by Ben Bova
Before he drifted to sleep the spider urged him, “Go apply for the job. What do you have to lose?”
It was tough, every step of the way. The woman behind the desk where Harry applied for a position with the space construction outfit clearly didn’t like him. She frowned at him and she scowled at her computer screen when his dossier came up. But she passed him on to a man who sat in a private cubicle and had pictures of his wife and kids pinned to the partitions.
“We are an equal opportunity employer,” he said, with a brittle smile on his face.
Then he waited for Harry to say something. But Harry didn’t know what he should say, so he remained silent.
The man’s smile faded. “You’ll be living for months at a time in zero gravity, you know,” he said. “It affects your bones, your heart. You might not be fit to work again when you return to Earth.”
Harry just shrugged, thinking that these whites were trying to scare him.
They put him through a whole day of physical examinations. Then two days of tests. Not like tests in school; they were interested in his physical stamina and his knowledge of welding and construction techniques.
They hired Harry, after warning him that he had to endure two months of training at half the pay he would start making if he finished the training okay. Half pay was still a little more than Harry was making on the Atlanta Renewal Project. He signed on the dotted line.
So Harry flew to Hunstville, Alabama, in a company tiltrotor plane. They gave him a private room, all to himself, in a seedy-looking six-story apartment building on the edge of what had once been a big base for the space agency, before the government sold it off to private interests.
His training was intense. Like being in the army, almost, although all Harry knew about being in the army was what he’d heard from other construction workers. The deal was, they told you something only once. You either got it or you flunked out. No second chances.
“Up there in orbit,” the instructors would hammer home, time and again, “there won’t be a second chance. You screw up, you’re dead. And probably a lot of other people get killed, too.”
Harry began to understand why there was no beer up there. Nor was there any at the training center. He missed it, missed the comfort of a night out with the gang, missed the laughs and the eventual oblivion where nobody could bother him and everything was dark and quiet and peaceful and even the spider kept silent.
The first time they put him in the water tank Harry nearly freaked. It was deep, like maybe as deep as his apartment building was high. He was zipped into a white space suit, like a mummy with a bubble helmet on top, and there were three or four guys swimming around him in trunks and scuba gear. But to a man who grew up in the desert, this much water was scary.
“We use the buoyancy tank to simulate the microgravity you’ll experience in orbit,” the instructor told the class. “You will practice construction techniques in the tank.”
As he sank into the water for the first time, almost petrified with fear, the spider told Harry, “This is an ordeal you must pass. Be brave. Show no fear.”
For days on end Harry suited up and sank into the deep, clear water to work on make-believe pieces of the structure he’d be building up in space. Each day started with fear, but he battled against it and tried to do the work they wanted him to do. The fear never went away, but Harry completed every task they gave him.
When his two months of training ended, the man in charge of the operation called Harry into his office. He was an Asian of some sort: Chinese, Japanese, maybe Korean.
“To tell you the truth, Harry,” he said, “I didn’t think you’d make it. You have a reputation for being a carouser, you know.”
Harry said nothing. The pictures on the man’s wall, behind his desk, were all of rockets taking off on pillars of flame and smoke.
The man broke into a reluctant smile. “But you passed every test we threw at you.” He got to his feet and stretched his hand out over his desk. “Congratulations, Harry. You’re one of us now.”
Harry took his proffered hand. He left the office feeling pretty good about himself. He thought about going off the base and finding a nice friendly bar someplace. But as he dug his hand into his pants pocket and felt the obsidian spider there, he decided against it. That night, as he was drowsing off to sleep, the spider told him, “Now you face the biggest test of all.”
Launching off the Earth was like nothing Harry had ever even dreamed of. The Clippership rocket was a squat cone; its shape reminded Harry of a big teepee made of gleaming metal. Inside, the circular passenger compartment was decked out like an airliner’s, with six short rows of padded reclinable chairs, each of them occupied by a worker riding up to orbit. There was even a pair of flight attendants, one man and one woman.
As he clicked the safety harness over his shoulders and lap, Harry expected they would be blasted off the ground like a bullet fired from a thirty-aught. It wasn’t that bad, though in some ways it was worse. The rockets lit off with a roar that rattled Harry deep inside his bones. He felt pressed down into his seat while the land outside the little round window three seats away tilted and then seemed to fly away.
The roaring and rattling wouldn’t stop. For the flash of a moment Harry wondered if this was the demon he was supposed to slay, a dragon made of metal and plastic with the fiery breath of its rockets pushing it off the Earth.
And then it all ended. The noise and shaking suddenly cut off and Harry felt his stomach drop away. For an instant Harry felt himself falling, dropping off into nothingness. Then he took a breath and saw that his arms had floated up from the seat’s armrests. Zero-gee. The instructors always called it microgravity, but to Harry it was zero-gee. And it felt good.
At the school they had tried to scare him about zero-gee with stories of how you get sick and heave and get so dizzy you can’t move your head without feeling like it’s going to burst. Harry didn’t feel any of that. He felt as if he were floating in the water tank again, but this was better, much better. There wasn’t any water. He couldn’t help grinning. This is great, he said to himself.
But not everybody felt so good. Looking around, Harry saw plenty of gray faces, even green. Somebody behind him was gagging. Then somebody upchucked. The smell made Harry queasy. Another passenger retched, up front. Then another. It was like a contagious bug, the sound and stench was getting to everyone in the passenger compartment. Harry took the retch bag from the seat pocket in front of him and held it over his mouth and nose. Its cold sterile smell was better than the reek of vomit that was filling the compartment. There was nothing Harry could do about the noise except to tell himself that these were whites who were so weak. He wasn’t going to sink to their level.
“You’ll get used to it,” the male flight attendant said, grinning at them from up at the front of the compartment. “It might take a day or so, but you’ll get accustomed to zero-gee.”
Harry was already accustomed to it. The smell, though, was something else. The flight attendants turned up the air blowers and handed out fresh retch bags, floating through the aisles as if they were swimming in air. Harry noticed they had filters in their nostrils; that’s how they handle the stink, he thought.
He couldn’t see much of anything as the ship approached the construction site, although he felt the slight thump when they docked. The flight attendants had told everybody to stay in their seats and keep buckled in until they gave the word that it was okay to get up. Harry waited quietly and watched his arms floating a good five centimeters off the armrests of his chair. It took a conscious effort to force them down onto the rests.
When they finally told everybody to get up, Harry clicked the release on his harness and pushed to his feet. And sailed right up into the overhead, banging his head with a thump. Everybody laughed. Harry did, too, to hide his embarrassment.
He didn’t really see the construction site for three whole days. They shuffled the newcomers through a windowless access tunnel, th
en down a long sloping corridor and into what looked like a processing center, where clerks checked in each new arrival and assigned them to living quarters. Harry saw that there were no chairs anywhere in sight. Tables and desks were chest-high, and everybody stood up, with their feet in little loops that were fastened to the floor. That’s how they keep from banging their heads on the ceiling, Harry figured.
Their living quarters were about the size of anemic telephone booths, little more than a closet with a mesh sleeping bag tacked to one wall.
“We sleep standing up?” Harry asked the guy who was showing them the facilities.
The guy smirked at him. “Standing up, on your head, sideways, or inside-out. Makes no difference in zero-gee.”
Harry nodded. I should have known that, he said to himself. They told us about it back at the training base.
Three days of orientation, learning how to move and walk and eat and even crap in zero-gee. Harry thought that maybe the bosses were also using the three days to see who got accustomed to zero-gee well enough to be allowed to work, and who they’d have to send home.
Harry loved zero-gee. He got a kick out of propelling himself down a corridor like a human torpedo, just flicking his fingertips against the walls every few meters as he sailed along. He never got dizzy, never got disoriented. The food tasted pretty bland, but he hadn’t come up here for the food. He laughed the first time he sat on the toilet and realized he had to buckle up the seat belt or he’d take off like a slow, lumbering rocket.
He slept okay, except he kept waking up every hour or so. The second day, during the routine medical exam, the doc asked him if he found it uncomfortable to sleep with a headband. Before Harry could answer, though, the doctor said, “Oh, that’s right. You’re probably used to wearing a headband, aren’t you?”
Harry grunted. When he got back to his cubicle he checked out the orientation video on the computer built into the compartment’s wall. The headband was to keep your head from nodding back and forth in your sleep. In microgravity, the video explained, blood pumping through the arteries in your neck made your head bob up and down while you slept, unless you attached the headband to the wall. Harry slept through the night from then on.
Their crew supervisor was a pugnacious little Irishman with thinning red hair and fire in his eyes. After their three days’ orientation, he called the dozen newcomers to a big metal-walled enclosure with a high ceiling ribbed with steel girders. The place looked like an empty airplane hangar to Harry.
“You know many people have killed themselves on this project so far?” he snarled at the assembled newbies.
“Eighteen,” he answered his own question. “Eighteen assholes who didn’t follow procedures. Dead. One of them took four other guys with him.”
Nobody said a word. They just stood in front of the super with their feet secured by floor loops, weaving slightly like long grasses in a gentle breeze.
“You know how many of my crew have killed themselves?” he demanded. “None. Zip. Zero. And you know why? I’ll tell you. Because I’ll rip the lungs out of any jerkoff asshole who goes one millionth of a millimeter off the authorized procedures.”
Harry thought the guy was pretty small for such tough talk, but what the hell, he’s just trying to scare us.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do anything,” the super went on, his face getting splotchy red. “The right way is what I tell you. Anything else is wrong. Anything! Got that?”
A couple of people replied with “Yes, sir,” and “Got it.” Most just mumbled. Harry said nothing.
“You,” the super snapped, pointing at Harry. “Twelvetoes. You got that?”
“I got it,” Harry muttered.
“I didn’t hear you.”
Harry tapped his temple lightly. “It’s all right here, chief.”
The supervisor glared at him. Harry stood his ground, quiet and impassive. But inwardly he was asking the spider, “Is this the monster I’m gonna slay?”
The spider did not answer.
“All right,” the super said at last. “Time for you rookies to see what you’re in for.”
He led the twelve of them, bobbing like corks in water, out of the hangar and down a long, narrow, tubular corridor. To Harry it seemed more like a tunnel, except that the floor and curving walls were made of what looked like smooth, polished aluminum. Maybe not. He put out a hand and brushed his fingertips against the surface. Feels more like plastic than metal, Harry thought.
“Okay, stop here,” said the super.
Stopping was easier said than done, in zero-gee. People bumped into one another and jostled around a bit while the super hovered at the head of the group, hands on hips, and glowered at them. Harry, back near the end of the queue, managed to brush against one of the better-looking women, a Hispanic with big dark eyes and a well-rounded figure.
“Sorry,” he muttered to her.
“Da nada,” she replied, with a smile that might have been shy. Harry read the name tag pinned above her left breast pocket: Marta Santos.
“All right now,” the super called to them, tugging a palmcomp from the hip pocket of his coveralls. “Take a look.”
He pecked at the handheld, and suddenly the opaque tube became as transparent as glass. Everybody gasped.
They were hanging in the middle of a gigantic spiderwork of curving metal girders, like being inside a dirigible’s frame, except that the girders went on and on for miles. And beyond it Harry saw the immense curving bulk of Earth, deep blue gleaming ocean, brighter than the purest turquoise, and streams of clouds so white it hurt his eyes to look at them. He blinked, then looked again. He saw long rows of waves flowing across the ocean, and the cloud-etched edge of land, with gray wrinkles of mountains off in the distance. Beyond the flank of the curving world and its thin glowing skin of air was the utterly black emptiness of space.
We’re in space! Harry realized. He had known it, in his head, but now he felt it in his guts, where reality lived. I’m in space, he said to himself, lost in the wonder of it. I’m no longer on Earth.
Abruptly the tunnel walls went opaque again. The view shut off. An audible sigh of disappointment gusted through the crew.
“That’s enough for now,” the super said, with a grin that was somewhere between smug and nasty. “Tomorrow you clowns go out there and start earning your pay.”
Harry licked his lips in anticipation.
The suits were a pain. The one thing they couldn’t prepare you for on Earth was working inside the goddamned space suits. Not even the water tank could simulate the zero pressure of vacuum. The suit’s torso, arms, and leggings were hard-shell cermet, but the joints and the gloves had to be flexible, which meant they were made of fabric, which meant they ballooned and got stiff, tough to flex and move when you went outside. The gloves were especially stubborn. They had tiny little servomotors on the back that were supposed to amplify your natural muscle power and help you move the fingers. Sometimes that helped, but when it came to handling tools it was mostly a waste of time.
Harry got used to the clunky gloves, and the new-car smell of his suit. He never quite got used to hanging in the middle of nothing, surrounded by the growing framework of the miles-long habitat with the huge and glowing Earth spread out before his eyes. Sometimes he thought it was below him, sometimes it seemed as if it was hanging overhead. Either way, Harry could gawk at it like a hungry kid looking through a restaurant window, watching it, fascinated, as it slid past, ever-changing, a whole world passing in panoramic review before his staring eyes.
“Stop your goofin’, Twelvetoes, and get back to work!” The super’s voice grated in Harry’s helmet earphones.
Harry grinned sheepishly and nodded inside his helmet. It was awfully easy to get lost in wonder, watching the world turn.
They worked a six-day week. There was no alcohol in the habitat, not even on Sundays. There was a cafeteria, and the crews socialized there. Everybody complained about the soggy sandwiches
and bland fruit juices that the food and drink machines dispensed. You didn’t have to put money into them; their internal computers docked your pay automatically.
Harry was scanning the menu of available dishes, wishing they’d bring up somebody who knew how to cook with spices, when a woman suggested, “Try the chicken soup. It’s not bad.”
She introduced herself: Liza Goldman, from the engineering office. She was slightly taller than Harry, on the skinny side, he thought. But she looked pretty when she smiled. Light brown hair piled up on top of her head. She and Harry carried their trays to one of the chest-high tables. Harry took a swig from the squeeze bulb of soup. It was lukewarm.
Goldman chattered away as if they were old friends. At first Harry wondered why she had picked him to share a meal with, but pretty soon he was enjoying her company enough to try to make conversation. It wasn’t easy. Small talk was not one of his skills.
“You’d think they’d be able to keep the hot foods hot,” Goldman was saying, “and the cold foods cold. Instead, once they’re in the dispensers they all go blah. Entropy, I guess.”
Harry wrinkled his brow and heard himself ask, “You know what I wonder about?”
“No. What?”
“How come they got food dispensers and automated systems for life support and computers all over the place, but they still need us construction jocks?”
Goldman’s brows rose. “To build the habitat. What else?”
“I mean, why don’t they have automated machines to do the construction work? Why do we hafta go outside and do it? They could have machines doin’ it, couldn’t they?”
She smiled at him. “I suppose.”
“Like, they have rovers exploring Mars, don’t they? All automated. The scientists run them from their station in orbit around Mars, don’t they?”
“Teleoperated, yes.”
“Then why do they need guys like me up here?”