Orbital Decay

by Allen Steele

  Out of grasp, perhaps, but not beyond reach. Skycorp, the company which had built Olympus Station, was now hiring men to build the world’s first space solar power satellite. Hooker had seen the advertisements in the newspapers, knew that the company was not restricting the job search to trained pilots or mission specialists. There was the possibility that even he could qualify….

  He continued to stare up at the tiny little ring in the sky. Yes. There was an escape. There was a way to run from himself, from his unforgivable crime. He could leave Earth and the ashes of his past far behind, take up a new life in the cosmos. Claude Hooker: astronaut, pioneer of the high frontier, builder of the future.

  He would make a new life for himself in space. He would never look back.

  Suddenly, the heat was gone, the violent shocks had diminished in strength to be replaced by a smooth sensation of falling.

  Hooker opened his eyes, and saw deep blue sky and a sun which, although bright, was nowhere near as intense as he had come to expect. Through his helmet he could hear a high-pitched keening whistle, as the wind whipped past him.

  His eyes went wide, and he didn’t have to check his gauges to know where he was. He had survived the initial reentry and was now tens of thousands of feet above the ground, somewhere in the stratosphere.

  Hooker pulled a handle on the control arm, and felt the heat shield lift away from him like a carapace being discarded by an insect. As he tumbled forward, he caught a glimpse of its blackened, scarred round shape before the cold winds of the upper atmosphere snapped and folded its fragile structure.

  The world stretched out before him, the uppermost cloud layers still miles below him. He had no idea where he was falling, and he didn’t care. The parachute was still strapped to his back. Maybe it would work. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe he wouldn’t even bother to find out.

  Hooker spread his arms and legs wide, transforming himself into a human kite, and embraced the world below him, feeling the wind drag at his limbs and torso as he made his long, long fall. Nice day for flying, he thought.

  THERE’S NO SUCH THING as summer out here, you know; not unless you’re keeping track of the baseball season. That’s how we counted the passage of the hot months. Summer began when the first ball was thrown out in Riverfront Stadium in Cincinnati and ended with the final game of the regular season and the beginning of the play-offs; the cold hand of winter was upon us when the final inning of the World Series was over. So it was near the end of our astronauts’ summer when it all came apart.

  You know most of the story now, of course. It was impossible for the NSA and Skycorp to cover the existence of the Ear module when its fragments rained down on the Indian Ocean and the Australian outback following its disintegration in the upper atmosphere, nor could they keep Mike Webb, Joni Lowenstein, and Dave Chang from talking to the press once they had been brought back to Earth to await prosecution on charges of conspiring to destroy U.S. Government property. About two weeks after the Ear’s command module was destroyed, the Senate Select Intelligence Committee began closed-door hearings on covert space operations by the National Security Agency. It was a reunion on Capitol Hill for a lot of former Skycan personnel: Not only were Dave, Joni, and Mike present, but also subpoenaed down from GEO were the station’s resident spooks, “Dave,” “Bob,” and “John.”

  Probably the most damaging testimony came from former project supervisor Henry G. Wallace, who was escorted to the hearings by two staff psychiatrists from Walter Reed Hospital in Bethesda, where he had been undergoing treatment since his nervous breakdown on Olympus Station and his attack on Joni Lowenstein. Wallace—now a broken, humbled shadow of his former imperious self—verified that Skycorp had cooperated with the NSA in establishing the Big Ear satellite System as a SIGINT-type global telecommunications monitoring system… and then, as unnamed witnesses later told the Washington Post and the New York Times, launched into a disjointed, rambling screed about humanity’s manifest destiny in the stars and the American spiritual mandate to conquer outer space, which wasn’t halted until Wallace was quickly, quietly ushered out into the corridor and allegedly sedated in the men’s room.

  If that wasn’t bizarre enough for the solons on the committee—particularly the venerable senator from Vermont who had made a name for himself as chairman of the committee and who was the Democratic front-runner in the coming Presidential election—then there was the flustered testimony of Clayton Dobbs, a principal designer of the Ear, who was aboard Freedom Station at the time of the incident. In response to a question from the Vermont senator, Dobbs defended his role in designing the Ear because “scientists are not responsible to the people, they are responsible to whoever has bankrolled their research.” When the senator pressed further, asking if that responsibility still held if the intent of the “bankroller” was basically immoral, Dobbs snapped, “Senator, that’s not my department!”

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to witness any of it, though I wished I could have been, if only to hear Wallace’s and Dobbs’ testimony. But my role in the events of September 2, 2016, ended at the moment when Phil Bigthorn put the cuffs on me in the computer bay on Skycan.

  That’s a long story in itself, and I’ll try to make it short. No one in the media or in Congress ever established my connection with the events, because Skycorp kept me from testifying. I never made it to Washington, D.C. I never made it back to Earth. I was sent to the Moon instead.

  It was relatively easy for Skycorp to keep me from testifying. When the shit hit the fan—you know, it’s getting so hot in this suit that even talking about fans makes me uncomfortable—some people at the company and at the NSA apparently decided that having three damaging witnesses from former Olympus personnel was enough. All they had to do was not acknowledge my presence, and get me to someplace I wouldn’t be found when the General Accounting Office inspectors arrived. Hank Luton had been given temporary (later permanent) command of Skycorp’s GEO operations, and when he broke the news to me, it went something like this:

  Hank—You want to write some sci-fi stories about living on the Moon, don’t you?

  Me—No, not the way you’re suggesting, Hank.

  Hank—Well, we’re not asking, anyway, Sam. You’re getting your bag packed and ready to board an OTV for Descartes Station at 0100 hours tomorrow. Sorry, Sam.

  No kidding, Hank. You always were a sorry bastard.

  They didn’t get everyone who was involved, of course. The disappearance of Jack Hamilton and Virgin Bruce has continued to be an unsolved aspect of the case. The shuttle Willy Ley, which investigators later fingered as their getaway vehicle from Freedom Station, made its landing at the Cape before anyone deduced its role in the events, even while the Ear module was breaking up in the stratosphere above kangaroo-land. Witnesses at the corporate Shuttle Processing Center later told investigators that they had seen two men matching Jack’s and Bruce’s descriptions, wearing flight jumpsuits, exiting the spacecraft after it had been towed into the hangar. Nobody paid much attention to them, assuming they were flight personnel looking over the Willy Ley for its next launch in three days. Steve Coffey, the mission’s copilot, later swore that he didn’t know what was going on until the flight commander, Lisa Barnhart, revealed her intentions while at dock with Freedom Station.

  As for Virgin Bruce and Jack Hamilton… no one has seen them since. Like Barnhart and her family, they disappeared within days of the event. No one has seen them again.

  As for Popeye…

  You know what happened to Popeye. No one needed a fried skeleton to determine that the man who uncoupled the Ear module and rode it to reentry in the atmosphere died when it broke apart. There is evidence to suggest that he might have tried to use the unproven escape system that was in the module—a brief trail of smoke in the stratosphere spotted by satellites, the absence of the escape system among the debris that was recovered—but no one was ever really uncertain about his fate, including myself. Popeye was one person who never made it to
Washington. And…

  Hold on, dammit.

  Sorry I had to do that.

  I just sneaked a peek at my suit’s chronometer. I guess I’ve got a few more minutes left in my air supply. I might just finish the story, even if I do get a little long-winded. No, there haven’t been any rescue crews through here lately, and it makes me feel better to go out talking. No, I don’t have a rope to use for climbing out, in case you’re wondering. Wouldn’t know how to use one even if I had it. What do I look like, Doc Savage?

  Descartes Station looked like three turtles hunched together in the gray lunar highlands. Each of the humps was two cylindrical modules, much like the ones Skycorp manufactured for Olympus Station, buried under an envelope of aluminum scaffolding, Mylar tenting, and about five feet of soil. It was designed to protect crews from radiation until the day a more permanent mining facility is built, which I guess will be in another ten or twenty years. It’s much like the lunar installation built at Tranquility Base by the Americans, and the polar base used by the Russians, as far as the way it’s constructed.

  Virgin Bruce would have liked the crew of Descartes Station; they’re his kind of degenerates, and they love listening to old Grateful Dead tapes. They spend eight-hour shifts bulldozing the regolith and sending it through the “dirt factory”—the electrostatic separators and microwave processors which separate the oxygen and hydrogen we live on and the aluminum we process into sheet rolls from the soil. Grinding, dirty, hard work—no one on Earth ever truly anticipated how hard it was to work like the Skycorp crew did until the company started that kind of industrial activity.

  There are twenty men and five women living at Descartes Station. Twenty-five people living in an environment even more closed and crowded than on Skycan. Unlike the NASA and Soviet bases, the crews are not frequently rotated back to Earth, because of the high cost of sending people there. Morale was bad on Skycan, but it was even worse on the Moon, all but destroyed by the lack of privacy in the base’s modules and the bleak, monotonous landscape of the lunar highlands.

  Making the situation worse is what the crew here has done to alleviate the boredom. Someone at the Cape has been pipelining drugs to the Moon inside the sealed supply canisters which land every few weeks. Nothing as relatively harmless as Jack Hamilton’s marijuana, either, but uppers, downers, bioengineered hallucinogens, and occasionally heroin or cocaine. Lester Riddell, the base commander and Wallace’s former copilot on the first lunar expedition, is more than tolerant; he’s become a druggie himself, and allows the men to use whatever they want as long as they don’t get high while working. Some of them do, anyway; this is the real reason why some of the shipments have been delayed. The living quarters are almost perpetually trashed; routine and vital tasks alike are done on an almost accidental basis. Fortunately, at least the base’s power source, the SP-100 nuclear reactor secluded within a crater just outside the base perimeter is designed to function automatically, but I hope I’ll never be here when something…

  Um. Just occurred to me. I won’t, will I…?

  I was welcome to join in during “party time,” the happy hour drug and sex escapades which started in the commons module at about 1500 and continued until everyone was either passed out or the next work shift started. Instead, during the two-week daylight periods, I began my own explorations of the Moon, traveling the lunar highlands on a fat-wheeled rover and rediscovering the strange beauty which the others had long since been conditioned to overlook and forget. My range of sightseeing was the Descartes region; I triangulated my tours around the base and the two life huts, or emergency shelters, which had been established south and west of Descartes Station during the initial months of exploration after the base had been set up, and seldom used since. My favorite place to visit was the Apollo 16 landing site: the bottom half of the LEM still blackened by the exhaust from the upper stage’s liftoff forty years ago, the footprints of Charlie Duke and John Young undisturbed in the soil, the sampling and measuring equipment still deployed near the old lunar rover they had used. I would sit on a boulder nearby, never venturing in close to the LEM for fear of disturbing the footprints, and look at Earth rising over the horizon and watch the sun reflect off the artifacts. Then I would go on.

  It was during this last safari that I ran into trouble. I was out near South Ray, an impact crater not far from the Apollo 16 site, when I drove into the shadow of a small hill. With no atmosphere to diffuse and bend light rays, the shadows on the Moon are dark and impenetrable, like being outside in the darkest moonless night you’ve ever seen. Thinking that I only had to skirt fifty yards around the side of the hill, I didn’t bother to switch on the headlights. My laziness cost me. The rover found the crevasse hidden in the darkness, and down I went—here.

  Radio destroyed, vehicle totaled, no way out… and now it’s my turn to die. Air’s getting thin and stuffy, suit’s become a broiler… it’s only a matter of minutes now.

  Wait. Forgot it almost. The Greatest Discovery… ha, ha, the Greatest Discovery Ever Made. I mentioned that before, didn’t I? Well, maybe I lied. Sorry, folks, but there’s no dead alien in a spacesuit, or a robot probe, or spaceship, or black monolith. Maybe one day they’ll find the little green men, but not today, José.

  Let me tell you what the Greatest Discovery Ever Made was. I’m looking at it now, high above the edge of the crevasse. It’s the view of Earthrise, the way Borman, Lovell, and Anders first saw it on Christmas Eve, 1968, as Apollo 8 came around the far side of the Moon. The sublime message of that sight resonates down through the years: No matter how far away we go, no matter what we do out there, we have only one real home, one common heritage.

  And now I’m going to die, which is just as well, because I’m getting maudlin as hell.

  That rhymes. I’ll be goddamned. I could never rhyme before.

  Lemme try that again. The air is getting thick… thick as a brick, as a brick… getting thick as a brick, can’t beat it with a stick… and the Moon is made of green cheese…

  What rhymes with cheese…?

  The gringo who walked into the roadside Navajo bar in the tiny town of Mexican Hat wasn’t dressed for the desert night; that was the first thing that attracted the attention of the regulars. Shorts, blue nylon shirt, and a pair of funny-looking, thick white metal boots so bulky that he could hardly walk normally in them. The Indians elbowed up to the long wooden counter silently eyed him as he stepped over the mongrel dog at the top of the steps and opened the screen door.

  Of course, they also immediately noticed that he was white. Mexican Hat was located just across the river from the boundaries of the Arizona Navajo reservation. Since drinking was illegal in Navajoland, and beer wasn’t sold at the stores on the reservation, if you wanted a drink you had to go to Flagstaff or Mexican Hat or one of the other towns just outside the reservation. The bar in Mexican Hat had no name; it was an Indian bar, simple as that. The only white people who came by were out-of-state tourists on their way into Navajoland looking for directions, and if they had any sense at all, they didn’t stay around for more than one beer.

  But this guy simply shuffled in his thick boots to the bar, dug into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled dollar bill, and dropped it on the counter. The men at the bar watched him with the neutral implacability only the red man is capable of maintaining, a silent watchfulness that makes most gringos nervous. A rerun of a popular soap opera nagged from the dusty TV above the bar, and flies settled and buzzed around the spilled beer and potato chip fragments littering the bar top. The bartender opened a Coors longneck and put it down in front of the newcomer, and he lifted it and drank deeply, all while the Navajos silently watched.

  He put down the bottle—more than half-emptied by his one swig—and looked at the three Indians wearing cowboy hats, seated on the adjacent stools. He glanced up at the TV and watched it while a commercial came on, then the call-sign of a Tuscon NBC affiliate. He then looked down at the bar, studied it for a moment, and said to the regular
s, “This is a stupid question, but is this Arizona?”

  They all nodded their heads. He nodded his own head in acknowledgment, then took another swig of beer. “What’s the name of this town?” he then asked.

  “It’s called Mexican Hat,” the bartender said after a moment.

  “Oh,” the white guy said. “Mexican Hat.”

  After another long moment, one of the customers said, “Where’re you from?”

  The white guy smiled and traced his finger around the edge of a small puddle of beer on the bar. “I’m originally from Florida,” he said, in slow, carefully chosen words, “but lately I’ve lived in outer space.”

  “I guess that explains the boots,” another man said, sotto voce.

  “Yeah, it does.”

  There was another long silence between them before the white guy said, “Do any of you know Phil Bigthorn?”

  They all shook their heads, not taking their eyes off him. “That’s good,” the white guy replied. After another moment he asked, “Does a bus come through here?”

  “Where do you want to go?” one of the regulars said.

  “Wherever the next bus goes.”

  The bartender pulled out a Greyhound schedule and told him that the next bus was due in three hours, destination Flagstaff. He could catch it at the Texaco station across the street. The gringo nodded his head, finished his beer, then bought a bottle of cheap red wine and some freeze-dried beef jerky. As he finished his beer and headed for the door, one of the customers said offhandedly, “Going back to space now, man?”

  The gringo turned and smiled as he pushed his back against the screen door, stirring the dozing mutt just outside. “Nope,” he replied. “Thanks for the directions home.”

  As he walked clumsily down the steps, the dog yawned and stretched and, having nothing better to do that late afternoon, followed him down the stairs and across the sandy parking lot. The man walked across the cracked highway to the Texaco station and bought a ticket to Flagstaff from the fat old Navajo woman, who also tried to sell him some turquoise jewelry. Then he climbed up on a gravel-and-sand hillock overlooking the highway and sat down, putting his back against a mesquite tree. The dog followed and lay down nearby, his tongue lolling moistly out of his mouth as he eyed the strip of jerky in the man’s hand.