Orbital Decay (2 page)

Science fiction is not, nor has it ever been, about predicting the future. On the other hand, it appears that
Orbital Decay
may have foreseen a few real-life developments. Global electronic surveillance systems very much like the Big Ear have become a reality, and they’re being operated by the National Security Agency, using the sort of data-mining methods I described. A private space industry is emerging from the ruins of NASA’s manned space program: Companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are building a new generation of manned spacecraft, Virgin Galactic is testing a winged passenger spaceplane, and Bigelow Aerospace has successfully orbited a prototype for an inflatable modular space station that resembles the one I described (with less catastrophic results, I hope). China has announced its intent to send people back to the Moon; Japan and India have expressed the same ambitions. Space exploration isn’t dead; it’s simply moving into a new era in which commercial efforts supersede big government programs.

I think the thing that tickles me the most, though, is the point on which some of the novel’s critics have been proven wrong. When
Orbital Decay
was first published, it was slammed by several reviewers, mainly in the SF fan community, for the apparent sin of cultural myopia. Some of them couldn’t bring themselves to believe that, in the faraway year of 2016, there would still be hippies and bikers, or that anyone would still be listening to bands like the Grateful Dead. I’ll admit that I should have dug a little deeper into my record collection—CDs weren’t quite there yet—for more recent bands that my characters might have been listening to, but while the Dead themselves are no longer touring, their music remains as popular as ever. There are still plenty of hippies, bikers, and Deadheads in the twenty-first century, and I have little doubt that some of them will eventually find their way into orbit.

Which is what this book is about, really. People living in space … ordinary people, not just government-trained NASA astronauts or the rock-ribbed heroes of military space opera. I believe this future is still possible. It may happen in 2061 instead of 2016, but it’s coming all the same. That’s a future I hope we’ll yet see … and I expect that we will.

Allen Steele

Whately, Massachusetts

May 2013

S
OME DAY SOON—PERHAPS
tomorrow, perhaps a week or a month, maybe as long as a year from now if they’re really lazy about it—they’re going to find this crevasse. It won’t be very difficult, because the tire tracks from my tractor will remain indelibly printed in the gray lunar soil. There are no winds on the Moon to shift dust over the tracks, no erosion save for the impact of stray micrometeorites. My trail will remain fresh even if they delay the search for a decade, and it will lead across the Descartes Highlands east of the Abulfeda Crater until it ends, quite abruptly, at the lip of this crevasse within sight of Argelander Peak.

When they shine a spotlight down here, they’ll discover the wreckage of my tractor, looking like one of the junked cars one sees from the highways in Pennsylvania. When they lower a couple of men down by cable, they’ll find my footprints in the dust at the bottom of the crevasse. They’ll follow those lonely footprints as they lead for a mile and a half northwest, the steep walls of the crevasse rising to either side like enormous hedgerows of ancient volcanic rock. It’s dark down here, even during the high noon of the two-week lunar day. Their helmet lanterns will cast ghostly circles of light along the walls and in the deep impressions of my footprints. They will feel the cold lonesomeness which is destined, in these last hours of my life, to be my dying impression.

Actually, I understand that oxygen asphyxiation is not a bad way to go, relatively speaking. There’s worse ways to die in space. In the end I’ll probably babble my head off, gleefully talking about moon worms as my lungs fill with carbon dioxide. I’ll go out crazy as a shithouse rat, but at least I’ll be happy. I think.

When they come to the end of my tracks, they’ll find me sitting on my rump with my back propped against a boulder, quite dead. They will also find the greatest discovery ever made. I’m serious. It’s down here in this crevasse with me, and the search party would have to be blind to miss it.

I only wish I could be around for the moment. I wouldn’t be able to see the expressions on their faces through the reflective coating on their helmet visors, but I can imagine what words will pass through their comlink.

Although, now to think of it, even hearing what they had to say would be impossible. If my suit radio, or the radio in my poor wrecked tractor was still working, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, waiting to die.

Life is just full of little ironies, ain’t it?

I wonder which will go out first: the oxygen supply, the batteries in my life-support system, which keep me from freezing to death, or the microcassette into which I’m dictating these last thoughts. Theoretically I shouldn’t be wasting precious air in speaking; I should be conserving it in hopes that a search party from Descartes Station will find me in time. Rescued in the nick of time, la la la. Sorry, that stuff only happens in science fiction stories. I know damn well that the guys back at the base, inert bastards that they are, won’t even think about looking for me until I’m several hours overdue. These two-week days tend to distort time like that. I’ll be long dead by the time someone peers over his Marvel comic book and says, “Hey, what happened to Sam?” It’ll be another hour before someone else says, “Hey, y’know, I think Sam’s overdue from his trip out.” And it’ll be another hour after that before someone finally says, “Well, gee whiz, maybe we ought to take another track out and go find ol’ Sam; he might be in trouble or something.”

You sons of bitches. I’m gonna get you for this.

At least there’s the consolation, the posthumous booby prize, that someone may eventually transcribe these taped recollections and publish them as an article about the man who made the greatest discovery. After all these years, after all those reject slips, I’ll finally get something of mine in print. The last words of a failed science fiction writer; maybe it’ll even get in
Analog
or
Omni
, one of the mags that turned down all the other stuff I wrote. It may even spur some publisher to print
Ragnarok Night
, the SF novel that no one would touch while I was alive.

I can always daydream, can’t I?

Yeah, life is just full of them crazy little ironies. Death is too, I suppose.

So, to pass the time until my oxygen or suit batteries peter out, I’ll tell you a story, you who will someday separate this tape from my suit recorder. A spaceman’s memoirs, if you will. How Samuel K. Sloane, who got a job with Skycorp so he could go to space to get authentic background for his science fiction novel, ended up making the Great Discovery.

Of course, that isn’t all there is to it. There was also the stuff that happened on Skycan and Vulcan, like Doc Felapolous and his cats or the run-in between Virgin Bruce and Cap’n Wallace, and Jack Hamilton and orbital decadence, and the day we messed with the plans of the National Security Agency and stuck a banana in the Big Ear, so to speak. That all came first… which of course means that I had best start at the beginning, like you do with all good stories.

First, you have to understand that outer space isn’t all that it’s cut out to be….

T
HE DAYS BEGAN THE
same way after a while: adventure made mediocre through repetition, the vastness of space a stale background against which their tedious lives were played.

A dozen men floated in the narrow cylindrical compartment, all facing in the same direction like automatons waiting to be activated. Even in weightlessness their aluminum space armor and enormous MMU backpacks seemed to hang on them like heavy burdens; they slouched under their packs, their shoulders bent, their helmeted heads hanging low, their hands moving slowly as they replenished their oxygen tanks from hoses dangling from the wall. The compartment was filled with the sound of hissing air and the thin crackle of suit radios being tested, of muttered comments and complaints and the clink of tools nestling together in the cargo pockets of their overgarments. Behind them a technician, wearing a T-shirt with a rock band’s name stenciled on the front, floated from man to man, checking suit joint seals, turning intake valves they couldn’t reach, rescuing runaway gloves and power tools from midair. There were no windows. CRT screens overhead displayed job assignments for the day, and TV monitors showed scenes inside the construction shack’s main bay and outside, where the work was going on. No one paid attention to the monitors; everyone knew what it looked like out there and didn’t want to be reminded.

They were all in there on that shift. Virgin Bruce, singing an old Grateful Dead song, his raucous laughter ringing through the whiteroom. Mike Webb, smiling at Bruce’s jokes, trying for the umpteenth time to get the suiting procedure right, always having to get Julian, the technician, to help him. Al Hernandez, moving efficiently, telling another interminable story about his family in Miami, his brother in the FBI, his son who wanted to join the Marines, his wife who kept asking when he was coming home (everyone, hearing these things, nodding, silently asking,
what’s new
,
Al?).
Hank Luton, who would be in the command center and not have to wear a suit for the next four hours, bugging everyone about little details—a joint in one section that needed to be rewelded, a bend in a truss which meant the beam had to be replaced, all the stuff the computers had picked up since the last shift—and being rewarded with surly grunts and mumbled apologies. And the rest of the handful of space grunts who called themselves beamjacks—because it sounded like “lumberjack”—who for some reason were thought of as pioneers instead of everyday Joes trying to make it through another dogass day.

One by one, they managed to make it out of the whiteroom, through the hatch at the end of the compartment into the next inflated plastic cylinder, moving in a ragged single file toward the airlock. Now and then someone had to go back because a suit sensor detected a slow leak or a weak battery. The airlock was a big metal chamber which they were herded into by another technician. When he sealed the hatch they stood for another few minutes, their feet gripped to the floor by magnetic overshoes, everything colored candy-apple red by the fluorescents in the ceiling. No sound now, except the whisper of air inside one’s helmet and conversations overlapping in the comlink, received through their snoopy helmets’ earphones.

The opposite hatch of the airlock slid open, and Vulcan Station’s main construction bay lay before them like an airless basketball court, paper-thin aluminum walls offering scant protection from the void. They shuffled out onto the deck, some heading for the beam-builders, some for the construction pods docked nearby, some for the hatch leading outside the shack.

Those who went outside, one by one, gripped their MMUs’ hand controls, pushing them forward and letting the little jets push them away from Vulcan. Once this had been exciting; now it was just the first part of the job, getting out to the powersat. It lay before them like a vast metal grid, a flat rectangle bigger than the towns some of them had been born in, larger than anything that had ever been built on Earth. They floated away from Vulcan, little white stick-men against the overwhelming darkness, the shack’s blue and red lights outlining them as silhouettes. Earth was a blue, white, and green crescent beyond the powersat. They tried not to look at it, because it never did any good; if you thought about it too much, you got depressed, like Popeye. Just do your job; punch the clock and hope you make it through the shift alive.

Once or twice a week, when he had a few minutes to spare at the end of his lunch break, the beamjack the others called Pop-eye would float down to Meteorology for a look at Earth.

Not that it was impossible to see Earth any time he wished; he saw the planet every time he went on shift. From 22,300 miles away, it was an inescapable part of life, always there, always to be there. It was something no one could ever forget.

Yet sometimes Popeye Hooker
did
find himself forgetting. There came times—while on the job, while lying awake in his bunk, while climbing into his suit for another work shift—when he tried to recall what standing on real ground was like, how fresh air tasted, and found himself unable to remember.

Sometimes he could not remember Laura’s face. Part of him didn’t want to remember what she looked like, and it might have been for the better if he could not; yet Popeye had to remember Laura, for reasons he could not comprehend. It was those instances when her face disappeared from his mind’s eye which scared him the worst.

So, when he could, he would head for the weather station to borrow a few minutes on the big optical telescope. Once or twice a week, although if he could have, he would have visited Meteorology every day. But his being allowed to use the telescope at all was a personal favor extended by the bogus meteorologists and he didn’t want to risk overstaying his welcome.

The weather station was at the south polar end of Olympus Station’s hub. To reach it from the rim, Hooker had to leave the four adjacent modules comprising the mess deck and walk down the catwalk until he reached the gangway leading down into the western terminus. On this particular day he had fifteen minutes before the beginning of his second shift, so he had to hurry. Hooker grabbed one of the two ladders in the terminus and began to climb up through the overhead hatch into the western spoke.

As he ascended, he passed fluorescent light fixtures, fire control stations and color-coded service panels set in the cool, curving metal walls. Along the inside of the spoke were taped-up notices of one kind or another: the announcement of the Saturday movie in the rec room, reminders of deadlines for filing W-2 forms and absentee voter registration, announcements for union meetings, and ever present “Think—Safety
First
!” signs. The second ladder ran directly behind him; another crewman passed him, heading down to the torus, his soles clanging on the ladder rungs, echoing in the utilitarian cool.