Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  He touched his helmet to Hamilton’s and his voice vibrated through—barely. “Mmmummarm mummum rarumrum mmma-murum rum!” was what Hamilton heard.

  “What?” Hamilton shouted back.

  “Whomm! Mamarum rum rum whap aharumra!” the crewman said, and jabbed his finger toward the airlock at the forward end of the cargo bay leading into the Willy Ley’s crew compartment. “Oh, okay,” Hamilton said. “You want to take me to your rum rum.”

  “Whaharum.” S.F. Coffey pushed off and drifted toward the airlock, pulling himself along on his tether. Jack and Bruce followed, avoiding the tether, which was suspended in the bay’s center like a straight, wrist-thick silver pylon leading up to its enclosed reel on the station. As they moved toward the airlock which Coffey was opening, Hamilton glanced up at the lighted porthole at the end of the command module, about thirty feet above and to the right of the shuttle bay. The crewman in the porthole—positioned at a right angle to the shuttle—seemed to be looking directly at them, although he was probably much more engrossed in maneuvering the Canadarm. No problem there; everyone wearing spacesuits looks alike.

  After cycling through the airlock—a tight squeeze for all three of them—they emerged into Willy Ley’s middeck. S.F. Coffey took off his helmet at once and craned his head around to shout up the egress leading to the flight deck. “Babe! Two for tea!”

  “First intelligible thing I’ve heard you say,” Hamilton said as he pulled off his own helmet.

  “Sorry,” Coffey said with a grin. “It always works in the science fiction novels. I didn’t have your frequency.”

  “Who are they?” Lisa Barnhart called down from the flight deck.

  “Hey, Lisa!” he shouted back, overjoyed. “It’s your favorite spacesick case!”

  “Hi, Jack!” she shouted. “That’s Steve. He’ll show you up when you’re ready.”

  “‘Hi, Jack,’” Coffey rumbled as he started crawling out of his suit. “I couldn’t have phrased it better myself.”

  “What do you mean?” Hamilton said as he unhooked his suit’s waist and began to clumsily work his chest and shoulders out of the suit’s top part.

  “Meaning…” Coffey sighed. “Forget it. If you’ve got something to do with all the hell that’s broken loose here, I don’t want to know anything about it.”

  It took a few minutes for the three of them to climb out of their suits and undergarments, stow them in lockers near the galley, and dress in baggy uniform trousers and polo shirts Coffey produced from another locker. Then Coffey led the way up the shaft in the middeck ceiling onto the flight deck. As he settled into the copilot’s seat, Lisa Barnhart looked around from her pilot’s station at Hamilton and smiled. “Welcome back,” she said.

  “God, it’s nice to see you,” Jack said. He bent forward and kissed her on the forehead, and she gently pushed him back.

  “No time for niceties,” she said. Lisa looked over at Virgin Bruce. “You’re the biker guy,” she said. “I can tell just from looking. And I can figure where your third man is.”

  “What? Where is he!” Jack demanded.

  “Well, I’m not sure, but I figure he has to have something to do with the module which just jettisoned itself.” She turned back to her flight station. “No time for any of that. Strap yourself into those seats there and keep quiet. We’ve got to get going without them realizing that you might be aboard. From what I’ve overheard, they still haven’t repressurized that access tunnel, and they figure you might be in the runaway module.” She peered over her shoulder at Hamilton. “I figured so, too, when I heard what happened, but I told Steve here to keep an eye peeled for you while he was out there.”

  “What have you heard about Popeye?” Virgin Bruce demanded as he buckled himself into one of the passenger seats behind Barnhart and Coffey. “What’s going on with the Ear module?”

  “Hush,” she said. “We’ve got to work quick. I’ve got to call Freedom Command. Steve…?”

  “APU’s powered up and systems are go for OT deployment,” he murmured, his hands working on his own consoles. “Optimal reentry approach green at sixty-five seconds and counting.”

  Lisa pressed a button on the console between her and Coffey. “Freedom Traffic, this is Willy Ley,” she intoned. “We’re go for OT deploy in sixty seconds, mark. Do you copy, over.”

  She listened for a second. Then she quickly cast a worried look at Hamilton over her shoulder. “Trouble,” she said. “If I give the word, you two get middeck pronto and snuggle into the sleeping berths with the curtains closed.”

  “Are they asking questions?” Coffey asked, and Lisa nodded her head quickly. “Great,” he murmured. He looked over his own shoulder at Hamilton and Virgin Bruce. “This was not my idea,” he said shortly. “If I didn’t love this woman, I would have left you…”

  “Clam it, Steve,” Lisa said. “Ah, that’s a negatory, Traffic. We’ve got a short countdown…” She suddenly reached to the clipboard attached to the console above the yoke and flipped back a page, scanning the cargo manifest. “And we’ve got perishable pharmaceuticals aboard. I don’t see what this has to do with us, anyway. Deploy in forty-five seconds, do you copy?”

  Hamilton could see her holding her breath. Then she said, “Roger, Traffic. Thank you. Willy Ley undocking on the count. Five, four, three, two, one…” She reached above her head and pulled down a red lever. A red light blinked on. “Willy Ley is loose. Countdown for tether deploy commencing. Thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight…”

  Jack let out his held breath and looked over at Virgin Bruce. The beamjack—former beamjack now—looked back at him and grinned widely within his spade beard, then held out his left hand. Hamilton reached out his right hand and clumsily shook it. Then he turned his gaze to the line of portholes in front of Lisa and Steve. Through them he could see Freedom’s command module. The crewman who had been operating the manipulator arm was now seated before its long window, intent on the controls before him.

  Lisa reached the end of her countdown, and Steve tugged another switch, firing the preprogrammed set of RCR’s which moved Willy Ley away from the space station. Without any perceptible sense of motion, Freedom Station rose up and away from the shuttle’s windows; there was no jolt as the shuttle was released from its docking adapter and began to lower itself on the station’s tether cable, letting Earth’s gravity pull it down the gravity well. At a distance of 40 miles and on a course already established by the shuttle’s onboard computers, the cable would release Willy Ley in the uppermost part of the atmosphere, there to begin its final reentry maneuvers. Since the computers had plotted it to the last second, the tether cable’s release would put the shuttle on an exact reentry and glide approach for the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida.

  Lisa Barnhart switched off her radio and looked back at Jack and Virgin Bruce. “Boys, you’re going home.” Her smile faded a little then. “So how did you talk that guy into pulling the crazy stunt he’s doing?”

  He touched a switch on the unit’s control arm and felt a slight bump as dense pressurized foam spewed from its globular container into the pack, inflating the aerobrake/heat shield into its curving, oblate form.

  He found a bottle of Cutty Sark in the wheelhouse and poured her a shot into a cheap plastic cup filled with packing ice which smelled vaguely of shrimp.

  As the pod inflated, he rested his left hand on the chest rocket’s firing switch and watched as the artificial horizon slowly settled itself into position, millimeter by millimeter. His breath was rasping in his throat.

  While she drank, sitting on top of a locker on the aft deck, he untied and cast off the ropes, then went into the wheelhouse and started the engines. The Jumbo Shrimp II rumbled deep within and her dual inboard diesels plowed a white froth of water from her stern, and she pulled away from the dock as he pointed her blunt bow toward the cool blue Gulf waters beyond the harbor. Laura bitched about the way her drink tasted and asked if he had any coke.

  When the
heat shield was fully erected—a huge, stiff umbrella behind his back—he watched his gauges, waiting for the moment to come. Moments later it did, and he pressed the rocket’s firing switch.

  He looked at her, and said, “I’m sorry.”

  Laura shook her head. “No,” she said, her voice a lazy, stoned drawl. “You should never say sorry. Sorry is how you’ll always be if you keep saying you’re sorry, so never say you’re sorry. Never, never, never.” She shook her head vigorously back and forth, her hair flying across her face, shrouding it with fine, moving wisps of brown. Then she gazed at him with smiling lips and hungry eyes and said, “Well, do you have any coke?”

  The miniature rocket engine flared, a nova exploding against his chest, and its sudden thrust kicked him backwards; his eyes squeezed shut, and for a moment he thought that he had mounted it on his suit incorrectly, that the engine would stamp through his body or scorch a part of his suit. Then he opened his eyes and saw that the engine had already died, its white-hot parasol of liquid fuel exhausted. That single thrust was all he needed to escape from orbit. Now he was falling to Earth. He unstrapped the engine and tossed it away with one hand.

  He had intended, first, to throw away the cocaine he had bought from Rocky, and second, to tell her that he had thrown it away. He had even intended to dump it into the water as she watched, to show her how easily the precious dope dissolved in common salt water, a demonstration of how little it was worth compared to the money he had spent on it. But he did neither. He told her where to look in the wheelhouse, and she grinned and took it out of its hiding place next to the fire extinguisher while he watched, cursing his own weakness. As he steered the Shrimp out into open water, he observed Laura out of the corner of his eye: carefully tapping a tiny white mound out onto the glass dial of his compass, using a rusty scaling knife to cut the mound into four uneven white lines, rolling a limp dollar between her fingers into a tube, all with the practiced ease of someone who knew how to use this stuff. Meanwhile she kept up her side of a conversation in which only she participated, a monologue about movies she had seen and how much she loved old Dustin Hoffman films and how she was thinking about sending in an application to the University of California at Los Angeles so that she could take graduate level courses in filmmaking, if only she wasn’t so involved with teaching herself, and God, Claude, this stuff is dynamite, you want some? He shook his head slightly, no, and couldn’t help but notice the avarice in her eyes as she bent over the two remaining lines on the compass—she had saved the smaller ones for him—and inhaled them greedily through the dollar tube: snuuuuf, sigh, snuuuuuuff! sigh.

  It seemed as if it was only a couple of seconds after he had released the rocket that he began feeling the first hints of turbulence, the signs that he was making contact with the upper atmosphere: a jar to the left, a jar to the right, a sudden dipping sensation which felt as if he had been suddenly thrown backwards ten feet, then bounced back out again. His stomach felt cramped and roiling; he willed himself against nausea, knowing that within minutes it was going to get far worse. Through either side of his helmet he could see flat planes of incandescent white; straight ahead, a narrowing cone of starfield. He gasped, feeling suddenly afraid, and gulped down his panic. Concentrate on something, he told himself. Anything. His mind burped up a fragment: a line from a song Virgin Bruce used to croon sometimes. “Goin’ home… goin’ home…” he whispered, trying to recall the tune. “Goin’ home… goin’ home… by the water’s… by the waterside I will rest my bones…”

  Then he was pitched into the maelstrom and he screamed.

  They were out on the aft deck…

  Oh no, oh God, don’t focus on that, don’t think about that. He clutched at the hand controls, useless while he made his journey to Hell, clenching his teeth until he could feel his molars grinding and his jaw muscles turning to iron, his eyelids fluttering as he fought to keep them open, his guts turning into a stiff, hollow cavity as he shook violently and dropped backwards into a bottomless pit all at once. Was that a warning light going off inside his helmet? He couldn’t see it long enough to be sure. Don’t think of Laura, don’t think about the boat, don’t…

  She kept on talking as they cruised out toward the setting sun, the boat’s prow cutting through the whitecaps, staring through the salt and fly-specked windows of the wheelhouse at the silver-blue sea under the sun, which was now only the width of two fingers from the straight flat horizon: how she liked the kids in her class except for a trio of boys who played terrorist and stole other kids’ lunches and wrote things on the bulletin boards, and why the PTA meetings were a hassle, where she and Doug the gym teacher whom she suspected had a little crush on her went for a drink after work—a garbled mishmash of sense and fantasy and bullshit that warbled somewhere on the outermost externality of his consciousness as he refilled her Scotch and water and stared at her tits.

  Then, in the middle of Doug and kids and movies and “Gee did you know it was Bob Dylan’s birthday last week? I always loved listening to that stuff”—in fact, while she was saying that Dylan was the greatest love-song writer of the last century—came the hurriedly murmured, just-barely understated: “You got any more coke?”

  Damn her for laughing, he prayed through the vibration and the roar that he heard in his ears and felt through his backside. Then in horror he realized for what he had been praying. Oh, no… oh no, Lord, she’s not damned. Give me to Hell, not her. Not her. (Wham! he pitched backwards another hundred feet in a fraction of a second.) Not her!

  “God!” he screamed, in that instant as his one-man heat shield was enveloped in a cushion of white-hot plasma, as four gees piled on his chest and his personal fireball reached a velocity of 600 miles per hour.

  “You think I enjoyed this?” She held up her right hand, displaying the gold wedding band in front of his face. “You think I ever enjoyed it? Don’t you accuse me of using you! All you ever did was use me, you bastard!” She yanked the ring off with a sudden, twisting motion, then whirled and threw it overboard. He ran to the side of the boat and leaned over in a vain attempt to save the ring, but saw only a glint of gold disappearing into the blue. Gone, forever gone…

  The heat was becoming unbearable; searing, broiling, sweat pouring down his face, stinging his eyes, as the turbulence buffeted his body like pile-drivers impacting against the oblate shield.

  He swung the boathook, and although he closed his eyes at the last moment, he could see in his mind’s eye its steel end crash into the back of Laura’s skull at the same instant as the dull thunk of metal connecting with soft flesh and bone transmitted itself through the long handle….

  “Oh, dear God, forgive me!” he shouted against the roaring around him, and knew that forgiveness was out of the question. He was a falling angel, a Lucifer in transit from Heaven to Hell. Just as he had attempted to escape his conscience by going into space, now he was confronting ill-buried memories in the last instants of his life, in his long, violent plummet back to Earth.

  The night was dark and moonless, the sea was calm, the stars shined with an icy, fragile beauty in a clear sky. He lay in the bottom of the inflatable life raft, exhausted, his feet and arms propped up on the sides of the raft, the plastic paddle lying in his lap. His clothes smelled of gasoline, and he knew that he would have to jump overboard to get the incriminating stench out of his clothes before he reached shore or was picked up.

  But then again, maybe not. He looked back over his shoulder again at the small, burning shape on the horizon, like a funeral barge on the Gulf waters. His alibi would be believed; he knew that already. A blocked fuel line. Laura with a lit cigarette, standing too close to the open fuel tank while he was below decks trying to clear the line. An explosion that killed her instantly; he himself with only moments to ditch into the water, with the raft, with not even enough time to radio a Mayday while the Jumbo Shrimp II was going up in flames.

  He wouldn’t have to pretend his horror.

  Why did she have
to laugh? he asked himself again. Why did she have to tell him that their love was, and always had been, a joke, their marriage a convenience? Why had she stolen from him to support her habit? And, oh Jesus, Laura, why did you have to take the last measure of my self-respect, the last ornament of my delusions, and throw it into the sea?

  “I didn’t need to kill you,” he murmured, as his head sank back against the cold wet plastic of the life raft.

  Hooker knew that he would reach shore by morning. The tide would carry him in, and he could be an appropriate shipwreck victim, a man who had lost his ex-wife to a tragic mishap on the high seas. The Cedar Key police and the Coast Guard would believe his story. But now there was the future to consider. His life had effectively ended at the same instant as he had ended her with the boathook; he had destroyed his source of livelihood when he had soaked the boat with a can of gasoline and dropped a lit match on the deck near her body. In more ways than one, he was adrift.

  Gazing up at the night sky, he made out a tiny ring of light, not much larger than the diameter of his little finger. Fascinated, he stared at it for a minute before he recognized it for what it was. The Olympus space station. He recalled the newscast he had watched only that morning (had it been only such a short time ago?) in his cabin.

  He gazed at it, his head resting on the raft’s side, fixed upon it with a growing sense of wonder that he had not felt since he was very young, when he had tacked up pictures of space shuttles and floating astronauts on the walls of his bedroom, when his dreams had been alive and he felt his destiny was not as a fisherman but as an astronaut. A pure feeling that seemed to ripple through him again, bringing back an aura of innocence which now seemed well beyond his grasp.