Orbital Decay (33 page)

“So why did you give it up?” Hamilton asked.

He sat on the gunnel on the aft deck
,
drinking beer and watching the other sailors getting ready to head out for the evening. At four o’clock the sun was still high in the summer sky. She’d be there soon. Unless she still wanted to blow his money away on Rocky’s trash. It was hot
,
so he unbuttoned his shirt.

“I just got sick of it,” he lied.

Now the station’s south pole was coming up. Looking at it, he could make out the telescope fastened to the hemispherical bulge of the Meteorology section, the rectangular casing pointed toward Earth. “Wonder what those CIA guys are looking at today,” Virgin Bruce said, as if reading his thoughts.

“Submarines off Cuba. Troop movements near the Canal. A spaceport being built in Haiti.” Popeye shrugged. “Go in there sometime and look over their shoulders at the reports they’re filing back home. You’ll wonder about this Century of Peace everyone’s proclaiming.” He raised his knees an inch or so up the back of the pilot’s seat, trying to relieve the growing cramps in his legs. “So where did this pot come from, Jack?” he asked. “Did you smuggle some up or what?”

“Well, yeah, I did, but I smoked that stuff up a little while ago. Ah, you promise not to tell anyone else?”

“I promise.”

“Well, I also brought up a little stash of seeds and I planted them in the hydroponics bay. What you’re smoking now… I mean, eating… is from the first crop. How do you like it?”

“Pretty good.” Actually, it had been so long since he had last smoked marijuana that even lousy pot could have made him high, but this stuff
was
good. He found himself staring at the Earth again. Down there is the Gulf of Mexico, and on it is a boat, he thought. And on that boat is a woman. She’s lying on her back under the sun, and there’s a little bead of sweat running down her left breast, down under the cup of her bra where the sun hasn’t turned her skin brown, and the warm sun feels like a lover’s hand so she arches her back slightly, her flat stomach rising up and her round buttocks pushing flat against the wooden deck. Her lips part slightly and her eyes open, and she sees me walking toward her; she smiles, so I push my thumbs underneath the waistband of my trunks and push them down, and she sits up and reaches for…

“Hey! Popeye!” Hamilton snapped. “Come back here!” Instantly he was back in the spacecraft. Hamilton was grinning at him and offering another brownie. Hooker stared at it for a moment, then shook his head. “I just asked you a question,” the hydroponicist said, putting the brownie back into the plastic bag.

“I asked you when was the last time you saw your ex-wife.”

Gold disappearing
…

“I haven’t seen her in a while,” he said shortly. He thought for a moment, then quickly added, “I don’t know where she is.” Another lie.

“You mean she hasn’t written to you or called or nothing?” Virgin Bruce asked.

“
No
,
I don’t want to stick around
,”
he told Rocky.
“
Just tell her that I’ve been here and I’ve got something for her
,
and if she wants it
,
she can come down to my boat. I’ll meet her there
.”

“No, I haven’t heard anything from her since I’ve been here,” Popeye replied.

Virgin Bruce snorted. “Ain’t that like women? I swear, sometimes I think they were put here just to drive men crazy, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah,” Popeye agreed most sincerely, “I know what you mean.”

Just then, Virgin Bruce sat forward intently and cupped his hand over his headset’s earpiece, waving his other hand urgently for silence as he listened to the comlink. “Keep it down,” he half-whispered, then jabbed the transmission button on the communications board. “Ah, yeah, we copy, Olympus Traffic. I’m winding up my first orbit now. Everything looks good. Do you want me to continue? Olympus Beta House over.”

He listened for another second, then his lips pulled back into a grimace. He looked over his shoulder at Hooker and Hamilton and shook his head, then said, “We copy there, Olympus Traffic. Beta House proceeding for docking at Olympus a-sap. Beta House over and out.”

He punched off, then sighed. “Son of a bitch. They want us to come back in. One of the hub antennae has gone out of alignment and they need this pod to send a guy to go fix it. Fortunately I don’t have the right equipment and they know it; otherwise I’d have to come up with a reason quick to stop them from sending me.”

Popeye nodded. There would have been no possibility of Virgin Bruce doing the errand; to fix the antenna on the south pole of Skycan’s hub, he would have necessarily had to have gone
EVA,
which meant that he would have had to depressurize the pod. There was only one suit in the pod, though. Not that Bruce could have pulled off such a delicate mission, in his present state of mind…

“Bruce,” he asked, “Are you sure you can dock this thing?”

“‘Are you sure you can…’” Bruce repeated, then stopped and glared back at Popeye. “Popeye, son, do you know who you’re speaking to? I’m the best pod pilot in the whole company! You’re talking to the hotdog man, brother! The ace of aces himself! I can dock a pod with my eyes closed! What the hell do you mean, ‘Bruce, are you sure you can dock this thing?’”

He turned back around, snapped off the autopilot and switched to manual, then hit a couple of switches and pushed the throttle arm forward. The pod eased forward, falling out of its orbit, but instead of going straight, it began to roll toward the left, taking a spiraling course toward the station’s hub. Red lights began to flash on the LCD simulation. Virgin Bruce muttered something unintelligible and hastily corrected his course, firing RCR’s to stop the rolling. “Nothing serious,” he said aloud.

“Bruce,” Hamilton said in a calm voice, although Popeye noticed that the hydroponics engineer had his eyes tightly closed, “I think I should rephrase Popeye’s question. The question isn’t whether you can dock this thing. It should be, can you dock this thing
stoned
?”

“Hey. Hey.” Virgin Bruce’s voice took a defensive edge. “This is no more difficult than riding my bike, and I used to do that all the time after smoking reefer. Man, they were good days. Driving down 40 on a summer day, high on good Jamaican weed, doing seventy through rush-hour traffic. No helmet, no nothing, just you and the road, man.” He giggled. “Man, I used to have fun with those big trucks…”

V
IRGIN BRUCE’S NEAR-CRASH LANDING
at the Docks wasn’t the first indication that things were getting a little loose on Skycan, but it was the most obvious. He ended up slam-docking his pod so hard that later a repair crew had to be dispatched to the airlock compartment to patch the small leaks in the seams which he had inadvertently sprung. Bruce himself got chewed out by both Chang and Anderson… especially by Chang, who was the only one who knew that more than one person had been in the pod, or what the three of them had been doing.

It’s worth noting that H.G. Wallace didn’t hear about the incident for a couple of hours, because the project supervisor wasn’t in the command center when Neiman, Hooker, and Hamilton took their joy ride. Lately, Wallace had not been his usual omnipresent self. He had, over the past few weeks, become a hermit, sequestering himself in his private quarters in Module 24, delegating most of the authority to Hank Luton and Doc Felapolous. Despite what Felapolous had said about Cap’n Wallace being the force which kept the SPS construction project on time and within budget, Wallace’s presence was not really missed. Work continued on the giant satellite without missing a beat; in fact, the beamjacks seemed to be enjoying themselves, now that they didn’t have to worry about Wallace constantly haranguing them over the comlink. It was possible that Wallace was still monitoring them from his cabin, but if he was, the only evidence he gave was a once-a-day whirlwind tour of the command center, during which he would harass everyone on duty about the sloppy jobs they were doing, before disappearing back to the isolation of his cabin.

Perhaps it was because Wallace was becoming invisible that things were getting looser on Skycan, but I think that there were some other factors. For one thing, there was Hamilton’s pot crop. I don’t want to give the impression that the crew of Olympus overnight became a gang of stoned-out twenty-first century hippies, but just having that stuff aboard had an effect on the crew. Hamilton tried to keep Skycan Brown—as he dubbed the particular, fast-growing strain he had developed in Hydroponics—a secret within a close circle of friends, but for how long could anyone keep anything a secret within the station? Not very damn long. He soon found himself in the position any well-known supplier of contraband materials on Earth has had to face: Crewmen started approaching him at all hours, looking for a joint or two, referred to him by “friend of a friend of a friend” connections.

Somehow, he got lucky in that word of his crop didn’t leak to the wrong people, like Phil Bigthorn or Wallace. But before things got completely out of control he harvested the last of his crop, cured the marijuana and hid it away, and didn’t grow any more. In fact, the day after he did that, he had an unexpected visit from Doc Felapolous, who said he was just “wandering by and decided to drop in for a little socializing.” After Doctor Feelgood managed to mosey through each of the five Hydroponics modules and peer closely at everything, he left Jack in a cold sweat—especially after Felapolous mumbled something about there being “a lot of careless little accidents lately.” At that point, Hamilton decided to go out of business. Like every smart dope dealer, he decided that it wasn’t worth the risk, let alone the paranoia.

There had been a lot of little accidents, and some of them had been caused by a lot of the beamjacks smoking pot. Things like that inside Olympus could be controlled. Stoned crewmen loosing their balance and falling down, and various other little incidents that happened when two or three guys were jammed together in a curtained bunk with a smokeless pipe, exhaling into a towel that had been liberally sprayed with deodorant—those things didn’t matter much. It was even funny when you would see somebody in the mess deck giggling uncontrollably at the food on his plate (or, better, someone who had always complained about the food, wolfing down his meal and mumbling with a mouthful about how great the slop seemed to taste), or a bunch of guys in the rec deck transfixed by a
Star Trek
or
Twilight Zone
rerun which they must have already seen a dozen times.

But it was a sign that the situation was getting out of hand when accidents started occurring during the work shifts out on SPS-1. Just before going on shift a couple of guys would hole up in a john with one of the little water pipes Hamilton had at first obligingly whipped up from the chemistry apparatus in his lab. Then they would ride the ferry out to Vulcan. Julian Price would have his hands full in the whiteroom, catching the careless mistakes these jokers would make while suiting up—the disconnected hoses or partially pressurized tanks or the unsealed suit seams. We were lucky we didn’t lose any guys that way. We were doubly lucky that no fatalities resulted from numerous other pot-induced errors: Beamjacks firing their MMU’s in the wrong direction and colliding with the satellite or each other, tethers improperly fastened. Once, a laser torch was fired in the wrong direction and damn near put a hole through the faceplate of the beamjack’s helmet. Oh, man, we were just
lucky
no one got killed!

If there was anything that Jack Hamilton’s experiment with cultivating marijuana in space proved, it was that dope doesn’t belong in space. Hamilton knew it, so he stopped passing out loose pot and his homemade brownies to the beamjacks. He told them that he had run out—a lie which no one could prove, since he carefully hid his remaining pound of cured pot somewhere in the hydroponics bay—and that he wasn’t going to grow any more, which was the truth after Doc’s visit. Fortunately, Doc didn’t get suspicious enough to start making spot checks of the crew’s blood and urine. He chalked up the rumors of drug use to the number of painkillers he had formerly handed out, figuring that some of the crew had been hoarding the pills, and started prescribing aspirin instead. After a little while, the accidents began to ease off in frequency and crewmen stopped laughing at their food.

But the long-term effect, far more benign, was that the morale of the people aboard Skycan had improved. It was a synthesis of pot use by the minority, the contact-high which the nonsmoking majority had gotten from them, and the absence of Cap’n Wallace’s brooding presence that raised spirits a little on the station. Since Hamilton had accumulated a small hunk of money from his short career as a reluctant dealer, he used that cash to have a few luxury items shipped up to Skycan, things that had been officially forbidden by Wallace until he had become a modern version of Captain Ahab. Through his friendship with Lisa Barnhart, one of the shuttle pilots who made runs to LEO from the Cape, Hamilton got us a few cassette decks, tapes, video cassettes that weren’t G-rated, Frisbees—little stuff that was taken for granted down on Earth but had been made unwelcome on Skycan by Wallace’s vision of a perfect space crew. They went a long way toward making people feel better. You could walk down the catwalk and see off-duty crewmen tossing the friz to each other, hear the Byrds coming from this bunkhouse, the Talking Heads from the next, Miles Davis or Stanley Clarke coming from the next. People stopped being uptight about sex as well. A few of Virgin Bruce’s bunkhouse mates were surprised when Joni Lowenstein started crawling in and out of Bruce’s bunk, but Command didn’t raise any objections. Wallace would have been upset to see all this going on, but Wallace seldom emerged from Module 24 anymore; he was completely self-immersed in his own private world which no one except Doc Felapolous was allowed to enter, and Doc wasn’t telling anyone what was going on inside Cap’n Wallace’s head.

No one cared. SPS-1 was still being built on schedule; the crew was happy, Skycorp was happy, the stockholders were reasonably satisfied. Things were good there, for a while.