The Victor Project (4 page)

     “Yea,” she replied.

     “It’s just like that,” he said.  “Except I would swear that the air was fresher.  There are large beautiful forests and long flat landscapes, along with lakes, animals, insects, you name it.”

     “The air is fresher?” she asked.

     “I think so,” he said.

     “And you see this everywhere, not just around the outside of the zones?” she asked.

     “Yea, it’s like that along the entire route between m Zone 3 and here,” he replied.

     “So if it’s so beautiful, then why aren’t we all out there living in it, enjoying it?” she asked.

     “I’m not sure.  I guess that there is still some animal out there carrying a deadly disease,” he replied.

     “Do you really believe that?” she asked.

     “Like I said, I’m not a scientist so I have to speculate,” he stated.

     “Have you ever asked?” she said.

     “No, but what other reason would there be to keep us in these zones?” he asked.

     “Maybe there’s some other reason than protecting us from some virus,” she said.

     “Like what, Miss Skeptic?” he asked.

     “I don’t know.  I’m not a scientist either.  Hey, what kind of hostess am I, not offering you a drink?” she said as she walked into the kitchen.”

     “A beer will do,” he said.

     Rick glanced at a few pictures displayed on the bookshelf as she stuck her head in the refrigerator.  With two beers in her hand she made a detour from the kitchen to the balcony.

     “Check out this view,” she said.

     “That’s got to be the end of the zone right out there,” said Rick pointing west.

     “It is.  One time I purposely worked my way over there to the edge,” she said.

     “And,” said Rick.

     “And nothing.  I just wanted to see if I was right,” she said.

     From a distance far outside the zone, Rick noticed a quick flash of light.

     “Did you see that flash of light just then?” he asked.

     “Where?” she replied.

     “Right there, you didn’t see it?”

     “No,” she said.  “You think that the power plant is out that way.”

     “Maybe.  Could be a landfill,” he said.

     “Maybe you are seeing things,” she joked.

     “Quite possible,” he replied.

     “One day I’m going to live out there,” she remarked.

     “Outside the zones?” he asked.

     “Yea, why not?” she said.

     “Well for one thing you’re not allowed out there,” he said.

     “See, that’s it.  Why aren’t we allowed out there?” she asked.  “It’s the same air.  It’s the same germs.  We’re people, not animals.”

     “But if everyone was free to travel whenever and wherever they chose, then another epidemic could easily spread.  One more like the last and man will vanish from the face of this earth,” he said.

     “I don’t believe that.  I believe that epidemics thin the population and that certain people will always survive and become immune to that virus.  Then that group re-populates the earth.  If another epidemic comes along, it starts all over again.  It’s mother nature’s way,” she said.

     “But here’s the kicker.  Thousands, no millions of innocent people will die while man ignores a way to beat
Mother Nature,” he replied.

     “You’re not supposed to beat
Mother Nature.  It’s natural selection, the strongest survive.  Don’t you see, it’s the way the earth takes care of itself.  We’re not supposed to fuck with that.  If you read about past epidemics, pandemics, contagions, etc., they all fizzled, they all burnt out.  The human population was reduced to some acceptable ecological level and life went on.”

     “I know, I’ve read history,” he said.  “But there just aren’t that many people left.”

     “And guess what would have happened if these zones wouldn’t have been built.  The human race would have thinned.  Eventually, the population would have become more secluded, more remote, moving away from the cities.  Sure masses of people would have been quarantined by the government and millions would have died, but in the end, the changes in society would stifle the virus and a few that survived would carry the immunity.  Mother Nature’s mission is fulfilled and everyone begins the every day business of survival.  Look out there.  See what she wanted?  She needed a break from man’s destruction, a chance to re-group and clean up the air and water, to re-forest.  It was going to happen either way,” she said.

     “So maybe the same number of people would still be alive, but.”

     “But we would be free and the immunity of the survivors would be stronger,” she interrupted.

     “You know that could mean that you and I would not be standing here talking,” he said.

     “That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?” she asked.

     “Well, I’m kind of enjoying your company,” he said.

     “That’s not what I meant,” she said.

     “I know what you meant,” he interrupted.

     “Hey, it’s getting pretty late,” she said as she glanced at her watch.  “Maybe I should give you a ride back to your hotel.”

     “No I can walk.  It’s just a few blocks up the street, right?” he asked handing her his empty bottle.

     “Yea, you can’t miss it.  You sure you don’t need a ride?” she asked.

     “I’m sure.  I actually don’t mind the walk on a nice night like this,” he said.

     “It seems like the last few years that every night has been like this,” she said.

     “Maybe the government is controlling weather also,” he joked.  “Hey, I had a great time.  When can I see you again?”

     “You’ll see me soon,” she replied.

     “You seem pretty confident of that,” he said.

     Val simply nodded.  The two made their way out of Val’s apartment and into the hallway.

     “We have to be quiet,” she said bringing a finger to her lips.

     Rick gave a wave before stepping onto the elevator.  He hadn’t met a girl like Val in a long time.  Paranoia or no paranoia, there was something interesting about her.

     The night really was beautiful.  It was almost fall and the air seemed just a bit cooler and fresher at night.  Heading toward the Glandville, he thought back to Val’s argument about who should have been taking care of the human race.  It was easy to see her vote was for
Mother Nature to take over the job.  Whatever process or selection that had been balancing the ecological system for the planet, had done a pretty good job over the last few million years.  A disease or two infecting the human inhabitants was really nothing in the big scheme of it all.

     He began to wonder if other people in the zones had the same thoughts as
Val.  Of course, there must be a few hundred, maybe even thousands, he told himself.  But why hadn’t he contemplated it on a more serious level until now?  Not until some woman he had never met before bends his ear back and slaps him in the face.  Now all he could think about was the credibility of his efforts for the department.  Was he really spreading some normal everyday germ between the zones?  Was that really his true purpose for the regular visits?  Val made it known that she felt there was some other reason that the government was confining us to the zones, reasons other than protecting the population from some virus.  The question that started to make sense was, why weren’t we free?  Moreover, when will man be allowed to live outside the zones again?  It all seemed so simple before tonight.

CHAPTER 3

     Chief Engineer John McKintrick navigated his way around deck Q5D checking each of the atmospheric meters posted at the corridor crossings.  C-Orbit Station was at most one year old, but at times it exhibited characteristics of a much older space station.  Lately there seemed to be more quadrant pressure alerts and non-standard breathable-air readings than during the entire time he had been aboard.  This was the first time that the sensors on the D section of level 3 had lit up the monitoring board.

     Module Q also had its fare share of problems lately, mostly with air-locks, but modules M and O had been keeping engineers working around the clock on everything from common electrical problems, to violent temperature fluctuations, to reports of strange noises.  Module S was the newest appendage to C-Orbit station and had been online without a glitch since its inception over two months earlier.  Module P was almost completed and was scheduled for live testing in forty-six days.  All the SPS engineers had assured everyone in Functional Services that a great number of lessons had been learned from the structural and functional issues arising from module’s Q, M and O testing and that no discernible problems would avail themselves for modules S and P that followed.  So far they had proven to be good students.  All McKintrick needed now was for SPS to invent time travel and revisit the construction of Modules Q, M and O.

     John McKintrick had been summoned from the remaining stragglers of the Galaxy Exploration Program (GEP) to join the building of C-Orbit station.  That had been almost two years ago to this date.  For almost two hundred years the GEP had waned amongst budget cutbacks and political pressure to resolve the more immediate problems of virus intrusion on the human population.  The entire United States GEP employee total had dwindled to less than three-hundred-twenty-five.  For the rest of the GEP associates around the world, estimates were around four hundred.  That was until six years ago when the C-Orbit program kicked in.  Now estimates worldwide of GEP employees were in the thousands.

     The United States GEP center was located along the northern edge of Zone 6, formerly Houston Texas.  The center consisted of approximately sixteen buildings most of them looking like vacant warehouses.  The pads for earth-originated launches were located approximately seventy-five miles south of Zone 6, but since most of the GEP ships were engineered and constructed from orbiting stations, the pads were mainly used to transport men and material.  On a clear earth night in the old days, when John looked southward from Zone 6 around one o’clock in the morning, he would catch a glow from a transport’s rockets as it headed for a GEP construction station.

     John had been born in Zone 3 and had never left until the call to join GEP in Zone 6.  Sometimes he wondered if he would ever see Zone 3 again, or even Earth for that matter.  Some of the SPS engineers had been vacuum residents for over ten years.  To John, there was something odd about the concept of long term space habitation.  He always thought man was Earth’s creatures bred for land, water and all the sundry gases that surround it and not designed to simply gestate in some metal tube.  He would prefer to evolve on a surface that evolved with him, a surface that was malleable and vulnerable and most of all unpredictable.  Upon completion of C-Orbit station, he had made up his mind to transfer back to the blue marble floating outside the window to his left.

     Every digital gauge that he had checked on D deck displayed the same fluctuating readings that had consistently fallen into the acceptable parameters.  All John could think of now was that there must be either a malfunction in the peripheral monitoring computer or the acceptable limits were set incorrectly.  One other possibility was that the sequencing of decks could have been registered improperly.  In the morning he would have one of his people rerun the internal program setup and logic for both the atmospheric readings and deck sequence.

     Unfortunately, regardless of the resolution, he was required to report all Level-2 and higher system alerts, be they benign or malicious.  And that meant registering a report with the Functional Services Committee who from time to time stuck there noses way beyond the limits of their smell.  For every piece of paper he had submitted to the committee over the past two years, they had requested an additional ten.  After two years, it seemed like enough documentation had been generated so that everyone on earth could have received one page.  He could only conceive that GEP had built a paperpulp space station that was at this very moment floating close by.

     Outside of Functional Service Engineering (FSE), someone had created a self sufficient testing group that was in charge of quality control of C-Orbit as an entire entity, the term Quality-Control translating to keeping everyone on track and in line.  FSQC as they were called, had been running rigorous testing scenarios for the past year.  For all John knew, the Level-2 alert could have been one of their mock-drills and his follow-up, crucial to the grade would receive, including the report submission to the committee.

     The spot where he completed the gauge check was less than twenty feet from the main elevator that offered access to the greater portion of C-Orbit.  His next stop needed to be the S5-corridor fire doors on S-Deck, which was right above him.  Two of his Engineer-3 flunkies, Brant Stiller and Stanton Kroil had been working on the doors all day and were close to finishing.

     Of the twenty-six engineers that reported to him, Stiller and Kroil had to be the two most cocky.  GEP hired them both on the same day, right out of school and somehow they both got assigned to C-Orbit as part of the same resource request, probably because no one else could stand them.  They were smart, that was for sure.  John had heard rumors that they were both top of their class at Aldrin Space Academy.  The trouble was that they frequently reminded him of that very fact in one form or another.

     To John, the two of them were actually quite a spectacle.  Every superior that they came in contact with got “The Test”, so to speak.  It was kind of their own personal probe of wit and sarcasm used to gauge if the target had the spine to command them.  John had got “The Test” five months ago when they came on board.  He had seen a hundred guys like Stiller and Kroil.  Granted, they were a little hard to take together, but on that day he drew his sharp sword of quip and slashed them down to size.  They still bare their chests and strut around every once in a while to test the waters, but in the end they know who the head rooster was. 

     The doors had been shut down now for nearly sixteen hours, well beyond the station’s Service & Safety Specifications that had been set by the committee.  Actually anything over ten hours made him a little jumpy also.  If the two of them hadn’t fixed the problem by now, he would have to perform a manual close on the doors and come up with another idea later.

     As John rounded the corner he could see Kroil stowing away tools.  Stiller had his remote override pilot plugged into the door’s access panel.

     “Chief,” said Kroil.

     “Tell me you’ve got this thing working,” said John.

     “All done,” said Stiller as he pressed the override button one more time.

     “Tell me you’ve got this thing working PROPERLY,” said John.

     “Hell, it’s better now than when those SPS fuck-ups built it,” said Stiller.

     “Yea, you two are just super-engineers, right?” joked John.

     “You got it Chief,” said Kroil.  “There ain’t nobody better than me and Stiller.

     “Except you Chief,” said Stiller.

     “Oh yea right, except you,” joked Kroil pointing the last screwdriver at John.

     “If you guys worked as well as you kissed ass, you’d have my job,” said John.

     “Who says we want your shit job?” said Kroil.

     “Good point.  I don’t even want the fucking thing.  Let’s see that thing one more time,” said John pointing toward the doors.

     Stiller pressed the button one more time and as the doors shut, John grabbed a screwdriver from the toolbox and stuck it between the closing doors.  The two massive metal plates closed tightly around the thinnest part of the screwdriver and snapped it in two.

     “Good thing you didn’t use your hand,” said Kroil.

     “Good thing I didn’t use your dick,” said John.  “You guys return the tools to the office and call it a night.”

     “Roger Chief,” said Kroil.

     The remainder of the first engineering shift had clocked out almost two hours ago.  Second engineering shift was short three people already, with one on earth-leave and two out sick.  It looked like he would again be working until midnight just to keep up with the service requests.  John spun around and headed back toward the main elevator for a quick ride back up to O-deck.  C-Orbit’s O-deck housed pretty much all the electrical and solar power functions for the entire station.  Most of the solar panels supplying the energy down to O-deck for storage and distribution were attached to giant structures that themselves were attached to B-Module.  These giant structures, which were located on what one would consider the top end of C-Orbit allowed full rotation of the panels to optimize the collection of solar energy.  He was most thankful that over the past two years the solar energy system had functioned relatively maintenance free, but earlier today it had evidently become jealous of all the attention the other modules were receiving.

     Over the past few twenty-four hour periods, the newly upgraded Energy-Unit-2 had four of it’s inline coolant pumps reach temperatures somewhat warmer than the other eight within the same grid, twelve degrees Fahrenheit warmer to be exact.  The temperature difference in the pumps didn’t trigger an official alert, he was thankful for that.  One of the monitoring room crews noticed the increase on the panel display and had upgraded the issue to their temporary checklist.  The array of idiot lights programmed to assist in monitoring the complex energy system of C-Orbit were known to have given false readings on occasion.  And even though the fluctuation didn’t require an official report to be opened, he had promised himself to check on it personally when the first opportunity arose.  

     John pressed his finger against the ID pad and spoke the three letter password to gain entrance to the Engine Monitoring Room.  As the door slid open, there were two men closest to the monitoring/control board who awkwardly halted whatever task they were executing and glared at him as if he was a B-deck tourist who took a wrong turn.  During his tour on C-Orbit, John had entered the Engine Monitoring Room what must have been over four hundred times and the two faces staring contemptuously in his direction were not familiar in the least.

     There had always seemed to be at least two people in the main area of cycle room, one routinely posted on guard in front of the monitoring panels, the other executing various duties.  One of them named Robert had consistently worked the second shift since John came on board, but after a quick glance around the room, he was clearly not on duty.  The badges the regular monitoring room workers were required to wear exhibited a bright orange stripe just below the title of Solar Engineer that was stamped near the fastener.  The way the two men were positioned, John couldn’t make out the type of badge they were wearing, if any.  What he could make out was that they were holding some hand held device with a small keyboard attached to its front.  Since someone had somehow seen to it that they had access to this room, they could dance the Tango and scream like monkeys, as long as they didn’t get in his way. 

     John made his way across the monitoring room and opened the maintenance door to the main generating room, which contained everything from the distribution grid to the solar feeds that ran from the panels.  The path to the Energy Units wove through a forest of conduits and massive cables.  EU2 was so tightly packed between EU1 and EU3 that he practically had to sit on one to even view the other.  The unit itself looked like a giant nine-foot hammer with the four pumps attached to the iron block on the end. 

     John made is way along EU2 caressing the cylinder in an attempt to acquire its temperature.  Nothing seemed out of the ordinary, at least not to the touch.  When he reached the end of the unit, John tapped the pumps with a much lighter touch than he did with the unit itself.  If the pump had increased in temperature ten degrees more than what he had seen lately, his finger would be paying a visit to the hospital deck.  A few more taps between the four pumps and John felt it safe to allow his fingers a longer sample time.  They were still hotter than they should have been.  His best guess would be the equivalent of the twelve degrees the indicators had been showing. 

     Assigning the task of a late night check to one of his engineers seemed like a good idea.

     “Pam, this is John,” he spoke into his transmitter.

     “Hey John, you checking up on me already?” she asked.

     “Do I need to?” he replied.

     “You know me, I’m always working harder than I should,” she said.

     “You sound like you’ve been hanging around the bullshit brothers on first shift,” he said.

     “That’s nice.  Call me up and insult me to start the day.  You’re a real inspiration,” she joked.

     “OK, here’s my speech.  I need you to check the coolant pumps running into EU2 around eleven o’clock tonight,” he said.