The Past Through Tomorrow (32 page)

This little guy came out the ship’s air lock, and hooked on to the ship’s line. Handling himself like he was used to space, he set his feet and dived, straight along the stretched line, his snap hook running free. I hurried back and motioned him to follow me. Tiny, the new man, and I reached the air locks together.

Besides the usual cargo lock we had three G. E. Kwikloks. A Kwiklok is an Iron Maiden without spikes; it fits a man in a suit, leaving just a few pints of air to scavenge, and cycles automatically. A big time saver in changing shifts. I passed through the middlesized one; Tiny, of course, used the big one. Without hesitation the new man pulled himself into the small one.

We went into Tiny’s office. Tiny strapped down, and pushed his helmet back. “Well, McNye,” he said. “Glad to have you with us.”

The new radio tech opened his helmet. I heard a low, pleasant voice answer, “Thank you.”

I stared and didn’t say anything. From where I was I could see that the radio tech was wearing a hair ribbon.

I thought Tiny would explode. He didn’t need to see the hair ribbon; with the helmet up it was clear that the new “man” was as female as Venus de Milo. Tiny sputtered, then he was unstrapped and diving for the view port. “Dad!” he yelled. “Get the radio shack. Stop that ship!”

But the
Half Moon
was already a ball of fire in the distance. Tiny looked dazed. “Dad,” he said, “who else knows about this?”

“Nobody, so far as I know.”

He thought a bit. “We’ve got to keep her out of sight. That’s it—we keep her locked up and out of sight until the next ship matches in.” He didn’t look at her.

“What in the world are you talking about?” McNye’s voice was higher and no longer pleasant.

Tiny glared. “You, that’s what. What are you—a stowaway?”

“Don’t be silly! I’m G. B. McNye, electronics engineer. Don’t you have my papers?”

Tiny turned to me. “Dad, this is your fault. How in Chr—pardon me, Miss. How did you let them send you a woman? Didn’t you even read the advance report on her?”

“Me?” I said. “Now see here, you big squarehead! those forms don’t show sex; the Fair Employment Commission won’t allow it except where it’s pertinent to the job.”

“You’re telling
me
it’s not pertinent to the job
here
?”

“Not by job classification it ain’t. There’s lots of female radio and radar men, back Earthside.”

“This isn’t Earthside.” He had something. He was thinking of those two-legged wolves swarming over the job outside. And G. B. McNye was pretty. Maybe eight months of no women at all affected my judgment, but she would pass.

“I’ve even heard of female rocket pilots,” I added, for spite.

“I don’t care if you’ve heard of female archangels; I’ll have no women here!”

“Just a minute!” If I was riled,
she
was plain sore. “You’re the construction superintendent, are you not?”

“Yes,” Tiny admitted.

“Very well, then, how do you know what sex I am?”

“Are you trying to deny that you are a woman?”

“Hardly! I’m proud of it. But officially you don’t know what sex G. Brooks McNye is. That’s why I use ‘G’ instead of Gloria. I don’t ask favors.”

Tiny grunted. “You won’t get any. I don’t know how you sneaked in, but get this, McNye, or Gloria, or whatever—you’re fired. You go back on the next ship. Meanwhile we’ll try to keep the men from knowing we’ve got a woman aboard.”

I could see her count ten. “May I speak,” she said finally, “or does your Captain Bligh act extend to that, too?”

“Say your say.”

“I didn’t sneak in. I am on the permanent staff of the Station, Chief Communications Engineer. I took this vacancy myself to get to know the equipment while it was being installed. I’ll live here eventually; I see no reason not to start now.”

Tiny waved it away. “There’ll be men and women both here—some day. Even kids. Right now it’s stag and it’ll stay that way.”

“We’ll see. Anyhow, you can’t fire me; radio personnel don’t work for you.” She had a point; communicators and some other specialists were lent to the contractors, Five Companies, Incorporated, by Harriman Enterprises.

Tiny snorted. “Maybe I can’t fire you; I can send you home. ‘Requisitioned personnel must be satisfactory to the contractor.’—meaning me. Paragraph Seven, clause M; I wrote that clause myself.”

“Then you know that if requisitioned personnel are refused without cause the contractor bears the replacement cost.”

“I’ll risk paying your fare home, but I won’t have you here.”

“You are most unreasonable!”

“Perhaps, but I’ll decide what’s good for the job. I’d rather have a dope peddler than have a woman sniffing around my boys!”

She gasped. Tiny knew he had said too much; he added, “Sorry, Miss. But that’s it. You’ll stay under cover until I can get rid of you.”

Before she could speak I cut in. “Tiny—look behind you!”

Staring in the port was one of the riggers, his eyes bugged out. Three or four more floated up and joined him.

Then Tiny zoomed up to the port and they scattered like minnows. He scared them almost out of their suits; I thought he was going to shove his fists through the quartz.

He came back looking whipped. “Miss,” he said, pointing, “wait in my room.” When she was gone he added, “Dad, what’ll we do?”

I said, “I thought you had made up your mind, Tiny.”

“I have,” he answered peevishly. “Ask the Chief Inspector to come in, will you?”

That showed how far gone he was. The inspection gang belonged to Harriman Enterprises, not to us, and Tiny rated them mere nuisances. Besides, Tiny was an Oppenheimer graduate; Dalrymple was from M.I.T.

He came in, brash and cheerful. “Good morning, Superintendent. Morning, Mr. Witherspoon. What can I do for you?”

Glumly, Tiny told the story. Dalrymple looked smug. “She’s right, old man. You can send her back and even specify a male relief. But I can hardly endorse ‘for proper cause’ now, can I?”

“Damnation. Dalrymple, we can’t have a woman around here!”

“A moot point. Not covered by contract, y’know.”

“If your office hadn’t sent us a crooked gambler as her predecessor I wouldn’t be in this jam!”

“There, there! Remember the old blood pressure. Suppose we leave the endorsement open and arbitrate the cost. That’s fair, eh?”

“I suppose so. Thanks.”

“Not at all. But consider this: when you rushed Peters off before interviewing the newcomer, you cut yourself down to one operator. Hammond can’t stand watch twenty-four hours a day.”

“He can sleep in the shack. The alarm will wake him.”

“I can’t accept that. The home office and ships’ frequencies must be guarded at all times. Harriman Enterprises has supplied a qualified operator; I am afraid you must use her for the time being.”

Tiny will always cooperate with the inevitable; he said quietly, “Dad, she’ll take first shift. Better put the married men on that shift.”

Then he called her in. “Go to the radio shack and start makee-learnee, so that Hammond can go off watch soon. Mind what he tells you. He’s a good man.”

“I know,” she said briskly. “I trained him.”

Tiny bit his lip. The C.I. said, “The Superintendent doesn’t bother with trivia—I’m Robert Dalrymple, Chief Inspector. He probably didn’t introduce his assistant either—Mr. Witherspoon.”

“Call me Dad,” I said.

She smiled and said, “Howdy, Dad.” I felt warm clear through. She went on to Dalrymple, “Odd that we haven’t met before.”

Tiny butted in. “McNye, you’ll sleep in my room—”

She raised her eyebrows; he went on angrily, “Oh, I’ll get my stuff out—at once. And get this: keep the door locked, off shift.”

“You’re darn tootin’ I will!”

Tiny blushed.

I was too busy to see much of Miss Gloria. There was cargo to stow, the new tanks to install and shield. That left the most worrisome task of all: putting spin on the living quarters. Even the optimists didn’t expect much interplanetary traffic for some years; nevertheless Harriman Enterprises wanted to get some activities moved in and paying rent against their enormous investment.

I.T.&T. had leased space for a microwave relay station—several million a year from television alone. The Weather Bureau was itching to set up its hemispheric integrating station; Palomar Observatory had a concession (Harriman Enterprises donated that space); the Security Council had some hush-hush project; Fermi Physical Labs and Kettering Institute each had space—a dozen tenants wanted to move in now, or sooner, even if we never completed accommodations for tourists and travelers.

There were time bonuses in it for Five Companies, Incorporated—and their help. So we were in a hurry to get spin on the quarters.

People who have never been out have trouble getting through their heads—at least I had—that there is no feeling of weight, no up and down, in a free orbit in space. There’s Earth, round and beautiful, only twenty-odd thousand miles away, close enough to brush your sleeve. You know it’s pulling you towards it. Yet you feel no weight, absolutely none. You float.

Floating is fine for some types of work, but when it’s time to eat, or play cards, or bathe, it’s good to feel weight on your feet. Your dinner stays quiet and you feel more natural.

You’ve seen pictures of the Station—a huge cylinder, like a bass drum, with ships’ nose pockets dimpling its sides. Imagine a snare drum, spinning around inside the bass drum; that’s the living quarters, with centrifugal force pinch-hitting for gravity. We could have spun the whole Station but you can’t berth a ship against a whirling dervish.

So we built a spinning part for creature comfort and an outer, stationary part for docking, tanks, storerooms, and the like. You pass from one to the other at the hub. When Miss Gloria joined us the inner part was closed in and pressurized, but the rest was a skeleton of girders.

Mighty pretty though, a great network of shiny struts and ties against black sky and stars—titanium alloy 1403, light, strong, and non-corrodible. The Station is flimsy compared with a ship, since it doesn’t have to take blastoff stresses. That meant we didn’t dare put on spin by violent means—which is where jato units come in.

“Jato”—
J
et
A
ssisted
T
ake-
O
ff—rocket units invented to give airplanes a boost. Now we use them wherever a controlled push is needed, say to get a truck out of the mud on a dam job. We mounted four thousand of them around the frame of the living quarters, each one placed just so. They were wired up and ready to fire when Tiny came to me looking worried. “Dad,” he said, ‘let’s drop everything and finish compartment D-113.”

“Okay,” I said. D-113 was in the non-spin part.

“Rig an air lock and stock it with two weeks supplies.”

“That’ll change your mass distribution for spin,” I suggested.

“I’ll refigure it next dark period. Then we’ll shift jatos.”

When Dalrymple heard about it he came charging around. It meant a delay in making rental space available. “What’s the idea?”

Tiny stared at him. They had been cooler than ordinary lately; Dalrymple had been finding excuses to seek out Miss Gloria. He had to pass through Tiny’s office to reach her temporary room, and Tiny had finally told him to get out and stay out. “The idea,” Tiny said slowly, “is to have a pup tent in case the house burns.”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose we fire up the jatos and the structure cracks? Want to hang around in a space suit until a ship happens by?”

“That’s silly. The stresses have been calculated.”

“That’s what the man said when the bridge fell. We’ll do it my way.”

Dalrymple stormed off.

Tiny’s efforts to keep Gloria fenced up were sort of pitiful. In the first place, the radio tech’s biggest job was repairing suit walkie-talkies, done on watch. A rash of such troubles broke out—on her shift. I made some shift transfers and docked a few for costs, too; it’s not proper maintenance when a man deliberately busts his aerial.

There were other symptoms. It became stylish to shave. Men started wearing shirts around quarters and bathing increased to where I thought I would have to rig another water still.

Came the shift when D-113 was ready and the jatos readjusted. I don’t mind saying I was nervous. All hands were ordered out of the quarters and into suits. They perched around the girders and waited.

Men in space suits all look alike; we used numbers and colored armbands. Supervisors had two antennas, one for a gang frequency, one for the supervisors’ circuit. With Tiny and me the second antenna hooked back through the radio shack and to all the gang frequencies—a broadcast.

The supervisors had reported their men clear of the fireworks and I was about to give Tiny the word, when this figure came climbing through the girders, inside the danger zone. No safety line. No armband. One antenna.

Miss Gloria, of course. Tiny hauled her out of the blast zone, and anchored her with his own safety line. I heard his voice, harsh in my helmet: “Who do you think you are? A sidewalk superintendent?”

And her voice: “What do you expect me to do? Go park on a star?”

“I told you to stay away from the job. If you can’t obey orders, I’ll lock you up.”

I reached him, switched off my radio and touched helmets. “Boss! Boss!” I said. “You’re broadcasting!”

“Oh—” he says, switches off, and touches helmets with her.

We could still hear her; she didn’t switch off. “Why, you big baboon, I came outside because you sent a search party to clear everybody out,” and, “How would I know about a safety line rule? You’ve kept me penned up.” And finally, “We’ll see!”

I dragged him away and he told the boss electrician to go ahead. Then we forgot the row for we were looking at the prettiest fireworks ever seen, a giant St. Catherine’s wheel, rockets blasting all over it. Utterly soundless, out there in space—but beautiful beyond compare.

The blasts died away and there was the living quarters, spinning true as a flywheel—Tiny and I both let out sighs of relief. We all went back inside then to see what weight tasted like.

It tasted funny. I went through the shaft and started down the ladders, feeling myself gain weight as I neared the rim. I felt seasick, like the first time I experienced no weight. I could hardly walk and my calves cramped.