The Best of Bova: Volume 1 (40 page)

ZERO GEE

The next three stories tell a connected tale about the early life of an Air Force astronaut named Chester A. Kinsman. Essentially, these stories deal with his loss of innocence and his first step toward real maturity. Or, to thoroughly mix metaphors and sources, the stories taken together form a miniature Paradise Lost and Purgatorio.

Kinsman has been with me since the late 1940s. I knew him from birth to death. He was the protagonist in the first novel I ever wrote, which was never published. But he showed up again in
Millennium
(1976),
Kinsman
(1979) and
The Kinsman Saga
(1987).

Eventually, Chet Kinsman changes the world. But in these early stories, he’s the one who must change.

Incidentally, these stories—written in the early 1960s—are about a future that never came to pass. The Air Force was never allowed to orbit its own space stations. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union established weaponry in orbit. Film cameras were replaced by digital.

But that doesn’t make the stories less true.

* * *

Joe Tenny
looked like a middle linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Sitting in the cool shadows of the Astro Motel’s bar, swarthy, barrel-built, scowling face clamped on a smoldering cigar, he would never be taken for that rarest of all birds: a good engineer who is also a good military officer.

“Afternoon, Major.”

Tenny turned on his stool to see old Cy Calder, the dean of the press-service reporters covering the base.

“Hi. Whatcha drinking?”

“I’m working,” Calder answered with dignity. But he settled his once-lanky frame onto the next stool.

“Double Scotch,” Tenny called to the bartender. “And refill mine.”

“An officer and a gentleman,” murmured Calder. His voice was gravelly, matching his face.

As the bartender slid the drinks to them, Tenny said, “You wanna know who got the assignment.”

“I told you I’m working.”

Tenny grinned. “Keep your mouth shut ‘til tomorrow? Murdock’ll make the official announcement then, at his press conference.”

“If you can save me the tedium of listening to the good colonel for two hours to get a single name out of him, I’ll buy the next round, shine your shoes for a month, and arrange to lose an occasional poker pot to you.”

“The hell you will!”

Calder shrugged. Tenny took a long pull on his drink. Calder did likewise.

“Okay. You’ll find out anyway. But keep it quiet until Murdock’s announcement. It’s going to be Kinsman.”

Calder put his glass down on the bar carefully. “Chester A. Kinsman, the pride of the Air Force? That’s hard to believe.”

“Murdock picked him.”

“I know this mission is strictly for publicity,” Calder said, “but Kinsman? In orbit for three days with
Photo Day
magazine’s prettiest female? Does Murdock want publicity or a paternity suit?”

“Come on, Chet’s not that bad . . .”

“Oh no? From the stories I hear about your few weeks over at the NASA Ames center, Kinsman cut a swath from Berkeley to North Beach.”

Tenny countered, “He’s young and good-looking. And the girls haven’t had many single astronauts to play with. NASA’s gang is a bunch of old farts compared to my kids. But Chet’s the best of the bunch, no fooling.”

Calder looked unconvinced.

“Listen. When we were training at Edwards, know what Kinsman did? Built a biplane, an honest-to-God replica of a Spad fighter. From the ground up. He’s a solid citizen.”

“Yes, and then he played Red Baron for six weeks. Didn’t he get into trouble for buzzing an airliner?”

Tenny’s reply was cut off by a burst of talk and 1aughter. Half a dozen lean, lithe young men in Air Force blues—captains, all of them—trotted down the carpeted stairs that led into the bar.

“There they are,” said Tenny. “You can ask Chet about it yourself.”

Kinsman looked no different from the other Air Force astronauts. Slightly under six feet tall, thin with the leanness of youth, dark hair cut in the short, flat military style, blue-gray eyes, long bony face. He was grinning broadly at the moment, as he and the other five astronauts grabbed chairs in one corner of the bar and called their orders to the lone bartender.

Calder took his drink and headed for their table, followed by Major Tenny.

“Hold it,” one of the captains called out. “Here comes the press.”

“Tight security.”

“Why, boys,” Calder tried to make his rasping voice sound hurt, “don’t you trust me?”

Tenny pushed a chair toward the newsman and took another one for himself. Straddling it, he told the captains, “It’s okay. I spilled it to him.”

“How much he pay you, boss?”

“That’s between him and me.”

As the bartender brought a tray of drinks, Calder said, “Let the Fourth Estate pay for this round, gentlemen. I want to pump some information out of you.”

“That might take a lot of rounds.”

To Kinsman, Calder said, “Congratulations, my boy. Colonel Murdock must think very highly of you.”

Kinsman burst out laughing. “Murdock? You should’ve seen his face when he told me it was going to be me.”

“Looked like he was sucking on lemons.”

Tenny explained. “The choice for this flight was made mostly by computer. Murdock wanted to be absolutely fair, so he put everybody’s performance ratings into the computer and out came Kinsman’s name. If he hadn’t made so much noise about being impartial, he could’ve reshuffled the cards and tried again. But I was right there when the machine finished its run, so he couldn’t back out of it.”

Calder grinned. “All right then, the computer thinks highly of you, Chet. I suppose that’s still something of an honor.”

“More like a privilege. I’ve been watching that
Photo Day
chick all through her training. She’s ripe.”

“She’ll look even better up in orbit.”

“Once she takes off the pressure suit . . . et cetera.”

 “Hey, y’know, nobody’s ever done it in orbit.”

“Yeah . . . free fall, zero gravity.”

Kinsman looked thoughtful. “Adds a new dimension to the problem, doesn’t it?”

“Three-dimensional.” Tenny took the cigar butt from his mouth and laughed.

Calder got up slowly from his chair and silenced the others. Looking down fondly on Kinsman, he said:

“My boy—back in 1915, in London, I became a charter member of the Mile High Club. At an altitude of exactly 5280 feet, while circling St. Paul’s, I successfully penetrated an Army nurse in an open cockpit . . . despite fogged goggles, cramped working quarters, and a severe case of windburn.

“Since then, there’s been damned little to look forward to. The skin-divers claimed a new frontier, but in fact they are retrogressing. Any silly-ass dolphin can do it in the water.

“But you’ve got something new going for you: weightlessness. Floating around in free fall, chasing tail in three dimensions. It beggars the imagination!

“Kinsman, I pass the torch to you. To the founder of the Zero Gee Club!”

As one man, the officers rose and solemnly toasted Captain Kinsman. As they sat down again, Major Tenny burst the balloon. “You guys haven’t given Murdock credit for much brains. You don’t think he’s gonna let Chet go up with that broad all alone, do you?”

Kinsman’s face fell, but the others lit up.

“It’ll be a three-man mission!”

“Two men and the chick.”

Tenny warned, “Now don’t start drooling. Murdock wants a chaperon, not an assistant rapist.”

It was Kinsman who got it first. Slouching back in his chair, chin sinking to his chest, he muttered, “Sonofabitch . . . he’s sending Jill along.”

A collective groan.

“Murdock made up his mind an hour ago,” Tenny said. “He was stuck with you, Chet, so he hit on the chaperon idea. He’s also giving you some real chores to do, to keep you busy. Like mating the power pod.”

“Jill Meyers,” said one of the captains disgustedly.

“She’s qualified, and she’s been taking the
Photo Day
girl through her training. I’ll bet she knows more about the mission than any of you guys do.”

“She would.”

“In fact,” Tenny added maliciously, “I think she’s the senior captain among you satellite-jockeys.”

Kinsman had only one comment: “Shit.”

The bone-rattling roar and vibration of liftoff suddenly died away. Sitting in his contour seat, scanning the banks of dials and gauges a few centimeters before his eyes, Kinsman could feel the pressure and tension slacken. Not back to normal. To zero. He was no longer plastered up against his seat, but touching it only lightly, almost floating in it, restrained only by his harness.

It was the fourth time he had felt weightlessness. It still made him smile inside the cumbersome helmet.

Without thinking about it, he touched a control stud on the chair’s armrest. A maneuvering jet fired briefly and the ponderous, lovely bulk of planet Earth slid into view through the port in front of Kinsman. It curved huge and serene, blue, mostly, but tightly wrapped in the purest, dazzling white of clouds, beautiful, peaceful, shining.

Kinsman could have watched it forever, but he heard sounds of motion in his earphones. The two women were sitting behind him, side by side. The spacecraft cabin made a submarine look roomy: the three seats were shoehorned in among racks of instruments and equipment.

Jill Meyers, who came to the astronaut program from the Aerospace Medical Division, was officially second pilot and biomedical officer.
And chaperon,
Kinsman knew. The photographer, Linda Symmes, was simply a passenger.

Kinsman’s earphones crackled with a disembodied link from Earth. “AF-9, this is ground control. We have you confirmed in orbit. Trajectory nominal. All systems go.”

“Check,” Kinsman said into his helmet mike.

The voice, already starting to fade, switched to ordinary conversational speech. “Looks like you’re right on the money, Chet. We’ll get the orbital parameters out of the computer and have ’em for you by the time you pass Ascension. You probably won’t need much maneuvering to make rendezvous with the lab.”

“Good. Everything here on the board looks green.”

“Okay. Ground control out.” Faintly. “And hey . . . good luck, Founding Father.”

Kinsman grinned at that. He slid his faceplate up, loosened his harness and turned in his seat. “Okay, ladies, you can take off your helmets if you want to.”

Jill Meyers snapped her faceplate open and started unlocking the helmet’s neck seal.

“I’ll go first,” she said, “and then I can help Linda with hers.”

“Sure you won’t need any help?” Kinsman offered.

Jill pulled her helmet off. “I’ve had more time in orbit than you. And shouldn’t you be paying attention to the instruments?”

So this is how it’s going to be,
Kinsman thought.

Jill’s face was round and plain and bright as a new penny. Snub nose, wide mouth, short hair of undistinguished brown. Kinsman knew that under the pressure suit was a figure that could most charitably be described as ordinary.

Linda Symmes was entirely another matter. She had lifted her faceplate and was staring out at him with wide, blue eyes that combined feminine curiosity with a hint of helplessness. She was tall, nearly Kinsman’s own height, with thick honey-colored hair and a body that he had already memorized down to the last curve.

In her sweet, high voice she said, “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Oh, for . . .”

Jill reached into the compartment between their two seats. “I’ll take care of this. You stick to the controls.” And she whipped a white plastic bag open and stuck it over Linda’s face.

Shuddering at the thought of what could happen in zero gravity, Kinsman turned back to the control panel. He pulled his faceplate shut and turned up the air blower in his suit, trying to cut off the obscene sound of Linda’s struggles.

“For Chrissake,” he yelled, “unplug her radio! You want me chucking all over, too?”

“AF-9, this is Ascension.”

Trying to blank his mind to what was going on behind him, Kinsman thumbed the switch on his communications panel. “Go ahead, Ascension.”

For the next hour Kinsman thanked the gods that he had plenty of work to do. He matched the orbit of their three-man spacecraft to that of the Air Force orbiting laboratory, which had been up for more than a year now, and intermittently occupied by two-or three-man crews.

The lab was a fat, cylindrical shape, silhouetted against the brilliant white of the cloud-decked Earth. As he pulled the spacecraft close, Kinsman could see the antennas and airlock and other odd pieces of gear that had accumulated on it.
Looking more like
a
junkheap every trip.
Riding behind it, unconnected in any way, was the massive cone of the new power pod.

Kinsman circled the lab once, using judicious squeezes of his maneuvering jets. He touched a command signal switch, and the lab’s rendezvous radar beacon came to life, announced by a light on his control panel.

“All systems green,” he said to ground control. “Everything looks okay.”

“Roger, Niner. You are cleared for docking.”

This was a bit more delicate.
Be helpful if Jill could read
off
the computer.

“Distance, eighty-eight meters,” Jill’s voice pronounced firmly in his earphones. “Approach angle . . .”

Kinsman instinctively turned his head, but his helmet cut off any possible sight of Jill. “Hey, how’s your patient?”

“Empty. I gave her a sedative. She’s out.”

“Okay,” Kinsman said. “Let’s get docked.”

He inched the spacecraft into the docking collar on one end of the lab, locked on and saw the panel lights confirm that the docking was secure.

“Better get Sleeping Beauty zippered up,” he told Jill as he touched the buttons that extended the flexible access tunnel from the hatch over their heads to the main hatch of the lab. The lights on the panel turned from amber to green when the tunnel locked its fittings around the lab’s hatch.

Jill said, “I’m supposed to check the tunnel.”

“Stay put. I’ll do it.” Sealing his faceplate shut, Kinsman unbuckled and rose effortlessly out of the seat to bump his helmet lightly against the overhead hatch.