Orbital Decay (7 page)

Mr. Big smiled a smile completely devoid of any humor. “You want a fight, Brucie, you got a fight. This time you don’t get a tray to bash me with….”

“Gentlemen, you’re beginning to behave like my nephews,” Felapolous said, still as calm as an afternoon in the Sonora. “Besides that, you’re about to give our friend here an anxiety attack.” He looked at Bob Harris. “Son, unless you’d like to learn what it’s like to be caught between two mad dogs, my advice to you as a physician is to get the hell out of there.”

Harris glanced at the men on either side of him, then grabbed for a rail over his head and squirmed from between them. Doc Felapolous looked at Virgin Bruce, raising an eyebrow inquisitively. “To answer your question, Mr. Neiman, I suggest that you examine your own actions. You come blasting in here in a pod, against regulations, demanding docking space and turning the channel blue with your language. You threaten the traffic control officer and tell the com officer to send Mr. Wallace up here so you can ‘have words with him.’ When you get here, you pin the first person you see against the wall….”

“Hey! I never touched him!” Virgin Bruce looked at Harris. “You tell him! I never laid a head on you!”

Harris shook his head vigorously. Felapolous barely gave him a glance. “All right, I’ll take that back, although you did seem to be a bit intimidating when we came in here a second ago. At any rate, you’ve managed to create quite a stir. Considering your reputation…”

“Reputation!” Bruce shouted. “Listen, Doc, lemme tell you about my reputation. Check my record. Who pulls more double shifts than any other beamjack? Who manages to get four hundred square feet of that powersat built every three days? Who went out and rescued Jobe’s ass when his tether broke?”

“Who did we catch trying to smuggle a case of beer up by bribing a shuttle pilot?” Mr. Big said. “Who once tried to hook into a comsat and attempted to transmit an obscene birthday message to the chairman of the board of Skycorp?”

Virgin Bruce started coughing, putting his hand over his mouth. Felapolous noticed the snoopy helmet with the torn out wires floating nearby. “Despite your propensity for sophomoric antics, I’ve never recalled an instance of you damaging equipment before,” he said. “You want to tell me about it?”

“Well, yeah,” Virgin Bruce said. “That’s why I’m here, Dr. Feelgood. See…”

Felapolous raised a finger admonishingly. “Bruce, I would appreciate it if you didn’t use that nickname someone has managed to pin on me. I may be known for dispensing various and sundry painkillers, but as a licensed physician and member in good standing of the AMA, I prefer that you call me ‘Doctor’ or ‘Doc’ or ‘Felapolous’ or ‘Edwin’ or any combination of the aforesaid. ‘Dr. Feelgood’ makes me sound like the guy who used to be the President’s personal physician.” He paused, gasped hugely, and sneezed into his palm. “You may continue. And please hurry; this place is cold.”

Mr. Big’s eyes rolled upward for a moment. Dr. Feelgood had never been known for brevity of speech. Harris hung from a rail and stared at them all. Trapped in an airlock with three guys called Mr. Big, Dr. Feelgood, and Virgin Bruce. What had ever compelled him to leave San Francisco?

Virgin Bruce continued. “What I was coming to, uh, Doctor, is a case of the crazies from having to hear that damn dentist-chair music—no offense—being piped into my helmet while I’m trying to work.”

Felapolous wiped his hand on his shorts and touched a finger to his lips. “Ah. You refer to the Muzak.”

“Yeah, I mean the Muzak. I hate hearing it in the station, I hate hearing it when I eat, when I’m trying to sleep, and I especially don’t like hearing it when I’m trying to do my job.”

“So you decided to take it up directly with your project supervisor, correct?”

“Damn straight. It’s his idea, after all. I got mad and took off my helmet and ripped out the wires, but then I had to hear communications over the pod speakers, which aren’t worth a damn. So I decided to come over here straightaway and, uh, take this up with Wallace himself.”

Doc Felapolous shrugged. “Somehow I can’t argue with the principle of the idea, to tell you the truth. I don’t particularly like that stuff myself. That’s why I have a tape deck in my office, so I can play my Mendelssohn and Mozart tapes. I have my wife send up cassettes every month or so.”

“Yeah, good idea. Except my weight allowance when I came up here wouldn’t let me bring up a deck. So I gotta listen to this wimpy stuff all the time.”

“Hmm. Yes. I suppose I can see your problem.” Felapolous stroked one waxed end of his mustache. “All right, Mr. Neiman, I’ll give you your choice of prescriptions.”

He had been holding his left hand close to his body throughout the conversation. Now he raised his hand, displaying the syringe he had kept hidden in his palm. “This is filled with enough happy juice to keep you sedated long enough for Phil to get you to a restraining bed in sickbay. I ought to give you that prescription, considering that our friend here doesn’t seem too happy with your attitude or your previous assessment of his physique.”

Mr. Big smiled humorlessly again; his expression tacitly said that he would have liked nothing better but to have a doped-up Virgin Bruce strapped down on a couch for a couple of hours, at his disposal.

“The alternative,” Felapolous went on, “is for you to get another helmet from a locker, have this poor fellow whom you’ve frightened half to death refuel your pod, and go back to work at Vulcan, where by your own account you’re too valuable to have missing for very long.”

“Yeah, uh-huh.” Virgin Bruce crossed his arms. “And what about my complaint?”

Felapolous gave a little smile. “My profession decrees that I must remedy pain, so I’ll take your complaint into consideration. I have an extra cassette player in sickbay, a small pocket version which was supplied to me so that I could take verbal notes. Since I generally write everything down, I wouldn’t miss it. I could give it to you on an indefinite loan. You may install it in your pod. You’d have to find your own tapes, though. I won’t lend you mine, and besides I rather doubt you’d enjoy listening to Italian opera or ‘Tales From the Vienna Woods.’”

“Uh-huh, I see.” Virgin Bruce nodded his head slowly. “And about my idea to take this up with Wallace?”

“Not part of the prescription, sorry. I never recommend that my patients attempt to treat themselves for their complaints.” He cocked his head toward Mr. Big. “Anyway, the difficulties you might have in that treatment could be detrimental to your health.”

Virgin Bruce glared at Mr. Big. “I doubt it.”

Mr. Big spoke up. “Hey, listen, Doc, I was told to…”

Doc Felapolous silenced him with a wave of his hand. “Mr. Bigthorn, concerning matters medical, I have the last word on Olympus, not the Project Supervisor. You’ve just heard me give Mr. Neiman treatment for his complaint.”

“Yeah? I haven’t seen you give him any medicine.”

Felapolous reached into a pocket of his shorts, fished out a tin of aspirin and opened it. He handed two tablets to Virgin Bruce. “Take these with water and get out of here,” he said. “Come back for a checkup when you get off your shift and I’ll fill out the rest of your prescription for you.”

He turned to Bob Harris. “Son, if you can quit grinning like a jackass, you can get Bruce’s pod refueled and ready to go. Also, please have Mr. Chang come to see me about his back problems.” He turned to leave. “I think he’s missing a spine. Come along, Phil.”

E
VERY JANUARY 28TH AT
about 11:30
A.M.
EST, regardless of how much work had to be done, there was always someone in Olympus Station’s hub, watching through the telescope for the reappearance of the Challenger Ghost.

It always appeared at exactly the same time, at 11:44
A.M.
off the Florida coast near Cape Canaveral. Whoever was watching through the telescope would see against the dark Atlantic waters a brief bright white-hot flash of light, like an explosion was occurring in the high atmosphere downrange from the Kennedy Space Center. Almost as quickly as it appeared, the flash would fade, leaving the watcher feeling confused, and slightly chilled.

Undoubtedly, what one had seen was the explosion of an airborne object in the vicinity of Cape Canaveral. The logical explanation, given the apparent altitude and bearings of the flash, was that a spacecraft just launched from the Cape had exploded over the Atlantic. However, in a sacred tradition dating from 1986, no manned or unmanned rockets were ever launched from the Kennedy Space Center on January 28—the anniversary of the
Challenger
disaster.

When the phenomenon had first been noticed, no one on Olympus Station recognized the significance of the date or time. An urgent radio message to the Kennedy Space Center was made by Olympus Command, inquiring if one of the cargo rockets which regularly lifted of from the Cape had exploded. After a longer than usual delay, the following message had been received:

CANAVERAL 1156 TO OLYMPUS RE LAST INQUIRY: WE NEVER REPEAT NEVER LAUNCH ANY SPACECRAFT ON THIS DAY. NO EXPLOSIONS HAVE BEEN SPOTTED DOWNRANGE BY GROUND OBSERVERS OR BY RADAR. CAPE WISHES TO INFORM OLYMPUS SOURCE THAT HE/SHE HAS A SICK SENSE OF HUMOR IF THIS IS BULLSHIT AS WE SUSPECT. CANAVERAL OUT.

Later, once Olympus Station assured the NASA administrators at the Cape that a nasty joke was not at the heart of the matter, both Skycorp and NASA began quiet investigations of their own. Yet nothing could be definitively proved or disproved until a year later, when January 28 rolled around again. On that day, a team of photographers, space historians, and scientists—including a couple of parapsychologists—were gathered at the Cape, monitoring by both optical telescope and by cameras sent aloft on Air Force planes the area of airspace nine miles down-range from the Cape where the
Challenger
had been destroyed by a malfunctioning solid-rocket booster. At the same time, a small group of Olympus crewmen gathered in the Meteorology compartment of the as-yet uncompleted space station to watch the event. A third group of observers were aboard the airplanes circling the area of the Atlantic Ocean where the sighting had been made. All three groups were recording the event with video cameras—and one of the parapsychologists was an esper who concentrated her thoughts on the approximate area of the explosion.

Nothing was seen from the ground or from the sky, or was registered by any of the cameras, but the flash
was
seen from space, at exactly the same historical moment when the
Challenger
was consumed in a ball of fire. A weather satellite’s pictures confirmed the eyewitness reports of the Olympus crewmen, and subsequent computer enhancements of those pictures showed a definite explosion, down to faint streaks showing what appeared to be two solid-rocket boosters beginning to arch away from the center of the explosion. But no one on the ground or in the air saw anything unusual; that information was confirmed by the camera footage. The parapsychologist who was attempting to gather an ESP impression at the crucial moment had to be told when the event had occurred; she registered nothing in her mind.

But from space, it had been seen. Still later, a NASA investigator making a check through satellite footage, which happened to have been taken of that area since 1987, noticed that similar white spots were evident in all pictures taken over Florida’s Atlantic coast on those days when the sky was not overcast and the satellites’ cameras were pointed in the right direction. The ghost light, therefore, could be registered by either human or artificial eyes… but only from outer space.

There had to be some significance to that detail, but whatever it was, it was too subtle for anyone to deduce.

New crew members aboard Skycan, when they asked why there were cats on the station, were frequently told that they had been brought aboard to control the cockroaches that stowed away in the food containers. The food—which was supplied to Skycorp by a distributor of airline in-flight meals—was bad enough to give that story some credibility, but that was not the reason why a half-dozen felines now wandered through the station’s modules.

The fact was that Doc Felapolous’ assistant, a University of Tennessee med student named Lou Maynard, who was completing his degree in space medicine aboard Skycan, had brought the first two cats up as test animals. Originally called OST One-A and OST One-B, the cats were respectively a young male and a young female, and it had been young Dr. Maynard’s intention to study their reactions and degrees of adaptation to reduced and near-nonexistent degrees of gravity. His initial hypothesis had been that even though the cats’ instinctive ability to right themselves while falling would be disturbed under such conditions, their nervous systems would eventually adapt and the cats would learn to regain their sense of balance.

The hypothesis, alas, was a bust. Neither cat ever became completely adapted to Olympus Station’s various degrees of gravitational pull. In the hub they yowled and flopped about crazily, clawing madly for anything, or anyone, that represented to their eyes a fixed point, and in the rim modules the Coriolis effect made them perpetually clumsy, missing jumps and crashing into things when they ran. At least Maynard was able to collect enough new observations to publish his results in
The New England Journal of Medicine
and in
Science
, but the real advances that the experiment made were unintentional. Sometimes, as Doc Felapolous later observed, this is the way scientific inquiry works.

Although OST One-A and OST One-B were at first kept in cages in sickbay, it is impossible to keep cats locked up for very long—as any cat owner knows. Sooner or later, they
will
get loose. When the cats did manage to escape, they found themselves welcomed by most of the station’s crew, who fed them and pampered them and played with them and hid them in bunks and in lockers when the distraught Dr. Maynard came searching for them. They would get locked away in their cages again and again, only to be set loose by a beamjack who was a born-again cat fancier. Once the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, that there were
pets
aboard Skycan—no one except Maynard and Felapolous referred to them as lab animals—OST One-A and OST One-B were adopted as crew mascots. They were given names: OST One-A became Spoker, for his tendency to escape under a ladder into the bottom level of one of the hub spokes, and OST One-B was named ZeeGee, for the amusing (albeit dangerous) antics she performed while in the microgravitational conditions of the hub.