Orbital Decay (6 page)

As it closed in on the airlock, Dave Chang, the Chinese-American who served as the whiteroom chief, glanced out a porthole, saw the pod’s hatch in the center of the docking adapter, and knew at once that they were all in big trouble.

Chang had been given only a brief warning from Anderson down in Traffic Control that a construction pod from Vulcan was making an unexpected rendezvous at Skycan. The instructions had been few: an order from Command that, under no circumstances, would the pilot be allowed to leave the Docks before Security Officer Bigthorn and Doc Felapolous arrived. Anderson had not told Chang who exactly it was inside the pod, negligence which Chang now believed to be the result of his having fleeced Anderson at a blackjack game in their bunkhouse a couple of weeks ago.

Anderson, obviously, was trying to set him up for a big surprise. But Chang had worked in the whiteroom at Vulcan before being sent over to Olympus, and thus knew all of the beamjacks. He was also aware that many of the workers who were assigned to fly the pods had their own preferences as to which of the machines they operated. Technically, regulations did not allow such preferences, but Luton quietly let them get away with rule-bending the way Wallace wouldn’t allow, so some of the pod pilots were given dibs on the machines with which they were most comfortable.

These pod pilots sometimes painted things on the hatches, which was also supposedly against regulations. Some of the pods thus had names (“Pod Person”; “Magic Fingers”; “Bertha”; “Smilin’ Ed”) and designs (Scooby Do sitting on a rocket; a buxom blonde winking seductively; a kid running along with a pizza under the slogan “We Deliver!”).

What Dave Chang saw on Zulu Tango’s hatch, illuminated by the pod’s running lights, was a grinning skull emblazoned with eagle wings. Painted below the skull, in red paint, were the words “Ride To Live, Live To Ride.”

“Oh, boy,” Chang said, “we are in deep shit now.”

“What?” asked Harris. The kid was strapped into a chair near Chang’s head; Chang was floating upside down next to the console Harris was attending. The kid was wearing a headset and had not clearly heard what Chang had said.

Chang looked at Harris. “I said, ‘Why don’t you go up and see if he needs help with his suit?’”

Harris studied Chang curiously. “I thought you said something else.”

Chang shook his head. “You misunderstood me. I’ll take over there. Why don’t you go and help the beamjack out of his pod?”

Bob Harris was new on Skycan, having arrived for his twelvemonth tour only two weeks before. He had grown up in San Francisco and had thus known Chinese-Americans all his life; he considered them to be the most straightforward and sincere people around. He was therefore willing to do anything his Chinese-American supervisor told him to do, and in fact regarded Dave Chang as his best friend on Olympus Station.

Chang, on the other hand, had long since grown tired of Harris’ puppyish devotion, considered him a putz and thought he should be abused at any opportunity. He just smiled and nodded toward the hatch leading to the Docks.

“Sure thing, Dave,” Harris said, returning the smile. He unbuckled his chair’s belt, floated upward and grabbed a pair of handholds, then began pulling himself toward the hatch. Chang settled into the chair and watched as Harris waited for the lights above the hatch to indicate that the MTDA had been pressurized. When the lights flashed green and a bell chimed, Harris un-dogged the hatch and pulled it open.

Once Harris had floated into the chamber, Chang pushed himself toward the hatch, pushed it shut, and turned the locking wheel. After all, he mused, the orders had been not to let the beamjack out until Mr. Big and Dr. Feelgood arrived. He then went back to the console to watch the show on the TV monitor.

The Docks was a narrow compartment about the size of one of the rim modules. There were five docking bays there, equilaterally separated by handrails and storage compartments. It was forever cold in the compartment, exposed as often as it was to vacuum. Only a few minutes earlier a ferry taking beamjacks out to the construction shack had departed from Olympus, so the heater had yet to take the edge off the chill.

Puffing little clouds, Harris made his way to the third airlock; he could see the locking wheel turning as the pod pilot began to let himself out.

He coasted in front of the hatch and grabbed hold of a rail overhead, hovering in front of the airlock as it swung open. As it did, he said cheerily, “Hi. Can I help you…?”

A fabric snoopy helmet was flung through the open hatch with such force that it smacked into Harris’ chest. The young crewman, who had played a lot of basketball, instinctively made to grab it with both hands. His letting go of the rail and the impact of the helmet was enough to send him sailing into the bulkhead wall behind him. Fortunately he had developed enough zero g reflexes to grab another handrail before he bounced into another hard surface.

With the rail gripped in one hand and the snoopy helmet—which, he now noticed, was trailing loose wires—clutched under his arm, he stared at the open airlock and watched the pod pilot clamber out.

The man who emerged was small, even by the standards of beamjacks, who never reached a height of over six feet. Five-five, probably the shortest admissible height for a Skycorp employee, but an awfully mean-looking five-five. With thin black hair combed straight back and a spade beard covering most of his lean face, the space worker would have looked filthy stepping out of a shower and ravenous coming away from a four-course meal.

He pushed himself through the airlock with the practiced ease of a long-timer. Eyes as black as his hair fixed on Harris, and his gaze made the kid think of rattlesnakes he had seen in zoos.

“Yeah, you can help me,” the pod pilot said, in a voice that was surprisingly soft. Floating in the middle of the compartment, he began to climb out of his spacesuit, releasing the top and bottom halves and pushing himself out of them. “You can help me by getting Cap’n Wallace’s ass down here so I can chew it off, you dig?”

“Cap’n W-Wallace?” Harris stammered.

“Y-yeah, Ca-Cap’n Wa-Wallace,” he mimicked with a sneer. He discarded his spacesuit carelessly, leaving it hanging in the air like a discarded carapace, unbelted his urine collection cup, and began to unzip his long underwear. Underneath he wore a black T-shirt and a pair of nylon gym shorts. “And if I don’t get him, I guess I’m just going to have to chew your ass instead.”

“Uh-huh. Right away, ah, sir.” Harris hastily moved toward the compartment hatch, still carrying the damaged helmet under his arm. He grabbed the handle, but found it immovable. Chang had locked the hatch from the outside.

Watching on the TV monitor in the whiteroom, Chang relished the expression of trapped fear that suddenly etched itself upon Harris’ face. “Meet Virgin Bruce, you little wimp,” he snickered.

Bruce Neiman grabbed an overhead rail and swung himself closer to Harris, backing the kid against a bulkhead until their eyes were only a foot apart. “Looks like you’re locked in here with me, kid,” he said, his voice no longer so soft. “Maybe Wallace is already on his way up here to see me. Why don’t we take the time to get to know each other better.”

“Uh, ah, yessir. My name’s…”

“Shut up. My name’s Bruce. Like it says here.”

He pointed to a tattoo on his left bicep, just under the T-shirt’s sleeve. Harris stared at it; it was a heart with a dagger thrust through it. A scroll underneath read “Virgin Bruce.”

Virgin Bruce grinned, displaying a gold-capped front tooth. The rest of his teeth looked as if they had been kicked at, many times. “Ain’t it pretty? What’s your name, kid?”

“B-Bob Harris. I…”

“I don’t give a shit. Where’re you from, B-Bob Harris?”

“San—California—I mean, San Francisco…”

“San Francisco!” A wide grin suddenly spread beneath the spade beard. “That’s the Grateful Dead’s town. You know the Dead, Harris?”

Harris swallowed. He was familiar with the Grateful Dead, even if it was only from listening to his father play their old records every night of his childhood. Once the old man had taken him to a Grateful Dead concert, to see the band—which now included younger musicians teamed with the graying survivors of the original group—but the music had never stuck on him as it had on his father.

“Yeah,” he quickly agreed. “I, uh, really like the Dead… man,” he added. This guy couldn’t be as old as his father, though, could he…?

The grin stayed on the beamjack’s face. “Yeah. You’re awright. Shit, you couldn’t live in Frisco without liking the Dead…”

He gave Harris a slap on the arm, which almost sent him sailing into the wall again, and unexpectedly began to sing. “Red and white… do,
dooh …
blue suede shoes… do,
dooh
… I’m Uncle Sam… do,
dooh
… how do you do do?… doom-da-do-de-doom…”

It was a Grateful Dead song. For the life of him Harris could not recall the title or the way it went, yet Virgin Bruce was clearly trying to get him to sing along. Harris flashed onto the absurdity of his situation: confined with a madman in an airlock thousands of miles from Earth, his life dependent upon remembering the lyrics to an old rock and roll song.

Virgin Bruce, in the midst of singing, thrust out his hand, palm spread upward. “So gimme
five
!” he sang.

Five? The beamjack was staring at him expectantly, waiting for something. Harris thrust his hands into his coverall pockets, searching for a nickel, and found he didn’t have any change with him.

“Umm…” He swallowed what felt like a rock. “I… don’t got any change, uh, man….”

The light in Virgin Bruce’s eyes disappeared as if it had been cut off by a switch. He glared at Harris and the younger man suddenly pictured himself being thrown out, screaming, through one of the nearby airlocks. Virgin Bruce himself looked tough enough to endure a few minutes of exposure to hard vacuum.

“Never mind,” he grumbled instead, looking disappointed more than anything else. “No one can remember all the songs all the time.”

He grabbed the wires dangling from the snoopy helmet he had hurled at Harris and wrenched the helmet out of the crewman’s grasp. As it floated in front of Harris’ face like an Indian’s captured scalp, Bruce said, “You know what really pisses me off, though?”

“N-no, what… the helmet?”

“No, goddammit! The Muzak!”

“The music? The Dead?”

“Fuck, no, not the Grateful Dead! The
Muzak
!” His mouth stretched into a grimace. “Man, if they piped the Grateful Dead into my earphones I wouldn’t be over here! I’d love hearing ‘Truckin’ or ‘Hell in a Bucket’ while I was out there pushin’ girders around. I’d be the happiest dumb son of a bitch they got hired on this orbiting funny farm!”

He hurled the helmet across the compartment. It bounced off a locker with a dull
thump
and drifted in midair near the empty spacesuit he had cast aside, looking like a decapitated head. “But, oh
no
, Cap’n Wallace decides that if he’s going to give any music to us hardworkin’ Joes spending eight hours every day shoving around beams and welding cross sections with our feet, it’s gonna be music that he likes…
dentist chair music
!” His voice rose to a scream. “Bullshit guaranteed to drive us out of our fuckin’
minds
!”

“Yeah,” Harris mumbled hurriedly, “I can understand…”

“
Understand
?” Virgin Bruce shouted. “You can
understand
? Do you know what it’s fucking
like
? Christ! You’re out there sweating out trying to hold two beams a hundred feet long together with those claws and weld ’em together before they both drift off to Mars, getting that sweat frozen on your forehead ’cause the heater’s on the blink again and it’s twenty degrees inside that thing, and one of your buddies is on the radio having apoplexy ’cause he can’t do what he’s gotta do till you’re done and out of the way, and Wallace and Luton are giving everyone hell ’cause the whole project’s four months behind schedule… and what do you hear in the background on your headset, some faggot string section playing ‘Born Free’! Don’t tell me you can
understand
, kid…”

“Uhhh…”

“And you know why Wallace wants that crap piped all over the station, on the main comlink channel for the beamjacks? It’s supposed to be calming, and to make us more efficient!”

“Ahhh…”

Whatever reply Harris might have managed was interrupted by the compartment hatch being unlocked and swung open. He and Virgin Bruce looked around to see two men pulling themselves through the hatch. One wore a uniform coverall bearing the shoulder insignia of Skycorp; on his breast was a patch that read “Security.” A taser was strapped to his belt. He was also the biggest crewman on Olympus, and probably the biggest Navajo anyone on the station had ever met. Phil Bigthorn, a.k.a. “Mr. Big,” had biceps the size of some guys’ thighs.

The other newcomer wore a golf shirt and raggedy Bermuda shorts and, while not quite in Mr. Big’s class, had a large, muscular build. Doc Felapolous’ hair was prematurely gray, as was his mustache, which he kept waxed so that it tipped upward at the ends. In his early fifties, his age pushed the limit for Skycorp’s space employees. His darkly tanned skin and deep wrinkles gave him the appearance of a desert rat, which fitted in with his Arizona upbringing.

Grasping a rail with one hand Mr. Big immediately started pulling himself toward Virgin Bruce. His other hand was reaching for his taser unit. Bruce grabbed for a handhold and swung himself around, bracing himself. Between them, Bob Harris looked as if he were trying to melt into the compartment wall.

Felapolous lightly grabbed Bigthorn’s arm. “Hold on, Phil,” he said calmly. “Let’s just let ol’ Bruce get a chance to explain himself.”

His gaze went to the beamjack. “Now, Mr. Neiman, would you kindly explain to us just what in the blazes you’re trying to prove?”

Virgin Bruce, meeting the security officer’s cold stare, replied, “Would you explain to me what ape-shape is doing here?” A corner of his mouth twisted up as his eyes locked with Mr. Big’s. “What’s the matter, Phil? Looking for another dance like our one in the wardroom last month?”