by Allen Steele
He heard laughter over the channels. Hey, Popeye, don’t let that pure oxygen go to your head now, eh?
Hey! Popeye! I gotta can a spinach if you need it!
Hooker, are you okay? That was Hank Luton, the construction supervisor. How’re you doing there?
“I said I’m okay,” he insisted. He grabbed his tether and started pulling it hand over hand, reeling himself in toward the beam he had been welding. “I just got the spins for a minute there. Let me get this done, and I’ll go work with Hernandez and Webb at their section.”
Nix on that, Popeye. You know the rules. Finish that weld, then I want you back on Vulcan and cycled through into the whiteroom. I don’t want anyone dozing off on the job.
Oh, that’s just great, Hooker thought as he grabbed the powersat again. That means he’ll put me on medical report to Doc, and Doc’ll put me on the couch again. “No, seriously, Hank, I’m okay,” he said, trying to keep the pleading tone out of his voice. “I just misfired my MMU a bit and that put me in a spin and I just got a little dizzy. I’m telling you, I’m fine.”
Don’t gimme that crap, Popeye. Untether now and head back. Al, go over there and finish what Hooker was working on. Hooker, back to the station, pronto, you copy?
“Goddammit,” Hooker said under his breath. He unsnapped his tether and hit the button on his chest box, which reeled the line back into the metal can on his hip. Then he pushed off from the girder with his leg, did a half-flip backwards and jostled the hand controls on his backpack’s arms. The MMU stopped the momentum from his backflip, and a correction on the vernier jets sent him gliding toward the telephone shape of Vulcan, hovering underneath the powersat three-quarters of a mile away, joining the continuous flying circus of men and vehicles arrayed around the shack’s open loading bays. Not only was he going to have to take a break now, Popeye thought, but he had little doubt that he was going to have to have to listen to Hank as well.
“I don’t know what to do about you, Popeye, I honestly don’t know.” Hank Luton paused to suck on the straw leading into his coffee bulb. “I mean, you and I both know you got problems, but I can’t do a thing for you if you don’t tell me about ’em, right?”
Hooker floated nearby, holding a bulb in his own hand. He had his suit on still, but with the backpack off, his helmet undogged and his gloves shed. He gazed moodily at a display screen; for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to look at Hank. He didn’t say anything.
Luton waited for him to answer. Getting no reply, he went on. “C’mon, Claude. You’ve been on this operation almost longer than anyone else. At least as long as the rest of the work crew. I’ve appreciated your hard work so far. You’re a good man. I like you. If you have something on your mind, tell me about it. It won’t go any farther than this room.”
“I don’t have anything to talk about.”
“Oh, Jesus, Popeye, get off it!” Luton snapped. “You don’t think anyone notices? You hardly say anything to anyone anymore. You’re never in the rec room, you eat alone on the mess deck, you don’t show any desire to be with other people. You work, you eat, you take a sponge bath, you sleep for a few hours and you go back to work again. A man just can’t live like that, Hooker!”
Hooker shrugged. “Doesn’t seem to be hurting me so far.” He sucked down a little coffee and didn’t look at the construction supervisor.
“Aw, bullshit, man. You spaced out back there. If you hadn’t had your tether secured, someone would now be retrieving you from your own little orbit.” Luton crushed the bulb in his black fist and shoved it down a disposal chute. “To tell you the truth, I don’t care if people daydream on the job sometimes, as long as they don’t let it interfere with what they’re doing. But up here, when you start to space out, that’s the beginning of a fatal mistake.”
“I wasn’t daydreaming, Hank,” Popeye said.
C’mon…
“No!” Suddenly, he felt something snap inside of him. He flung the coffee bulb he had been holding across the compartment, where it bounced off an oxygen tank and ricocheted into a Mylar wall. “I had a little bit of vertigo, that was all, I just got a little dizzy and I shut my eyes to get my shit together!” he shouted. At the same time, he had the impression that he was outside his own body, watching himself yelling at Hank Luton, passively examining himself as he lost control. “And I don’t want to talk about my problems because I don’t have any, so I don’t have anything I don’t want to tell you about, so just let me do my fucking job. I just got dizzy, that’s all! I just got the spins and that’s why I didn’t answer Sammy, and there’s nothing I want to talk to you about, so thank you very much and get outta my life you goddamn nigger!”
Hank Luton’s right fist wound back for a punch so fast that the momentum sent him toppling backwards and he had to grab for a handhold to keep himself in place. The fist hung parallel to his shoulder for a moment, trembling as if it contained a fury of its own, and Hooker shrank back, waiting for the blow which would probably take his head clean off his neck. Luton’s dark eyes bored into his own for a long second; then, remarkably, he lowered his hand, his fingers uncoiling from the bricklike fist he had made.
Luton let out a breath. “Popeye,” he said slowly and softly, “I haven’t let a white guy live after calling me a nigger since I was a little kid. I know you’re not the type who usually says things like that, though, so I’m going to let that one slide by.”
“I’m sorry, Hank,” Hooker said. “You’re right. I didn’t mean that.”
The construction supervisor nodded his head and looked away. “If you really were a bigot you wouldn’t have saved Julian’s life when that hotdog blew out,” he murmured. “I’m just glad he’s not on this shift so he didn’t have to hear you say that. I know you’re sorry, Popeye. You don’t have to say anything else.”
Hooker no longer felt detached from himself. He only felt ashamed. It was like what had happened a few weeks earlier, when he had blown up at H.G. Wallace. Something deep inside himself had snapped its reins and had roared loose, but unlike the episode with Cap’n Wallace, this time it had been ugly and obscene and he wanted to crawl away someplace to die because of it. He remembered…
Rocky, fat Rocky, two hundred-plus pounds of manipulative shit, bent over a small mound of soft white powder balanced in the cup of gold-plated balance-beam scales which reflected in the Florida sun like a promise disappearing into the blue; gone, forever gone. “Money’s money, man,” Rocky murmured as he carefully balanced the scales, “but I hope your lady likes the present you’re giving her.”
“I’m sorry,” Popeye said. “I guess it just came out.”
Luton nodded. “Hooker, you’re through for this shift,” he said. “I know there’s something wrong that you don’t want to talk about with me, so I’m going to take you off this shift and let you catch a ferry back to Skycan. I know I can’t make you do it, but I want you to go talk to Doc Felapolous and get whatever it is off your chest.”
Hooker nodded, knowing that he wasn’t going to visit Felapolous. Luton turned toward the hatch leading back toward Vulcan’s command compartment. “Just one warning,” he tossed over his shoulder. “If you space out again, I’m going to recommend to Doc and Cap’n Wallace that you be sent back to Earth on a psychiatric release. I can’t put my finger on it, but I get the feeling that’s the last thing you want to happen. You’re homesick, Popeye, but you never want to go home.”
He sat in the whiteroom for a while after Luton left, gazing at the crumpled coffee container he had thrown across the compartment, which drifted like a tiny rogue asteroid. Luton had been right. I want to go home, Hooker thought, but I can’t, and getting shipped back would be the worst thing to ever happen to me.
Almost the worst thing.
18
Virgin Bruce’s Tale
IF IT HAD NOT been for the St. Louis Cardinals throwing away their chance to go to the Series to the Chicago Cubs—a major development in the season, which eventually led t
o the historic games between the Cubs and the Tokyo Giants—we probably would never have learned how Virgin Bruce came to be on Olympus Station. It took a disastrous defensive play by the Cards in the seventh inning for Bruce to get upset enough to spill the beans about his past.
Of course, no one had ever asked him to tell about himself before, at least not in any detail, that was tradition among the Skycan crew, a tacit agreement by which it was generally understood that a beamjack or any other crewman wasn’t obligated to relate his autobiography to anyone.
There were a couple of reasons for this. One, it was rumored, and correctly so, that a few guys had past affairs which were nobody’s business but their own. Bad marriages and divorces which had them running from alimony payments, or possible criminal charges concerning God knew what real or trumped-up offenses (remember Tennessee’s “Tipper” law against live rock music performances?), or shattered reputations and ruined businesses in wherever one called home—these were the most recurrent stories, when one heard them. Remember, we were all living in close confines on the station, so there wasn’t much privacy. A yarn told to a few friends in the bunkhouse could spread throughout Skycan, until someone sat down next to you in the mess deck and calmly asked you if that seventeen-year-old in New York had been any good. The other reason was that some of the guys had psychological scars which were simply too vulnerable to expose in public. Popeye Hooker was one of those people. He had something in his background he didn’t want to discuss, and no one really pressed him about it, except maybe Hank Luton or Doc Felapolous.
It was not as if everyone on Skycan were in the position of expatriated Americans living in banana republics under false identities. Many times during the long, dull hours spent in the rec rooms or in the bunkhouses between work shifts some guys would open up, telling their life stories to whoever was nearby. That was another reason for the tradition of voluntary silence: Most of those stories were either tedious drivel or pure bullshit. But while there were many people who spouted dull anecdotes or tall tales, there were also a few who didn’t have much to say about what they did before they came to work for Skycorp. Virgin Bruce was among the members of the latter group.
At least before that Sunday afternoon in the west rec room, that is. The baseball fans aboard had been long looking forward to that game. The Cubs and the Cards were rivals way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, and in the season of 2016 they were running almost neck and neck for the numero uno standing in the National League, especially after they both kicked the shit out of last season’s Series champs, the San Diego Padres, and summarily whomped American League stalwarts like the Royals (whom the Cards had never forgiven since the 1-70 Series of ’85), the Yankees, and the revived and highly touted Washington Senators. After all these years, it looked like the Cubs were again going to make it at least to the play-offs, and there were enough Midwesterners among the crew to make that particular game of interest even to those of us who really didn’t give a damn about baseball, only because we wanted to see if there was going to be a bloody brawl between Cards and Cubs fans by the time it was done.
So a lot of shift-swapping had occurred the week before, which had placed a couple of dozen diehards around the tri-vee table by 1400 hours Sunday, with more swarming in after the fourth inning, when the second shift got off duty. I was never much of a baseball fan—college basketball was my sport, besides boxing—but I ducked out of work at Data Processing and strolled over to the west rec room, where one of the two circuses on Skycan was in progress. With two rec rooms on Skycan, it worked out that most of the Cards fans were in the west hemisphere and most of the Cubs fans were in the east, which probably reduced the bloodshed in the aftermath.
I remember that the compartment was jammed almost to capacity. Most people were standing in a dense circle three layers deep around the table; the lucky few who had staked out seats had been there two hours before the game, and weren’t moving for love or money. I recall one surprise: Joni Lowenstein, the beautiful woman who usually worked Olympus’ communications station during the second shift on weekdays, she who had resisted the advances of every guy on Skycan, who hardly spoke to any beamjack anymore except as “Skycorp Command” over the comlink. She turned out to be a true blue-eyed Cards fan and managed to spirit herself into one of the few tableside seats to yell for her team throughout the game. The men present were too astonished to even think about making a pass at her.
I suspect Joni was there mainly to watch Shelly Smith play. That sours the memory a little, because Shelly’s blowing it at the bottom of the seventh was what lost the game for the Cards. It was a bad moment for the first female player on a major league baseball team, and I was surprised that Joni watched the game through to the bitter end.
The tri-vee tables were two of the few luxuries Skycorp had sent up to us. There was one in each rec room and they were blessings, nice Mitsubishi systems with stereo sound and overhead TV screens for the close-up shots. A holographic image projected on the tabletop showed the diamond and the outfields as a three-dimensional diorama painted in ghostly translucent light, the players as three-inch images running across the table. With a little imagination, one could imagine himself or herself up in the nosebleed section of Busch Stadium squinting down at the field. We had to keep the cats off the table, because it was so convincing to them that they would bat with their paws at the players on first and third base or go snatching after an outfielder running to intercept a pop fly.
It was a good game, which ended in tragic defeat for the Cardinals. The St. Louis team had started off strong with Cox and Bingham taking home in the first two innings and Caruso stealing home during a stumble by the Cubs’ Kelso, but by the end of the fifth the old Cards curse of early burnout set in when a rookie dropped a base hit, which the Cards screwed up in catching and thus let two Cubbies run home. Things got better for the Cubs and worse for the Cards after that, especially when the Cards coach sent in Ron Lucey as the relief pitcher. Lucey had been a promising rookie once, but his megabuck salary had sapped away his drive, and through the rest of the game he sent erratic pitches to the Cubs batters, who either ignored them or sent them slamming into the stadium’s outfield walls. The Cards fans in the west rec room became surly around that time; if there were any Cubs fans in the room, they either kept mum or had the wisdom to go over to the east rec room, where they were having a good time.
The killing blow in the seventh happened when one of Lucey’s weird pitches was clobbered by a Cub heavyweight named DiPaula, straight into right field. Shelly Smith ran to intercept it, stumbled at the last minute, let it drop, recovered, grabbed the ball and flung it at second base… too much too late, because by then DiPaula was rounding second and a schmuck named Lomax, who had made it to third base on luck alone, was prancing across home plate like a sixteen-year-old who had copped a feel on his first date. The error was compounded by the Cards’ second baseman missing Smith’s throw, which allowed DiPaula to run home a moment later. Shelly Smith crumpled to her knees and the Cubs took the lead, and the screams in the west rec room could be heard throughout the station.
Virgin Bruce, who had been sitting quietly in a chair behind first base throughout the last two innings, crumpled a near-beer can in his fist and chucked it across the table. It fell like an aluminum meteor on a Cubs player, passed through his ghostly miniature body, and bounced off the table. “Sonuvagod-damnbitch,” he snarled, getting up from his chair. “I can’t stand to watch anymore.” He pushed through the crowd and headed for the refrigerator. A few guys eyed his empty chair covetously, but no one made a move to claim it. You don’t tempt fate that way.
It was just as well that Bruce stayed away for the next two innings. Smith’s bad play was the end of the game for the Cards; the Cubs managed to repulse them from bringing any more men home for the rest of the game, and the final score was 4-3 in favor of Chicago. We let Asimov the cat onto the table to maul the 3-D image of Fred Bird as he pranced around the pitcher’s mound, a
nd most of the crowd climbed up the ladder out of the rec room, probably bound for the east rec room to take their frustrations out on the Cubs fans there.
That left a few people sitting around the now empty tri-vee table: Joni, Dave Chang, Mike Webb, Claude Hooker, and myself. I had pulled out my Tandy PC and unfolded the screen, preparing to finish the chapter of Ragnarok Night I had been suffering over for the past week, but somehow a bull session got started and I didn’t get more than a line written. A few minutes later Virgin Bruce, who was getting over his apoplexy from watching his team lose, came back to the table and sat down in a vacant chair.
Somehow—and don’t ask me how; you know the way bull sessions tend to go—the subject drifted to home towns. I remember Mike Webb telling a long story about his juvenile delinquency down South, and Chang telling some anecdotal tale about a Chinese restaurant in Boston’s Chinatown which used to serve up cat as an entree, which didn’t amuse Joni, who was stroking Asimov in her lap. Everyone seemed to take turns in relating their favorite tall tales except for Popeye, who as usual was reticent about his past. We didn’t push him on it; there was something dark and ugly in Hooker’s past, and the beamjack was within his rights to be secretive about it. The unwritten rule and all that.
However, that didn’t stop Joni from turning to Virgin Bruce, who was seated to her right, and saying, “Bruce, you grew up in St. Louis, didn’t you?”
I could see Bruce shift uncomfortably in his seat. He was being put on the spot. Any guy who would have tried to pry something out of Neiman about his past probably would have been told to go to hell. However, Joni was the best-looking of the few women aboard Skycan, and Bruce had been pursuing her since anyone could remember. Lowenstein had always been cold to our resident ex-biker, calling him a greaseball and a motorhead and so forth, but now here was a rare circumstance—probably arising from the fact that they appeared to have at least one thing in common, both being Cards fans—in which she was actually addressing him in a civil tone. The only problem was that she was subtly asking him to talk about the one thing Bruce never talked about: what he had done before becoming a beamjack. She was breaking the rules, but how could Bruce cry foul, when it was his first, and perhaps only, chance to win some points with the object of his desire?