by Ben Bova
“And… nobody cares?”
The Chairman looked truly sad. “The people are quite accustomed to talk of scientific miracles. Rarely do they see such miracles come true.”
“But the food they eat, weather control, medicines, space expeditions…”
“All part of the normal, everyday background,” said the Chairman. “Once a miracle comes true, it quickly becomes a commonplace. And the people hardly ever connect today’s commonplaces with your talk of tomorrow’s miracles. So your promises of genetic engineering do not excite most people. Grasping politicians, yes; hungry workers and farmers, no.”
“So it’s over… completely finished. No way around it.” Lou sank back in his seat numbly.
“I am afraid so. I have lived with this problem for more than a year now, trying to find some alternative to exile. There is none. I am sorry. Somewhere, we have failed. We build gleaming technologies to turn ourselves into devils.” The Chairman shook his head. “I am ashamed of myself, of the government, of the entire society. We are doing you a dreadful injustice.”
“But you’re going ahead and doing it,” Lou muttered.
“Yes,” the Chairman shot back. “That is the most terrible part of it. I hate this. But I will do it. I know you can never accept it, never agree to it, never understand why it must be done. I am sorry.”
The four of them lapsed into a dismal silence.
Finally, the Chairman said, “As I told you, I will personally examine the matter of the rocket scientists. Dr. Kori, I cannot promise you your freedom, but I do promise to try.”
Kori nodded and tried to look grateful but not too happy, glancing sidelong at Lou.
“And Miss Sterne,” the Chairman went on, “you are free to go whenever you wish. The government will furnish you with transportation back to Albuquerque,, or any place else you may desire to go. And you will be reimbursed for the troubles that you’ve been put to, of course.”
Bonnie said, “Sir? Would it be possible for me to go to the satellite? On a temporary basis?”
Lou stared at her.
“Most of my friends are there,” Bonnie said, looking straight at the Chairman and avoiding Lou’s eyes. “Maybe I’d rather live there than anywhere else. But I can’t tell unless I’ve tried it for a while.”
The Chairman folded his hands on his thin chest and gazed thoughtfully at Bonnie. He looked as if he knew there was a lot more to Bonnie’s request than she had stated.
“How do you think the others will feel, knowing that you can return to Earth anytime you wish to?”
Bonnie’s face reddened slightly. “I… I would only stay a few weeks. I’d be willing to make a final decision then.”
“A few weeks,” the Chairman echoed. “And then you would make a decision that would be irrevocable… for the rest of your life?”
She nodded slowly.
A little smile worked its way across the Chairman’s wrinkled face. “I can picture Kobryn’s reaction. Highly irregular. But—very well, you may have a few weeks aboard the satellite. But no more.”
“Thank you!” Bonnie said. And then she turned, smiling, to Lou.
20
It was literally another world.
Lou never saw the satellite from the outside. He, Bonnie, and Kori were tucked into a shuttle rocket that had no viewports in the cargo / passenger module. They sat in padded plastic contour chairs amidst cylinders of gas, packing crates of foodstuffs, motors, pumps, furniture. Lou swore he could hear, through the airlock that connected to a second cargo module, the bleating of a goat or sheep.
The satellite was huge, of course; a small town in orbit. From the inside it was a strange, different kind of environment. For one thing, you always walked uphill. The corridors all curved uphill, in both directions, because the satellite was built in a series of giant wheels, one within another. Most of the living quarters were in the largest, outermost wheel, where the spin force almost equaled the full gravity of Earth’s surface. It took no extra physical effort to walk along the constantly uphill corridors because you didn’t have to work against the spin-induced gravity.
His compartment—you couldn’t call it a room—was a marvel of compactness, plastic-trimmed with aluminum spray paint. Lou thought of it as a cell. An astronaut would feel comfortable in it; a scientist on duty in a satellite for a month would put up with it; Lou realized he’d be living in it for the rest of his life.
Edmond Dantes had a bigger cell than this.
Life had already settled into something of a dull routine in the plastic little world. Lou, Kori, and Bonnie were met by a greeting committee when they stepped through the airlock from the shuttle rocket. They were shown to their quarters. After he had unpacked his lone travel bag, Lou received a phone call from Mrs. Kaufman, who was acting as her husband’s secretary now, asking him to meet with the Director’s Council right after breakfast the following “morning.”
Time, of course, was completely arbitrary aboard the satellite. So everyone ran on the same clock, set on Universal Time. When it was midnight in Greenwich, England, it was midnight aboard the satellite.
Lou spent his first “evening” prowling through the uphill corridors. He couldn’t find Bonnie, didn’t know where her quarters were or what her phone number was. Same thing for Kori. He could have asked someone,- but instead he started walking along the main corridor. It was completely featureless, bare plastic walls broken only by bare plastic doors. All alike, except for tiny room numbers on them.
There were other people drifting through the corridors, most of them strangers, but a few men and women that he had worked with at the Institute. They nodded recognition or mumbled a hello. If they were surprised to see him, or wondered why they hadn’t seen him before this, they didn’t show it in any way. All Lou could see in their faces was a vague guilt, a shame at being locked up here.
Like the living dead, Lou thought of them.
The only change in the long, sloping, featureless corridor was that every ten minutes or so there was a spiral ladderway that led up toward the next wheel, in closer to the hub of the slowly spinning satellite. After passing several of them, Lou decided to go upstairs and see what was there.
The ladderway ended in another curving corridor, much like the first one, but smaller, narrower, with doors on one side only. This left side must be an outside bulkhead. Lou expected the gravity to be lighter in this second level, but if it was he could • detect no difference. Which meant that the satellite must be much larger than he had envisioned it. He began to realize how big the satellite would have to be to hold two thousand scientists and their immediate families.
As he walked aimlessly along the corridor, he came to a section that was dimly lit. Only a few dull red light panels overhead broke the darkness; it was barely light enough to see your way along. Ahead of him, Lou saw a motionless figure. As he got closer, he recognized him.
“Greg! Hey, Greg!”
Greg Belsen jerked as if startled, then turned to see who had called him.
“Greg!” Lou said, smiling and reaching out to grab his friend’s shoulder. “Boy am I glad to see you!”
“Hello, Lou,” Greg said quietly. “I heard they finally got you here.”
Lou’s smile vanished. This wasn’t the same Greg he had known at the Institute. The nerve had been taken out of him. Then he saw why Greg had been standing at this spot. There was a viewport in the wall: a small circle of heavily-tinted plastiglass. And outside that viewport hung the Earth. Rich, blue, laced with dazzling white clouds, beckoningly close, alive. It was swinging around in a slow circle, the reflex of the satellite’s spinning motion.
“She’s only a few hundred kilometers away,” Greg said in a soft flat voice that Lou had never heard from him before. “Less than the distance between Albuquerque and Los Angeles. You could go to one of the airlocks and practically jump back home.”
Lou’s blood ran cold.
Lou finally met Bonnie and Kori again the following morn
ing, after a fitful, tossing few hours of dream-filled sleep. They all arrived at the autocafeteria at about the same time, and found each other at the “menu”—actually a wall panel studded with selector buttons. Only the breakfast buttons were lit. The cafeteria could seat perhaps fifty people, at long narrow tables. It was nearly empty.
“No morning rush to work, at least,” Kori said, trying to sound cheerful.
When neither Bonnie nor Lou answered him, he shrugged his bony shoulders and turned to the selector panel to study the available choices for breakfast.
“Are you supposed to meet with Kaufman and the Council this morning?” Lou asked Bonnie.
Kori answered, “Yes, at nine-thirty,” while Bonnie shook her head no.
Surprised, Lou said to Kori, “You are? But you’re not from the Institute. Why would Kaufman want you to report to him?”
“Your Dr. Kaufman has been elected head of this colony,” Kori answered. “Didn’t you know?”
“No, I didn’t. I thought it would be Professor DeVreis—”
With a shake of his head, Kori said, “DeVreis died of a heart attack his first day here.”
“Ohh.” Somehow, Lou felt as if someone close to him had died. He hardly knew DeVreis, but it seemed so unfair for a man who had lived such a rich and useful life to be tossed into exile, to die here, in this place.
Kori turned back to the selector panel and tapped buttons for orange juice, eggs, muffins, sausage, and coffee. Almost immediately a part of the panel slid back to reveal a steaming tray bearing his order.
“Well,” he said, “at least the food looks good.”
Sure it looks good, Lou found himself thinking. You’ve got a chance of getting off this jail.
Turning to Bonnie, he asked, “Kaufman hasn’t sent word to you?”
She shook her head. “No, nobody’s said anything to me about meeting with the Council. I guess they’re going to ignore me unless I decide to stay permanently.”
Lou agreed. “Well, I’m supposed to see them at nine.”
He was a few minutes late. It took him longer than he had expected to find Dr. Kaufman’s office, which was in the second wheel.
It was a long and narrow room, just long enough to have a slight curve to the floor. Kaufman’s desk was at one end, a long conference table at the other. All the furniture was made of plastic and light metals; it all looked temporary and cheap.
Kaufman sat at the head of the table. He had lost weight, Lou saw. There were new lines in his still-proudly handsome face. His thick hair seemed a shade whiter than it had been at the Institute. Greg Belsen, Kurtz, Sutherland, and two strangers filled all but one of the remaining chairs. Lou took the last chair, at the end of the table.
After introducing the two new faces—representatives from labs in Europe—Dr. Kaufman said, “We’re all trying to accustom ourselves to our new environment. The reason for meeting with you this morning is to ask you to select some sort of project for your working hours.”
“Project?” Lou asked.
“Yes,” said Dr. Kaufman. “I don’t believe that we should sit around and do nothing. The government won’t let us have the major types of facilities that we need for our old work—”
“There’s no computer aboard?”
Greg almost laughed. “No computer, Lou. No big toys for any of us. No electron microscopes, no ultracentrifuges, no microsurgery equipment—nothing but early twentieth-century stuff: optical microscopes and Bunsen burners, the kinds of things you buy kids for Christmas.”
Lou felt his lips press into a grim tight line.
Dr. Sutherland explained, “The government doesn’t want us to do anything more on genetic engineering. Even here. They’re afraid that if we start making progress again, we’ll smuggle the information back to Earth. And that’s exactly what they don’t want.”
It all made horrible sense to Lou. “But…what are we supposed to do up here? Turn to rust?”
“Nothing of the sort,” Kaufman said, waving his hand in a negative gesture. “We may not have modern equipment but we can still do good science. We’ll simply have to be more ingenious, more inventive, and make do with the simple equipment that we’re allowed to have.”
Allowed to have, echoed in Lou’s mind. This was a jail, no two ways about it.
“For instance,” Ron Kurtz said, leaning forward on the fragile-looking table, “I’ve never had the time to really write up all the work I’ve done over the last three or four years. I’ve published a few little notes in the journals, but now I can sit back and write up everything carefully, the way it ought to be done.”
To be published where? Lou asked silently. In the chronicles of wasted time?
“It’s quite clear that we won’t be able to make any further progress in genetic engineering,” Kaufman said, taking charge of the discussion once again. “At least we won’t be able to follow our previous route, which required large-scale equipment. So we’re all trying to evolve ideas for useful research that can be accomplished with the laboratory equipment that we now have.
We’d like you to think about what you can do, and how you can do it.”
A computer engineer without a computer. Then Lou thought of Greg’s elaborate lab back at the Institute, millions of dollars worth of automated chemical analysis equipment. No wonder he’s ready to jump ship.
Aloud, he said, “Okay… I’ll try to think up something.”
He started to get up from the table.
“Oh yes,” Kaufman added. “You must have some very interesting tales to tell about your adventures over the past several weeks. Maybe you’d be good enough to tell the whole population, tonight, over our closed circuit Tri-V system.”
That caught Lou by surprise. “Well, I don’t know…”
“Of course you will,” Kaufman said. The discussion was ended.
Lou stood there awkwardly for a moment. Then the others started to get up. He turned and headed for the door. As he stepped out into the corridor, Greg said from just behind him:
“Don’t get up tight about being a Tri-V performer, buddy.”
Lou turned to him. “Easy for you to say.”
Greg put an arm around Lou’s shoulder and they started up the corridor together. “Don’t worry pal. All you’ll have to do is sit down with me and one or two other guys and we’ll talk. That’s all. You won’t even know the camera’s on you. It’s simple.”‘
“My big chance in show business.”
Greg smiled, but there was sadness in it. “Listen… we’re all going a little crazy for something to do, something to talk about. It hasn’t been easy, suddenly finding yourself cooped up in this squirrel cage…”
They were heading toward the dimly-lit section of the corridor, where the outside viewport was.
Lou asked, “And what’s your scientific research project for the next fifty years?”
“You don’t want to see a grown man cry, do you? Weren’t those guys pathetic in there? They’re talking about re-doing Calvin’s work on photosynthesis or writing their memoirs. Lord, they’re just going to fill in some time before they curl up their toes and die.”
“That would be very patriotic of them,” Lou said. “The government would be awfully pleased if we all just passed away. nice and neat, without a fuss. It’s exactly what they want down there.”
“Hmp.”
They were in the darkened part of the corridor now. Greg stopped in front of the viewport. There was Earth, swinging slowly, majestically, in rhythm to the satellite’s spin.
“That’s what makes it hard,” Greg said, staring. “Seeing her out there. Knowing she’s only a few hundred kilometers away—”
Lou grabbed his arm. “Come on, snap out of it. Let’s get some coffee. You going back in to talk with Kori? He’s due to see the Council at nine-thirty.”
Pulling himself away from the viewport, Greg said, “I know… but I’m not going back in there. Those guys are looking more like a morticians’ convention every day
. I think I’m going to go crazy… and soon, too.”
Lou tried to laugh at him. It sounded hollow.
It was an empty day. Lou spent it prowling through the satellite’s different levels, the wheels within the wheels. He found a fairly decent library, a tiny auditorium, some small telescopes and other astronomical gear scattered here and there. And there was an extensive hydroponic garden running all the way along one of the smaller, innermost rings. The big event of the day was watching a shuttle rocket link up to the satellite’s main airlock, at the zero-gravity hub, and unload fresh food and medical supplies.
He called Bonnie for dinner, and they went together to the cafeteria.
“Do you know where Kori is?” Bonnie asked as they put their trays down on a table.
Lou shook his head. “And I’m not going to look for him. I’d like to have you to myself for once.”
She smiled at him.
They ate with very little conversation. Finally, as he toyed with a gelatin dessert, Lou burst out:
“God, this is awful! Depressing! It’s just terrible—How in the name of sanity are we supposed to stand it! To spend the rest of our lives like this!”
She reached out and touched his hand. “Lou… people are staring at you.”
“Bonnie, get out of here. Tell them you want to get off on the next rocket. Don’t stay. Get out while you can.”
“It does look bad, Lou,” she said quietly, trying to tone him down. “But it’ll get better. I know it will. Right now, everybody’s still sort of in shock. Nobody’s used to this yet. It’ll get better—”
“No. It’s going to get worse. I can feel it. Everybody’s so hopeless! There’s no purpose to their lives, there’s nothing to live for!”
“They’ll adjust,” Bonnie said. “So will we.”
“We?”
Just then, Kori came striding into the cafeteria, long-legged, loose-jointed, and spotted them. He ambled over to their table, smiling broadly. “I’ve been looking every place for you.”
Looking up at him, Lou snapped, “How can you be so blazing cheerful?”