Short fiction complete, p.168
Short Fiction Complete, page 168
Living aboard Freedom was sort of like living in a bad hotel, without gravity. The quarters were cramped, there was precious little privacy, the hot water was only lukewarm, and the food was as bland as only a government agency could make it. I spent ten-twelve hours a day inside a space suit, strapped into an MMU—a manned maneuvering unit—assembling our equipment on the special boom outside the station.
The agency insisted that the magnetic field could not be turned on until every experiment being run inside the lab module was completed. Despite all our calculations and simulations (including a week’s worth of dry run on the station mock-up in Huntsville), the agency brass were worried that our magnetic field might screw up some delicate experiment the scientists were doing. It occurred to me that they didn’t seem worried about screwing up the stations own instrumentation or life-support systems. That would have threatened the lives of just astronauts and mission specialists, not important people like university scientists on their campuses.
Anyway, after eleven days of living in that zero-gee tin can, I got the go-ahead from mission control to turn on the magnetic field. Maybe the fact that one of the big solar panels got dinged with a stray chunk of junk hurried their decision. The panel damage cut the stations electrical power by a couple of kilowatts.
Rockledge had already launched two of the Nerf balls: one on a shuttle mission, and the other from one of their own little commercial boosters. They were put into orbits opposite in direction to the flow of all the junk floating around, sort of like setting them to swim upstream.
Right away they started having troubles. The first Nerf ball expanded only partway. Instead of knocking debris out of orbit, it became a piece of junk itself, useless and beyond anybody’s control. The second one performed O.K., although the instrumentation aboard it showed that it was getting sliced up by some of the bigger pieces of junk. Rather than being nudged out of orbit when they hit the sticky balloon, they just rammed right through it and came out the other end. Maybe they got slowed enough to start spiraling in toward reentry. But it wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks before the Nerf ball was ripped to shreds—and became yet another piece of orbiting junk.
“They’re part of the problem,” I said to Sam over the station’s videophone link, “instead of being part of the solution.”
Sam’s round face grinned like a jack-o-lantern. “So that’s why D’Argent’s looking like a stockbroker on Black Tuesday.”
“He’s got a lot to be worried about,” I said.
Sam cackled happily. Then, lowering his voice, he said, “A friend of mine at the tracking center says the old original Vanguard satellite is going to reenter in a couple weeks.”
“The one they launched in ’58?”
“Yep. It’s only a couple of pounds. They called it the grapefruit back then.”
I looked over my shoulder at Freedom’s crew members working at their stations. I was in the command module, standing in front of the videophone screen with my stockinged feet anchored in floor loops to keep me from floating around the place weightlessly. The crew—two men and a woman—were paying attention to their jobs, not to me. But still. . . .
“Sam,” I said in a near whisper, “you want me to try to retrieve it?”
“Do you have any idea of what the Smithsonian will pay for it?” he whispered back. “Or the Japanese?”
I felt like a fighter pilot being asked to take on a risky mission. “Shoot me the orbital data. I’ll see what I can do.”
It took a lot of good-natured wheedling and sweet-talking before Freedom’s commander allowed me to use one of the station’s OMVs. There was a provision for it in our contract, of course, but the station commander had the right to make the decision as to whether VCI might actually use one of the little flitters. She was a strong-willed professional astronaut; I’d known her for years, and we’d even dated now and then. She made me promise her the Moon, just about. But at last she agreed.
The orbital maneuvering vehicles were sort of in between the MMUs that you could strap onto your back and the orbital transfer vehicles that were big enough for a couple of guys to go all the way to GEO. The OMVs were stripped-down little platforms with an unpressurized cockpit, a pair of extensible arms with grippers on their ends, and a rocket motor hanging out the rear end.
I snatched the old Vanguard grapefruit without much trouble, saving it from a fiery death after it had spent more than half a century in space. It was just about the size and shape of a grapefruit, with a metal skin that had been blackened by years of exposure to high-energy radiation. Its solar cells had gone dead decades ago.
Anyway, Sam was so jubilant that he arranged to come up to Freedom in person to take the satellite back to Earth. Under his instructions, I had not brought the grapefruit inside the station; instead, I stored it in one of the racks built into the station’s exterior framework. Sam was bringing up a special sealed vacuum container to take the satellite back to the ground without letting it get contaminated by air.
Sam was coming up on one of the regular shuttle resupply flights. Since there wasn’t any room for more personnel aboard the station, he would stay only long enough to take the Vanguard satellite and take it back to Earth with him.
That was the plan, anyway.
Well, the news that a private company had recaptured the old satellite hit the media like a Washington scandal. Sam was suddenly hot news, proclaiming the right to salvage in space while all sorts of lawyers from government agencies and university campuses argued that the satellite by rights belonged to the government. The idea of selling it to the Smithsonian or some other museum seemed to outrage them.
I saw Sam on the evening TV news the night before he came up to the station. Instead of playing the little guy being picked on by the big bullies, Sam went on the attack:
“The satellite’s been floating around up there as dead as a doornail since before I was born,” he said to the blonde who was interviewing him. “My people located it; my people went out and grabbed it. Not the government. Not some college professor who never even heard of the Vanguard 1958b until last week. My people. VCI, Incorporated.”
“But the satellite was paid for by the American taxpayer.”
“It was nothing but useless junk. It went unclaimed for decades. The law of salvage says whoever gets it, owns it.”
“But the law of salvage is from maritime law. No one has extended the law of salvage into space.”
“They have now!” Sam grinned wickedly into the camera.
It didn’t help, of course, when some Japanese billionaire offered 30 billion yen for the satellite.
Next thing you know, the shuttle resupply flight had no fewer than five guests aboard. They had to bump an astronomer who was coming up to start a series of observations, and a medical doctor who was scheduled to replace the medic who’d been serving aboard the station for ninety days.
Five guests: Sam, Ed Zane from the space agency, Albert Clement from the Department of Commerce; Pierre D’Argent of Rock-by-damn-ledge.
And Bonnie Jo Murtchison.
Sam was coming up to claim the satellite, of course. Zane and Clement were there at the request of the White House to investigate this matter of space salvage before Sam could peddle the satellite to anyone—especially the Japs. I wasn’t quite sure what the hell D’Argent was doing there, but I knew he’d be up to no good. And Bonnie Jo?
“I’m here to protect my investment.” She smiled when I asked her why she’d come.
“How did you get them to allow you . . .?”
We were alone in the shuttle’s mid-deck compartment, where she and Sam and the other visitors would be sleeping until the shuttle undocked from the station and returned to Earth—with the satellite, although who would have ownership of the little grapefruit remained to be seen.
Bonnie Jo was wearing a light blue agency-issue flight suit that hugged her curves so well it looked like it was tailor-made for her. She showed no signs of space adaptation syndrome, no hint that she was ill at ease in zero-gee. Looked to me as if she enjoyed being weightless.
“How did I talk them into letting me come up here with Sam? Simple. I am now VCI’s legal counsel.”
She sure was beautiful. She had cropped her hair real short, almost a crew cut. Still, she looked terrific. I heard myself ask her, as if from a great distance away, “You’re a lawyer, too?”
“I have a law degree from the University of Utah. Didn’t I tell you?” The whole situation seemed to amuse her.
When a government employee gets an order from, the White House, even if it’s from some third assistant to the flunky, he jumps as high as is necessary. In the case of Zane and Clement, they had been told to settle this matter about the satellite, and they had jumped right up to space station Freedom. Clement looked mildly upset at being in zero gravity. I think what bothered him more than anything else was that he had to wear coveralls instead of his usual chalky gray three-piece suit. Darned if he didn’t find a gray flight suit, though.
Zane was really sick. The minute the shuttle went into weightlessness, Sam gleefully told me, Zane had started upchucking. The station doctor took him in tow and stuck a wad of antinausea slow-release medication pads on his neck. Still, it would take a day or more before he was well enough to convene the hearing he’d been sent to conduct.
Although the visitors were supposed to stay aboard the shuttle, Sam showed up in the command module and even wheedled permission to wriggle into a space suit and go EVA to inspect our hardware. It was working just the way we had designed it, deflecting the bits of junk and debris that floated close enough to the station to feel the influence of our magnetic bumper.
“I must confess that I didn’t think it would work so well.”
I turned from my console in the command module and saw Pierre D’Argent standing behind me. “Standing” is the wrong word, almost, because you don’t really stand straight in zero-gee; your body bends into a sort of question-mark kind of semicrouch, as if you were floating in very salty water. Unless you consciously force them down, your arms tend to drift up to chest height and hang there.
It made me uneasy to have D’Argent hanging (literally) around me. My console instruments showed that the bumper system was working within its nominal limits. I could patch the station’s radar display onto my screen to see what was coming toward us, if anything. Otherwise, there were only graphs to display and gauges to read. Our equipment was mounted outside, and I didn’t have a window. The magnetic field itself was invisible, of course.
“The debris actually gains an electrical charge while it orbits the Earth,” he muttered, stroking his gray mustache as he spoke.
I said nothing.
“I wouldn’t have thought the charge would be strong enough to be useful,” he went on, almost as if he were talking to himself. “But then, your magnetic field is very powerful, isn’t it, so you can work with relatively low charge values.”
I nodded.
“We’re going to have to retrieve our Nerf balls,” he said with a sad little sigh. “The corporation will have to pay the expense of sending a team up to physically retrieve them and bring them back to Earth for study. We won’t be launching any more of them until we find out where we went wrong with these.”
“The basic idea is wrong,” I said. “You should have gone magnetic in the first place.”
“Yes,” D’Argent agreed. “Yes, I see that now.”
When I told Sam about our little conversation, he got agitated.
“That sneaky sonofabitch is gonna try to steal it out from under us!”
It all came to a head two days later, when Zane finally got well enough to convene his meeting.
It took place in the shuttle’s mid-deck compartment, the six of us crammed in among the zippered sleeping bags and rows of equipment trays. Bonnie Jo anchored herself next to the only window, the little round one set into the hatch. D’Argent managed to get beside her, which made me kind of sore. I plastered my back against the airlock hatch at the rear of the compartment.
Sam, being Sam, hovered up by the ceiling, one arm wrapped casually on a rung of the ladder that led up to the cockpit. Zane and Clement strapped themselves against the rows of equipment trays that made up the front wall of the compartment.
Zane still looked unwell, even more bloated in the face than usual, and queasy green. Clement seemed no different than he’d been in Washington; it was as if his surroundings made no impact on him at all. Even in a flight suit, he was a thin, gray old man, and nothing more.
Yet he avoided looking at Sam. And I noticed that Sam avoided looking at him. Like two conspirators who didn’t want the rest of us to know that they were working secretly together.
“This is a preliminary hearing,” Zane began, his voice a little shaky. “Its purpose is to make recommendations, not decisions. I will report the results of this meeting directly to the vice president, in his capacity as chairman of the Space Council.”
Vice President Benford had been a scientist before going into politics. I doubted that he would look on Sam’s free-enterprise salvage job with enthusiasm.
“Before we begin. . . .” There was D’Argent with his finger raised in the air again.
“What’s he doing here, anyway?” Sam snapped. “What’s Rockledge got to do with this hearing?”
Zane had to turn his head and look up to face Sam. The effort made him pale slightly. I saw a bunch of faint rings against the skin of his neck, back behind his ear, where medication patches had been.
“Rockledge is one of the two contractors currently engaged in the orbital-debris-removal feasibility program,” Zane said carefully, as if he were trying hard not to throw up.
Bonnie Jo said, “VCI has no objection to Rockledge’s representation at this hearing.”
“We don’t?” Sam snapped.
She smiled up at him. “No, we don’t.”
Sam muttered something that I couldn’t really hear, but I could imagine what he was saying to himself.
D’Argent resumed, “I realize that this hearing has been called to examine the question of space salvage. I merely want to point out that there is a larger question involved here also.”
“A larger question?” Zane dutifully gave his straight line.
“Yes. The question of who should operate the debris-removal system once the feasibility program is finished.”
“Who should operate. . . .” Sam turned burning red.
“After all,” D’Argent went on smoothly, “the debris-removal system should be used for the benefit of its sponsor—the government of the United States. It should not be used as a front for shady, fly-by-night schemes to enrich private individuals.”
Sam gave a strangled cry and launched himself at D’Argent like a guided missile. I unhooked my feet from the floor loops just in time to get a shoulder into Sam’s ribs and bounce him away from D’Argent. Otherwise, I think he would have torn the guy limb from limb right then and there.
Bonnie Jo yelled, “Sam, don’t!” Clement seemed to faint. My shoulder felt as if something had broken in there.
And Zane threw up over all of us.
That broke up the meeting pretty effectively.
It took Bonnie Jo and me several hours to calm Sam down. He was absolutely livid. We carried him kicking and screaming out of the shuttle and into the station’s wardroom, by the galley.
What really sobered Sam up was Bonnie Jo. “You damned idiot! You’re just proving to those government men that you shouldn’t be allowed to operate anything more sophisticated than a baby’s rattle!”
He blinked at her. I had backed him up against the wall of the wardroom and was holding him by his shoulders to stop him from thrashing around.
“I screwed up, huh?” Sam said sheepishly.
“You certainly showed Zane and Clement how mature you are,” said Bonnie Jo.
“But that sonofabitch is trying to steal the whole operation right out from under us!”
“And you’re helping him.”
Before I could say anything, the skipper poked her brunette head into the wardroom.
“Can I see you a minute, Spence?” she asked. From the look on her face, I guessed it was business, and urgent.
I pushed over to her. She motioned me through the hatch, and we both headed for the command module, like a pair of swimmers coasting side by side.
“Got a problem,” she said. “Mission control just got the word from the tracking center that Rockledge’s damned Nerf ball is on a collision course with us.”
I got that sudden lurch in the gut that comes when your engine quits or you hear a hiss in your space suit.
“How the hell could it be on a collision course?” I didn’t want to believe it.
She pulled herself through the hatch and swam up to her command station. Pointing to the trio of display screens mounted below the station’s only observation window, she said, “Here’s the data; see for yourself.”
I still couldn’t believe it, even though the numbers made it abundantly clear that in less than one hour, the shredded remains of one of the Nerf balls was going to come barreling into the station at a closing velocity of more than ten miles per second.
“It could tear a solar panel off,” the commander said tightly. “It could even puncture these modules if it hits dead center.”
“How the hell . . .?”
“It banged into the spent final stage of the Ariane 4 that was launched last week. Got enough energy from the collision to push it up into an orbit that will intersect with ours in . . . “—she glanced at the digital clock on her panel—” . . . fifty-three minutes.”
“The magnetic field won’t deflect it,” I said. “It hasn’t been in space long enough to build up a static electrical charge on its skin.”
“Then we’ll have to abandon the station. Good thing the shuttle’s still docked to us.”
