“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.
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.”
