The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  When Jill came out of the sack it was Linda’s turn to sleep. Kinsman stayed at the control desk, sucking on a container of lukewarm coffee. All the panel lights were green. Jill was taking a blood specimen from one of the white mice.

  “How’re they doing?”

  Without looking up, she answered, “Fine. They’ve adapted to weightlessness beautifully. Calcium level’s evened off, muscle tone is good . . .”

  “Then there’s hope for us two-legged types?”

  Jill returned the mouse to the colony entrance and snapped the lid shut. It scampered through to rejoin its clan in the transparent plastic maze of tunnels.

  “I can’t see any physical reason why humans can’t live in orbit indefinitely,” she answered.

  Kinsman caught a slight but definite stress on the word physical. “You think there might be emotional problems over the long run?”

  “Chet, I can see emotional problems on a three-day mission.” Jill forced the blood specimen into a stoppered test tube.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Come on,” she said, her face a mixture of disappointment and distaste. “It’s obvious what you’re trying to do. Your tail’s been wagging like a puppy’s whenever she’s in sight.”

  “You haven’t been sleeping much, have you?”

  “I haven’t been eavesdropping, if that’s what you mean. I’ve simply been watching you watching her. And some of the messages from the ground . . . is the whole Air Force in on this? How much money’s being bet?”

  “I’m not involved in any betting. I’m just . . .”

  “You’re just taking a risk on fouling up this mission and maybe killing the three of us, just to prove you’re Tarzan and she’s Jane.”

  “Goddammit, Jill, now you sound like Murdock.”

  The sour look on her face deepened. “Okay. You’re a big boy. If you want to play Tarzan while you’re on duty, that’s your business. I won’t get in your way. I’ll take a sleeping pill and stay in the sack.”

  “You will?”

  “That’s right. You can have your blonde Barbie doll, and good luck to you. But I’ll tell you this: she’s a phony. I’ve talked to her long enough to dig that. You’re trying to use her, but she’s using us, too. She was pumping me about the power pod while you were sleeping. She’s here for her own reasons, Chet, and if she plays along with you it won’t be for the romance and adventure of it all.”

  My God Almighty, Jill’s jealous!

  It was tense and quiet when Linda returned from the bunkroom. The three of them worked separately: Jill fussing over the algae colony on the shelf above the biology bench; Kinsman methodically taking film from the observation cameras for return to Earth and reloading them; Linda efficiently clicking away at both of them.

  Ground control called up to ask how things were going. Both Jill and Linda threw sharp glances at Kinsman. He replied merely:

  “Following mission profile. All systems green.”

  They shared a meal of pastes and squeeze-tubes together, still mostly in silence, and then it was Kinsman’s turn in the sack. But not before he checked the mission flight plan. Jill goes in next, and we’ll have four hours alone, including a stretch over the Indian Ocean.

  Once Jill retired, Kinsman immediately called Linda over to the control desk under the pretext of showing her the radar image of a Russian satellite.

  “We’re coming close now.” They hunched side by side at the desk to peer at the orange-glowing radar screen, close enough for Kinsman to scent a hint of very feminine perfume. “Only a thousand kilometers away.”

  “Why don’t you blink our lights at them?”

  “It’s unmanned.”

  “Oh.”

  “It is a little like World War I up here,” Kinsman realized, straightening up. “Just being here is more important than which nation you’re from.”

  “Do the Russians feel that way, too?”

  Kinsman nodded. “I think so.”

  She stood in front of him, so close that they were almost touching.

  “You know,” Kinsman said, “when I first saw you on the base, I thought you were a photographer’s model, not the photographer.”

  Gliding slightly away from him, she answered, “I started out as a model . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Don’t stop. What were you going to say?”

  Something about her had changed, Kinsman realized. She was still coolly friendly, but alert now, wary, and . . . sad?

  Shrugging, she said, “Modeling is a dead end. I finally figured out that there’s more of a future on the other side of the camera.”

  “You had too much brains for modeling.”

  “Don’t flatter me.”

  “Why on earth should I flatter you?”

  “We’re not on Earth.”

  “Touché.”

  She drifted over toward the galley. Kinsman followed her.

  “How long have you been on the other side of the camera?” he asked.

  Turning back toward him, “I’m supposed to be getting your life story, not vice versa.”

  “Okay . . . ask me some questions.”

  “How many people know you’re supposed to lay me up here?”

  Kinsman felt his face smiling, an automatic delaying action. What the hell, he thought. Aloud, he replied, “I don’t know. It started as a little joke among a few of the guys . . . apparently the word has spread.”

  “And how much money do you stand to win or lose?” She wasn’t smiling.

  “Money?” Kinsman was genuinely surprised. “Money doesn’t enter into it.”

  “Oh no?”

  “No, not with me,” he insisted.

  The tenseness in her body seemed to relax a little. “Then why . . . I mean . . . what’s it all about?”

  Kinsman brought his smile back and pulled himself down into the nearest chair. “Why not? You’re damned pretty, neither one of us has any strings, nobody’s tried it in zero gee before. Why the hell not?”

  “But why should I?”

  “That’s the big question. That’s what makes an adventure out of it.”

  She looked at him thoughtfully, leaning her tall frame against the galley paneling. “Just like that. An adventure. There’s nothing more to it than that?”

  “Depends,” Kinsman answered. “Hard to tell ahead of time.”

  “You live in a very simple world, Chet.”

  “I try to. Don’t you?”

  She shook her head. “No, my world’s very complex.”

  “But it includes sex.”

  Now she smiled, but there was no pleasure in it. “Does it?”

  “You mean never?” Kinsman’s voice sounded incredulous, even to himself.

  She didn’t answer.

  “Never at all? I can’t believe that.”

  “No,” she said, “not never at all. But never for . . . for an adventure. For job security, yes. For getting the good assignments; for teaching me how to use a camera, in the first place. But never for fun . . . at least, not for a long, long time has it been for fun.”

  Kinsman looked into those ice-blue eyes and saw that they were completely dry and aimed straight back at him. His insides felt odd. He put a hand out toward her, but she didn’t move a muscle.

  “That’s . . . that’s a damned lonely way to live,” he said.

  “Yes, it is.” Her voice was a steel knifeblade, without a trace of self-pity in it.

  “But . . . how’d it happen? Why . . .”

  She leaned her head back against the galley paneling, her eyes looking away, into the past. “I had a baby. He didn’t want it. I had to give it up for adoption—either that or have it aborted. The kid should be five years old now. I don’t know where she is.” She straightened up, looked back at Kinsman. “But I found out that sex is either for making babies or making careers; not for fun.”

  Kinsman sat there, feeling like he had just taken a low blow. The only sound in the cabin was the faint hum of electrical mac
hinery, the whisper of the air fans.

  Linda broke into a grin. “I wish you could see your face: Tarzan, the Ape-Man, trying to figure out a nuclear reactor.”

  “The only trouble with zero gee,” he mumbled, “is that you can’t hang yourself.”

  Jill sensed something was wrong, it seemed to Kinsman. From the moment she came out of the sack, she sniffed around, giving quizzical looks. Finally, when Linda retired for her final rest period before their return, Jill asked him:

  “How’re you two getting along?”

  “Okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. We’re going to open a Playboy Club in here. Want to be a bunny?”

  Her nose wrinkled. “You’ve got enough of those.”

  For more than an hour they worked their separate tasks in silence. Kinsman was concentrating on recalibrating the radar mapper when Jill handed him a container of hot coffee.

  He turned in the chair. She was standing beside him, not much taller than his own seated height.

  “Thanks.”

  Her face was very serious. “Something’s bothering you, Chet. What did she do to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Really?”

  “For Chrissake, don’t start that again! Nothing, absolutely nothing happened. Maybe that’s what’s bothering me.”

  Shaking her head, “No, you’re worried about something, and it’s not about yourself.”

  “Don’t be so damned dramatic, Jill.”

  She put a hand on his shoulder. “Chet . . . I know this is all a game to you, but people can get hurt at this kind of game, and, well . . . nothing in life is ever as good as you expect it will be.”

  Looking up at her intent brown eyes, Kinsman felt his irritation vanish. “Okay, kid. Thanks for the philosophy. I’m a big boy, though, and I know what it’s all about.”

  “You just think you do.”

  Shrugging, “Okay, I think I do. Maybe nothing is as good as it ought to be, but a man’s innocent until proven guilty, and everything new is as good as gold until you find some tarnish on it. That’s my philosophy for the day!”

  “All right, slugger,” Jill smiled, ruefully. “Be the ape-man. Fight it out for yourself. I just don’t want to see her hurt you.”

  “I won’t get hurt.”

  Jill said, “You hope. Okay, if there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “Yeah, there is something.”

  “What?”

  “When you sack in again, make sure Linda sees you take a sleeping pill. Will you do that?”

  Jill’s face went expressionless. “Sure,” she answered flatly. “Anything for a fellow officer.”

  She made a great show, several hours later, of taking a sleeping pill so that she could rest well on her final nap before reentry. It seemed to Kinsman that Jill deliberately laid it on too thickly.

  “Do you always take sleeping pills on the final time around?” Linda asked, after Jill had gone into the bunkroom.

  “Got to be fully alert and rested,” Kinsman replied, “for the return flight. Reentry’s the trickiest part of the operation.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Nothing to worry about, though,” Kinsman added.

  He went to the control desk and busied himself with the tasks that the mission profile called for. Linda sat lightly in the next chair, within arm’s reach. Kinsman chatted briefly with Kodiak station, on schedule, and made an entry in the log.

  Three more ground stations and then we’re over the Indian Ocean, with world enough and time.

  But he didn’t look up from the control panel; he tested each system aboard the lab, fingers flicking over control buttons, eyes focused on the red, amber and green lights that told him how the laboratory’s mechanical and electrical machinery was functioning.

  “Chet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you . . . sore at me?”

  Still not looking at her, “No, I’m busy. Why should I be sore at you?”

  “Well, not sore maybe, but . . .”

  “Puzzled?”

  “Puzzled, hurt, something like that.”

  He punched an entry on the computer’s keyboard at his side, then turned to face her. “Linda, I haven’t really had time to figure out what I feel. You’re a complicated woman; maybe too complicated for me. Life’s got enough twists in it.”

  Her mouth drooped a little.

  “On the other hand,” he added, “we WASPs ought to stick together. Not many of us left.”

  That brought a faint smile. “I’m not a WASP. My real name’s Szymanski. I changed it when I started modeling.”

  “Oh. Another complication.”

  She was about to reply when the radio speaker crackled, “AF-9, this is Cheyenne. Cheyenne to AF-9.”

  Kinsman leaned over and thumbed the transmitter switch. “AF-9 to Cheyenne. You’re coming through faint but clear.”

  “Roger, Nine. We’re receiving your telemetry. All systems look green from here.”

  “Manual check of systems also green,” Kinsman said. “Mission profile okay, no deviations. Tasks about ninety percent complete.”

  “Roger. Ground control suggests you begin checking out your spacecraft on the next orbit. You are scheduled for reentry in ten hours.”

  “Right. Will do.”

  “Okay, Chet. Everything looks good from here. Anything else to report, ol’ Founding Father?”

  “Mind your own business.” He turned the transmitter off.

  Linda was smiling at him.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You are. You’re getting very touchy about this whole business.”

  “It’s going to stay touchy for a long time to come. Those guys’ll hound me for years about this.”

  “You could always tell lies.”

  “About you? No, I don’t think I could do that. If the girl was anonymous, that’s one thing. But they all know you, know where you work.”

  “You’re a gallant officer. I suppose that kind of rumor would get back to New York.”

  Kinsman grinned. “You could even make the front page of the National Enquirer.”

  She laughed at that. “I’ll bet they’d pull out some of my old bikini pictures.”

  “Careful now,” Kinsman put up a warning hand. “Don’t stir up my imagination any more than it already is. I’m having a hard enough time being gallant right now.”

  They remained apart, silent, Kinsman sitting at the control desk, Linda drifting back toward the galley, nearly touching the curtain that screened off the sleeping area.

  The ground control center called in and Kinsman gave a terse report. When he looked up at Linda again, she was sitting in front of the observation port across the aisle from the galley. Looking back at Kinsman, her face was troubled now, her eyes . . . he wasn’t sure what was in her eyes. They looked different: no longer ice-cool, no longer calculating; they looked aware, concerned, almost frightened.

  Still Kinsman stayed silent. He checked and double-checked the control board, making absolutely certain that every valve and transistor aboard the lab was working perfectly. Glancing at his watch: Five more minutes before Ascension calls. He checked the lighted board again.

  Ascension called in exactly on schedule. Feeling his innards tightening, Kinsman gave his standard report in a deliberately calm and mechanical way. Ascension signed off.

  With a long last look at the controls, Kinsman pushed himself out of the seat and drifted, hands faintly touching the grips along the aisle, toward Linda.

  “You’ve been awfully quiet,” he said, standing over her.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you said a while ago.” What was it in her eyes? Anticipation? Fear? “It . . . it has been a damned lonely life, Chet.”

  He took her arm and lifted her gently from the chair and kissed her.

  “But . . .”

  “It’s all right,” he whispered. “No one will bother us. No one will know.”

  She shoo
k her head. “It’s not that easy, Chet. It’s not that simple.”

  “Why not? We’re here together . . . what’s so complicated?”

  “But—doesn’t anything bother you? You’re floating around in a dream. You’re surrounded by war machines, you’re living every minute with danger. If a pump fails or a meteor hits . . .”

  “You think it’s any safer down there?”

  “But life is complex, Chet. And love—well, there’s more to it than just having fun.”

  “Sure there is. But it’s meant to be enjoyed, too. What’s wrong with taking an opportunity when you have it? What’s so damned complicated or important? We’re above the cares and worries of Earth. Maybe it’s only for a few hours, but it’s here and now, it’s us. They can’t touch us, they can’t force us to do anything or stop us from doing what we want to. We’re on our own. Understand? Completely on our own.”

  She nodded, her eyes still wide with the look of a frightened animal. But her hands slid around him, and together they drifted back toward the control desk. Wordlessly, Kinsman turned off all the overhead lights, so that all they saw was the glow of the control board and the flickering of the computer as it murmured to itself.

  They were in their own world now, their private cosmos, floating freely and softly in the darkness. Touching, drifting, coupling, searching the new seas and continents, they explored their world.

  Jill stayed in the hammock until Linda entered the bunkroom, quietly, to see if she had awakened yet. Kinsman sat at the control desk feeling, not tired, but strangely numb.

  The rest of the flight was strictly routine. Jill and Kinsman did their jobs, spoke to each other when they had to. Linda took a brief nap, then returned to snap a few last pictures. Finally, they crawled back into the spacecraft, disengaged from the laboratory, and started the long curving flight back to Earth.

  Kinsman took a last look at the majestic beauty of the planet, serene and incomparable among the stars, before touching the button that slid the heat-shield over his viewport. Then they felt the surge of rocket thrust, dipped into the atmosphere, knew that air heated beyond endurance surrounded them in a fiery grip and made their tiny craft into a flaming, falling star.

  Pressed into his seat by the acceleration, Kinsman let the automatic controls bring them through reentry, through the heat and buffeting turbulence, down to an altitude where their finned craft could fly like a rocket-plane.