by Allen Steele
“You have to believe me when I tell you,” Saul continued, “that this crew is as close to perfect as any captain can expect. Sure, there’s bickering and arguments. Yoshio gets mad at Old Bill, and he gets pissed off at Leslie, and she has a falling out with Betsy, and Betsy takes it out on Geoff. Same with the kids…Young Bill’s not really talking to Kaneko right now, and when they get into fights over something, Wendy usually steps in for Kaneko ’cause he’s the youngest.”
He shrugged again. “So what? Families do that. They have little spats and feuds and rivalries, but it doesn’t stop them from being a family.” He grinned a little, patting the covers of my bed. “Lemme tell you something, though…when I ran the Lowell a few years ago, I once had to throw a guy on the floor and sedate him because he was threatening to push another person into the airlock and punch the button…and he meant it, too. You know why? He snored in his sleep.”
“And you haven’t seen anything like that?” I asked.
“Not a bit.”
His reply came candidly, with absolute certainty; even then, I wasn’t willing to trust him entirely. It sounded just a little too pat, too much like the classic utopian vision of life in space. I didn’t think Saul Montrose was lying—his omission of the Hess incident could be excused as tact, considering we were within Yoshio’s earshot—but I wasn’t about to buy his version of events as objective truth.
I said nothing, though, only folded my hands together on my chest and waited for him to go on. We gazed at each other for a few moments before he spoke up again. “You don’t believe me, do you?” he asked.
“I didn’t say that,” I replied. “I’m only waiting for you to prove it to me.”
Saul smiled…and then he suddenly swatted my left knee with the flat his right hand. I flinched a little, and he grinned broadly. “Reflexes look good. Can you lift that leg?”
I raised it beneath the bedcovers and wiggled my foot for good measure. He nodded again, then pulled a pen out of his vest pocket. “Catch,” he said, then tossed it to me. I grabbed for the pen; Coriolis effect caused by the rotation of the ship’s arms almost caused me to miss it, but I managed to clumsily snag the pen from midair.
“Good deal.” Saul took the pen from my hand, then stood up from the bed. “And you’re able to walk okay?”
I demonstrated by throwing off the covers, swinging my legs off the bed, and walking a few steps. I couldn’t wait to get out of the hibernation bay; I would have done handsprings if he had requested it. Although it was close to midnight by ship time, all I really wanted to do is walk around the vessel a little before making my way to my quarters in Arm One.
The captain, though, had other plans for me. “Very good,” he said. “I’ll tell Yoshio you’re fit for duty immediately.”
“Pardon me?” I shook my head, wondering if Montrose was kidding. If he wasn’t, then the Medici Explorer had to be the first ship I’d ever encountered where the passengers were pressed into duty.
Saul seemed to read my mind. He nodded his head slowly, confirming that I am, indeed, expected to work while I’m aboard his vessel. “Nothing you won’t be able to handle, of course,” he said, “but we’re coming up on the fourth watch and we could use someone else to keep an eye on things in the bridge…I can’t stay awake all the time, y’know.”
He stepped toward the hatch leading to the access shaft. “When you’re dressed, report at once to the bridge. Twenty-four hundred, sharp. Young Bill and Betsy will be standing watch with you until oh-six-hundred. They’ll brief you on what you’ll need to do for them. Yoshio…? I believe Mr. Cole’s ready to leave now.”
Then he was out the hatch and climbing up the ladder toward the ship’s hub. I turned to Yoshio, ready to plead my case, but Smith-Tanaka was already extending a stack of neatly folded clothing to me; after a second, I recognize the trousers, shirt and pullover as my own clothes, last seen nine months ago when I brought them aboard the Medici Explorer in my duffel bag.
“I took the liberty of fetching these from your quarters,” he said with just a trace of a smile as I took them from his arms. “There was…ah, a certain possibility that the skipper might ask you stand watch as soon as you were able.”
With no possibility of a medical deferment, all I could do is nod my own head as I pulled off the one-piece gown I had been wearing for the past two days. Again, it became blatantly obvious: aboard the Medici Explorer, everyone was expected to pull their own weight.
Twenty minutes later, I had managed to climb the long ladder up the Arm Two shaft, negotiate the rotating hatches of the hub carousel, and make my way up the second ladder to the bridge.
Although there is no natural night or day in deep space, the pattern is subtly replicated aboard the Medici Explorer. Lights are automatically dimmed through the vessel, major systems are put on automatic, and most of the crew goes to sleep. I have heard of space vessels where the nocturnal sounds of crickets, rain, and summer breezes are piped through the corridors and compartments, but the artificial night was not taken that far aboard the Medici Explorer. It would have been absurd to hear bullfrogs croaking aboard a spacecraft hundreds of millions of kilometers from the nearest swamp.
Yet there was a subtle peace of a different kind: the low, almost inaudible throb of the nuclear engines, the vacant shaft which echoed with each footfall on the ladder rung, the closed hatches and the subdued half-light of recessed fluorescent tubes. Instead of crickets or bullfrogs, one of the AI’s—Ditz, probably, or maybe its twin Jethro—scaled the walls of the Arm Two shaft, endlessly prowling for lint and trash. The peace of a deep space vessel, cruising through the outer reaches of the solar system.
Besides the number of ladder rungs I had to conquer, it took me three attempts before I figured out how to duck through the carousel hatches without bashing my head against a bulkhead…and I had to make the transition from one-tenth gravity to the microgravitational environment of the hub without losing my dinner. Fortunately, my nausea passed before I pushed open the top hatch of the hub shaft and glided, albeit clumsily, into the command center.
The ceiling fluorescents had been lowered to an almost twilight level; the sharpest glow came from the myriad red, green, blue and silver displays from the vacant duty stations. Most of the holoscreens had been switched off, but on the ones which were still active, distant Jupiter shined like the beacon of a faraway lighthouse on a midnight sea. Some of the flatscreens displayed rotating, three-dimensional images of the planet’s rings, its plasma torus, the vast curving network of its vast electromagnetic fields, and the orbits of its fifteen moons. Yet Jupiter itself dominated even the most complex of these computer-enhanced images, as if the giant planet was the sun it could have once been, dominating a miniature solar system.
I found Young Bill and Betsy Smith-Makepeace in the alcove on the other side of the bridge, seated next to each other and drinking coffee from squeezebulbs. Young Bill looked no different than when I first met him nine months earlier; he watched with open amusement as I slowly made my way across the bowl-shaped compartment, carefully placing the soles of my stikshoes against the carpet, step by tentative step, my arms thrown out for balance as if I was walking a tightrope.
“Hey, reporter!” he called out as I passed the captain’s chair in the center of the deck. “You want some coffee?”
“Yeah,” I replied, still watching my feet. “Love some.”
“Okay…catch!” He unhooked another squeezebulb from the coffee dispenser on the shelf behind them and, before I could do more than squawk, tossed it toward me.
“Bill!” Betsy yelled. “That’s cruel!” As I flailed helplessly for the squeezebulb, tumbling end over end toward me, the young woman unsnapped her seat belt and used her arms to push herself out of her chair.
Her grace was as phenomenal as her trajectory was unerring; she glided to the ceiling of the bridge, pushed off again with her hands, performed a mid-air somersault which tucked her legs behind her body, hurtled down toward me and
managed to intercept the squeezebulb before it could hit me.
Grasping the back of the center chair with her left hand, the navigator handed the coffee to me, smiling sweetly. “Hi, I’m Betsy. We’ve met before, haven’t we?”
“Aw, c’mon!” Bill protested. “I introduced you two before we launched!”
She cast a sour look over her shoulder at him. “That’s Bill. He’s a jerk.” Turning to me again, her smile reappeared. “You should try not using those shoes so much,” she said, glancing at my feet. “You look like a baby, doing it that way. Trust me, you don’t need your legs to move around in here. I never did.”
“Yeah,” said Young Bill, “but your legs aren’t worth…”
“Hush!” Betsy glared reproachfully at him. This time, though, there was a hint of real anger in her voice. Bill shut up and stayed shut-up; his face reddened and he looked away, visibly embarrassed.
Betsy returned her attention to me. “All you really need to do,” she continued, “is figure out a straight line to where you want to go, then gently push yourself toward it. If it’s a big area, then aim for short distances along the way…like this.”
She pushed off the wingback chair, glided to a handrail on a nearby bulkhead and rebounded off that to the chair in front of the engineering station, finally braking herself with her hands in front of the alcove where Young Bill was seated. As she did so, I noticed something unusual; at no time did she use her legs. It was all done with her hands and arms.
Nor did her legs seem quite right. Although at first glance they appeared to be normally developed, I now noticed that they seemed to be perpetually bent at the knees and hips, as if the joints had been locked into a sitting position.
It suddenly dawned on me that this woman, however athletic she might be in zero-gee, could not walk in Earth-normal gravity.
“Okay,” Betsy said once she had retaken her seat in the alcove. “Your turn.”
I tucked the squeezebulb into a pocket of my pullover, then unstuck my shoes and carefully pushed away from the captain’s station, following her course toward the alcove. My first real effort in moving through microgravity was neither as accurate nor as liquid as Betsy’s—while trying to emulate her smooth bounce off Old Bill’s chair, I missed the target and came to close to slamming into his console, but I finally managed my way to the empty seat in the rest area.
I fished the squeezebulb out of my pocket and held it up; through all of this, it had remained unbroken. A small victory. Betsy beamed at me and clapped her hands. Young Bill grinned, nodding his head approvingly. I tried to make a low bow and almost plummeted headfirst into the chair.
“Whoa!” Bill shouted, reaching up to stop me. “Don’t run before you can walk.”
“Right. I’ll try to remember that.” I hauled myself into the chair, buckled the seatbelt, and took a long sip through the straw. The coffee had turned lukewarm by now, but I was thirsty enough not to care. As I drank, my eyes wandered again toward Betsy’s legs. She was wearing aquamarine leggings beneath a long woolen sweater; while she was seated, her legs seem normal enough, but…
“Something on your mind, Mr. Cole?” It was not a hostile question, but it is clearly a challenge; she had obviously noted my attention. I looked at her and for the first time I noticed her eyes: bright blue, very sharp and direct, much like her precocious daughter’s.
I coughed as cold coffee went down the wrong side of my throat. Betsy waited patiently until I recovered, her gaze never wavering. “Pardon me,” I said at last. “I don’t mean to be rude, but…”
The words faltered in my mouth, but Betsy picked up the rest. “What’s wrong with my legs, you mean,” she said quietly. “Well, I can’t use ’em, to make a long story short.”
She smiled grimly and took another ship from her coffee. “PPS…Post-Polio Syndrome. I was one of the Chicago kids.”
Elizabeth Smith-Makepeace was a survivor of the Chicago polio epidemic of the ’30s—the Childrens’ Plague, as it was known then, because the first persons infected with the disease were children under age ten.
As the story goes, a polio strain was introduced into the Chicago school system by a substitute teacher who had unwittingly carried the virus back to the United States after touring North Africa the previous summer. While making his rounds through the city’s elementary schools, giving arithmetic and science lessons, the teacher had transmitted the disease to literally hundreds of kids, who in turn passed it on to their friends, parents, and relatives.
By the time the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta had identified the contagion not as influenza—as had been initially diagnosed by most local doctors, whose medical training had not included recognizing “extinct” diseases—but as polio, almost two thousand people in the Great Lakes region had contracted the virus. Quite a few of them died, and many more were permanently disabled, before Chicago was placed under paramilitary quarantine and a mass-immunization program was put into effect by the CDC.
The majority of the infected children recovered from the plague and were thought to be cured. However, ten to twenty years later, many of the survivors developed Post-Polio Syndrome. As Betsy explained it to me, both she and her future husband were among those who thought they had conquered polio. Indeed, Geoff Makepeace had by then become a long-distance runner, regularly competing in the New York and Boston marathons when he wasn’t studying deep-space communications at Tennessee Tech, while Betsy Kesselbaum had often gone Nordic skiing in the Sierras during breaks from post-grad work at the Stanford University School of Space Science.
“One semester, I was a perfectly fit college girl. Then one day next semester…” She snapped her fingers. “Boom, I couldn’t get out of bed. Like that, I went from cross-country skier to wheelchair jockey.” She shrugged, solemn but without a trace of self-pity. “Life’s a bitch like that sometimes.”
The only good thing about contracting PPS was that she met Geoff while undergoing therapy at the Warm Springs Rehabilitation Institute, although they had both—ironically enough—grown up only a few blocks apart from each other in the same North Chicago neighborhood. One of the things which brought them together was their shared love of space exploration; when they were married two years later, it was in a public ceremony at the Chicago Museum of Science, in front of the Chesley Bonestell mural of the lunar landscape. The bride wore a white gown inherited from her mother, the groom a black tuxedo from Brooks Brothers. Like at least half of the wedding party, both were confined to electric carts.
“We knew we wanted to go into space,” Betsy said sixteen years later, sitting in the command center of a ship bound for Jupiter. “It wasn’t just that we loved the idea and were trained for it. We also knew that, out here, being handicapped doesn’t matter as much as it did back on Earth. I mean, let’s face it…you can be a double-amputee and still function in zero-gee.”
“So you managed to get jobs on this ship,” I said. “Good idea.”
She shrugged, wadding up her empty squeezebulb and shoving it into the recycle chute behind her. Young Bill had pushed himself over to the captain’s station, where he was entering the mandatory hourly report into the ship’s log. As it turned out, there wasn’t much expected of the fourth watch except for us to keep each other awake; I suspected that Saul Montrose had assigned me to this job only because Betsy was on the duty roster and he wanted me to meet her.
“It wasn’t that easy,” she went on. “There’s a lot of stigma attached to handicapped people…” Betsy’s mouth twisted into a wry smile. “Excuse me. ‘Differently abled persons,’ since that’s the accepted parlance these days…”
“Cripples,” I said.
She frowned and wagged a finger at me. “Now, that really is offensive. If a pro golfer can be handicapped, so can I, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to be called a cripple…anyway, there’s still a lot of stigma attached to disabled persons. Especially in this profession, since the dominant paradigm seems to be that of the rough, tough space her
o…”
“Captain Future to the rescue,” Bill muttered, his fingers tapping the keypad of his console. “Two-fisted conqueror of the galaxy, hero of the spaceways…”
“Able to drop-kick swarthy aliens over the goalpost of the universe,” Betsy finished. It sounded like an old joke between them. “If it wasn’t for the equal-opportunity clause of the union contracts, Jeff and I would still be riders back in Chicago.”
She swiveled around in her chair to pump some more coffee from the urn into a fresh squeezebulb. “Even then, it was a long time before we were able to get a shot at any deep-space jobs. We lived on the Moon for six years…I co-piloted a tug for the Pax while Geoff jockeyed a console in the city…and we both had to put up with a boatload of shit.”
“Such as?”
She passed the squeezebulb to me and began to fill one for herself. “For one thing, the Pax was reluctant to let us have Wendy. They thought we might pass the disease onto her, although that’s practically impossible since the offspring of polio survivors are usually born immune. The government didn’t want to have to support…y’know, another cripple. Or worse yet, a kid who could infect the rest of Descartes City with polio.”
“I didn’t think polio could be transmitted that way,” I said.
“It can’t. That’s the whole point. Someone in government was being stupid, thinking polio is a hereditary disease.” Betsy pinched off the squeezebulb lip from the urn, slipped a valve around the nipple, and took a sip. Having finished making his log entry, Bill glided back to the alcove, where he buckled himself into the vacant chair and filled a bulb for himself. “It took us a long time for the Pax to issue us a pregnancy permit,” she went on, “and only after we managed to get four different specialists to confirm that Wendy would be born normal would they allow us to go ahead with the pregnancy.”