Star Cops

by Chris Boucher

  “What are you trying to hide, Ms. Lancine?”

  “What is it that you expect to find, Mr. ’Endvorrsen?”

  “I expect to find the answer to where a great deal of public money, taxpayers’ hard-earned money, has been wasted.”

  “I will tell you where it ’as not been wasted!” snapped Lancine. “It ’as not been wasted on safety procedures for our workers.”

  “The people will be as shocked as I am to hear you admit that,” Hendvorrsen almost whispered, as he contrived to sound suitably shocked.

  “I am sure they will,” Lancine sneered, “but the point is that if I cannot guarantee the safety of experienced workers, ’ow can I guarantee your safety?”

  “Am I to regard that as a threat?”

  “I am not in the business of making threats.”

  “This is the police office, gentlemen.” Theroux folded back the stiff plastic door curtain, and showed the three candidates the quarter-module which was the ISPF’s allocation on the station.

  The German pulled himself inside. He was obviously determined to be positive and thrusting, and demonstrate all those other important leadership qualities which selection boards liked. He floated across to the equipment console and pulled himself down to look at the terminals. He was followed closely by the Spaniard who had clearly been on the same management courses and did not intend to be outshone. Both seemed quite comfortable with zero-G. In fact, they both seemed to be enjoying the sensation of floating.

  The Englishman stayed outside the door. He looked to be the youngest of the three and definitely the sickest, and he was, Theroux noticed, making clumsy efforts to resist weightlessness. His feet were braced on the walking strip, and he was holding the grasp rail as though his life depended on it. If anyone was going to barf in the cabin, it was going to be this guy.

  “Do all the stations provide these offices?” Hans Dieter asked, in his almost-too-flawless English.

  “It is part of the agreement which set up the force,” Geraldo Sanchez said, before Theroux could answer. “I’m surprised you did not know this, Hans.”

  Dieter smiled good-naturedly. “There’s a lot I don’t know, Geraldo. So I look, and I ask.”

  It struck Theroux that you could probably like the guy if you worked at it, and he said, “As you can see, there’s not a whole lot of privacy in here.”

  “Not a whole lot of room, either,” commented the Englishman.

  Nathan was beginning to get claustrophobic as well as nauseous. He peered into the cramped and dimly lit room. It was tubular in cross-section, like the architecture of practically every piece of space hardware he had come across so far. The Last Great Adventure be buggered, he thought, this was One Hundred And One Things To Do With Tubing.

  The black American who was showing them round said, “That’s a general problem out here, sir. Making large structures is relatively easy, but the delivery and maintenance of life-support within them; that costs.”

  “The low light level is to conserve power,” Sanchez said.

  “I knew that,” said Nathan.

  Theroux said, “Actually, that’s only partly true.”

  “What other explanation do you suggest?” asked Sanchez.

  “One of the light units is on the fritz.” He pointed to the dead light strip. “Maintenance haven’t gotten around to replacing it yet.”

  “This office does seem to contain everything that’s needed, though, wouldn’t you say so, Mr. Spring?” asked Dieter, who had been careful from the moment they had been introduced to observe the proprieties which went with Nathan’s superior rank.

  “Apart from the lighting, you mean,” Nathan answered, adding, “And please call me Nathan.”

  Dieter looked pleased. “Thank you, I will; Nathan.”

  Nathan caught Theroux’s slightly puzzled look. “The etiquette of rank,” he said. “I’m a chief super. Hans is a superintendent.”

  “I am also a superintendent,” Sanchez chipped in.

  As far as Nathan was concerned, the American couldn’t be much of an investigator if he needed to be given simple background information which professional curiosity should have prompted him to find out for himself.

  Realizing that he probably should have known that, Theroux said, “Must make you front runner then, sir.”

  “I see no reason why our respective ranks should be a deciding factor,” murmured Sanchez.

  “And running doesn’t feature high on my agenda,” the Englishman said as he attempted to turn towards the main bulkhead door, lost his footing and floated upwards from the floor. “As you can probably tell.”

  “Some people take to it naturally I think, and some do not,” Sanchez commented, pulling himself to the door and holding out a hand to Nathan, who ignored it as he struggled to get his feet back on the Velcro strip.

  “The trick is to be able to fly and chew gum at the same time,” said Theroux.

  “I thought the trick was to be able not to fly and chew gum at the same time,” Nathan gasped – and Theroux thought he understood now what the effort was for. The guy was trying to fit in. “Takes time,” he said.

  Nathan smiled as he got his breath back and said, “I don’t intend to be here that long.”

  The smile was open and youthful and Theroux found himself grinning back. “Listen,” he said, “there’s no fine for flying but it costs you a dollar if you let anything but yourself float loose.”

  “Anything at all?”

  “Anything at all.”

  “Christ,” said Nathan, who had had trouble changing into the station-issue coveralls, and at one stage had all his clothes and personal effects orbiting the changing cubicle, “the job could end up costing you money.”

  “We give new people forty-eight hours to get used to things. They usually stop feeling sick by then, too.”

  “After that, we pay?” asked Dieter.

  Theroux nodded. “Dollar an item. Can’t afford disorder in this sort of environment.”

  “Not at those prices, certainly,” said Nathan.

  Dieter turned his attention back to the computer terminal and communications equipment. “Can we get direct communication with Earth from here?” he asked.

  Again, Sanchez answered before Theroux had a chance to open his mouth. “All communication is routed through the station traffic control centre,” he said.

  “You’ve certainly done your homework, sir,” said Theroux. “P’raps you’d better show me around.”

  Sanchez was the only one who did not smile. “I believe in being prepared,” he said. “It is an essential of good police work.”

  “It is an advantage to know more than anyone else, that is certainly true,” Dieter acknowledged, still grinning.

  “Wasted if you let them know it, though,” murmured Nathan and Theroux saw that he was no longer smiling.

  “Shall we take a look at the traffic centre?” Theroux suggested and stepped past Nathan into the linking passage.

  Dieter and Sanchez propelled themselves to the door – and then got in a small tangle as they were forced to abort the manoeuvre, because Nathan had moved awkwardly and was now blocking their exit. He was even more hesitant and ungainly than before, though it did seem to Theroux that his co-ordination suddenly improved once the confident progress of other two had been balked.

  Theroux wondered for a moment whether it was a smile he had seen on the Englishman’s face as it happened, but the expression had been so fleeting that he could not be certain. “Everyone on the station has at least two specialties,” he continued as the floaters sorted themselves out. “I work as back-up in traffic and communications.”

  “I take it police work is not your other speciality,” Nathan said.

  Theroux could not decide whether this was critic
ism or just an observation. He said, “I’m a flight engineer by profession.”

  Nathan nodded but his face remained expressionless, so Theroux was none the wiser.

  Sanchez and Dieter meantime had got themselves untangled, and the Spaniard was eager once again to demonstrate his superior preparation. “His speciality could not be police work, how could it? None of the ISPF personnel are police professionals.”

  “I hate to disagree with all that background research, Geraldo,” Nathan said mildly, “but anyone who gets paid to do something is a professional. We can argue about how well they do it, if you like…”

  Theroux made up his mind that it had been a criticism. No question about it. He also decided that it would be better if Nathan Spring did not get the commander’s job. No question about that, either.

  Nathan was trailing some distance behind the others by the time they reached the large module which housed the main communications and radars for the station. Moving in zero-G, particularly in the restricted way he had chosen for himself, called on muscles he did not normally use – so, on top of everything else, he was beginning to ache.

  The way things were going, he thought, the medical and psych tests he would have to take when he got back to Earth would probably rule him out for the job without the need for anything else to be considered. Theroux was waiting by the entrance hatch when he reached it.

  “Are you okay, sir?”

  “No. And stop calling me ‘sir’, for Christ’s sake. I have no standing here and I’m not that much older than you. Though God knows I feel a hundred and forty just at the moment.”

  “What would you prefer I called you?”

  “Nathan’ll do.”

  Theroux looked dubious. “And what happens if you get the job?”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Nathan said.

  The entrance hatch was part of an emergency bulkhead designed to isolate the module in the event of an accident and life support failure. Each main section of the station and all of the major modules had these bulkhead hatches, which were not wacsobs, but genuine safety features. They were also extremely difficult to get through unless you floated, since there was a rim almost a metre high all round the circular access port.

  Theroux stepped aside and watched as Nathan approached the hatch. To ‘walk’ through, it was necessary to lift the lead leg, reach through blind, and touch it down on the other side at the same time as the trailing foot was released from the link-tube walking strip. It was a sort of hop and even the experienced could come unstuck, with undignified and painful results. Nathan looked at the entrance for a moment, then reached forward with his hands and, letting both his feet drift up from the walking strip, carefully floated through. Once down on the other side, he looked back at Theroux and shrugged. “No sense in being a damn fool about these things,” he said.

  As he waited for Theroux to step through, Nathan looked about him. Again a tube, though larger than any of the others that he had been in, and again dimly-lit, but this time only to make it easier to see the various screens presumably. And there were certainly plenty of those: banks of radars; a couple of standard-looking communications screens; a couple of larger mixer-screens, one of which was in use and was switching through inputs from the other sources; some picture units showing feeds from cameras which looked to be mounted at strategic points on the outside of the station; small multi-screen readouts which must come via the life-support computer from monitoring points throughout the station. This place, it seemed, was the eyes, the ears, the mouth, in fact, cliché or not, it was the nerve centre of the station.

  A stocky, youngish man with a round, pale face and thinning butter-yellow hair was operating one of the mixer-screen control consoles. The speed and dexterity with which he worked suggested great expertise, unless he was just playing random silly buggers to impress ignorant visitors from Earth. Butler looked up from what he was doing to watch Theroux shepherd the three policemen closer to the screens. “More tourists?” he enquired sourly.

  “This is the traffic control and communications module,” Theroux explained, sounding to himself more and more like a groundsider tourist guide, and not a very good one at that. “You might call it the nerve centre of the station.”

  “Only if you had a masterful grasp of the English language and a towering imagination,” said Butler, to no-one in particular.

  “We are professional policemen,” Sanchez responded politely. “Imagination is not something encouraged by our work.”

  “I had heard that about professional policemen,” Butler commented.

  “You misunderstand my colleague,” Nathan said, irritated by the man’s superciliousness. “If you define imagination as the exaggeration of experience, no copper can afford it if he wants to stay sane.”

  “And if he doesn’t want to stay sane?”

  “He gets into pointless discussions with total strangers.”

  “I’m sorry,” Theroux said quickly, “my fault. Gentlemen, this is Simon Butler. What he doesn’t know about station communications and traffic control just ain’t worth knowing. And the same could probably be said for the man himself. Simon these are Superintendents Sanchez and Dieter, and this is Chief Superintendent Spring. You two are fellow countrymen.” When neither man showed any sign of responding to this last part of his introduction Theroux said, “Or am I mistaken?”

  Dieter smiled. “I think you will find that no two Englishmen are ever ‘fellow countrymen’. They are very German like that.”

  “My God,” exclaimed Butler, “what a philosophical group of professional policemen you are. Positively sensitive. You must contract out the rubber hose work these days, I imagine?”

  Dieter continued to smile cheerfully. “You don’t like the police, Herr Butler. Why is that, I wonder?”

  Butler said, “I have a guilty conscience,” and turned back to his workscreen.

  Theroux felt it was probably time to get on with the conducted tour. Simon was obviously still pissed about all the visitors, and was cranking up his ‘eccentric Englishman’ routine to full sonofabitch level. “As I told you, I spend most of my duty shifts in here,” he said, “at this control console.”

  “This is where the crime is to be found, perhaps?” asked Dieter in what could have been a ponderous attempt at a joke.

  Nathan thought, And they say the Germans have no sense of humour – but then felt oddly disloyal to Dieter, who was likeable enough in a pushy sort of way. Certainly preferable to his own ‘fellow countryman’, as the idiot American called him. He turned to watch Butler checking vehicle movements in his own and neighbouring control sectors, and was almost impressed when the man said, “We do our best to be entertaining,” without interrupting his routine, adding, “especially as we seem to have developed into a weightless theme park for bored groundsiders, just recently.”

  “Yes?” said Nathan. “Well you can have my ticket to ride, and welcome to it, friend.”

  “The romance of space not for you?” asked Butler, still not pausing in his work.

  “He’s sick to his stomach,” Theroux said.

  Butler said, “Get your medication checked. There’s no need to suffer. Mild discomfort maybe, nothing more.”

  “He’s allergic to it,” said Theroux, and looked at Nathan. “Why else would you go through that? No sense in being a damn fool about these things,” he quoted.

  It occurred to Nathan that maybe the American wasn’t a total idiot after all.

  “It’s a pity,” said Butler, “that the same problem doesn’t afflict our visiting politician.”

  “Lars Hendvorrsen?” asked Dieter, looking puzzled.

  “A once warm and wonderful human being,” said Butler, “emotionally crippled, no doubt, by a lifetime of thrashing himself with wet birch twigs.”

  “You don’t like him?
” said Dieter.

  “I don’t have to like him. He’s got nothing to do with getting me a job.”

  “And he’s commandeered Simon’s cabin,” Theroux said, and smiled so that there could be no doubt in anyone’s mind that what they were hearing was just a fit of childish pique.

  Butler stopped what he was doing and rounded on Theroux angrily. “That’s got absolutely nothing to do with it! The man’s a pompous prick!”

  “You’ve met him,” Nathan said in a tone that could just have made it a question.

  “The self-important oaf was in here telling me, telling me mind you, how to do my job.”

  “He has a lot of energy,” Sanchez said, “and an instinctive understanding of the procedures.”

  “The man has the brains of a mushroom,” said Butler.

  “I cannot agree,” said Dieter.

  Butler sneered, “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  “I find his grasp of the problems facing the ISPF quite exciting,” Dieter went on imperturbably. “What do you think, Nathan?”

  “I think nausea and disorientation are quite enough excitement for the moment.”

  Butler turned back to his mixer-screen, and as he resumed his checking routine, he said, “European Parliamentary Representative Lars Hendvorrsen, self-made squillionaire, self-appointed guardian of the public purse and all-around nice guy, surpasses them effortlessly.”

  “You may have noticed that my colleague does not respond well to criticism,” Theroux said, vainly hoping to interrupt the tirade.

  “My feeling is,” Butler continued, “they made a mistake with his heart transplant and gave him an armpit.”

  “The screen which Simon is using,” Theroux said, trying to get back to the official tour at least, “takes feeds from any of the other sources via the control console. This allows him to pull in any information he needs without having to switch his attention between separate monitors.”