Orbital Decay (19 page)

There was a bright flash of light through the portholes and a
thump
, unheard but felt, as explosive bolts triggered on the underside of the
Willy Ley
and the streamlined booster separated from the orbiter. In her mind’s eye Lisa could see the narrow rocket with the stubby little wings angling into a somersault for its reentry into the atmosphere and remote controlled landing on Kennedy Space Center’s shuttle landing strip. “Control, this is
Willy Ley
,” she said. “We have FRB separation.”

Roger
,
Willy Ley
,
we copy. You are go for OMS-one burn
,
over.

“Roger, OMS-one burn, out.” Steve’s fingers were already gliding over the digital autopilot panel, punching in the instructions to the ship’s computers which would start the orbiter’s main engines and send
Willy Ley
farther into space.

The first OMS fire occurred less than two minutes later and it brought the shuttle out of the shallow dive. There was no vibration on the flight deck when it happened, no sound, only the instruments showing that the engines, with a combined thrust of 12,000 pounds, were firing to place the shuttle in a low elliptical orbit 300 miles above the planet.

“Control, this is
Willy Ley
,” Lisa said. “We have OMS cutoff, FRB umbilical doors closed.”

Roger
,
out.

“Okay,” Lisa said, “let’s take ’em the groceries.”

“Spoken like a true housewife,” Coffey murmured, taking off his helmet and stowing it under his seat.

“Yeah,” she laughed. “Real housewife.” She stowed her own helmet, then checked the notebook held open in the holder in front of her, to confirm that the second OMS burn would occur in half an hour. This one would put them on course for the
Freedom
space station. She shut down the auxiliary power unit while Coffey changed the computer program, resetting for the roll maneuver which would align
Willy Ley
for the deployment of the OTV she carried in her cargo bay.

Oh hell, she thought as she watched Steve punch in the coordinates. I forgot all about Jack Hamilton. She punched the intercom button and said into her throat-mike, “OTV-Four Navajo, this is
Willy Ley.
The button’s next to your right armrest, Jack, talk to me.”

There was a pause, then she heard Jack Hamilton’s voice in the intercom. He sounded weak.
Hi. Lisa.

“Hi, yourself. How are we doing down there?”

I don’t know how we’re doing
, the hydroponics engineer replied, sounding a little surly.
Personally speaking, I’m sick as a dog.

“Oh, dear,” she said. She heard Coffey guffaw and cast him a dirty look. “I’m sorry, Jack. Didn’t you take your pills?”

Yeah. Didn’t help once you started doing loops
,
though. I found the bag
,
though
,
so at least I didn’t make that bad of a mess. Nice of Skycorp to take that into consideration.

“Sorry I can’t come back there and help you,” she said, “but you’re sealed off from me.”

That’s okay. You wouldn’t want to see me now
,
anyway.
He paused.
They don’t have a TV screen or anything back here. What’s it look like out there
?

She gazed through the windows at the planet slowly turning above her; the sight of the world upside down would have been enough to upset her own stomach if she wasn’t already so used to it, and she was careful not to mention the angle to Hamilton. “Well, we’re going over Australia now,” she said. “Clear skies in kangaroo land. There’s the Coral Sea and the leading edge of the Bismarck Archipelago….”

New Guinea
? he asked.

“Yeah, I can just see New Guinea,” she said. “There’s the Great Barrier Reef, and I swear I can see a school of blue marlin… no, no, I think that’s just waves, maybe a current or something.”

That’s great. We’ve gone halfway around the world already. Bet you love this every time.

“Ah, I dunno. I get used to it.”

No. You’re only fooling yourself. When she gets old enough
,
you should bring Annie up with you. Let her travel around the world in eighty minutes.

Inexplicably, she felt her eyes getting moist. She tried to dab at them with her fingertip, but only succeeded in jostling little round droplets, which floated in midair. She snuffled and glanced toward Coffey, who seemed to be pointedly gazing out the portholes on his side of the cabin. Or perhaps he was just as transfixed by the southwestern Pacific.

You okay
? she heard Hamilton say.

“I’m okay,” Lisa said, rubbing at her eyes. “It’s just… a little post-orbital nasal drip, y’know?” She laughed.

You’re a good woman
,
Lisa
, Hamilton said.
Damn it that you’re married. I could fall in love with you.

“Yeah,” she said. “Happily married.”

Sorry. I didn’t mean anything, y’know.

“I know. I realize that.” She paused. “Listen, Jack, I like you. If you ever need anything… like, if you ever get sick of the view and want to stow away on a homeward shuttle or something… you can call me on the phone. My number’s in the directory.”

Call you
?
On the phone
?

“Sure. It’s just like making a long-distance phone call. Same comsats, only a little more expensive from where you are. Gimme a call if you need anything smuggled up or something, y’know.”

Thanks. I don’t know what to say.

“No, thank
you
,” she said. “I think you’ve helped me remember something I forgot.”

“Payload deployment in sixty seconds, Commander,” Coffey said stiffly, signaling her that it was time to knock off the mushy stuff and get back to business.

“Right,” she said. “Gotta go, Hamilton. Take care of yourself in that tin can, okay?”

Got it
, he said.
Thanks for the lift up
,
sweetheart.

“Any time, big boy.”

T
HREE OF HIS BUNKMATES
were sitting on the metal floor, absorbed in a game of Monopoly. The last time he had checked, all the property—including the utilities and railroads—had been taken by one of the three, and most of the houses had been replaced by little red hotels. But it didn’t look like any of the three were ready to lose; they were simply trading stacks of hundreds and fifties, each hoping that he would be the one who would land next on the Free Parking square and thus grab the rising mound of play money in the center of the board. A couple of other beamjacks were seated on the edge of a nearby bunk, watching the three-way standoff; one had ZeeGee the cat in his lap and was stroking her fur. He could almost hear ZeeGee’s contented purr as well as the sound of the men’s voices through his bunk’s curtain.

The plastic clatter of dice rolling across the board. “Seven, lucky seven… one, two, three, four, five, six… shit.”

“Ha! Boardwalk! With three houses, that’s… nine hundred dollars! Pay up, sucker.”

A rustle of play money being counted. “That’s all the money you got from him the last time he ran through your railroads.”

Laughter. “You broke yet?”

“Forget it, pal. I still got a grand or more here, and you’ve got to make it around my corner here. I’ll frisk your ass and send you to the poorhouse.”

“Bullshit. You’ll land in jail like you always do and won’t be able to collect!”

“Hey, I got this Get-Out-of-Jail card. Remember, last time I landed on Chance? Here’s your money, now shaddup and roll ’em.”

The clatter of dice on the board. “Six.”

“That’s not a six, that’s a five.”

“Oh. Sorry. One, two, three, four… ah, damn!”

“Property tax!”

It was driving Hooker bananas. Once before, a couple of days ago, he had tried to get them to tone down the noise. No, more than that; he had rammed open the plastic curtain with his hands and had yelled at them to shut up. The crewmen, who had turned to marathon Monopoly out of the boredom which had haunted the construction crew during the long days of the work shutdown, had simply stared back at him in bewildered anger. Phillips had asked him if anything was wrong, with the tone of an adult addressing a mentally disturbed child, and that had made him further blow his cool. He had jerked the curtain shut again, and had heard them snickering a few minutes later.
Popeye’s going over the edge. Losing his grip. Better make sure he doesn’t get his hands on any sharp objects
,
man.

So he didn’t bother to object anymore. After all, it was his problem that he was slowly going insane, wasn’t it?

Hooker lay on the foam sleeping pad inside his bunk and stared at the narrow walls of what was laughingly referred to in Skycorp’s official jargon as his private crew accommodations. Right. Very private. He picked up the dogeared paperback copy of
Moby Dick
he had been trying to force himself to read, opened it, stared at the pages, closed it and plopped it back down beside himself again. Absently, he picked up the phone receiver from the hook inset in the wall, realized there was nowhere or no one on Skycan he particularly wanted to call, and put the receiver back on the hook. He stared at the toes of his regulation sneakers and wondered where he had gotten all those scuff marks, but even that thought was too boring to stay in his mind for longer than a second.

There was a snapshot of Laura taped on the wall near his head. He studiously avoided looking at it.

Impulsively he pulled his terminal keyboard out of its slot in the wall, propped it in his lap and punched in control-S, the code for station general status report. The LCD screen just beyond his feet, at the far end of his bunk, beeped. Words formed on its dark green surface. Hooker read it quickly: With the shutdown in effect, no work crews were going in or going out; it was 1504 hours station-time, 0804 Eastern Standard Time, 0704 Central Standard Time, so it was therefore morning in most of America and, unlike the crew of Skycan, most of the country was getting ready to go to work, big deal; all life-support systems were working nominally; an OTV was due for docking with Olympus at 1600 hours station-time.

Hooker stared at the last entry. Scuttlebutt had it that the new crew member, the new hydroponics engineer, was arriving this morning, but that wasn’t what he was thinking about. The last OTV had carried away the bodies of the beamjacks who had been killed in the accident. Hooker had found himself in the Docks when David Chang and Doc Felapolous had loaded the body-bags into the tiny spacecraft for the long trip back to Earth. He remembered what he had thought then:
only two ways to leave this place
—
serve out your contract
,
or get killed.

It wasn’t entirely true, of course—if you read the fine print on the Skycorp contract—but close enough. Hooker closed his eyes. He wanted to go home desperately, but for some reason he had voluntarily extended his contract; he could be thinking about going back to Earth in a few months, but now he was stuck on Skycan for almost another two years. Why?

Involuntarily, his eyes wandered to the snapshot of Laura which was taped to his bunkspace’s wall. Because he didn’t want to go back.

A flash of gold disappearing.

He squeezed his eyes shut, so hard that his head throbbed.

Her laughter.

His head sank back against the wall.

“Free Parking!” someone outside his bunk yelled. “Gimme that money!”

Oh, God, I don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to remember….

As if he had any choice.

Hooker had not been surprised to find Laura gone when he awoke the next morning. Even when they had been married, it was usual for one of them to wake up and find the other side of the bed vacant—usually Hooker himself, since his fishing generally kept him out until the early hours of the morning, and Laura’s teaching job had her in the classroom before nine. Even on the weekends she was up and around long before his eyes opened. She was simply more of a morning person.

Even though he had begun getting up early after their divorce, she had left his place out by Hog Island before he was out of bed at eight o’clock. Wandering naked through the cabin, scratching his groin in time with the throbbing in his skull, he stopped to stare wearily through the front window at the sandy driveway outside. Her battered little Toyota, which had followed his Camaro back from town last night, was gone from the driveway.

Well, what did he expect? Typical of Laura, the sexual pirate. Wham bam thank-you-ma’am, I think. She got what she came for, he thought. Why stay around for the uneasy morning after, especially when it’s with your former hubby?

Hooker leaned against the windowsill and stared at the sunlight filtering down into the front yard through the pine and cypress woods surrounding his place. The night before had been great. Spectacular, in fact. Four stars. They had writhed together in bed with a fervor which had left them gasping for breath between rounds. Between bouts they had polished off a bottle of white wine he had found in the refrigerator, and they had told each other funny stories and giggled as they each tickled the other’s old, familiar sensitive places, until they finally pounced on each other again and the giggles became soft moans and whispers in the darkness. Good loving indeed.

And she had split before he had awakened, like a pirate who had pulled off another successful raid. One woman on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Gallo.

“Damn, Laura,” he mumbled, feeling alone and tossed aside. “You could have at least left a note.” And what would she have written on it, stupid?
Claude: last night was great
!
Let’s get married again
! Uh-huh. Fat chance.

He shuffled back to the bedroom and pulled on a pair of ragged cutoffs and tennis shoes, then went out through the back door and crossed around the side of the cabin to the driveway. The morning air was cool and fresh, and he sucked in the smell of pine needles and salt as he walked down the driveway to fetch the morning paper and mail from the mailbox. By the time he got back to the cabin his head felt clear, his hangover less crippling.