by Ben Bova
I gave her my innocent-little-boy look. “What makes you think...”
“Sheena told me how upset you got. How you think one of us is working for Rockledge Industries.”
“Well, yeah, I am upset about that. Wouldn’t you be?”
“Me? Upset about something Sheena thinks she might have heard while she was guzzling booze and frying what little brains she’s got on Rick’s junk?” Marj smirked at me.
“Whoever made that slip about Liechtenstein must’ve also been high,” I said.
“Well it wasn’t me.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. But either my expression or my tone told her I didn’t altogether believe her profession of innocence.
Marj patted my cheek with one long, slender-fingered hand. “Sam, dear, there are times when I would gladly kick you in the balls.”
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s condescension. “You’d hurt your delicate little foot, tall lady. I wear a lead jockstrap.”
She laughed out loud. “I’ll bet you do, at that.”
I assured her that I did.
Anyway, that was almost a month ago. Since then nobody’s said or done anything suspicious, and the cruise is going along without a hitch.
Which worries me. Maybe Grace really is the Rockledge agent. Maybe she’s kept lots of secrets, especially about herself. How would I know? Or Marj. Or any one of them.
Jeez, I’m getting paranoid!
Anyway, we pass the point of no return in another six days. The ship is under a constant acceleration from the plasma thrusters. It’s a very low acceleration; in the hub of the ship you still feel like you’re in zero-gee, that’s how low the acceleration is. But although those little thrusters don’t give you much push, they’re very fuel-efficient and can run for years at a time (when they don’t crap out) and keep building up more and more velocity for you.
As an emergency backup, we’re also carrying three pods of chemical rockets with enough delta-v among ‘em to change our course, swing past Mars, and head back to the Earth-Moon system. So we can cut this ride short and go back home if there’s any major trouble—up to the point of no return. Then, if we have a problem, no matter what the hell it may be, we’ve still got to coast all the way out to the Asteroid Belt and swing back to Earth on a trajectory that’ll take us at least eleven months.
So, six days from now we become hostages to Newton’s laws of motion and momentum. The point of no return. I hate to admit it, but I’m nervous about it.
THOSE MOTHER-HUMPING, SLIME-SUCKING, illegitimate sons of snakes from Rockledge! Now I know what they’re up to, and why they’ve got an agent on board!
We passed the point of no return two days ago.
Today the main food freezers crapped out. All three of ‘em, at the same time. Bang! Gone. Sabotage, pure and simple. Nineteen months more to go, and all our food is thawing out!
I wish I was an Arab, or even a Spaniard. Those people know how to curse!
It makes perfect sense. We die of starvation. That’s all. Those bastards from Rockledge murder us—all except their own agent, who waits until we’re all dead, then sends a distress call back to Earth where Rockledge has a high energy booster all set and ready to zoom out to rescue their man. Or woman.
Or maybe they let the poor sucker die too. Dead spies tell no tales. And you don’t have to pay them.
Oh hell, I know that doesn’t make any sense! I’m starting to babble, I’m so pissed off.
All three food freezers shut down. We don’t know exactly when because there was no indication on the Christmas Tree of the main control console. All the goddamned lights stayed clean green while our food supply started to thaw out.
It was Erik who noticed the problem. Bright-smiling, genial, slowwitted Erik.
I was showing off the command center to Jean Margaux, our high society lady from Boston’s North Shore. (She pronounces it Nawth Showah.) She’s the one who got jealous the first night about my zero-gee antics with Sheena and Marj. What the hell, if I’m naming names I might as well name all of them.
Jean is the tall, stately type. Handsome face; good bones. Really beautiful chestnut-colored hair, and I think it’s her natural shade. Not much bosom, but nice long legs and a cute backside. She likes to wear long slim skirts with slits in them that show off those legs when she moves.
Cool and aloof, looks down her nose at you. It’s not as if she gives the impression that her shit don’t stink; she gives the impression that she doesn’t ever shit. But touch her in the right place and she dissolves like a pat of butter in a rocket exhaust. She turns into a real tigress. All it takes is a touch, so help me—and then afterward she’s the Ice Queen again. Weird.
So I’m showing her the Christmas Tree, with all its red and green lights, only there wasn’t a single red one showing. The ship was humming along in perfect condition, if you could believe the monitor systems. Alonzo Ali was on duty at the command console; Lonz is not only my first mate, he’s a Phi Beta Kappa astronautical engineer and navigator from the International Space University.
So Erik comes into the command center with a puzzled frown on his normally open, wide-eyed face.
“There are no windows,” Jean was saying. Coming from her, it sounded more like a complaint than a comment.
“Nope,” I said. “With the ship swinging through a complete revolution every two minutes, you’d get kind of dizzy looking out a window.”
“But we have windows in the lounge,” she said. “And in our suites.”
“Those are video screens,” I corrected as gently as I could. “They show views from the cameras at the ship’s hub, where they don’t rotate.”
“Oh,” she said, as if I’d stuck a dead skunk in front of her.
Erik was kind of hanging around behind her, in my line of vision, not interrupting but sort of jiggling around nervously, like a kid who has to pee.
“Excuse me,” I said to Jean. Her high-society airs sort of made me act like a butler in a bad video.
I stepped past her to ask Erik, “Is something wrong?”
“I think so,” he said, furrowing his brow even deeper.
“What is it?” I asked softly.
“I’m not really sure,” said Erik.
Jean was watching us intently. I restrained my urge to grab Erik by the throat and pull his tongue out of his head.
“What seems to be the trouble?” I asked, as diffidently as possible. No roughneck, I.
“Funny smell.”
“Ah. A strange odor. And where might this odd scent be coming from?”
“The food freezers.”
All this polite badinage had lulled me into a sense of unreality.
“The food freezers? Plural?”
“Yeah.”
“The food freezers,” I repeated, smiling and turning toward the blue-blooded Ms. Margaux. Then it hit me. “The food freezers!”
I lunged past Erik to the command console. The goddamned Christmas Tree was as green as Clancy’s Bar on St. Patrick’s Day.
“No malfunctions indicated,” Lonz said, in that deep rich basso of his. He’s from Kenya, and any time he gets tired of space he can take up a career in the opera.
My heart rate went back to normal, almost, but I decided to go down to the freezers and check them out anyway. Jean asked if she could accompany me. There was a strange light in her eyes, something that told me she anticipated a lesson in arctic survival.
I nodded and headed for the hatch.
“Isn’t Erik coming, too?” Jean asked.
Oh-ho, I thought. She wants the cram course in arctic survival.
“Yeah, right. Come on Erik. Show me where you smelled this funny odor.”
The logistics section is almost exactly on the opposite side of the wheel from the command center. We could have gone down one of the connecting tubes and through the hub, but I decided with Jean along it’d be better if we just walked around the wheel and stayed at a full one gee.
It’s a
lways a little strange, walking along inside the wheel. Your feet and your inner ear tell you that you’re strutting along on a flat surface, while
your eyes see that the floor is curving up in front of you, right out of sight. Anyway, we walked down the central corridor, past the lounge, the galley and dining salon, the passengers’ living quarters, and the gym before we got to the logistics section. The workshops and maintenance facilities are all on the other half of the wheel. Our factory and processing smelter are down near the hub, of course, in microgravity.
Erik opens the big door to the first of the walk-in food freezers. It smells like a camel caravan had died in there several days ago. The second one smelled worse. By the time we got to the third one I guess our noses were suffering from sensory overload: it only smelled as bad as rancid milk poured over horse manure.
Jean kept her oh-so-proper attitude, but her face looked like she had stopped breathing. Erik was giving me a sort of hangdog grin, like he expected me to blame him for the catastrophe.
I kept my cool. I did not puke or even gag. I just raised my clenched fists over my head and uttered a heartfelt, “Son of a BITCH!”
Jean couldn’t control her ladylike instincts any further; she yanked a facial tissue from a pocket in her blouse, pressed it to her face, and fled back toward her quarters.
I left Erik there and zipped back to the lounge to call the passengers together to ask for volunteers to help with the cleanup.
It’s a very nice lounge, if I say so myself. Plush chairs, deep carpeting, big video screens that can serve as windows to the splendors of the universe outside. At the moment they were showing a video of some tropical beach: gentle waves lapping in, palm trees swaying against a clean blue sky, no people in sight. Must have been a clip from some travel agency’s come-on. There hasn’t been a beach that clean and empty of tourists since the first commercial flights of the hypersonic airliners.
“Wait just a moment, Sam,” said Lowell Hubble, our pipe-smoking astronomer. No tobacco, of course, that stuff had been outlawed way back in ‘08 or ‘09. Whatever he had in the blackened, long-stemmed pipe he always held clamped in his teeth was smokeless and sweet-smelling. I think it was a bubblegum derivative.
“Are you telling us,” he said from around the pipe, “that our food supply is ruined?”
“Most of the frozen food, yes,” I admitted. “Looks that way. I need some help checking out the situation.”
“We’ll starve!” Rick Darling yelped.
“You’ll starve last,” quipped Grace Harcourt. Good old Grace: she could be tough or tender, and she knew when to be which.
Darling stuck out his lower lip at her. The others were staring at me apprehensively. They had been sitting in the recliner chairs scattered about the room; now they were hunching forward tensely on the front two inches of each chair. I was standing in front of the bar, trying to look cool and competent.
“Nobody’s going to starve,” I told them. “It’s only the frozen food that’s affected and I think we can save a good deal of it, if we move quickly enough.”
“Isn’t all the food frozen?” asked Bo Williams, our Pulitzer Prize author, the man who had already signed a megabuck contract to write the book about this voyage. Bo looked more like a professional wrestler than an author: shaved bullet head, no neck, heavy shoulders and torso, bulging gut.
“Most of it. But we have a backup supply of packaged food. And the reprocessors, of course.”
“Canned food.” Darling shuddered.
“Some of it’s canned. Most of it’s been preserved by irradiation. Food’s been stored for half a century and more that way.”
“Radiation?” Sheena Chang’s big eyes went wider than usual. She was wearing violet contacts to go with the color of her outfit, a Frederick’s of Hollywood version of a flight suit, real tight, with lots of zippers.
“It’s all right,” Hubble said, leaning over from his chair to pat her hand reassuringly. “Nothing to worry about.”
“What was that about reprocessors?” Grace asked.
This was not a subject I wanted to discuss in any detail. “We can recycle the food, to a certain extent.”
“Recycle?” For once I was not happy that Grace was a newshound.
“It’s been done on space stations and long-duration missions.” I tried to pass the whole thing off. “The Mars expedition has a recycling system.”
“The food we eat will be recycled?” Damn Grace and her goddamned tenacity!
“Right,” I snapped. “Now, I need ...”
Rick Darling was catching on. “You mean our garbage will be recycled into fresh food?”
“Not just our garbage, sweetheart,” Grace told him.
Jean Margaux, she who gave the impression she did not do that sort of thing, stared at me as if I had insulted her entire family tree.
Marjorie Dupray said grimly, “I’ll starve first.”
Marj wouldn’t have far to go before she starved. She was all skin and bones already. As usual, she was wearing the crummiest clothes of the group: a shapeless sweater of dingy gray and baggy oversized slacks decorated with fake machine oil stains. But I knew that underneath that camouflage was a body as sleek and responsive as a racing yacht.
“Nobody needs to starve,” I said, getting irritated with the bunch of them. Maybe this was the Ship of Fools, after all.
“Sure,” Darling groused. “We can spend the next year and a half eating recycled...”
“Don’t say it!” Jean snapped. “I can’t bear even to think of it.”
“Let’s see how much of the frozen food we can rescue,” I urged. “Who’s gonna help us clean up the freezers?”
Not a hand was raised. None of my partners would volunteer to help.
“That’s the crew’s responsibility; not ours,” said the always gracious Jean Margaux.
The others agreed.
It was grisly work.
We had to go in there and see what was spoiled beyond recovery, what could be saved if we cooked it immediately, and what was still reasonably okay. At the same time I wanted to figure out how all three freezers could fail without any warning lights showing up on the command console.
Erik and I did the dirty work with the food. Will checked out the freezers’ electrical systems. He wore an oxygen mask with a little supply bottle on the belt of his flight suit. Sensitive kid.
“Where I grew up in South Philadelphia used to smell like this,” he grumbled through the clear plastic mask as he entered the first of the freezers. “I never thought I’d get a whiff of home out here in space.”
“Don’t get homesick on me,” I told him. “Just find out what went wrong.”
About half of the food had turned to green slime, really putrid. The stench didn’t seem to affect Erik at all; he just cleaned away with the same obtuse smile on his chiselled features as ever.
“Doesn’t the smell bother you?” I asked him.
“What smell?”
“For chrissakes, you’re the one who reported it in the first place!”
“Oh that. Yeah, it is rather annoying, isn’t it?”
I just shook my head and Erik went back to work in blond, blue-eyed innocence.
So we shoveled several tons of spoiled food into the reprocessor, which chugged and burped and buzzed for hours on end, turning out neat little bricks of stuff, some colored reddish gray, others colored greenish gray. They were supposed to be synthetic meat and synthetic vegetables. I nibbled on one each, then wished we had brought a cargo bay filled with Worcester sauce, ketchup, soy sauce, and Texas three-alarm salsa.
WILL BASSINIO JUST showed me what went wrong with the freezers.
He looked really worn out when he reported to me this morning in the command center. Eyes red from lack of sleep, a black ring around his nose and mouth from the oxygen mask he’d been wearing for nearly twelve hours straight. He didn’t smell so good, either. The rotting food had impregnated his coveralls.
“You bee
n at it all night?” I asked him.
He nodded wearily. “Whoever did the job on the freezers was pretty fuckin’ smart.”
Will pulled three tiny chips from the chest pocket of his smelly, stained coveralls. They were so small I couldn’t make out what they were.
“Timers,” he explained before I could ask. “Somebody spliced ‘em into the control unit of each freezer. Really neat job; took me all fuckin’ night to find ‘em. Interrupted the current flow and shut the freezers down, while at the same time sending an okay reading to the monitors up here on the bridge. Pretty fuckin’ ingenious.”
“Can you fix the freezers before all the food thaws out?” I asked.
Will gave me a sad shake of his head. “Whoever did this job knew what he was doing. I’d have to rebuild the whole control unit in each freezer. Take two-three weeks, maybe more.”
“We don’t have spares?”
“We were supposed to. They’re listed in the logistics computer but the bin where they ought to be stored is dead-empty.”
I felt my blood seething. Sabotage.
“Were they put into the control units before we launched, or during the flight?” I asked.
Will gave me a shrug. “Can’t tell.”
“There aren’t any locks on the freezer doors,” I muttered.
“Never saw anybody goin’ in there,” he muttered back. “Except that Darling guy, once. He said he was looking for a key lime pie.”
Darling. The art critic. The guy who’d been stuffing himself ever since we had left Earth orbit.
The file I had on Darling claimed that he had inherited a modest fortune from his mother, a real estate broker in Florida. It would’ve been a larger fortune if his father hadn’t kept frittering money away on half-baked schemes like opening a fundamentalist Christian theme park in Beirut. The old man died, eventually: gunned down by a crazed ecologist on the Ross Ice Shelf where he was trying to build a hotel and penguin-hunting lodge.
Darling claimed his ten million investment in the Argo expedition came from his inheritance. Said it was all the money he had in the world.
I called a lady in Anaheim that I knew, Kay Taranto. She specialized in tracking down deadbeats for the Disney financial empire. I asked her to find out if any money from Rockledge had suddenly appeared in Darling’s chubby hands. Told her to check Liechtenstein. Kay was as persistent and dogged as a heat-seeking missile. If there was anything to find out about Darling, she was the one to do it.