Losers in Space Read online

  The walls inside the pod all have that odd sheen from being vacuum-plate-cast in a centrifuge. Where in the crew bubble the surfaces are covered with panels shipped up from Earth to look more “natural,” inside the pod it’s all native, stuff formed in space, glass, metal, and plastic salvaged from all the fuel tanks, engines, and scaffolding left over from putting Virgo into an Aldrin cycler orbit. I run my hand over it; the alclad surface is so smooth that it feels curiously soft to my touch.

  Destiny says, “Virgo puts me in awe every time I look at her seriously. Can you imagine this ship once had fifty iceballs, instead of four, and a hundred fifty engines instead of eleven, and a factory where the crew bubble sits now? And the engines ran night and day, and they were still catching iceballs all the way to Mars? Do you remember our last Christmas together on Earth, kiddo?”

  “Yeah.” It’s a sad memory; at age seven, I hadn’t understood Anny Dezzy wasn’t coming back, that she was going to be out there in the sky forever, while Fleeta and I watched the launch. I had cried for days, later, when I realized.

  “Well, the shower I took Christmas night—remember we were all at the hotel in Singapore?—was the last bath I got that wasn’t a sponge bath for more than a year, and that hotel room was the last time I had a room to myself till after the next Earthpass, a few months after your tenth birthday. When I first saw Virgo from the approaching capsule, the pod was still more than half open girderwork, the barracks was a big radiation shelter inside the finished part of the pod, and the factory was where the crew bubble is now.

  “Year after year, trip after trip up into the far dark and back, we kept feeding junk engines and tanks into the factory, and pulling out plates and spars and everything else, till that last amazing three months when we fed the factory into itself, made the crew bubble, and then one bright day we all had quarters of our own instead of a bunk in a can. I remember floating slowly down onto my bed, after eating a huge meal I’d cooked in my kitchen, looking out my window, tears piling up on my face in pure happiness.”

  “You never put that in your messages,” I said.

  “I sort of did. That was why I wanted you to come up when you were eleven. My quarters in the crew bubble were only a couple months old; I wanted to show them off to family!”

  “It sounds so primitive, like something out of a history book,” I say, thinking that at about the same time I was running around with Fleeta, visiting all those weird scientist types, playing with my dog Stanley, and begging all the time for trips to the beach and to orbit, and having no idea that I was having the most fun I ever would. “I can’t imagine how tough your life must have been.”

  “Oh, that was kind of my point. I didn’t mean to make it sound like more than it was. Finishing the pod and building the bubble was a tough job, and it went on a long time, but it was duck soup, really, compared to what the first generation of evalists had already done. Those evalists, the guys who structured the steel and hung the first tanks and engines on the framework, all under constant acceleration, where if you lost your grip you’d fall away from the ship forever, or trail off into solar-temperature exhaust—years and years sharing a bunk with two other people and taking ten times the radiation anyone would be allowed to nowadays—they were evalists. They feared nothing, would try anything, and could do everything; I guess I’ll always wonder if I’d’ve been up to their challenges, and be grateful I never found out. It was enough to have known men and women like them. The Senior Mentor on my shift when I first came up was old Charlie Tang, as in the Tang Rule.”

  “I’ve never heard of it,” I say, slightly embarrassed.

  “I suppose only evalists have, but we’re all pretty grateful to Charlie for fighting for it in collective bargaining. Charlie had his pellor locked on the side of a LOX tank when it broke loose, and cracked the nozzle on his pellor to boot. He ended up working his way back to the ship because they didn’t have any way to go get him. Took him nineteen days.”

  Notes for the Interested, #8

  Getting around outside

  Pellor: a small, 1-to-4 person spacecraft with hooks, clamps, and manipulators, used by evalists to do assembly work outside. Compared to an evasuit, it provides more radiation protection (with lead-lined walls) and more comfort (bathroom, food locker, ability to take the suit off part of the time). Many important tasks can be performed with the pellor’s mechanical arms. Except for the engine nozzle, practically the whole surface of a pellor consists of lead-shuttered windows; normally the operator only opens the shutters over a window to see to work for the briefest possible time, to minimize radiation exposure. The sills separating the windows are thick with mechanical arms, claws, magnetic clamps, smart cables, and other manipulators. (A pellor, in Latin, means “a thing that pushes,” just as a tractor means “a thing that drags.” Pellors usually push things into place rather than tow them.)

  eva: pronounced ee-vuh. Any trip outside the main vessel, whether inside a pellor or in an evasuit. The term comes from EVA, a twentieth-century acronym for Extra Vehicular Activity. (In Latin extra means “outside.”) Nobody at the time of this story remembers that, any more than you remember that radar once stood for RAdio Detection And Ranging or scuba stood for Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus. To them, an eva is just an eva.

  LOX: liquid oxygen. A basic material in space operations since the very beginning of space travel.

  Free fall: the condition of moving without resistance to gravity, going where the gravity takes you. Galileo’s cannonballs dropped from the tower of Pisa were free falling. So are objects in orbit. The path of Virgo in free fall is not a straight line but a very long curve around the sun; the engines don’t so much speed it up, slow it down, or move it sideways as they change which curve around the sun it is riding on.

  Similarly, Charlie Tang’s pellor was also in orbit around the sun—unfortunately for him, not the same orbit as Virgo, which he was trying to return to. What Charlie had to figure out was which orbit he could get into with the fuel he had, such that his orbit would intercept the ship’s orbit, at the same velocity as the ship, at exactly the same time the ship would be there. All this as the ship changed its orbit constantly. It would be an interesting exercise for a third-year engineering student’s semester project; Charlie Tang was solving it in a slowly tumbling closet-sized box.

  “Nineteen days in a pellor? How did he live?”

  “He was tied to a LOX tank, remember. So he had something to breathe if he could get to it. He hand-rigged a tap and hose, all out of parts in the general repair kit, in evasuit gloves, and got air flowing with about half an hour to spare. Then he rebuilt the damaged nozzle on the pellor’s thruster, and hand-navigated back to the ship, which is a real good trick, because when one free-falling object is trying to catch another, the shortest path is not just to aim straight at it, and it’s anything but intuitive.”

  “Wow. So what’s Tang’s Rule?”

  “I was getting to that but I was enjoying the story first, kiddo. Charlie stretched his two days of rations out as long as he could, but he still ran out of food three days before he got back. He always said that first meal on return was the best he’d ever had. What all us evalists are grateful to him for is that he hammered out a deal with management so that every pellor always goes out with food, plus enough water and air-recycling capability, to last a month for a crew of four. Tang’s Rule makes survival more skill and less luck, and I suppose it might save my life someday, and”—she grins, enjoying her bragging—“I used to bunk close enough to Tang to hear him snore.”

  Notes for the Interested, #9

  Virgo’s pod —the reason for the ship

  The pod is a double-hulled cylinder, 210 meters across by 1 kilometer long. Between the inner and outer hulls there is a 2-meter separation, filled with water to block radiation. Inside the inner hull, six sections run almost the length of the pod. Because the pod rotates on its long axis to supply artificial gravity, a person inside the pod experien
ces “down” hullward, and the apparent gravity varies inversely with distance from the center. Thus there is milligravity (if the object weighs 1 tonne on Earth it will weigh 1 kilogram on the inner hull) if you are standing on the inner hull, zero gravity if you are on the centerline of the coretube, and proportionate gravity in between: if you are 40 meters above the hull the gravity is 60% milligravity (1 kilogram weight on Earth=0.6 grams at that position).

  If you sliced through the ship crosswise, you would see the sections forming a hex, looking like slices of a pie cut into six pieces. Thus each section is a little over 100 meters across on the “floor” (inner hull) and only about 5 meters across at the “ceiling,” 100 meters above.

  The six sections are:

  the Pressurized Cargo Section, which is filled with room-temperature air and used for transporting things that would be damaged by vacuum or extreme heat or cold

  Vacuum Cargo Sections 1 and 2, which are kept in vacuum and carry mostly bulk cargo like pre-built houses, shipping containers of flour, or specialty machine parts

  Farm Section 1, 2, and 3, which grow food for the ship and recycle its waste, air, and water.

  To keep the load balanced, cargo and farm sections alternate.

  On the centerline of the pod, a 5-meter across coretube, nearly without gravity, runs the length of the ship. People use it as a shortcut, flying or jumping to the door nearest their work.

  At the nose of the pod, the spire sticks about 40 meters into space, a tall thin tower where caps can dock and cargo can be loaded in directly; the tip of the nose spire is a small observation bubble. At the tail of the pod, the crew bubble attaches to a “tail disk,” a disk-shaped whorl of corridors through which the crew go to and from duties in the pod. Just noseward of the tail disk, off the coretube, partly enclosed in the Pressurized Cargo Section, there is an auxiliary crew area, with cockpit, galley, bunk room, infirmary, restrooms, and everything that the crew of Virgo might need if some or all of them had to leave their quarters in the crew bubble and take shelter in the pod.

  Most of Farm Section 1 is being prepared for planting. Old vegetable beds are being sterilized and filled with a mixture of sand and composted organic waste. We airswim past a lot of tanks and plumbing, and stacked bags of soil. It’s like a low-grav gardening store.

  The Forest is a hundred-meter-square grove of geneered trees at the nose end of Farm Section 1. The trees only have to support a thousandth of the weight they would on Earth, but their wood is as strong as it is anywhere, so they’re geneered to grow into impossibly long and spindly spearheads whose tips all fit into the narrow upper space. Immense clusters of fruit and nuts—a dozen varieties on each tree—hang from every short branch of the hardwoods; a hedge of 5-meter-high conifers along the perimeter blocks the view of metal walls and doors, adding to the feeling of a clearing in the forest.

  “The onboard kids love getting picking duty,” Destiny says. “It means spending a day airswimming around from branch to branch, grabbing oranges and walnuts, apples and avocados, pecans and peaches, hanging out on the limbs, eating all they want, and being thanked for bringing so much back.”

  We stand on the hull, at the bottom of the Forest. The light is green and moist, with a glow like the sky overhead coming down through the dense branches. A fiber optic system captures sunlight from the hull and feeds it to light ports on the coretube overhead, sending down the light the trees need, mixing with beams from the windows below. The golden sun flashes up through glass-covered pools every other minute and a half, turning the space from twilight to bright day; a moment later it’s back to twilight, and stars shine through the crystal clear water at your feet.

  “I really hope the tour comes this way,” I say. “Marioschke, our crazy hippie mystic girl, is ultra into plants and growing things.”

  Destiny grins and pulls out her wristcomp. (A wristcomp. Like Glisters and F.B. wear. Emblems of anti-fashion. I guess you have to forgive your favorite aunt, though, no matter what.) She makes me spell Marioschke and relays that suggestion. She probably thinks I’m a nice person for making it, instead of a sneak and a traitor.

  I bombard Destiny with questions; Crazy Science Girl is ultra, ultra back. I can only hope no camera is watching, because the only hooks that could be splyctered out of this would be something like, Self-Styled Sophisticated Bad Girl Susan Tervaille Is Brain-o Dork Inside! Nothing is more splycterable than the humiliation of inconsistent styling.

  But after a few minutes of exploring in the Forest, airswimming up to get fresh pears right off the tree, and eating them with our legs wrapped around the branches, somehow when I think about meeds and hooks and all that sheeyeffinit, the only thought that follows is, So what?

  I lie on my back on the thick, soft carpet of grass, next to Destiny, looking up through the branches at the diffuse glow of the piped light, savoring the change from dim green to brilliant gold, turning in the dark times to watch the stars wheeling across the watery window beside me.

  “Is it ever night here?” I ask.

  “They opaque the windows for four hours of total dark; some of the trees have to have that. The Forest is a pretty complex piece of interactive design, but it was all dreamed up by one mind—Reggie, that sculptor we visited.”

  “It was a great idea.”

  “Absolutely great.” A crew guy, in his black coverall, is stretched out a couple meters away from us, holding hands with a woman in a yellow coverall, and he has a little girl—his daughter, I guess—lying back with her head on his chest. “This is your niece, Destiny?”

  “This is her. As you can see, every bit as bad as I said.” She’s beaming.

  The crew guy lifts his daughter up without waking her—she’s about six, but in the low gravity she weighs about what a dry bath towel does on Earth—and sets her to the side so he can comfortably turn over to face us. “Yeah, this place really preserves our sanity.”

  “If I lived here,” I say, “I’d come here every day.”

  “Some of us do that,” the crew guy says. “Right around shift change you’ll see maybe ten or twelve people.”

  It’s a good thing we didn’t decide to stow away in the Forest.

  Wow, I’m a good little spy.

  Just like that I’m back to hating myself.

  Bouncing through the maze of corridors in the tail disk, Destiny and I come to a ladder leading noseward. Via alternating ladders and corridors, we scramble to the aux cockpit. “Why is there a cockpit in the pod?” I ask.

  “Well, two reasons,” Destiny says. “First of all, the main server is here inside a superconducting Faraday cage. So if the connection to the main cockpit in the crew bubble ever goes down—say in a thousand-year solar storm or something—we can fly it from here if we have to. And also, it’s not likely, but if the crew bubble ever separates from the pod, then we can call up the AIs in this cockpit, slave everything, and have it rendezvous with us.”

  “The pod has its own engines?”

  “The pod has most of the engines on the ship—there are three on the tail end of the crew bubble, and eight on the pod. Really Virgo is like two docked spaceships that never undock. Both the crew bubble and the pod are designed so that in a worst-case scenario, we could ride them through an aerobrake into a low orbit around Earth or Mars, and wait to be rescued from there—which would be a lot easier for the Space Patrol than spending months or years chasing us, since an accident wouldn’t make us stop moving and they don’t fly any faster than we do.

  “And of course it’s always possible that a separation might happen while crews were over here working, and then they could use the cockpit to fly back to the crew bubble, which might take a few days. They wouldn’t be very comfortable, but still, the pod by itself is a much more comfortable spaceship than the one Paulo Kfouri and his crew flew to Mars the first time.” She swims forward to the console in front of the pilot’s chair, and taps a few keys.

  “You aren’t, um, flying the ship—”

  S
he laughs. “No, silly. It’s slaved right now, the screens show everything that’s going on in the main cockpit, but the only thing I can do locally is to select the display I want to see. I just want to see how they’re coming with Iceball-4—ha! Right now! Follow me!”

  Notes for the Interested, #10

  The language of spaceship architecture

  Because so many movies and novels imported their ideas about spaceships from our Earthly experience of sea ships, there has been a tendency to use nautical terms for the parts of science fictional spaceships, with the captain standing on the bridge and engines firing out the stern and so forth.

  The reality is that spaceships are developing not from sea ships, but from airplanes, and the names of the parts of a spaceship are much more likely to be drawn from there. So you will not find Virgo’s captain standing on the bridge talking to the first mate; you will find the commander in the cockpit, talking to the pilot. Virgo has a nose and a tail, not a bow and a stern, and its working surfaces are three-dimensional, not two, so crew members move noseward or tailward, hullward or coreward—not fore, aft, port, or starboard.

  In the almost-weightless coretube, Destiny says, “This part is fun. Watch yourself with all the handholds on the walls, don’t jam a finger.”

  She crouches down at the tail end of the coretube, one hand holding a handhold between her feet, and I copy her. She lets go very carefully of the handhold, braces her hands by her feet, and springs forward like an awkward, lunatic frog, shooting noseward through the coretube. I do the same, but I’m not as accurate as she is, so where she only touches the sides twice in her kilometer-long flight, I touch five times, taking advantage each time of the chance to plant my feet and fling myself forward harder. I’m moving pretty fast when I catch up with Destiny at the nose hatch; she has to brace herself to catch me. “Careful about building up momentum, kiddo. Just because there’s no gravity doesn’t mean inertia doesn’t matter.”