She damned near beat me. She damned near did. She should have never mentioned marriage. That woke me up.”

  What had happened, while Sam was fighting the Battle of the Bunk, was that when Sam’s partners realized that Global was interested in the tourist facility, they become absolutely convinced that they had a gold mine and backed Sam to the hilt. Their lawyers challenged Global’s lawyers, and once the paper-shufflers in Phoenix saw that, they realized that Miss Beryllium’s mission at the Shack was doomed to fail. The Blonde left in a huff when Phoenix ordered her to return. Apparently, either she was enjoying her work or she thought that she had Sam weakening.

  “Now lemme get another week’s worth of sleep, will you?” Sam asked me. “And, oh, yeah, find me about a ton of vitamin E.”

  So Sam became the manager and part-owner of the human race’s first extraterrestrial tourist facility. I was his partner and, the way he worked things out, a major shareholder in the project. Global got some rent money out of it. Actually, so many people enjoyed their vacations aboard the Big Wheel so much that a market eventually opened up for low-gravity retirement homes. Sam beat Global on that, too. But that’s another story.

  Malone was hanging weightlessly near the curving transparent dome of his chamber, staring out at the distant Moon and the cold, unblinking stars.

  The reporter had almost forgotten her fear of weightlessness. The black man’s story seemed finished; she blinked and adjusted her attention to here and now. Drifting slightly closer to him, she turned the recorder off with an audible click, then thought better of it and clicked it on again.

  “So that’s how this facility came into being,” she said.

  Malone nodded, turning in midair to face her. “Yep. Sam got it built, got it started, and then lost interest in it. He had other things on his mind. He went into the advertising business, you know …”

  “Oh, yes, everybody knows about that,” she replied. “But what happened to the woman, the Beryllium Blonde? And why didn’t Sam ever return to Earth again?”

  “Two parts of the same answer,” Malone said. “Miss Beryllium thought she was playing Sam for a fish, using his Casanova complex to literally screw him out of the hotel deal. Once she realized that he was playing her, fighting a delaying action until his partners got their lawyers into action, she got damned mad. Powerfully mad. By the time it finally became clear back at Phoenix that Sam was going to beat them, she took her revenge on Sam.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sam wasn’t the only one who could riflle through old safety regulations and use them for his own benefit. She found a few early NASA regs, then got some bureaucrats in Washington—from the Office of Safety and Health, I think—to rewrite them so that anybody who’d been living in zero gee for a year or more had to undergo six months’ worth of retraining and exercise before he could return to Earth.”

  “Six months? That’s ridiculous!”

  “Is it?” Malone smiled without humor. “That regulation is still on the books, lady. Nobody pays any attention to it anymore, but it’s still there.”

  “She did that to spite Sam?”

  “And she made sure Global put all its weight behind enforcing it. Made people think twice before signing an employment contract for working up here. Stuck Sam, but good. He wasn’t going to spend any six months retraining! He just never bothered going back to Earth again.”

  “Did he want to go back?”

  “Sure he did. He wasn’t like me. He liked it back there. There were billions of women on Earth! He wanted to return, but he just couldn’t take six months out of his life for it.”

  “That must have hurt him.”

  “Yeah, I guess. Hard to tell with Sam. He didn’t like to bleed where people could watch.”

  “And you never went back to Earth,” the reporter said.

  “No,” Malone said. “Thanks to Sam, I stayed up here. He made me manager of the hotel, and once Sam bought the rest of this Big Wheel from Global, I became the manager of the entire Alpha station.”

  “And you’ve never had the slightest yearning to see Earth again?”

  Malone gazed at her solemnly for long moments before answering. “Sure I get the itch. But when I do, I go down to the one-gee section of the Wheel here. I sit in a wheelchair and try to get around with these crippled legs of mine. The itch goes away then.”

  “But they have prosthetic legs that you can’t tell from the real thing,” she said. “Lots of paraplegics …”

  “Maybe you can’t tell them from the real thing, but I guarantee you that any paraplegic who uses those things can tell.” Malone shook his head. “No, once you’ve spent some time up here in zero gee, you realize that you don’t need legs to get around. You can live a
good and useful life here, instead of being a cripple back down there.”

  “I see,” the reporter said.

  “Yeah. Sure you do.”

  An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. She turned off the recorder on her belt, for good this time. Finally Malone softened. “Hey, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be nasty with you. It’s just that … thinking about Sam again. He was a great guy, you know. And now he’s dead and everybody thinks he was just a trouble-making bastard.”

  “I don’t, not anymore,” she said. “A womanizing sonofabitch, like you said. A male chauvinist of the first order. But after listening to you tell it, even at that he doesn’t sound so terrible.”

  The black man smiled at her. “Look at the time! No wonder I’m hungry! Can I take you down to the dining room for some supper?”

  “The dining room in the full-gravity area?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Won’t you be uncomfortable there? Isn’t there a dining area in the low-gravity section?”

  “Sure, but won’t you be uncomfortable there?”

  She laughed. “I think I can handle it.”

  “Really?”

  “Certainly. And maybe you can tell me how Sam got himself into the advertising business.”

  “All right. I’ll do that.”

  As she turned, she caught sight of the immense beauty of Earth sliding past the observation dome; the Indian Ocean a breathtaking swirl of deep blues and greens, the subcontinent of India decked with purest white clouds.

  “But …” she looked at Malone, then asked in a whisper, “don’t you miss being home, being on Earth? Don’t you feel isolated here, away from …”

  His booming laughter shocked her. “Isolated? Up here?” Malone pitched himself forward into a weightless somersault, then pirouetted in midair. He pointed toward the ponderous bulk of the planet and said, “They’re the one’s who’re isolated. Up here, I’m free!”

  He offered her his arm and they floated together toward the gleaming metal hatch, their feet a good eight inches above the chamber’s floor.

  Space Station

  In the grief and turmoil following the January 1986 explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, most of the world lost sight of NASA’s program to build a permanent manned orbiting station.

  A few weeks after that tragic accident, the Soviet Union launched Mir, the eighth space station it has placed in orbit since 1971. Mir is apparently a permanent station. Two cosmonauts are working in it as I write these words. I doubt that we will ever see a day again when there are not at least a few human beings living and working in space.

  NASA’s space station is still the most important project in the American civilian space program. It is the key to all the future explorations and development of the solar system, a base in orbit from which we can go on to the Moon, to Mars—eventually, to the stars.

  Soon after I wrote this piece I was invited to give a lecture in Pittsburgh. My hosts provided a lovely suite in a downtown hotel that overlooks the spot where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers join to form the Ohio. From my hotel window I looked down at the little park there and saw the foundations of the original Fort Pitt.

  It struck me that this was the frontier less than three centuries ago. Fort Pitt was a bare little outpost in the wilderness then. It has grown into a giant modern city, headquarters of mammoth corporations such as USX (formerly U.S. Steel), Rockwell International, Alcoa Aluminum, and many others.

  Less than three hundred miles overhead, a bare little outpost will be built in space. And for the same reasons of industry and exploration that turned Fort Pitt into modern Pittsburgh, that space station will grow into a city of commerce and industry and science.

  And it won’t take two centuries to make it happen. Not if we act with vigor and intelligence.

  “When you think of this thing being a little over four times as long as a shuttle, it is a big piece of equipment.”

  Neil Hutchinson paused for a moment, then added, “And that’s just the initial station that we’re trying to put up there.”

  Hutchinson was manager of the Space Station Program Office at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, outside Houston. He was in charge of building the largest structure ever placed into space.

  To Philip Culbertson, Hutchinson’s boss at NASA headquarters in Washington, the size of the space station was not as important as its permanency.

  “We want this thing to fly for twenty-five or thirty years,” said Culbertson, pointing to an artist’s rendering of NASA’s planned space station. “It must be an evolutionary design.”

  He tapped the picture on his conference table. “The space station may not be very graceful-looking,” he said, but since it will be assembled in orbit from pieces carried aloft by the space shuttle, there will be no need to make it streamlined. No winds will rock the space station, no weather will threaten it. It will not have to reenter the atmosphere and return to Earth. It is intended to be in space permanently. If it is eventually abandoned, it will be disassembled and sent back to Earth aboard space shuttles, reversing the technique by which it will be built.

  Sitting beside Culbertson was his deputy, John Hodge. Assembling the station in space “just changes your whole attitude toward the design,” he said. The space station can evolve and develop even after it begins operating in orbit.

  A slow smile broke across Culbertson’s face. “It’s kind of nifty that we can attach pieces on the outside with no penalty.”

  The first modules of the space station are scheduled to be launched aboard the shuttle in the early 1990s, according to current NASA plans. The station should be complete and “ready for business” in the mid-1990s. Its initial mass will be more than fifty tons, with room for growth. At least six shuttle missions will be required to bring the station’s primary components into orbit.

  Total program cost was originally budgeted at $8 billion, but by 1987 the cost was more realistically pegged at $12.5 billion.

  One year after President Reagan’s go-ahead in 1984, NASA awarded some $200 million worth of Phase B advanced development contracts to eight competing teams of aerospace companies for detailed studies of the station’s major systems and components.

  “We want a space station designed, not the space station,” says Hodge. There are still plenty of unknowns and variables to be settled before a definite design of the space station can be pinned down.

  The idea of placing a permanent station in orbit around the Earth goes back to the beginnings of the space program. But the political pressures of the 1960s pushed NASA to send astronauts to the Moon without first erecting an orbiting way station. After the Apollo program was killed and funding for space shriveled, NASA devoted its major energies to developing the space shuttle.

  But the shuttle was intended, from the first, to go back and forth to a permanent station in orbit. By January 1984, with the shuttle fleet working well, President Reagan announced in his State of the Union speech:

  “Today I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade. A space station will permit quantum leaps in our research in science, communications and in metals and life-saving medicines that can be manufactured only in space.”

  The station is intended to serve as a base for many different kinds of scientific research under long-term conditions of weightlessness; as a permanent observatory of the heavens and the Earth; as a “transportation node” where very complex spacecraft can be assembled, checked out, and launched on deep-space missions; as a facility for servicing and repairing satellites; and as a manufacturing facility where new materials and medicines can be made under zero-gravity conditions.

  Opposition to the space station has been raised by some scientists who believe that manned space operations are more costly than they are worth. They insist that unmanned spacecraft can accomplish most of the tasks a space station would do, and at a fraction of the space station’s cost. They fear that major manned programs
such as Apollo, the space shuttle, and now the space station, siphon funding away from their own scientific efforts.

  In May 1984 James Van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belts circling Earth, told the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union, “The development of a space station is … premature, and will severely reduce the opportunities for advances in space science during the next decade.”

  In November 1984 the Office of Technology Assessment, the high-tech advisory arm of the Congress, issued a massive report that found “no compelling, objective, external case” for a space station. In essence, the report portrayed NASA as pushing the station project merely to keep up its budget and payroll.

  NASA Administrator James Beggs blasted the OTA study when it was first released. “Not a professional piece of work.” He claimed that the study was “laced with rhetoric.” But a few weeks later, in testimony to Congress, Beggs said that the study actually makes a “very compelling case” for NASA’s space station program.

  Despite such arguments and criticisms, NASA is moving ahead, although many in the aerospace community worry that the space station program may be particularly vulnerable to congressional cost-cutters seeking to trim massive federal budget deficits.

  Even the station’s most important backer, President Reagan, proposed a $50-million decrease in the station’s funds for fiscal year 1986, from $280 million to $230 million. Although space enthusiasts want to have the station in operation by 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World, the Administration’s schedule now calls for the station to be operational “in the mid-1990s,” meaning 1994 at the earliest.

  At this early stage of the program, hardly any of the details of the station’s design have been firmed up. NASA has been doing its own in-house studies for several years, and many aerospace companies have also been conducting studies on their own. Every major aerospace corporation is involved in this competition, from RCA to TRW, from Rockwell to Martin Marietta, from Ford Aerospace to General Electric, and more.