Orbital Decay (24 page)

“This is John Hamilton, Popeye,” Wallace explained. “Why don’t you tell him a little about life here on Olympus.”

For a moment it was as if the crewman had not heard Wallace, and Hamilton thought he was going to mumble off something meaningless. Then, as if a notion had passed into Hooker’s mind, he raised his haunted eyes and looked straight at Hamilton.

“It sucks,” he said in a hollow voice, without any emphasis or inflection. “It’s a fucking purgatory. If I had anything to go back home for, any reason to go back to Earth, I would go, but I don’t and that’s why I’m here. We’re all bored out of our minds, and this guy here is a goddamn maniac, and a couple of weeks ago I had a couple of friends killed out in space, so don’t listen to anything this fucker has to say about how swell our lives are up here. It’s shit, and the only reason why I’m still here is because I’m just a little crazier than he is, and if I were you, I’d get on the next OTV out and go home before…”

Wallace took the arm he had wrapped around Hooker’s shoulders and used it to hurl the crewman against the far wall of the corridor. The one-third gravity lessened the violence of the shove, but Hooker still hit the hard plastic wall with enough force to make him crumple to the floor.

Hamilton immediately started toward him, and Wallace roared, “
Let him alone
!
Let that coward alone
!”

Hamilton stopped and stared, first at Hooker, then at Wallace. Hooker, holding his neck and chest painfully, got up off the metal grid floor slowly. He glanced first in Wallace’s direction, then looked at Hamilton and gave a weak grin, which seemed to make him a little stronger than he had been when Hamilton had first laid eyes on him. He didn’t say anything else; he simply turned and hobbled his way down the upward-sloping corridor.

Wallace had been staring at Hooker with inflamed eyes. He shut his eyes now and slumped against the catwalk wall. He raised his right hand to cover his face and his chest rose and fell as if he were sobbing silently to himself. Hooker was gone by the time he exposed his face again.

Hamilton saw that the project supervisor had composed himself again. More than that; it was as if Wallace had blocked the incident from his mind. The hydroponicist thought he heard footsteps coming from the direction in which they had been walking, but when he looked he didn’t see anyone there. Someone had witnessed this savage episode, and, probably wisely, had decided that discretion was the better part of valor.

“Well,” Wallace said. He straightened his shoulders and smiled brightly at Hamilton. “I suppose you want to see where you’re going to be working, eh?”

Oh
,
don’t mind me
, Hamilton thought as he forced himself to nod his head.
I only get like that sometimes.
Wallace said nothing more but simply turned and started striding down the catwalk. Back straight, eyes ahead. As if nothing had just happened.

He stopped after a moment and looked inquisitively over his shoulder at Hamilton. “Coming?” he asked.

Right
, Hamilton replied silently. He started following the project supervisor—and deliberately kept a few paces behind.

“Of course, you realize that this is a difficult environment. We’re isolated from everything we’ve grown up with, in a place where danger lurks at every step, with the crew working eight-hour shifts each day. No one ever said that this was a safe environment, but then, when you think about it, when has there ever been a safe environment for man?”

They had been in the five-module Hydroponics section for the past fifteen minutes, and Hamilton had still not seen much more of his workplace than when they had first come down the ladder. He was anxious to give the section a thorough inspection, particularly the rows of tanks which held the station’s vegetable crops, but Wallace was apparently deaf to all the subtle hints he had dropped. This was Wallace’s chance, it seemed, to twist his new senior crewman’s ear and lecture him interminably about the promise and perils of life in space.

“As you’ve noticed, Skycorp doesn’t have a uniform, although I’ve
requested
that the men aboard this space station maintain a decent wardrobe. But the thought remains the same. There must be discipline, or everything goes to hell, excuse my language. Otherwise things become lax, and it leads to carelessness, and carelessness kills, Mr. Hamilton,
carelessness
is the murderer in space.”

“Right,” Hamilton said, for the fifth or sixth time during H.G. Wallace’s monologue, hoping again that making sounds of agreement during Wallace’s spiel would ease him out of the compartment.

“Absolutely!” Wallace said, smiling broadly with the knowledge that Hamilton agreed. “It was
carelessness
that killed those two unfortunate men a couple of weeks ago. Someone on Earth was careless in making the fuel pod for the FFWS that was near Vulcan Station at the time of the accident, so it exploded. But more importantly those two men were killed because of their own
carelessness
, because they shouldn’t have been there… I mean, they shouldn’t have been… they shouldn’t have put themselves into that position in the first place, do you know what I mean?”

No
,
not at all
, Hamilton mutely responded. “I see what you mean, sir,” he said aloud.

“Right!” Wallace exclaimed. He slapped the rung of the ladder with his palm. “Yes! Right! It’s a question of discipline! If we’re ever going to conquer the final frontier, we’re going to need to maintain discipline. We’re building a bridge between the heavens and the earth, between America and the stars. We’re on the edge of the greatest adventure that man has ever known, and the adventure is only beginning, Hamilton! This requires perfection, it requires discipline, oh, and yes, it requires
carelessness
!”

Wallace stopped. He face turned red. “I mean…” he began.

At that moment two things happened at once. First, the overhead hatch leading up to the catwalk opened and a pair of feet in sneakers stepped onto the ladder leading down into Module 42. “Hello!” a voice called. “Anyone down there?”

Then another hatch in the right wall of the compartment opened and a thin man with a mustache stepped through. He stopped and looked first at Wallace, then at Hamilton. “Hi,” he said. “You must be the new hydroponics man.”

“Yeah, I do believe that’s who he is.” Doc Felapolous climbed down the ladder and walked over toward Wallace and Hamilton. “Pardon me for interrupting your conversation,” he said amiably to H.G. Wallace, “but I encountered this gentleman while he was being piped aboard at the Docks, and I didn’t really have a chance to introduce myself.” He held out his hand to Hamilton. “Edwin Felapolous, son. Chief physician. I hope you’re over your bout with spacesickness by now.”

Hamilton took Felapolous’ hand, but before he could say anything, Wallace butted in. “I’m sure he’s over it by now, Edwin,” he said somewhat stiffly. “I was just giving him his orientation tour of the station….”

The thin man who had come in from the next compartment walked forward, also holding out his hand. “My name’s Sam Sloane,” he said. “I’m chief programmer at the data processing center next door. I heard you come in, and I just wanted to…”

“I’m certain you’ll have ample time in which to introduce yourself, Mr. Sloane,” Wallace said quickly. “As I said, I was giving Mr. Hamilton his orientation tour of the station, and I…”

“Oh, now, Henry, I’m sure Mr. Hamilton knows his way around here.” Felapolous waved his hand expansively toward the tanks of algae arranged in rows down the length of the module, with feeder lines dangling from nutrient tanks suspended from the ceiling, and bright growth lights shining on them from overhead tracks. “After all, as I understand his record, Jack… may I call you Jack?… holds a Ph.D. from Yale in space bioengineering and is a former fellow in hydroponics with the Gaia Institute at Cape Hattaras.” He turned and patted Hamilton’s shoulder. “One of Vishnu Suni’s former students, are you not? I seem to recall a paper you had published in the
Journal
late last year…”

“Well, yes, I, ah…”

“Oh, you were once with
the
Gaia Institute?” Sam Sloane interjected. “I’ve read much about that place. They were the innovators of the Ocean Ark.” He pumped Hamilton’s hand enthusiastically. “You’re simply going to have to tell me everything about that place. I once heard a lecture by Suni and I was very impressed by the things he said about…”

“
Gentlemen
,” Wallace said, a glowering expression growing on his face, “I was
speaking
to Mr. Hamilton about this space station and its mission.”

Felapolous turned his head to look at Wallace. “Oh, Henry, I’m terribly sorry,” he said, wide-eyed and apologetic. “I almost forgot the second reason I tracked you down. You’re needed up on the command deck at once. Huntsville needs to communicate with you about the timetable for coming off the work shutdown. I believe it’s urgent.”

Wallace’s eyes widened. His eyes darted back and forth between the three men. Then his back straightened and his gaze became self-involved. “Thank you, Doctor,” he said formally. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me…”

He turned, walked across the compartment, and quickly scaled the ladder up and out of the module. Sloane watched him until he had disappeared from sight, then he looked at Doc Felapolous with a raised eyebrow. “Nice improvisation,” he said softly. “I’m surprised that he didn’t ask why he wasn’t summoned over the intercom, though.”

“He might in a few minutes,” Felapolous replied, resting his hands behind him against the edge of a tank. “But I’m sure he’ll think of a reason why he wasn’t.” He looked at Hamilton with an amused expression. “How are you doing, Jack?”

“Fine, just fine,” Hamilton replied. He felt bewildered by the sudden flurry of conversation. His eyes glanced from the two newcomers to the overhead hatch and back to the two men again. “Would someone mind explaining to me what just happened here?”

Sloane and Felapolous looked at each other and smiled. “It looks like we both came to the same conclusion at once,” Sloane replied. “That, ah, you might want a little relief from your talk with our project supervisor.”

“Well…” Hamilton paused. “He is… a little intense, isn’t he?” he said guardedly.

“A little intense.” Sloane grinned, clapped his hands and rubbed them together. “Well!” he said to Felapolous. “That’s as diplomatic a way to describe a full-blown maniac as you’re going to find, right, Doc?”

I
S IT TOO MUCH
to say that I anticipated that things would be different from the first moment I laid eyes on Jack Hamilton? I guess so. That type of foreshadowing occurs only as the cheapest of coincidences in pulp fiction, usually written in mauve sentences:
Sam looked at the handsome young stranger who stood before him in the space station and thought
, “
Yes
!
He’s the one
!
He’ll be the one who shall redeem us
!” I’ll admit, I embarrassed myself by sending short stories with shit like that to editors at
Analog
and
Amazing
, but any yo-yo—well, nearly any yo-yo—knows that revelations like that just don’t occur in real life. Even Saint Peter doubted who Jesus was until He did his little stroll across the waters….

But I will go so far as to say that Jack Hamilton made an impression on me the moment I walked into the hydroponics section, if only because he was putting up with Cap’n Wallace’s rambling ravings while keeping a straight face. A perfectly deadpan look; nary an upturned eyebrow, a rolling eyeball, or a wry or a condescending or a humoring smile. But I also sensed at once that not only was he not buying anything that Wallace said, but he had come to the same conclusion that ninety-five percent of Skycan’s crew had long since reached: that our head honcho, chief, and project supervisor was a certifiable Daffy Duck. A Daffy Duck trying to sound like William Shatner.

I
was
impressed. Not many men can look such flat-out weirdness in the eye and not blow their cool. So forgive me if I can’t foreshadow things by saying that I knew at once that our new chief hydroponics engineer would be the man who would soon take the whole apple cart and kick it down Dead Man’s Hill.

Doc Felapolous gave me an angry glance. “Sam, don’t you think you’re stretching things a little by calling your boss a full blown maniac?” he said in a tone of voice that meant,
You better watch where you’re speaking your mind
,
son. I’m Wallace’s friend
—
if you don’t remember.

I didn’t care. “Doc, I thought the man was only eccentric, until I saw the way he treated Popeye Hooker a few minutes ago,” I said. “You spent time with Hooker after the accident, so you tell me if he deserved to be shoved and called a coward.”

Felapolous cleared his throat and looked down at the floor. Hamilton looked from him to me. “I thought I heard someone else in the corridor,” he said. “That was you?”

“Entirely by accident,” I replied. “Yeah, I saw what happened. Then I came back here and called Doc on the intercom, told him to get over to Hydroponics as soon as he could manage. Not a bad fib you concocted, Doc.”

“Only a subterfuge to get Henry back to Command so we could explain things to our new arrival.” Doc stared at the floor for another moment before looking back up at Hamilton. “It’s a little difficult to explain, Jack… may I call you Jack?”

“Call me anything you want except late to supper.” That old saw seemed to appeal to Doc’s country-boy persona, and he grinned. “Tell you what,” Hamilton added, “why don’t we talk while I check out my new workplace? I haven’t really had a chance to inspect the place while, ah…”

We both nodded in understanding. Wallace had cornered him down here, so Jack Hamilton had not really been given the chance to see the hydroponics section. As Felapolous talked, he began to wander around the compartment, inspecting the tanks, looking at the consoles, checking readings and so forth.

“I won’t pretend that there isn’t something wrong with Henry Wallace,” Felapolous began, “but I’ll ask you to bear in mind that his malady isn’t an unusual one for spaceflight. I’ll also ask you to remember that I’m a medical doctor and not a psychologist, or at least not much more than an armchair psychologist with a better than average knowledge of space medicine. First, you have to keep in mind the unusual physical environment in which we’re living. In effect, this is a closed universe. There are no windows or portholes because, in a spinning environment, the sense of momentum can induce vertigo.”