Orbital Decay

PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF ALLEN STEELE

An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition. —Booklist

The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today. —Asimov’s Science Fiction

No question, Steele can tell a story. —OtherRealms

The master of science-fiction intrigue. —The Washington Post

Allen Steele is among the best —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Steele writes with a spirit of exuberant, even exalted, optimism about our future in space. … Intelligent, literate, and ingenious. —Booklist

[Steele’s writing is] highly recommended. —Library Journal

A leading young writer of hard science fiction. —Science Fiction Weekly

Orbital Decay

Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel

Stunning. —Chicago Sun-Times

[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue. —The Washington Post

Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D. —The New York Review of Science Fiction

A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be. —Jack McDevitt, author of Cauldron

An ambitious science fiction thriller … skillfully plotted and written with gusto. —Publishers Weekly

A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space. —Locus

Reads like golden-age Heinlein. —Gregory Benford, author of Beyond Infinity

Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of. —Rave Reviews

The Tranquillity Alternative

A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date. —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy

Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner. —Jack McDevitt, author of The Engines of God

"With The Tranquility Alternative, Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored." —Nicola Griffith, author of Ammonite

Labyrinth of Night

Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one? —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

The Jericho Iteration

"Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In The Jericho Iteration he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down." —John Varley, author of Slow Apocalypse

Rude Astronauts

A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction. —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

Clarke County, Space

Lively … engaging. —Locus

A really gripping tale … This stuff is what I love the most about science fiction! —The Texas SF Inquirer

Lunar Descent

A well-balanced blend of hard science, adventure, and thoughtful extrapolation. —Science Fiction Chronicle

A triumph of the individual human spirit … excellent. —Starlog

Time Loves a Hero

"Not only a story about time traveling and multiple worlds, but also a look at how science fiction inspired scientific endeavors … [Time Loves a Hero] demonstrates Steele’s growth as a writer." —Steven Silver’s Reviews

Oceanspace

Steele’s descriptions of the ocean depths and the unknown possibilities down there are first rate. —The Denver Post

Steele’s account of the undersea research facility that is the real star of this book is so thorough you’d think he had visited the place. The plot is complex and the characters real. There aren’t many people writing fiction grounded in realistic scientific explanation. Allen Steele is among the best. —St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"The closest thing in years to [Arthur C.] Clarke’s The Deep Range. Steele has done his technical homework thoroughly and he writes with an eye to pacing and dry wit. Hard SF adventure doesn’t get a whole lot better than this." —Booklist

Orbital Decay

Allen Steele

Contents

Introduction

Part One: A Hard Day in the Clarke Orbit

1. Homesick

2. Ear Test

3. The Wheel

4. Virgin Bruce

5. Tall Tales

6. Hooker Remembers (A Night on the Town)

7. Getting Some Sun

8. The Whiteroom

9. Zulu Tango Approach

10. An Inch Away from Eternity

11. Huntsville

Part Two: Welcome to the Club

12. Milk Run

13. Hooker Remembers (Where Did She Go?)

14. Welcome to the Club

15. Profiles in Weirdness

16. Seeds of Dessent

Part Three: High Up There

17. Space

18. Virgin Bruce’s Tale

19. Hearing Aid

20. Popeye Goes to Heaven

21. Strange Tales of Space

22. Ear Ache

Part Four: 300-Mile Fade-away

23. The Weirdo Summit

24. Labor Day

25. Freedom Rendezvous

26. Captain Crunch

27. Snafu

28. Orbital Decay

Acknowledgments

About the Author

This one’s for Linda because of all the right reasons

And for her favorite band, The Grateful Dead

Just as the oceans opened up a new world for clipper ships and Yankee traders, space holds enormous potential for commerce today. The market for space transportation could surpass our capacity to develop it. Companies interested in putting payloads into space must have ready access to private sector launch services… We will soon implement a number of executive initiatives, develop proposals to ease regulatory constraints, and, with NASA’s help, promote private sector investment in space.

—President Ronald Reagan

State of the Union address

January 25, 1984

… In recent years there has been an increasing amount of interest and speculation in the area of space colonization and space habitation…. It is only fair to point out, however, that far too much space colonization work has been pure Utopian dreaming; historically, there is nothing wrong with this if you keep fact and fiction delineated. Similar Utopian dreaming heralded the opening of the new frontiers of the past. Cathay was once a magical kingdom with great wizards and magic that were really advanced technology beyond the comprehension of visitors. Par Araby was a place of jinns, flying carpets and odalisques ready to do your every bidding. America was a land of milk and honey where the streets were paved with gold and even if they tossed you in jail it was in golden chains. California was a land of perpetual sunshine where it never rained. And the space colony offers us a pastoral existence with trees, grass, grazing livestock, happy farmers and dancing children eating goat cheese…. But opening a frontier is a deadly, difficult, gut-tearing job that requires the best people that the human race can produce and demands its toll in lives and property.

—G. Harry Stine

The Space Enterprise

Sure, we had trouble building Space Station One—but the trouble was people.

—Robert A. Heinlein

Delilah and the Space Rigger

Introduction

I’m very pleased that, at long last, Orbital Decay is being released as an ebook. At the very least, it means that readers will no longer spill coffee on their first-edition paperback copies … as I did just a few minutes ago.

I was quite proud of this novel when it was published in 1989. I still am. Orbital Decay wasn’t the first novel I wrote—that was Play Dirty, which I wrote as a college student—but it was my first fiction sale, and thus the first book of mine to see print. I wrote Orbital Decay during the mid-eighties, while I was in my twenties. I was a grad student at the time, working on my master’s degree in journalism at the University of Missouri. I wrote the novel in the afternoons and evenings, stealing time from my coursework—and sometimes my classes, when I felt like playing hooky—so I could pursue my ambitions of becoming a science fiction writer, which I intended to support with a newspaper career. I finished Orbital Decay while working as a staff reporter for a weekly alternative paper in Worcester, Massachusetts, a job that became increasingly frustrating as time went by. Two weeks after my editor at Ace Books, Ginjer Buchanan, informed me that she wanted to buy the novel, I tendered my resignation at Worcester Magazine and became a full-time SF writer. Orbital Decay’s success assured me that I’d never have to work for a newspaper again.

I’ve been intrigued by space exploration for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories was Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight aboard Freedom 7. I spent my childhood watching all the Gemini and Apollo missions on TV, becoming a pint-size space aficionado in the process. My love for science fiction was born at the same time, which only made sense; SF was the only form of literature that routinely dealt with space flight. I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up, but when it became apparent that that wasn’t going to happen—colorblindness would prohibit me from ever becoming a military pilot, which was pretty much the only way to get into the NASA astronaut corps—I decided to turn a certain talent for storytelling into an earthbound substitute for space travel and become a science fiction writer instead.

I was in college when the space shuttle Columbia made its maiden voyage in 1981, and I believed then that human history had just reached a turning point and that we were on the way to becoming a spacefaring species. The future looked rather bleak at the time, with the Reagan administration pursuing a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and World War III seemingly just around the corner—but suddenly things seemed a bit more promising. I was then writing a contemporary novel about the nuclear industry and the anti-nuclear movement, and I eventually finished that book mainly because I’d already committed three years of my life to it, but I wasn’t terrifically upset when Play Dirty failed to find a publisher. I was already plotting my second novel, which would be a true-quill science fiction story about a future which was apparently just beyond the horizon.

I sold Orbital Decay in early 1987, just a month after my twenty-ninth birthday; my publisher’s backlog delayed its publication for over two and a half years. So more than twenty-five years have passed since I typed the novel’s final words on the Smith Corona Office Electric Standard now rusting away in my basement, and I realize that I may have been a bit over-optimistic in the scenario I projected for 2016. We still don’t have solar power satellites or lunar bases; NASA’s remaining Columbia-class shuttles are now in museums, and second-generation shuttles with fully reusable flyback boosters didn’t get past the drawing boards. Although I acknowledged the Challenger disaster in a chapter I inserted in the novel’s second draft, I didn’t anticipate the long-term chilling effect it would have on American space exploration as a whole.

Science fiction is not, nor has it ever been, about predicting the future. On the other hand, it appears that Orbital Decay may have foreseen a few real-life developments. Global electronic surveillance systems very much like the Big Ear have become a reality, and they’re being operated by the National Security Agency, using the sort of data-mining methods I described. A private space industry is emerging from the ruins of NASA’s manned space program: Companies like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences are building a new generation of manned spacecraft, Virgin Galactic is testing a winged passenger spaceplane, and Bigelow Aerospace has successfully orbited a prototype for an inflatable modular space station that resembles the one I described (with less catastrophic results, I hope). China has announced its intent to send people back to the Moon; Japan and India have expressed the same ambitions. Space exploration isn’t dead; it’s simply moving into a new era in which commercial efforts supersede big government programs.

I think the thing that tickles me the most, though, is the point on which some of the novel’s critics have been proven wrong. When Orbital Decay was first published, it was slammed by several reviewers, mainly in the SF fan community, for the apparent sin of cultural myopia. Some of them couldn’t bring themselves to believe that, in the faraway year of 2016, there would still be hippies and bikers, or that anyone would still be listening to bands like the Grateful Dead. I’ll admit that I should have dug a little deeper into my record collection—CDs weren’t quite there yet—for more recent bands that my characters might have been listening to, but while the Dead themselves are no longer touring, their music remains as popular as ever. There are still plenty of hippies, bikers, and Deadheads in the twenty-first century, and I have little doubt that some of them will eventually find their way into orbit.

Which is what this book is about, really. People living in space … ordinary people, not just government-trained NASA astronauts or the rock-ribbed heroes of military space opera. I believe this future is still possible. It may happen in 2061 instead of 2016, but it’s coming all the same. That’s a future I hope we’ll yet see … and I expect that we will.

Allen Steele

Whately, Massachusetts

May 2013

PART ONE

A Hard Day in the Clarke Orbit

SOME DAY SOON—PERHAPS tomorrow, perhaps a week or a month, maybe as long as a year from now if they’re really lazy about it—they’re going to find this crevasse. It won’t be very difficult, because the tire tracks from my tractor will remain indelibly printed in the gray lunar soil. There are no winds on the Moon to shift dust over the tracks, no erosion save for the impact of stray micrometeorites. My trail will remain fresh even if they delay the search for a decade, and it will lead across the Descartes Highlands east of the Abulfeda Crater until it ends, quite abruptly, at the lip of this crevasse within sight of Argelander Peak.

When they shine a spotlight down here, they’ll discover the wreckage of my tractor, looking like one of the junked cars one sees from the highways in Pennsylvania. When they lower a couple of men down by cable, they’ll find my footprints in the dust at the bottom of the crevasse. They’ll follow those lonely footprints as they lead for a mile and a half northwest, the steep walls of the crevasse rising to either side like enormous hedgerows of ancient volcanic rock. It’s dark down here, even during the high noon of the two-week lunar day. Their helmet lanterns will cast ghostly circles of light along the walls and in the deep impressions of my footprints. They will feel the cold lonesomeness which is destined, in these last hours of my life, to be my dying impression.

Actually, I understand that oxygen asphyxiation is not a bad way to go, relatively speaking. There’s worse ways to die in space. In the end I’ll probably babble my head off, gleefully talking about moon worms as my lungs fill with carbon dioxide. I’ll go out crazy as a shithouse rat, but at least I’ll be happy. I think.

When they come to the end of my tracks, they’ll find me sitting on my rump with my back propped against a boulder, quite dead. They will also find the greatest discovery ever made. I’m serious. It’s down here in this crevasse with me, and the search party would have to be blind to miss it.

I only wish I could be around for the moment. I wouldn’t be able to see the expressions on their faces through the reflective coating on their helmet visors, but I can imagine what words will pass through their comlink.

Although, now to think of it, even hearing what they had to say would be impossible. If my suit radio, or the radio in my poor wrecked tractor was still working, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, waiting to die.

Life is just full of little ironies, ain’t it?

I wonder which will go out first: the oxygen supply, the batteries in my life-support system, which keep me from freezing to death, or the microcassette into which I’m dictating these last thoughts. Theoretically I shouldn’t be wasting precious air in speaking; I should be conserving it in hopes that a search party from Descartes Station will find me in time. Rescued in the nick of time, la la la. Sorry, that stuff only happens in science fiction stories. I know damn well that the guys back at the base, inert bastards that they are, won’t even think about looking for me until I’m several hours overdue. These two-week days tend to distort time like that. I’ll be long dead by the time someone peers over his Marvel comic book and says, Hey, what happened to Sam? It’ll be another hour before someone else says, Hey, y’know, I think Sam’s overdue from his trip out. And it’ll be another hour after that before someone finally says, Well, gee whiz, maybe we ought to take another track out and go find ol’ Sam; he might be in trouble or something.

You sons of bitches. I’m gonna get you for this.

At least there’s the consolation, the posthumous booby prize, that someone may eventually transcribe these taped recollections and publish them as an article about the man who made the greatest discovery. After all these years, after all those reject slips, I’ll finally get something of mine in print. The last words of a failed science fiction writer; maybe it’ll even get in Analog or Omni, one of the mags that turned down all the other stuff I wrote. It may even spur some publisher to print Ragnarok Night, the SF novel that no one would touch while I was alive.

I can always daydream, can’t I?

Yeah, life is just full of them crazy little ironies. Death is too, I suppose.

So, to pass the time until my oxygen or suit batteries peter out, I’ll tell you a story, you who will someday separate this tape from my suit recorder. A spaceman’s memoirs, if you will. How Samuel K. Sloane, who got a job with Skycorp so he could go to space to get authentic background for his science fiction novel, ended up making the Great Discovery.

Of course, that isn’t all there is to it. There was also the stuff that happened on Skycan and Vulcan, like Doc Felapolous and his cats or the run-in between Virgin Bruce and Cap’n Wallace, and Jack Hamilton and orbital decadence, and the day we messed with the plans of the National Security Agency and stuck a banana in the Big Ear, so to speak. That all came first… which of course means that I had best start at the beginning, like you do with all good stories.

First, you have to understand that outer space isn’t all that it’s cut out to be….

1

Homesick

THE DAYS BEGAN THE same way after a while: adventure made mediocre through repetition, the vastness of space a stale background against which their tedious lives were played.

A dozen men floated in the narrow cylindrical compartment, all facing in the same direction like automatons waiting to be activated. Even in weightlessness their aluminum space armor and enormous MMU backpacks seemed to hang on them like heavy burdens; they slouched under their packs, their shoulders bent, their helmeted heads hanging low, their hands moving slowly as they replenished their oxygen tanks from hoses dangling from the wall. The compartment was filled with the sound of hissing air and the thin crackle of suit radios being tested, of muttered comments and complaints and the clink of tools nestling together in the cargo pockets of their overgarments. Behind them a technician, wearing a T-shirt with a rock band’s name stenciled on the front, floated from man to man, checking suit joint seals, turning intake valves they couldn’t reach, rescuing runaway gloves and power tools from midair. There were no windows. CRT screens overhead displayed job assignments for the day, and TV monitors showed scenes inside the construction shack’s main bay and outside, where the work was going on. No one paid attention to the monitors; everyone knew what it looked like out there and didn’t want to be reminded.

They were all in there on that shift. Virgin Bruce, singing an old Grateful Dead song, his raucous laughter ringing through the whiteroom. Mike Webb, smiling at Bruce’s jokes, trying for the umpteenth time to get the suiting procedure right, always having to get Julian, the technician, to help him. Al Hernandez, moving efficiently, telling another interminable story about his family in Miami, his brother in the FBI, his son who wanted to join the Marines, his wife who kept asking when he was coming home (everyone, hearing these things, nodding, silently asking, what’s new, Al?). Hank Luton, who would be in the command center and not have to wear a suit for the next four hours, bugging everyone about little details—a joint in one section that needed to be rewelded, a bend in a truss which meant the beam had to be replaced, all the stuff the computers had picked up since the last shift—and being rewarded with surly grunts and mumbled apologies. And the rest of the handful of space grunts who called themselves beamjacks—because it sounded like lumberjack—who for some reason were thought of as pioneers instead of everyday Joes trying to make it through another dogass day.

One by one, they managed to make it out of the whiteroom, through the hatch at the end of the compartment into the next inflated plastic cylinder, moving in a ragged single file toward the airlock. Now and then someone had to go back because a suit sensor detected a slow leak or a weak battery. The airlock was a big metal chamber which they were herded into by another technician. When he sealed the hatch they stood for another few minutes, their feet gripped to the floor by magnetic overshoes, everything colored candy-apple red by the fluorescents in the ceiling. No sound now, except the whisper of air inside one’s helmet and conversations overlapping in the comlink, received through their snoopy helmets’ earphones.

The opposite hatch of the airlock slid open, and Vulcan Station’s main construction bay lay before them like an airless basketball court, paper-thin aluminum walls offering scant protection from the void. They shuffled out onto the deck, some heading for the beam-builders, some for the construction pods docked nearby, some for the hatch leading outside the shack.

Those who went outside, one by one, gripped their MMUs’ hand controls, pushing them forward and letting the little jets push them away from Vulcan. Once this had been exciting; now it was just the first part of the job, getting out to the powersat. It lay before them like a vast metal grid, a flat rectangle bigger than the towns some of them had been born in, larger than anything that had ever been built on Earth. They floated away from Vulcan, little white stick-men against the overwhelming darkness, the shack’s blue and red lights outlining them as silhouettes. Earth was a blue, white, and green crescent beyond the powersat. They tried not to look at it, because it never did any good; if you thought about it too much, you got depressed, like Popeye. Just do your job; punch the clock and hope you make it through the shift alive.

Once or twice a week, when he had a few minutes to spare at the end of his lunch break, the beamjack the others called Pop-eye would float down to Meteorology for a look at Earth.

Not that it was impossible to see Earth any time he wished; he saw the planet every time he went on shift. From 22,300 miles away, it was an inescapable part of life, always there, always to be there. It was something no one could ever forget.

Yet sometimes Popeye Hooker did find himself forgetting. There came times—while on the job, while lying awake in his bunk, while climbing into his suit for another work shift—when he tried to recall what standing on real ground was like, how fresh air tasted, and found himself unable to remember.

Sometimes he could not remember Laura’s face. Part of him didn’t want to remember what she looked like, and it might have been for the better if he could not; yet Popeye had to remember Laura, for reasons he could not comprehend. It was those instances when her face disappeared from his mind’s eye which scared him the worst.

So, when he could, he would head for the weather station to borrow a few minutes on the big optical telescope. Once or twice a week, although if he could have, he would have visited Meteorology every day. But his being allowed to use the telescope at all was a personal favor extended by the bogus meteorologists and he didn’t want to risk overstaying his welcome.

The weather station was at the south polar end of Olympus Station’s hub. To reach it from the rim, Hooker had to leave the four adjacent modules comprising the mess deck and walk down the catwalk until he reached the gangway leading down into the western terminus. On this particular day he had fifteen minutes before the beginning of his second shift, so he had to hurry. Hooker grabbed one of the two ladders in the terminus and began to climb up through the overhead hatch into the western spoke.

As he ascended, he passed fluorescent light fixtures, fire control stations and color-coded service panels set in the cool, curving metal walls. Along the inside of the spoke were taped-up notices of one kind or another: the announcement of the Saturday movie in the rec room, reminders of deadlines for filing W-2 forms and absentee voter registration, announcements for union meetings, and ever present "Think—Safety First!" signs. The second ladder ran directly behind him; another crewman passed him, heading down to the torus, his soles clanging on the ladder rungs, echoing in the utilitarian cool.

Soft music from an occasional speaker set in the walls accompanied his journey to the hub, the Muzak that was piped through Skycan. Hooker gritted his teeth as, for perhaps the tenth time that day—he had lost count, if he had ever kept it—he heard If I Had A Hammer segueing into a syrupy version of Yesterday. Elevator music for a place that didn’t have elevators; it was another sign of his lapsed mental condition that he couldn’t laugh at this irony.

By the time he had climbed halfway up the spoke, most of the one-third normal gravity experienced on the rim of the station was gone, and he was not climbing the ladder so much as pulling himself forward. Down as a direction became meaningless; the spoke’s shaft took a horizontal rather than a vertical perspective. By the time Hooker reached the hatch leading into the hub he was clinging lightly to the ladder, experiencing zero gee. It was a sign of how long he had been on Skycan—how long, too, he had trouble recalling—that he became almost instantly acclimated, with only the slightest feeling of queasiness.

The spoke ended at the entrance to the hub, in a central passageway running perpendicular to the rim. Another hatch opposite to the one he emerged from led to the east spoke leading back down to the other half of the torus. In one direction, the passageway led to Command/Communications and the airlocks. In the other, toward the south pole, were Power Control and Meteorology. The soft hiss of air from the vents was drowned out by Yesterday, reverberating off the metal walls.

By the time he reached the weather station at the end of the hub, passing the yellow radioactivity warning signs on the hatches leading into Power Control, the Muzak had segued into Close To You and Hooker was feeling closer to the edge than before. The hatch at the end of the corridor was marked METEOROLOGY—Authorized Personnel Only. Popeye grasped a handrail and pressed the button on the intercom by the hatch and waited, trying to shut out the saccharine violins and chorus. Impending insanity was soundtracked by the Carpenters; there had to be better ways to lose one’s mind.

The intercom crackled and he heard the voice of one of the bogus meteorologists. This one called himself Dave, but no one knew their real names. Yeah? Whoizzit?

Claude Hooker, Popeye said. Hey, is the telescope free now? For a few minutes?

The intercom was silent for a moment. Popeye imagined Dave consulting with the other two men in the crowded compartment beyond the hatch. Popeye’s out there. Wants to use the telescope. Any incoming transmissions? He hoped things were quiet in Cuba and Nicaragua today.

The intercom crackled again. Yeah, okay, Popeye, for a few minutes. Give us a chance to straighten up in here first, okay?

Hooker nodded, forgetting that Dave could not see him. The straighten up line was a tired old shuck. In microgravity there was no place for carelessly misplaced items; a compartment in Skycan’s hub always had to be kept shipshape. Dave and his companions were doubtless putting away long-range telephotos of Soviet silos and submarine bays and troop movements, transcripts of messages from Washington and Langley and Cheyenne Mountain.

In a sense, the three men in the weather station did serve as meteorologists. If asked, they could confidently explain current weather patterns in the Western Hemisphere, tell a listener a high pressure system hanging over the American Midwest was causing St. Louis to feel like an anteroom of Hell or why a front coming in from the Pacific was dumping rain over northern California and Oregon.

But everyone in Olympus Station’s hundred-person complement, except for the occasional greenhorn who happened to ask why the three meteorologists generally kept to themselves, knew that Dave and his companions Bob and John were National Security Agency analysts. They were weathermen of the world’s geopolitical climate, rather than the natural. Their meteorologist roles were rather weak covers for their spending long hours in a compartment crammed with telescopes and radio equipment.

Their cover story had never been very solid. The phony weathermen knew that the rest of the crew knew their real purpose aboard Skycan, and the crew knew that they knew that as well. No one made an issue of it, though, or at least as long as little favors were extended by the NSA spooks. Sometimes it was getting them to transmit, via their private communications downlink, birthday and Christmas greetings to friends and relatives on Earth, or allowing a homesick space hardhat a few minutes at one of the few optical telescopes aboard, and the only one kept fixed on the planet.

For the NSA weathermen the little favors could be written off as good public relations and a guarantee that no wise-aleck beamjack would stop by their table at mess and loudly inquire about how every little thing was in Havana today.

The hatch opened from the inside, held open by Dave, his feet held to the carpet by his Velcro-soled sneakers. He stepped aside as Hooker gently pushed himself into the weather station. The other two guys—John and Bob, or whatever their names were that week—were seated before consoles, ostensibly studying photos of a storm front gathering over the West Indies; there were no photos or computer printouts anywhere in sight. The three of them looked almost like brothers who had all gone to Yale, down to their cleanshaven faces, closely cropped hair, and neatly pressed uniform coveralls, which almost no one else bothered to wear or had modified by cutting off the sleeves or sewing on various unofficial patches. The weathermen were so clean-cut, in fact, that whenever Skycorp’s front office in Huntsville sent a request for publicity photos to illustrate press releases, the snapshots sent back were usually of Dave and John and Bob at work in their neat little compartment, dressed in their neat little uniforms, with a caption like Olympus Station scientists at work uncovering the secrets of the universe. Everyone else aboard Skycan looked like the Three Stooges.

The weather station was a hemispherical bulge at the end of Olympus’ hub, which was kept permanently pointed toward Earth. Half of the dome was windowed with thick Plexiglas, permitting the best view of Earth available on the space station. Arrayed around the window were various consoles and screens, the largest of which was the TV screen belonging to the telescope.

The telescope itself was a smaller version of the big space telescope in orbit near Skycan, which was used by the astrophysics lab. It was positioned outside the dome on a yoke and was operated by a joystick on the console below the TV screen, which turned the box-shaped instrument in the direction desired. Whatever was captured in the telescope’s three-inch lens was transmitted to the TV screen inside the dome.

Hooker attached his own Velcro slippers to the carpet and walked to the bucket seat in front of the telescope console. As he sat down and strapped himself in, Dave bent over next to him and put his fingers on the console’s touchpad controls.

What’ll it be today, Popeye? he asked pleasantly. There’s clear skies over the Rockies…. I got a really stunning view of the Great Divide this morning. Can you believe there’s still some snow up there? Bob managed to see a whale pod swimming off the coast of Nova Scotia a little while ago, too.

Gulf of Mexico, Hooker replied. Off the coast of Florida. Panama City area, northern part of the state.

Kinda overcast over Florida today, Popeye, Bob said.

He’s right, Dave said. There might be a hurricane developing in the Caribbean. We’ve been keeping an eye on it for the past couple of days.

You’ll have to make it short, said John, the gruffest of the trio. We have to track the thing, y’know.

Hooker wondered if they were watching the hurricane or the movements of Soviet subs near the Dominican Republic. Besides, it was early summer down there, not exactly hurricane season yet. But there was no sense in irritating the bogus meteorologists with those notions. He noticed that the Muzak had not penetrated the sanctum of the weather station. Apparently John, Dave, and Bob, with their exalted government status, had escaped Cap’n Wallace’s means of improving crew efficiency and morale.

Try it anyway, please, Hooker prodded. I won’t stay long.

Dave shrugged and tapped instructions into the telescope’s range finder.

Watching the TV screen, Hooker saw the Earth leap toward him, the thousands of miles peeling away as if he were sitting on an accelerating rocket hurtling down the gravity well. He stopped four hundred miles above the ground. Patchy clouds filled the screen, indistinct at first but becoming more defined as Dave adjusted the focus. Through breaks in the shroud he could see brown and green edged by sapphire blue. Dave checked a computer simulation on a smaller screen beside them.

We’re over Louisiana right now, he told Popeye. He sniffed the cool, conditioned air. "Mmm-mmmmh! Can’t you just smell that Cajun cooking!" he said theatrically, trying to imitate a deep southern drawl with his New England accent.

Never could stand coon-ass country myself, Bob said from his console across the compartment. The girls are nice, but some of those redneck types there…

Hang on, Popeye, Dave said, noticing the beamjack’s restless fidgeting. Lemme just recalibrate the… His fingers danced across the glowing keys as he watched the computer simulation. Ah, there we go.

The screen blurred as the scene shifted to the right and closed in, tracking across the southern tier of states as it simultaneously zoomed in. Earth spiraled around, 22,300 miles away; from this part of Olympus it looked as if the planet were constantly in a slow tailspin. The telescope’s computer corrected this illusion caused by Skycan’s own revolution, giving observers a steady picture of the surface that didn’t induce vertigo.

We’re in luck, Dave said. "Found a break in the cloud cover. We’re