Orbital Decay Read Free Page A

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