Chapter 3

It took only a week to destroy Banner’s little world. Sophie was gone so quickly that he didn’t even get to say goodbye. He returned after a day spent packing and shifting stuff around to find a glowering young marine living next to him. Dude was always banging into things, shaking the stall with loud curses, singing along with the 3Xper music he favored, and farting loudly—when he wasn’t masturbating furiously, slapping the end of his bad thing against the thin wall of the partition.

Camus disappeared the same time Sophie did. Banner didn’t know if the cat could survive full gravity on Earth but maybe the French had some way to resolve that problem. He couldn’t message her because it was now treasonous to communicate with anyone belonging to one of the other sides. Maybe he didn’t want to know anyway.

He spent a few days showing bored young soldiers how to polish knobs, change lights, and unplug the head. The International Space Station was literally being taken apart around them as the Russians prepared to move their part into another orbit. One day he was given fifteen minutes to pack his kit and then shipped unceremoniously back to Earth where he was immediately handed his pink slip. Only old Stubbsie stayed behind, muttering under his breath about the new recruits and slinging “shit on a shingle” like the pro that he was.

On the ground Banner drifted forlornly back to his home in Brown County, Indiana where he discovered that he was something of a local hero. He rented a small apartment in the village of Nashville, spending a few weeks collecting unemployment, drinking beer, and catching up with old friends. When he was offered a job teaching at the high school he didn’t say no and soon after started dating a woman he’d known most of his life, Annabeth Crunkle, a sales technician for Barnacle Bill the Realtor’s local office.

ØØØ

Novy Mir moved to an orbit on the other side of the world from the recently renamed ISS—once again called Freedom. The Russians worked doggedly, as was their style, while new alliances were forged on the planet below. Modules were quickly added, scavenged from hangers, museums, and monuments throughout the old USSR. Others were whanged together on the fly from the upper stages of booster rockets. If things occasionally decompressed, or quit working, you improvised, by god! Outer space wasn’t for pansies.

With nowhere else to turn the French joined with the Russians and, surprisingly, the Japanese. The three nations collaborated first on building a moonbase, Tsiolkovsky/jVerne/Itogawa (AKA TjVI or Tj6), taking advantage of the Russian’s share of the Lunar north pole and its hidden reserves of water.

As Europe’s leading expert in controlled ecological life support systems, Sophie Täuber was deeply involved in planning the spaceship from its inception. She routinely flew from Paris to Star City in Russia, then to French Guiana by way of Japan, where she boarded a rocket directly to jVerne, on the Moon. Nearby, in the Russian quarter, the hull of the spaceship was being manufactured. It looked hauntingly like a Soviet-era submarine.

Their conservative Russian partners had rejected her first design, where the cosmonauts would live within a park-like setting. She was forced to confine her efforts to a large bay up front where the plant life would consist mostly of tanks of algae soaking up the crew’s excess carbon dioxide. This biomass would then be pressed into yummy, artificially flavored briquettes, both nutritious and full of fiber. As compensation she was allowed a small, compact garden to supply just enough variety in their diet to prevent them all from going completely bugfuck, as the Americans liked to say.

She had to be careful about using Americanisms like “bugfuck” around her French colleagues, who were highly suspicious of her ties with NASA as it was. In contrast, the Japanese still loved all things American and the Russians just laughed when reminded of their former partners, as they would at the antics of their favorite circus clown, or an ape. In contrast, the French were taking it personally.

She also learned that she was expected to raise chickens and maybe even a few pigs and goats for the crew. She sighed, “The things I’ll do for science.”

ØØØ

Soon after returning to Earth she took a weekend off to drive up to the Vosges Mountains of Alsace.

“Why aren’t you married?” Her mother asked as they stood together in the yard of her uncle’s winery where their clan gathered every year for its reunion. It was a mild afternoon, a fresh breeze playfully blowing at the skirt of her sunny yellow dress, just enough to keep the lads interested. Her shoulders were bare, protected from the sun by the shade of a wide brimmed hat. As they talked she watched the children playing on the lawn around small parental islands.

“My career . . .”

“Your career!” Mama Täuber mocked. “Aren’t there any nice boys in astrology?”

“Astro-aeronautics, Mother. Of course there are. I just haven’t the time right now.”

“I don’t want to die without grandchildren.”

“What about René’s and Charlotte’s children?”

“Ach,” she snorted. “They never visit their grandmother.”

“There’s Charlotte right there,” she hurriedly motioned her sister over. They hugged. The sisters were very similar except that Charlotte’s eyes were lightly colored and her brown hair was long and swept back.

“You looked like you needed rescuing.”

“Mother’s trying to get me married again.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Charlotte laughed, reaching affectionately over to their mother.

In her wake came the twins and her husband André. He had once been Sophie’s lover, in fact she had been the one to introduce him to her sister.

“How’s the outer space thing going?” André asked after a quick hug.

“I can’t say too much about it,” she shrugged apologetically. “The government literally thinks of it as a war.”

André laughed, “Politicians are crazy.”

Sophie nodded agreeably.

ØØØ

The wind was cool and stiff coming off the mountainside as the kids were finishing off their salt water taffy. Sophie pulled her sweater around her shoulders.

“It’s all the darkies’ fault!” Her mother bitterly groaned. They had been arguing for a long time and the older woman was pulling out all stops, like a prune tree at a wholesale auction. “Those Arab bastards! For once we should listen to the Germans.”

“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” André cautioned. “After all, we invited them in to do our dirty work, but still . . . they’re different from us.”

“They have their traditions,” agreed Charlotte. “They may be as valid as ours but the two don’t mix.”

“Look at the way they treat their women,” said Mama Täuber. “They think of us as prostitutes!” She spit on the ground with contempt.

Her children looked at one another, wondering what that was all about.

“We’ve been in conflict with them for over a thousand years,” André added, the scent of antiseptic about him. “How many times must they invade us before we put an end to the argument?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Sophie gasped.

André shook his head at her naiveté. “No one wants to see it happen this way but once the oil is gone—before they can get any more nuclear bombs—they must be dealt with. Mark my words: it’s Tours all over again, but this time for keeps. It has to be.”

Sophie didn’t know what to say so she said nothing and soon the conversation drifted back to children and old friends and their old friends’ children, but she remained disturbed for a long time after.

ØØØ

The evening sun glowered like the red eye of Osiris over the waters of Lake Monroe as Banner and Annabeth lifted their canoe out of the water, carrying it the short distance to her Toyota Trailseeker. As they secured it to the rack on top Banner had little to say. They had covered a good deal of the east end of the lake, gone into what felt like a hundred inlets, seen a thousand houses, heard several dozen barking dogs, and found a few areas that hadn’t yet been improved by the bulldozers. They’d had sex in the woods in one of them, later finding ticks in a few unlikely places, then swam in the drinking water for 250 thousand people and peed in it, to be frank. Now he was sunburned, a little lightheaded, and needed a beer.

But first they drove to the old ghost town of Elkinsville, depopulated in the previous century by the Army Corps of Engineers while they built the Monroe Reservoir. They parked the ’Seeker by the road and hiked up Browning Hill where several friends had set up shop at the Miller Memorial campgrounds. A cooling breeze whooshed through the trees as they climbed the hill. He hoped it didn’t mean rain. The day’s long slide into evening shadow having just begun.

“Whassup?” Smitty asked as they arrived at the camp. He was sitting on a large worn log with a banjo on his knee.

“Beer,” was all that Banner replied while opening the cooler. “Meadowbrook, Miller, or Footfall Light, m’dear?”

“Footfall.”

“‘Aw-Natch-uh-lee!™’” he said, mimicking the ad.

“Whatever. Where is everybody?”

“They went with Lia to look at the ruins,” Smitty said while giving the banjo a plunk.

“And you . . .”

“I’ve seen ‘em. They don’t look like ruins to me.”

“It’s still weird, though.”

“Yeah, well, maybe.”

“You don’t think the ancient Celts set themselves up a little Stonehenge up here?”

“I don’t think the Celts set up Stonehenge at all.”

“Um,” Banner muttered uncertainly.

“But flying saucers are another matter,” Smitty said standing up. “If we’re going to look for them I’d better take some reinforcements.” He started sticking beer cans in every available pocket.

“Reinforce me, too,” Banner said.

Ten minutes later they had reached the site. Large stone blocks lay like cordwood stacked by a mad hatter. No one knew how they got there but there were plenty of ideas. Some thought the Native-Americans had cut them out of the soil, as a place to honor the Eternal Spirit of the Land, even if that wasn’t exactly their style. Others thought that the formations were natural, first exposed by the glaciers’ retreat. Others believed they were quarried by the first Anglo settlers and then forgotten. And some imagined things stranger still—of a lost tribe of Celts or Vikings or little green men.

In the deepening twilight Banner didn’t care. It seemed mysterious and spiritual and that’s all that mattered. His sudden hug caught Annabeth by surprise. She looked to him questioningly.

ØØØ

It was fiendishly hot as Dr. Christain Monelly moved from chauffeured limousine to air-conditioned building and back again. Since returning from the International Space Station Monelly had been deeply involved in building a coalition out of the debris of the old European Space Agency. It was not an easy task since many of the primary facilities had gone with the French and the Russians. EURO-NOL, the union of the German Cultural Alliance with the Northern League (Scandinavia and the Baltic States), did not even have its own launch facility.

Which is why he was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo dicking with the locals. The equator was the best place of all to launch space vehicles and the Germans had maintained a small launch facility here briefly in the late-1970s before the onset of the great Congo wars devastated the area. Numerous militias and armies still controlled much of the Congo River watershed. He was there to shore up the Congo government without alarming its opposition.

To accomplish this he’d brought along Arne Sak as his Regulator. An Icelander, military expert, and true son of the Vikings Sak was tough, unflinching, and, when necessary, brutal—perfect for Christain’s needs.

Truly it saddened him when he was forced to use violence but he’d learned long ago that it was better to give than to receive. Arne was his gift to anyone who stood in his way.

He met with Sak at dusk in a small construction shack on the spaceport’s south side, amongst piles of material hastily unloaded from the huge oceangoing vessels that docked here 24/7, as the goddamned Americans would say. Christain was alone but Sak traveled with a small entourage that he left sweating outside in the evening heat.

“Arne, what have you got for me?” Sak gratefully took the beer that he offered.

“It’s just as you said,” he replied. “The hardest part is separating the dross from the bullshit, as they said in college.”

“I didn’t know you had cattle in Iceland.”

“We don’t. I went to school in Berkeley.”

“Ah. Plenty of bullshit there!”

“We’ve secured everything here in the Congo estuary,” Arne resumed. “River traffic is being restricted to the far bank. The Fourth Corps is taking care of that and they’ve blown up a few locals to prove we’re serious.”

“And the government?”

“Well, Nzuzi wants to use all his new weaponry but we've convinced him to follow our strategy.”

“And that strategy is? . . .”

“Carrot and stick. We’ll leave his rivals alone as long as they stay up river. There’s going to be fighting, sure, we just need to hold it far enough away from the spaceport to keep our investors from getting nervous. The perimeter is being watched by six different kinds of systems, not to mention mined, electrified, and systematically irradiated. If necessary we can create a dead zone around us to the horizon. But that’s a last resort.”

Christain grunted. “A delicate balance.”

Sak grinned. “Old Nzuzi has plenty of rivals in his own party to keep him occupied, hell, in his own family. We can pull the string on him at any time.”

Christain nodded, satisfied. “Good work.”

“If our business is done . . .” Sak walked over to the door and opened it, letting in a wave of thick, hot air. “Send them in.”

“What’s this?” Christain frowned. After a moment the ebony face of a girl appeared as she hesitantly climbed the steps into the trailer, two more girls following. “Benu kota ya benu,” Sak encouraged them inside.

“What is this, Arne?” Christian watched the young girls shyly clinging to one another as they entered the room. He realized that they were thirteen or fourteen at the oldest.

“It’s hard to find clean girls in this part of the world,” Sak answered matter-of-factly. “The younger you can buy them the better. These girls’ families are Christian, they raised them right. I’ve had them tested every which way and they’re not only clean but possibly virgin.”

Christain looked at him mutely.

“Which one do you want first?” Sak finally asked him laconically.

Christain looked at the three girls for a moment before standing up and walking towards them. “For god’s sake, Arne, they’re terrified. Get them something to drink. Please,” he said beckoning to them. “Sit down.”

“Beu,” Sak motioned. “Beu vwanda ya benu.”

Still holding to one another the girls shyly crossed the room to the couch. Monelly handed them each a soft drink. They giggled as the carbonated bubbles tickled their noses. “That’s better,” said Christain sitting on the edge of the couch, his hand softly touching the nearest girl’s knee.

“What’s this?” he asked, pulling a coin from behind her ear. She reacted with astonishment as he handed it to her, showing off her prize to the others, who laughed excitedly. For the next half-hour he amused them with parlor tricks and other childish games. He even managed to get Sak involved as the diversions became progressively more intimate. Finally he maneuvered them into the back room where the engineers kept a few small hard cots.

“What will happen to the girls?” Christain asked later after they were escorted out.

“We’ll sell them back to their families, at a discount of course,” Sak grimaced without concern. “If they don’t want them Whoretown can always use new girls.”

“You will try their families first?”

“Of course,” Sak answered gravely.

“Yes. Well, I must go now. There’s still work. Thank you for this evening, Commander. I want to meet with you again before I leave.” He hesitated. “Maybe you can delay returning the taller girl, Kath, I think she said her name is . . .”

Sak gave a sort of bow. “I’m sure she would enjoy being our guest for a while longer.”

“Thank you.” With that Monelly entered the soggy night air.

ØØØ

Group Captain Henry Ireton of His Majesty’s Royal Space Force felt like smacking his head against the wall. Sometimes he thought it would be easier to work with the French and Russians or even, God forbid, the Germans, rather than the Americans. Everything he did had to be vetted by seventeen committees and rewritten into a sort of gobbledygook to satisfy NASA and a hundred other agencies, some of them dating back to the Wright Brothers, he was sure of it. Still, they were seeing some progress. The plans for the so-called “Yankee Clipper” were firming up rapidly. Some of the raw material was already being boosted into space.

The project would have been unimaginable ten years before when even nearby Mars had been out of reach. The irony is that they had had the technology for decades but not the political will. Vast amounts of money had been pissed away on war technology with little to show. Modern warfare was ridiculous, either total extermination or indeterminate conflicts that could last decades and cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. John Kennedy had been right all along. Space was the only substitute for war, a place where nations could compete safely, and where the effort would pay back many times more than all the gold the Spanish had squeezed out of the New World. Essential metals like copper, platinum, zinc, gallium, hafnium, and even elements like helium were severely depleted on Earth. If another source could be found within the solar system—and why not since it was made out of the same stuff as Earth—the race would be on.

It was also a matter of national security. Whatever was inside Charon could change the power balance on Earth forever. God forbid that anyone else got there first.

Inside JPL in Pasadena the plans for the Clipper were coming along nicely. It was hard to believe that they were building a ship large enough to carry twelve people, with room unimaginable to pioneers like Glenn, Armstrong, and Gagarin. Even compared to the ISS it was extravagant. The Americans were throwing their latest technology at it, a lightweight carbon frame, aerogel interior walls, and smart technology everywhere.

Of course the atomic powerplant would be tremendous, with enough power to run a city. It was already under construction at Camp Armstrong near the Moon’s north pole. Its uranium core was being launched in small, nearly indestructible packages, from a floating pad in the Pacific, a place where nary a terrorist, reporter, or protester could reach without having US Navy gunboats up their ass.

It was the ion-drive that would give them the edge, providing them a small but significant acceleration all the way to Uranus’s orbit nearly two billion miles out where they would flip the ship over and begin slowing down again. The engineers were confident in their design; after all, it wouldn’t do to flame out four billion miles from home.

The Germans were said to be working along similar lines but he didn’t see how they could possibly catch up. Their Moon facilities were small and they had no orbital platform. The Russian, French, and Japanese cartel certainly had the expertise to build an ion-drive but was rumored to be taking a more brute force approach. The Chinese—who in the hell knew what the Chinese were up to? They had been an x-factor ever since beating the Americans back to the Moon. Certainly they knew how to make an ion-drive but could they develop one quickly enough?

Well, he didn’t have time to worry about that. His secretary had left another stack of resumes to go through. He had to narrow it down to a hundred or so people who were qualified to go on this mission and then the real whittling would begin. Really, the problem wasn’t skill, they all had skill. The problem was compatibility. Which of them could stand to live for a decade or more in what amounted to a very small jail, closer than family, with no way out if the inmates couldn’t get along?

Each file contained an evaluation from Dr. Ashlee Monelly’s psychology task force broken down to a simple formula. But even these numbers had to fit together like some sociological Humpty Dumpty.

Sipping from a cold cup of coffee he went back to work.

ØØØ

Moon city lights could be seen from Earth, especially showboat towns like jVerne and Oberth. Banner and Annabeth sat gazing upward in the darkness above Browning Hill. Most of their friends were asleep or bumping uglies in their tents. Her head rested on his chest as they pointed out favorite stars and constellations in the sky above them. The flatworm-shaped Milky Way glowed wanly as it crossed the dark sky. Banner absently stroked her hair.

“You miss it, don’t you?”

Banner sighed. “God, I don’t know. It’s so beautiful tonight. The air is clean and there’s a cool breeze. And I got my best girl. In space there usually isn’t much to look at and you can smell a fart for weeks.”

“Sounds like your classroom.”

“Yah . . .” He sighed again. “When I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction.”

“I remember. You were one of the nerds.”

Banner laughed. “Naw, I was never ornery enough.” He sighed, “I always wanted to be out there, somewhere. Now I’ve been out there and the irony . . .”

“A nerdy word.”

“. . . is, is that out there you’re always crowded inside a small room with a bunch of people. There’s not much space in outer space.”

He rested his hand on her chest, above her heart, thumb tickling her chin.

“Hmm,” she smiled like a contented cat, closing her eyes. Banner continued watching the night sky as it moved about his head.

“I love you, sweet girl,” he finally said, but she was asleep.

ØØØ

When the news came Banner almost missed it. He was in the middle of moving from his apartment into Annabeth’s house outside Needmore and the envelope looked like a pre-approved credit card come-on at first. But when he saw the return address his breath caught and he had to sit down, even though there was only the floor left to sit on. It was a simple message, for all it asked of him, and at first he didn’t know what to do. Then he made a telephone call.

Annabeth took his halting explanation calmly, considering what he told her. He didn’t even bother unpacking his boxes, taking them over to his parent’s garage to store. He left her that night.

Sex sad is the sweetest kind.
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More links!
Osiris:
Ancient Egyptian Creation Myth
Osiris And The Golden Pipe (UFO)
The Light of Isis and Osiris
Browning Hill:
Browning Hill Stonehedge2
Wright Brothers:
XKCD
Milky Way:

Galactic Timelapse

Linked earlier:"A Milky-Way Band" photo credit & copyright: John P. Gleason, Celestial Images

Chapter Two

It came through the dark, the spaceship from afar, slowly approaching the small twin planets—plutoids—after a journey lasting six and a half years. Small and compact, the device was the completion of an enterprise that had begun with the Soviet Union’s Luna flyby of the Moon in 1959 and continued through Pioneer, Mariner, Venera, Zond, Explorer, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens, ExoMars, and New Horizons I, visiting every planet and significant satellite in the inner solar system—including these last two, so seemingly insignificant.

Yet the greatest surprise was saved for last.

For two months “Newer Horizons” had been sending back data and with every picture scientists were becoming more excited. As expected Pluto looked like it had been gnawed on by rats but its partner Charon was a perfect sphere.

“Just like the freaking Death Star™!” said Christain Monelly, mission psychologist. He was one of several billion people watching the pictures coming from NASA whose commentator, while visibly excited, was trying to sound reasonable. “It has not been confirmed that Charon is anything but a natural object.”

“Foo!” Monelly crowed. “There really is life out there!” He hugged the nearest woman, who happened to be surprised American engineer Lomaine Brooks. Her startled reaction pulled his foot from its restraint and sent him tumbling, laughing, across the room. When he reached the other side he grabbed a conveniently protruding knob, looking back at the now horrified young woman.

“Dr. Monelly! I-I’m sorry! I wasn’t expecting . . .”

He waved off her apology. “My fault entirely, Ms. Brooks, I was so excited, I forgot myself.”

“The man’s Italian, all right,” snorted another woman nearby. “Roamin’ fingers.” Lomaine turned but could not determine who made the comment. The lounge was quickly filling up as word spread throughout the station. Small vials of cognac and vodka appeared, saved for a special occasion. And what could be more special than finding the signs of life where it had been least expected?

They patted each other on the back. Many kissed. Never was there a warmer international feeling, a oneness. French, British, German, Zimbabwean hugged and shared drinks with their long lost brothers and sisters—the Russians, Americans, Hebrew, Japanese, Indian. Even a Chinese was there, Sen Chin Hui, observing the celebration rather coldly from outside the hatch.

Somebody broke out their private stock of “prison beer” and when a few more off duty “Techs” showed up the party quickly warped out of control. The irrepressible music of Yanni blurped from the PA as conversation became louder to compensate. Couples disappeared. Tension and desire, long repressed, snaked loose. None of them had been drunk in space before. Some of them had not been drunk since joining the astronaut program. It left them easy victims to their emotions. They danced The Huracanrana with abandon in cool microgravity and participated in adolescent drinking games. A huge puddle of beer (the Romanians entire supply) was persuaded to float in the middle of the room while various people drank through long plastic tubes. One guy stuck his lips on the globule and it quickly enveloped his head. Only the fast action of a couple of laughing marines saved him from drowning.

The frivolity continued until Admiral Grobotnin got wind of it. He looked into the room with horrified dismay, quickly gathering his staff who entered the room to quietly persuade the scientists and station personnel that it was time to go back to a reasonable facsimile of work.

Two hours later Banner Brummett shook his head in disbelief. The place was a disaster. The hatches had been shut and the module powered down to prevent crap from floating all over the station. It was up to him and him alone to make things right. He knew the job was dangerous when he took it. An Internal Maintenance Person (IMP) by any other name was still just a janitor.

ØØØ

“She called me her friend.”

“Too bad.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s already decided that you ain’t the lover-man for her. It’s her way of letting you know, you know?”

“Oh, no.”

“Yeah, too bad.”

“But if I just . . .”

“There ain’t no ‘buts’ about it,” Stubbs growled. “Women are very specific about these sorts of things. Maybe in twenty or thirty years. After one or two divorces her standards might change. You never know. Until then, forget it!”

“Twenty or thirty years?” He asked in dismay.

“Yeah, you’ll be surprised how quick the time goes by. But you gotta stay friends with her. Keep in touch.”

“Do you keep in touch, Stubbs?”

“Sure. Gotta girl in every port, as they say. Or is that a port in every girl? I always get them mixed up.”

“Naw!”

“C’mon, kid, there’s just a few simple rules. If she’s married, it’s hands off. Maybe have dinner with her and the hubby and meet the kids. Be a pal, it won’t kill ya. But if she’s between husbands, then I’ll be between her sweet sheets before you can wink an eye.”

Banner laughed. “Get off that!”

“Ah,” Stubbs turned away with disgust. “You young guys think everything has to happen right now! Plan for the future! Throw your net out wide and eat what you catch!”

This was why Banner hated talking about serious things with Stubbs. The old man had plenty of free advice, advice that could strip paint off a battleship. “Twenty years,” he sighed. Free advice when all he wanted was little Sophie.

Oh well, Camus would have to do for affection. The cat didn’t have complete run of the station but close to it. He was allowed in the crew quarters, the lounge, welcomed in the greenhouse, and the boys in CrispusAttucks® Bio Lab always liked a look at him. For some reason he didn’t go there much.

Banner had the responsibility to keep Camus fed, his litter boxes clean, and his furry body as far away from the brass as possible. Easy to do. Yeah. Many times he was called to rescue the feline, such as the time General Spigot was visiting. Who could have guessed the General had such an odd phobia? Oh, and they didn’t care for Camus wandering around in a shuttle after it had docked, or in the cloning tent, or surgery. Banner was certain he’d only sniffed at that old kidney, not licked like they’d said. The galley was also forbidden turf but Stubbs kept the cat out of sight while feeding him tidbits in a warm little spot near the forced-air oven that was his favorite place to snooze. Today, though, he was nowhere to be found.

Banner went into the cafeteria where he got a drink of limeade, avoiding the carbonated beverages. Unlike on Earth, in microgravity air would not come out of suspension within a liquid, meaning that the bubbles of carbonation passed through the body instead of fizzing out with a few satisfying burps when it hit the stomach. It wasn’t supposed to hurt the kidneys or anything but Banner didn’t care much for the tickling sensation later while it passed from his body. Supposedly if you drank enough you could even carbonate your sperm but he suspected that story had been made up by some overzealous Casanova.

There were several techies in the cafeteria but no one he knew so he left the module. He looked at his watch tattoo and realized with a shock that he had some free time before he had to be in Engineering. The luxury was so unexpected that he didn’t know where to turn first. Of course he should go back to his room and study, or sleep. He could visit Sophie, but she’d just put him to work. What to do?

Zeee zeee zeee, his cell phone signaled. Banner sighed before answering. “Brummett here.”

“It’s your cat again, Mr. Brummett.”

“My cat?” Banner protested. “You mean our cat, don’t you?”

“The furball’s in the command module,” the lieutenant scowled from the display. “The Admiral wants him out and I think he means all the way out.”

“Oh, right. And who do you think is more popular right now? Camus, the first and only space cat, beloved by children worldwide—not to mention the President’s daughter—or Admiral Grobotnin?”

“Just come and get him, Mr. Brummett,” came Grobotnin’s tired voice from behind the lieutenant.

Oops! “Right away.” Smooth move, Banner thought as he pulled himself along to Command, to piss off the Admiral.

Camus was being held by Sophie as he came in. He could hear the cat purring against her breast loudly.

“Where’d you find him?”

“By the vent.”

“He likes the warm air. Come here, big gray,” Brummett took the cat from her. Camus burfed with indignation. “It’s okay.”

Banner was surprised to see that all the station’s top brass were present, crowded in with some new faces that must have come up this morning. Even he could sense the ill-disguised worry and uncertainty here. He quickly hurried the cat away.

Admiral Grobotnin watched them leave, then called the meeting to order. The room was small but far better than being in a submarine, where he had started his career, because here, at least, you could sit on the ceiling. He had grown used to a lot of unconventional things, he realized, looking around where the senior personnel of the major partners of the International Space Station floated queasily. The group included US Admiral Phillis Creed; the representative for the European Union, “Long” Jean Albertine; Sen Chin Hui of China; Cal Mikaru representing JAXA. Advisers included Group Captain Henry Ireton of Britain; Major Dunker from the US Army; Italian psychologist Dr. Christain Monelly; and American engineer Lomaine Brooks. Besides the bigwigs, bigger wigs watched from Second Life.

Admiral Creed was the first to speak, befitting the leading role the US expected to take. “We are gathered here to discuss the recent discovery of an alien artifact by the United Nations Space Ship Newer Horizons and form some sort of early consensus as to our response.” Her dour gaze drifted over the representatives of the senior partners of the United States.

On the room’s screens pictures of Charon and Pluto were shown, many unreleased to the public. “Of course the first shots returned were highly compressed. These are the complete transmissions and you can see quite a bit more detail. There was no doubt about the huge open pits under the ice on Pluto’s surface were not natural formations. By contrast Charon and the smaller moons look as smooth as billiard balls although the surface has some cratering and what look like tearing in the surface.”

“We’ll have to go there!” Countess Tracy spoke without taking her eyes off the slideshow.

“Yes, it looks that way,” Creed replied. “We’ll send more probes, of course, but our robots just aren’t sophisticated enough to do what needs to be done.”

“First contact!”

“Maybe . . . There’s little doubt that someone built Charon from material that was probably mined on Pluto but the evidence suggests that it’s been a long time since anyone was there.”

“Could they be in suspended animation?”

“Or living inside without knowing where they are?”

“Or controlling our world through proxies?” Christain Monelly snorted. “All of this is speculation, pure science fiction. We won’t know until we get there.”

“How will we accomplish this?” Long Jean asked. “It took almost seven years for the probe, a small device, to reach there.”

“As you know we’re about to commence tests on the Moon of a nuclear powered ion drive that we were planning to use for the Mars expedition,” Creed replied. “We think we can lead an effort to send up to twelve people to Charon within, oh, five to ten years.”

“You are preparing to lead . . .” Albertine repeated with muted hostility.

“Well, it’s a very general document, of course. Congress would have to approve as well as the partner nations.”

“It’s good of you to want our approval.”

“What does that mean?”

“US leadership has always lacked . . . focus.”

“It might be time for someone else to take the lead,” Nikolai Matroshka, the Kremlin’s advocate, interjected.

“Someone else? Who do you have in mind? Russia? You couldn’t even make it to the Moon!”

“Americans’ problem is that you always overcomplicate things.”

They all looked to Grobotnin. The Russian, after all, had been onboard Mir! He had been with the ISS from the very beginning of the cooperative venture, instrumental in keeping the Soyuz supply craft aloft when Congress had refused to allow NASA to pay its share of the effort. His whole career was invested in getting along with the Americans.

He shrugged. "Will be better to go our own way.”

“Alexi, I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Creed said, aghast.

The noise in the room grew as everyone starting arguing at once, including the avatars on Government Island.

ØØØ

Next to the air lock Banner quickly went through the checklist one last time with the astronaut floating before him. The man was nervous inside his space suit, this being his first time out.

“Nothing to worry about, Ace,” Banner reassured him. “We’ll be watching you closely.”

“Sure,” Cantrell replied, thoughts somewhere else. He was there to work on the (Space) Measurement Project, an offshoot of the investigation of tethers in orbit, where it was shown that a single strand of aluminum, 10 kilometers or longer, would thrum the magnetic lines surrounding Earth causing electricity to flow through the tether. With completion of the loop this electricity could be used. The cost was in a declining orbit, which inevitably had to be paid back—expensively.

For this experiment buckytubes, hollow carbon fibers, were produced from doped slurry of carbon, aluminum, and a patented catalyzing-agent, shipped to Earth orbit. The filaments were kilometers long, more ephemeral than cobweb, yet harder than diamond. Although they cut into almost any surface, individually they were too light to do much harm unless the shards were inhaled. It was only when they were twined together in long thin ropes, that the strength of the carbon molecule became apparent.

For this experiment the fiber had been left untwined, and a little brittle from its doping. From Banner’s monitor in Engineering ten kilometers away it looked something like a huge, dark ball of cotton candy with a long string attached.

“And from this you’ll get power?” he asked Lomaine dubiously.

“Not so much,” she said. “Think of it as a sieve sweeping through Earth’s orbit. They’re trying to define space, or at least the strip of it that passes through that sieve, to way below the atomic level.”

“Damn!” Banner said thoughtfully.

“Electrodynamic tethering is only one thing they’re investigating. There’s also some hope of finding a useful way to tap vacuum energy.”

“I’ll guess I’ll have to wait for the paper.”

Outside the crew was still running over their checklists. Lomaine stretched her rubbery body, sighing, then took a drink of water. “Better do your business if you got any,” she said. “This’ll be your last chance for awhile.”

“I’m fine.”

Lomaine continued studying her readouts even though there was little to see as they waited for the crew to finish their readiness checks and move into position. Considered one of best of the new generation of space engineers, Lomaine Brooks was on her first stint at the ISS, although she had been to the Moon once, helping dig Tunnel East at New Neil, the village nestled against Armstrong Moon Base.

She was a “NASA brat,” growing up in Cape Canaveral.

“What was that like?” Banner asked wistfully.

“Probably like anywhere else in the South except they’d let us out of school sometimes to watch big honking rockets go up.”

“Lucky.”

“Well, Dad worked for NASA, so I knew everybody. They let me have the run of the place. I met all the astronauts, even Neil Armstrong once,” she sighed dreamily.

“Damn! I got to see a Shuttle go up once. Dad and I had to stay three days for the weather to clear. Missed out on Disney World but it was worth it.”

Lomaine laughed. “You probably drove right past my house.”

“What did your father do at NASA?”

“He helped get shuttles ready for launch.”

“He’s retired now?”

“He died in a fueling accident, with four others. Twelve years ago.”

“Oh, I’m . . .”

“No, it’s . . .” She smiled sadly at Banner’s look of consternation. “I’m only sorry he didn’t get to see me make it up here. It was his dream, too.”

“We’re ready, Houston,” Stan Orsky said from outside, allowing them to drop the conversation and concentrate on their jobs.

Ace Cantrell was easy to find since he was wearing the big fluorescent green stripe of a rookie. He represented the companies that were underwriting this project. Castile and Orsky were wearing the orange of the experienced outside worker.

They had finished combing the hair of the Medusa’s head of buckytubes and were ready to begin calibrating the tools.

Orsky, an old hand, had helped construct the “Next Gen” ISS. A naturalized American citizen from Poland, he hid sly humor beneath a peasant’s face. It was as if Copernicus’s brain had been dropped into a plumber’s head. The third astronaut, Hermando Castile, was the best Belize offered, one of the nation’s few pilots to rate a jet fighter. Even so he’d been teaching classes at the University of Belize just five years before.

Banner’s duties weren’t much, an extra set of eyes. Watching another person work in space was boring, really, so keeping his checklist up to date was important, it kept him involved. It also kept his attention focused on detail, which is why he didn’t notice the new guy swooping towards the collector field. Its tendrils seemed to ripple as if it were underwater, an illusion that reminded some of a giant jellyfish but to Banner it always looked nasty and sharp, like a porcupine.

A tool had slipped from Cantrell’s grasp with enough momentum to take it through the safety zone.

Banner’s first thought was annoyance. He was certain he’d tethered the instrument correctly. But it was difficult to use that way and Cantrell must have removed the restraint—presumptuous for a rookie. Then he realized the man was moving too quickly as he sailed past the tool he was chasing. Even as Banner keyed a warning he knew it was too late, watching with horror as Cantrell plowed into the field of buckytube filaments. There go a few hundred million bucks down the drain, he thought, watching the man disappear in a puff of splintering tendrils. Who was going to clean up that mess? He was just glad there was a video record of the suiting because they were going to blame somebody for this cock-up. For sure Cantrell would never leave the ground again.

“Aw, Christ!” Lomaine exclaimed violently. Then with consternation, “Stan!?”

“We’re on our way.”

She turned up the gain on Cantrell’s suit mike. They could hear his angry muttering. There was also a whispering sound as he passed through the bucktube field, like sawgrass slapping against bluejeans.

It took Lomaine a moment to realize what that meant, and then she gasped, “Get him out of there!”

Cantrell’s squeal died like a deflating balloon. Banner could see the filaments puff a bit from escaping gas where the man had disappeared. White frost limned the Medusa’s tendrils. In shock, Banner barely noticed the emergency alarm going off.

ØØØ

Dr. Mary Ellen Cartouche performed the autopsy in a special room. She was wearing a Mylar™-coated space suit because the module had been evacuated to prevent contamination of the evidence. It was also to keep the infinitesimal shards of buckytube from contaminating the station, or invading the skin and lungs of the doctor, she hoped.

In the middle of the room a large cube of black stuff was strapped to a gurney. It was what was left of Ace Cantrell after they had removed the bits that didn’t have human paste stuck to them. All she needed to do was dig out a few samples so that they could officially confirm that this mess was who they thought it was and for the drug tests and whatnot. Maybe a brick to give to his family for burial, although she’d let the metallurgists handle that. The remainder would be dropped into the Sun with the rest of the hazardous waste.

Cantrell had been sliced to less than ribbons by the buckytube filaments, Dr. Cartouche would tell the inquest. Oh, you wouldn’t notice the first one you brushed against, or the first thousand. The damage they did would be microscopic, not enough to raise a welt on bare skin. But a million would start to hurt and a billion buckytubes would completely shred a man, one molecule at a time. There was nothing left of Cantrell, no suit, no bone, no lucky rabbit’s foot, or picture of his children. There was just this block of freeze-dried human/carbon goo where even the DNA had been parsed into tiny fragments.

ØØØ

Ashlee pressed the warm towel to her face, getting the pores to open and breathe. Sometimes it seemed that being hidden underneath a damp towel was the only time of the day when she could be completely alone. Sadness filled her briefly as she listened to Christain humming to himself from the other side of their compartment. He was listening to Caledonian pop again through the ePod™ implanted into his cochlea. She had to smile as he tried in vain to keep up with the tempo.

Their private suite was by far the most extravagant in the ISS but still only about the size of a large Tokyo capsule hotel. Nevertheless, they had enough space for their own sanitary facilities and even enough room for two or three visitors if they packed everything away and nobody breathed hard. She carefully braced herself before pulling her red hair back in a ponytail.

The humming stopped. “Ashlee, honey,” he said in his soft accent. “Come to bed, please. We have to be up in four hours.”

“All right,” she said, pulling herself over to her sleepystation and unraveling its womblike hammock. They no longer shared a sack but she had gotten used to that.

Christain watched her undressing in the dim light. There was a time when the sight would have filled him with anticipation but tonight it filled him with vague anger. It didn’t make sense; after all they’d agreed to an open marriage—at least that’s what he’d thought. Scratch an American and you’ll find a Puritan lurking underneath the surface every time. Why had he married one?

Looking at the round curve of her ass he knew one reason. Another was that she was by far the brightest student he had ever taught. Despite their age difference, like most women she had been easy enough for him to seduce, but there was something else in her: energy, ideas, and—Christain was honest with himself if with no one else—political connections, which attracted him and was the reason why he had made her his fourth wife.

For Ashlee’s part, she was used to having men fall in love with her. It was expected. Like a child with too many toys she’d lost interest in all of them. She rejected most men before they’d opened their mouths. Christain, though, had proven to be a hard nut to crack.

Christain’s age, he was twenty years older after all, had scandalized her family, but the sex was very good and felt somewhat naughty. Most importantly, their ambitions were identical. They were both deeply interested in the social and physical environment of humans living in outer space. Christain was Europe’s leading researcher in space medicine and psychology. Forming an alliance with him made sense, the more intimate the better.

Or had been. While discreet, Christain had never made a secret of his interest in all women, from 18 to 80, but when it reached a point where Ashlee couldn’t touch him until she’d seen the results of blood tests he’d taken on his way to bed, she knew it was over.

Typically, now that she was all cozy in her sleepysack, Christain wanted to talk. About work, what else was left? Another sign of age, or was it familiarity?

She answered him the best that she could. He was concerned, he said, about the imminent break-up of the coalition that supported their work. She woke a little at that. “You’ve heard something new?”

Monelly sighed. “I can tell you because it’ll be public knowledge in a few hours.” He paused as if considering what to say.

Ashlee snorted. She knew he had worked out every word well in advance. He always did.

“My government is ending its cooperative agreement with NASA and the United States.”

“What?”

“I’m being recalled.”

“So it’s come to that. When did you find out?”

“A few hours ago.”

“And when were you going to tell me?” she said as cold certainty enfolded her.

“I just did,” he replied calmly. “I had to pack first.”

“What about you and me? You remember, man and wife?”

“I assumed that you would want to stay with your people.”

“My people?” She puzzled. “What people?” She peered at him out her sleepysack. Thin blue light cast his face into shadow as he answered.

“You know it wasn’t working.”

“Our relationship?”

He shook his head with disappointment. “No, my dear, the relationship between our nations.”

“Is it irreconcilable?”

“Well, duh,” he said mockingly, showing his age.

“I’m not one of your bimbos, Christain,” she replied angrily. “What the fuck?”

Monelly looked up at her peering from her cocoon. Even here he was impeccably dressed, graying hair neatly swept back, wearing a robe and slippers. All he lacked was a pipe. Work surrounded him like a blizzard. “Ashlee, I know you’re paying closer attention to the world situation than that.”

“I’ve been busy working on the calcium differentials you’ve been ignoring.” She felt tired, politics bored her. “Let’s see—for sure the Brits with the Americans, bringing most of the old British Empire with them; Israel, Canada, Mexico, a few others; the Russians and . . . I don’t think Japan is ready to break with the US yet. France? Where will they jump? They don’t like the Americans or the Germans. China will carry along a couple of vassal states; Islam, Inc., obviously, will stick together; Europe, east of Alsace, west of Russia . . . Italy? You’re reviving the Axis?” she said, laughing. “You people are insane!”

“More like the Holy Roman Empire,” he answered dryly. “There is much to be said for the Homelands Movement™.”

“You believe that Pride without Prejudice shit? Peaceful Persuasion?”

“Europe for Europeans. There is nothing wrong if it’s done humanely.”

“Like putting a dog to sleep.”

“More like putting the dog out for the night, my dear. What your country does with its Hispanic population.”

She didn’t have an answer for that.

“You can see why our marriage would be a liability. For both of us.”

“Nobody would want that.”

“You could come along,” he offered insincerely. “Join us.”

“I’ve always dreamed of being a tool of German Cultural Alliance propaganda.” She watched him for a moment. He continued reading his PapeR™ serenely. “I was leaving you at the end of our tour anyway.”

“I know,” he sighed. Silence lingered for several moments.

“Do you want a farewell fuck?” Ashlee finally said, poking her head out of the sleepysack.

“Not really,” Christain answered without bothering to look up. “I’ve a busy day tomorrow.”

“Good,” she replied, quickly falling asleep.
.
.

Chapter One

Banner woke to the rhythmic thumping of the couple in the next cubicle. For a moment he moaned along with them but when he awoke he was alone.

“Ah, Sophie!” he murmured, turning on the light. He saw that Camus had gone.

He slipped open his door and leapt towards the shower room. The trick was to get through the doorway without touching the lip of the entrance and then grabbing the bar inside the chamber. After nearly three months on board International Space Station 3.2 Banner could do it in his sleep, which was fortunate as he was still groggy. He had been working 18 to 20 hour days and it was only going to get worse if the scuttlebutt was correct.

Once inside, the door slid shut as he stripped off his sleeping togs. Then he pulled himself to the stool and plugged his butt into an ovoid hole in the wall. Air currents were the secret of taking a dump in microgravity. You just had to get used to the way it tickled your ass and made nasty sucking sounds.

When he had finished, a warm jet of water rinsed his butt crack. Then he climbed into the shower bag, sealing it behind him. Attaching his mouthpiece to the regulator, he breathed easily as a coarse mist of water was circulated about him, like being in a warm thunderstorm. It was the most sensual experience (outside the “other” thing) you could do in orbit. When the spray cycle paused he soaped the thin meniscus of water adhering to his body, scrubbing with the vacuum loofah. The rinse cycle had started before he realized why the sounds coming from Sophie’s stall troubled him. “There were no shuttles, and therefor no shuttle pilots, due in!” He couldn’t remember the last time that had happened. Even time for taking a dump was scheduled at least three months in advance by NASA.

He considered the problem while running the dry cycle. He emerged like a moth from a cocoon to find his pager blinking with annoyance.

“Wanted and needed,” he sighed and quickly swished a gulp of mouthwash around his gums before spitting it into the nearest sucking hole. He’d have to brush his teeth later, if he had time.

He slipped on his overalls and had pushed himself back towards his cubicle when a young man suddenly launched himself from Sophie’s chamber like a Sparky 906 Intercontinental Interceptor (S906II)™. They somehow avoided a collision, Banner froglegging wildly and the dude pulling himself into a tight ball. Banner crashed into the wall, still hearing the rude SOB’s curses fading into the distance.

“Banner!” Sophie said from her door. “You thumped yourself.”

“Who in the hell was that maniac?”

“It’s my Johnny Gatlinberg. Didn’t you see him?”

“It was all a blur. He could have killed someone.”

“Johnny’s been to the Moon!” she said as if that explained everything.

Banner reached inside his cubicle for his socks and began putting them on. “What’s he doing here? I thought there wasn’t a shuttle due for another week.”

“He couldn’t say. I know he brought up some very important people. He just got in an hour or two ago and woke me up.

“Fast work.” he muttered.

Sophie just laughed.

‡ ‡ ‡

The International Space Station had been operational for nearly thirty years, surviving shuttle disasters, budget disasters, management disasters, and wavering vision. NASA had gone nearly insane finding ways to manage construction on a reduced budget. They even considered manning it part-time and building it to last only a short duration. Ideas so ludicrous and wasteful that they must be considered ploys to simply get the space station into orbit in hope that, “If we build it they will come.” And they did. First Russia, then Europe and Japan stepped in, prodded by private money.

The decision to internationalize the ISS saved it. Since then the station had grown like a bilboa tree on steroids, much larger than ever anticipated by its planners. Having a module, or at the very least, a scientist, aboard the ISS became a status symbol that every nation craved.

As nations lined up to contributed major components to the ISS the United States was compelled to increase their commitment to the facility. New modules were added like popcorn strings to a Christmas tree as neophyte space-faring nations such as India, China, and Saudi Arabia bought time there.

As the station personnel grew well past the puny early days of three reduced to two it became efficient to send a small support staff to maintain the outpost. When a country or organization spent tens of millions of dollars training and transporting a scientist to the ISS they wanted that person spending every moment working on their project, not collecting trash, changing filters, or fixing the plumbing. This is where Banner Brummett came in.

It was not the way he’d expected to go to space but he gladly took it.

He was the station’s IMP—Internal Maintenance Person. It meant scrubbing the head, unclogging pipes, taking out the trash 300 miles above the earth’s surface. It meant distilling sacks of urine and fermenting feces, the methane to be broken down further, making fuel and oxygen. The slurry collected in a large elastic bag that Banner called his “bota.” When full he took the slurry bag over to “Botany Bay” where they used what nutrients were left for the plant life. There was more slurry than needed so every third bag was dried out and pressed into briquettes. These were stored in the ICF, (International Containment Facility), also known as “the dump,” where an empty upper-stage booster casing from a Russian Kazooker preceded the ISS in orbit. The ICF served as a bank of raw material for the day when reprocessing would be practical, maybe.

‡ ‡ ‡

“If you’ll check your itinerary you’ll see that it’s been completely changed around,” Lt. Abrogage said as Brummett studied the list. “We’re moving the touristas down and you need to clean up their rooms and get them ready for new visitors.”

“What’s going on?”

Abrogage’s eyes regarded him frostily. “You don’t have a need to know.”

“No, sir, but you don’t just dump people that are paying 20 mill a pop to spend three glorious days vomiting in outer space for no reason.”

Abrogage was unrelenting. “The rooms need to be ready in two hours.”

“Two . . . I’ll need help.”

“Charlotte will be down in a little bit.”

‡ ‡ ‡

God, how he hated tourists. Brummett’s face twisted with disgust as he felt something soft, and wet, and gooey, just out of sight, deep inside the air inlet. He tried not to gag as he pulled the pink-stained chunks out. In microgravity everything tended to follow the airflow, which was the whole point—to encourage skin flakes, hair, dust, pieces of food, saliva, etc. to collect in the traps instead of some important bit of machinery. Sometimes it worked too well.

Where had they gotten all the paper? He wondered, as he cleaned every trap within the module. And the rubbers? It seemed like most of these folks were coming all this way, paying tens of millions of dollars, just to be able to say they’d fucked in orbit. He wished that he had the time.

The trash went into separate containers, which he dutifully inventoried. Fortunately he could be vague about these things. A kilo of glass replaced a champagne bottle and several one-serving bottles of scotch, vodka, and cognac. The joke was that you weren’t supposed to drink in space but, like sex, he’d never met anyone who hadn’t. No use getting some bureaucrat’s or, worse, righteous politician’s, gums in an uproar. Banner worked to clean spattered bits of drink and food from the walls.

Fortunately Charlotte showed up to “change the linen.”

“I didn’t sign up to be a maid,” she groused, ripping a soiled sleep restrainment facility (SRF) from the wall. “I’m a colonel, for Christ’s sake.”

No answer was expected so Banner hauled the trash back to his station. There he separated the material, crushing it before adding it to various storage bins. When they were full somebody would take them outside to the ICF.

‡ ‡ ‡

Brummett’s blog:

Nobody writes anymore, they say. Then why do I spend so many hours filling out forms?

No, that’s not a very good start. Dr. Monelly thinks that it is a good thing for us to keep a record of our daily thoughts for him to thresh (as he calls it) so he can analyze our psychological state and determine any “potential negative” tendencies.

I told him I’d show him mine if he showed me his. He laughed and said he never read the reports themselves but processed the information with a program that breaks the language into small pieces that are rated and compared. He showed me a chart of someone else’s writing and it looked something like a Kandinsky painting. What that means is that what I write is confidential even from him. We’ll see. Especially when he finds out I’ve been boffing his wife, Dr. Ashlee—Just kidding doc.

Or am I?

Because someone is . . .

But that’s just station gossip. Sometimes things get a little like a soap opera despite our code of “professionalism.”

I mean, of course everybody has to try “it” out at least once in microgravity but after that people mostly only have time for an occasional quick roll in the hay, everyone is so busy. So there is probably more—and less—sex going on in space than people think.

I suppose the Drs. Monelly probably could give you the exact figures but I wouldn’t know.

I’m just the janitor.

Oh, I’ve got a fancy title but you can look that up. What it comes down to is that I clean up the messes other people make. Whether it’s loose hair, radioactive spillage, caustic chemicals, or an exploded shit bag, I’m the guy they call.

And then there’s the cat box. I haven’t told you about Camus, yet. Don’t worry, I’ll get to his majesty later—Right now my schedule says it’s time to help Stubbsie in the kitchen.

‡ ‡ ‡

“Stubbs,” Sgt. Frank N. Stubblefeld the third, was probably the least likely man to have ever reached earth’s orbit. He’d joined the Navy as a 19-year-old out of Brooklyn because he liked their ads on TV. After boot camp someone had decided he would make a passable cook and that was all right with him. One day he saw that cooking on the ISS would get him another level of pay and an opportunity to pad his nest egg for retirement. Seniority, good health, and politics had gotten him the job that so many craved.

“I couldn’t care less about the rest of it,” he’d say, unlighted cigar clamped between his teeth, while deftly peeling a potato in one long drifting slice. “I was on submarines when I was young, and later on the big carriers, and I’ll tell ya, the view is never much. I mean, earth’s orbit has got the views but when do you ever get the time to go take a look? It’s just the insides of another ship.”

When it was decided that the expansion of the original ISS facilities would require the services of a full time cook it was for economy. Until that time food was prepared on earth, dried or frozen, creating tons of garbage to pack back down, not to mention the accumulated costs of shipping the packaging up to begin with. It was cheaper to send a balding, profane, son-of-a-bitch into orbit than to have specialists, whose skill could be worth ten thousand dollars a minute, waste their time preparing food.

Also, meals are very important psychologically for a crew far away from home in a stressful situation. An International Feeding and Recreational Facility (IFRF) was designed. About two-fifths of the module contained the kitchen and storage facilities. The rest was a cafeteria/auditorium. One end had a large video screen. A rail went by the serving bar, a long glove box that looked something like a sealed salad bar. Diners pulled themselves along, using tongs and such to maneuver their food onto a tray with dozens of barbs on the bottom to snag the food, whether it be creamed corn, tofu-laced bacon shards, rolls, or chicken-fried steak, which was then egressed to the outside. It could be messy until you learned the basics.

Self-contained foods were the most popular such as fruit and raw vegetables; tortillas, pita, and all kinds of pocket foods; foods with “glop power” like lasagna or Spaghettios™; breads, rolls, bagels, muffins—all processed to keep crumbs at a minimum. Large exhaust fans helped filter debris from the air.

The kitchen had advanced “targeted” microwave ovens; steam jacketed pressure cookers using sound waves to stir the material inside; “Safety Knives™”, with a chip that unsheathed the edge during use; egg depackagers; salami holsters; lemon squeezers; and so on.

Although he usually enjoyed the time he spent with the profane, worldly older man, when Banner entered the mess he could tell immediately that it was going to be the kind of day when he didn’t even want to be in the same orbit as Stubblefeld.

“Get your apron on and wash me some pans.”

“Ummn, which ones?”

“The rectilinear containers, you idiot! How long have you been working here?”

Because a cake, or bread, not only rises in microgravity, it never stops rising, Stubbs had made some rather spectacular globe cakes but most of his utensils were used to restrain such activity. It also made them difficult to clean, which was why they needed Banner, in lieu of a trained ape, to supply the elbow grease.

Banner looked through the porthole where some pans were already soaking in a thin, hot spray of water. Much of the cleaning could be done by machine but there was always some scrubbing around the pans’ corners and ungunking of the spring-loaded doohickies to be done. While waiting for the cycle to finish he watched Stubbs chop mushrooms inside a small transparent box.

“Lasagna makes quite a mess.”

“Yeah, but there’s plenty of goop to hold it together on the end of a fork.”

“A naked lunch.”

“Save that smart-ass shit for Countess Tracy or one of them other women you’re trying to get your end in. Check the bug juice, will ya?”

“Aw . . . Countess Tracy?” The administrator from EURO–NOL was old enough to be his mother. Besides . . . “She hasn’t been in orbit in over twenty years.”

“Well, the bitch is back,” Stubbs muttered, following with a stream of invective so foul Banner nearly hugged himself with glee. “And she’s got some kind of special diet—all those motherfuckers have a special diet. They expect me to make sixteen different dinners without any warning whatsoever. Diabetic dinners, salt-free dinners, vegetarian dinners—fricken diabetic-salt-free-vegetarian dinners! In my day people ate what you put in front of them and it didn’t matter if you were from India, Houston, or Timbuktu!”

Hearing a light ping as the pre-rinse finished, Banner turned back to the porthole where he inspected each pan and utensil carefully before directing powerful jets of water to scour them clean.

“When you’ve finished with that make sure the cafeteria is ready to go, would you?”

Banner pulled himself into the next room. There looked to be enough “bug juice,” in the dispensers. Bug juice was an anonymous citrus-style drink, fortified with vitamins that never tasted any different no matter what color it was. The pop dispensers were in order, nipples clean. The room was in its lounge setting so he quickly unfolded the dining tables from the wall. One of the ass pads needed gluing but otherwise the seating was in order. Sitting velrcoed into a chair was about the only thing you could do in microgravity that wasn’t a pure bitch.

After fixing the seat he looked in on Stubbs to see if anything else was needed but Stubbs dismissed him with a distracted, uninspired curse.

In this kitchen nothing went to waste so Banner gathered the vegetable refuse containment object [VRCO] and hauled it down to Botany Bay, like Santa with a sack full of goodies.

“Botany Bay” was Banner’s favorite place for the simple reason that he got to see his heart’s desire, Sophie Täuber, a young French scientist with about fourteen academic degrees. And single. And a pure bombshell in Banner’s humble opinion. The trouble was that Banner wasn’t her type, which, at this stage of her life at least, was surprisingly specific. She liked rocket jocks, the guys that piloted the shuttles. They were interchangeable, like lightbulbs, and low maintenance, too. She shacked up with whichever one was in port. They were only around a few days at a time and for the rest of the month she could concentrate exclusively on her job.

Her laboratory was literally a Garden of Eden. An extension of the European Space Agency’s Micro-Ecological Life Support System Alternative (MELISSA) it had grown over time from a few seedlings in sterile cabinets to an entire module dedicated to the growing of plants in space. While not part of the original design for the ISS, various agricultural combines had enthusiastically underwritten the module. It was quite large and fat in the middle, like an overweight boxer.

Every kind of plant imaginable had been tried and the ones that thrived were bred to accentuate their best traits. Oxygen exchange for carbon dioxide had always been important, but so were foodstuffs and the psychological impact plants had on people living inside sterile modules. Täuber was expert in all of these things. It was her “microgravity flowerpots” that had allowed household plants from coleus to hydrangea, sinuous vines, and long grasses to invade the confines of the ISS.

Botany Bay itself was an exotic hothouse where plants grew in every spare inch. Water tubing ran everywhere, as did light conduits that brought filtered sunlight into the module for nearly half an orbit, substituting artificial light the rest of the time. Trails were narrow paths bored like a mole’s tunnel throughout the grasping biomass, with guide ropes to pull oneself along. Occasionally a newbie even got himself lost within this verdant garden.

Sophie cared for most of this jungle by herself. A very hard job as she had extended her realm throughout the ISS, backed by the Drs. Monelly, who said the plants and their flowers were essential for morale. She also maintained a vegetable and fruit garden that was used to supplement the station’s rations, another psychological necessity. Although its crops were small it definitely established the necessity of growing food in space.

The centerpiece of Botany Bay was a fountain designed by Henri Guest of Paris. From a reservoir water was forced onto thin buckytubes that guided droplets like beads on a string. Filaments swayed and moved under the influence of the water’s movement. When they touched one another larger beads formed, later to be torn apart. Inertia and capillary action kept the mist and droplets within their realm, eventually to be collected by a ventilation fan into a second reservoir where the water was pumped back around to start the process over again. The effect was remarkably like a fountain on earth, including the tinkling sound of water.

She was used to visitors who came in to enjoy the respite for a few moments. In this she was supported by the Drs. Monelly, who prescribed time to the garden whenever they detected a let down in someone’s mental acuity.

Chatting with the charming Sophie could also lighten anyone’s mood. The girl was an open book with an endless supply of ribald stories. Banner wanted her with all his heart and soul but she kept him at bay like a little boy with a crush on his babysitter. He accepted it because he couldn’t imagine a day without her on any terms. His job allowed him to visit several times a day to gather the trash or, lucky man, to help her with a project, like when they scrubbed and disinfected the slime tanks together.

Today, though, she was in an atypical blue funk. She had learned that, with all the new people coming onboard, several shuttles were expected at one time meaning she could expect a surfeit of boyfriends arriving at any moment and she didn’t see how she could possibly keep them apart.

“I wish I had such problems,” Banner said wistfully.

“No you don’t.”

“Can’t you just say you’re busy?”

“Maybe. I Don’t know,” she answered unhappily. “This is getting to be too much like secondary school.”

“Hey, have you seen Camus today?”

“He’s around here somewhere, I think. He was chasing the birds earlier. Look in his blanket.”

Banner pulled himself over to a set of cubes where they parked useful items and sure enough Camus lay sleeping in one corner. Banner felt a little jealous of the cat as it snoozed there peacefully. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had enough sleep. He hated the blaze of fluorescent lights in the morning when everything looked too real. He laughed to himself. Not surreal—too real. Harf, harf, harf. Boy, was he coming unglued or what? Better not tell anybody.

Fortunately Sophie broke in on his reverie. “How does he do that?” she asked floating forward to observe the slumbering kitty. Camus was curled into a tight ball. A paw covered his eyes and nose with a little help from his tail.

“All cats do that.”

“I mean, how does he keep from drifting around?”

“Well, he uses his claws. The blanket is attached to the brace and the creases and folds just sort of hold onto him once he gets scooched in there.”

“What do you mean by this scooched?” She asked in her charming accent.

She was drifting closely enough to feel her warmth and smell her breakfast, fortunately with mint tea. “You know, like you and Gatlinberg.”

She stretched languidly before him, giving him a suspicious look. “Does Camus also use the barbs on his penis to stay put?”

Banner shrugged. “Does Gatlinberg?” He laughed as Sophie rewarded him with a hard thwack on the head that sent them spinning in opposite directions.

‡ ‡ ‡

One of the more recent additions to the ISS, the gym was a huge wheel spun to create artificial gravity. Set off to one side of the ISS it was reachable through a long, flexible tube to keep it’s vibrations from disturbing the rest of the station. The tube ran from the old Gravity Environment Region Biology Laboratory (GERBL), which acted as an air-lock, to the hub of the wheel where a second air-lock opened into a chamber that slowly turned about the axis of the wheel. From here all points led south and you could choose one of four ladders extending down into the wheel. Water was pumped through an intricate system of piping and reservoirs that maintained the wheel’s balance as people moved within it, sounding something like a constantly flushing toilet.

Weight returned with every rung of the ladder. The bottom was nearly half earth standard, its air smelling of human sweat, lineament, and oil.

Banner could see about a hundred feet in either direction before the curve of the floor rose out of sight. There was a wide jogging track along one side of the corridor. Along the other side was training equipment, basketball hoops, a handball court, lockers, a shower, medical facilities, offices and sleeping quarters for the few who could never adjust to microgravity. Right now a doctor from India was sleeping in the room every night instead of exercising to find out if this alone would be enough to protect him from the debilitation of microgravity. He wore a body stocking containing sensors that constantly monitored and recorded his every moment while seriously hampering his love life.

Not much of a sportsman, Banner preferred jogging around the track although he was also required to take calisthenics in the morning with the military staff.

Ever since the early days of Salyut and Skylab the problem of bone and muscle loss in microgravity had been a major barrier to humanity’s exploration of the solar system. At one time it was believed that artificial gravity would have to be maintained constantly for humans to live and work in space. GERBL suggested that a much shorter time, if combined with diet and exercise, could keep muscle and bone wastage under control. The gym, officially known as the Large Gravity Environment Region Biology Laboratory (L-GERBL), was the first full-scale facility to test this theory.

Near the north ladder were the medical and physical therapy facilities where Banner encountered one of the ISS physicians.

“While you’re here, Banner . . .” Dr. Ashlee Monelly said while pulling out the necessary equipment for a Fecalogram™. Anyone who came to the ISS was automatically a subject for the medical department’s study.

“Aw, gee whiz.”

Monelly, an American, was the wife of the other ISS doctor, Christain Monelly, an Italian. Together, they were the most formidable team in the field of space medicine and psychology. They had performed the first surgery in microgravity and were pioneers in the field of “weightless therapy” for burn victims and badly shattered bone.

‡ ‡ ‡

After washing up Banner returned to his cubicle in the habitat module. This was his only private space, little more than a telephone booth or shower stall. Microgravity helped make it seem bigger than it actually was. He had a video screen that he could use with his computer, or to watch television, movies, and wrestling pay-per-views (if he had any spare time, which he didn’t), or correspond over the Internet. This time he decided to study because Banner had ambitions to be something more than just another space maintenance expert.

Ever since he was a young boy growing up in Brown County, Indiana, Banner had wanted to be an astronaut. He’d built models and collected patches, went to Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama when he was eleven using the money he’d saved from nearly two years of paper routes. He could remember vividly the Shuttle launch he’d seen when his parents had taken him to Florida. Bad weather had forced its delay and his father had stayed with him for five days while Mom took the rest of the kids to Disney World and the beach. He had been too young to remember the Challenger disaster, but Columbia ached like an old war wound. By the time he reached college he knew the requirements he needed to become an astronaut and focused, as they say, like a laser.

He was a math and engineering major as an undergraduate. He thought that in the next generation—his generation—there could be need for lots of people in space. He studied the requirements and after two years of graduate study he applied for the astronaut corp.

He was rejected. The next year he tried again and was rejected again. After his third try he was told that he had almost made it but with so many applications and so many qualified people he should probably try other career options.

Despondent, Brummett prepared to move on. He was walking through Armstrong Hall at Purdue when a small notice on the bulletin board caught his eye.

IMP NEEDED!

NASA needs an Internal Maintenance Person for its
implementation of version 3.2 of the International Space Station.
Apply at the Physics Office by 2pm Friday.

This candidate didn’t have to be as qualified as other personnel. In fact, it was better if they weren’t. When he told his parents his father said, “You went to college for eight years to become a janitor?”

The memory still made him laugh.

Even this job attracted an incredible number of competitors. This was where Banner’s previous efforts paid off because he was already known by all the right people. They didn’t really want unqualified personnel on the ISS because the IMP would have to serve as a back up if things went drastically wrong. Yet this person also had to be able to perform routine, mundane tasks every day without popping a cork.

“We don’t want someone so motivated that they forget why they’re there,” they’d tell him, not really meaning it and, “You’re on the lower end of a very high curve.”

After a winnowing process that was every bit as rigorous as the one used to select shuttle pilots, and a scare when someone decided they could save money by getting a junior partner in the ISS to supply the janitorial services, and another when someone else thought the janitor would be a good way to help balance sexes and/or minorities (until a congressman from the Bronx pointed out that carrying a mop was not exactly the way most minorities saw themselves contributing to the space program), Banner was finally chosen as one of an elite cadre of Internal Maintenance Persons.

“Zee, zee, zee,” his phone buzzed, waking him from a light sleep.

“Wanted and needed,” he yawned. “Wanted and needed.”