by Ben Bova
Goldman gave him a long, thoughtful look. “Because, Harry, you’re cheaper than teleoperated equipment.”
Harry was surprised. “Cheaper?”
“Sure. You construction people are a lot cheaper than developing teleoperated machinery. And more flexible.”
“Not in those damned suits,” Harry grumbled.
With an understanding laugh, Goldman said, “Harry, if they spent the money to develop teleoperated equipment, they’d still have to bring people up here to run the machines. And more people to fix them when they break down. You guys are cheaper.”
Harry needed to think about that.
Goldman invited him to her quarters. She had an actual room to herself; not a big room, but there was a stand-up desk and a closet with a folding door and a smart screen along one wall and even a sink of her own. Harry saw that her sleeping mesh was pinned to the ceiling. The mesh would stretch enough to accommodate two, he figured.
“What do you miss most, up here?” Goldman asked him.
Without thinking, Harry said, “Beer.”
Her eyes went wide with surprise for a moment, then she threw her head back and laughed heartily. Harry realized that he had given her the wrong answer.
She unpinned her hair and it spread out like a fan, floating weightlessly.
“I don’t have beer, Harry, but I’ve got something just as good. Maybe better.”
“Yeah?”
Goldman slid back the closet door and unzippered a faux leather bag hanging inside. She glided back to Harry and held out one hand. He saw there were two gelatin capsules in her palm.
“The guys in the chem lab cook this up,” she said. “It’s better than beer.”
Harry hesitated. He was on-shift in the morning.
“No side effects,” Goldman coaxed. “No hangover. It’s just a recreational compound. There’s no law against it.”
He looked into her tawny eyes. She was offering a lot more than a high.
Her smile turned slightly malicious. “I thought you Native Americans were into peyote and junk like that.”
Thinking he’d rather have a beer, Harry took the capsule and swallowed it. As it turned out, they didn’t need the sleeping bag. They floated in the middle of the room, bumping into a wall now and then, but who the hell cared?
The next morning Harry felt fine, better than he had in months. He was grinning and humming to himself as he suited up for work.
Then he noticed the super was suiting up, too, a couple of spaces down the bench.
Catching Harry’s puzzled look, the super grumbled, “Mitsuo called in sick. I’m goin’ out with you.”
It was a long, difficult shift, especially with the super dogging him every half-second:
“Be careful with those beams, hotshot! Just ’cause they don’t weigh anything doesn’t mean they can’t squash you like a bug.”
Harry nodded inside his helmet and wrestled the big, weightless girder into place so the welders could start on it while the supervisor went into a long harangue about the fact that zero-gee didn’t erase a girder’s mass.
“You let it bang into you and you’ll get crushed just like you would down on Earth.”
He went on like that for the whole shift. Harry tried to tune him out, wishing he had the powers of meditation that his great-uncle had talked about, back home. But it was impossible to escape the super’s screechy voice yammering in his helmet earphones. Little by little, though, Harry began to realize that the super was trying to educate him, trying to teach him how to survive in zero-gee, giving him tips that the training manuals never mentioned.
Instead of ignoring the little man’s insistent voice, Harry started to listen. Hard. The guy knew a lot more about this work than Harry did, and Harry decided he might as well learn if the super was willing to teach.
By the time they went back inside and began to worm themselves out of the spacesuits, Harry was grinning broadly.
The super scowled at him. “What’s so funny?”
Peeling off his sweat-soaked thermal undergarment, Harry shook his head. “Not funny. Just happy.”
“Happy? You sure don’t smell happy!”
Harry laughed. “Neither do you, chief.”
The super grumbled something too low for Harry to catch.
“Thanks, chief,” Harry said.
“For what?”
“For all that stuff you were telling me out there. Thanks.”
For once, the supervisor was speechless.
Days and weeks blurred into months of endless drudgery. Harry worked six days each week, the monotony of handling the big girders broken only by the never-ending thrill of watching the always-changing Earth sliding along below. Now and then the super would give him another impromptu lecture, but once they were inside again the super never socialized with Harry, nor with any of his crew.
“I don’t make friends with the lunks who work for me,” he explained gruffly. “I don’t want to be your friend. I’m your boss.”
Harry thought it over and decided the little guy was right. Most of the others on the crew were counting the days until their contracts were fulfilled and they could go back to Earth and never see the super again. Harry was toying with the idea of signing up for another tour when this one was finished. There was still plenty of work to do on the habitat, and there was talk of other habitats being started.
He spent some of his evenings with Goldman, more of them with the chemists who cooked up the recreational drugs. Goldman had spoken straight: The capsules were better than beer, a great high with no hangovers, no sickness.
He didn’t notice that he was actually craving the stuff, at first. Several months went by before Harry realized his insides got jumpy if he went a few days without popping a pill. And the highs seemed flatter. He started taking two at a time and felt better.
Then the morning came when his guts were so fluttery he wondered if he could crawl out of his sleeping bag. His hands shook noticeably. He called in sick.
“Yeah, the same thing happened to me,” Goldman said that evening, as they had dinner in her room. “I had to go to the infirmary and get my system cleaned out.”
“They do that?” Harry asked, surprised.
She tilted her head slightly. “They’re not supposed to. The regulations say they should report drug use, and the user has to be sent back Earthside for treatment.”
He looked at her. “But they didn’t send you back.”
“No,” said Goldman. “The guy I went to kept it quiet and treated me off the record.”
Harry could tell from the look on her face that the treatment wasn’t for free.
“I don’t have anything to pay him with,” he said.
Goldman said, “That’s okay, Harry. I’ll pay him. I got you into this shit, I’ll help you get off it.”
Harry shook his head. “I can’t do that.”
“I don’t mind,” she said. “He’s not a bad lay.”
“I can’t do it.”
She grasped both his ears and looked at him so closely that their noses touched. “Harry, sooner or later you’ll have to do something. It doesn’t get better all by itself. Addiction always gets worse.”
He shook his head again. “I’ll beat it on my own.”
He stayed away from the pills for nearly a whole week. By the fifth day, though, his supervisor ordered him to go to the infirmary.
“I’m not going to let you kill yourself out there,” the super snarled at him. “Or anybody else, either.”
“But they’ll send me back Earthside,” Harry said. Pleaded, really.
“They ought to shoot you out of a mother-humping cannon,” the super growled.
“I’ll beat it. Give me a chance.”
“The way your hands are shaking? The way your eyes look? You think I’m crazy?”
“Please,” Harry begged. It was the hardest word he had ever spoken in his whole life.
The super stared at him, his face splotchy red with anger, hi
s eyes smoldering. At last he said, “You work alone. You kill yourself, that’s your problem, but I’m not going to let you kill anybody else.”
“Okay,” Harry agreed.
“And if you don’t start shaping up damned soon, you’re finished. Understand?”
“Yeah, but—”
“No buts. You shape up or I’ll fire your ass back to Earth so fast they’ll hear the sonic boom on Mars.”
So Harry got all the solo jobs: setting up packages of tools at the sites where the crew would be working next; hauling emergency tanks of oxygen; plugging in electronics boards in a new section after the crew finished putting it together; spraying heat-reflecting paint on slabs of the habitat’s outer skin. He worked slowly, methodically, because his hands were shaking most of the time and his vision went blurry now and then. He fought for control of his own body inside the confines of his space suit, which didn’t smell like a new car anymore; it smelled of sweat and piss and teeth-gritting agony.
He spent his nights alone, too, in his closet-sized quarters, fighting the need to down a few pills. Just a few. A couple, even; that’s all I need. Maybe just one would do it. Just one, for tonight. Just to get me through the night. I’ll be banging my head against the wall if I don’t get something to help me.
But the spider would tell him, “Fight the monster, Harry. Nobody said it would be easy. Fight it.”
The rest of the crew gave him odd looks in the mornings when he showed up for work. Harry thought it was because he looked so lousy, but finally one of the women asked him why the super was picking on him.
“Pickin’ on me?” Harry echoed, truly nonplussed.
“He’s giving you all the shit jobs, Twelvetoes.”
Harry couldn’t explain it to her. “I don’t mind,” he said, trying to make it sound cheerful.
She shook her head. “You’re the only Native American on the crew and you’re being kept separate from the rest of us, every shift. You should complain to the committee—”
“I got no complaints,” Harry said firmly.
“Then I’ll bring it up,” she flared.
“Don’t do me any favors.”
After that he was truly isolated. None of the crew would talk to him. They think I’m a coward, Harry said to himself. They think I’m letting the super shit on me.
He accepted their disdain. I’ve earned it, I guess, he told the spider. The spider agreed.
When the accident happened, Harry was literally a mile away. The crew was working on the habitat’s endcap assembly, where the curving girders came together and had to be welded precisely in place. The supervisor had Harry installing the big, thin, flexible sheets of honeycomb metal that served as a protective shield against micrometeoroid hits. Thin as they were, the bumpers would still adsorb the impact of a pebble-sized meteoroid and keep it from puncturing the habitat’s skin.
Harry heard yelling in his helmet earphones, then a high-pitched scream. He spun himself around and pushed off as far as his tether would allow. Nothing seemed amiss as far as he could see along the immense curving flank of the habitat. But voices were hollering on the intercom frequency, several at the same time.
Suddenly the earphones went dead silent. Then the controller’s voice, pitched high with tension: “EMERGENCY. THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. ALL OUTSIDE PERSONNEL PROCEED TO ENDCAP IMMEDIATELY. REPEAT. EMERGENCY AT ENDCAP.”
The endcap, Harry knew, was where the rest of the crew was working.
Without hesitation, without even thinking about it, Harry pulled himself along his tether until he was at the cleat where it was fastened. He unclipped it and started dashing along the habitat’s skin, flicking his gloved fingers from one handhold to the next, his legs stretched out behind him, batting along the curving flank of the massive structure like a silver barracuda.
Voices erupted in his earphones again, but after a few seconds somebody inside cut off the intercom frequency. Probably the controller, Harry thought. As he flew along he stabbed at the keyboard on the wrist of his suit to switch to the crew’s exclusive frequency. The super warned them never to use that frequency unless he told them to, but this was an emergency.
Sure enough, he heard the super’s voice rasping, “I’m suiting up; I’ll be out there in a few minutes. By the numbers, report in.”
As he listened to the others counting off, the shakes suddenly turned Harry’s insides to burning acid. He fought back the urge to retch, squeezed his eyes tight shut, clamped his teeth together so hard his jaws hurt. His bowels rumbled. Don’t let me crap in the suit! he prayed. He missed a handhold and nearly soared out of reach of the next one, but he righted himself and kept racing toward the scene of the accident, whatever it was, blind with pain and fear. When his turn on the roll call came he gasped out, “Twelvetoes, on my way to endcap.”
“Harry! You stay out of this!” the super roared. “We got enough trouble here already!”
Harry shuddered inside his suit and obediently slowed his pace along the handholds. He had to blink several times to clear up his vision, and then he saw, off in the distance, what had happened.
The flitter that was carrying the endcap girders must have misfired its rocket thruster. Girders were strewn all over the place, some of them jammed into the skeleton of the endcap’s unfinished structure, others spinning in slow motion out and away from the habitat. Harry couldn’t see the flitter itself; probably it was jammed inside the mess of girders sticking out where the endcap was supposed to be.
Edging closer hand over hand, Harry began to count the spacesuited figures of his crew, some floating inertly at the ends of their tethers, either unconscious or hurt or maybe dead. Four, five. Others were clinging to the smashed-up pile of girders. Seven, eight. Then he saw one spinning away from the habitat, its tether gone, tumbling head over heels into empty space.
Harry clambered along the handholds to a spot where he had delivered emergency oxygen tanks a few days earlier. Fighting down the bile burning in his gut, he yanked one of the tanks loose and straddled it with his legs. The tumbling, flailing figure was dwindling fast, outlined against a spiral sweep of gray clouds spread across the ocean below. A tropical storm, Harry realized. He could even see its eye, almost in the middle of the swirl.
Monster storm, he thought as he opened the oxy tank’s valve and went jetting after the drifting figure. But instead of flying straight and true, the tank started spinning wildly, whirling around like an insane pinwheel. Harry hung on like a cowboy clinging to a bucking bronco.
The earphones were absolutely silent, nothing but a background hiss. Harry guessed that the super had blanked all their outgoing calls, keeping the frequency available for himself to give orders. He tried to talk to the super, but he was speaking into a dead microphone.
He’s cut me off. He doesn’t want me in this, Harry realized.
Then the earphones erupted. “Who the hell is that? Harry, you shit-head, is that you? Get your ass back here!”
Harry really wanted to, but he couldn’t. He was clinging as hard as he could to the whirling oxy tank, his eyes squeezed shut again. The bile was burning up his throat. When he opened his eyes he saw that he was riding the spinning tank into the eye of the monster storm down on Earth.
He gagged. Then retched. Dry heaves, hot acid bile spattering against the inside of his bubble helmet. Death’ll be easy after this, Harry thought.
The space-suited figure of the other worker was closer, though. Close enough to grab, almost. Desperately, Harry fired a few quick squirts of the oxygen, trying to stop his own spinning or at least slow it down some.
It didn’t help much, but then he rammed into the other worker and grabbed with both hands. The oxygen tank almost slipped out from between his legs, but Harry clamped hard onto it. His life depended on it. His, and the other guy’s.
“Harry? Is that you?”
It was Marta Santos, Harry saw, looking into her helmet. With their helmets touching, Harry could hear her trembling voice, shocked and scar
ed.
“We’re going to die, aren’t we?”
He had to swallow down acid before he could say, “Hold on.”
She clung to him as if they were racing a Harley through heavy traffic. Harry fumbled with the oxy tank’s nozzle, trying to get them moving back toward the habitat. At his back the mammoth tropical storm swirled and pulsated like a thing alive, beckoning to Harry, trying to pull him down into its spinning heart.
“For chrissake,” the super’s voice screeched, “how long does it take to get a rescue flitter going? I got four injured people here and two more streakin’ out to friggin’ Costa Rica!”
Harry couldn’t be certain, but it seemed that the habitat was getting larger. Maybe we’re getting closer to it, he thought. At least we’re heading in the right direction. I think.
He couldn’t really control the oxygen tank. Every time he opened the valve for another squirt of gas the damned tank started spinning wildly. Harry heard Marta sobbing as she clung to him. The habitat was whirling around, from Harry’s point of view, but it was getting closer.
“Whattaya mean it’ll take another ten minutes?” the super’s voice snarled. “You’re supposed to be a rescue vehicle. Get out there and rescue them!”
Whoever was talking to the super, Harry couldn’t hear it. The supervisor had blocked out everything except his own outgoing calls.
“By the time you shitheads get into your friggin’ suits my guys’ll be dead!” the super shrieked. Harry wished he could turn off the radio altogether but to do that he’d have to let go of the tank and if he did that he’d probably go flying off the tank completely. So he held on and listened to the super screaming at the rescue team.
The habitat was definitely getting closer. Harry could see spacesuited figures floating near the endcap and the big mess of girders jammed into the skeletal structure there. Some of the girders were still floating loose, tumbling slowly end over end like enormous throwing sticks.
“Harry!”
Marta’s shriek of warning came too late. Harry turned his head inside the fishbowl helmet and saw one of those big, massive girders looming off to his left, slightly behind him, swinging down on him like a giant tree falling.
