The Ferryman Lingers

Chapter Seven

2010-01-16T12:28:00.003-05:00

“No peeps from the peeps aboard spaceship Eisenhower! News 6 at Six right after thix!”

Venus in real color image courtesy NASA.

As the Eisenhower approached its closest point to Venus Banner donned his spacesuit and joined the few members of the crew with nothing better to do in the shuttle bay where the air had been evacuated and the hanger door rolled back to open vacuum. Venus looked like a moldy peach below them. To his surprise Dr. Cartouche, the head of the science team, was there, watching through the open door.

“I thought you’d be in the lab working.”

“Oh, I’m going back soon,” she said. “We dropped the probes several hours ago and there’s not much happening until they settle into the atmosphere. It was a good time to have a look at the real thing.”

The clouds that girdled the planet below may have looked serene but were in fact violent gusts of acid laden sky. The color reminded Banner of dirty smoke, like in the old days when the farmers could still burn their fields before the spring planting.

Banner was used to looking at Earth’s clouds from orbit. Here what he was seeing were clouds on top of clouds, variations of ocher with lighter patches of sulfur dioxide. The coloring was much subtler than he had expected given that in the pictures of Venus he usually saw the color contrasts were heightened and filtered. He also hadn’t expected the clouds to be so dazzling bright.

The others drifted back inside as the sun passed behind the darkened planet but, oddly, Mary Ellen Cartouche remained with him. Standing together at the edge of the open hanger door the stars in the dark sky shone with an intensity Banner never got tired of seeing. Cartouche gave his arm a gentle tug, pointing towards Venus’ dark crescent.

“Look closely,” she murmured. “Tell me if you can see lightning.”

He wasn’t sure, but there, maybe. . . . With a slight tic his helmet touched hers.

“The first time we knew about the lightning was when the Venera probe heard thunder but no one’s ever seen it. That’s one of the things we’re looking for.”

“Is it like Earth lightning?”

“No, we think it has something to do with particulate matter expelled by volcanoes,” she gave a warm, husky laugh. “But we’ve never seen that either.” She pronounced it eye-ther. Startled, he wondered if she had stayed behind for other reasons than the sights they were seeing. She was giving him a “right chat-up” as Stubbs would say with an affected British accent, but still . . .

He put a gloved hand on her shoulder, pointing towards the brightening edge of the planet. “We’re about to become the only two people to watch the sun rise over Venus.”

He felt her leaning against him, although in microgravity with two pressurized space suits between them it was more a gesture of good will than anything else. More quickly than he could have imagined the sun broke from behind the planet and they quickly moved back into the shadow where they faced each other. He tried to imagine what she looked like behind the gold shield of her visor. Short brown hair, a sincere look in those hazel eyes, dark eyebrows, soft, full lips. She liked to laugh, he knew that. He wondered briefly if she had someone back home but supposed that it didn’t matter since she was going back and he was not.

“Burn in fifteen,” said Lieutenant Astraios. “Strap in.”

“I have to get back to my station,” she said. “Why don’t you drop by in a few hours and have a look at what we’ve found.”

“I’d like that,” he smiled. Although she couldn’t see him, she could hear it in his voice.

He made it to his station with just enough time to strap in and flick his “present” key.

“About time, Mr. Brummett.”

“Sorry, sir.” When there’s no excuse, don’t bother giving one.

ØØØ

“Much of the human condition is caused by fighting one’s own body and its ‘mind,’ as it were.”

Sak listened to Christain without much interest.

“As if fighting the ‘other mind’ wasn’t hard enough,” he sighed as his voice slowly settled down.

Sak left him there like Hamlet on a cloudy day. At the gym Kirin and Venetia were working out. Kirin had that “Eva Braun” thing going that he might have liked, but he knew from experience that she was no waif.

Sak jumped onto the treadmill so that he could watch while they worked out, less out of sexual interest than his interest in their fighting technique. They were playing Pfadfinder—a virtual roleplaying game on a court that was tapered like an alkaloid rhombus. It was an old military exercise that had recently been turned into a Virtual TV reality sport much to the old guard’s disgust.

Kirin was a big, strong woman, a Valkyrie of German Cultural Alliance propaganda—they used her image all the time. Venetia, on the other hand, was small, dark, and wiry. Acceptable for Service—after all, Hitler had been small, dark, and wiry—but suspicious nonetheless. Even so she’d be unable to get a Reproduction Card if she ever asked. . . .

Unlike most physical sports, Pfadfinder didn’t reward the most physically fit, but those with stealth, cunning, swift reflexes, and dexterity. Strength and physicality were important but not essential as it was in soccer or basketball. He watched Venetia slithering across the room, avoiding god knows what that only the two of them could see; maybe the aggressive feints Kirin was giving—god, the woman looked like she could fuck a plowhorse—but the movements seemed too disjointed in time for them to be fighting each other. So they must be teaming.

Sak hacked their visuals, seeing with disgust that they were roleplaying some dumb-ass Nordic heroic tale—big boobs, monstrous breastplates, large swords, fluttering scarves, a bald necromancer nearby opposing them with his hoard of the damned—the whole nine yards. At least they could be said to be working well together. He turned away from them, browsing idly for awhile before settling into his workout regime. He loaded Routine Albatross 13, a favorite WWII epic where he ran around Stalingrad climbing over ruins while avoiding snipers and cutting a throat here and there. Mostly it was about picking up heavy objects and running with them.

A loud noise and flash of light jolted him awake. “Goddamned tanks!” he cursed. He’d just have to blow the cocksuckers up. He ran back to the depot for explosive. He could have ignored the many dead soldiers he encountered in the ruins but he was fascinated by the limitless ways men could die. These images had been lovingly recreated from pictures taken during the Second World War. It was nasty, horrible, funny, and pathetic, almost as exciting as the real thing. Even the smell seemed authentic.

At HQ they gave him the explosives, no questions asked, but before he could return he was asked to follow an ashen-faced corporal into a private room, where he was set upon by a Russian infiltration team. He killed the pallid man who had been leading him easily, stabbing him in the back with his bayonet. The second one couldn’t fight worth a fuck and Sak quickly dispatched him. The other two were far better skilled and writhed out of his grasp while landing hard punches that he couldn’t physically feel but slowed him down nonetheless, reducing his hit points. He realized that he wasn’t just fighting the game anymore, but real opponents and that meant . . .

“Venetia! Kirin!” he roared, dropping the visuals to see the two of them laughing from their stations. “Corny scenario, Arne!” Venetia jibed.

“We thought you needed a better workout, boss,” Kirin added, reinitializing the game. They let him chase them through the Stalingrad ruins for awhile before losing him. Realizing that he was in a different part of the city than he’d ever been he started back to HQ. Big black crows were picking through the corpses. He could see hundreds of them flying above the ruined buildings, calling to one another loudly.

He overheard someone nearby speaking in Russian, realizing he had strayed beyond the battle lines. It would do major damage to his score if he got caught this way. On the other hand, he was already here and had a big pack full of explosives ready to go. Sak skulked about the ruins until he came to what looked like a communications outpost. He didn’t have time for subtlety so he set the fuse and flung it amongst a group of surprised officers while leaping behind a convenient stone wall. Pieces of bodies dropped on him. When he looked all he could see was the smoke from the explosion so he quickly left, hoping to report back to the General directly so that they could take advantage of this incursion. He had just about started to breath easier when a loud explosion deafened him while a fatal white light blinded him. He gasped sinking to his knees. He’d forgotten about the tank and it had finally picked him off.

Disappointed, he turned off his *pod™ as Stalingrad dissolved into an empty gym.

ØØØ

The Eisenhower’s journey to Venus had been the quickest on record, even though they had already passed its orbit once while falling inward towards the Sun, well within the orbit of Mercury. The science crew gathered a lot of data there, for the day when industry would decide to mine the Sun’s corona. On the way back out they skimmed by Venus, taking advantage of its momentum to gain velocity for their return to Earth.

In the space assigned to the lab the video screens were unrolled everywhere, some showing unbroken, dusky mist, others glowing in the ultraviolet or infrared.

“We’re mostly collecting information at this point and relaying it back to Earth,” Mary Ellen told Banner. “We do have a few hundred rovers on the surface but they’re still being evaluated and unpacked. They’re little beggers, about the size of your hand. A stationary lander is relaying pictures of the surface.”

There was the strange sight of a dark valley stretching beneath them and mountains beyond. A bright streak jagged through the sky.

“Was that . . . ?”

Cartouche smiled. “Lightning? Yes, Banner, we’ve found our culprit.”

A rumbling was heard.

“Yes, yes, we’re listening as well. Everything helps.”

“I read a lot about it as a kid. The pictures from Venera were cool, especially when they fixed the data.”

“Wait’ll you see our stuff,” she crowed. “We’re looking at everything!”

“I know. I helped unpack it.”

“Our mother-rovers are built like effing lorries,” she continued enthusiastically. “There is nothing in them to break, or melt, or overheat. In fact, they run on the heat, little steam engines, like locomotives. The difference is that their fire is outside the boiler. As long as we keep them fueled they’ll keep running. Most of the electronics is upstairs in a plane, balloon, or satellite where heat is no problem.”

“I’m more fascinated by the aerostat you launched.”

“Proof of concept, no blokes there yet, of course. It’s well known that you can float a colony, like a raft, on the thick, hot carbon dioxide layer by simply inflating the structure with regular air. It floats about 50 kilometers above the planet’s surface, well above the heat and pressure. We released a model—Landis Station—and, depending on the data, a habitat with crew aboard could be placed within five or ten years.

“Stupid,” Banner said, awed.

“Very stupid.”

ØØØ

Five days after Venus encounter they finally lit the torch—torches—of their thousands of ion thrusters. It took Lomaine 48 hours of preparation before she was ready to commit the ship and she was too nervous to hold still for long, prowling Engineering like an unkempt meerkat.

Banner helped where he could, running errands and catering for the engineers.

“We start by warming the whole thing up,” she explained while sipping the coffee he’d brought and staring at the telemetry. “We stuff the lithium into a hopper where it’s teased into gas and delivered to one of our thousands of little motors that ionizes it to within an inch of its life before kicking it out the back door. That’s why the Ike is such a hot rod . . . for ion drive, I mean.”

“I can hardly wait for some weight.”

“You’ll feel it, sure. We’ll be able to bossa nova.” She rammed him with her hip.

“But never very well,” he muttered, banging off the console.

“Oops,” she looked around contritely before breaking into a laugh. “You always were too bony!”

“Yeah, it’s always my fault.”

“Commander Ireton,” she said, her tone of voice keying the console. “We’re ready.”

He replied simply, “Go at our mark.”

“This is it!” she said nervously, typing in a password, which was immediately rejected. “Darn, I knew I should have written it down,” she muttered. “Banner, what’s Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday?”

“Uh, February something?”

Lomaine smiled, “01-f1FteEn-19tw*9.” She hit enter.

Banner didn’t notice anything at first. He had retreated to the far part of the room, well out of the way, while he watched them working. Gradually, he became aware of the room moving around him. Fascinated at first, he continued watching passively as the deck rose to meet him like a monstrous fly swatter.

“Ow!” He hollered, landing with a thwack. From the habitat above came the muted sounds of unsecured objects crashing throughout the structure.

“Somebody didn’t read the memo,” she frowned down at Banner on the wall—now floor. “Sounds like you’ve got a mess to clean up.”

He tried standing. “Very nice,” he said, bending his knees and hopping lightly. “Enough to be useful, but not enough to be annoying.” He climbed up to the hatch, which opened for him like the iris of his old man’s film camera, the one he’d broken while taking it apart.

Up in the habitat Sergio Biscone was looking at the devastated south forty. Tools, light ribbons, sprout rails, and other detritus were strewn about everywhere. “Save as much as you can,” he muttered while passing out the APRs (Amorphous Particle Retrievers AKA bags).

After they cleaned up the mess they started reconfiguring the biosphere’s watering system. The mild acceleration wouldn’t cause a major disruption because most was covered by system programming, but there were physical changes they had to make every time they turned the ion drive on or off.

At last they were able to turn on the fountainhead at the very top of the habitat. With aching slowness a blob of water grew there. It looked like jelly, rippling continuously as it bulged outwards. The constant thrust of the ion drive was just enough to encourage the water downward, but instead of cascading, as it would in strong gravity, hydrogen bonding—the force that allows water to climb against gravity up the capillaries of the tallest trees—continued holding the water together. The bubble of liquid grew alarmingly until it became elongated, like a huge drop about to fall from a faucet. Instead, it met the head end of the fountain—a slightly concave disk with a halo of thin mesh, which encouraged the water towards the sides of the biosphere. There the mesh divided into hollow strings, acting as conduits for the water, which continued falling along the sides of the sphere where they could use it to nourish the ancillary gardens. Bundles of strands combined near the habitats where they became sparkling rivulets of water cascading—actually, oozing—down falls and through fountains. At the bottom of the habitat, what water remained collected into a pond stocked with freshwater fish and plants.

Sergio was in his office-space fretting about the die-off in his biomass but so far the readings showed nothing unusual happening.

Banner looked over the north forty where they planned to grow wheat, soybeans, and rape. The bundles of FIENAPs were like bouquets of dead white flowers. It was not so different from grandpa Carl planting his seed in the spring. “You went all that way to be a farmer?” he’d heard his Dad laugh when they were close enough to Earth for two-way conversation to be half-way enjoyable again.

Taking a tray of sprouts to row zb8495 he began quickly attaching them to the apparatus, occasionally giving the tubing a good squeeze to get it going. Having “gravity” back (acceleration, if you prefer), even if insubstantial, seemed really strange within their huge vault, which now yawned beneath him. He had to make use of the hand and foot holds that he’d mostly ignored before, not to mention the hassle of keeping his carabiner deployed. A fall from this height probably wouldn’t kill him but it sure would hurt.

Once he’d finished a row he loosed a ribbon of grow-light, attaching it to the adjustable framework overhead. Then he texted the server with the info it needed, squeezed the feeder a few more times, and moved to the next row. By noon he had a pretty good field started.

Looking around the chamber he could see areas that had already begun to “green up” substantially.

He had lunch Downside with the bio crew amidst the stand of saplings that were spouting aggressively near the retention pond.

“Once you’ve squeezed the apple and get all its juice you’ll throw the rind away and that’s when my beetles get to work!” Sergio harrumphed.

“I don’t know, mano, I think a lot more research needs to be done before we start introducing insects to space.”

“They’re here already whether you want them or not,” Francine shrugged happily. “You just haven’t found them yet.”

ØØØ

In his spare time—when he should have been sleeping—Banner spruced up his little home area, encouraging coleus, herbs, and vines along his perimeter. He dreamed of someday having enough growth that he could ditch the tent. The water falling nearby made enough racket that he actually felt like he had a little privacy now, not that he had that much use for privacy, at least not until Mary Ellen finally showed up.

After Venus encounter she had worked for three straight days before collapsing and then three weeks more before she found any time for Banner. By then they were almost back to Earth.

“Nice flat,” she said looking around. “I do nothing but sleep at mine,” she shrugged.

“I’m going to be living here for a quite while longer,” he smiled, showing her around. “These shoots will grow great big leaves and you won’t even be able to see Commander Ireton’s privy from here any more.”

“Oh, what’s wrong with the cat?” she said moving past him, picking up Camus, who gnurlted meekly.

“He hates gravity.”

“Poor kitty,” she held him in her arms. “Is it dangerous for him?”

“Fuh, we’ve built him up in the centrifuge, this should be nothing, but he likes to complain.”

He reached out to pet Camus on the back, his hand touching her arm. Their eyes met and he kissed her. Camus felt crowded so he escaped, leaving them laughing. “I thought I was here for dinner,” she said, smiling.

“Sit here,” he led her by the shoulders to a gossamer white chair that actually felt quite comfortable once you were plugged into it properly.

“White or red wine?”

“White,” she said surprised.

“Good, I can leave out the dye.”

He brought out two small unit containers, like shot glasses, only square. “First crop, kinda hurried along,” he grimaced apologetically. They toasted one another and she didn’t quite gag. “Too sharp is better that too sweet,” she finally said.

“It’ll be better out at Pluto after it’s aged.” This statement didn’t have the effect he’d imagined.

“Banner, are we going to eat? I haven’t had a shred in a day and a half and I’m starving!”

“Sorry. I’ve got some chicken flavored soy-brick or would you prefer a rasher of Tanquomyle?”

“Is that all that’s left?” she said, horrified.

“Oh, and this tofu Tetrazzini I had laying around, somewhere.” He popped open his microwave, gingerly grabbing a container and placing it on the table. He then brought out bags of greens and a squirt bottle of dressing, a light French-like bread, and water.

“Dig in, this is Stubbs’s favorite recipe. He says it works every time.”

“Works?”

“Oh, ah, you know.”

She looked at him glacially.

“Gets, ah, people in the mood,” he admitted ruefully.

“What kind of mood?” she asked suspiciously, then laughed.

“That’s what Stubbs says. I’ve never actually tried it before so you better eat-up so we can find out.”

As usual, Stubbs was right about matters of the heart. “I like you, handyman yob,” she confessed afterwards, kissing him.

“But I have a PhD!” he replied, defensively as she laughed out loud, warm thigh pressing against his spiral yardarm. They were tangled in the web of his bed, like two fat flies in a spider’s den.

“Does that make you overqualified?” she smirked.

“Just underpaid.” Not for the first time he noticed the freckles on her nose, the calm merriment in her eyes. And soon she’d be gone. Life was simpler without this . . . loss, he thought sadly, but not worth living.

ØØØ

Compared to the Eisenhower it was claustrophobic inside the Korolyov, which was more of a submarine than a space vehicle, floating inside a giant bladder of water. Water they hoped to replenish on the other end of their voyage. Ugly from the outside, she supposed it was ugly on the inside, too. Fortunately she spent most of her time working in her gardens.

Or floating in the tank. Yynerdii had introduced her to that pleasure. The especially flat, clear water between the hull and the outer bladder was eventually to be electrolyzed into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen would then be shoveled through the reactor with the oxygen serving as an afterburner. Crude, powerful, and much less efficient than the Allies’ ion engine, which would pass them for good sometime outside of Saturn’s orbit, probably, but the concept was simple and reliable.

Used as a heat sink for the reactor, the waters were improbably warm. They donned the scuba gear that was available for the engineers. It was dark inside except for a few orange safety lights shining wanly in the distance. Swimming without gravity was a lot easier than trying to cross open air because you could grab onto water where you would just flail like an idiot in air. Swimming laps inside the big prophylactic tank was exhilarating and a good workout. Of course Yynerdii had another kind of workout in mind, boffing her against the submarine’s aft side, but that was a pleasure, too, like having sex inside a womb. And nothing stopped her from going back later for a swim with other friends.

Except for the two hours a day she spent in the centrifuge life wasn’t all that bad. The centrifuge, also known as the “washer/dryer,” was small, with just enough room for a couple of people to work out on the machines. The spin left her dizzy for up to a half-hour afterwards and a little sick to the stomach. Pir had been nearly killed when the bearings had seized sending weights, bandages, and a 50-liter carboy of sports drink ratcheting around with her inside the room. She had been lucky to get away with just bruises and a dislocated shoulder.

They’d let her recuperate in what the crew called Hell’s Half-acre—Sophie’s garden, an anarchy of riotous plantlife. It was their refuge when they’d stared at the gray walls for too long or tired of the light-green porridge that was called breakfast hash.

“Funny, the doctor being the first one injured,” Sophie laughed over morning coffee.

Pir frowned, “That’s why there are two of us.”

They were in a little alcove near the hatch where Sophie kept amenities. They both wore regulation gray jumpsuits with the bright red, white, and blue coalition patch. Sophie’s suit was stained, torn, and smelled a little of sweat. Pir wore flowers in her hair. Her scent was pleasantly neutral.

“I talked with Mikhail today,” she added. “The time lag from Earth is still tolerable.”

“How is he?”

“He’s being brave but I can tell he’s still hurt. Hell, I am too,” she moved her arm with a wince. “And it was my idea.”

“Lovers come and go,” Sophie sighed. “It’s leaving my family that bothers me the most. I have no children of my own, obviously, but nephews and nieces that I’ll miss growing up. How close can you really be by email? How about you?”

Pir smiled wanly. “I was an only child. Most of my grandparent’s generation disappeared in the war. My parents are gone, too, so there is only me.”

Sophie could think of nothing to say. They both watched a honeybee buzz her cup forlornly. She shoed it away.

“It’s not quite that bad!” Pir burst out laughing. “I have friends, of course, and some of them are as close as family. I just mean that in some ways I’m more fortunate than those who left family behind.”

“It’s not like we’ll be gone forever.”

“Of course not,” Pir replied none too certainly.

While she was there Sophie made her work, albeit slowly because of her injury. She enjoyed caring with the livestock. The rabbits had already doubled their population and the chickens were laying like they were back on the farm.

“We didn’t have a garden when I was a child,” she told Sophie. “We lived too close to Chernobyl.”

“Surely you could grow flowers?”

“Well, yes. We just couldn’t bring them inside.”

That afternoon they processed a tank of plankton. They squeezed, dried, and powdered most of the crop but Sophie kept a few weeds aside and for lunch they ate an acceptable, if stringy, fresh green salad with their meal.

“Things will be better once the first crops come through,” said Sophie. “We’ll have lettuce soon and some other early vegetables shortly after.”

“That will be nice. We’re all tired of the supplement already.”

“It’ll be better soon. I promise,” Sophie replied.

Sophie’s bay was at the front of the hull, where the torpedoes would normally have been if this was actually a submarine and not a lightweight copy of one. The thin aluminum hull had been manufactured on the Moon and tossed towards Earth in pieces by the Gagarin mass driver at St. Leninsburg. From there they were eased into low earth orbit and glued together like an overly large plastic model.

The first airlock led into an open storage area, packed tight with supplies and thin pathways between the bundles. They pulled themselves along until the corridor widened, stopping at a bulkhead where they climbed “down” several levels to another airlock. Inside, the corridor led off past the crew quarters. Anyone there at this time of day was probably sleeping so they moved along quietly. Sophie checked her planters while Pir stopped by her quarters to change into whites. When she came out Sophie saw that she had removed the flowers from her hair. “Back to work!” she smiled.

“Pir!” Ikko Kamaradi cried as they entered the medical galley. He immediately began fussing with the sling that kept her shoulder still. Then he studied her battered face. “I’m more concerned with how you’ll feel going back in the exercise chamber.”

“I’m all right,” she sniffed. “Seriously, I’ve had worse accidents in training.”

“I doubt that.”

“Well, snowboarding, anyway. Anything exciting going on here?”

Ikko gave Sophie a quick smile. “I’ve been forcing people to come in for checkups out of boredom. That’s all. I’ve about worn our practice dummy out practicing.”

Sophie left the two of them preparing the dummy for a faux surgery, pulling herself up to the command deck. It was spacious because most of the hardware was unnecessary and had been removed. They controlled the entire ship from a large viewscreen and a pair of Godboxes®. Ekrim was on-duty but there wasn’t much to do so he was riding the bike and either practicing a disaster scenario or watching anime, she couldn’t tell which. “Hey, little angel, a sunny sight for sore eyes!”

“What’s going on?”

“We got a burn coming up in a few days and then nothing,” he shrugged, “for a few weeks. I’ll probably go on vacation in Moscow while I wait.”

“Good luck with that,” she grinned.

“What’s this civilian doing on my bridge!” Captain Nikolai Matroshka growled from behind them. He pulled himself near, but he was smiling.

“I just stopped by to make sure you weren’t killing my plants.”

“We love your plants, yes, Ekrim?”

“They taste good.”

She just shook her head, pulling herself over to an instrument bay that was unneeded and empty. She had installed grasses and broadleaf plants, whose main function was to produce oxygen. It was all new growth so there was very little detritus to clear from the trap. She hummed happily to herself, which gave some delight to the men listening nearby.

“Ha, look at this!” Matroshka keyed the screen and a picture from outside appeared on the right side. In the middle they could see the oblong shape and dusky coloring of the Eisenhower. “They’re approaching Earth and should reach there in a few days. The vehicles they’re rendezvousing with have already been launched and are positioning themselves now. We’ll be playing tag with them all the way to Jupiter.”

“Then what?”

Matroshka thought for awhile. “Inevitably they will pass us.”

“We could leave them a few presents around Jupiter,” Bodoyev growled.

Matroshka looked over at Sophie speculatively but she went about her business without reacting. “That would be an act of war, Ekrim,” he said evenly, “and not for us to decide.”

“Just sayin’,” he used the Americanism unconsciously. Matroshka decided not to mention it.

“All done,” Sophie announced. “Nikolai, Pir and Ikko wanted me to invite you to a dinner and a movie tonight. Can you come?”

“If I can get someone to cover for me.” He looked at Ekrim.

“All right, boss,” the man shrugged helplessly. “Moscow can wait.”

Chapter Six

2009-06-23T20:15:00.018-04:00

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

Chapter 5

2009-04-29T16:35:00.009-04:00

Photo courtesy NASA

Freedom looked like a spider with a monstrous golden egg sac to Group Captain Henry Ireton as they made their approach. The sac was actually a flimsy, unpressurized structure made of thin gold foil meant only to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on inside.

Ireton oversaw the ship’s approach to the opposite side of the station. He probably should have been using the time to prepare for the day’s meetings but what the hell? Routine felt comforting.

Ireton had been involved in the planning of the Allies’ deep-space ship—code-named Yankee Clipper—at every stage, but this was the first time he’d actually come to see the beast in person. It was state-of-the-art all the way. Maybe pre-state-of-the-art when you came right down to it. But that was the American Way, wasn’t it? The flashier the better. No wonder they’d never really gotten along with the Ruskies, who preferred to do other things in space besides spend money.

The transfer into the station went quickly but Ireton chafed at having to go through the ritual of greeting, which including the playing of a nineteen-70s era rock and roll song chosen by some groundside space geek in his honor—Rocket Man, was it? At least it wasn’t the William Shatner version.

He was met by General Lewis N. Clark, who had been lured out of retirement at his villa in the Moon’s northwest corner to ramrod the project. He was surprisingly informal as he introduced the project engineers.

He was then escorted to a bay overlooking the worksite and there it was, his baby, the Yankee Clipper, its shell a lumpy irregularly dimpled shape courtesy of its double-icosahedral frame.

“Not exactly the interplanetary spermatozoa of 2001,” smiled Lomaine Brooks, the engineer assigned to give him the tour. She was wearing khaki pants and suspenders stretched over her ample frame, and a navy-blue Snorg T-shirt reading:

All this
and
brains, too!

Ireton shook his head. Typical of the US. They'd built a Bugatti when a Chery would have nicely done the job.

“When can we take her out for a ride?”

“Soon. Maybe six months, eight if we glitch.”

“Hmm. Well, I have a lot of questions.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she answered brightly. “We pressurized the outer hull three days ago and there were no major leaks. We can go right inside.”

He followed her as she propelled herself down the large transparent oval tube leading to the Clipper’s shell. Reaching the airlock first, she opened it before he’d had a chance to catch up, causing him to tumble ass over teakettle when she moved the place he’d planned on landing.

“Newbies always do that,” she laughed, catching him in her powerful arms. For a moment he could feel her warm breath on his face.

“But would you have caught General Clarke?” he asked, grinning as he reached out for a handhold.

“I wouldn’t have had to,” she sniffed while opening the inner lock. “Besides, he’s an oldbie” They were inside a large dark space, lighted by a few safety lamps. Translucent walls surrounded them. Ireton rapped on one with his knuckles. There was a dead, dry sound.

“Aerogel inner walls,” she said proudly. “Light as air and you can bounce a bowling ball off them.”

“I don’t remember designing for a bowling alley.”

She ignored him. “This gridwork along the inner hull connects to bundles of carbon filaments doped with copper that act as radiators for the heat we’ll be generating. That’s what gives the hull its hairy look and buff color.”

“I thought it just needed a shave.” Ireton felt a sense of awe, as he looked around, despite its state of dishabille—the missing panels, the fiber and conduits snaking everywhere. Shining his light inside, he could see where the tanks of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, lithium, carbon, and water would wrap around the crew’s living quarters.

“At the gooey center is the habitat,” Lieutenant Brooks poked her head into the opening where Ireton had been woolgathering. She looked at him from the tops of her eyes, forehead wrinkled like an inquisitive child’s. “But nothing’s been installed yet. It’s mostly empty space.”

At the end of the corridor they came to a gap leading into the large self-contained icosahedron within.

ØØØ

“The habitat has privacy areas that will be assigned throughout the chamber,” she said leading him across on a Buckyrope™ ladder into another airlock. The sides will be terraced green space, mostly crops but ornamental plants as well, that grow fast and make lots of oxygen. As you know, when the ion motors are lit there will be a very mild constant acceleration that should cause things to settle a bit although it still will be kind of like living in a big bubble.”

Once inside they pulled themselves along into the emergency bridge where Ireton stopped by the Captain’s chair. Around him closely grouped were the stations for NAV, Engineering, IT, and the seat he expected to occupy—second in command. Not what he’d wanted but it would have to do. He knew the Americans would never let a Brit run the show but it was still his baby. Even so the demotion stung a little.

“Questions, sir?”

He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought. “Not really. I helped design this room. I can see what a beautiful job you’ve done.”

“Thank you,” she beamed.

“Have you had dinner, yet?” he suddenly asked.

“Why, no,” she replied, surprised.

“Well?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“Its just newbies hardly want to eat when they first come up.”

“Well, I may be clumsy but I’m hardly a newbie,” he laughed. “And microgravity has never bothered my appetite.”

“Lucky man.”

She took him back, this time through the large void where the habitat would soon be constructed. Halfhearted scaffolding twined deep into the vault. It took his breath away—the largest controlled space ever placed in orbit.

“Watch this!” Lomaine said, pulling herself to the edge of the scaffolding and launching off.

Ireton heard her whoop as she crossed the wide space to the other side. After a moment, and with a silly grin, he leaped after. It was something like skydiving inside the atrium of a building but not so fast, in fact he could feel himself slowing down as he pushed through the air.

“Does anybody ever get stuck in the middle?”

“Only newbies,” she laughed, launching herself straight towards him. She thumped him on the chest hard enough to kill his momentum, while conserving enough of her own to spin lazily off towards the scaffolding. She watched him for awhile as he tried various swimming techniques to get himself to the edge without success.

“Patience, sir, you’ll come over, eventually” she called out to him. “There’s enough air circulation to suck you down a vent sooner or later.”

“Lieutenant, I don’t want to have to order you to rescue me.”

Grinning, she threw him a strand of a Buckyrope.

ØØØ

“My father was a military man, also in the RAF,” he told her as they queued at the cafeteria railing. The Sticko-pads™ beneath it were worn and gave his stockings little purchase, but it didn’t seem to bother him as he used his knees to hold himself in place at the counter while grabbing portions of bread, asparagus—with some kind of clearish sauce holding it together—a piece of blackened chicken (although he suspected the blackening had nothing to do with the recipe), and a hot block of scalloped potato. “He was on loan to the Jamaican Air Force as a jet-fighter trainer, which is where he met my mother. He married her despite, you know, the racial thing,” he said apologetically. He didn’t know why he felt he needed to apologize, perhaps because Lomaine’s skin was so godawful black.

“You’d hardly notice,” she laughed.

“They noticed it enough in school,” he shrugged. “But, really, it wasn’t too bad. Better than being a fatty.”

“I hear that.”

“I didn’t mean . . .”

“No, no,” she smiled. “There ain’t an ounce of fat on this.” She pinched her powerful thigh. “It’s just the way I’m built. But I have to watch it. I can gain five pounds just looking at a piece of cheesecake.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Why, Group Captain!”

“Call me Henry,” he grinned.

“I’m, ah,” she replied, flustered.

He was surprised that he felt so attracted to her. Usually he preferred the willowy type, whereas Lomaine was built like an effing lorry, he thought, feeling guilty. And the blackest woman he’d ever met. Part of it, he realized, was that he’d been too busy over the previous eighteen months for a proper romance, but part of it was genuine attraction, which disturbed him somehow.

“How about yourself?”

“Oh, you know, science-nerd-girl in grade school. Discovered physics, sports, and boys in high school. Decided I liked physics best. A couple of PhDs along the way. My first job was on the Moon. The usual thing.”

Ireton laughed. “I’ve got to go,” he said looking at his watch and pulling away from the table. “I have to return to London in a few hours and I need to talk with the General first. Thank you for the briefing, Lomaine,” he said gripping her hand. “I enjoyed dinner.”

“Well, I did, too.”

“Call me the next time you’re downside.”

“I’m not sure that I should,” she looked at him questioningly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling a little embarrassed by his oversight. “I just assumed there was no one else.”

“N-o-o,” she frowned. “It’s not that. It’s that I’ve applied for a position with the Clipper’s crew.”

“Ah,” he replied, heart sinking. “I’ve no input either way with the committee, if that’s what you’re worried about. That’s Dr. Monelly’s purview . . . although they say the important thing is compatibility between crewmembers,” he smiled like a naughty little boy.

“I just don’t want to get too compatible too quickly,” she frowned at him momentarily and then laughed, disturbing a nearby technician who’d fallen asleep at his table.

“If we’re going to be mates we should know each other in any case. Besides, I owe you dinner.”

“I’ll think about it . . . Henry,” she added after he’d left.

ØØØ

On the other side of the world, outside Novy Mir, they didn’t care who saw the ship they were building. To the blogosphere it looked like a Tinkertoys™ set that had been jammed together by a crack baby with a Soviet-era atomic submarine at the center. The French proclaimed it the ultimate expression of the modernist ideal, the Russians shrugged and said plumbing wasn’t supposed to be pretty, while the Japanese simply didn’t bother to answer the question.

“Big Banger” was the headline of the Internet ’papes when the Russians slid an immense neoprene sheath over the construct like an obscenely huge prophylactic. It looked like a bright red sausage needing a good grilling. When bags of water started arriving from the Moon the Tweeters™ speculated jokingly about steam-powered rockets.

Then a report circulated that the water was indeed to fuel the monstrosity. It was first to be split by electrolysis. Then the hydrogen would be shoved through the reactor core to be superheated and recombined with the oxygen, working as an afterburner—an oxygen-augmented nuclear thermal rocket. There were plenty of problems with this design but it was simple and they could refill their tanks at Charon. The biggest problem was that they would have to coast between burns while they distilled the fuel.

They christened their ship the Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov, after the “master builder” of the Soviet space program.

Sophie Täuber was living in the French quarter of their lunar base, called jVerne. The city was buried well underground. During the lunar day filtered sunlight reflected down into it from a large mirror on the surface. The gardens that Sophie and her crew were building were already famous for their beauty as well as their practicality. Tall, thin frames invited vines to climb explosively in the weak gravity.

“Who would have thought it, autumn on the Moon?” said “Long” Jean Albertine as he accompanied her beneath a row of young sugar maples.

“The hardest part is making decent soil,” she said. “Lunar dust is worthless for growing things. Right now we use hydroponics for the crops. As we gather compost we refine it, mix it with sanitized lunar dust and sewerage, and make these planting regions. It’s coming along but it’ll take a generation or two.”

They stopped by a vending machine and he bought her an Italian ice. “It’s been a long time since I strolled with a pretty girl,” he said.

“I don’t believe that for a minute!” she laughed. They walked for a while longer. “Why are you here?” Sophie finally asked.

“I think you can guess,” he answered after a pause. “We want you—we need you—to join the Charon expedition. No one has tried to keep a closed ecosystem alive for so long a time. You better than anyone know the complexity of what we’re attempting. To my mind there is no one else I’d trust to manage such a system.”

“Pish,” she replied, scornfully. “What about Robbie Frankel, or Meridia Lacombe?”

“Nobody likes Frankel and Meridia has . . . other problems.”

“Huh. You do know what you’re asking of me? My parents could be dead by the time I return. My nephews and nieces grown up. My friends will seem like strangers. My lovers . . .” She suddenly stopped walking, a distant look on her face. “And I’ll never have children of my own.”

“I know, Sophie,” Albertine stood next to her, resting his hand on her shoulder in sympathy. “I don’t like asking you to make this sacrifice. If we thought anyone else could do it . . . Not many of us get the opportunity to make history. Your name will be remembered as long as Marie Curie’s.”

“Who?” she joked feebly, watching him from the corners of her eyes while fussing over a small planting of wildflowers.

Albertine laughed. “You may discover alien life, be the first scientist to study it and evaluate it. Speak with it.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Jean.”

“All right, but what scientist could pass this up? You must do this—for yourself, for the human race, for France!”

“Viva la France,” she echoed hollowly.

ØØØ

The von Braun spun like a top as it followed the Moon in orbit at the L5 Lagrange Point. It looked very similar to the space station Werner von Braun had envisioned during the 1950s and had been elaborated upon so famously in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By calling the ship the von Braun the Germans were deliberately goosing both the Brits—by honoring the developer of the V2 rocket—and the Americans—by reclaiming von Braun’s legacy.

Christain Monelly sat in his office finishing his day’s work. EURO–NOL’s strategy, largely at his suggestion, was succeeding. None of their competitors had an inkling of what they were planning or how close they were to their goal. Still, they were a long time from launching and could easily lose this race. It all depended on American hubris.

He snicked his teeth with a splinter of wood while studying the files on his proposed crew and their understudies, each carefully evaluated and selected by Christain personally. He would be meeting with them all soon, the first time they’d be together, but now he was meeting with the head engineer, Walter Thiel, a German, and the Dutch captain Ole Christensen Rømer.

The walls of his office were filled with a surprising amount of bric-a-brac, considering the expense of shipping them here. There were his awards and diplomas, photos, and paintings of him with various politicians and pop stars. And they were all in heavy frames. The walls were made of wood—very thin wood—but real wood. The carpet was lush and ornate, and the window had blinds he could close whenever he tired of watching the Earth meandering about his sky.

His intercom buzzed.

“Mr. Thiel is here.”

“Send him in.”

Walter Thiel was a thin, angular man, his thinning hair plastered straight back. Dead skin would have peppered his shoulders if the environmental manager allowed it, of that Christain was certain. Of course his looks didn’t matter but his competence did. He had been recruited from Forschungszentrum Jülich—the Jülich Research Centre.

“I hope you have gotten comfortably settled in.”

“Yes, of course, thank you.”

“How is progress on the powerplant?”

“No problems with that. The technology is very well known. The problem is keeping the tests secret.”

“As long as we can stay on schedule.”

“If that’s the case then what am I doing here?” he answered testily.

Monelly looked at him closely. His tests had shown that Thiel was high strung, but malleable. He’d be leaving behind an estranged wife and two children but by all accounts everyone would be the happier for it. He was a man looking for direction and Monelly was the person to give it to him.

“We have to prepare for the journey itself, Walter. I want the crew to start training together.”

“Is that necessary?”

“We’re going to be together a long time.”

“Then we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Monelly laughed. “You’ll be back to work soon enough, Walter, I’ll see to it. For this week, though, relax, get to know your crewmates. We can lay out your training schedule and maybe share a few drinks in the meantime.”

Thiel sighed resignedly. “Of course, Dr. Monelly.”

“Christain.”

Watching him leave Monelly reflected that all the old boy really needed to cheer him up was to get laid regularly. He was pinning his hopes for that on Fraulein Katerina Egge, who liked the brainy but dumb type. The kind she could push around. Christain’s psychological testing, not to mention his personal experience with her, had indicated that the two could be a very good match, but of course with the human heart nothing was a sure thing. He shrugged. At times he felt like he was running a very expensive dating service.

Captain Rømer proved to be much more affable. The “Flying Dutchman,” as the press insisted on calling him, was renowned for his calm demeanor and cold deliberation. A former test pilot, he had been the head astronaut for the European Space Agency before the split with France and Britain, and the first person to ride the German booster, Hringhorni, into orbit. He had carried EURO–NOL’s flag to the Moon.

Christain met him in the onion shaped module along the north axis of the space station, attached to the framework that surrounded the station like an oversized Faraday shield. It did not spin along with the rest of the station and so was without pseudogravity.

They shook hands. Rømer was a short man, solidly built, square-shaped, seemingly as wide as he was tall.

“It’s good to see you, Captain.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Monelly. I’m looking forward to seeing my crew.”

“They should be along shortly but first I wanted to have a little talk with you.”

“About what?”

“The chain of command.”

Rømer regarded him warily. “Yes?”

“I want us to be clear on this. You command the ship, obviously. I command the mission.”

The Captain grinned. “Christain,” he chided. “How long have we known each other?”

“Officially, I’m an advisor. I have no power whatsoever.”

“Um hmm. And if I told you to go fuck yourself how long would it be before I was back on Earth?”

“Monelly smiled. “How long would it take you to walk?”

Rømer nodded. “You tell me what to cook, Christain, and then stay the hell out of the kitchen.”

“Good, I knew you’d understand.”

“Or I never would have been chosen in the first place.”

The door to the airlock opened and the first member of the crew arrived, the Belgian, ecologic specialist, Geo Lemaître. Walter Thiel soon followed bringing along the rest of his engineering crew, Antonia Carubia from the Czech Republic, and Monelly’s fellow Italian Emily Romagna, the IT specialist. Dr. Katerina Egge arrived next, promptly sneering at the sight of Thiel, who had a splash of lasagna on his shirtfront. He stared back at her, intrigued. The cook, Kirin Wahmke, and pilots Hermann Gromek and Venetia Katherine Phair, all German, arrived together. Last to arrive was the Icelander, security specialist Arne Sak. He coldly surveyed the room.

“I’m so happy we could finally get together,” Monelly said after they had quieted down. “We are about to embark on one of the greatest adventures in the history of humankind. Compared to us Armstrong and Aldrin did take a very small step for mankind. Columbus sailed across a mud puddle. Marco Polo visited his next door neighbor and Magellan took a stroll around the block. It takes light four hours to travel where we’re going. No one will be close by to rescue us if we fail. Our enemies will be nearby. We must be closer than friends, closer than colleagues, closer than family, closer than shipmates have ever been. We can have no conflict, no jealousy, no anger, no strife.” He looked around the room, deliberately meeting each and every eye.

“I’ll be watching you very closely this week. Not as a big brother, or a policeman, or priest, but as a therapist so that we can anticipate trouble before it becomes a problem. Make changes. Keep everyone, if not satisfied, then at least understanding. I’m depending on your help, your cooperation, and your honesty—with me and with each other.

“We will be the first to claim Charon for our nations and unravel its secret. I have no doubt the history of the next thousand years depends on us. We are truly harbingers of a new era, when our peoples, too long restrained by the jealousy and hatred of other, lesser races, will once again take our rightful place at the head of civilization.”

With that he opened the champagne, squeezing drinks into a bulb for each as they toasted one another.

Later, back in his office, he sat sharing a cognac with Arne Sak.

“Nice speech, boss. Do you think anyone bought it?”

Monelly shrugged, unconcerned. “What have you found out?”

“Nothing that’s not in my report. The Allies . . .”

Monelly snorted. “Are they really calling themselves that?”

“I’m afraid so. I don’t know who in the hell they think they are. World War Two was a long time ago.”

“As propaganda it’s useful.”

“If you say so.”

“What else?”

“The Americans are getting nervous thanks to our Slav-Jap-Frog pals but as long as they plan to slingshot around Venus first they’re on a schedule we can beat.”

“What about the Russians?”

“I wouldn’t worry about them. That piece of shit they’re constructing will probably fall apart halfway there.”

“How about the efforts at sabotage?”

“We’re stirring the pot, backing as many groups as will take our money, but they’re mostly amateurs and about as likely to strike at us as any of the others.”

“The Chinese?”

Sak grunted with frustration. “We know they’re sending nuclear material to the Moon. They’re definitely up to something but we don’t have a chance in hell of finding out what that is.”

“Do you have an estimate?”

“Assume that it’s going to be very close.”

“All right, Arne. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Once he’d left Christain opened his window’s blinds and contemplated the blue globe drifting there.
. .

Chapter Four

2009-02-23T18:44:00.019-05:00

New rules about non-combatants in space required Banner to first join the US Army. Soon after filling out the application he found himself in basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia with a bunch of regular army infantry recruits. It didn’t kill him but there were a few moments when he wished that it had.

For one thing he couldn’t understand the young kids’ music. “Whatever happened to good old Hip-Hop?” he wondered. There was no other way to say it but this new stuff wasn’t even music.

His opinion didn’t bother anybody. At 28 he was the old man of the group and when they discovered why he was there, and that he had been in outer space, he was treated with an awed deference that he found embarrassing. After awhile they started calling him Gramps because he was always trying to protect them from themselves, offering them advice, and loaning them money that he didn’t really expect to get back.

By the end of training he was as tough as a dog’s old chewstick, knew how to fight to the death, and had made more friends than he could count. Kids that were heading out to Afghanistan, Borneo, Saskatchewan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and a half dozen other nasty killing places where their government thought they should be. He might be there soon himself, he reflected, if this Charon thing didn’t work out.

Then he was off to Houston and the Johnson Space Center to begin training in earnest. The bus let him off at a barracks where, for the next three months, he and the other recruits were put through a rigorous process by a rough old Sergeant who pushed them hard as they learned the bare necessities about surviving in the nekkid vacuum and radioactivity of a space environment. It was all old hat to Banner but he knew better than to let Sarge know that and diligently went through the process with the rest.

Cape Canaveral never looked so beautiful as their bus approached from the coastal road. Banner was surprised to find tears in his eyes when he saw the gantries where rockets went up almost daily. They let them off near a sad little flat-roofed one-story building that could have been built way back in the 1950s where they were given their duffel bags, queued up, marched a quarter mile to a transport where they gave up them back, and then marched to another bus, which took them to a larger building where they were inspected, hosed down, and issued generic space gear that they hastily donned as their loving Sergeant growled encouragement.

Then they hiked a short way through an air-conditioned tunnel, its scuffed walls a bright yellow. Banner waited his turn to squeeze in the elevator with five other recruits. When the doors opened they were hurried into the EEV (Earth Egress Vehicle), nicknamed Little Boots by its mischievous crew. Soon after they strapped in the Wally Schirra “Black Hat” booster was lit, beginning their trip to the Moon. The brutal acceleration of the vehicle brought a few anonymous whimpers from the recruits but it filled Banner with fierce joy.

They wouldn’t let Banner visit his old haunts on the ISS, or rather Freedom as it had been rechristened, during their stopover. He was there to pee, eat, and transfer with the rest of the troops to the Moon Unit taking them the rest of the way to Armstrong Base. The place looked shabby, worn out, he reflected as he pulled himself through the corridor along with the rest, carefully observing military rules so that Sarge wouldn’t get his shorts in an uproar.

He did recognize the old hatch leading into the mess. Inside, he saw that the video screen had been removed and the food station streamlined. Gone were the big old pressurized carboys that held drinks and in their place spigots stuck out from the wall where you could plug in your canteen’s blow hole. One was labeled coffee, one was labeled water, and one was labeled citrus, which oozed out as orange as a Safety Stripe™.

The ass-pad on his chair was gone and he had to curl his legs around the seat base to stay in place. Still, he was doing better than some of the guys, who stared at the food on their trays with a green look about their gills. “Once one of them barfs it’ll all be over,” he thought contentedly. He’d seen it happen before with newbies once the smell hit them—the dreaded chain-puke. The first one who could get out of the room was required to close the hatch behind him and leave the others to their fate.

“You gonna eat that?” he asked the rookie sitting next to him. She shook her head very slowly, not daring to look up.

“Thanks.” He swallowed the gooey briquette happily. That’s when he saw a woman gesturing from the entrance. Her red hair was cropped short, a reddish fuzz, really, emphasizing the flat planes of her skull and sharp angles of her cheekbones. It took him a moment to realize the officer was his Dr. Ashlee Monelly!

“Sarge,” he said to the man glowering from his station on the ceiling above him. “The Captain wants to talk to me.” Sergeant Teigs squinted in the direction he was indicating before saying quietly, “OK, Brummett, but be ready to leave in ten.”

“Yes, sir.”

He was trying to think of what he should say as he drifted towards her self-consciously.

”Uh . . .” he squeaked as she grabbed him in a fierce hug. He put his arms around her and inhaled deeply. She smelled neutral, of course, as everyone did, but somehow her neutrality smelled better than the rest.

“Banner! It’s so good to see a friendly face.”

He was melting into her when he realized that the entire room had gone quiet. He peeked around the back of her skull and saw that, yes, dear mother, everyone was staring at them. Some were smiling, cynically or wistfully, he couldn’t tell. Others looked shocked. Sarge looked like he was about to go major Krakatoa.

“Maybe we should . . .” he pushed off from the footrail pulling her out into the corridor next to a stanchion that used to hold one of Sophie’s old hydrangeas. They huddled together, whispering like two conspirators.

“It is good to see you again,” she said smiling. He saw there was moisture in her blue eyes. —Oh god . . .

“I’m sorry about you and Dr. Christain . . .”

She made a face. “It was going to happen anyway. What about you?”

He shrugged. “Teaching school, thinking about getting married."

“Ah.”

“But I could hardly ask her to wait by the fireside for ten or fifteen years.”

She hugged him again. “Which college were you teaching at?” she said to change the subject.

He laughed. “High school math. I like to start at the bottom.”

“And now you’re going with us to Charon!”

“I hope so. I’ve gotta get through space-basic first.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said placing her hand on the blade of his shoulder. He was about to kiss her when an angry gray head poked through the hatch.

“Brummett!” Sarge pulled himself into the corridor where he encouraged the cadets that followed to move along, “Can the bullshit!”

Banner stared at him hopelessly. “I have to go, Ashlee. But I’ll see you soon.”

“Good luck, Banner.” She kissed him on the cheek as rough hands pulled him away.

“Excuse me, M’am,” Sarge said to Captain Monelly.

“Carry on, Sergeant,” she replied, eyes twinkling with amusement.

It wasn’t until they were in the Moon Unit that the old soldier released him, observing dryly, “You don’t have to stand at attention, soldier.”

Banner looked down, turning red, as a nearby soldier guffawed, earning a hard stare from the sergeant.

“Get strapped in, son,” he said not unkindly as he pulled himself down the line, checking each young soldier in turn.

ØØØ

JJ Gatlinberg was a hundred yards from the Chinese far-side base. No one had ever been closer. He had spent the previous eighteen hours maneuvering into position but was way too pumped to feel tired. Even so there wasn’t much to see—some very large tractors, a couple of shacks. Everything else was nestled deep inside the crater, which was roofed by a thick flat sheath. A huge retractable door ran along one side, its motors as tall as five-story buildings. If he could just make it to them without being detected he might find a place to hide until he could slip inside.

He thought he knew where all the security cameras were hidden but must have missed one because halfway to the engine housing he saw soldiers emerging from one of the nearby shacks. He watched them approach. There was nowhere to run.

“Shit! Call the Cap!” he hollered to no one in particular.

He couldn’t see their features in the glare as they approached in their red and gold spacesuits, stopping just inches from him. He watched as one of them raised a thick boot, bringing it down with a crunch. All was blackness.

Gatlinberg turned from the screen with a sigh. Behind him Cap looked on sternly, but resigned.

“You did the best you could JJ.”

“The Nanos were able to move a little closer during the distraction,” someone said.

“So it wasn’t a total loss,” said Cap.

“I was so close.”

“We learned a lot.”

“The next time . . . “

Cap took him by the shoulder. “Not for you, Lieutenant.”

Gatlinberg looked up at him, not comprehending.

“You’re being reassigned. I’m sorry JJ. Lieutenant Gustefson was caught in that blow-out at Cassini the other day and they need someone to replace him with the newbies.”

“Aw, no! Not babysitting. We’re so close to getting in.”

“It’s just for one group,” Captain Spigot (he pronounced it "Spee-jo") replied. “The Chinese will still be here when you get back.”

“When do I leave?” JJ huffed with frustration.

“Can you be ready in ten minutes?”

“But I haven’t slept in . . . yes, sir.”

ØØØ

“Go, go, go, go!” Sarge yelled as they jumped into their spacesuits. Banner helped his partner run down her checklist and then she did the same for him. Soon after they were outside on the parade ground standing at attention, easy to do in a pressurized spacesuit that could stand on its own without any help from the person inside.

Sarge came down the line with that funny little hop people used on the Moon. Hopping right along beside him was an officer. They stopped in front of Banner. The officer seemed to be staring at him intently. Hard to tell when his face was behind a gold-tinted faceplate. “What the hell?” Banner thought.

“Private Brummett?”

“Yessir!” With mounting horror Banner realized that he recognized the officer’s voice. “It can’t be!” He glanced at the namepatch on the man’s chest. “Lieutenant Gatlinberg?” he gasped.

“That’s right, Gump,” the lieutenant grated, putting his helmet right against Banner’s. He had turned off his radio but Banner could still hear him loud and clear. “I don’t know how you made it here, loser, but if you fuck up once I’ll run you back to Earth so fast it’ll take two weeks for your asshole to catch up!”

“Original,” Banner muttered.

“What was that?”

“Yessir! Uh, thank you, sir!” Banner tried to salute but his arm couldn’t quite make it all the way up in his pressurized suit.

“Pathet . . .” Gatlinberg muttered as he pulled away. Sarge stared at him for a moment with what would have been a puzzled expression but Banner couldn’t see his face, either, before following the Lieutenant down the line.

“Holy fuck!” thought Banner, sweat stinging his eyes. “Holy Jesus fuck!”

ØØØ

Hurry up and wait was the same everywhere. Even on the Moon. Banner was sweating in his suit like Aunt Maude at the 4th of July picnic. “I’m even starting to think like a Gump,” he realized. “What a world.” They had brought them out in the long afternoon sun because they were using a leftover atomic bomb to blow a new hole in a crater wall and thought it would be a good idea to take the troopers somewhere dangerous to see how they’d hold up. And here Banner had thought that the whole point was to avoid danger entirely.

“Thinking like NASA,” they called people with his attitude, and it was discouraged in the military.

The ground beneath them began to shake violently. A crevasse opened up a half mile away spewing forth chunks of possibly radioactive debris in tall parabolic arcs.

“Eat dirt!” Sarge growled as the pieces thudded down amongst them, some pinging off their suits. It seemed to take forever as Banner fell like a soap bubble to the regolith.

“Check your status!” came the next command.

Banner ran through his displays. Nothing damaged. Radiation high but tolerable. He dared a quick look around. Sarge was stalking amongst them intently watching his readouts and verifying the answers with his own eyes. When he was satisfied he made them leave in small groups, taking no chances that a vault might have opened up beneath them. Then they were marched back to the transport. At the barracks they were subjected to decontamination procedures before being allowed inside. A few of them had to see the docs but no one would need to go back to Earth.

“What the hey, I didn’t want kids anyway,” someone joked.

“Oh, you can have kids, they’ll just be ugly.”

“Can’t blame radiation for that.”

ØØØ

“Born again to what?” Banner asked his bunkie who was trying to recruit him to a higher cause.

“Born again in Christ,” Antowaine replied with a smile. “I know because the holy Greene, Penrose, and whatisname proclaimed that God’s world is smaller than we can ever see, heaven is in what they call dark matter. God is what they call dark energy . . .” he hesitated. “Or zero point energy, I forget which.”

“Gosh, Ant, I was raised a Catholic and they didn’t exactly teach string theory.”

“The Manifold,” he corrected piously.

“Yeah, and they said we’d go to hell if we talked about it too much.”

“They don’t want you to hear the truth. Where do you think hell is?”

“Somewhere down below . . . and hot?”

“It’s in the dark matter that makes up 22% of all the stuff in the universe, my man!” Antowaine replied cheerfully. “We’re only 4%, God is the rest.”

“The dark energy?”

“They only call it that because they’re ignorant,” he sniffed. “It’s just the Energy, man. It’s where our spirits dwell. It’s where we’re judged.”

“I can live with that, I mean with being judged. I’ve lived a clean life.”

“But you ain’t been born again, Banner. You’ve gotta be washed in the blood of the lamb. You have to accept Jesus for what He is.”

“About that . . . see, the nuns were right, we’ve talked about it too much. Now is the part where you tell me I’m going to hell.”

“You are if you’re not born again!”

Banner shrugged. "Halle-fuckin'-lujah!"

ØØØ

Lieutenant Gatlinberg seemed like was never far away. Part of that was because the base wasn’t very big but it was also because he wasn’t content to sit back and administer the program while letting the Sergeant handle the up close and personal. No, he was in their shit all the time. He even took calisthenics with them in the morning and found inner peace with them during yoga class in the evening. And every minute Banner felt his eyes watching closely, begging for any excuse to wash him out.

The base was eight Quonset huts buried deep in the regolith beneath a dull gray dome of aluminum. Filtered sunlight dappled down two weeks a month, the rest of the time sickly orange sodium lights competed with common sense outside the huts. Not much attention had been paid to a biosphere but nevertheless some scrub grass was growing in the corners, and a few things that could be jimson weed.

At one end was a small parade ground beside two squat buildings. One housed the mess hall and the other was a storage facility. Between them was a slope where the roadway sunk beneath one end of the dome to the main airlock. An entire company could be decompressed at one time. On the other side of the airlock a second dome housed the garage.

One day, while standing on the lump of green-painted sward outside the barracks thinking about the butterscotch pudding they’d had with dinner, he looked up to see the Lieutenant frowning at him.

“Have you heard from her, Gump?” Gatlinberg suddenly asked.

“Sir?”

“Sophie. You were her friend, right? At least she talked about you while I pretended to listen.”

“That would be against regulation, sir.” Banner snapped to attention, adding after a moment’s silence. “I haven’t heard from her since she left the ISS.”

“Yeah. I thought you might know a way.”

“No, sir.”

Gatlinberg turned and hopped away. Was this some kind of test? Banner wondered, watching him leave, feeling shaken by the man’s intensity. The less Jesus Johnny talked to him the better.

The next day the troops were out on the shooting range trying out various weapons. Banner had always been a good shot as a kid, although the first time he’d killed something it gave him a sick feeling and he never did it again. Firing a weapon was different on the Moon. The trajectory was flatter and there was no air pressure to account for. Since his suit made sighting the regular way impossible the gun was held at hip level and sighted electronically through a display on the inside of his faceplate. He soon had the hang of it and was amazed at the distance he could accurately shoot the rocket-propelled fléchettes.

“You’re a regular Davy Crockett, ain’t you Brummett?” the sergeant noted after the results were tabulated.

“Tweren’t nothin’, sir,” he replied, Crockett-like.

Hand-to-hand combat was an especially frustrating exercise in futility. There wasn’t much you could do to an opponent in a battle-hardened pressure suit without a weapon, except crack his helmet open with a rock. “We’ve come all the way to the Moon to fight like cavemen,” Banner thought after one encounter left both him and his opponent lying in the artificial mud, exhausted—until Sarge came along and whacked them both soundly on their heads with his “lickin’ stick.”

Banner did better in the tactical training class. Sitting at a console while running through various scenarios based on actual combat situations, Banner was able to outmaneuver his opponents more often than not. “I guess all those hours of wiizing are finally paying off,” he thought with some satisfaction. Closely reading the manuals they’d been given helped, too, he realized, and gave him an edge on the younger guys who weren’t quite so diligent.

Once a week they were taken out for a long hike across the Moon’s surface. Lighter gravity meant little when you were required to haul eight times your own weight around with you. Sometimes they’d walk in a big circle, returning to base the same day. Other times they spent the “night” on the surface, inflating pressurized tents inside a rill canyon or in the shade of a crater wall. Above them the Earth hung like a revolving blue lamp, the shadow of night creeping across its surface teasing lattices of light from its cities and highways. Banner watched for hours sometimes, waiting for sleep to come.

One day near the end of training they were following along the edge of a steep crater when his buddy stumbled, danced briefly for a moment trying to regain her balance, and fell inside. Without hesitating Banner followed her into the dark shadow, flicking on his lamp, digging at the ground to help brake his fall. Somehow he reached the bottom on his feet. Looking around for the soldier in the gloom he made out a small blinking red light. He gasped, hopping desperately to reach the still figure. The light meant her suit was depressurizing. In less than a minute she’d be dead.

Dropping his pack he ripped open his emergency shelter. Within seconds it had pressurized and he shoved her inside its fallopian airlock. Fearing this would not be enough he started depressurizing his own suit and followed her inside. The fit was extremely tight but he managed to wrestle her helmet off. He saw blood around her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears and that she was fitfully breathing. Removing his own helmet he began giving her artificial respiration, the taste of her blood in his mouth. Finally, with a cough and a wretch, she began breathing regularly again.

“Thank God,” he said over and over as the other troops caught up, quickly erecting a field tent and cutting them out of the shelter. He watched numbly as the medics took over.

“Man, you’ll do anything for a piece of ass,” said one of his buddies admiringly.

“Shut up,” Banner smiled wanly. “Shut the fuck up.”

ØØØ

Training was over at last. Sporting his new corporal’s stripes Banner went into the nearby town of Neil with some of his buds. He bought a round of whiskey for his table. It really didn’t taste like any whiskey he’d ever had but he supposed oaken casks were hard to come by on the Moon.

“Too true,” said the bartender, whose establishment it was. “We make it in the back. It’s basically vodka mixed with a little Liquid Smoke.”

“Uk.”

“But since it’s your last night,” the barkeep learned over confidentially, “Let me buy you a drink from my private stock.” The man poured him a shot of single malt scotch.

“Word,” Banner gasped, rolling the liquid around in his mouth gratefully. “I can’t even afford to drink this stuff on Earth.”

Back at the table Roland was doing an impression of General Starks that caused Cindy Lou to blow beer through her nose. The table burst into raucous laughter as Banner rejoined them.

“To the corporal,” one of them raised his glass and the others followed.

“Dawg.”

“Muh man.”

They all drank.

“What’s next, Banner?” One of them asked.

“I go back to Earth and wait for them to decide whether or not I get to go.”

“That is so great,” Cindy Lou said.

“What about you?” he asked her.

“I’m going down to the edge of Mare Nubium with most of the guys to keep an eye on the Germans. Some of us are going out to Lagrange to help with the new space station and a few can’t say. But you’re going all the way!”

“I hope so,” he looked into her eyes like Jim Beam on a Sunday.

“It’s such an adventure,” she said, touching his forearm. “I’ll probably never see you again.”

“Oh, it’s only for ten or twenty years.”

“That seems like forever.”

“You know, you have the bluest eyes,” he said as she smiled at him.

“Brummett!” Suddenly a figure came up beside them. “You pointy-dicked SOB, let me buy you a drink,” a very drunken John Jesus Gatlinberg croaked while sitting down beside him.

“Lieutenant, ah . . .” Banner gulped, standing.

“Siddown, hoss, that’s an order.”

Banner sat, not knowing what to expect. “It’s a little late to cashier me,” he tried to joke.

“Naw, naw, naw, man!” To his shock Gatlinberg tried to hug him.

“This guy, this soldier,” Jesus Johnny proclaimed to the table of bemused recruits. “You done me proud. Who’d a thunk it, a punk like you? We were on Freedom together, did you know that?” he blearily looked around the table. “And this guy was a low-life weenie. Could barely wipe his ass with both hands. Now you can shoot—you’re the best in the troop. You can fight, I’ve seen ya. And you know how to take care of your own. That makes you a soldier I’m proud to serve with.”

Accepting the compliment Banner finished his beer and poured another, to try and get in the spirit of the thing after Cindy Lou, with sad eyes, said goodnight. Towards the end of the evening he found that Gatlinberg had put his arm around him and was whispering confidentially into his ear.

“You know, I loved that Sophie girl.”

“Sure. Me too.”

“No, I mean it,” he growled. “I’ve fucked plenty of women in my green time but none like her. Did joo fuck her?”

“No,” Banner answered defensively.

“Ah, you woosie. I didn’t think so. That gal is all woman. It takes a real man to get to her.”

Banner flushed with anger. “There’s more to her than just a roll in the hay!”

“Calm down,” Gatlinberg said with a laugh. “Relax. You’re right. I know it. She’s not like any woman I’ve ever had, goddamnit! That’s why it still bothers me. Here, have another beer. I think maybe you’ve got the hots for her, too,” he added pityingly.

“So?”

“Well, you’ll never get her that way, pardner. Women talk, you know, but what they want is another thing entirely. You can listen to them, sympathize—if all you want is to be their brother! That’s why they like faggots,” he burped loudly, and maybe farted, too, Banner realized with disgust. “Or you can be a man and take what you want—and what they want—why else put you through all that bullshit . . . like that little girl you were talking to when I interrupted,” he smirked.

Banner looked at him dumbly, thinking about what he’d lost with Sophie, Annabeth, and now Cindy Lou, and feeling deep, dark despair. He noticed that the bar was closing and the others had gone, except Ferd who lay unconscious on the table, blowing little bubbles in a wet puddle of beer. Banner hoisted him over his shoulder.

“Thanks for explaining things,” he said coldly to Gatlinberg before turning to leave.

“When a shark stops swimming he dies,” Jesus Johnny shrugged to no one in particular.
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More links:
Apollo Over the Moon: a View from Orbit Chapter 4: The Maria
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Chapter 3

2008-12-28T08:23:00.024-05:00

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

Chapter Two

2008-11-28T06:45:00.015-05:00

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

2008-10-21T16:38:00.023-04:00

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.”

Preface

2008-10-19T11:06:00.002-04:00

“The Eagle II has landed.” The voice came through loud and clear. There was applause throughout the room. America was back on the Moon.

After descending the short ladder to the surface the astronaut turned to the camera, the red, white, and blue outer layer of his suit rippling in the vacuum like the snap of a pennant off Cape Cod. “That’s another small step for a person, another . . . uh. . . .” The astronaut, Captain Bill Bailey, turned, looking into the distance. “Wait a minute.”

“Pan the camera,” someone urged and after a moments hesitation the picture moved but the sudden glare blanked the picture.

“Dammit!”

“Hang on,” the technician said in an exasperated voice. It’ll compensate in a moment.”

Even as he spoke the picture returned ghostly, like Neil Armstrong hopping beneath the LEM.

“What the hell?”

A vehicle approached them, treads throwing up dust like a Mississippi mud-skivver. It was already very close, as if waiting for them nearby.

“What is it?”

“You mean, who is it? Can you zoom in?”

“I see a standard.”

A groan went up. “It’s the Chinese!”

“What?”

The vehicle stopped near the dumbfounded astronauts. After a moment’s pause two figures climbed out, approaching them.

“Boys, we have a problem.” CAPCOM said.

Astronauts and Taikonauts stood looking dumbly at one another.

“Their radios are on a different frequency, fellas.”

“Can’t we adjust?”

“I mean, real different. I guess they didn’t want to take a chance of us knowing they were already there.”

“It worked.”

“It doesn’t really matter because this is between Washington and Beijing. They’re meeting at the SL Embassy as we speak.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“Watch the feed.”

Bailey looked on in growing horror. “The Chinese are claiming the Moon!”

“What?”

“They’ve built a base right over those hills.”

“That was our base!”

“Uh-uh, the Chinese say it’s theirs now, finder’s keepers.”

“Dawg! Can they do that?”

“I don’t know, Eagle II, but you may have to return to orbit.”

“Without Base we ain’t got the fuel.”

“That’s a rog-o.” There followed a long silence. “It’s out of our hands.”

“No shit,” Bailey muttered to 3 billion outraged viewers before NASA could break the connection. “No fucking shit!”

Invocation

2008-10-19T10:38:00.001-04:00

This is the story of the space race, the second one, the permanent one—when humanity finally grasps its destiny by the short hairs. . . .