Chapter Seven
“The first space community would house 10,000 people; 4,000 would be employed building additional colonies, while 6,000 would be producing satellite solar power station.”
—“Space Colonies: The High Frontier,”
by Gerard O’Neill, The Futurist, February 1976.
*
Rick Venner’s reception at the docking port of Island One had differed considerably from that of the others, who’d been taken to the Lagrange Hilton. Rick and two other construction workers who had come in on the Tsiolkowsky were met and checked out by an arrogant clerk, who read off their names flourishing his clipboard like a scepter. Carrying their own bags, the new-hire workers were led to the monorail and taken through the tunnel to the terminal; but their destination was not the island’s sole hotel. They were led out the main entry into the street and, making their way on foot, proceeded to a fair-sized building a few hundred feet along the pavement.
One of the three, the youngest contract worker, looked around as he progressed. “Sure doesn’t look like the Tri-Di shows,” he said, a touch of dismay in his voice.
“Nothing ever looks like Tri-Di shows it,” the clerk said flatly. “In real life, did you ever see any mopsies stacked like Tri-Di starlets? What the hell did you expect, sour cream in your borscht? You came here to work, not gawk.”
Rick gave him the once-over from the corner of his eye. With that slight, carefully deliberate exaggeration of gentleness that spells “menace” he said to the clerk, “What’s the matter, chum-pal—don’t you like us poor people? Or is it that we’re new up here; or friendless?”
“That’s my business,” the clerk sniffed.
“Let me tell you something about the construction business,” said Rick, making an educated guess into a veiled threat: “We won’t long stay poor. Or new. Or friendless. That’s because we have good memories.”
The clerk looked up nervously at Rick. All three of the new workers looked as if they’d been around and kept in shape—and they all outweighed the clerk. His adam’s apple bobbing, the clerk looked away. “This way, gentlemen,” he said with respect.
He led them to a dormitory that had space for a hundred men. The quarters weren’t exactly reassuring; in fact, they were stark. The sole bedding consisted of two off-white sheets over a thin, hard mattress, and a small pillow covered with the same material—some durable synthetic almost as heavy as denim.
The clerk said, “This is the induction center. You’ll be here until you’re assigned to your jobs, and until you make arrangements for permanent quarters. Some of the men, singles, prefer to stay—I suppose for the companionship,” he sniffed. “The location is up to you. Pick your own bunks.”
The metal bunks were three high along the walls. None of the top ones and only a few on the second level were strewn with the magazines, clothing, or other articles that indicated occupancy.
Rick and a tough, rangy Texan he’d met glancingly on the way up, simultaneously swung their bags onto the sole unclaimed lower-level bunk. The Texan, with a level look at Rick, said, “I had it first.”
Rick shrugged. “I make it a dead heat. Tell you what: I’ll match you for it.” He brought a coin from a coverall pocket. “Or are you a short sport?”
The other grinned, then gave a curious glance at the coin. “What’s that thing?”
“A half-dollar. You know; currency, like your grandpaw used.” Rick showed it off. “A head on one side, and the other side is called “tails.” I flip it, you call heads or tails. If you’re right, you get the bunk.”
“Huh. I remember somethin’ about that. Well, I say you’ll flip heads up.”
Rick flicked the coin, let it fall to the floor. It came up tails. “Sorry,” he murmured. “Lady Luck’s a fickle bitch.” The other glowered but took his bag and slung it to the bunk just above.
“It’s just as well,” Rick said affably. “You wouldn’t want me above you anyway. I’m a bed-wetter.”
Beneath each bunk were three small drawers. Rick unpacked, crumpled his flimsy luggage up and stuck it in, too. He kicked off his shoes, climbed into the metal bed, put his hands behind his head, and stared up at the bottom of the bunk above. It was so near his nose he could barely focus his eyes on it. Rick had never been in a prison, but he suspected that most prisons had more spacious quarters than these.
“Home was never like this,” he muttered. He thought back about some swank hotels he’d known. “Neither was the Paris Ritz,” he added.
He relaxed, waiting for developments, until he had almost dozed off. He could hear the clerk showing others around, pointing out the showers, dining room, and assembly room, which doubled as a library and Tri-Di room. Rick didn’t bother; in his true profession, you got your bearings in moments.
He was aroused by a voice calling, “Venner? Rick Venner? Is there a Rick Venner here? Speak up, lad.”
Rick tried to sit erect, banging his head on the Texan’s bunk and swearing. He swung his legs to the floor, got into his shoes, came to his feet. “That’s me,” he called.
The man who came up to him, beaming, was possibly forty-five and obviously an old pro construction man. He shook hands with controlled energy. “You’re a sight for sore eyes, lad,” he said. “Been waiting for you. Waiting for half a year, in fact.”
Rick let his arm be pumped and said, “But I only signed up a month or so ago.”
The other stepped back a pace and eyed him enthusiastically. “Wizard, but I’ve needed a half-dozen more experienced lads for so long I can’t remember. Haven’t worked in space before at all, have you? Down in low-Earth orbit, or wherever?”
Rick shook his head. He tried to recall the details of the papers Pavel Meer had forged for him. “Mostly oil rigs, bridges; a couple of tunnels.”
The older man was clearly disappointed, but ready for that disappointment. He was a bluff, friendly, loud-voiced sort, banged-up of face, rough as unaged tequila. He had a flash of gold in his mouth in a day when cosmetic dentistry could hide the fact that you had any dentures at all. Two of the man’s front teeth were solid, gleaming gold. Rick had the damndest feeling that, at one time or another, the man had willingly hocked those gold teeth when he needed money between jobs.
“No deep-sea experience?” The question held forlorn hope.
“’Fraid not. Why’d you ask?”
“You’d be surprised how similar diving suit work is to working in a spacesuit. Some of our best lads are deep-sea men. Oh, well, you can’t ask for every—oh, the devil! I’m Davis. Freddy Davis, Rick; your supervisor. Should’ve said that first, eh?”
They had moved over to the benches that lined the long metallic table in the center of the sleeping room. Davis looked around and said, “A helluva place to pad out, this. As soon as possible you’ll want to team up with a buddy or two; get an apartment or a house. They aren’t much better, but at least you get privacy. At least they’re someplace you can take a mopsy—if you can find one.”
“I’ll keep it in mind,” Rick said. “Where’ll I be working?”
“Ah. Outside on the hull, at present. Lots of bugs out there, lad. Whoever designed this thing down Earthside may have been a great pastry cook, or tap dancer, but he was sure as hell no engineer, for my money.”
“I can hardly wait to get to it,” Rick said, hoping it was what the older man wanted to hear.
Davis, beaming at his new assistant, shot a glance at his wrist. “I’m between shifts now. You can get processed and suit-fitted and start tomorrow. Meanwhile, long as you don’t have to work a full shift in a bad fit, we can rustle you a borrowed suit so you can go outside the hull.” The gleam in Davis’s eyes was that of a teenager. “Want to pop outside for a look at the job? Lunch isn’t for a couple of hours.”
An excuse was on the tip of Rick’s tongue, but it was high time he learned what those pills really did. “Wizard,” he said, “soon as I get a drink of water.” And the pill that goes down with it.
; * * * *
An hour later, after the brief excursion outside multiple airlocks and the pill-induced nightmare, Rick Venner found himself half-dragged to a metal stool in the innermost airlock. He struggled to sit up, his face greenish, panting like a dog. Tears ran down his cheeks, and those weren’t the only signs of distress.
Freddy Davis unsealed a gauntlet and laid a friendly hand on Rick’s shoulder. “You’ll be all right, lad,” he soothed.
Rick managed to say, “Jeee-zus!”
“Let’s get you out of that suit and clean it—and you—up.”
Rick followed the other to the suit-up room, staggering. “Holy Jesus, Freddy; what happened?” It shamed him that he knew.
“Just a touch of space sickness. Somebody once said if you combine vertigo with paranoia, this is what you get. Not all that uncommon for a first-timer, lad. Go on, get into that shower. You know how spacers shower?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Like showering in a ship in the old days when fresh water was short. First wet yourself down. Turn off the water, lather up good, then rinse it off quick.”
Rick stared at him. “Water shortage? Up here?”
“Durn tootin’—we’re short on everything good up here,” said Davis grimly. “Oh yeah, we were supposed to have plenty of everything, soon as the closed ecosystem recycled it all. Wizard; only they haven’t got it working yet. We get oxygen from refining lunar ores, but to get water we have to combine it with hydrogen, and that has to come from Earthside. And large-scale recycling isn’t quite perfect. Sometimes it reminds you that you’re drinking recycled piss. You earn your pay up here, lad.”
Rick cleaned up. The effects of the pill weren’t quite as bad as Meer, the Penman, had warned. But he’d vomited and was drenched with sweat. His bowels, at least, hadn’t come unglued. So far, everything was going as planned, discounting a nagging guilt that Rick seldom knew.
He returned to the dressing room to find that Davis had found him a fresh set of coveralls. As he dressed, the other tried to reassure him. “This isn’t all that rare, lad. Hell of a lot of guys got space sick when we first started this project. These days, Earthside medics and at the Goddard catch most of those too prone to it. They get rotated back fast. But cases like yours usually get adjusted after two or three tries.”
“Two or three?” Rick’s anguish was plain. “I have to go through that several times? I mean—you’re out there without anything solid under you, and there’s Earth with nothing between you and it but about a million miles of falling.”
Davis’s smile was on a bias. “Actually only a quarter-million miles. Just rest up, and in a couple of days we’ll give it another try. You’ll be surprised how much easier it’ll be.”
“I can’t believe I’m a flop,” Rick said. “After looking forward to this for so long, and now look at me.”
Davis patted his shoulder roughly, in man-to-man affection. “Don’t believe that. You’ll make out. I know a good worker when I see one, and Lord knows I need some good electrical engineers. You’ll get used to free fall.”
“It didn’t bother me on the way up. But out there…” He shook his head. “A hundred dollars says I can’t hack it.”
“I’ll take that bet,” Davis told him, “just to show I believe in you. Come on. Let’s get back to your dorm so you can get some lunch, such as it is.”
Back at the induction center dorm, Freddy Davis pointed out the dining hall. “I won’t be eating there,” he said. “I’ve got my family here and we have our own place.”
Another coveralled man, already seated at the long community table, looked up sourly. “You forgot to mention that you’re a supervisor, so you don’t have to eat this swill.”
Freddy Davis, a veteran at handling construction workers, pretended to take the slur as a joke, though there was an unhappy element of apology beneath his words. As Rick took a place at the long metal table, Freddy said, “You know how it is, lads. It took me a good many years to work myself up to supervisor.”
“Yeah,” the disgruntled one said around his food. “And things aren’t so bad for you bosses. From what I hear, they live like fucking gods over there in the L5 Hilton.”
Freddy Davis ignored him and gave Rick a last clap on the shoulder. “I’ll see you in a couple of days, Rick,” he said. “Get yourself oriented and try to line up some buddies so you can get into a private pad.”
“Wizard,” Rick told him, making his voice sound embarrassed. “Sorry I made such a spectacle of myself.”
“Forget it.” The other turned and left.
About twenty were eating. The places were set with aluminum plates, knives, and forks. There were large metal bowls and plates in the center of the table. Rick reached out for one of the bowls.
Across from him, a fellow diner said sourly, “Eat hearty, mate. Today’s treat day. We’ve got shit-on-a-shingle for the main course. At least it’s better than everlasting stringy rabbit and scrawny chicken.”
Rick looked at him.
“Shit-on-a-shingle,” the other said. “I can see you’ve never been in the military. Dried beef, cut tissue-paper thin, and cooked up into a gravy with dehydrated milk and flour. You get it on toast. I sure as hell never thought I’d live to see the day I’d think it was a treat.”
One of the other said, his voice just as lemonish, “Stop your whining, Jeff. When you signed up, did you figure there’d be a branch of Antonio’s New Orleans restaurant up here? Shucks, today we’ve got fresh carrots from the hydroponic farm.”
Rick filled his plate from the unappetizing-looking bowls of food and set to. He had never eaten dehydrated food before in his life, save a small amount of it on the spaceship coming up. Except for the carrots, which proved to be on the tasteless side, this was all dehydrated, save for the bread. He assumed that there was no manner of dehydrating flour beyond its already dry state. He looked down at the food in dismay and realized, upon looking up, that the other newcomers, including the Texan whose bunk he had done him out of, were doing the same. A universal laugh came up from the older hands seated. Seemingly, it was a standing joke, watching space tyros eating their first meal in Island One.
Projecting his usual good humor, Rick said, “It’s obviously pretty rugged here in Island One, but I imagine when the larger islands get built, things will soften up.”
“What larger islands?” one of the old-timers scoffed. Rick looked down the table at him. “Islands Two and Three, and, later on, even Four. The big ones. Holding millions of space colonists eventually.”
Almost all of them laughed at that.
The one named Jeff, a scrawny little man with complaint built into his wizened face, said, “Island Two, ha! We’ll never finish Island One. They can keep pouring money down the drain until the Sahara floods over, but they’ll never finish this one, let alone ever get around to starting Island Two.”
The Texan, who was seated across from Rick, was scowling. He said, complete with a drawl that could only have come from the vicinity of San Antonio, “What-all’s wrong with the way this island’s going? I can see there’s a lot of work to be done, but…”
He’d set several of them to chuckling anew.
Jeff, who seemed to be the most talkative, shook a fork at the larger man and said, “Everything’s wrong with it. And most of it shoulda been seen before it was ever started. The eggheads who dreamed this whole Lagrange Five Project up were a bunch of college professors and scientists. Damn few, if any of them, had any practical experience. When they got out of their own fields, they supplied the missing parts off the tops of their heads. Everything’s gone wrong. That moon base where they’re supposed to lob up raw material for us to smelter up here and use to build everything is a laugh. The Solar Satellite Power Stations aren’t reliable. At least, not yet. The microwaving of power down to Earth has so many bugs in it they oughta spray it with insecticides. The ecology system here in the island hasn’t gotten off the ground and practically everything has to be shipp
ed up from Earth; hydrogen, food, nitrogen. The ore smelter here in space don’t work. The radiators can’t get rid of all the heat they generate. In short, everything’s fucked up.”
The Texan was looking unhappier by the minute. He said, “What’s wrong with the moon base? I’m supposed to go over that way.”
One of the other complainers took over. “We call it Siberia,” he said. “From the first, it was a balls-up. The plans set by Doc Ryan and the others called for 200 men to run the moon base. Two hundred men, shit. First they were supposed to be landed there and set up a community. Then they were to build that eleven-kilometer mass-driver monorail, all lined up to a fraction of a fraction so the packages of lunar ore they lobbed up would hit the Catcher, 35,000 miles off. The Catcher is only 100 meters across, about three hundred feet. How’d you like to hit a target that small from 35,000 miles away? That gives you an allowable error of .00017 percent.”
“What went wrong?” Rick asked. He was irritated by all this. Damn it, if he was going to be out here for five years, he didn’t want the project to be a fouled-up mess.
“Everything,” the other said. “Take that figure of 200 men. Break it down. Say you have a steward department of a dozen people. They cook the food, they serve it, they make the beds, they do the laundry, they sweep the floors, and all the rest of it, like on a ship. Then you have the medical department—the doctors, the nurses, the clinic attendants, the X-ray and other technicians. You think you could get by with a smaller medical department on a danger spot like the moon? Don’t kid yourself. They have to be ready for everything. On an oil rig, off the coast, if a man gets hurt or sick and they don’t have the facilities to take care of him on the rig, they send him by helicopter to shore and to the nearest hospital. But not at the moon base. He’d be dead before they got him to Island One or Earthside. They’ve got to take care of every medical eventuality on the spot. Then there’s the office workers, including the communications people, also working three shifts every 24 Earth hours. There’s a lot of paperwork, computer work, supervising, and all involved. That’s another 25 people, at least. Then there’s the maintenance people, maintaining everything from the computers and the communications equipment to the vehicles and all the equipment devoted to air, water, solar power, the nuclear plant, and even the electric typewriters and kitchen stoves. Don’t think there isn’t a lot of machinery involved in that damned moon base. And don’t think that just anybody can repair it. A lot of it’s awfully sophisticated. There goes another 25 men.”
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