The Tranquillity Alternative (20 page)

“Speak for yourself, Poppa …”

“Hey, guys,” Rhodes insisted, “I’m not here to do a story about you. I’m off the clock. I just came to—”

“Bullshit. Open your mouth in front of a reporter, tomorrow you read it in the paper.” Fred stopped racking the balls, picked up his stick, and dropped it in a stand near the TV. “C’mon, Lou, let’s get out of here. I gotta fifth of tequila my wife sent me back at my bunk.”

“I hear ya.” Lou placed his stick on the table and walked toward the hatch. “Who needs this shit?”

Each of them cast cold glares at Berkley as they passed her on their way out of the rec room. “Media slut,” Fred muttered to her back before he slammed the hatch shut behind him.

An uncomfortable silence descended upon the room. “Sorry about that, ma’am,” Poppa said softly. “They’ve just been up here too long and have forgotten their manners, that’s all.” He looked at the kid who had been sorting through the CDs. “Billy, give the lady a beer, please. And put something on that won’t peel the paint off the walls.”

“I think it’s peeling already,” Billy murmured, but he slid a CD into the stereo. The first low-key riffs of “Black-Eyed Man” by the Cowboy Junkies filtered from the beat-up speakers, as raw and mellow as a winter morning in eastern Kentucky. Billy looked as if he might have come from coal-mining country himself; mid-twenties, tough and stringy-looking, greasy black hair, and narrow sideburns stretching down his jaw. He reached into the fridge, pulled out an ice-cold can of Budweiser and silently handed it to her before slumping into a chair to watch Bruce Willis kill some bad guys.

“I’m sorry I caused a problem,” Rhodes said as she sat down next to Poppa and cracked open the beer. “I was told I could get a drink here, and … well …”

“Let me guess. You wanted to meet some people here, maybe see what we’re like off-duty.” The old man crushed the empty can in his hand and lobbed it toward a nearby waste can; it bounced off the wall and hit the floor, but he made no move to pick it up. “Your arrival wasn’t exactly a surprise, ma’am. In fact, we sort of thought you’d show up sooner or later.”

“I wasn’t …”

“Horseshit,” he said slowly, smiling a little. “You’re not the first journalist who’s come calling, and you ain’t gonna be the last.”

Rhodes took a nervous sip from her beer. There was no point in denying it; Poppa had caught her in the middle of a lie. “Don’t take it personal, miss,” he continued, “but there’s not a whole lot of sympathy for reporters among the people who work here. Ain’t that right, Curtis?”

Dr. Z didn’t reply; he had already returned his attention to the computer screen. “Of course,” Poppa went on, “Dr. Z and Billy are young turks, so they don’t remember the old days. Now, take Bill here, f’rinstance …”

“Shut up, Poppa.” Billy’s right foot tapped the floor in time with the music; he didn’t look away from the tube. “I’ve got enough trouble as is.”

Poppa ignored him. “Billy’s my co-pilot. We fly a satellite retriever, when we’re not hanging out here. Now, Billy here … he spends six years in the Navy, flying air-sea rescue choppers out of Jacksonville while getting some astronaut training on the side, all ’cause he wants to be an astronaut when he grows up.”

“Shut up, Poppa.”

Poppa paused to belch into his fist. “’Scuse me … only problem is, the program’s going down the tubes by the time he gets out. Kid wants to go to Mars, but he’s lucky to be picking up busted American Comsats with me so we can sell ’em to the Japs.”

“You’re salvaging dead satellites for NASA?” Rhodes asked.

“No,” Billy replied. “We’re salvaging dead satellites for us.”

“McGraw Orbital Services,” the old man explained. “Edmund McGraw, president and chief executive officer, at your service.” He winked at her. “NASA keeps us up here to get rid of the low-orbit junk, and we make a few extra bucks by selling it to the Wogs and Krauts as scrap and spare parts.”

He groaned as he heaved himself out of the couch to fetch another beer out of the fridge. It wasn’t hard to tell that he was already drunk. “At any rate, it’s a living. Sucks, but it’s a living.”

“Gravity sucks,” Billy said, “but only by one-third …”

“Old joke, Bill, and watch your mouth.” Poppa McGraw fell back into the couch as he opened his beer. He stretched out his legs and motioned with his can toward Curtis Zimm. “And as for the right honorable Dr. Z over there …”

Zimm only half-listened as Poppa McGraw droned on, telling Rhodes more than she probably cared to know of his life story.

Not that he particularly minded. Ed McGraw was an old-timer whose service record aboard the Wheel went back to the old Space Force days, and he always welcomed the opportunity to rehash his stories when anyone gave him half a chance. Everyone aboard the Wheel had already heard them a dozen times; pretty soon, Poppa would start telling Rhodes about his glory days as the pilot of the retriever ship that had rendezvoused with Ares One when it returned to Earth back in ’77. Rhodes, of course, would believe every word; so had Zimm, when he first came aboard Space Station One a year ago.

Over
a year ago, he reminded himself; fourteen months, two weeks, and three days, to be exact.

Curtis Zimm had wanted to be an astronomer ever since his father had given him a small hobby telescope for Christmas when he was eleven years old. Although his family didn’t have the money to send him through college, Zimm had partially solved the problem by enlisting in Air Force ROTC. The decision had caused him to lose a few friends among the Minneapolis hard-rock crowd he’d been hanging out with, but it enabled him to go to CalTech to study radio astronomy. Given a choice between searching for black holes or watching another Prince-wannabe at a downtown club and pumping gas for the rest of his life, he chose black holes.

Zimm had completed the requirements for his B.S. and M.S. in record time, but in his sixth year of college the federal tuition money began to run out. As a career prospect, radio astronomy is practically worthless unless one has earned a Ph.D., but since his ROTC funds had dried up and the National Science Foundation had turned down his grant application, it looked as if Zimm’s academic term at CalTech would come to an end before he could complete his doctoral thesis on quantum singularities.

As it turned out, his faculty advisor at CalTech had once been a major in the old U.S. Space Force and still had some connections at NASA. On behalf of his student, Professor Beason managed to swing a deal with the space agency: in exchange for spending a year aboard the Wheel, during which time he would learn to fly
Harpers Ferry
, NASA would pay Zimm’s tuition, as well as giving him preferred access to its low-orbit Advanced X-ray Astrophysics Facility. The last part of the arrangement was particularly sweet; although it was difficult for students to book time with the AXAF satellite, it was controlled from the Wheel, and therefore Zimm would be pushed to the head of the line every time he wanted to log an hour or two with the observatory. And in return, NASA had a new taxi pilot, just when the last one was quitting and going back to Earth.

Zimm had jumped at the chance; if everything worked out, he’d come out of the twelve months with a doctorate and enough real-world experience to land him a nice professional job at one of the better radio observatories. But everything didn’t work out. Ten months after he joined the Wheel’s crew, AXAF had gone on the fritz before he could complete his studies of the Cygnus X-l pulsar. The satellite’s starboard solar array had been nailed by a micrometeorite, causing the telescope to lose half of its internal electrical power.

NASA didn’t have the necessary funds to purchase a replacement wing from Martin Marietta, and wouldn’t have until half a dozen congressional subcommittees decided whether the cost of maintaining AXAF was worth sacrificing some senator’s favorite pork barrel. The last he had heard, the satellite was competing against a proposal to build a railroad museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

So here he was: stranded aboard a broken-down space station, his doctoral thesis in limbo, his future prospects uncertain. At this point, it was beginning to look as if his next job would be teaching Astronomy 101 at a junior college in Duluth …

“Now, back in ’77, things were different,” Poppa was saying.
Tell me about it
, Zimm thought. “I was running MR-13 … Mars Retriever One-Three, and she’s still my ship … and we had gone out to lunar orbit to pick up Ares when it came back, and ol’ Neil … that’s Neil Armstrong, y’know … Neil radioed in to say that he had lost power to the port engines and he was …”

Poppa would soon get to the part in which he would claim that if it weren’t for him, Ares One would have shot past the rendezvous point and its crew would have been lost in the cold, fathomless reaches of outer space. It was the same bullshit story Curtis had heard a dozen times over.

If it wasn’t for on-line pals like Mr. Grid, he would have gone nuts by now.

OK
, so let me get this straight,
he typed as he tried to focus on keeping up his end of the conversation.
The Duke came to the Castle, but he wasn’t interested in sex. Right?

He had begun using Le Matrix shortly after he arrived on the Wheel, first as a way of communicating with the rest of the astronomy community, but later as simple escapism. He had first met Mr. Grid on the
Lost In Space
fan board, and since then she had become one of his closest friends on the net. She had some kinky interests, to be sure, but at least she didn’t flame like many of the teenagers he had encountered on Le Matrix, nor did she sign off at the mention of an event horizon.

When it turned out that her on-line boyfriend was supposed to be visiting the Wheel—indeed, that Thor200 was Paul Dooley, a crew member on the upcoming
Conestoga
mission to Tranquillity Base—he promised to meet Dooley when he got off the ferry from the Cape and pass a sly word that she was waiting for him this evening on Le Matrix. His private impression of Dooley was that he was as weird as a three-dollar bill. However, judging by the way she was talking tonight, he wasn’t entirely certain Mr. Grid hadn’t gone off the deep end herself.

A long pause. The system was running slow, but that was to be expected. His downlink was being bounced across any number of Iridium Comsats, so it sometimes took more than a few seconds for their messages to be transceived between the Wheel’s rec room and her small apartment in Phoenix, Arizona.

Finally, the reply came:
It wasn’t just THAT, damn it! He didn’t ID himself as the Duke either! He signed on as Thor and he thought the Duke was someone else!

He shrugged.
So he forgot he was supposed to be the Duke & signed on as Thor200 instead. Where’s the beef?

“So why do they call you Poppa?” Rhodes asked.

“’Cause I’m the poppa dog, Miss Rhodes. Like a retriever …
Fido’s Pride
, that’s my ship, the MR-13. You’ll see it tomorrow when Dr. Z runs you out to
Conestoga
. It’s parked next to the garage. Gimme another beer, Billy.”

That’s not all,
Mr. Grid replied.
I don’t think he knew I was a woman. When I started to come on to him, he didn’t know what to do at first, then he started to tell ME what I was supposed to be feeling!:(

Curtis picked up the Coke he’d been drinking, found it empty, and tossed it in the waste can.
He looked a little shaken when I picked him up at the ferry, Gaby. Shuttle flights can be rough sometimes.

“In fact,” Poppa continued, “we’re going to be flying the ol’ boat out tomorrow, right behind you guys …”

“Really?”

“That’s the fact. We have to pick up
Conestoga
’s departure tanks after y’all drop them. They usually let them go, but after
Conestoga
comes home, the Smithsonian wants to dismantle the whole thing and bring it back to Earth for storage at the Air and Space Museum annex in Maryland. So they want the whole ship, drop-tanks ’n all.”

That’s not all,
Mr. Grid replied.
He drank the nectar without realizing that it was blood. When I told him that it had come from a young boy I had captured and placed in the dungeon, he thought I was talking about having SEX with him!

Curtis blinked as he read that.
Well,
OK
, that’s a little weird, all right … but he could have still been shaken up!

“The entire ship?” Rhodes asked. “That’s going to cost a lot to bring back to Earth.”

“Sure it is. Kind of a bitch, ain’t it … ’scuse my language. We’ve got enough money to dismantle the last moonship and make it a tourist attraction, but we can’t pay to keep it operational. I mean, what’s this country coming to?”

I got suspicious, so I told him the Dane was calling for me from upstairs and I had to leave … and he reacted as if the Dane was still alive!! BUT HE MURDERED THE DANE 6 MOS. AGO! :0

Dr. Z nervously rubbed his hand across his shaved scalp. There was a lot about cybersex that he still didn’t understand. How two adults could achieve erotic satisfaction from indulging in on-line fantasies was still beyond his comprehension; for him, it was like trying to masturbate with a copy of
PC World
. Nonetheless, his friendship with Mr. Grid was as intimate as if they were brother and sister sharing stories about a real-world rendezvous with a secret lover; because of that, he knew a lot about the romance between Thor200 and Mr. Grid … or rather, under different screen-names, DukePaul and LadyG.

At least once a week the Duke and LadyG had rendezvoused in a private room on Le Matrix, where they gradually collaborated in a romantic liaison that combined elements of various gothic horror novels they had both read. A bit of Bram Stoker, a dash of Anne Rice, some cable-TV reruns of
Dark Shadows
… soon they had created a scenario in which Lady Gabrielle, a vampire of noble blood, had seduced Duke Paul and, after biting his neck and transforming him into her undead consort, had coerced him into murdering the Dane, her husband. Now they got together on Le Matrix to grope each other in the Castle. They traditionally began each session by drinking the blood of fictional teenage boys LadyG had lured from the nearby village … the “nectar,” as she preferred to call it.