Orbital Decay (27 page)

“Won’t you try just a little bit harder,

“Couldn’t you try just a little bit more…?”

Static. Then a loud, overpowering voice: “
Neiman
!
Can it
!”

Snap! There went the music, gone like that. Popeye blinked a few times, relaxed his vision. He looked at his hands, and was surprised to see that he wasn’t holding anything. The tether line was floating several inches away from his right hand, and the edge of the girder was many feet from his left hand. He had let go of the powersat, and was held to it only by the tether, and he hadn’t noticed that he had let go.

Glancing upward, he saw the powersat stretching away above his head as a silvery grid several miles long pointed almost directly at the three-quarters-full Earth. Not far away to his left, a pair of beamjacks hovered underneath a truss section; he could see the brilliant white flash of a hand-held laser torch spitting against a joint as one of the pair welded in a section held in place by the other worker. Much farther away, another beamjack gently guided himself toward a long stay which was being maneuvered into place by a work pod. Through the grid’s square openings, he could see another pod coasting above him and the powersat, carrying long aluminum sections from Vulcan’s stores out to another point of assembly on the gargantuan structure.

Neiman
,
I’m not telling you this again. You got permission to play your damn tapes in your pod
,
but you’re not going to broadcast them over any of the comlink channels. It screws up communications. Do you copy
?

Yeah
,
right
,
I copy
,
Hank. Don’t get upset.
The music abruptly ceased.

Station One-Betty
,
this is Vulcan Command. You copy there
,
Popeye?

Oh, hell. Hooker thought, they must have missed me. “Vulcan, this is One-Betty, we read you.”

What’s going on
,
Hooker
?
I called for you a minute ago.

“I’m okay, Sammy. I just had a slight case of vertigo, so I shut my eyes till it went away.”

He heard laughter over the channels.
Hey
,
Popeye
,
don’t let that pure oxygen go to your head now
,
eh
?

Hey
!
Popeye
!
I gotta can a spinach if you need it
!

Hooker
,
are you okay
? That was Hank Luton, the construction supervisor.
How’re you doing there
?

“I said I’m okay,” he insisted. He grabbed his tether and started pulling it hand over hand, reeling himself in toward the beam he had been welding. “I just got the spins for a minute there. Let me get this done, and I’ll go work with Hernandez and Webb at their section.”

Nix on that
,
Popeye. You know the rules. Finish that weld
,
then I want you back on Vulcan and cycled through into the whiteroom. I don’t want anyone dozing off on the job.

Oh, that’s just great, Hooker thought as he grabbed the powersat again. That means he’ll put me on medical report to Doc, and Doc’ll put me on the couch again. “No, seriously, Hank, I’m okay,” he said, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice. “I just misfired my MMU a bit and that put me in a spin and I just got a little dizzy. I’m telling you, I’m fine.”

Don’t gimme that crap
,
Popeye. Untether now and head back. Al
,
go over there and finish what Hooker was working on. Hooker
,
back to the station
,
pronto
,
you copy
?

“Goddammit,” Hooker said under his breath. He unsnapped his tether and hit the button on his chest box, which reeled the line back into the metal can on his hip. Then he pushed off from the girder with his leg, did a half-flip backwards and jostled the hand controls on his backpack’s arms. The MMU stopped the momentum from his backflip, and a correction on the vernier jets sent him gliding toward the telephone shape of Vulcan, hovering underneath the powersat three-quarters of a mile away, joining the continuous flying circus of men and vehicles arrayed around the shack’s open loading bays. Not only was he going to have to take a break now, Popeye thought, but he had little doubt that he was going to have to have to listen to Hank as well.

“I don’t know what to do about you, Popeye, I honestly don’t know.” Hank Luton paused to suck on the straw leading into his coffee bulb. “I mean, you and I both know you got problems, but I can’t do a thing for you if you don’t tell me about ’em, right?”

Hooker floated nearby, holding a bulb in his own hand. He had his suit on still, but with the backpack off, his helmet undogged and his gloves shed. He gazed moodily at a display screen; for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to look at Hank. He didn’t say anything.

Luton waited for him to answer. Getting no reply, he went on. “C’mon, Claude. You’ve been on this operation almost longer than anyone else. At least as long as the rest of the work crew. I’ve appreciated your hard work so far. You’re a good man. I like you. If you have something on your mind, tell me about it. It won’t go any farther than this room.”

“I don’t have anything to talk about.”

“Oh,
Jesus
, Popeye, get off it!” Luton snapped. “You don’t think anyone notices? You hardly say anything to anyone anymore. You’re never in the rec room, you eat alone on the mess deck, you don’t show any desire to be with other people. You work, you eat, you take a sponge bath, you sleep for a few hours and you go back to work again. A man just can’t live like that, Hooker!”

Hooker shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be hurting me so far.” He sucked down a little coffee and didn’t look at the construction supervisor.

“Aw, bullshit, man. You spaced out back there. If you hadn’t had your tether secured, someone would now be retrieving you from your own little orbit.” Luton crushed the bulb in his black fist and shoved it down a disposal chute. “To tell you the truth, I don’t care if people daydream on the job sometimes, as long as they don’t let it interfere with what they’re doing. But up here, when you start to space out, that’s the beginning of a fatal mistake.”

“I wasn’t daydreaming, Hank,” Popeye said.

C’mon…

“
No
!” Suddenly, he felt something snap inside of him. He flung the coffee bulb he had been holding across the compartment, where it bounced off an oxygen tank and ricocheted into a Mylar wall. “I had a little bit of vertigo, that was all, I just got a little dizzy and I shut my eyes to get my shit together!” he shouted. At the same time, he had the impression that he was outside his own body, watching himself yelling at Hank Luton, passively examining himself as he lost control. “And I don’t want to talk about my problems because I don’t have any, so I don’t have anything I don’t want to tell you about, so just let me do my fucking job. I just got dizzy, that’s all! I just got the spins and that’s why I didn’t answer Sammy, and there’s nothing I want to talk to you about, so thank you very much and get outta my life you goddamn
nigger
!”

Hank Luton’s right fist wound back for a punch so fast that the momentum sent him toppling backwards and he had to grab for a handhold to keep himself in place. The fist hung parallel to his shoulder for a moment, trembling as if it contained a fury of its own, and Hooker shrank back, waiting for the blow which would probably take his head clean off his neck. Luton’s dark eyes bored into his own for a long second; then, remarkably, he lowered his hand, his fingers uncoiling from the bricklike fist he had made.

Luton let out a breath. “Popeye,” he said slowly and softly, “I haven’t let a white guy live after calling me a nigger since I was a little kid. I know you’re not the type who usually says things like that, though, so I’m going to let that one slide by.”

“I’m sorry, Hank,” Hooker said. “You’re right. I didn’t mean that.”

The construction supervisor nodded his head and looked away. “If you really were a bigot you wouldn’t have saved Julian’s life when that hotdog blew out,” he murmured. “I’m just glad he’s not on this shift so he didn’t have to hear you say that. I know you’re sorry, Popeye. You don’t have to say anything else.”

Hooker no longer felt detached from himself. He only felt ashamed. It was like what had happened a few weeks earlier, when he had blown up at H.G. Wallace. Something deep inside himself had snapped its reins and had roared loose, but unlike the episode with Cap’n Wallace, this time it had been ugly and obscene and he wanted to crawl away someplace to die because of it. He remembered…

Rocky
,
fat Rocky
,
two hundred-plus pounds of manipulative shit
,
bent over a small mound of soft white powder balanced in the cup of gold-plated balance-beam scales which reflected in the Florida sun like a promise disappearing into the blue
;
gone
,
forever gone.
“
Money’s money
,
man
,”
Rocky murmured as he carefully balanced the scales
, “
but I hope your lady likes the present you’re giving her
.”

“I’m sorry,” Popeye said. “I guess it just came out.”

Luton nodded. “Hooker, you’re through for this shift,” he said. “I know there’s something wrong that you don’t want to talk about with me, so I’m going to take you off this shift and let you catch a ferry back to Skycan. I know I can’t make you do it, but I want you to go talk to Doc Felapolous and get whatever it is off your chest.”

Hooker nodded, knowing that he wasn’t going to visit Felapolous. Luton turned toward the hatch leading back toward Vulcan’s command compartment. “Just one warning,” he tossed over his shoulder. “If you space out again, I’m going to recommend to Doc and Cap’n Wallace that you be sent back to Earth on a psychiatric release. I can’t put my finger on it, but I get the feeling that’s the last thing you want to happen. You’re homesick, Popeye, but you never want to go home.”

He sat in the whiteroom for a while after Luton left, gazing at the crumpled coffee container he had thrown across the compartment, which drifted like a tiny rogue asteroid. Luton had been right.
I want to go home
, Hooker thought,
but I can’t
,
and getting shipped back would be the worst thing to ever happen to me.

Almost the worst thing.

I
F IT HAD NOT
been for the St. Louis Cardinals throwing away their chance to go to the Series to the Chicago Cubs—a major development in the season, which eventually led to the historic games between the Cubs and the Tokyo Giants—we probably would never have learned how Virgin Bruce came to be on Olympus Station. It took a disastrous defensive play by the Cards in the seventh inning for Bruce to get upset enough to spill the beans about his past.

Of course, no one had ever asked him to tell about himself before, at least not in any detail, that was tradition among the Skycan crew, a tacit agreement by which it was generally understood that a beamjack or any other crewman wasn’t obligated to relate his autobiography to anyone.

There were a couple of reasons for this. One, it was rumored, and correctly so, that a few guys had past affairs which were nobody’s business but their own. Bad marriages and divorces which had them running from alimony payments, or possible criminal charges concerning God knew what real or trumped-up offenses (remember Tennessee’s “Tipper” law against live rock music performances?), or shattered reputations and ruined businesses in wherever one called home—these were the most recurrent stories, when one heard them. Remember, we were all living in close confines on the station, so there wasn’t much privacy. A yarn told to a few friends in the bunkhouse could spread throughout Skycan, until someone sat down next to you in the mess deck and calmly asked you if that seventeen-year-old in New York had been any good. The other reason was that some of the guys had psychological scars which were simply too vulnerable to expose in public. Popeye Hooker was one of those people. He had something in his background he didn’t want to discuss, and no one really pressed him about it, except maybe Hank Luton or Doc Felapolous.

It was not as if everyone on Skycan were in the position of expatriated Americans living in banana republics under false identities. Many times during the long, dull hours spent in the rec rooms or in the bunkhouses between work shifts some guys would open up, telling their life stories to whoever was nearby. That was another reason for the tradition of voluntary silence: Most of those stories were either tedious drivel or pure bullshit. But while there were many people who spouted dull anecdotes or tall tales, there were also a few who didn’t have much to say about what they did before they came to work for Skycorp. Virgin Bruce was among the members of the latter group.

At least before that Sunday afternoon in the west rec room, that is. The baseball fans aboard had been long looking forward to that game. The Cubs and the Cards were rivals way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and in the season of 2016 they were running almost neck and neck for the numero uno standing in the National League, especially after they both kicked the shit out of last season’s Series champs, the San Diego Padres, and summarily whomped American League stalwarts like the Royals (whom the Cards had never forgiven since the 1-70 Series of ’85), the Yankees, and the revived and highly touted Washington Senators. After all these years, it looked like the Cubs were again going to make it at least to the play-offs, and there were enough Midwesterners among the crew to make that particular game of interest even to those of us who really didn’t give a damn about baseball, only because we wanted to see if there was going to be a bloody brawl between Cards and Cubs fans by the time it was done.

So a lot of shift-swapping had occurred the week before, which had placed a couple of dozen diehards around the tri-vee table by 1400 hours Sunday, with more swarming in after the fourth inning, when the second shift got off duty. I was never much of a baseball fan—college basketball was my sport, besides boxing—but I ducked out of work at Data Processing and strolled over to the west rec room, where one of the two circuses on Skycan was in progress. With two rec rooms on Skycan, it worked out that most of the Cards fans were in the west hemisphere and most of the Cubs fans were in the east, which probably reduced the bloodshed in the aftermath.