Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  Popeye blinked. It was completely unexpected, and he was already beginning to have misgivings… but Jack did trust him, and Popeye realized that a key part of getting over his misery was to stop alienating himself from his crewmates. “Sure. Sure. When are we going to meet?”

  “We’re doing it right now. Module One. You’ll be there?” Hooker nodded, and Jack gave him a slap on the shoulder. “See you there…. Hey, and don’t let anyone know you’re coming,” he added.

  Popeye watched Hamilton as he walked up the gangway leading to the catwalk, heading toward Module One. He noticed Jack pausing for an instant to say something to Virgin Bruce, who was also coming off shift. As Hamilton disappeared onto the catwalk, Virgin Bruce looked at Hooker and nodded in a knowing way. Intrigued now, Popeye nodded back, then closed and locked his locker.

  Yet his mood was still buoyant as he strode down the catwalk. For the first time in weeks, he found himself noticing things that he must have heard and seen previously but simply ignored while immersed in his personal blue funk. Crewmen passing each other on the catwalk as they either headed for work on the third shift or returned to the bunkhouses before heading for the mess deck, saying things as they dodged around each other: “Take it easy out there, pal” “What’re they serving down there today, Ike?” “Watch the feed from the number two Grumman, man, it’s putting out some warped sections today” “Hey, Hildebrant! You use up all the hot water again or what?” From the open hatches leading down into the habitation modules he could hear music from the tape decks that had suddenly proliferated through the space station, the twentieth-century rock music that was suddenly enjoying a revival among the crew: the Band’s “Rag, Mama, Rag” coming from Module 33, “California Girls” by the Beach Boys from Module 34, the grating thump of the James Gang’s “Funk #49” from Module 35, the tender sigh of the Youngbloods’ “Darkness, Darkness” from Module 36. He saw the notices taped up on the catwalk’s tubular walls: “Wanted: Led Zep tapes. Buy or trade. Rockin’ Joe, Module 12, East” and “Dungeons and Dragons! James Bond! Traveller! Need fresh blood for new games! Roll your own characters and put them thru my tomato-pulpers! DM Dick, Module 31. No wimps!” and “Movie Saturday night. Two Stallone classics: First Blood and Rambo. 2000 and 2200, East Rec.” He passed the rec room, hearing the metallic clanging of the exercise machines being worked out and the buzz of conversation from below.

  Things had changed on the space station in the past months. People were much more relaxed, now that Cap’n Wallace had gone into hiding. They were beginning to enjoy themselves. I wonder why no one thought of locking away that pompous bastard before, Popeye thought. Would have saved everyone a lot of grief, especially me. He smiled at the recollection of his encounter with Wallace on the day Jack Hamilton had arrived on Skycan. In an odd way, he felt he could credit himself, at least in part, for Wallace’s self-alienation from the rest of the personnel. It had probably been the first time in his career that Wallace had ever had anyone tell him off.

  He strode past the first three Hydroponics modules with their brown color-coded signs and stopped above the sealed hatch of Module 1. He kneeled and twisted the locking wheel to lift open the hatch. Conversation in the module paused as he climbed down the ladder, shutting the hatch behind him. As Popeye stepped off the ladder and turned around, he took a quick accounting of the bunch gathered in the compartment.

  Everyone was familiar to him, of course; Joni Lowenstein, the communications officer, leaning against a rack of seed trays with her arms resting on the shoulders of her new-found lover, Virgin Bruce, who was seated in front of her; Dave Chang, the Docks operations chief, standing next to a bulkhead with his arms crossed-over his stomach; next to him, sitting at a lab bench, Sam Sloane, the Data Processing chief; and, of course, Hamilton himself. All of them nodded or murmured greetings to Popeye. Six people in a compartment already filled with plant beds, consoles, benches, and furniture made the module small indeed, so Popeye rested his butt on the bottom rung of the ladder. Looking around, he noticed at once that the lateral hatches connecting to Module 42 and 2 were sealed and locked, adding to the mysterious nature of the meeting.

  “Thanks for sealing the hatch, Popeye,” Hamilton said. “You’re the last one who’s been invited, so if you’d do us a favor and climb up and lock it, we’ll get started.”

  Popeye did so as the hydroponicist cleared his throat formally, ending the small talk which had resumed once Popeye had entered the compartment. “As the saying goes, I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve called you here today,” he began.

  “To smoke dope and have an orgy,” Chang said. As the others laughed, he noticed Joni turning red. “Sorry,” he said, genuinely apologetic. “Didn’t mean to imply anything about the lady’s character.”

  “Better not, bubba,” Virgin Bruce replied, wearing an expression of good-natured menace.

  Even Joni laughed at that. However, Popeye noticed that neither Jack nor Sam had laughed. Hamilton shook his head. “Sorry, folks. This isn’t going to be a smoking session.” He paused. “It hadn’t occurred to me that it might occur to you, when I invited each of you here, that this might be the reason. Each of you was picked to be here for a particular reason, and each of you are needed. However… well, if smoking pot is all you have on your mind, if that’s all you want to do, you might consider going someplace else. That’s not what we’re here to do.”

  “What Jack is saying,” Sloane added, “is that we’ve got some important business to discuss, and that there’s a reason why all of you—Bruce, Joni, Dave, and you, Popeye—were asked to be here. You’re crucial, but… well, if smoking pot is all…”

  “We get what you mean, Sam,” Virgin Bruce interrupted. He held up his hands. “Hey, I’m probably the biggest junkie of the bunch, but I know when it’s time to get serious. Whatever it is, I’m sticking around.”

  He looked at the others meaningfully, and they either shrugged or nodded their heads. “But it does have to do with pot, doesn’t it?” Bruce continued. “Let me figure it out. Cap’n Wallace and Mr. Big have finally wised up, and we’re all in deep shit.”

  “Oh, hell,” said Chang. “Does it mean we have to eat the rest of that stuff now?”

  That cracked everyone up, even the taciturn Jack and Sam. “No, no, no,” Sloane said. “Pot has something to do with it, but only peripherally. What it is, is…”

  He stopped, and looked at Hamilton. “Well, Jack told me about this yesterday, so it’s probably best that he explain things himself. Jack?”

  Hamilton crossed his arms. “All right,” he began. “Yesterday at about 1500 I was down here when I got a call over the intercom…”

  As Hamilton was wrapping up his story, Hooker was beginning to feel grim again, despite being intrigued with the disclosure of what “Dave” the phony meteorologist had leaked to Hamilton, and how Sloane had managed to crack the rest of the secret through the station computer. He wondered privately how much had been just under his nose during those visits he had made over the months to Meteorology to peer through the telescope at Earth. Perhaps if he had only listened harder, knowing—as everyone on Skycan did—that John, Dave, and Bob were attached to the National Security Agency. Thinking how much his own obsessive behavior had blinded him to the truth only served to make him feel worse, if he wasn’t already disturbed by what Hamilton had just said.

  “Okay, all right,” Virgin Bruce said, bending forward in his chair. “I’ve been following along, but I’m a little slow to pick up on all this spy stuff, so tell me in simple language what this Big Ear thing is all about.”

  “Well, better yet, I can show you.” Sam Sloane turned about in his chair to the computer terminal on the lab bench. “I did this up last night just to show you, Bruce, so I hope you appreciate it.” He tapped in commands, and after reaching a file in his own directory he punched it up.

  A graphic simulation of the Big Ear appeared on the screen. With Earth as the nucleus, it resembled a model of a heavy-
element atom. A network of circular orbits surrounded the planet, arcing on, above, and below the equatorial plane, sometimes bisecting one another. As the earth rotated in the simulation, so did the orbits. “This, of course, is the Ear,” Sloane said. “It’s twenty communications satellites established in geostationary orbit in the Clarke Belt, a couple of them not relatively far from Skycan’s location.”

  He typed in another command, and a series of black dots with red lines connecting them appeared in the orbits. “The satellites can cover practically every inch of the globe,” Sloane continued. “That is to say, through uplinks and downlinks with Earth stations now based in virtually all corners of the globe, they can send and receive messages to and from every continent. But as well, they can communicate with each other, so that a signal sent from, say, Zaire, can be ‘bounced’ from comsat to comsat until it reaches its destination in, for example, San Francisco. Each satellite is capable of handling several thousand phone calls, television signals, computer messages, and radio transmissions simultaneously, so there is practically no ceiling on the network’s communications capability.”

  Sloane typed in another command, and another orbit appeared on the screen, this one closer to Earth than the orbits of the Ear satellites. “Now, that much is public information which the Ear’s primary builder, Skycorp, has released. The deep, dark secret is that the NSA, through Skycorp’s cooperation and that of no telling how many friendly governments, has established a way of tapping into the Ear. You see, the comsats are also capable of transmitting their messages to the Freedom space station in low-Earth orbit. We found out that a new module has just been added to Freedom, which acts as a sort of orbital ‘switchboard,’ or funnel if you want to call it that, for all those tens of thousands of simultaneous signals being bounced around the Ear.”

  Sloane turned around in his chair to face the group. “In short, that module is the biggest telephone bug ever conceived, except that it can also tap TV and radio communications and patch into stuff being sent computer-to-computer through modem. Through another series of Earth stations—these ones based worldwide and operated by the NSA—those signals can be relayed to the agency’s headquarters in Fort Meade, Maryland. What happens then is interesting. The signals are fed through the agency’s computers, which are programmed to translate or decode the messages. The computers are also programmed to pick out certain key words or phrases.”

  Hamilton jumped in again. “Those key words or phrases, of course, are those which the NSA and its clients consider to be dangerous or unpatriotic or un-American, whatever. If one of those words or phrases pops up during a conversation, the computer does two things. One, it traces the origin and the destination of the signal and identifies it according to the phone number or frequency it has used. So it gets the name of the parties who sent and received the message, whether it be by telephone or radio or computer. At the same time, it logs the call and its identification and alerts someone that a so-called dangerous conversation is taking place.”

  “All right, I think I understand,” Joni interrupted. “Say I was in New York and I called a friend in, oh, England…”

  “Or it could be across town, or in Akron,” Sloane added. “Once more satellites are added to the network, they could probably patch in on telephone calls from one house to the next one on the block.”

  “Whoa, wait a minute,” Chang said. “Local calls aren’t relayed by comsats, so how can anyone patch into them?”

  Hamilton and Sloane both shrugged. “We’re not sure,” Sam replied, “but the file we read specifically mentioned the capability to tap into local-to-local communications. Our guess is that the Ear is, or will be, interfaced with SIGINT-type satellites. Those are satellites which are capable of listening in on distant telephone communications. They’ve been with us since the 1980s, when the superpowers used them as spy satellites.”

  “This is the likelihood,” Hamilton added. “If the NSA is going to scheme something this big and extensive, they’re not going to leave local communications untouched.”

  “Okay, I got that,” Joni continued, holding her hands up. “Here’s my example: I called a friend in, okay, Akron, and I said something like, ‘Let’s shoot the President tomorrow,’ or ‘Let’s bomb City Hall….’”

  “Or, ‘The President is a scum-sucking rat fink,’ or ‘Do you know where I can buy some pot?’” Sloane shrugged. “You don’t even have to be serious. You could wish aloud that the King of England be run over by a garbage truck or that your friend’s town be used as a test site for the neutron bomb, and somebody might pay attention.”

  “Right, so I say something nasty and seditious,” Joni continued, nodding her head. “Does that mean the computer will pick up that phrase, trace both me and my friend, and alert someone that possible sedition or criminal conspiracy is taking place?”

  “Right,” Sloane said. “That’s exactly what would take place.”

  “So what would be considered a dangerous word or phrase?”

  “Anything they damn well please,” Sloane replied in a low voice.

  There were a few moments of silence as everyone considered the implications. “Well, it’s not necessarily a bad thing,” Virgin Bruce said at last. “I mean, they could cut down on a lot of crime that way, or stop terrorism before it starts, or…”

  “Ah, c’mon, Bruce!” Jack slapped his hands on his knees in anger. “This way anything could be made into a crime! Anyone could be cast as a potential criminal or terrorist! Innocent people would be hurt as much as the guilty.”

  “He’s right, Bruce,” Popeye said.

  Everyone turned to look at Hooker, who had not said a word during the whole meeting. Realizing that he was suddenly the center of attention, and why—he seldom said anything—Popeye felt himself blush, and look down at the deck.

  “Go on,” Hamilton said, his voice at a normal pitch once again. “What’s on your mind, Popeye?”

  “Well…” Popeye spoke slowly, unaccustomed to speaking his mind before a lot of people and wondering how he had become so shy over the past months. “It would be like in Orwell’s 1984, with the Thought Police monitoring what everyone said, inferring treason from casual conversations. I mean, we’ve had it happen again and again in history. The Salem witch trials and the McCarthy hearings and the Accuracy in Academia movement. Shit, they arrested a lot of people in America a hundred years ago, during World War I, for violating the Alien and Sedition Acts, just for saying things which seemed to support Germany.”

  “Goddamn,” Virgin Bruce said, visibly impressed. “I didn’t know you were so educated, pal.”

  Popeye shrugged, feeling a bit proud of himself. “When I used to trawl for shrimp, there wasn’t much to do sometimes. I took books out on the water and read a lot. Uh, and I did a correspondence course with the University of Florida. But the thing is, despite the First Amendment and the principles of free speech, there has always been a history of the U.S. government listening in on the people and taking the names of those who said things which were politically disagreeable. However…” He shook his head in amazement. “This is the worst yet, if it’s true. No one will be safe. It’ll end freedom of speech.”

  “Nice speech.” Virgin Bruce leaned back in his chair and crossed in his arms in a gesture of nonchalance. “Okay, assuming that everything you’ve found out is true, why did you tell us about it?”

  “Because we’ve got to put a stop to it,” Hamilton replied.

  “Ohhh,” Virgin Bruce retorted, rolling his eyes, “we’ve got to put a stop to it.” He shook his head. “Look, Jack, I agree with you that this is serious stuff, but what the hell do you expect us to do about it? I mean… shit, I’m just a grunt spaceman. Do you think I look like the type who gives a shit about the fate of democracy or something?”

  “Frankly, yeah, I do,” Hamilton said calmly. “A couple of months ago you risked your own butt to save the lives of Webb and Honeyman. You did that because you cared, and you were able to do that bec
ause… well, I don’t mean to offend you… but you’re a natural-born spaceman.”

  This broke everyone up, and Hamilton grinned in spite of himself. “Well, admit it,” he said, gesturing toward Virgin Bruce. “Look at this clown. Look at yourselves. Fifty years ago it was only test pilots and scientists who went into space. Now it’s slobs like us…”

  “Like him!” both Joni and Chang shouted in unison, pointing at Virgin Bruce.

  “Okay, like him.”

  “God’ll get you for that, Jack,” Bruce murmured, red-faced but grinning.

  “If the NSA doesn’t first,” Hamilton replied. “But now it’s people like us who are living up here, doing all the things which were only dreamed about years ago. I mean—and I don’t want to ring in those hoary old clichés—but we’re the pioneers, folks. We’re the ones who are really opening up space for the world, for everybody in the human race.”

  “God help the human race,” Chang said with a snicker.

  “If you like, but I’d rather it be us. Look, if we’re up here, we’re the pioneers. Take a look at history. It’s always been the misfits, the losers, the weirdos, the people running from the law or the tax collectors or their wives who’ve started things. Look at most of the people who colonized America. Look at the people who ended up colonizing Antarctica. The weirdos do it eventually, not the governments or the military, and if they don’t like what’s going on, they change the rules.”

  “What Jack’s trying to say,” Sloane continued, “is that if we don’t make the decisions for what goes on in space, who will? The guys on Earth? There’s Skycorp, who have this P.R. thing going about how the powersats are going to release the world from the energy crunch, and cooperating with the NSA to bug everyone in the world. The government? They’re the ones who started the whole thing.”