Orbital Decay (10 page)

Yet those were tender hands as well. His skin remembered her palms stroking his back in the middle of the night, her fingers clutching his ass at the height of her orgasm. Flesh remembers.

As if she were reading his mind, Laura pulled him closer. “Look,” she said softly, “if you really must get laid tonight, well, y’know, I’m not doing much….”

“Jesus, Laura… c’mon. It’s supposed to be over. We’re not married anymore.”

“I didn’t say we were,” she replied, shaking her head. “I didn’t say we had to get married again. But, shit, we slept together for a year before we got married, and I don’t see…”

Okay
,
go on
, he thought.
Let’s hear the rest of the speech.

“I mean,” she continued, “here we are, both in this little town, and it’s not like we’re both seeing other people. We’re still friends. Can’t we do what, y’know, some friends do?”

She’s going to keep it short this time
, he thought.
Nothing
a
bout how much she’s missed me, or how she loved watching the sunrise from my porch
,
or the way I made scrambled eggs in the morning. Repetition makes for brevity
,
I guess.

Laura laughed. “Hey, look, I’ll admit it, I’m kinda horny myself. And there isn’t another guy in the place who looks better.”

Hooker looked down at the floor, but instead of seeing the floor, all he could see was her. Damn it, she was still wearing the calfskin boots he had given her for her birthday a year ago, just before they got married. His mind remembered. His flesh remembered. His mind was fogged after the beers and tequila, but the flesh never forgets.

She was following a script they had read through a couple of times before; the next line was his.

“I think there’s a bottle of wine in the fridge back at my place,” he said quietly. “Go on. Get your coat.”

She smiled, and leaned forward to kiss him. As she did, Hooker wondered why—when they were divorced, when seeing her was something he tried to avoid—he could not stop from sleeping with her.

D
OES IT SEEM FUNNY
to you that I’m so obsessed with the names we put on the things we built and used in space? Perhaps it should be strange, but it’s only a reflection of how the people who worked up there felt about their jobs, their environment, their living conditions: a cross between a nostalgia for futures past, and cynicism for what shape the future had taken. How we name things is an indication of our true feelings.

Take, for instance, the formal name given to Skycorp’s orbital construction shack in the Clarke Orbit. When it was still in the design and development stages, Skycorp simply called it “the Construction Shack,” in the same way NASA went for the longest time calling its first permanent space station simply “the Space Station.” But when it finally was built, shortly after Olympus Station was finished, the company decided to christen it with something less generic.

They picked the name Vulcan, the P.R. people said, because it fit in with the mythological origins for Olympus, the name of the main space station in geosynchronous orbit; that is, Olympus being the home of the gods, and Vulcan being the tool-making deity, the omnipotent blacksmith. It makes sense that way, of course, but note: NASA had used mythological nomenclature—Mercury, Apollo, Thor, Athena, et cetera—during its first years, now regarded as the halcyon, pioneering days of spaceflight. Seen in that context, this tends to make the use of names like Olympus and Vulcan a commentary on how Skycorp’s leaders felt about their work, as taking further pioneering steps into that great, high frontier.

Second point. In the TV series of the twentieth century,
Star Trek
, what planet did Mr. Spock come from? Skycorp never came straight out and admitted that this bit of trivia from modern mythology had anything to do with its choice of name for the construction shack, but one can’t but help notice that a lot of the company’s aging execs were old-time SF fans and trekkies, that long before they had risked their financial assets with McGuinness’ fledgling commercial space enterprise they had parked themselves in front of the tube to watch the continuing adventures of William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, and DeForrest Kelly. And before you scoff at this premise, remember: The first space shuttle NASA built had its name changed from the
Constitution
to the
Enterprise
because of pressure from the trekkies.

Speaking from a strictly aesthetic viewpoint, it makes sense that an old SF television series had something to do with the christening of Skycorp’s construction shack. Of all the big structures built in space, Vulcan Station alone had that funky, semi-streamlined, designed-by-committee look that typified the spaceships on
Star Trek
, a look which reminded one of common household objects. The TV
Enterprise
looked like an old Whammo Frisbee with a toilet-paper core and two crayons attached; the Romulan battle cruisers looked like dinner trays; the Klingon ships were reminiscent of the plastic mallards your uncle the duck hunter used to have hanging over his cabin fireplace.

Vulcan Station looked like a telephone receiver. Not the ones which came into common usage by the end of the 80s; the big ones with round ends that Bell Telephone put in every house and office after the end of World War II. It might have been strictly a coincidence of design, but I rather think an engineer, sitting up late in his office, trying to come up with a practical design for the construction shack, stared at an old phone on his desk and went—“Eureka!”

Essentially, Vulcan was an elongated bar between two hemispherical modules. The modules, called Module A and Module B, were flattened at the bottoms. Most of Vulcan was unpressurized except for the command deck in Module A and the inflated modules that were strapped on the outer skin of Module B—colloquially called “hotdogs” because of their sausagelike appearance—which served as temporary areas for the beamjacks to suit up and rest in.

The rest of the shack was uninhabitable, exposed to hard vacuum, including the main construction bay between the two modules, where much of the work was done. In contrast to the designs made for construction shacks by earlier designers, though, these areas were not skeletal, open areas; a thin aluminum skin, not much thicker than tinfoil, was stretched over the whole superstructure. The point was to protect the construction supplies—including the aluminum sheet rolls sent from the Moon at great expense—from micrometeorite damage. This gave Vulcan its unexpectedly streamlined appearance.

The underside of Vulcan, in the long cross section between Modules A and B, contained a wide-open hatch, the main construction bay. The shack hovered above the powersat, tethered in place by cables, with the hatch over the unfinished end of the powersat’s structure.

The beam builders were contained in the main bay. They were like the ones designed by Grumman and NASA in the 70’s: big rectangular machines each weighing nearly a hundred tons on Earth. Their mass alone was formidable in space, when it meant lowering and raising the fat bastards in and out of the bay. Three large rolls of aluminum sheet, made on the Moon, were loaded on rollers on the outside of a beam builder, one on each of the machine’s three sides. The sheets were fed in and molded into spars and joined with cross-spars with laser welders. What came out was a perfect tetrahedral beam, a hundred feet long, which could be joined with other beams to form one of the main spars.

To join the beams together, beamjacks in MMU backpacks and in pods would glide between and under them, inserting trusses and reinforcing seams. It was long, slow work, because guidance lasers in Vulcan were focused down the length of the satellite. With them, Command could tell whether the giant structure was being built straight. If it wasn’t—a common occurrence—then beamjacks would have to get it straight. Imagine trying to build something several miles long as straight and even as a laser beam, and you can see one of the reasons building the thing was such a heartache.

On the end of Module A was a ramp where more guys worked at assembling the two microwave transmitting dishes which would eventually be fixed to rotary joints at each end of the completed powersat.

The construction pods were housed within Module B, near one of the two freighter loading bays on the upper half of the shack, just across from the main airlock leading to the hotdogs. During changes in the work shifts, which occurred three times daily, this area was always the most crowded. One shift coming in, one shift going out, pods maneuvering in through their bay adjacent to the main construction deck for refueling and taking on relief pilots, sometimes with the added confusion of a freighter from the Moon or Earth unloading materials. Every eight hours it looked like a Chinese fire drill performed in zero-g.

The focus of all the activity—when there was a focus—was the massive structure floating underneath Vulcan. When the White House and Skycorp and NASA announced its inception, they called it Project Franklin, after old Ben who allegedly discovered electricity by flying a kite with a key on the end into a thunderstorm. This name was almost as pretentious as if they had called it Project Prometheus, and so most people forgot about it as one of those names a Republican administration in the White House would devise.

SPS-1, or the powersat as it was more conveniently called, was planned to be about 13.3 miles long and 3.3 miles wide. It resembled a vast flat gridwork, with the construction shack hovering over one end, men and work pods skirting around it like tiny white insects. Eventually it would be covered with sheets of protovoltaic cells manufactured on the Moon, transforming it into a massive, rectangular mirror.

You know the rest. The cells capture sunlight, transform it into electricity which in turn is transmitted through microwave beams to rectennas in the Southwest, supplying five gigawatts of electricity to the U.S., the cost of which shows up on your electric bill each month. Frankly, I don’t think it’s my place to say whether that cost is high or low, except to say that the forests in the northeastern states and Canada look much prettier since the acid rain problem has been obviated and school kids in Pennsylvania history classes have to struggle to remember what the fuss in the 70’s over Three Mile Island was all about.

Since grabbing the sun’s energy was what all of the expense and R&D and manpower had been for, perhaps the government and Skycorp should have called the whole shebang Project Prometheus. It fit with the rest of mythology, but… well, it wasn’t used after all. All the science fiction writers had already overused the name.

H
OOKER’S REMINISCING WAS INTERRUPTED
by the inaudible yet tactile
thump
of the ferry docking with Vulcan Station.

“All right, coffee break’s over!” someone up in the front of the narrow compartment said loudly. “Everybody, back on your heads!”

There were just as many crewmen asking what was so funny as there were who were snickering at the punch line of the old joke. Seat belts were unbuckled and the men in the spacecraft began to float out of their couches, each reaching up to grab the rail running the length of the compartment’s ceiling. It took a moment for Hooker to bring himself back from the remembered evening in the bar. For an instant, as he took in the weird sight of crewmen gently floating above his head, he found himself weighing this reality against that mind’s eye vision. The former was sorely lacking in appeal.

Unfastening his own seat belt, he pushed himself up with the toes of his sneakers and grabbed the overhead rail. He bumped into Mike Webb, the beamjack who had been sitting next to him, and muttered an apology. From the front of the cabin he could hear the slow hiss of the hatch being undogged and opened. The line of crewmen began to ease toward the airlock hatch, pulling themselves hand over hand along the rail. It was then that Hooker realized he had made a slight mistake upon boarding the ferry.

The problem was that he had been one of the first to board the spacecraft at Olympus. It was something most of the men who worked shifts at the powersat project tried to avoid; he could only blame his lack of forethought on the crummy day he’d already had.

The first crewmen to board the ferry had to go to the back of the cabin to get seated. Because there was only one hatch in the ferry, at the bow, it meant that the last beamjack aboard at Olympus was the first to get out at Vulcan. It made no difference when the ferry was returning to Olympus from Vulcan; one simply crawled out into the Docks and headed for the rim modules. But the crews coming aboard Vulcan had to be processed through the whiteroom, and there lay the rub.

The whiteroom was in the second hotdog affixed to Vulcan’s outer skin; four such modules were attached to Module B, joined together by metal sleeves, and anchored near an airlock in the construction shack. Vulcan had been designed so that the modules could be moved about the space platform as necessity dictated, since pressurized areas were a secondary consideration aboard the construction shack.

The whiteroom, like the rest of the hotdogs, was a narrow compartment in which only a few crewmen could fit at a single time. It was where the beamjacks climbed into their suits and replenished their oxygen tanks before going to work on the powersat. Suit-up was a long, clumsy procedure. Even the comparatively lightweight suits worn by the pod pilots took five or ten minutes of work to don; the bulky hard suits worn by the men doing
EVA
jobs took as long as twenty minutes to struggle into, depending on the dexterity of the individual.

Which meant that the last guys aboard the ferry when it came over from Olympus sometimes had to hang around—literally—for up to an hour, waiting for the persons ahead to suit up, pressurize, check themselves, clock in and cycle through the airlock. Once, Command had tried to control the situation by giving beamjacks revolving numbers for their boarding rank and docking work—time for the minutes wasted in the whiteroom; but the first part of this arrangement fell apart when crewmen started ignoring the boarding rank (because of apathy, or feeling as if they were getting the same bad seats over again). The second part fell through when the union found out about it and raised hell with Skycorp.