Orbital Decay (20 page)

The kitchen was still a mess, as was the rest of the house. Hooker promised himself that he would clean up the place before he went into town. If it had been Jeanine he had brought home last night—he wasn’t surprised to find that he couldn’t recall her last name—he would have been embarrassed. He put the newspaper and mail down on the kitchen table, glanced once through the back window at the edge of the salt marsh which lay in his back yard, and saw the tip of Hog Island a quarter of a mile out on the edge of the Gulf. Once that little chunk of land had been dotted by the summer homes of the rich. Most of the homes were gone now, the fortunes which had built them swept away by the Second Depression. The houses which were left were shells populated mainly by poor Cuban and Haitian immigrants who had found their way to Cedar Key and who commuted back and forth in leaky rowboats and inflatable dinghies. Sometimes at night he could see their bonfires and wondered what they were burning. Maybe a rich man’s library and paintings.

Hooker switched on the portable TV set on the counter and listened to
Good Morning America
as he fried a couple of eggs and link sausage and made a pot of coffee. The news was still the same, as most people preferred these days, following the tumultuous end of the twentieth century. California was still trying to raise money to clean up after the El Diablo meltdown of ’98. NATO and Warsaw Pact troops continued to eyeball each other across the East German border while Washington and Moscow tried to negotiate the final details of SALT IV and the Space Weapons Treaty in Geneva, but it would still be a while before either country completely forgave the other for the mistakes made during the Polish Uprising. Libyan diplomats were in Israel again, as the two shattered countries tried to recover from their bloody little war. The Presbyterian Church of America had joined the more fundamental denominations in decrying the findings of the Princeton biomedical team which had determined that there was indeed an afterlife and that it lasted for about forty-five minutes. The northeastern United States and parts of Canada were still digging themselves out of a blizzard which had dumped fourteen inches of snow on Boston. A child prodigy in Great Falls was reciting
King Lear
after having read it only once, and Hooker went to the john during a quick report on how Johnny Cash’s 3-D simulacrum was packing the house at the New Grand Ol’ Opry in Nashville.

When he got back to the kitchen, the pretty anchorwoman, Linda Francis, was introducing her next guest for the morning. Hooker scraped the eggs and sausage onto a chipped plate and poured a mug of black coffee as he watched the set from the corner of his eye.

“Olympus Station has been in orbit over Earth for a year as of this week and is now mostly complete, and Project Franklin, America’s attempt to build three solar-power satellites in geosynchronous orbit, is in its first stages,” she said into the camera. In the background behind her appeared a file tape showing a cylindrical spacecraft coasting into orbit near the slowly turning space station. “Yet despite claims by the space industry and the White House that the project will be the beginning of the final solution to America’s energy needs, skepticism still abounds.”

The film clip disappeared from the background and the studio set reappeared. The camera moved in for a close-up of a lean, blond-haired man sitting in an armchair next to Francis. “With us today is Olympus Station’s new project supervisor, Henry G. Wallace, formerly of the NASA astronaut corps and the leader of the first expeditionary mission to the Moon, now working for Skycorp and McGuinness International, the prime builders of Project Franklin. He will be sent up to Olympus later this month to take over as head of operations on the space station. Good morning, Mr. Wallace.”

“Good morning, Ms. Francis,” Wallace said. He appeared to be in his late thirties; solidly built, hair thinning on the top of his scalp, wearing a dark blue sports jacket with a recognizable Skycorp logo pin on his lapel. He grinned when his name was mentioned, displaying perfect teeth.

Hooker—unshaven, unwashed, hungover—disliked his boyish grin and perfect good looks at once. Oh boy, he thought, look at the space hero. He made a farting sound with his lips and murmured, “Good morning, jerk.”

Linda Francis, as rosy and smiling as Wallace, opened her questioning. “Mr. Wallace, there’s been some question lately as to the claims Skycorp has made concerning Project Franklin’s effectiveness. Do you believe the powersats can completely solve the energy problems of the new century?”

Hooker winced. It was the year 2014, and the twenty-first century didn’t look or feel a hell of a lot different from the twentieth (except that it seemed a hell of a lot less deadly), yet the mass media was running the phrase “the new century” into the ground. Fifteen years old and still being thought of as a baby, Hooker thought, as if some wondrous event were taking place. He drank his coffee. Christ. The only wonder is that we didn’t exterminate ourselves.

Wallace’s perfect smile didn’t falter. “Well, Linda, it would not take too much homework to poke holes in some of the more, ah, enthusiastic predictions about the SPS program. That’s a tendency even experts have when they’re discussing the potentials of space. Right now the power consumption annually of the United States is somewhere around 900,000 megawatts, and that’s even with the loss of some utility companies in the last fifteen or twenty years. Since each of the powersats planned, when completed in five years, will only produce 5,000 megawatts, they’ll only account for a little less than six per cent of the nation’s total power demand.”

The anchorwoman’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Six per cent? Nuclear power plants accounted for eight per cent in the last century….”

“Yes, but there are not as many of them with us anymore, are there? Remember, the utilities, that went under…”

“Went under because the debt burden for paying for the plants became too high,” Francis finished. “Project Franklin isn’t going to be cheap, either. How can we justify building something this big, when its output is only going to account for six per cent of the national energy requirement each year?”

“Two reasons.” Wallace raised a finger. “One, it’s an infinitely renewable resource. The sun is going to be with us always, or at least for another few hundred million years. It’s an energy resource that’s available as long as we have the capability to move beyond the atmosphere’s filtering effect and tap into it. Certainly it’s expensive. Even with the last few decades of breakthroughs in space technology, it’s going to be a while before getting a cargo into high orbit will be cheap. But… and here’s the second reason…”

As he spoke, the studio-set background changed to show a starscape several hundred miles above Earth. Three-dimensional videotape clips showed the big HLV’s arriving in orbit near a half-complete Olympus station; spaceworkers unloading the cylindrical crew modules from the cargo bays; a long shot of the station being built; the arrival of the beam-builders at the Vulcan construction station. “Now that the commitment has been made,” Wallace was saying, “the investments from Skycorp and the U.S. Government made which have established Olympus and Vulcan in geosynch orbit and got Descartes Base built on the Moon, most of the work has been done, really. We only have the major components of the scheme on-line and operating, but once we really get started on this thing, ah, space construction, we’ll gain experience and the costs will begin to go down. Actually, Linda, there’s no reason why we should stop the project when we’ve built the three powersats being planned.”

“You mean there are plans to build more?” she asked.

“No, not at this time at least. But the capability will be there. In fact, it gets better as we put more time and energy into the project. The cost of each satellite will decrease as the technology is perfected and the raw materials become more available, and so mass production will eventually become feasible. The first powersat will account for only two per cent of the annual U.S. energy requirement, but that will increase exponentially once more powersats are built. The main thing will be making the raw materials more available.”

“You’re referring, of course, to Descartes Base.” As she said that, the film clip in the background changed to show the mountainous Descartes region of the Moon’s southern hemisphere: lunar freighters making soft touchdowns on the gray plains, bulldozers shoving lunar soil over the habitation modules, a man in a spacesuit standing near the bottom half of the old Apollo 16 LEM left there since 1972.

“That’s right,” Wallace replied. “In the lunar highlands. That area, as everyone now knows, is rich in oxidized aluminum and silicon, the main materials required for building powersats. In fact, we discovered that during the Apollo missions thirty years ago. Once the base is expanded, and once the mass-driver is perfected and built, we won’t have to use freighters any more, but will be able to shoot the building materials up, making the cost for the girders and the solar cells that much cheaper.”

“Uh-huh.” Linda Francis held a finger to her slightly parted lips. Hooker’s gaze was fixed on her. God, he thought, why haven’t I met any beautiful women like that in my life? Was the rumor true that she was married to a dwarf? “Of course, once these satellites are operational, Skycorp and McGuinness will make a fortune selling utilities cheap electrical power.”

Wallace’s smile thinned a little. “That’s a rather loaded statement, isn’t it?” She laughed. “For one thing,” he continued, “there will be enormous initial costs to be covered—to the subcontractors, to NASA, and so forth—that will have to be settled before McGuinness or Skycorp will be able to make any fortunes. Those will begin being paid when SPS-1 goes operational, but even then, it’ll be a while before…”

“But if Skycorp builds more powersats…”

“That’s right. Mass production will cover its own costs. For another thing, what’s wrong with the companies involved making that profit? They’re taking the risks, their stockholders are taking risks, so why shouldn’t they benefit from the end results? Besides, part of the rebuilding of the economy after the last depression means restoring American industry. The Europeans and the Japanese have full-fledged space capability of their own now, but they’re not doing anything on this scale. The Russians are on Mars and it looks like they’re gearing up for a Titan expedition, so there’s a matter of national presence in space to be dealt with. No other country, though, is taking this step, even though people like Peter Glaser and Gerard O’Neill were postulating it many years ago. It’s about time we got down to doing it, that’s all.”

The anchorwoman consulted her notebook, and Hooker poured another cup of coffee. “Tell me a little about the job you’re taking,” she said. “You’re going to be in charge of the whole project. Are you…?”

“Actually, I’ll only be in charge of the high part.” The smile again. Hooker winced. What a bloody Boy Scout. “The decisions will really be made in Huntsville, at Skycorp’s company headquarters. I’ll only be supervising the work and support crews on the project. Lester Riddell—who, you might remember, was my co-commander on the lunar expedition years ago—is to be in charge of operations at Descartes Base. We’re basically foremen, making sure that everything stays on schedule. They’re putting a pair of old space cadets up there, you might say.” The smile again.

“So you’ll be up there for two years. What will you do in your free time, when you’re not working?”

Henry G. Wallace chuckled. “Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t had much time to think about that. If I do have any free time… well, I’ll probably just look at the stars.”

Francis put on a plastic smile. “Thank you for being with us this morning, Mr. Wallace.” She turned to the camera. “When we return, George Bingham will be giving us today’s weather, and Angela Hoffer will be talking with a man who practices ESP with dogs. On ‘Good Morning.’”

Hooker grunted and reached for the morning mail as a commercial with Jane Fonda speaking for Geritol appeared. When he was a kid, outer space had fascinated him. That was in the days when the first shuttles were going up and space was big news. He remembered waking up early to catch the TV broadcasts of those launches, and the pictures of the
Columbia
and the
Discovery
and the
Atlantis
he had tacked to his bedroom walls in his family’s old house in southern Georgia. He smiled wistfully. There was a time when he had idolized astronaut Pinky Nelson, and wanted nothing more than to fly a space shuttle into orbit just like him.

The good old days, long ago and far away. Hooker shook his head and leafed through the junk mail and bills.
This is the crap that makes us grow old
, he thought.
If only we could forget about the high cost of living
,
advertisers trying to sell us stuff we don’t need
,
and ex-wives who pull disappearing acts. If only we could jump on a space shuttle for a trip away from Earth.
Occasionally, he did make a rendezvous with his old obsession, at those times when he would find himself on the state’s Atlantic side. He would tell himself that Port Canaveral was a good place to make landfall for supplies for the return trip down the intra-coastal waterway, but the fact was that the rockets on Merritt Island would call to him as he sailed by. Once, he had anchored off the Cape and had watched an HLV lift off. He had sat in the aft deck, drinking beer as he watched the giant cargo ship thunder into the sky, and had imagined himself as a kid again, his dreams riding on that spaceship….

Hooker frowned at his telephone bill. Damn it, had the rates gone up again while he wasn’t looking? He hardly used his phone at home, rarely making long-distance calls. How could the long-distance service charge be so high? Then he remembered the cellular phone he had installed on the
Jumbo Shrimp II.
He had put the billing on his home phone, so that would account for the charge.

He shrugged. It was something he could take care of on the way to the dock, at the phone company’s branch office in Cedar Key. While he thought about it, Hooker got up and went into the bedroom, to his desk where he kept his cash box. He had a character flaw—a phenomenal capacity for bouncing checks, so whenever possible he kept much of his expense money in cash, to avoid embarrassments with his major creditors. He had cashed a check for two hundred dollars just the other day, and though it was pegged as grocery money, he had better get it to the phone company before…