Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  When any of these things happened—the snoring, the paddleball, the lost chess games, all the other scenes the three of us staged over the course of eight weeks—we’d have to restrain the occasional impulse to glance at one of the camera lenses not very well concealed in the bulkheads or ceilings. They wouldn’t have shown us anything, of course, but at times like those, we would’ve loved to know what the NASA and Skycorp shrinks were making of the little scenarios we were putting on for their benefit.

  We played to those cameras right up to the end. The day before Miguel went bonzo, Ron and I slipped away to the Personal Hygiene Area—in non-technical parlance, the head—while Miguel remained on watch in the command module. To make it even more convincing, we muted our headsets, and even stuck a piece of tape over the ceiling camera. There was another lens concealed within the passageway, though, along with a hidden mike, so we played to that, making sure that we didn’t close the hatch while we had a private chat. It lasted only a minute or so, but it gave Dr. Heinemann and his people something else to write up. Like they didn’t have enough already.

  So when Miguel flamed out, it wasn’t spontaneous human combustion; we’d spent a lot of time stoking the furnace. But he was the leading man in our little melodrama, so we let him pick the time and place.

  Tuesday, June 8, 2023; 0915 GMT:

  “Will you knock it off with that thing?”

  “What thing?” I hung upside-down in the service module, feet anchored to a restraint bar, bouncing the red ball off my racket. Bonka-bonka-bonka-bonka…“This thing?”

  “Yeah, that thing. Cut it out.” Miguel hovered above the atmosphere control console, ebook in hand, trying to take accurate readings from the various flatscreens. All of them displayed false data, of course, just as the plasma displays behind what would have been normal portholes showed us Mars as we would’ve seen it from 24 million miles away. Nice work, really; whatever Hollywood special-effects outfit Skycorp had subcontracted for this part of the Mess had definitely earned their money.

  “Sorry. Didn’t know it was bugging you.” I caught the ball, tied it against the paddle, slipped it into the back pocket of my jumpsuit. Miguel glanced at me, and when he did, his right eyelid twitched a little as a very subtle wink. A signal: do something else.

  “So…how’s your family?”

  “They’re fine.” Terse, staring at the panel again. Little red numbers on little blue screens.

  “Great. Glad to hear it.” I unhooked my feet from the bar. “How’s your sister?”

  “Fine.” He touched his ebook screen again; I noticed some crude, hand-drawn circles in the margins. Doodles. Good. Shrinks love doodles. “Why’re you asking?”

  I somersaulted, came down behind him and grabbed a wall rung. “Just asking. Seems like a nice girl, that’s all.”

  He didn’t look back at me. “So why do you want to know?”

  “He’s just asking a question.” Ron was coming through the hatch from the personnel module, hair still wet from the sponge-bath he’d just taken. “What’s the big deal?”

  “Yeah, that’s all.” Then I turned away from Miguel and muttered something nasty about what I’d like to do with his sister.

  He caught it, as I knew he would; I’m sure the people in Huntsville did, too, because I said it just loud enough for the hidden mikes. In the next instant, Miguel dropped the ebook and came at me, launching himself across the narrow compartment. I turned around just as he grabbed me by the collar and rammed me against a bulkhead.

  “Say that again,” he snarled in my face, “and I’ll kill you!”

  So I grinned and said it again.

  As I said, we’d planned the whole thing in advance, before we’d even left the ground. In his pocket, Miguel had a stage knife: a six-inch switchblade, pearl handle and everything, just like the ones the L.A. street gangs carry, only this one had a phony blade that couldn’t cut cheese and, when pushed against a solid surface, retracted straight back into the handle. Skycorp wasn’t the only one to use Hollywood magic; Miguel had a friend who worked for a prop supply company.

  Miguel yanked the knife out of his breast pocket, flicked it open. My eyes widened, and I yelled, “Whoa, man, waitamminit…!”

  “What the hell are you doing?” Ron shouted. “Leggo of him!”

  He pushed himself toward us, but Miguel kicked him out of the way. Ron flew across the compartment, flailing his arms helplessly. And then Miguel turned to me again and, muttering a Latino obscenity, shoved the blade into my chest.

  Ron’s aim was perfect; at that instant, he landed next to the main communications panel. One swipe of his elbow across a pair of toggle switches, and the Ku-band transceiver was down. He quickly checked the radio, then looked back at Miguel and me.

  “Okay, that’s a wrap,” he said. “We’re off the air.”

  Miguel still his knife thrust up to its hilt in my heart. Hearing Ron, he pulled the knife away. Sproing, the blade reappeared. “You okay?” he asked, genuinely concerned.

  I looked down at myself. I wasn’t even knicked. “I’m good.”

  “Didn’t mean to slam you so hard,” he added, genuinely concerned.

  “Don’t worry about.” In zero-gee, any action like that can be enough to hurt. Considering that I’d been lethally stabbed, though, I was feeling pretty good. “Does this mean I can have a date with your sister?”

  “No.” He gave me a wry grin “She’s married.”

  “Nice job, gentlemen,” Ron-Jon said. “I think that’ll keep ’em busy for a while.”

  “How long you want to stay dark?” Pushing myself away from Miguel, I floated into the command module, checked the simulator com panel. Although Ron had knocked off the real-time wireless link, the Mess’s time-delay communications system was still operational. No text messages from Huntsville, or at least not yet; we were still on fifteen-minute delay. The longer we played possum, though, the more likely the boys in Huntsville would believe that something had seriously gone bad up here. No doubt, Doctor Heiney was already on the phone with the Flight Director, telling him that Team Zulu had cracked.

  “Let ’em stew a bit.” Miguel said as Ron-Jon disappeared through the hatch leading to the personnel module. “I’d like to have a drink first.”

  Ron had gone to fetch the fifth of tequila we’d been saving for this moment; it was concealed in a locker, where it had been hidden ever since we’d arrived on the Mess two and half months ago. We’d have to use squeezebulbs, of course, but at this point none of us minded. If we were going to get booted from the Mars program, we might as well go out in proper Zoo Team style.

  “Suits me.” I said, and was turning to go get my pack of Bicycles when we heard a loud bang! and felt a hard thump against the hull.

  That’s when the joke ended.

  The joke started about four months earlier, when NASA picked the crews for Skycorp’s Mars Exploration Simulator and it turned out that Miguel, Ron, and I would be on Zulu Team. But if you want to understand the punchline, you have to go a little further back, to when NASA decided that they needed to do orbital flight simulations before it sent a second mission to Mars and contracted Skycorp to handle the logistics.

  Everyone has seen the pictures that Ares I sent back from Mars, of course: American and Japanese astronauts walking across the cold red landscape, raising their respective flags and making awestruck comments about the Arsia Mons volcano. But what most people didn’t know is that those were the mission’s best moments, carefully selected and edited for public consumption. Most haven’t seen the more tawdry incidents witnessed by flight controllers in Houston: the abusive remarks, loud arguments, sexual harassment, fist-fights and so forth that had half the six-person crew no longer on a casual speaking basis with the other half—and all but two on anti-depressants—by the time the ship reached Mars.

  But NASA and NASDA officials noticed, as did the committees of both Congress and the Diet that had oversight over the respective space agencies of their two
countries. And since Ares I produced less scientific data than expected, the shortfall was blamed on low crew morale. So the government committees issued a mandate: before Ares II could be funded any further, mission planners would spend more time learning how to keep astronauts from going chimp during long-duration flights.

  NASA turned to its major contractor, Skycorp, to carry out a new round of psychological testing. Skycorp had already learned a lot about space crew psychology from its powersat construction program, and one important thing they’d discovered was that the results that came from ground-based simulators were questionable at best. Sure, there had already been several studies in which groups of people had been sealed within small, spacecraft-like habitats for months at a time. But the results of those experiments weren’t totally reliable, mainly because the men and women in those simulators knew they weren’t really in space. The presence of gravity couldn’t be avoided, and there were other subtle hints that the millions of miles that supposedly separated them from Earth were only a fiction, and on the other side of the airlock hatch was a great big world full of pizza and beer and sex and all the elbow room you could want.

  The psychologist in charge of the Skycorp studies was one Joseph Heinemann, Ph.D., late of the Harvard medical school. It was Dr. Heinemann’s contention that the only way Skycorp could reliably test, train, and select the crews for Mars missions would be to build a small space station whose interior would resemble an Ares spacecraft as much as possible. Placed in low orbit above the earth, the Mars Expedition Simulator—which, naturally, became nicknamed the Mess—would have fake portholes that were actually video screens, and all space-to-ground communications would be subject to delays that would become increasingly longer as the test went on.

  Dr. Heinemann then devised a two-part program. In Phase 1, four teams of astronauts, with three persons in each team, would spend ninety days—that is, about half the time it’d take a ship to get to Mars—aboard the Mess, doing everything that an Ares crew would do during the outbound leg of their mission, while ground controllers studied their conduct through hidden cameras and mikes. Responses to various stimulations. Once those four teams—designated Alpha, Gamma, Theta, and Zulu—completed their turns in the Mess, the results would be studied and the findings would be the basis for Phase 2, when the six astronauts who’d done best during the Phase 1 test would be the ones selected for Ares II, and would hence go into training for the mission itself.

  To be sure, this was an expensive and rather time-consuming way of determining who’d be most likely to crack under pressure. On the other hand, no one ever again wanted to see footage of an astronaut threatening to gouge out another guy’s eyes with a plastic spork. So Dr. Heinemann’s proposal was approved, the Mess was built, and an announcement was made that the window was now open for applications to the Ares II training program.

  I wanted to get on the next Mars mission, as did just about everyone else in the space business. It was like offering a climb up K2 to hard-core mountaineers; who can resist? But I knew my chances of being picked were somewhere between nil and zip. Sure, I’d spent a year working on Skycorp’s SPS-1 project, but my company record was…well, questionable, to put it mildly. “Disciplinary problems” is the expression most often used in my performance reports. Oh, I did my job well, and my safety record was unblemished. But I had a tendency to talk back to the boss, and bureaucrats give me a real pain in the neck. That sort of thing doesn’t fly well in NASA’s button-down, no-nonsense culture, and even though I sent in my application, I figured that, a year or two later, I’d still be parked on a barstool at the Cape, waiting for my union rep to find me another low-orbit construction gig.

  So I was surprised when Skycorp invited me in for interviews and physicals, and even more surprised when I made it to the short list. Face it: I was a space monkey, a grunt with some technical skills and the ability to bolt two pieces of metal together while floating upside down. And I had an attitude. I had little business being in the same room with NASA and NASDA astronauts who had doctorates like I have calluses and who’d been first in everything they’d done since childhood. Next to these purebred Best Of Show champs, I was some mutt who’d managed to sneak in through the dog door.

  As it turned out, though, I wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t long before I realized that two other Phase 1 candidates weren’t Boy Scouts either. Miguel LaCosta was another former Skycorp contract worker, and before that he’d worked for one of the space-tourism companies. He was a USAF-trained left-seater who knew his way around the cockpit of anything that had wings and a hydrazine engine, but a rep for practical jokes had made him persona non grata with most of the privates. NASA had no more room for him than they did for one of their own: Ronald Johnson, a former Navy flyboy who’d been something of a star in the astronaut corps before he’d gotten caught in a Texas whorehouse with a girl in his lap—yes, I said that right—and a whiskey bottle on his knee. Bye-bye Ron-Jon…or at least until he had the temerity to apply for the Mars program and, like Miguel and I, was astonished to find himself on the short list.

  So here was the Justice League International, and here was the Legion of Super Pets. And guess which one was assigned to Zulu Team, the first group to spend three months aboard the Mess?

  At first, Miguel, Ron-Jon, and I could hardly believe our luck. As the first group to go up, we’d also be the first to come back down; that meant we’d have time to goof off until the final crew selection was made and Phase 2 would begin. That, along with the fact that none of us really belonged there in the first place, made each of us wonder what we’d done to deserve our great fortune.

  We weren’t lucky. The exact opposite, in fact. But it took awhile for us to find that out.

  When Skycorp built the Mars Expedition Simulator, they used inflatable modules which could be easily lifted into orbit aboard an expendable launch vehicle. The Mess had three modules, each about the size of a bus, connected together in tandem; they were made of some industrial-grade polymer that could take sea-level pressurization, and had various solar arrays, radiator panels, tanks, and antenna sticking out in all directions. At the aft end of the station was a hard-hull airlock module, and attached to it was a three-man re-entry vehicle that Miguel, Ron-Jon, and I were supposed to pretend didn’t exist until the last day of our mission, when we’d be allowed to climb aboard for the ride back to Earth.

  I was familiar with inflatable modules from my time on the powersat construction project. Beamjacks called them “hot dogs” and, although the company kept insisting that they were safe, none of us trusted them very much. They were a cheap, light-weight substitute for metal spacecraft hulls, and even though they’d been proven to be resistant to cosmic radiation and micrometeorites, everyone who used them was aware that they were vulnerable to one particular kind of orbital threat.

  And, damn it, that’s exactly what happened to the Mess. It got hit by a piece of space junk.

  Sure, USAF Space Command constantly tracks the location of all known orbital debris, and periodically the ground controllers in Houston would gently maneuver our little station so that it was out of the way of a fuselage panel, screwdriver, or third-stage faring that would come barreling toward us at 3,600 miles an hour. But the boys at Cheyenne Mountain can’t locate and track everything; now and then, some object gets lost or jettisoned that isn’t reported for one reason or another—usually stupidity—and it orbits Earth until it either finally falls into the atmosphere and burns up, or hits something else up there and thus causes someone to have a really lousy day.

  I had no idea what struck the Mess other than it was bigger than a washer and smaller than a pen, and it made our lives really interesting. Within seconds of the thump-and-bang of it hitting the simulator, a very non-simulated master alarm went off in the command module. Miguel and I were still staring at each other when Ron-Jon came back through the hatch.

  “Blowout,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Miguel calmly put the fake knife back
in his pocket. “Emergency stations, gentlemen.”

  In science fiction movies and novels, you often see astronauts going into a blind panic when there’s a catastrophic accident. Who knows, that sort of reaction may happen from time to time. But it didn’t happen to us. Miguel, Ron, and I were well-trained and experienced, and since we’d already rehearsed emergency procedures for the Mess, each of us knew what to do. As team leader, Miguel went straight to the command module, where he entered the six-digit code into the main computer that disengaged the simulation routines and returned the Mess to normal operation. While he did this, Ron-Jon went about trying to locate the source of the blowout and, if possible, making temporary repairs. My job was to go to the airlock, suit up, and prepare to either go EVA and fix the problem from outside the Mess or, if all else failed, get the re-entry vehicle ready to serve as a lifeboat in case we had to abandon the station.

  I was still blessing some Skycorp engineering team for having developed zero-prebreathe spacesuits that could be donned and cycled through an airlock in minutes instead of hours when I heard Miguel’s voice through the earpiece of my bunny cap. “Huntsville, this is Zulu Team,” he said, as casually as it this was a routine radio check. “We’re reporting an in-flight emergency. Suspected collision with a foreign object and possible cabin depressurization. Do you copy?”