by Allen Steele
Thanks. I don’t know what to say.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I think you’ve helped me remember something I forgot.”
“Payload deployment in sixty seconds, Commander,” Coffey said stiffly, signaling her that it was time to knock off the mushy stuff and get back to business.
“Right,” she said. “Gotta go, Hamilton. Take care of yourself in that tin can, okay?”
Got it, he said. Thanks for the lift up, sweetheart.
“Any time, big boy.”
13
Hooker Remembers (Where Did She Go?)
THREE OF HIS BUNKMATES were sitting on the metal floor, absorbed in a game of Monopoly. The last time he had checked, all the property—including the utilities and railroads—had been taken by one of the three, and most of the houses had been replaced by little red hotels. But it didn’t look like any of the three were ready to lose; they were simply trading stacks of hundreds and fifties, each hoping that he would be the one who would land next on the Free Parking square and thus grab the rising mound of play money in the center of the board. A couple of other beamjacks were seated on the edge of a nearby bunk, watching the three-way standoff; one had ZeeGee the cat in his lap and was stroking her fur. He could almost hear ZeeGee’s contented purr as well as the sound of the men’s voices through his bunk’s curtain.
The plastic clatter of dice rolling across the board. “Seven, lucky seven… one, two, three, four, five, six… shit.”
“Ha! Boardwalk! With three houses, that’s… nine hundred dollars! Pay up, sucker.”
A rustle of play money being counted. “That’s all the money you got from him the last time he ran through your railroads.”
Laughter. “You broke yet?”
“Forget it, pal. I still got a grand or more here, and you’ve got to make it around my corner here. I’ll frisk your ass and send you to the poorhouse.”
“Bullshit. You’ll land in jail like you always do and won’t be able to collect!”
“Hey, I got this Get-Out-of-Jail card. Remember, last time I landed on Chance? Here’s your money, now shaddup and roll ’em.”
The clatter of dice on the board. “Six.”
“That’s not a six, that’s a five.”
“Oh. Sorry. One, two, three, four… ah, damn!”
“Property tax!”
It was driving Hooker bananas. Once before, a couple of days ago, he had tried to get them to tone down the noise. No, more than that; he had rammed open the plastic curtain with his hands and had yelled at them to shut up. The crewmen, who had turned to marathon Monopoly out of the boredom which had haunted the construction crew during the long days of the work shutdown, had simply stared back at him in bewildered anger. Phillips had asked him if anything was wrong, with the tone of an adult addressing a mentally disturbed child, and that had made him further blow his cool. He had jerked the curtain shut again, and had heard them snickering a few minutes later. Popeye’s going over the edge. Losing his grip. Better make sure he doesn’t get his hands on any sharp objects, man.
So he didn’t bother to object anymore. After all, it was his problem that he was slowly going insane, wasn’t it?
Hooker lay on the foam sleeping pad inside his bunk and stared at the narrow walls of what was laughingly referred to in Skycorp’s official jargon as his private crew accommodations. Right. Very private. He picked up the dogeared paperback copy of Moby Dick he had been trying to force himself to read, opened it, stared at the pages, closed it and plopped it back down beside himself again. Absently, he picked up the phone receiver from the hook inset in the wall, realized there was nowhere or no one on Skycan he particularly wanted to call, and put the receiver back on the hook. He stared at the toes of his regulation sneakers and wondered where he had gotten all those scuff marks, but even that thought was too boring to stay in his mind for longer than a second.
There was a snapshot of Laura taped on the wall near his head. He studiously avoided looking at it.
Impulsively he pulled his terminal keyboard out of its slot in the wall, propped it in his lap and punched in control-S, the code for station general status report. The LCD screen just beyond his feet, at the far end of his bunk, beeped. Words formed on its dark green surface. Hooker read it quickly: With the shutdown in effect, no work crews were going in or going out; it was 1504 hours station-time, 0804 Eastern Standard Time, 0704 Central Standard Time, so it was therefore morning in most of America and, unlike the crew of Skycan, most of the country was getting ready to go to work, big deal; all life-support systems were working nominally; an OTV was due for docking with Olympus at 1600 hours station-time.
Hooker stared at the last entry. Scuttlebutt had it that the new crew member, the new hydroponics engineer, was arriving this morning, but that wasn’t what he was thinking about. The last OTV had carried away the bodies of the beamjacks who had been killed in the accident. Hooker had found himself in the Docks when David Chang and Doc Felapolous had loaded the body-bags into the tiny spacecraft for the long trip back to Earth. He remembered what he had thought then: only two ways to leave this place—serve out your contract, or get killed.
It wasn’t entirely true, of course—if you read the fine print on the Skycorp contract—but close enough. Hooker closed his eyes. He wanted to go home desperately, but for some reason he had voluntarily extended his contract; he could be thinking about going back to Earth in a few months, but now he was stuck on Skycan for almost another two years. Why?
Involuntarily, his eyes wandered to the snapshot of Laura which was taped to his bunkspace’s wall. Because he didn’t want to go back.
A flash of gold disappearing.
He squeezed his eyes shut, so hard that his head throbbed.
Her laughter.
His head sank back against the wall.
“Free Parking!” someone outside his bunk yelled. “Gimme that money!”
Oh, God, I don’t want to remember, I don’t want to remember, I don’t want to think about it, I don’t want to remember….
As if he had any choice.
Hooker had not been surprised to find Laura gone when he awoke the next morning. Even when they had been married, it was usual for one of them to wake up and find the other side of the bed vacant—usually Hooker himself, since his fishing generally kept him out until the early hours of the morning, and Laura’s teaching job had her in the classroom before nine. Even on the weekends she was up and around long before his eyes opened. She was simply more of a morning person.
Even though he had begun getting up early after their divorce, she had left his place out by Hog Island before he was out of bed at eight o’clock. Wandering naked through the cabin, scratching his groin in time with the throbbing in his skull, he stopped to stare wearily through the front window at the sandy driveway outside. Her battered little Toyota, which had followed his Camaro back from town last night, was gone from the driveway.
Well, what did he expect? Typical of Laura, the sexual pirate. Wham bam thank-you-ma’am, I think. She got what she came for, he thought. Why stay around for the uneasy morning after, especially when it’s with your former hubby?
Hooker leaned against the windowsill and stared at the sunlight filtering down into the front yard through the pine and cypress woods surrounding his place. The night before had been great. Spectacular, in fact. Four stars. They had writhed together in bed with a fervor which had left them gasping for breath between rounds. Between bouts they had polished off a bottle of white wine he had found in the refrigerator, and they had told each other funny stories and giggled as they each tickled the other’s old, familiar sensitive places, until they finally pounced on each other again and the giggles became soft moans and whispers in the darkness. Good loving indeed.
And she had split before he had awakened, like a pirate who had pulled off another successful raid. One woman on a dead man’s chest, yo-ho-ho and a bottle of Gallo.
“Damn, Laura,” he mumbled, feeling alone and to
ssed aside. “You could have at least left a note.” And what would she have written on it, stupid? Claude: last night was great! Let’s get married again! Uh-huh. Fat chance.
He shuffled back to the bedroom and pulled on a pair of ragged cutoffs and tennis shoes, then went out through the back door and crossed around the side of the cabin to the driveway. The morning air was cool and fresh, and he sucked in the smell of pine needles and salt as he walked down the driveway to fetch the morning paper and mail from the mailbox. By the time he got back to the cabin his head felt clear, his hangover less crippling.
The kitchen was still a mess, as was the rest of the house. Hooker promised himself that he would clean up the place before he went into town. If it had been Jeanine he had brought home last night—he wasn’t surprised to find that he couldn’t recall her last name—he would have been embarrassed. He put the newspaper and mail down on the kitchen table, glanced once through the back window at the edge of the salt marsh which lay in his back yard, and saw the tip of Hog Island a quarter of a mile out on the edge of the Gulf. Once that little chunk of land had been dotted by the summer homes of the rich. Most of the homes were gone now, the fortunes which had built them swept away by the Second Depression. The houses which were left were shells populated mainly by poor Cuban and Haitian immigrants who had found their way to Cedar Key and who commuted back and forth in leaky rowboats and inflatable dinghies. Sometimes at night he could see their bonfires and wondered what they were burning. Maybe a rich man’s library and paintings.
Hooker switched on the portable TV set on the counter and listened to Good Morning America as he fried a couple of eggs and link sausage and made a pot of coffee. The news was still the same, as most people preferred these days, following the tumultuous end of the twentieth century. California was still trying to raise money to clean up after the El Diablo meltdown of ’98. NATO and Warsaw Pact troops continued to eyeball each other across the East German border while Washington and Moscow tried to negotiate the final details of SALT IV and the Space Weapons Treaty in Geneva, but it would still be a while before either country completely forgave the other for the mistakes made during the Polish Uprising. Libyan diplomats were in Israel again, as the two shattered countries tried to recover from their bloody little war. The Presbyterian Church of America had joined the more fundamental denominations in decrying the findings of the Princeton biomedical team which had determined that there was indeed an afterlife and that it lasted for about forty-five minutes. The northeastern United States and parts of Canada were still digging themselves out of a blizzard which had dumped fourteen inches of snow on Boston. A child prodigy in Great Falls was reciting King Lear after having read it only once, and Hooker went to the john during a quick report on how Johnny Cash’s 3-D simulacrum was packing the house at the New Grand Ol’ Opry in Nashville.
When he got back to the kitchen, the pretty anchorwoman, Linda Francis, was introducing her next guest for the morning. Hooker scraped the eggs and sausage onto a chipped plate and poured a mug of black coffee as he watched the set from the corner of his eye.
“Olympus Station has been in orbit over Earth for a year as of this week and is now mostly complete, and Project Franklin, America’s attempt to build three solar-power satellites in geosynchronous orbit, is in its first stages,” she said into the camera. In the background behind her appeared a file tape showing a cylindrical spacecraft coasting into orbit near the slowly turning space station. “Yet despite claims by the space industry and the White House that the project will be the beginning of the final solution to America’s energy needs, skepticism still abounds.”
The film clip disappeared from the background and the studio set reappeared. The camera moved in for a close-up of a lean, blond-haired man sitting in an armchair next to Francis. “With us today is Olympus Station’s new project supervisor, Henry G. Wallace, formerly of the NASA astronaut corps and the leader of the first expeditionary mission to the Moon, now working for Skycorp and McGuinness International, the prime builders of Project Franklin. He will be sent up to Olympus later this month to take over as head of operations on the space station. Good morning, Mr. Wallace.”
“Good morning, Ms. Francis,” Wallace said. He appeared to be in his late thirties; solidly built, hair thinning on the top of his scalp, wearing a dark blue sports jacket with a recognizable Skycorp logo pin on his lapel. He grinned when his name was mentioned, displaying perfect teeth.
Hooker—unshaven, unwashed, hungover—disliked his boyish grin and perfect good looks at once. Oh boy, he thought, look at the space hero. He made a farting sound with his lips and murmured, “Good morning, jerk.”
Linda Francis, as rosy and smiling as Wallace, opened her questioning. “Mr. Wallace, there’s been some question lately as to the claims Skycorp has made concerning Project Franklin’s effectiveness. Do you believe the powersats can completely solve the energy problems of the new century?”
Hooker winced. It was the year 2014, and the twenty-first century didn’t look or feel a hell of a lot different from the twentieth (except that it seemed a hell of a lot less deadly), yet the mass media was running the phrase “the new century” into the ground. Fifteen years old and still being thought of as a baby, Hooker thought, as if some wondrous event were taking place. He drank his coffee. Christ. The only wonder is that we didn’t exterminate ourselves.
Wallace’s perfect smile didn’t falter. “Well, Linda, it would not take too much homework to poke holes in some of the more, ah, enthusiastic predictions about the SPS program. That’s a tendency even experts have when they’re discussing the potentials of space. Right now the power consumption annually of the United States is somewhere around 900,000 megawatts, and that’s even with the loss of some utility companies in the last fifteen or twenty years. Since each of the powersats planned, when completed in five years, will only produce 5,000 megawatts, they’ll only account for a little less than six per cent of the nation’s total power demand.”
The anchorwoman’s eyebrows rose slightly. “Six per cent? Nuclear power plants accounted for eight per cent in the last century….”
“Yes, but there are not as many of them with us anymore, are there? Remember, the utilities, that went under…”
“Went under because the debt burden for paying for the plants became too high,” Francis finished. “Project Franklin isn’t going to be cheap, either. How can we justify building something this big, when its output is only going to account for six per cent of the national energy requirement each year?”
“Two reasons.” Wallace raised a finger. “One, it’s an infinitely renewable resource. The sun is going to be with us always, or at least for another few hundred million years. It’s an energy resource that’s available as long as we have the capability to move beyond the atmosphere’s filtering effect and tap into it. Certainly it’s expensive. Even with the last few decades of breakthroughs in space technology, it’s going to be a while before getting a cargo into high orbit will be cheap. But… and here’s the second reason…”
As he spoke, the studio-set background changed to show a starscape several hundred miles above Earth. Three-dimensional videotape clips showed the big HLV’s arriving in orbit near a half-complete Olympus station; spaceworkers unloading the cylindrical crew modules from the cargo bays; a long shot of the station being built; the arrival of the beam-builders at the Vulcan construction station. “Now that the commitment has been made,” Wallace was saying, “the investments from Skycorp and the U.S. Government made which have established Olympus and Vulcan in geosynch orbit and got Descartes Base built on the Moon, most of the work has been done, really. We only have the major components of the scheme on-line and operating, but once we really get started on this thing, ah, space construction, we’ll gain experience and the costs will begin to go down. Actually, Linda, there’s no reason why we should stop the project when we’ve built the three powersats being planned.”
“You mean there are plans to build more?�
�� she asked.
“No, not at this time at least. But the capability will be there. In fact, it gets better as we put more time and energy into the project. The cost of each satellite will decrease as the technology is perfected and the raw materials become more available, and so mass production will eventually become feasible. The first powersat will account for only two per cent of the annual U.S. energy requirement, but that will increase exponentially once more powersats are built. The main thing will be making the raw materials more available.”
“You’re referring, of course, to Descartes Base.” As she said that, the film clip in the background changed to show the mountainous Descartes region of the Moon’s southern hemisphere: lunar freighters making soft touchdowns on the gray plains, bulldozers shoving lunar soil over the habitation modules, a man in a spacesuit standing near the bottom half of the old Apollo 16 LEM left there since 1972.
“That’s right,” Wallace replied. “In the lunar highlands. That area, as everyone now knows, is rich in oxidized aluminum and silicon, the main materials required for building powersats. In fact, we discovered that during the Apollo missions thirty years ago. Once the base is expanded, and once the mass-driver is perfected and built, we won’t have to use freighters any more, but will be able to shoot the building materials up, making the cost for the girders and the solar cells that much cheaper.”
“Uh-huh.” Linda Francis held a finger to her slightly parted lips. Hooker’s gaze was fixed on her. God, he thought, why haven’t I met any beautiful women like that in my life? Was the rumor true that she was married to a dwarf? “Of course, once these satellites are operational, Skycorp and McGuinness will make a fortune selling utilities cheap electrical power.”
Wallace’s smile thinned a little. “That’s a rather loaded statement, isn’t it?” She laughed. “For one thing,” he continued, “there will be enormous initial costs to be covered—to the subcontractors, to NASA, and so forth—that will have to be settled before McGuinness or Skycorp will be able to make any fortunes. Those will begin being paid when SPS-1 goes operational, but even then, it’ll be a while before…”