Orbital Decay (35 page)

“But he got solidly stoned,” Sloane said impatiently.

“Right. And then he started to
talk
.” Hamilton drew the last word out meaningfully. “He started to talk about how crummy his job was, how he was becoming disillusioned with the whole role that the NSA was playing in spying on the rest of the world, how he really felt that a lasting world peace could really be accomplished if we only learned to trust each other the way he and I had learned to.” Hamilton noticed the pained look on the computer chief’s face. “Yakety-yack like that,” he said shortly. Then he leaned forward in his chair. “Then he said, ‘And it’s such a bitch, that the government can’t even trust its own citizens anymore, that it’s starting to spy on the people themselves.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean, Jack?’ And he said, ‘Hey, you wouldn’t believe what they’ve got cooked up with this Big Ear project.’”

“Big Ear,” Sloane said. “What did he mean, Big Ear?”

“C’mon, Sam,” Hamilton chided, “you know what that is. It’s the comsat system that’s being set up. The ring of communications sats that are being established in geosynchronous orbit, interconnecting with each other. A telephone in every tribal village, bringing about the Global Village, all that stuff? C’mon, it’s been in the news for at least the last couple of years.”

“Oh, right, the Big Ear project the multinationals were bringing off.” Sam shook his head, wondering at his own forgetfulness. DBS technology had been old hat in the United States since the 1990s, when coaxial cables had been rendered obsolete by dishes and when wristphones had been first made available to the general public. Once that had occurred in the U.S., Great Britain, and Japan, the Third Wave countries had largely forgotten about the impact such advances could have upon the Third World countries. Until, eventually as it must, the multinational corporations saw the benefits of expanding DBS technology worldwide, realizing the longstanding dream which Arthur C. Clarke, R. Buckminster Fuller, and other visionaries had of uniting humanity through satellite-based communications.

“Right. The Big Ear. But from the way he talked about it, there’s something going on with that thing which the NSA is involved with. Something that he and those two other guys have been testing.”

“Something?” Sloane asked, his interest was aroused again. “You mean he wouldn’t say, or what?”

Hamilton shook his head. “I don’t know. You have to remember, he was very stoned. I don’t even think he was talking to me. He mumbled something about a test they had done on the day of the Vulcan blowout, which allowed them to tap into phone calls in California and Tennessee. Then he said something like, ‘Once the Ear is brought on-line, there isn’t going to be any privacy left in the world and we can flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet.’ I asked him what he meant, and he just looked at me and shut up completely. In fact, in a few minutes after that, he put down the pipe, thanked me for getting him high, and left.” Jack snickered. “Poor sap was so rocked out of his skull he banged his head on the hatch while climbing up the ladder. I think he went to his bunk to sleep the rest of it off.”

Sloane rubbed his jaw. “Well, if he’s that stoned, you might try finding him and asking some more questions.”

Hamilton shook his head. “I sincerely doubt it. He told me that stuff while he wasn’t aware of what he was saying to whom. If anything, he’s probably worried sick that I might have made sense out of it.” Hamilton paused. “I dunno, Sam. Stuff about using the Ear to tap into telephone calls. Ending the Bill of Rights. Am I just high, or is there something here to worry about?”

Sam Sloane sat back in his chair and propped his feet up on the arm of Hamilton’s chair. “It’s hard to say,” he said thoughtfully, pulling on one end of his mustache with his fingertips. “We’ve had spy satellites capable of monitoring phone conversations on the ground since the ’80’s, but that’s always been something that’s been part of the NSA’s mission. Why would anyone want to listen in on phone calls in the United States? Maybe they were just making a test run on California and Tennessee lines.”

“Yeah, maybe that’s it, but why that line about there not being any privacy left and flushing the Bill of Rights?” Hamilton cupped his face in his hands and shook his head. “Oh, man, this is bizarre.”

Sloane pondered the problem for a moment. Then, on impulse, he pulled his legs off the armrest, swiveled his chair to face his terminal, and typed in a command that exited him from his own program. “What are you doing?” Hamilton asked.

“I’m not the computer chief on Skycan for nothing,” Sam muttered. “I’ve never tried this before, so I hope…” His. voice trailed off as he typed: CD/NSA.

INVALID COMMAND, the computer replied.

CD/METEOROLOGY, he tried.

INVALID COMMAND, the computer responded again.

“Trying to get into their files?” Hamilton asked, peering over Sam’s shoulder.

“Yeah. So much for the obvious logons.” Sloane pulled on his mustache some more. “Okay, it has to be something easy to remember that they’ve entered.” CD/BIGEAR, he typed.

INVALID PROTOCOL, the computer responded.

“Okay, we’re getting somewhere,” Sloane said. He thought for a moment, then typed, CD/STORMKING.

STORMKING LOGON, the computer printed out. ENTER PASS PHRASE NOW.

“Hot damn,” Hamilton said. “How did you guess…”

“Old brand name for a cigarette lighter,” Sloane snapped. “Hush! It sounds like I’ve got only a few seconds to come up with the pass phrase, or we’re screwed.”

“How about ‘Zippo’?” Hamilton inquired.

“Damn it, Jack, don’t bug me!” Sloane pounded his clenched fists against the side of his own head. “I’ve been lucky so far, but this thing probably won’t take a wrong answer at this point…” He stopped, then snapped, “What did you say that guy’s name was?”

“Ah… uh, um… Jack Jarrett. Hey, what the hell.”

“Worth a shot. Can’t think of anything else logical.” Sloane quickly typed in JARRETT.

PASS OK, the computer replied. ENTER FILE NAME.

“Hallelujah!” Hamilton yelled as Sloane sagged back in his chair, suddenly exhausted. “I can’t believe you just did that!”

“A computer whiz’s skill and a writer’s sense of the obvious,” Sam said with a weak grin. “Okay, let’s see what this bugger has to tell us.”

He typed in, BIGEAR, and suddenly the screen filled with print. Both men leaned forward and began to study the screen.

They missed dinner, and it didn’t matter to them. The file was short and it took them only a couple of minutes to read it through the first time, but they found themselves studying its scrolling copy on the screen, again and again. Finally, Sloane made a hard copy on the printer, closed the file, and exited the program, being careful not to log himself as the last user.

“Well,” Hamilton said simply.

“Well,” Sam said in a near-whisper. Rubbing his eyes, he stood up from his chair and arched his aching back, stretching. “We’ve just stumbled onto a secret, and a big one at that. Question is, what are we going to do about it?”

Hamilton stared at the blank screen. No longer stoned, he now had a throbbing headache and his own eyes felt sore from staring at the screen so long and so intently. “Jesus, I don’t know,” he replied. After a moment he added reflectively, “When I started growing pot up here, I did it strictly for recreation. I stopped dispensing it when I realized people were beginning to get hurt. Now it turns out that getting one guy high has opened up this whole mess. I don’t know if I should regret smoking with him, or being glad Jarrett happens to be as bored as everyone else and wanted to have some kicks of his own.”

“I don’t think the pot had anything to do with it,” Sloane said. He leaned against a hardware rack on which he had magnetically tacked a print of an old Frank Kelly Freas painting. “Sounds to me like our friend Jarrett has a guilty conscience about what he’s aiding and abetting. He might have told anyone, anyway. It just so happened that your dope helped him say what was on his mind at this time and place.” He thought for a second, then added, “Though if I were you, I’d dump the rest of that stuff out the airlock the first chance you get.”

“Yeah. You might be right. If someone finds out that we’ve discovered what they’re up to…”

“Exactly,” Sam agreed, “but we can’t let ourselves linger on that now. If the timetable on that file is correct”—he pointed a finger at the terminal—“then the command module for the Ear has already been joined with the Freedom space station and there’s only a matter of days before the system as a whole goes on-line.”

If their mood wasn’t already somber, that thought definitely sobered them. They looked at each other for a few seconds before Hamilton cleared his throat. “Well,” he said, “what are we going to do about it?”

Sloane shrugged, knowing already what had to be done. “Someone has to take responsibility, I guess. I mean… somebody’s got to put a stop to it.”

Hamilton nodded. “Yeah.” He hesitated. “So who’s it going to be?”

Sam closed his eyes. “I don’t think we have much choice.”

“Right,” said Hamilton. “We’ve got to think of something.”

Sam kept his eyes closed. He felt one hell of a headache coming on. Shit, he thought. All I wanted to do is write a science fiction novel.

I
REALLY HAVE NO
idea how much time I have left. It looks as if my suit batteries are going to outlast my air supply, but that’s because I’ve switched off all the nonessential stuff, except for this recorder, and turned down the thermostat to about 60 degrees Fahrenheit. It’s a little cold, but what the hell. I’ll be dead before I get frostbite.

As far as my air supply goes, I haven’t the foggiest how much I have left. One of the nonessentials which got switched off were all the gauges. Since they all worked off the same switch on my chest pack, that means the heads-up displays inside my helmet are dark, including the one which would normally warn me when I’m breathing my reserves. The oxygen pressure needle on the chest pack is lying flat, but since I’m still breathing, there’s obviously still some air left. The only thing I haven’t been able to switch off is the digital chronometer, because it runs off its own battery, but it’s set into the cuff of my suit’s right sleeve, so I don’t have to look at it. And I won’t.

Two reasons why I’ve switched off everything. One, I don’t want to know. When I die, I don’t want to have an amber warning lamp blinking on and off in my face while watching the pressure indicator’s needle making a slow plunge toward the zero mark. I can spare myself the possibility of living those last few minutes in blind, helpless panic. Give me a little dignity, please. Second, I’m trying to preserve the batteries to power the recorder, in the slim hope that I can finish this chronicle before I croak. It’s my last testament, after all. Certainly more worth the reader’s time than
Ragnarok Night
, which—I have to admit, in my dying hour—was unmitigated dogshit.

Hey, if anyone does decide to transcribe and publish this thing, at least I won’t have to live with a lot of things writers have to cope with. Editorial demands to rewrite. Publicity tours. Agents. Royalties. Fame. Awards. The groupies the pros attract at SF conventions.

Notice that I’m not laughing any more. God damn it. I think I’m actually becoming scared of dying.

Let’s get back on the track here. Take a deep breath. What the hell, let’s splurge….

Y’know, the thing which always got me about the exploration of space was how naively the human race—but Americans particularly—has approached the whole thing. I mean, because we’d proven to ourselves that it was possible to send men and machines into orbit, we always assumed that everything would always work
right
, that people would always do the
right
thing out there, that just being in space would make everything so
right.
Jesus, you would have thought that after 1986, after the
Challenger
blew up and killed seven people because some people at NASA disregarded good advice not to launch that day, that after SDI was proven to be a monstrous sham which knowledgeable people who knew that it couldn’t work as advertised tried to foist upon the world anyway, after the L-5 colony bullshit which even more so-called reliable sources tried to present as being economically feasible and practical…

Whoa. Gotta watch it on those long-winded speeches. Let’s not splurge too much, Sam. You’ve got to finish the story.

But there is an underlying point that has to be made, if only to clarify the reasons for what we did. Mainly, we did what we did because we were the only ones who could—the only ones who
would
—do anything about it. The Big Ear should have been the instrument which destroyed the global status quo, not the bludgeon which reinforced it. It should have acted as a global switchboard, a ring of satellites that united every city, town, village, and hamlet, making it possible for anyone to trade information with anyone else. National borders rendered obsolete, political ideologies of secondary consideration, even differences in language of a lesser priority. Do-it-yourself world government, established not through a League of Nations, but through the everyday act of picking up the telephone, and dialing New York, Thailand, Japan, the U.S.S.R., Botswana, Brazil, the Aleutian Islands, wherever…

But instead, those who didn’t want to have the power of information access spread decided to use the Big Ear to consolidate their own power. They did it, unfortunately, with the blind endorsement of the system’s original supporters, just as the architects of the Strategic Defense Initiative managed to shanghai the grass-roots supporters of space development into advocating the “Star Wars” plan. The democracy of one Big Ear plan became the technocracy of another plan by the same name.

Except that we managed to stumble upon it. We: a small group of pot-smoking, fornicating, seditious working-class Joes. It fell to us, the responsibility of making certain that a dream didn’t become corrupted, as so many others in the past had, into yet another Cold War weapon, with the only difference being that the Cold War was being waged this time against ourselves.