The Tranquillity Alternative

by Allen Steele

  We’ll go to Mars, if only because the funds have already been appropriated and because no one wants to back out on the Russians. Yet, like Archie Bunker and his family, stranded together on a forgotten lunar outpost where Edith serves up endless slices of green algae pie and Meathead always forgets to shut the airlock, America is clearly lost in space….

  EIGHT

  2/16/95 • 1402 GMT

  CLIMBING THE LADDER THROUGH the Wheel’s western spoke from the hub, Ryer felt the tug of gravity gradually increase with each rung she passed.

  She had been virtually weightless when she left the hub, and at first the spoke seemed to be a horizontal tunnel, its ladder a nigh-useless handrail running along its ceiling. A third of the way down the spoke, she found a sign painted in large red letters on the walls: USE LADDER NOW. By then the tunnel had become a vertical shaft, the ladder a necessity. For the first time in a couple of hours, Cris could feel the objects in her pockets, and her duffel bag hung like a dead weight from its shoulder strap. Her hair settled back down around her neck, her breasts no longer seemed to bob an inch above her chest, and her arm and leg muscles had to exert themselves once again.

  It was almost a shame; she had forgotten how much fun zero-g could be. Experiencing a moment of vertiginous nausea as her guts resettled, she paused on the ladder to briefly close her eyes and reorient herself to the up-and-down perspective. Breathe deeply, she told herself. Take it easy …

  A foot clanged on the rung next to her left hand, barely missing her head: “Oops! Sorry.”

  Glancing up, she saw Parnell holding onto the ladder just above her, his duffel bag suspended a few inches over her shoulder. He gazed down at her with concern. “You okay?” he asked.

  “I’m okay. Just resting a sec.” She noticed that his face was ashen. “How are you doing?”

  Parnell nodded. “Fine … fine.” He looked around the shaft, pretending not to be unsettled by the gravity gradient. “Last time I was here, this thing was lined with rope nets. Made the climb a little easier.” He took a deep breath. “And the elevator still worked.”

  “The elevator hasn’t been used in years,” Cris said. “The cables wore out and—”

  “Nobody wanted to spend money to replace ’em.” Parnell shook his head. “Made it easier for the Geritol bunch. You sure you’re okay?”

  “Sure,” she replied, and recommenced the long climb down to the torus.

  Two young NASA officers had met the lunar team when Harpers Ferry docked at the south turret. Once everyone had reclaimed their bags, one lieutenant led Rhodes, Bromleigh, and Dooley down the eastern spoke to their quarters on one side of the wheel, while the other officer escorted Parnell, Lewitt, and Ryer to operations center on the opposite end of the station. It had been almost four years since Cris’s last visit to Space Station One, and it was a relief to cycle through the main airlock; at least she was off the Constellation and no longer had to deal with Kingsolver and Trombly. There were probably homophobes among the station crew, but if so, they wisely kept their prejudices to themselves. The unwritten code among Wheel personnel was that if you disliked someone because of race, politics, religion, or what they did in the privacy of their bunks during off-hours, you either kept your opinions to yourself or transferred to a ground job. Put up, shut up, or get-off: that was the rule.

  Not that there was a shortage of privacy inside Space Station One anymore. Signs of the cutbacks which had trimmed the crew by two-thirds were obvious the moment Cris floated from the docking node into the suit-up compartment. The walls of the spherical chamber had once been crammed with spacesuits and racks of helmets: one for each crew member, in the unlikely event of an emergency which would force a mass evacuation of the station. Now only thirty-odd suits remained; the rest had been taken back to the Cape and warehoused as surplus.

  Lewitt and the j.g. were waiting for Ryer and Parnell at the bottom of the ladder. “Right this way, please,” Lieutenant Frierson said, holding open a hatch that led onto Deck One. “The commander’s waiting for you in Main-Ops.”

  The Wheel had never been made for comfort or aesthetic appeal. Its bare metal walls were studded with rivets and painted a utilitarian shade of gray; small blue plastic door signs affixed to hatches and the occasional red fire extinguisher or intercom were the only colors. The torus had about as much charm and homeyness as an old Polaris sub, yet it occurred to Cris that it had always been full of life. The last time she’d been here, one couldn’t walk ten feet down an upward-curving corridor without having to stand aside and allow another crew member to squeeze by. One heard voices constantly: conversations through half-open hatches and air-ducts, general announcements from ceiling speakers, people talking to each other in the corridors. If you remained standing in one place for a short amount of time, you would probably see half of the crew walk past, heading for duty-shifts or taking care of roster details or just getting a little exercise by jogging the decks. What life aboard the Wheel had lacked in style, it made up for in round-the-clock human activity.

  Now, there was not even that. Most of the hatches they passed were shut, some sealed and locked, and they didn’t need to stand aside for anyone as they marched toward Main-Ops. No voices. No intercom messages. No light jazz or country music coming from the officers’ wardroom. Just the tread of their shoes on the threadbare carpet of the corridor, the hollow sound of air circulating through wall vents, the faint gurgle of water running through ceiling pipes from one ballast tank to the next.

  “I think everyone’s gone AWOL,” Parnell said quietly.

  Cris nodded. “That or the biggest furlough you’ve ever seen.”

  “Hey, look!” Lewitt said, pointing somewhere just ahead. “I saw a tumbleweed!”

  “Maybe they all got abducted by UFO’s …”

  “Your congressman, more likely.”

  Dismal laughter, humorless and flat. Space Station One was a cold ghost town, spent and used up. If there was a museum big enough to hold a 250-foot bicycle tire, then the Wheel belonged there.

  They were walking through an historical relic, and even history didn’t seem to give a damn anymore.

  Main-Ops was the only place where there seemed to be any life remaining aboard the Wheel, if only because it was the station’s nerve center and, as such, was manned on a twenty-four-hour basis.

  The operations center was the largest single compartment within Space Station One. While the rest of the torus was divided into three concentric decks, Main-Ops was a double-decker comprising half of one of the station’s twenty torus sections. They stood on a catwalk overlooking the central floor, which was lined with carrels much like Launch Control at the Cape. An electronic Mercator projection of the globe, traced with parabolic curves depicting the Wheel’s footprint as it orbited Earth, took up one entire wall, and above the map was a set of dial clocks displaying the various time zones.

  Main-Ops was dimly lit. Most of the illumination came from computer screens that cast a pale blue glow across the faces of the duty officers who were seated at the carrels conversing quietly with one another via headset mikes. A laser printer chattered as it churned out the endless scroll of the station’s logbook; the air held a vague odor of coffee from the enamel mugs nearly everyone had on their desks.

  A hatch opened on a balcony at the far end of the catwalk; a young man in jeans and a flannel shirt stepped through and trotted down the spiral staircase to the main deck, carelessly allowing the hatch to remain ajar. Through the hatchway could be seen a smaller, single-deck compartment, its walls lined with television monitors.

  The Earth Observation Center. There was a time, Ryer recalled, when she would have had to show Top Secret security clearance to an armed guard posted just outside the hatch before she was allowed to enter the EOC, and leaving its hatch open would have been unthinkable. That was back in the days when Space Station One’s role had been almost exclusively military and the screens would be displaying any number of scenes relayed to the Wheel by ISP
Y, the space telescope positioned in polar orbit 1,075 miles above Earth: Soviet submarines surfacing off the coast of Cuba, troop movements in the Angolan desert, suspicious-looking freighters gliding between China and North Vietnam, U.S. Navy carrier convoys heading toward the Philippines, NATO exercises in the North Atlantic.

  In its time, the Wheel had helped keep the Cold War nice and chilly. Indeed, a former Space Force officer named John Walker had been sent to prison for life for selling ISPY’s orbital parameters to the Russians; most of his information had been stolen during duty tours aboard the Wheel. That time was over. Long before the Soviet Union had crumbled, unmanned spy satellites in low orbit had rendered ISPY, and by extension Space Station One itself, obsolete. While ISPY could only pick out the vague shape of a Soviet boomer as it entered Havana Harbor, the cameras aboard a KH-11 had superior resolution, making it possible for a CIA analyst in McLean, Virginia, to tell if it was an Oscar, Delta, or Typhoon-class sub … and the Keyholes’ orbits could be repositioned far more easily than ISPY, making them flexible in ways never possible for either the Wheel or the Mole.

  Now the Wheel served other purposes. ISPY monitored environmental degradation in South America and Africa, charting the recession of Brazilian rain forests and the growth of deserts in the Sudan, while the station itself kept track of the low-orbit Global Positioning Satellites, occasionally dispatching repair teams to overhaul them. Every now and then, DEA or Coast Guard intelligence experts would come aboard and try to ferret out the location of secret coca plantations in Colombia and Mexico, but that was the closest affiliation the Wheel still had with national security. In terms of day-to-day military application, the Wheel was now as useless as the filled-in Minuteman ICBM silos scattered across the Midwest.

  And it showed. Leaning against the catwalk rail, Ryer couldn’t help but notice how antiquated Main-Ops had become. The workstation computers were clunky old Digitals whose CRT’s flickered with snow, their keyboards first-generation AT-clones that audibly clacked with each keystroke. Vintage 1985 hardware, she guessed, and her observation was confirmed when she spotted an operator carefully sliding a 5.25-inch floppy into a disk drive. Some of the other equipment made the computers look brand-new in comparison; the master console of the attitude-control bay beneath the stairwell resembled a prop from some fifties science fiction movie, and much of the equipment in Main-Ops, with its dials and meters, looked as if it had been installed when Cris was in kindergarten. Even the round air-conditioning vent in the ceiling vaguely reminded her of a hubcap from a 1963 Oldsmobile.

  A junkyard owner would love this place.

  “Gene! How the hell are you?”

  Cris looked around as several pairs of soft-soled shoes trod up the spiral staircase. A tall, skinny man with a horsy-looking face and a gray mustache appeared on the catwalk. He was followed by three other men who seemed to be an entourage.

  Gene Parnell turned away from a wall plaque he had been studying. “Hello, Joe,” he said as he formally extended his right hand. “Nice to see you again.”

  “Aw, don’t gimme that crap!” The man ignored Parnell’s hand as he rushed down the catwalk and gave him a bear-hug instead.

  Parnell gasped slightly, the surprise on his face evident, before he wrapped his arms around the tall man’s narrow shoulders and returned the hug. “Nice to see you, too, Commodore.”

  “Commodore … Jesus, you’re such an asshole.” Joe Laughlin broke the hug and stood back, his hands lingering on Parnell’s shoulders. “Eleven years since I last saw you … what do you want to do, salute me or something?”

  Ryer traded looks with Lewitt; he grinned and gave a small shrug. As junior officers, they had never known Laughlin as anything except Old Joe, the NASA commander of Space Station One; although formally he wore the U.S. Navy commodore’s stripe-and-star insignia on his shoulders, he seldom demanded that anyone salute him.

  Joe Laughlin didn’t try to hide the fact that he was the last of the original Project Luna astronauts who was still on active duty. He had retired from the Space Force when it was phased out in 1972, although he retained his rank by serving in the naval reserve. During the next twelve years he worked as a civilian consultant for Lockheed and, as a sideline, wrote and published a few science fiction stories under the pseudonym of Hal Robinson. For a time, that had been all right with him, but when he received the Nebula Award for best SF short story of 1984 two weeks after he lost his wife to cancer, something snapped deep inside that he still wouldn’t discuss.

  He resigned from Lockheed, stopped writing, rejoined NASA, and retrained for astronaut duty; anyone who thought he was over the hill quickly reconsidered after they watched him master a flight simulator at Von Braun. Five years ago, NASA had given him command of Space Station One—rumor had it that he finally resolved the age question by trouncing former NASA administrator James Fletcher and Senator Albert Gore on the golf course—and he had been here ever since. Save for an occasional vacation groundside to visit his grown-up son in Alaska, he seldom left the Wheel, contenting himself with the role of gruff Dutch uncle to a crew who, by and large, were young enough to be his kids. A framed photo of his wife hung above the desk in his quarters; his acrylic Nebula cube, scratched and cracked, was used as a paperweight.

  “Jesus, that beard looks terrible.” Old Joe scowled at his former Luna Two crewmate as he stood back to inspect him. “You could do something about the gut, too. What’s Judy doing, feeding you barbecue all the time?”

  “Barbecue, pork rinds, and a six-pack of beer every day. Breakfast of champions.”

  “For the love of …” Laughlin’s voice trailed off in disgust. He caught sight of Ryer and edged around Parnell to graciously extend his hand to her. “Hey, I’m sorry, Cristine. I almost missed seeing you back there. Welcome back, Captain.”

  “Thanks, Commodore … Joe.” Laughlin’s hand grasped her palm for a moment longer than necessary, his humorous eyes searching hers for some reaction; she gave him a polite smile before gently pulling her hand free. Old Joe was notorious for coming on to female astronauts; although he had never done anything that could be misinterpreted as sexual harassment, it was clear that he was not a believer in political correctness either.

  Parnell coughed politely and nodded toward the three men standing behind Laughlin. “I take it these are our people,” he said.

  “Hmm?” Old Joe managed to tear his attention away from Cris. “Oh, yeah … sorry for my lack of manners. Permit me to introduce you to—”

  “Leamore,” the first man said, stepping past Laughlin to extend his hand. “James Patrick Leamore, Commander Parnell. Executive vice-president of lunar operations, Koenig Selenen. Delighted to meet you.”

  As Parnell grasped his hand, Leamore gestured to one of his companions, then the other. “And this is Uwe Aachener and Markus Talsbach. They’re astronaut-candidates, currently completing their training period.”

  Another round of handshakes as Conestoga’s flight team introduced themselves to the mission’s remaining passengers. With the exception of Paul Dooley, it was the first time the NASA astronauts had met the contingent from Koenig Selenen GmbH. The German company had insisted upon training its crew members independently, as an acid test of how well European methods of selecting and educating its astronauts stacked up against NASA’s. The agency had balked at this, of course, until Koenig Selenen made it clear that although its astronauts would have already passed muster in basic space-survival techniques, they were not expecting to pilot Conestoga and would act instead as passive observers. NASA finally caved in. After all, once this mission was completed, Koenig Selenen would be the sole owners of Tranquillity Base; how well or how poorly they prepared their space crews was up to them.

  The agency in turn had insisted on training Dooley at the Von Braun Space Center; since the hacker would be expected to help reactivate Tranquillity Base and assist with the disposal of the Teal Falcon missiles, he needed to know a little more about the lunar base than t
he German astronauts.

  Leamore was much what Ryer had expected from reading his dossier during earlier briefings. Although in his mid-forties, he looked considerably younger, his build slender and athletic, his brown hair only slightly speckled with gray. A former RAF fighter pilot who had moved to Berlin after earning a post-graduate degree in international business from Oxford, he had worked his way up through the European aerospace community until he joined Koenig in the early eighties, just as it was beginning to seriously invest in commercial space enterprise. When the company formed its Selenen division, Leamore was the person they’d chosen to head up the lunar operations program; in fact, he had been the company’s chief negotiator when it opened discussions with the Dole administration over acquiring Tranquillity Base from NASA.

  “Captain Ryer, delighted.”

  “Likewise, Mr. Leamore.”

  “James, please …”

  “You can call me Cris.”

  Not bad for a British expatriate working in Germany. If Koenig Selenen GmbH came out a winner with its lunar program, Leamore stood to earn quite a few deutsche marks for his efforts. Euro-yuppie or not, Ryer thought, she was probably shaking hands with the first millionaire to make his fortune from the Moon. If only the American business community had been so foresighted. Had that been so, of course, then most American computers wouldn’t have Japanese microchips, most American cars wouldn’t be constructed of materials made in Europe and Asia, most American airliners wouldn’t be built in France, and most Americans wouldn’t have their paychecks drawn on banks owned by God knows who, but it sure as hell wasn’t other Americans.