Orbital Decay (23 page)

It was by far the largest compartment in the space station, about twenty-five feet wide and thirty feet high, arranged in a circular fashion around the access shaft at the center of the modified Shuttle Mark I external tank from which the hub had been built. The deck was divided into half-levels, like tiered balconies built onto the bulkhead walls opposite each other. Vertical poles—vertical, that is, in that they ran in the direction of the station’s polar axis; they could just as easily be horizontal, depending on one’s perspective in zero g—ran through the length of the compartment near each tier, and Hamilton noticed rungs welded onto the poles, indicating that they functioned as “fireman’s poles” allowing one to easily climb from one level to another. The floors of each level were open metal grids. Looking up, he could see through the floor above him two crewmen seated in front of a console. Fortunately the chairs were all bolted in the tiers in the same direction—there had to be some consistency here, he supposed, even within these strange gravitational conditions—but he was still a little disturbed to see a woman making her way, hand over hand on the rungs, headfirst down one of the poles, and another crewman floating calmly in a horizontal position next to a seated colleague. All in all, Command looked as if it had been designed by the late M.C. Escher.

After a moment, though, he realized how logically the command deck had been designed. If there’s little or no gravity to deal with, why bother with old-fashioned notions like floors and ceilings? Each tier was apparently a work station with its own separate function. The center was dimly lighted by red fluorescent bulbs, with the bluish glow from CRT’s at the work stations giving the faces of the men and women sitting in front of them a ghostly look. At least a dozen people were working at various stations on the tiers, but the noise level was surprisingly low. Each wore a headset mike, so they could speak to others at different stations on different tiers without having to shout across the compartment. There was a weird, efficient, and somewhat sterile beauty to the place that entranced Hamilton. This was what he had imagined the inside of a space station to be like.

And, realizing that, he almost instantly took a dislike to it. A place of computers and men welded together in a fusion that took away humanity. Here there were no pegged-up notices for used cars on sale in Des Moines, no shelves of dogeared paperback books. This was a place of cool efficiency, of fingers urgently tap-tapping on keyboards, eyes straining to read quickly moving figures on glowing blue screens, everyone doing their best to make all the little systems go so that the big systems could go. Some people thrived in it, and some, like Hamilton, who disdained using electronic equipment in the growing of plants when his green thumbs and intuition could do it just as well, hated it.

He was still gazing around at the command center when a young guy dressed—as everyone in here was—in a powder blue jumpsuit with Skycorp patches on his chest and shoulders floated up to him from a level above. “Are you the new hydroponics chief?” he asked. Hamilton nodded, somewhat distractedly. “Mr. Wallace is down here,” he said, motioning upwards with his thumb. “He’s waiting to see you now.”

Hamilton nodded, and carefully followed the crewman as they pulled themselves up—or down, according to one’s own personal perspective—a pole’s rungs to a tier that was two half-levels up and a third of the way across the deck. Hamilton found himself at the largest tier, fifteen feet long, with a long console wrapped concave inside a bulkhead wall. There were three chairs fixed to the floor in front of the console, facing a set of computer and television screens, and in the middle one was seated Henry George Wallace, the project supervisor for Olympus Station and the Franklin Project.

Hamilton nearly did not recognize him.

When he had applied to Skycorp for work and when he had been in training—not to mention when the lunar expedition had happened and when Olympus was being established—Hamilton had gotten used to seeing pictures of Henry G. Wallace. TV interviews, magazine and newspaper photos—all had shown a handsome, smiling man in his mid-thirties, with thinning, stylishly cut blond hair and an athletic build—so good-looking and square-cut, he was almost a throwback to the NASA astronauts of the 1960s, a modern space hero.

This was not the same person. H. G. Wallace had physically changed: His eyes, under which there were now heavy bags due to body-fluid shift in weightlessness, seemed more intense, staring bleakly ahead; he had gained more weight than could be accounted for by fluid shift, and had a pot belly; his hair had been cut back until it was a thinning crew cut. Wallace crouched forward in his chair, his neck tucked down almost parallel with his shoulders. The smile was gone as if it had never existed, leaving only a gaunt, dissatisfied pout.

Wallace looked over his shoulder and saw Hamilton hovering behind him, but instead of saying anything, the project supervisor simply turned his attention back to the station in front of him. A couple of TV screens showed pictures of the SPS-1 powersat from angles Hamilton guessed were shot from the construction shack. An LCD between the screens showed a computer-generated animation of the powersat’s gridlike structure, a simulation that periodically changed at the touch of a nearby crewman’s fingers on a keyboard. Wallace leaned forward in his chair, his eyes fixed on the TV display, his right hand absently stroking his headset mike, ignoring Hamilton.

Suddenly he snapped, “Hold it!” The crewman seated at the keyboard tapped a command and the animation of the powersat stopped its procession across the screen. “Zoom in on the bottom half of the truss section in the center,” Wallace said. “That one there.” The crewman glanced at Wallace’s pointing finger and at the screen, then quietly tapped out a new command. The animation expanded and rotated until the truss was magnified several times.

“Gimme the specs,” Wallace said in a rasping voice, and a cluster of numbers appeared on the left margin of the screen. Wallace peered closely at the figures, then said, “Hank, that truss is off, dammit. Who was doing that section?”

A voice came from an audio speaker above the console.
It’s off
,
Henry
,
but not by much. Our instruments say it’s only .057 centimeters. That’s within the acceptable limits of
…

“Bullshit!” Wallace snapped with an anger that made Hamilton step back a little. “That’s not goddamn acceptable, Luton! Why do you think we’ve got lasers to make measurements if it isn’t going to be
perfect
!”

Wallace calmed down. He rubbed his hand across his forehead in exhaustion. “That section was done on the twentieth?” he asked, addressing no one in particular. He reached to his own keyboard and tapped in a complex command, and a screen to his far right lit with a list of names and numbers. The project supervisor studied it for a moment. “It was either Harwell or Hooker,” he muttered. “Figures. Harwell was probably carrying on about baseball and Hooker was probably daydreaming again. Hank, warn both of those dummies that if they don’t get it together, we’ll start deducting the time wasted in fixing their mistakes from their paychecks.”

I’m telling you
,
there’s no mistakes on that section
…

“And I’m telling you that there is and that when we get off of this shutdown it had better get fixed.”

Roger
,
Command
, the voice said after a barely perceptible pause.

As if he had suddenly remembered Hamilton’s presence, Wallace turned halfway around in his seat to gaze silently at the hydroponicist. He didn’t say anything, only stared at Hamilton with an expression which seemed to mix hostility, curiosity, and fear. It was unsettling, and Hamilton knew of nothing else to do but to lock eyes with Wallace and try not to display any emotion.

There was something singularly disturbing about Wallace’s eyes. They reminded Hamilton of the eyes of a drug addict who had been driven insane by junk; of a lion he had seen in a zoo, which had restlessly prowled its cage, looking straight ahead, driven crazy by the loneliness and the austerity of its existence; of old, nineteenth-century English engravings of the caperings of the inhabitants of Bedlam.

In a word: madness. Wallace had crazy eyes. C’mon, now, don’t jump to conclusions, Hamilton thought as a chill crept down his back. He’s overworked, under pressure. Stress. He has a lot of responsibility. He looks that way because it’s been a hard day of chewing out people for making fraction of a centimeter mistakes. He
can’t
be crazy, because Skycorp wouldn’t
let
a crazy man run this operation.

Suddenly, H.G. Wallace unbuckled the straps holding him into his chair and gently rose, floating upward only a few inches. His mouth suddenly arced into a smile, although his eyes remained wary. “So you’re Mr. Hamilton, our new hydroponics chief,” he said, extending his hand. “I was wondering when you would arrive. Welcome to Olympus Station, son!”

Son? Hamilton tried to not smile as he clasped Wallace’s hand. At the age of twenty-eight, it had been many years since anyone had called him “son” unless they were in their sixties or older, and Wallace was no more than forty. “I was a little held up at the, ah, docking area,” he explained, deciding not to tell Wallace about his welcome at the Docks by Webb and Virgin Bruce. “I was just shown to my bunk by a couple of your crewmen and dropped off my…”

“Who met you?” Wallace asked, in a less than demanding tone.

“I believe their names were Webb and… ah, Virgin Bruce?”

Wallace’s face clouded at the mention of their names. For a moment he simply stared at Hamilton, and this time Hamilton turned his eyes away; that lunatic gaze was a bit much to take at close range. Lord, what was going through this man’s mind?

Abruptly, Wallace gave him a slap on the arm and laughed out loud. Hamilton was forced to fumble blindly above his head for a handhold, but he had already sailed five feet away from the project supervisor before he managed to stop himself, colliding backwards with a passing crewman as he did. The scientist mumbled an apology and caught a dirty look from the crewman. “Well!” exclaimed Wallace, as if he hadn’t noticed the accident. “I suppose they didn’t give you a proper orientation to your new home, did they? Come on then, Mr. Hamilton, let me show you Olympus Station!”

Without waiting for a reply, he did a neat somersault, grasped the rungs of a pole and started descending headfirst toward the lower levels of the compartment, leaving Hamilton to clumsily follow feet first.
Son of a bitch
, the hydroponicist thought as he tried to catch up with Wallace, who gave no sign of slowing down for him.
He meant to slap me across the compartment. He might have even hoped that I would run into that guy. There’s no way he could not have known what he was doing
,
if he’s that seasoned to zero g.
Hamilton realized that, in his own way, H.G. Wallace had just given him some kind of rebuff, and a warning. But for what?

Once out in the hub’s passageway, Wallace began to reel off a lecture about the station as he led the way toward the spoke shafts. Some of it Hamilton had heard before, from the two who had met him at the Docks. It seemed to him that Wallace was deliberately ignoring the fact that he
must
have already learned some of this, since Hamilton had told him that he had been to the rim already. For instance, Wallace seemed compelled to tell him just how he should descend the east spoke ladder and how to cope with the gravity gradient.

It seemed to Hamilton that Wallace was determined to be the first person to show the new man around the space station, even if simple logic dictated otherwise. It was enlightening to hear Wallace’s description of things: the Muzak coming from the speakers (“Rather pleasant, don’t you think? It’s a little unorthodox, but it’s soothing and improves efficiency… and the men just
love
it.”); the food (“Skycorp has a contract with one of the companies which supplies in-flight meals to the major airlines. They’re balanced meals, very tasty, and can be sent up with maximum efficiency. The men
love
it!”); and the shortage of water for hygienic purposes (“Most of the time, of course, we have to settle for sponge baths with cold water, but we do try to allow everyone a hot shower at least once or twice a week. The men don’t mind.”) None of this matched what Bruce and Mike had expressed about annoying music, tasteless food, or the fact that most of the crew stank from having washed infrequently.

They were halfway around the station’s rim when they came upon a crewman who was coming the opposite way. Hamilton took one look at him, and realized that he was the saddest example of the crew’s morale he had seen so far. Blond hair growing long and unkempt, circles under his eyes, hollow-chested, shoulders bent. When he looked up and saw them coming, the crewman’s eyes darted to the floor, but instead of walking past, Wallace abruptly descended on him.

“Hello, Popeye!” Wallace exclaimed grandly. He wrapped an arm in a buddy-buddy way around the crewman’s shoulders and turned him around to meet Hamilton. “Mr. Hamilton, allow me to introduce you to one of the best construction specialists we have aboard: Claude Hooker.” He looked condescendingly at Hooker. “Claude used to be a shrimp fisherman before he came to work for us, so that’s why we call him Popeye!”

The poor wretch winced as Wallace said that. Hamilton looked at him and realized that it had been a while since he had seen a more unhappy-looking person. Not noticing—or, perhaps, choosing not to notice—Hooker’s discomforture, Wallace went on. “Popeye is one of our old-timers here on Olympus,” he said. “Not only has he been here for one two-year shift already and just signed up for another tour of duty, but he’s even turned down the one-week vacation the company offered him when he agreed to sign on again. He’s a real professional, hardworking spaceman, aren’t you, Popeye?”

“Yeah,” said Popeye Hooker, staring emptily at a space somewhere around Hamilton’s knees. Hamilton recalled seeing Wallace on the command deck inspecting recent work on SPS-1 and wondered if this man was the same Hooker that Wallace had accused of wasting time and daydreaming.