It was with mounting excitement that Banner reached Freedom Station for his first glimpse of the Yankee Clipper. Unfortunately, the vehicle was still shrouded in its golden wrapper, like a candy bar on Christmas morning.
His first job was to help pack away the tons of material that had been recently boosted to the station. NASA’s storage plan had been very carefully charted to the hundredth of an inch in a pattern that would, theoretically, allow the items of most use to be uncovered when most needed. Banner’s crew spent most of their time watching the lieutenant in charge scratch her head while muttering some truly inventive curses. Fortunately after an hour spent floating on his ass, Group Captain Ireton rescued him for the grand tour of the Clipper.
Banner remembered Ireton from his days on the ISS, although they had never exchanged more than a “Yessir!” or two. All Banner knew for sure is that he had been a hotshot Royal Air Force fighter pilot before joining the European Space Agency. Maybe fought somewhere. He had been the first British citizen to walk on the Moon and, if walk could be the word, on the Near Earth Object ReyRey 619. He was said to have been on the short list for the now cancelled international mission to Mars.
The Group Captain led him through the same long opaque tunnel they’d recently been hauling stuff through.
“Let’s start on the flight deck,” Ireton said as they crossed into the ship and down a long corridor curving deep inside.
“Yessir.”
Ireton stopped. “Corporal,” he said. “Banner. We’re going to be stuck in this tin can for the next seven to ten years. Let’s get rid of the formalities right away.”
“Yes . . . sir . . . sir,” Banner gulped.
“It’s Henry unless the brass is around.”
“It may take me awhile to get used to that, sir, uh, Henry.”
“Good man,” Ireton grinned. “Now this is the airlock leading onto the flight deck,” he said while undogging the hatch. “There are three discreet areas in the ship with its own atmosphere: the flight deck, the biosphere, and engineering. There are also a few special cases, like the hanger. The idea was that if there is a decompression in one area there would be others the crew could retreat to. Airlocks’ll be a pain in the ass to use but flight protocol says we use them and I’m a stickler for that kind of thing.”
He pushed open the inner lock and they moved inside.
“Whooah!” Banner gasped. “It’s like Star Trek.”
Ireton laughed. “The layout here is different. The Enterprise was made so Kirk could storm around like a sea captain and look good doing it. This is a little more practical and crowded. It has more in common with the layout of a submarine than the Enterprise. Also, we’ll be able to do most of our work from our offices in the habitat. We’ll only need this place occasionally, if at all. Only an emergency, most likely.”
“Yessir.”
“With luck it’ll all be very, very boring.”
“Boring is my middle name.”
“Mine, too.” He let them through another hatch into a corridor. “No sliding doors here, I’m afraid. This leads into the habitat.” Banner noticed that it had that new car smell that was so delightful and so probably carcinogenic.
“As you know we’ll be under a constant but slight acceleration for most of our trip. It should make it easier to get around but no one really knows. It could turn out to be annoying.”
Ireton opened the second airlock. “I expect you to know how to operate this in an emergency and I expect you to always maintain the protocols,” Ireton repeated. “Just because we’re informal does not mean we’ll be unprepared.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Good. Now this way leads back into the living area.”
“Good Christ!” Banner muttered as they opened the hatch and pulled themselves inside. He looked into a large well-lighted space, like a domed football stadium standing on its head.
“This is where we’ll live,” Ireton grinned.
“How can we afford to push all this mass?”
Ireton smiled, his eyes dreamy. “It’s mostly space, holding an atmosphere that we’d have to carry anyway. Space is space whether it’s inside or outside the hull. Small, cramped ships are the result of the difficulty of getting things into Earth orbit.”
“And limited fuels.”
“Yes, but that’s really the same thing, isn’t it? Once you’re out of Earth’s gravity well you’re half way to anywhere, as they say.”
“Heinlein . . . uh, Henry. Halfway plus four and a half years.”
“Of course. But look how long it took Drake to circumnavigate the globe. We do it in 90 minutes.” Ireton pulled himself along a rope. Banner followed warily. He wasn’t used to seeing so much space in space and it made him slightly giddy. He knew that he couldn’t fall but what if he couldn’t land?
“Stay focused, stay focused, stay focused,” he muttered.
“What was that?” Ireton called back.
“Urp!”
“Ah, I see. Well, you’ll get used to it.”
Ireton scuttled away and, reluctantly, Banner followed.
They reached something that looked like a giant shower head. “Once we’re under way water will be drawn from a reservoir behind the bulkhead and emerge here where it will be guided slowly along the walls, held together mostly by hydrogen bonding, until it reaches the plants. At what will be the bottom is another reservoir where it’ll be collected, filtered, and pumped back around.”
Banner pulled himself along a long rope crossing the bottom third of the vault. “Some storage in there,” Ireton pointed out areas of flimsy half structures and border tape, “med center, common room, cafeteria . . . once you’ve been through orientation you’ll be helping to put all of this right.”
He stopped by a corner of the biosphere’s dodecahedral framework. “These rooms are yours,” Ireton said, gesturing to a black marker perimeter, sad graffiti on the wall. “Since you’ll be working in the Clipper from now on there’s no reason you can’t move right in.”
“Uh.”
“I’ll requisition you a sleepysack. You can eat and bathe on Station.”
“Jesus, I left Indiana for this?”
“Indiana, that’s right, you’re a Hoosier,” Ireton never sounded more British than when he was saying Ho-o-osier. “It’s midlands, right? I’ve never been there . . . probably flown over it a thousand times.”
“Aw, you’d like it. It’s just like England.”
“I never lived in England all that much,” Ireton admitted. “My father was stationed in Jamaica where he met my mother. That’s where I was raised. Of course I went to university in England.”
“Purdue.”
“Cradle of astronauts.”
“In state, I was lucky.”
“Between the two globes is our gymnasium,” Ireton said while leading him through an air lock in the middle of a spokeless wheel. “Runs on magnetic tracks and spins quickly enough to make a couple Gs if you have the stomach. “An hour or two a day in here should be enough.”
Through another airlock and they were in Engineering, where they found Lomaine Brooks glaring into a partly disassembled workstation.
“Welcome aboard, Scotty,” Banner joked.
“Any more Star Trek references and we’ll drop you at Venus,” Ireton frowned. Banner realized he was serious. “Venus?”
“Hey, chicken,” Lomaine gave him a hug that pushed the air from his lungs.
“I guess you know each other. Lomaine, tell him about the trip to Venus would you old dear? I’ve got to get back.”
“Sure.” She didn’t bother to look up as he turned and left. “Old dear.”
“Don’t you like him?”
“Oh, he’s okay. He’s just got a thing about his color.”
Banner looked back at the airlock where he’d gone. “I hadn’t really noticed.”
“That’s what I mean.”
Banner puzzled over that for a moment. “How do you know that much about him, anyway?”
“I know. Believe me, I’ve met enough of his kind.” She sighed with discouragement. “We had a brief thing a little while ago,” she admitted. “I found out more than I needed to know about Group Captain Henry Ireton.”
“Oh, I . . . “
“Don’t worry about it. We’re professionals. We can work together. If anything he’s easier to get along with now. I treat him as well as I would any other white cracker wannabe.”
Banner laughed. “You get along with most of us actual white crackers well enough.”
She looked to him fondly. “You may be an idiot, Banner, but you ain’t no cracker.”
“So, where’s the reactor?” Banner said, changing the subject while he could.
“You’re sitting on it.”
She laughed as he flailed to escape the console without touching it.
“Actually, the nasty stuff is way south, near the end of the superstructure. You can’t see much from here.” She led him down a corridor, the walls were olive-green punctuated with red handles, violent orange signboard, and yellow radiation warnings. There must be another airlock down at the far end, he couldn’t tell. “The rest is classified.”
“Too bad. What’ll I be doing down here?”
“Oh, the usual.” She opened a storage unit. It was packed full of small black cones. She pulled one out and handed it to Banner. “Careful, it’s delicate.”
It felt like paper but he knew better. A small dark box fit at the apex of the cone.
“What is it?”
“An ion motor. We use thousands of them. When one burns out we throw it away and plug in another, like light bulbs.”
“Seems wasteful.”
“I suppose we might rehabilitate a few . . . let me show you the workroom. You can familiarize yourself with this stuff during our shakedown run.”
“They haven’t told me very much. Security.”
“Yeah. Security. Now that you’re here there’s no reason you shouldn’t know. We’re taking the Clip to Venus first to work the kinks out of her.”
“Isn’t that going in the wrong direction?”
“Sort of, but in the context of where we’re going it’s on the way. We’ll make it up by adding momentum with a gravity assist at Venus and then another when we blow past Earth on the way out. Hopefully we’ll have the bugs worked out of her by then. Now come on, I’ve got some sewage for you to treat.”
“That’s what all the girls say.”
ØØØ
Banner’s first night in the biosphere felt like an evening on Browning Mountain. Darkness fell slowly, in the course of an hour, a slow cascade from “east” to “west” until there was only the glow of a few safety lamps in the distance. The sound of crickets, frogs, and other night creatures throbbed subtly in the background. Of course it was only a program written to recreate the sounds of a rural summer evening but, what the hell, it sounded like home. “Nice,” he thought. “Maybe tomorrow we can listen to the beach.”
Sipping his fruit juice meditatively, he was about to turn-in when he saw a shaft of light stabbing in from the perimeter and realized that someone had opened the lower south hatch. He watched a shadowy figure pull itself along a guide rope though the ghostly white basin. The specter was lugging a box awkwardly behind him.
“Stubbs,” Banner cried out in astonishment. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m pulling duty in the kitchen, which you’d know if you’d ever come over.”
Banner shrugged. “Ain’t much reason to leave this place,” he said. “It’s like paradise.”
“If that’s the case, where’s Eve?” Stubbs growled.
“Any day now.”
The old sergeant snorted. “Be careful what you wish for.” He looked around the area suspiciously. “Can we go to your quarters? I’ve got something to show you.”
Mystified, Banner led him to the tent-like structure he’d docked against a bump of some sort. Stubbs carefully pulled his package along. “Here, take this.” He said when they’d gone inside, shoving the box in his direction.
“Oof,” Banner gasped.
“It’s for you.”
“Me? When did you start giving people gifts?”
“It’s a long story.”
Banner quickly unfolded the lid. To his astonishment he saw thick gray fur. “Camus!” he gasped.
“I had to sedate him,” Stubbs apologized. “He should be up and about in a little while.”
“But I thought Sophie had him.”
“Yeah, well she don’t.”
Banner picked up the dark, quiet form, holding him protectively to his chest. For a brief moment Banner thought he felt a gentle purring.
“He’s been hiding out in odd corners and ducts in Freedom all this time. I kept an eye on him when I was here but it was the Marines what kept him alive. They call him Tojo.”
“What?”
Stubbs looked at him impassively for a moment before shrugging. “Beats me.”
Banner cradled the cat in his arms.
“We can’t keep him hidden much longer. He crapped in General Reid’s sleepysack yesterday and the old boy put out an alert. I thought it would be best if you got him before I ship back to Earth.”
“Well . . . thanks.”
On his way out Stubbs stopped by the tent’s entrance. “See, Brummett, even you get a little pussy once in awhile.”
Banner shook his head. “I just didn’t expect to be getting it from you.”
Stubbs laughed, waving goodbye, whistling a little like Gene Kelly in a banana factory as he disappeared into the dark.
“Aw, my baby,” Banner murmured as he slowly made his way to his tent and trying to unravel his sleepysack using just one hand. It didn’t work so well but he didn’t want to let go of Camus, either, as he hummed along with the cat’s contented purr, using his teeth to pull open the bedroll. He was so skinny. He could feel his bones and the cat’s fur was matted in placed with some godawful gunk. "My poor kitty-cat,” he whispered sadly. “My poor cat.”
ØØØ
Finally the day arrived when the gold foil was stripped away and Banner, along with the rest of the world, watched the great ship unveiled. Its odd beauty took his breath away.
Since they didn’t dare break a bottle over its prow they spritzed a little champagne in its direction instead, officially christening the ship Dwight David Eisenhower in honor of the general who had led the original Allies to victory in World War Two.
Banner would have joined in with the celebration but, like the rest of the crew, he was busy preparing the ship to leave Earth’s orbit.
From his station he watched as the umbilicals were detached and felt the attitude jets slowly pushed the Ike away from the Freedom space station, its gravity wheel spinning round and round, like a circus carousel. Behind it was the blue Earth.
“All okay,” he said when cued, then quickly belted into a nearby safety chair. At the end of a countdown hydrazine rockets pushed them rudely into a long elliptical orbit falling past Venus. Banner unhitched himself and hurried into the biosphere. Along the north wall he found Sergio Biscone, the head of Life Sciences, talking with Francine Mathers.
“I’m all yours,” he said to Biscone, a thin, bony Guatemalan.
“We need to go over the plumbing and test it for leaks so I want you to study the procedure tonight—I’ve sent you the information—and tomorrow we can start. I’ve got you in the morning, right?”
“Yessir.”
Banner left them, pulling himself along the rope leading back to his living area. It still seemed naked. The hydrangeas were just stubs and the mother-in-law's tongue was threatening no one. They hadn’t planted the north forty yet. “Sweet,” he thought. “I can kick back for a few hours and read this stuff before going downstairs to unpack dinner for everybody.” He pulled a container of fruit juice out of his cooler, then leaped for his office area, passing Camus who was floating asleep in the middle of his area.
Banner quickly found Biscone’s email and its links. “Ouch, there’s a couple of hundred page documents in there and some virtual run-throughs. Shit!” Banner parked himself in the corner by his reading light and started with the first one.
They intended to turn their living chamber into a huge greenhouse that would simulate a sub-tropical earth environment. He looked at the schematic for the water system that would feed the plants. Once they started acceleration water, actually a nutrient solution, would be pumped in at the top of the habitat and fed into gutters running down the sides of their dodecahedral living chamber. The solution was divided into pans containing the root system of each plant, held in place by a plastic lattice through which the plants grew, covered by a thin opaque film. A fine mist was sprayed continuously onto the roots. Light was provided by fat ribbons of luminescent diode held above the gardens by thin carbon scaffolding.
Under the influence of the slight, but constant, push of the ion engines the excess water would slowly drip downward to be collected in a huge octagonal tank beneath the floor. There it would be sterilized with ultraviolet light, filtered, and mixed with water from the ship’s other systems. This water was then allowed to emerge as watercourse that languidly flowed into a large basin, AKA the “Ol’ Swimmin’ Hole,’ which would be filled with aquatic plants, tilapia, salmon, and trout. Finally the basin’s overflow disappeared down a drain where it would be moved around some more, before it was mixed with nutrient solution #409, and the cycle begun again.
He was reading the details of the system and what he would be expected to do when he noticed movement from the corner of his eye. Startled, he saw that Camus had woken from his snooze and was furiously spinning end-over-end, claws fully extended, chasing his own fluffed-up tail.
Banner quickly tossed a wadded pair of dungarees at the whirling cat.
“Rowl!” Camus shrieked, tearing at the fabric when it startled him, using its momentum to move him towards a sheet Banner had tied up as a privacy shield, which he quickly shredded while gaining the traction he needed to leap to a better place.
Banner sat openmouthed for a moment, before deciding that the crisis had passed.
“Lettuce and spinach, tomatoes and zucchini, parsley, chives and basil, wheat, beans, and potatoes, each seed must be placed precisely at the end of its unique fibrous enabling apparatus (FIENAP).”
He stopped reading. Feeling restless he left, taking the shortcut along the green conduit towards the west wing leading to the observatory crest.
Earth had already shrunk to the size of a waterlogged softball. Watching it recede was spooky, he decided. Bouncing willy-nilly between worlds like a basketball in a Jacuzzi factory suddenly seemed a damned crazy thing to do. What had he been thinking? He was beginning to appreciate just how empty the solar system really was.
“This is insane,” he murmured aloud.
“Ain’t that the truth!” Banner turned with a start to see one of the engineers, Stanislaus Orsky, pulling himself into the bay.
“Oh, hey,” Banner muttered. “It’s giving me the willies a little is all.”
“Me, too, kid.”
Banner grinned at the old veteran, all of 35, who had first ridden into orbit on the Atlantis Space Shuttle, which had been retired long after it was supposed to be. It was like reaching space in a Conestoga wagon and about twice as dangerous.
“Off duty?”
“For a little while, I have to go out later. I thought I’d break for a smoke.”
Banner gaped stupidly.
“A joke. I haven’t been able to smoke in space since the Russians left.”
“Uh . . .”
“Another joke. You’re much too uptight, my friend.”
Banner smiled. “Now you’re sounding like my dad.”
“A son needs a firm grip.”
“Is that what you tell your son?”
“Sometimes.”
“Does he ever listen?”
Orsky laughed, handing Banner the *Pod™ from his waistband.
Banner saw a pic of a blond-haired boy and girl sitting at a breakfast table. “Pretty daughter.”
“Takes after her mother, of course.”
“They must miss you.”
“Not really.”
Oh, no, Banner thought. What have I stepped into now?
Orsky sighed. “Wilma and I were divorced several years ago. Old story. Husband too involved in career to notice wife unsatisfied. Never home. Kids like strangers. Wife lonely. One day she emails to say she’s taken up with a retro-rock musician she met in Warsaw. ‘Where do you want me to send your medals?’”
“I’m sorry,” Banner replied feeling embarrassed.
Orsky shrugged philosophically while gazing back at the shrinking blue planet. “I’m not.”
ØØØ
Ireton watched the image on his screen for the twelfth time as the monstrosity fired its engines and moved violently out of Earth’s orbit. The “Big Banger,” as the Vloggers insisted on calling the vehicle, really did look like a huge sausage with 40 million pounds of thrust blowing out its ass. He shook his head. The Russians were crazy wankers, all right. You had to admire them. How they’d convinced the French and Japanese to go along was anybody’s guess.
It was estimated that the Eisenhower would catch up soon after the two ships reached Jupiter but after that, if their powerplant worked as promised, the Russians would leave them in their radioactive dust.
Meanwhile the German’s were still expanding their space station, enclosing it in a thin framework to hide what they were building, presumably. Not that it would matter, either. It was already too late for them.
And no one could figure out what in the hell the Chinese were up to inside their little crater on the Moon—New St. Mao, they were calling it. He snorted. “Whatever the hell that means.” The Allies’ satellites watched the outpost intently, counting how many cargo ships landed, calculating their mass. Not learning much and spending a lot of money doing it.
There was the sound of a bell chiming. Was it 21:30 already? He stretched and pulled himself to the flap that served as his door. “Come in,” he said to the dark-haired woman waiting there holding a thermal inertia device (TID). She floated into his arms for a quick hug, accompanied by the warm smell of spices.
“You look awful,” Francine laughed.
“Thanks. You look nice, too.”
“I just had four hours sleep,” she bragged. “Do you want something to eat? I brought up some Chinese from the cafeteria.”
“Yeah, thanks, let me set up the restraining units.”
“You didn’t need a restraining unit last night,” she teased.
“Some things are better left unrestrained, my dear.”
Mathers was about to answer when light tapping came at the flap. Ireton opened it reluctantly. Francine frowned when she heard a soft voice there, followed by a brisk invader.
“Henry, you said . . . oh, Francine,” Lissa Gaskill stopped talking suddenly, even as she drifted across the room. The two women eyed each other narrowly.
“We were about to have dinner,” Francine said, coolly. “Would you like to join us?”
“Oh, no. I’m watching my weight.”
“I suppose you have to,” Francine replied with a friendly smile, which turned into a puzzled frown as a beep came from the portal. It was the British flight surgeon, Mary Ellen Cartouche.
Ireton sighed, “Come in, Mary Ellen.”
The woman stopped just inside, surveying the three knowingly. Lissa looked back at her with an alarmed expression, while Francine stared blandly at nothing in particular. Ireton seemed resigned.
“Up to your old tricks, Henry?” Mary Ellen said mockingly. “I was going to ask if you could go for a nightcap but I’m guessing you don’t need the company.”
“Now, Mary Ellen . . .”
“My ass,” she laughed, shaking her head sardonically while pushing for the exit. “Ladies.”
“I guess I should be going too,” Lissa gulped as soon as she’d gone. “Busy day tomorrow.”
They watched her swim out the door. The room was silent for a moment before Ireton turned to Francine. “What are you thinking?” he finally asked.
She studied his face for a moment, straying lightly over the dark curve of his jaw, past lips pouting in a moue of uncertainty, resting on his questioning brown eyes.
“What the hell,” she said reaching for her cold supper.
More Links:
The Drake Hoax
Another description of Drake's circumnavigation
An Observatory Crest Appreciation
