Orbital Decay (13 page)

“Hank, I just heard from the Korolev cosmodrome,” he said. “The Russians have picked up our signals and are offering rescue assistance.”

“Oh, swell. That’s great news.” Luton ran a free hand over his balding forehead; the sweat that hadn’t caught in his kinky hair rubbed off into beady droplets which hung in the air. The Soviets were also maintaining a station in GEO orbit, but even by a straight-line trajectory it was still several thousand miles away. The best they could do now was to send over another pod to serve as a meat wagon for the dead…. “Tell ’em thanks, but no thanks,” Luton replied. “Tell ’em we got everything under control, thank-you anyway.”

“Sir, the Space Rescue Treaty…”

“Damn it, Sammy, I’m not going to play UN right now! Tell the Russians to take a hike and keep an eye on what Neiman’s doing!”

He turned his head to look over Sammy’s shoulder at the traffic control screen. One white spot on the screen indicated where Virgin Brace’s pod was located; it was moving closer to the center as he watched. Another white spot, Alan McPhee’s pod, was hanging nearby; a blue line between Neiman’s pod and the construction shack showed that Zulu Tango would come close, but not intersect, the point where Romeo Virginia was floating dead in space. “How bad is McPhee’s drift?” he asked.

Orlando made a quick computation on his computer. “A few hundred meters per minute. Want to send a rescue pod?”

“Negative. He sounds okay, just a little shaken. Keep an eye on him, that’s all.” He found himself smiling. “If he gets too far away, get the Russians to rescue him, if it’ll make ’em feel important.”

The communications officer looked over her shoulder. “I’m getting a message from Hooker and Price. They wanna…”

“I heard, I heard!” Luton yelled. “Julie, keep listening to them, and if it sounds like they’re running out of air, get Mike to open the other hatch and let ’em out, but I don’t want to hear their crap again. Mike, how’re they doing?”

“I think they’ll make it for a few minutes,” the chief engineer said. “I’m worried about the beam-builders.”

“Shit. Didn’t you get those things cut loose?” Without waiting for a reply, Luton somersaulted to face the wide port that overlooked the main construction bay. He could see that the massive machines had been disengaged from their telescoping supports and were now drifting below the construction shack at the ends of the beams they had been processing before their shutdown. “I see ’em. What’s the problem?”

“They might break loose.”

“Oh, great.” The beam-builders cost several billion dollars and had required separate shuttle flights to get them into space, due to their size and mass. Losing one of them would be almost worse than having a man killed.

But not quite. “Just keep an eye on them,” Luton snapped impatiently. “Put a man on each of ’em if you get a chance. I’m not worried about…”

“Hank! I’m getting something from Number Two!” Julia Smith yelled.

“They’re still alive?” Luton attempted to roll over again in midair, but he did it too fast and his torso slammed into an overhead panel. He swore again and glanced down to make sure no important switches had been thrown. “What’s going on, who’s that, what’s he…?”

“It’s… incoherent.” Julia’s pretty eyes were squeezed shut. She had listened to long strings of profanities from beamjacks on duty without scarcely batting an eyelash, but what she was hearing now was giving her pain. “He’s… he’s panicking, Hank.”

Who wouldn’t? Luton thought. Who couldn’t? He remembered what he had (cruelly, he now realized in spontaneous hindsight) told Hooker a minute (had it been that short a time?) ago:
They’re dead men.
“Try to talk to them,” he rasped. “Tell ’em to hang on… or something. Help’s on the way.”

He craned his neck to glance out through the port. Out beyond the hemisphere of Module B, where earthlight shone on the skeleton of the powersat, he could see the growing spotlights of pod Zulu Tango approaching the shack. A strange, bitter irony: The end of this sudden, deadly nightmare rested with a man he had been half-intending to fire ten minutes ago. Everything depended on a sleazy biker from Missouri: It was as disgusting as it was horrifying.

“Sammy, just make sure he’s on course and nothing’s in his way,” the shift supervisor said, his eyes locked on the approaching construction pod. To himself, he murmured, “Bruce, for Christ’s sake, don’t fuck up this time.”

It was hard to breathe now. The air inside the whiteroom had become so rarefied that he had to gasp for each lungful. The cyclonic wind which had ripped through the compartment had settled some, which made Webb realize that most of the air was already gone. Soon, it would all go through that inch-long slit in the fabric wall. When it did, he and Honeyman would die.

Webb hung with one hand to an overhead rail and took deep gasps of cold oxygen. His fingers were turning numb and the upper portion of his body—the part that was not encased in spacesuit armor—was becoming chilled, since the heat had been sucked out along with most of the cabin pressure. He doubted he would freeze before he suffocated, however. Even though the bit of shrapnel which had punctured the hotdog was wedged in the wall fast enough to prevent explosive decompression of the type that had killed the two guys in Hotdog One, the leak was fast enough that he knew he and Honeyman would die in a couple of minutes, three at most.

He almost envied those guys. They had gone out quick. What was that old movie-poster line? “In space, no one can hear you scream”? He
had
heard them scream, just before the emergency hatches had irised shut. But Webb knew that they must not have screamed for very long. Now Honeyman was doing enough screaming for them all.

“
Get us out of here
!”

The rookie beamjack was hanging to a handhold near an intercom panel, howling at it in stark terror. Tears had streamed from his eyes and were floating around his face in fat globules. “Goddammit, you bastards, I don’t want to die, get me out of here!” His voice was turning hoarse and, in the decreasing atmospheric pressure, tinny, as if he were farther away than fifteen feet. Webb noticed that Honeyman’s chest was heaving with the effort to sustain his howling. He also noticed, in disgust, a dark splotch in the crotch of the beamjack’s jumpsuit where he had urinated in fear.

“Shut up, damn it!” Webb forced himself to yell. He didn’t want to die, either, but he was damn sure not going to go out like a coward, or in the company of one if he could help it.

The absurd part of it was, there he was in a spacesuit bottom, with other parts of a suit floating around the compartment, and there wasn’t any way he could use them. Not in time, anyway. Getting into a suit was a long procedure. Even half-dressed as he was, Webb would still need ten to fifteen minutes to struggle into the top half, join the halves, connect the hoses and adjust the air supply, put on the gauntlets and don the helmet. This was even if he omitted steps like adjusting and switching on the interior water-cooling system or donning the overgarment. Parts of the spacesuit had been scattered all across the compartment by the escaping pressure; just gathering them would take a couple of precious minutes…. It wasn’t even worth trying.

“You fucking shits! You rat-fucking bastards! Get me—!”

“Shaddup, Honeyman!” Webb snapped. He thought of the first American astronauts to die in a spacecraft. Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 1 fire at the Cape, way back before the first Moon landing. Even at the end, when the fire in the tiny command module was reaching for their bodies and their lungs were filling with smoke, they had been trying to undog that hatch the engineers had made so well it couldn’t be opened quickly in an emergency. They had screamed, that was for certain, but they had fought for their lives until they lost consciousness.

Bad engineering and lack of foresight was going to kill him and Honeyman as well. Whoever had designed the hotdogs, in trying to conserve space inside the cramped little compartments for suit racks and TV monitors, had apparently decided that rescue balls were not needed here, and that sealkits should be given to the astronauts working outside the hotdogs, not put inside. No way to seal the hole from inside….

Or was there?

A flash of inspiration hit him, an old Dutch legend he had learned in childhood. My mind must be going, Webb thought. My life is passing before my eyes, to recall something like that now.

Yet he glanced around and spotted what he was looking for: a spacesuit glove, floating in midair a couple of yards away. Without allowing himself time to think through what he was going to do, to consider the dangers—no time, no time—Webb let go of the rail and pushed himself toward the glove. Grabbing it as he passed, he shoved his right hand into the thick gauntlet as he automatically braked his plunge through the compartment with his feet. The glove fit snugly on his hand, and for the first time since he had been a beamjack, Webb didn’t mind the tight fit. He would need that snugness, every fraction of an inch of it, for what he was about to pull off.

If
he could pull it off. Webb took another deep lungful of rapidly thinning air, then pushed off again with his legs. Arms thrust in front of his head, he launched himself toward the hole.

Julian Price had taken care of their air supply before the situation in the sleeve had become critical. Disconnecting the air hose from Hooker’s spacesuit and adjusting the regulator on his chest pack, the whiteroom technician had transformed Hooker’s backpack oxygen tank into an oxygen source for both men. Now that they didn’t have to worry about asphyxiation, they only had to wait for someone to rescue them from the sleeve.

The waiting was the hardest part. Vulcan Command was no longer listening to them since Hooker’s outburst, so there was no point in trying to communicate with Sammy or Hank. Julian had tried to cheer the beamjack up with small talk, but Hooker had stopped listening. They floated together in the sleeve, pressed against each other like lovers, yet Hooker wasn’t seeing Price’s face any more. Eyes half shut, breathing shallowly—his momentary hysteria had drained him both emotionally and physically—the beamjack’s mind was tar away in time and space….

He lay on his back in a rubber boat under a jet-black night sky
,
feeling the ocean’s tides gently rock him back and forth. Eventually the waves might carry him back toward shore—he wasn’t that far from land—or he might eventually sit up and use the boat’s plastic oars to get him home. For now
,
though
,
he didn’t care
;
his only concern was his pain.

He turned his head slightly and looked across the bow. The boat was still burning
,
a charcoal on fire on the ocean’s surface a couple of miles away. Eventually the rest of the hull would sink below the waves and the gasoline would consume itself
,
and the little tongue of flame that still glowed on the ocean would be extinguished. He stared at it for a while
,
remembering how a glint of gold vanished into the ocean—gone
,
forever gone—Then he turned his eyes away
,
to stare up at the clear night sky.

The stars had come out
,
brilliant and white. Mars stood out as a reddish point near the horizon
,
and the Milky Way was a gauzy
,
breathtakingly huge swath across the heavens. He realized that he had never seen anything as beautiful as the night sky over the Gulf.

Staring up at the stars
,
he felt the pain in his heart beginning to ease
,
to be replaced by a deep yearning. How could he have forgotten that which he had felt as a kid
,
the frightening beauty and wonder of infinite space
?
If only he could be there now
,
one with the stars
,
far away from this tragic and painful Earth.

He noticed
,
then
,
that one of the stars was moving
,
steadily rising from the horizon. He watched it move. No
,
it wasn’t an aircraft
;
judging from its trajectory
,
it had to be a spacecraft
,
probably a launch from Cape Canaveral
,
hundreds of miles away on the other side of the Florida peninsula. Recognizing it for what it was
,
he looked above the moving star
,
and spotted its probable destination
,
a couple of bright lights almost directly above his head. Those would be the space stations
,
Olympus and Vulcan.

Unexpectedly
,
he found himself smiling
….

He felt a hand grasping and shaking his shoulder. Julian Price’s dark face replaced the starscape. “Hooker! Popeye! Wake up, man,” Price was saying. “I think something’s happening out there!”

Virgin Bruce tried not to look at the bodies. One was floating close to one of the construction pod’s canopy. The corpse was wearing a jumpsuit that was blotched with frozen red blood, and Bruce was glad that at least he couldn’t see the face. Explosive decompression was a grotesque way to die. It may have been sudden, he realized, but the beamjack must have had a long, final minute of horror and agony….

Forget it, he told himself. Forget that the stiff was probably a friend of yours. Concentrate. He ran his gaze over the bank of instruments above the viewports, making sure the pod’s cabin was depressurized and that all the engines were safed, then quickly glanced at the tiny bank of lights within his helmet, just above the rim of the visor. Everything was green. Virgin Bruce then grabbed a lever on the left, next to his seat, and pushed it forward. The hatch directly over his head undogged and opened to space.

The construction pod was held by its arms to the hull of the construction shack, an emergency maneuver only seldom rehearsed and never, in his memory, actually put to use in a real-life crisis. His seat harness was already undone; Bruce planted his feet on either side of his seat and pushed himself upward through the hatch. He propelled himself out of the pod faster than he had anticipated, into the red and white glare of the navigational beacons arranged around the shack’s hull. They dazzled his eyes for a moment, and he raised the handjet blindly to shoulder-length and squeezed the trigger. The spurt of the jet slowed his momentum and he blinked furiously, trying to clear his vision. Christ, he had not expected it to be so bright outside….