Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  But from space, it had been seen. Still later, a NASA investigator making a check through satellite footage, which happened to have been taken of that area since 1987, noticed that similar white spots were evident in all pictures taken over Florida’s Atlantic coast on those days when the sky was not overcast and the satellites’ cameras were pointed in the right direction. The ghost light, therefore, could be registered by either human or artificial eyes… but only from outer space.

  There had to be some significance to that detail, but whatever it was, it was too subtle for anyone to deduce.

  New crew members aboard Skycan, when they asked why there were cats on the station, were frequently told that they had been brought aboard to control the cockroaches that stowed away in the food containers. The food—which was supplied to Skycorp by a distributor of airline in-flight meals—was bad enough to give that story some credibility, but that was not the reason why a half-dozen felines now wandered through the station’s modules.

  The fact was that Doc Felapolous’ assistant, a University of Tennessee med student named Lou Maynard, who was completing his degree in space medicine aboard Skycan, had brought the first two cats up as test animals. Originally called OST One-A and OST One-B, the cats were respectively a young male and a young female, and it had been young Dr. Maynard’s intention to study their reactions and degrees of adaptation to reduced and near-nonexistent degrees of gravity. His initial hypothesis had been that even though the cats’ instinctive ability to right themselves while falling would be disturbed under such conditions, their nervous systems would eventually adapt and the cats would learn to regain their sense of balance.

  The hypothesis, alas, was a bust. Neither cat ever became completely adapted to Olympus Station’s various degrees of gravitational pull. In the hub they yowled and flopped about crazily, clawing madly for anything, or anyone, that represented to their eyes a fixed point, and in the rim modules the Coriolis effect made them perpetually clumsy, missing jumps and crashing into things when they ran. At least Maynard was able to collect enough new observations to publish his results in The New England Journal of Medicine and in Science, but the real advances that the experiment made were unintentional. Sometimes, as Doc Felapolous later observed, this is the way scientific inquiry works.

  Although OST One-A and OST One-B were at first kept in cages in sickbay, it is impossible to keep cats locked up for very long—as any cat owner knows. Sooner or later, they will get loose. When the cats did manage to escape, they found themselves welcomed by most of the station’s crew, who fed them and pampered them and played with them and hid them in bunks and in lockers when the distraught Dr. Maynard came searching for them. They would get locked away in their cages again and again, only to be set loose by a beamjack who was a born-again cat fancier. Once the cat was out of the bag, so to speak, that there were pets aboard Skycan—no one except Maynard and Felapolous referred to them as lab animals—OST One-A and OST One-B were adopted as crew mascots. They were given names: OST One-A became Spoker, for his tendency to escape under a ladder into the bottom level of one of the hub spokes, and OST One-B was named ZeeGee, for the amusing (albeit dangerous) antics she performed while in the microgravitational conditions of the hub.

  This caught Doc Felapolous’ interest as an unlettered psychologist of the armchair variety. When H.G. Wallace became upset about the cats’ presence on his space station—“There’s no place for house pets aboard a space station,” he said to Felapolous sternly—Felapolous was able to reply, “Oh, but there is!” He pointed out the subtle role which pets play in people’s lives, as familiar living objects who will accept people no matter what they are like, who can be talked to, stroked, played with, confessed to, loved and admired. Felapolous pointed out that clinical psychologists had known for decades that pet therapy was an important tool in dealing with depressed patients, and that some prisons had successfully experimented with allowing long-term inmates to keep pets.

  “The men are bored,” Felapolous said to Wallace. “Let them keep the cats as pets. It’ll be good for them.”

  “How can they be bored?” Wallace retorted. “They’re participating in the ultimate human adventure. They’re making the conquest of space.”

  “Henry,” Felapolous replied, “man can’t live on starlight alone.”

  The deciding factor in the argument, however, rested in the instinctive behavior of the cats themselves. Put a male cat and a female cat together for a little while, and guess what happens?

  Unfortunately, Lou Maynard was unable to follow his first paper, “Observations On The Adaptive Behavior of Domestic Cats To Microgravity” with a hot sequel, “The Results of Feline Inbreeding In Microgravitational Conditions.” Like humans, Spoker and ZeeGee desired privacy for their mating practices; unlike the male and female crew members on Olympus Station, they got what they wanted. Two months later, a crewman named Ralph Conte came off his shift, went to his bunk in Module 14, opened the curtain, and was surprised (and, to his credit, even somewhat excited) to find ZeeGee nursing a litter of six tiny kittens, born while he was out on the powersat welding girders together.

  This event was almost enough to cause a mutiny when H.G. Wallace let it be known that he considered two to be company and eight a crowd, and that he intended to ship the whole bunch back to earth in the next OTV destined for rendezvous with a shuttle in low Earth orbit. By the time it filtered down through the crew, scuttlebutt had it that Wallace secretly intended to throw all the kitties out through an airlock in the Docks. Had Doc Felapolous not interceded and acted again as the station’s mediator, it is possible that the first full-scale mutiny in space would have occurred, with perhaps H.G. Wallace being the one who would have gone spacewalking without the benefit of a tetherline—perhaps without a spacesuit as well.

  In the compromise which was reached, ZeeGee and Spoker were sent back to Earth once the kittens were old enough to be weaned. It was also agreed that the two males of the litter would be neutered before they reached reproductive maturity, to prevent any further increase in the feline population. Wallace grumbled a little because his vision of stellar conquest did not include cats among his stalwart crew, and the male members of the crew blanched somewhat at the mention of other males becoming eunuchs, but a compromise was better than no agreement at all. When Skycorp questioned the logic of keeping the offspring aboard, Dr. Maynard told them that his next research project was to be the adaptive behavior in microgravitational conditions of felines born outside an Earthlike environment, et cetera.

  New crewmen who were being broken in as beamjacks were issued a chest control unit for their spacesuits, which included a recessed button covered by a sliding safety plate. Asked what this button was for, the Vulcan Station crewman fitting them into their suits would say, “Oh, that. Well, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but if anything goes drastically wrong—I mean, really wrong, where nothing you can think of helps you and no one else can do anything for you—push that button.”

  Once in a while the rejoinder was, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one before.” But most of the time, the next questions were “What is it? What does it do?”

  The whiteroom assistant would wink knowingly and say, “That’s the panic button. It’ll bring help.” No one ever believed it immediately.

  Now and then, greenhorns would find themselves in a situation in which they felt helpless and beyond assistance: becoming untethered while on EVA, having a girder slip out of hand and go floating away out of reach, finding themselves in an uncontrolled roll or pitch because of a misfire by their MMUs. After trying everything they had been taught, and after yelling fruitlessly for help over the comlink, sometimes they would in desperation slide back the little cover and shove their gloved finger down on the red panic button.

  Nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. The button was a dead switch, wired to absolutely nothing in the chest control unit, not so much as a light. But it made people who were panicky feel like something was b
eing accomplished; occasionally, it had the effect of buying time for confused people to think out a solution. No one knew where the idea of a panic button originated, but most agreed that it was a nifty idea.

  6

  Hooker Remembers (A Night on the Town)

  A FEW MINUTES BEFORE Virgin Bruce docked at Olympus Station, an interorbital ferry set out from Skycan and headed for Project Franklin.

  The ferry was a modified OTV, its stern engine removed and replaced with a docking adapter matching the one at the front, its propulsion coming from thrusters arrayed around its cylindrical fuselage, piloted by remote control from Olympus Station. The interior resembled the cramped interior of a Greyhound bus; twenty acceleration couches left over from its service as a shuttle’s passenger module were arranged in two rows down the length of the compartment. There were no viewports, only a single TV monitor at the forward end; really, there was nothing to do during the fifteen-minute trip to Vulcan except stare at the back of the couch in front and breathe the oxygen pumped in to offset decompression sickness. If anyone were allowed to smoke in space, the cabin’s NO SMOKING signs would have been lit, and everyone knew better than to unbuckle their seat belts while the ferry was under thrust. It all made for a boring fifteen minutes.

  Hooker sat in the back of the compartment, plastic time-card in hand, and stared at the back of another beamjack’s head, his eyes following the aimless drift of a lock of hair that bristled out from under the band of the guy’s cap. Another beamjack, Mike Webb, was sitting next to him, but Hooker didn’t feel like carrying on small talk. He simply sat and waited for the trip to end, pondering his own dark thoughts.

  For some reason the trip to the meteorology deck had left him more depressed than he’d been before he’d gone there. That had never been the case in the past; a few minutes with the telescope used to refresh him, used to remind him that there was still a Gulf of Mexico waiting for his return from two years in space.

  He remembered when he could daydream about it, that day of coming home: feeling the thump of the landing gear cranking down, the slight wobble as the elevons airbraked the final approach, then the smooth jar of the shuttle’s touchdown on the Cape’s landing strip, the spaceship whisking past palmettos and Spanish bayonette, white sand kicking up in the noonday sun; then, finally, climbing put of the cool white metal womb into tropical heat, feeling the coastal breeze on his skin. He would bum a cigarette from one of the ground crew and wander off down the runway, sauntering away from the slow ticking of cooling metal and the whine of machinery being moved into place. Where’re you going, Popeye? someone would ask. Out to the beach. I’m goin’ fishing, he’d reply. Don’t you want your check? someone else would ask, as an awed silence fell over the processing area. Send it to my bank, he’d throw over his shoulder.

  Somehow, he had stopped having that daydream. It had happened at about the same time he had started losing track of the days.

  Hooker stared at a loose rivet on the couch in front of him. He remembered looking at the sailboat through the telescope. Had he seen a girl on the boat, a sliver of suntanned skin against the whitewashed deck? She had blond hair and wore a blue bikini; she was lying face down with her arms crossed under her head; there had been sweat on her back, small thick beads beginning to roll down the cleft in her buttocks, where it disappeared into her bikini bottom. He could see that sweat from twenty-two thousand three hundred goddamn miles away, so he knew for bloody sure that it was Laura lying on the deck of that sailboat, Laura smiling softly as she improved her tan, Laura who was…

  It had not been Laura. There had been no girl lying on the deck of the sailboat.

  Hooker clenched his hands on the armrests of his couch. His eyes squeezed shut tight, his head lolled back against the couch. Unbidden, uninvited, the memories came.

  By some miracle—probably its location in the northern part of the state, where it still got cold in the winter—Cedar Key had managed to escape the devastating effects of the boom which had hit Florida during the twentieth century. It had never become a major tourist attraction, even as a coastal town.

  A couple of hotels had been built near the beach, it was true, and the long boardwalk near the municipal marina included the usual seashell shops and overpriced restaurants found at any surfside location. But the weather in northern Florida could be as cold and damp during the winter months as it was in New Jersey or Missouri, so the snowbirds from Trenton and Jefferson City tended to stay away from lonely little Cedar Key, heading instead for the plastic sprawl of Panama City Beach or the urban familiarity of Ft. Lauderdale. This left Cedar Key as one of the few places on the Florida coast, even in the early twenty-first century, which still retained a vestige of its charming old-time squalor.

  So it was to a still undeveloped, underpopulated Cedar Key that Claude Hooker made port that cool January evening. He brought the Jumbo Shrimp II into the marina shortly after eight o’clock, avoiding the anchored sailboats and other shrimp boats lined up at the jetties. A steady breeze from the southwest blew through an open window on the bridge, ruffling his thinning hair. Over the low rumble of the boat’s diesel engines he could hear the faraway rumble, from miles away over the Gulf, of the approaching thunderstorm that had chased him and the other fishermen home early from the night’s work.

  Within an hour Hooker had tied up the Shrimp and battened down the trawler for the coming storm. There was no catch in the live hold below the aft deck, so he left the nets in the hold and spread a canvas tarp over the hatch to prevent the hold from flooding. Checking the lines to make sure they would keep the boat at the dock, but weren’t so tight that they would snap in a heavy wake, he noticed soft orange lights glowing in the cabins of some of the other shrimp boats tied up nearby. Other captains staying with their boats overnight, he decided, hoping the storm would break and pass by later in the night so they could head out and try to get at least a few hours fishing in by morning.

  Lightning flashed on the horizon, briefly outlining the thunderhead’s forbidding mass in the night sky. Satisfied the Shrimp was secure, he jumped onto the dock and walked toward the gravel parking lot nearby. He felt a little guilty for not hanging by, as the other shrimpers on the boats were doing. The hell with it, he thought. If he missed a night’s work, it wasn’t fatal. There was money in the bank. For once, the bills were all paid at least long enough to keep his creditors off his back, and it had been weeks since he had given himself a night off. Perhaps the storm was a blessing in disguise. Hooker smiled. Maybe it was God’s way of telling him to go get drunk in town tonight.

  He was still smiling as he fitted the key into the door lock of his old Camaro. Yeah, maybe it was a good night to head over to Mikey’s Place. Hanging out in the bar sipping cold ones and playing pool was preferable to going home and watching TV all night. Maybe he could even find a young lady, so when he did go home it wouldn’t have to be alone. For all the good that it had done, things had been a little lonely since Laura had moved out.

  Hooker’s mouth twitched as he settled into the driver’s seat and fitted the key into the ignition switch. If he was lucky, perhaps the storm would keep his ex at home tonight.

  The storm’s squall line hit the town just as Hooker opened the bar’s wooden front door. He pressed the door shut against the wind and rain as patrons nearby howled irritably, then turned and looked around the inside of the place.

  Mikey’s was having a big night. The place was nearly jammed to capacity with Cedar Key locals, half of whom had already departed from sobriety. It was a small and dimly lighted bar, with rough pine furniture, old fishing nets suspended from the ceiling, and boathooks fastened to the walls between plastic beer signs and framed sailing prints. A musky scent hung permanently in the air, beer and tobacco mixed with crusted salt and sand from the boots and sneakers of the fishermen who made this their hangout.

  Over the long bar and liquor case behind, next to a holograph of a tall ship, a video screen showed an old Pink Panther movie play
ed on an ancient videodisc system beside the cash register. Peter Sellers’ voice was drowned out by rock and roll music from a decrepit Wurlitzer in the corner, John Fogarty belting out an old blues number he and Creedence Clearwater Revival had revamped many years ago. Mikey, an oldies fan, allowed nothing in his jukebox less than thirty years old, which suited most of his regulars just fine; besides, the oldies were back in style, since the New Wave of the last few years of the twentieth century had finally bankrupted itself into Hollywood schmaltz. Sidestepping his way through the crowd, Hooker glimpsed Sellers being attacked by a Chinese assassin while the Wurlitzer banged out “The Midnight Special.” Somehow, the combination made aesthetic sense.

  Then the screen was obscured by a figure: A short man with his shirt pulled open, exposing a flopping beer gut and extreme sunburn, had climbed up on the bar and commenced dancing to the Creedence song. He lip-synched the words as his dirty tennis shoes stomped along the polished wooden surface, sending an ashtray skittering off to crash on the floor. His performance brought yells and laughter. People sitting at the bar hastily grabbed their glasses and bottles from his path, and a plump young woman reached up to tuck a folded dollar bill into his waistband. He leered at her and pumped his fat thighs suggestively, and was rewarded with a high-pitched giggle from her and a dark glare from the man sitting next to her.

  An elbow bumped Hooker’s. “Kinda looks like Mikey’s is in good form tonight, huh, Hook?”

  Hooker looked around, saw Whitey Cuzak standing next to him. Hooker shrugged and grinned. “Place hasn’t changed much since the last time I stopped by,” he murmured under the music. “Hey, Cooz. Who is that fat fool anyway?”

  “I dunno his name, but I hear he’s in from New Orleans. It figures it would have to be some ragin’ Cajun.”