Orbital Decay (14 page)

Neiman
,
what’s going on
?

“I’m outside the pod, Hank,” he said. It had been a long time since he had gone
EVA,
not since he had tested with a pod and satisfied the supervisors that he was competent with the buglike machines. For an instant he felt vertigo, and he forced it down. “I’m about”—he squinted his eyes and peered at the rounded surface of the shack’s B module below his feet—“fifteen, twenty feet above the hotdogs.”

Your pod secure
?

“Roger.” Actually, he hadn’t checked since he had left it, but if the magnetic shoes on its claws had not held and it had started to drift, he was not about to go back and fool with it at this point—Let the damn thing drift. “Now shut up and lemme work.”

Bruce
—Then Hank Luton shut up. His vision cleared, Virgin Bruce started easing himself downward toward the hotdogs. If he had known this was going to happen, he reflected, he would not have taken the spare snoopy helmet with its built-in communications headset from that kid in the Olympus whiteroom. Of all things now, he didn’t need Luton giving him the mother hen treatment.

Never mind, he thought. Forget that dipshit. Save those poor bastards’ skins. Going headfirst, he steered his body around until he faced the hotdogs. Through the visor he could see the debris caused by the accident—torn scraps of Mylar and aluminum mesh, odds and ends blown out from Hotdog One, tumbling in microgravitational orbit around the shack. He hadn’t spotted the body of the other crewman killed by One’s explosion yet, and he prayed that he wouldn’t. That was all he needed now to completely freak him out; his stomach told him again that it had been a long time since he had last gone spacewalking.

Nothing to grab onto on the shack’s hull; he had to rely completely on the little handjet, something he had used only once before, during the initial week of training. Probably no one had used one seriously since Olympus had been built six years ago. He felt his mouth going dry, but he didn’t dare distract himself to sip from the water straw inside his helmet; those guys could be fighting for their last gasps now. He forced thoughts of the immensity of space around him from his mind. The inside of the suit chafed at his skin. “Busted, down on Bourbon Street…” he sang absent-mindedly.

Come again
,
Zulu Tango
?

He ignored Julia Smith’s inquiry; an old Grateful Dead song was the only thing keeping his head on tight. “Set up… like a bowlin’ pin… knocked down, it gets to wearin’ thin…”

He made it to Hotdog Two and the first thing he could grab, the hemisphere of struts holding the rubbery cylinder in place. He grabbed a strut with his free hand and started to ease himself along, pulling himself carefully so as not to accidentally push himself away and off into space. Glancing down, his eyes widened as he saw that the tightly stretched multilayer fabric of the temporary module was already beginning to sag inward, like an inner tube being leaked. It could only be a matter of seconds now….

Neiman
,
where are you
?

“I’m on the hotdog, Hank. Shut the hell up already!” Okay, he had arrived, now where was the damn hole….

His helmet lantern swept the area and caught a small, ragged edge protruding from the side of the module. There it was! “I got it!” he yelled. It was only a few feet away now. “Hang on… hang on…” he mumbled.

Neiman
…

“Will you shut the hell up, Hank. I’m trying!” Virgin Bruce yelled. He yanked himself forward and almost threw himself off the strut in his haste. He had to stretch his hand just to grab the next bar.

He was almost on top of the rip and was reaching for the sealkit where he had strapped it to his right thigh, when he noticed something peculiar: a jagged piece of metal, glinting in the light, slowly tumbling away from the rip. It was obviously a piece of the fuel cell which had exploded—he could tell from its general shape and form—but if it was, why had it not lodged itself in the hotdog when it had come so close? Indeed, why was it drifting
away
from…?

Oh, my God, he thought. It’s the piece that was lodged in the skin. It had to be. But if it had become dislodged, then why wasn’t the hotdog exploding?

He looked down at the rip, and saw a stubby white cylinder sticking out of the hole. It was effectively stopping the rip like a cork in a bottle. Amazed, he stared at the object for a long moment under the glare of his helmet lantern’s beam. There was something familiar-looking about that thing, yet he couldn’t quite put his finger on it….

Suddenly, he began to laugh. He heard Luton’s voice in his headset:
Neiman
,
listen
,
it’s okay. Mike Webb’s inside the hotdog and
….

“I know, Hank, I know!” he nearly shouted. “I can see it! It’s his damn finger!”

S
KYCORP’S CORPORATE HEADQUARTERS WAS
located in Huntsville, Alabama, in that part of the western side of the town where the aerospace contractors traditionally nestled up against the George C. Marshall Space Center. That part of the little Southern town had begun to grow in the 1960s; the boom had continued into the 1990s, when NASA and the U.S. government had been the western hemisphere’s largest purchaser of aerospace goods and services. The facilities of Boeing, Rockwell, and General Electric constituted their own city-within-a-city, a high-tech enclave on the doorstep of Marshall Center, waiting for the next major contract.

But by the last years of the twentieth century, the contractors had begun to go into business for themselves instead of for NASA. McDonnell Douglas started it first, when it followed the early success of its Project EOS space experiments to develop a space-manufactured pharmaceuticals industry. North American Rockwell and several smaller companies began to launch their own rockets as the result of Government deregulation and White House encouragement, and soon private launch services in the United States were able to successfully compete not only with the original commercial space-carrier, Europe’s Arianespace, but even with NASA and the Soviet Union, in providing reliable, economic launch facilities for commercial industry.

It was only a matter of time before someone in the space business took the big jump. It turned out to be McGuinness International, the Atlanta-based firm that had established itself as a leader in nuclear technology and experimental aviation. McGuinness started a branch company, Skycorp, which would be dedicated exclusively to space development. The parent company immediately sank over $50 billion into the company, building state-of-the-art facilities in Huntsville and combing the aerospace industry to hire the best management, scientists, and workers in the field.

Early on, Skycorp announced that its first major goal would be establishing permanent quarters in high orbit to house over a hundred space workers and construction facilities in both space and at the site of the tiny U.S. lunar base. In the industry—behind closed boardroom doors, on the golf links, in the pages of
Aviation Week
and
Space Business News
—it was rumored that Skycorp’s second major goal was to build a network of solar power-plants in space, to operate themselves and sell the electricity to American utility companies. In New York, Chicago, and London, some boasted that Skycorp’s upper management would soon be taking swan dives off the Cape Canaveral launch towers, while other quietly instructed their brokers to buy Skycorp stock and get ready to sell it at once if things got too weird.

So far, Skycorp’s stockholders had remained happy with their decisions and no one had gone high-diving on Merritt Island.

The Skycorp compound on Saturn Boulevard in Huntsville consisted of the main administration building—an enormous, eight-story A-frame made of white granite and stainless steel-surrounded by dome-shaped laboratory and test buildings and small, squat hangars. The complex included a private airstrip and its own telemetry field, a grove of dish antennae that maintained the communications links with Skycorp’s offworld holdings. The complex was located prestigiously close to Marshall Center, close enough that the tops of the Atlas and Saturn boosters on display at the Alabama Space Museum could be seen over the treetops from the administration building windows.

A bronze plaque set in a marble slab by the entrance drive bore the corporate logo, a sphere traversed by a stylized spaceship flying past on a cometlike path. Golden letters below the logo read “SKYCORP A Division of McGuinness International.”

Two basement sublevels beneath the administration building was the company’s own Orbital Operations Center, which closely resembled the spacecraft-tracking centers at NASA’s Houston facility and the Air Force’s CSOC facility in Colorado Springs. In some ways, Skycorp’s SpaceOps was superior to the Government’s centers. The computers represented the latest, fastest advances in artificial intelligence. The work station displays, through satellite relays, gave OOC techs the same information available to Olympus and Vulcan commands. The electronics had EMP protection and the center itself could be sealed off and maintained independently in the case of nuclear war, a major consideration when the center had been built, although that was no longer quite as important.

The center was designed for comfort as well as efficiency. The chairs in front of the tiered consoles were leather upholstered, the temperature in the room maintained at a comfortable 72 degrees. The lighting was dim enough to allow the red and blue light from the computer and TV monitors to stand out, yet not so dim as to make one squint in order to read a printout. On busy days there were polite young men and women working as gofers, gathering hard-copy from the line printers and fetching coffee and sandwiches from the commissary.

It had been one of those days. The blowout of the Vulcan hotdogs had electrified the thirty men and women manning SpaceOps that afternoon. In the hours that followed those critical few minutes of the emergency they had been trying to figure out the exact circumstances of the accident: running simulations through the computers, gathering what scant data could be gained from Olympus and Vulcan, communicating with eyewitnesses in orbit.

The team had, after four hours of feverish work, come up with little more than they had initially learned. No one knew exactly what had caused construction pod Alpha Romeo’s fuel cell to explode, and it would not be until Hotdog One was dismantled and shipped back to Earth that a lab team could analyze the wreckage to determine exactly how a piece of shrapnel managed to cause the explosive decompression that had killed the two crew members. Now, as the long twilight of a summer evening settled in, most of the team had gone home for the day, leaving a skeleton crew of five technicians to monitor the boards and a few tired gofers to clean up the mess of coffee cups, crumpled sandwich wrappers, and ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.

Kenneth Crespin found Clayton Dobbs in the operations supervisor’s glass-walled cubicle at the rear of the operations center, staring at a long sheaf of printout which trailed from his hands into a pile on the floor next to his desk. Crespin stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at Dobbs and wondering how long it would take the young man to notice his presence. Probably never, or at least until Dobbs decided it was time to get up and go home, which from the reports that had filtered to Crespin’s attention would be sometime in the wee hours. Like many geniuses, Dobbs apparently had an infinite concentration span, and like many ambitious young men of his caliber, he slept only when it was absolutely necessary.

After a moment Crespin cleared his throat; ten seconds later, Dobbs noticed, his angular head jerking up from the printout. “Oh,” he said. “Hello, Kenneth.”

Crespin smiled and took a couple of steps into the cubicle. “I’m surprised you’re still here, Clay. I understand your team has figured out everything which led up to it. Are you still trying to find something else?”

Dobbs said nothing for a moment, then dropped the printout on his desktop—the surface of which was invisible, buried completely by paper—and leaned back in his armchair, knitting his fingers together over his negligible stomach. “So how did the press conference go?” he asked mildly.

Crespin shrugged. His eyes wandered to framed pictures on Dobbs’ walls, of shuttles lifting off from the Cape, and Olympus Station being built in high orbit. “Well enough, I suppose, considering. I didn’t participate, but I spoke with our reps afterwards and was told that it was rough, but at least not quite as rough as when we had that worker killed on Olympus two years ago. The press has come to expect that people can and do get killed in space just as they can and do on Earth. They came away satisfied.”

“They came away satisfied.” Dobbs blew out his cheeks in a great sigh. “I’m sure those guys’ families have also come away satisfied. For Christ’s sake…”

“Clay…”

“You know what I’m looking at here?” Dobbs continued, tapping a finger on the computer printout he had been studying. “These are the results of a computer projection my guys ran on the blowout, taking what we found out about the event and letting the machine run a simulation.” He nodded his head toward the terminal beside his desk. “I’ve compared it with a similar profile I did before we had decided to attach hotdogs to Vulcan, and the numbers match almost exactly. I remember a couple of years ago waving the earlier projection in front of the Board and telling you guys that inflatable crew modules, especially in a construction zone, wouldn’t cut it.”

“Clay…”

“Don’t ‘Clay’ me, Kenneth. We both know the score here. The board pooh-poohed my objections. That horse’s ass Roland said that the risk was well within the limits of acceptability, that making temporary crew habitations on the shack was more economic than shipping up a couple of additional hard modules.”

Dobbs stood up and shook his head. “I’m sure you didn’t do it, but if there was any justice in the world you would have had Roland make the phone calls to those families to tell them that their husbands or sons were dead.”

“What do you want me to say, Clayton? That you were right all along? That we should have listened to you, and that we’re sorry that this happened, and that next time we’ll take the bluster of our resident boy-genius seriously?”