Orbital Decay (16 page)

The problem we encountered was that, as soon as the shit hit the fan downstairs, Skycorp’s brass in Huntsville made what they saw as a prudent decision. They ordered a temporary work shutdown on the powersat project. No one except vital supervisory personnel was to be allowed on Vulcan Station, and absolutely no one was to be allowed in the hotdogs until they were deflated and replaced with Olympus-type hard modules, which were being hastily thrown together in Alabama. They called it a paid vacation for the construction crew. We called it two weeks in hell.

There was nothing to do
! Actually, I didn’t mind it so much, because my work in the data processing center went on, and in the extra free time I used the chance to work on my science fiction novel,
Ragnarok Night
, but for the majority of space grunts living on Skycan it was the worst thing Skycorp could have done to them short of ordering Cap’n Wallace to depressurize all the living compartments. As I pointed out before, most of the beamjacks were your basic, Joe Lunchpail construction types, not intellectuals. Some of them had probably never picked up a book since they had cheated their way through high school exams on
Silas Marner
and
The Old Man and the Sea.
Fewer still knew anything about meditation or any of those other mind games one can play to zip away unwanted hours.

Fortunately for a few, there was one guy—I can’t recall his name, except that he was a Jewish guy from Long Island who was a first-class Dungeons and Dragons Dungeonmaster. Someone had told me that he was a world-class player until something had happened which made him ship out to work in space. He had gathered a few converts to the game while on Skycan, and during the shutdown they took the opportunity to launch an extensive, wild campaign this Dungeonmaster had been spending months dreaming up. They took over bunkhouse Module 14 and chased everyone else out, and played like fanatics for several days straight until the DM either knocked off the players with his tomato-pulper deathtraps or raised the survivors so many levels that they became near-deities. They had fun.

But for the vast majority, life during those two weeks was the epitome of dullness. Their lives had become built around an eight-hour shift of putting together that huge, spaceborne Erector Set, and without it they were lost. They hung around in the rec rooms watching either baseball games or soap operas beamed up from Earth, or fooled around with the six half-grown offspring of ZeeGee, or played blackjack or poker or solitaire, with Mr. Big checking in to make sure they weren’t disobeying Wallace’s edict against gambling. They chased after the few female crew members, and getting nowhere they closed themselves off in their bunks and masturbated. They tried to throw Frisbees on the catwalk, which was both absurd and boring. They went low-gravity jumping in the spokes until one guy sprained his ankle badly and Doc Felapolous outlawed the sport. If they had possessed knives they probably would have played mumbletypeg. They wrote long, dull letters to their families and friends, many of which were probably never sent. Sometimes you found them just sitting in chairs or lying on their bunks, staring at nothing, thinking about something they didn’t want to talk about. Popeye Hooker was that way a lot, but no one ever knew what it was about except that it vaguely involved his ex-wife.

Maybe the Skycorp executives thought they were saving lives with their shutdown, but they didn’t save anyone’s nerves.

Only one eventful thing came out of the godawful period, and that was the arrival of Jack Hamilton on Skycan. No one knew it at the time, but the new hydroponics engineer was destined to change life for the beamjacks, and also make history.

L
ISA BARNHART’S ALARM CLOCK
went off with a sustained whine at three o’clock in the morning just as she felt she was falling asleep. As usual for her on Thursday nights she had gone to bed at seven o’clock, just after dinner, in order to be up and refreshed before dawn on Friday. Annie, however, had decided that it was not yet time for her mother to go to bed. The baby had begun wailing about an hour after Lisa had gone to bed, and nothing Carl could do had been able to soothe her, so it had been Mommy who had to get up and walk her child around their apartment, rocking and singing to Annie all the lullabies she could remember until, an eternity later, the baby had fallen back to sleep.

So Lisa was still fatigued, even after her shower. Talking to someone usually helped wake her up, but Carl was dead asleep on his side of the bed, and she knew better than to even contemplate waking him up. He would either be a complete grouch, or would make an attempt at having sex with her, neither of which would wear well with her for the rest of the long day ahead. And there was even less sense in waking up Annie, she thought as she poured the first of several cups of coffee she would consume that morning. One-year-olds were notorious for not keeping up their end of the conversation.

Lisa pushed open the glass door leading to the balcony and walked outside. Even in the early morning hours it was still hot outside, a reminder of yesterday’s broiling heat and a harbinger of today’s broiling heat. The balcony overlooked the beach, and as she sipped her coffee she listened to the constant crash of the surf. Far out at sea she could see the lights of freighters prowling the Atlantic coast; or perhaps they were the spy trawlers which the Soviets, to this day, continued to dispatch to the Cape whenever a launch was scheduled.

She turned to her left and gazed up the coast toward the old Eastern Test Range and the Kennedy Space Center. Brilliant blue-white searchlight beams lanced up into the night sky, converging a couple of thousand feet above the launch pads. She clutched her coffee cup and stared at the beams with wide eyes, feeling her pulse quicken. The beams were focused on Pad 39-A; in their center, transfixed in a chrysalis of light, was the
Willy Ley.

Lisa drank her coffee, reminding herself to hurry. I wonder if I’m treating Carl and Annie right, she thought. Annie needs a mother and Carl needs a wife, and when they need me I’m either off training pilots or in preflight sessions or taking off for another milk run. Carl says Annie cries every Friday morning, when she wakes up and finds out that Mommy’s not around to change her or feed her. How do you explain to a baby girl that Mommy’s 300 miles up in space?

She put her coffee cup down on the railing and gave herself another moment to stare at the lights on Merritt Island. She could take that extra moment; the techs at Launch Control knew what they were doing, and so did the pad rats and her copilot and everyone else. All she had to do was fly the thing. Shit, she thought, I used to enjoy this job. I had wanted it since I was five years old and Sally Ride and Judy Resnick and Rhea Seddon and old John Young himself were my heroes. Now I’ve arrived, I’m an astronaut, and all I want to do is be a full-time mother. She smiled grimly and pushed away a tear with her forefinger. Oh, baby, what do you do when the thrill is gone?

Half an hour later she pulled up to the security gate off Route 3 and held up her ID card. The elderly guard shined his flashlight through the windshield and peered in, closely inspecting both her pass and her face. The old guy did it the same way every Friday morning; one would have thought the senile old coot would have remembered her face by now. Finally he stepped back and waved her on. Dingbat, she thought. I wish he would at least get his eyes checked. As she drove past, the armed MP on the other side of the road swept up her arm in a customary salute, which Lisa returned with an absent nod.

Driving down the Kennedy Parkway, she passed the darkened marshes of the wildlife sanctuary surrounding the launch facilities and the industrial area, which had blossomed over the past twenty years to become a small city of its own. She looked out for critters which might appear on the road—two months ago she had been forced to swerve for an alligator which had decided to cross the road just then—although she was sure most of the early morning traffic had already scared the critters away from the road. One day, she mused, she was going to be piloting
Willy Ley
for a touchdown on the shuttle landing strip and there was going to be one of those big lizards sunning itself on the concrete.

The Vehicle Assembly Building was directly ahead, a mammoth white block standing out in stark relief under the spotlights, the American flag and Bicentennial star glowing against the huge alabaster walls. She parked in the lot beside it and walked to the Crew Prep building next to the KSC cafeteria building. Years ago, astronauts had prepared for launches at the training facility in the industrial area near the NASA headquarters building, but once the number of flight-worthy shuttles topped a dozen and the launches became scheduled on a weekly basis, the new building had been constructed. No longer were the crews given steak and egg breakfasts, paraded through the walk out past a battery of journalists waiting in the corridor, and driven to the pad in the company of the launch director, with an escort of security cruisers and helicopters flying overhead. I would have liked to have had that treatment just once, Lisa thought as she pushed through the glass and waved her ID at the security guard standing inside. It might have been nice to have been thought of as a VIP….

Taking an elevator down to the basement, she went into the locker room and changed out of her civvies into her regulation blue jumpsuit with a Skycorp patch over her left breast and “L. Barnhart” on her right. After lacing up her high-topped sneakers and tucking pens, headset, flashlight, and calculator into her pockets, she pulled on her own, nonregulation addition to her uniform: a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, a reminder of her girlhood home.

Leaving the locker room, she strolled down the hallway to the Green Room, where the crews waited until the technicians made the finishing touches on the birds.

“Morning, Lisa.”

“Morning, George.” She stopped at the bulletin board and pulled her clipboard off its hook. “Got my breakfast ready?”

“In the skillet, waiting just for you, beautiful.” The old cook hobbled around the kitchenette counter to his stove, displaying the limp he had picked up many years before as a chopper pilot in Vietnam. “I’m through with that newspaper if you want it. Coffee and O.J.?”

“Yeah, thanks.” She threw a glance at the Cocoa
Today
lying on the table, but decided not to pick it up; if she started getting engrossed in the Sports and Op-Ed pages, she’d never get to looking over the flight reports and her checklist. She sat down at the table and began thumbing through the sheaf of papers on the clipboard. The room was nearly empty, except for one other person in a jumpsuit sitting at the far end, a tall guy whom she barely noticed.

George reappeared with her plate: scrambled eggs, toasted bagel, and a slice of Canadian bacon. How the cook managed to keep track of what every shuttle crewman ate before launch was anyone’s wild guess; he never had to ask twice. “So what do you think is going to happen with the Cards-Reds game tonight?”

“Are you kidding me? Cincinnati’s going to blow it. National League East is having a crummy season and the Reds are at the bottom of their division.”

“Chicago’s doing okay,” he observed, settling down in the chair opposite her and picking up the newspaper. “They stomped the Pirates last night.”

“Uh-huh. I watched some of the game. Eight-oh shutout.” She shrugged and forked some eggs onto a bagel. “I guess it’s about time they had a decent season.” She glanced back at the clipboard, at the manifest she had just turned to. “Have you seen the Launch Director this morning?”

“Yeah, Paul stopped by a little while ago to update the board. Why?”

“I seem to have only one passenger going up in the OTV.” She looked again at the manifest. Sure enough, besides the usual food and medical supplies and the mailbag, plus a box of personal request items, there was only one name penciled in on the list. “I thought they tried to save on payload expense by sending up the reliefs all at once. Hell, they could just bottle this guy into the nose of a Delta and shoot him up that way, if they’re just going to send up one person.”

“Beats hell out of me. That’s him sitting over there. Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

Lisa looked across the Green Room at the man in the jumpsuit sitting at a table alone, picking at his breakfast. She glanced down at her manifest again, then called out, “Hey, is your name Hamilton?”

The passenger’s head bobbed up at the sound of his name. “Uh, yeah?”

Just like all the new cannon fodder: lost, hopeless, and with the look of the damned. “Don’t have to be a stranger,” she said. “Come on over and have some coffee with me.”

The passenger got up and walked over to her table, carrying along a nylon shoulder bag. He appeared to be in his late twenties, with longish blond hair and a thin, rather scraggly beard on his chin. He had startlingly blue, clear eyes, and when he got closer he gave her a smile. Not bad-looking, Lisa caught herself thinking. Better watch yourself, dear, or you can end up as one of the other tawdry soap opera cases at the Cape.

“Thanks,” he said as he sat down. His eyes went to her breast, and Lisa blushed before she realized that he was reading her patch. “L. Barnhart,” he said. “The
L
stands for Linda, and you’re the commander.”

“Wrong and right,” she replied. “The letter stands for Lisa, and yes, I’m the commander.” Without having to be cued, George got up to go fetch the coffeepot. “I understand you’re the only passenger I’m taking up today.”

“I guess that’s right. I hope I’m not wasting your time.” He stuck out his hand. “My name’s Jack Hamilton. I’m the new hydroponics engineer at Olympus. At least you’re only taking me halfway, since I’ll be in the, uh…”

“OTV,” she said, shaking his hand. “Orbital transfer vehicle. You’re not wasting my time, either. There’s supplies which have to go up also. I’m just surprised that they’re not sending you up with the two new beamjacks they’re sending to replace the guys who got killed last week.”

“Holdup in their training,” George said, returning with the coffee. “It’s getting harder to train those guys in the KC-135’s. All they want to do is toss their cookies, eh?”