Nonetheless, I felt suddenly lonely. I hadn’t realized how much I’d come to depend on the company of my fellow cadets—even those I thought I couldn’t stand. But outside of those seven, whom aboard the Station did I know?
There were my instructors, Landis, Trimble, and Wilimczyk, but I liked none of them, and the feeling seemed to be reciprocal.
Among the others.. .1 had developed a strong respect and admiration for Commander Davidson, but of course he was pretty close to unapproachable for a cadet like me. Lee Hoffman was a gruff man, but he seemed to have confidence in me, and I liked him. But there was a gulf separating us that I couldn’t put my finger on. Age, I guessed.
That left the Cramers. And I hadn't seen them once to talk to since I’d come up.
My luck didn’t improve much. I ate a lonely lunch and headed into the adjoining rec room, figuring I’d at least kill a little time watching TV. I was “on call" for space-tug missions, but Hoffman assured me that I wouldn’t be called again that day. “Your next mission will be solo, Paul," he’d told me as we unsuited. " You did well on this one; you won’t need me.’’
“How many guys are there on these missions?" I asked.
“Not many. There’s Dean Ford, and Bob Tucker, and ... me, I guess. Tucker went down on the shuttle you came up on for two months’ rotation. I guess you’re his replacement for the time being.’’
“Is there that much work?’’
“No. You’ll probably get most of it. We all have other duties up here.” His voice had lowered into a more confidential tone. “Most of the guys up here, they’re earthlubbers really. They cope, they get their space leg. But most of ’em never get that real feeling for it. You’ve got it—it’s a body awareness, an instinct, I guess.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “Stick with it, kid. You’ve got what it takes.”
I’d felt embarrassed for a moment, and then I’d looked up. He’d turned away. The back of his neck was red. He’d been as embarrassed as I was! For some reason, that was reassuring.
The rec room lights had been dimmed, and the big wall screen was full of glowing technicolor. They were beaming some Hollywood movie up to us. I slumped into a surprisingly comfortable lightweight chair, and took a look around.
There weren’t many in the room, and at first I recognized no one. Then I saw Mary.
She was wearing a regulation jump suit, but on her it did not quite look regulation. I revised my opinion of her skinniness. She was sitting with a crewman. They seemed to be having their own personal conversation. I debated the merits of interrupting them, of trying to watch the movie, or just cutting out entirely.
I hadn’t made my mind up when Mary solved it for me: she saw me.
“Hey, Paul! Come on over, Paul." She was smiling her usual bright smile.
I sauntered over and sprawled into a nearby chair. “You’re not working?" I asked.
She made a face. “My first real breather in days. Daddy told me I’d been working so hard I should knock off for the afternoon. I haven’t seen much of you, Paul. How are you doing? Oh! I’m sorry; I should’ve introduced you—this is Norm Edwards. He’s the fellow who helped us at docking, remember?’’
I hadn’t recognized him in the dim light. He turned his head and nodded, and the light caught the sardonic lift of his eyebrow.
“Hello,” I said evenly. “How’s the gossip business?”
Edwards straightened. “Come again?”
“You’ve given me quite a little reputation, haven’t you?” I said. I felt my temples throbbing, and I wondered why I was doing this.
“Paul, what are you talking about?” Mary asked. Her smile was gone.
“Hotshot here,” Edwards answered her, “has a lot to teach us neos. He gives demonstrations.”
“Why don’t you get off my back, Edwards?” I said, my temper pulling a tight band around my chest.
“I didn’t know you two knew each other so well,” Mary said very coldly.
“It’s obvious you don’t know one of us that well,” I replied. “This creep has been spreading stories about me all over the Station.”
“You flatter yourself, Williams,” Edwards said.
“He never even mentioned you to me, Paul,” Mary said. “What is this all about?”
“Ask him, why don’t you?’’
“Don’t you want to speak for yourself, Paul?" “Why bother?" I replied. “I know when I’m outnumbered." I climbed to my feet and stalked quickly out of the rec room. I didn’t look back.
I spent the next two hours in my bunk, playing the whole scene over in my mind again and again, trying to figure out where I’d soured it.
I’d blown the whole bit; I knew that. But why? Things had been going so well. I’d been pretty proud about my morning’s work—why did I go out of my way to antagonize Mary by picking a fight in front of her?
When was I going to learn?
I was deep in a funk, when the door slid open, and Bix came in.
“Well, hey! How’d it go?’’
“Lousy. Rotten. I blew it.’’
“What?”
I roused myself. “Oh, not the space work. That went O.K. It was afterward.’’
“What happened afterward?’’
"Bix, what am I going to do with myself? I pulled off a fine space job, and impressed everybody. Then I went and scrubbed it all by shooting my mouth off.’’
“Tell me about it." He climbed up into his bunk.
I did.
“It’s not as though I was deeply involved with this girl or anything," I said finally. “But she is a nice girl—a good person. And I acted like a Number One jerk in front of her.’’
“You care what she thinks of y^u?”
“Of course! Didn’t I just say that?’’
Bix made a few noncommittal noises.
" What about this Edwards guy? He was the guy’ who thought you were showing off, right?’’
“Yeah. And I’ve heard the story from several different people. Every time I come up looking like a real obnoxious guy.’’
“And—?”
“And what?”
“Are you? An obnoxious guy, I mean.”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering,” I said very quietly.
Chapter 9
Life went on. If I was going to go through Dr. Beiderbecke’s private psychoanalysis, I was going to have to do it on my own time. The next morning found me with a new mission: this time I would be on my own.
I was briefed at Control. Radar had picked up a sizable hunk of hardware on an eccentric orbit. It had apparently been out quite a lot farther. The orbit was now decaying, and the computer showed that this swing would likely be close to its last.
It was a routine run; they weren’t about to hand me anything fancy for my first solo effort.
When I brought the tug out, the Earth was in full daylight below. Still in the shadow of the Station, I let the tug hang for several moments while I stared down over its side. Almost directly below was the Pacific. A little to the east was the cloud-shrouded coast of Venezuela. A few offshore islands were etched cleanly in a lighter turquoise against the aquamarine of the ocean.
It was all too big, too close. It felt as though it would engulf me—swallow me up. As a boy I’d thought of space work being a very different thing: jetting about through space with the nearby planets all no larger than the few coins in my pockets, and as flat-looking as the Moon seen from Earth.
Below, the Earth was no disk. It was a huge globe that filled more than half my field of vision. There was no other way to think of it than as down. And, my senses told me, I was falling. As long as I worked out here, hovering over this great blue planet, I would always be falling.
I felt cold sweat on my brow, and lifted my hand to brush it away. My glove collided with my faceplate, and for a moment I was afraid I’d scratched it. Then my nose itched.
Resolutely, I punched the red button and threw the switch that put the tug on automatic, and let the th
rust of the main rockets force the nervousness from my mind. I had a job to do.
“Do your job. Work is often the best therapy," Bix had told me the night before. “Do a good job and it speaks for itself. The people who count will judge you by your actions—not the stories they’ve heard about you.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to do all along,” I said morosely.
“Well, stick to it. What else can I say?”
“I thought you were going to run me through your little black box and make me your first successful case.”
Bix’s reply was a long time coming. “You know, sometimes I wonder if I’m really the hotshot shrink I pretend I am....”
Sheesh! Then we were both depressed.
Thrusters flared, and the tug’s nose dropped. The onboard computer was making a few flight changes. I checked the instruments. We had a radar lock. I looked up and started a visual search.
It was pretty close before I saw it, and when I got closer I could see why. It had a low albedo; its surface had been painted a dull color that did not reflect much light.
The tug swung into a matching orbit alongside, and I surveyed the object.
It was a capsule, and a large one. There were small viewports clustered around the nose, and Russian letters on its side. I’d hit a jackpot.
I went through my routine with the cables with a mounting sense of impatience—I wanted to look into that thing!—but with none the less careful discipline. This would be a big catch, and I wanted to make no mistakes with it.
I made the cables fast to my belt, and jumped over. This satellite had no tumbling motion to its orbit; it hung apparently motionless in space next to my tug.
I fixed the grapples first, securing the cables to the dead capsule. Then I crept to a viewport and stared in.
At first I saw nothing. The capsule turned from the slight spin I had induced upon hitting it, and one of the viewports opposite swung into the sun. A clean ray of brilliant sunshine cut through the gloomy interior of the capsule.
Two men and a woman stared up at me with dead and empty eyes.
I stared back for several moments in surprised horror, the hackles rising on my neck.
They were each strapped into couches. None of them wore space suits, but instead had on uniforms of some sort.
They had been dead for a long time.
Their bodies looked shrunken, aged, and wizened: mummified.
Dark skin stretched tight over grinning skulls. I could tell the woman from the men only by her long hair. For a moment I was afraid I was going to be sick.
“Hello, Control,” I said weakly.
“Yeah, Williams. How’s it going?”
“I’ve got a funny one here,” I said. “A big capsule— Russian, I make it. By the looks of it, pretty old.”
“Uh-oh. That means extra work for us and no scrap metal,” Control said in my headphones.
“That’s not the kicker,” I said. “This one’s not empty.”
‘Wo?”
“Three mummies.”
There was a brief silence, a few clicks, and then a different voice. “Williams? This is Commander Davidson speaking. Bring that thing on in,pronto. Don’t mess with it, and don’t waste time. Get it back here, on the double! Got that?”
“Yessir!” I said. “Right away, sir.”
I grabbed my life-cable, and yanked it to halt the free unreeling action. Then I pulled myself back along it to the tug.
Once reseated, I started the cable-winding motors, and pulled the tug up snug against the capsule. I’d had a wide window on this mission, and I knew there was plenty of margin for error, but the commander seemed to be in a particular hurry. Nonetheless, I wasn’t skipping anything as I carefully checked out each detail for cradling the capsule, and reactivated the automatic control computer.
The computer “knew” that the tug would now have a much greater inertial mass, a new center of gravity, and an orbit that was dropping us closer to the surface of the blue world below us every minute. Almost instantaneously, it made its calculations, fired thrusters to change our attitude, and then ignited the main engines.
Hoffman met me at the docking port. “I’ll take over, Paul.”
I unhooked myself and used my backpack to jet me inside the air lock. There I braked, then turned and hung, watching.
Expertly, Hoffman took over the manual controls of the tug and deftly maneuvered it into the lock. They were taking no chances on this one. I felt cheated—done out, at the last minute, of the job which was my responsibility.
The outer port closed, and air cycled in. My suit relaxed as air pressure took over the job. Then the inner port was open, and men were hustling around me.
A hand gripped my arm, “Inside you go, kid," Hoffman told me, with a rueful grin. “This’n’s too big for us chickens. You’re off duty now. Scram.” The grin took the bite out of his words.
I wasted as much time as I could in the mess hall and rec room, but no one showed up whom I knew—no one I could talk to. I wondered what was happening with the Russian space capsule, and what they’d found out about it. But if anyone knew, he wasn’t telling me. Finally, after watching a couple of tired TV programs—why they bother channeling that slush up to us I’ll never understand—I decided to knock off and sack out for a while. Sooner or later the news would be out. What I needed was patience.
Still, it burned me a little: the capsule had been my discovery, after all.
I told Bix as much when he dropped by.
“No, it wasn’t,” he said. “You were the first to get your hands on it, but Control had a radar pickup on it, after all.”
“O.K., be a nitpicker,” I said wearily. “The point’s the same: I picked it up. I’m the one who told them about what it was. I could’ve kept my mouth shut about it, after all."
“Paul, knock it off. You did the right thing—you know that. Making the pickup—that was your job. Now it’s in other hands, and they’re just doing their jobs. Unlax.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You’re right. As usual.”
“Hey, Paul?”
“What?”
“Why aren’t you out and doing things? I mean, like the way you did before—-training yourself, getting your space legs, and all that?”
“I don’t know. Depressed, I suppose. I tried to watch TV. First a situation comedy about a talking housefly that everybody’s trying to swat—I wanted to myself! Then a news special about the spring fashions in Paris. It was just so much noise.”
“That’s not what I meant. You’ve stopped. I mean— what’s happened to that burning ambition to Get Ahead and learn new things?”
“Umm. Well, I got ahead.”
“Paul.”
“No, I mean it. You don’t know what it’s like, Bix, working out there. It’s like swimming in a transparent, invisible sea. Down below-is the Earth. You hang, suspended, over it. The visibility’s fantastic. It looks impossibly close. And when you’re coming back to the Station—did you know you can see the Tin Can twenty miles away? As if it wasn’t half a mile. That’s it, Bix. I’m here—I’ve arrived. Ambitious? I’d have to be nuts to be ambitious if it meant moving up to a job where I wouldn’t get to go out like that.
“Besides, that’s where my talents lie. That’s what I was training for, only I didn’t know it. I’m a space jockey, Bix. I’m the closest thing to a spaceman there is today. And I’m good at it, and getting better. Hoffman told me himself.”
Bix sighed. “So when you’re not out there, you’re moping around watching TV, or bunking out in here. This is great?”
“What would you have me doing?”
“What’d I tell you the other day? Socialize, man. This is your chance. You’re not a cadet any longer—you’re a spaceman. You said it yourself.”
I thumbed my chest, even though he couldn’t see me from where he was sitting on his bunk. “I’m still wearing apprentice greens, fella. You forget that? To the rest of those guys, I’m just another green
ie, and that’s all I’ll be.”
Bix was swinging his legs back and forth rhythmically. His foot almost caught me in the ribs. “You gotta be kidding, Paul. Why, I know over half a dozen crewmen to talk to, and I’m still in training. I don’t mean the instructors, either. I mean guys I’ve met hanging around and socializing* I’ve even been to a party. So look: maybe things seem pretty dull to you in here after you’ve been out there in open space, but don’t palm it all off on how the big boys won’t let the little boys play. That doesn’t make it; not at all.”
He jumped down from his bunk, whirled around, and faced me. “Let’s put it in a concrete basis. Let’s go hunt up some action.”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“Aw, Bix, I’m tired.”
“Come off it.”
“Yeah, really. It takes a lot of nervous energy when you’re out there, having to be completely aware of yourself.”
“Come on.”
“Besides, you didn’t have to see three corpses staring up at you.”
“Try it.”
I shrugged. “O.K., Bix. Doctor’s orders, huh?” “My latest prescription: social therapy.”
Several shifts were changing when we hit the rec room, and there were a lot of people standing around. I felt a little easier with Bix along—it was a comforting feeling to know that, come what may, they wouldn’t all be ganging up on me—but there was still that knot of tension in my stomach.
“This is your next big challenge,” Bix told me as we’d climbed down the shaftway. " Look at it as a new training period. Put some ambition into it.”
Looking at it that way, I could see the sense in it, but it still had me very tensed up. I felt as though I was digging down through layers of personality I’d never known existed. I was tampering with myself on a level I’d buried and forgotten years ago.
And the strangest thing was, I had no idea why / was feeling this way.
“It’s an anxiety reaction,” Bix said, and we walked down the green corridor.
Sectret of The Marauder Satellite (v1.0) Page 9