Saturn Run

11.

Three of them hadn’t been up.

Sandy, Becca, and John Clover were fine when they were strapped down—weightlessness had been more or less meaningless in the comfortable flight chairs, more like a science experiment than anything—but walking on their own was disconcerting: the combination of weightless limbs and shoes that stuck to the floor was odd. They shuffled off the Galahad, moving slowly; a group of cheerful station employees kept an eye on them, and pointed them off to their various destinations.

“Don’t worry about it,” Crow said to the three of them. Having been up before, he more or less knew what he was doing, and Fiorella had already disappeared. “When we get out to the habitats, we’ll get some weight back, and you’ll be fine.”

“I need someplace that I can work, right quick,” Becca said. “And I need just a few minutes’ access to the Big J before I talk to Fang-Castro.” The Big J was a government supercomputer.

“We can get you that. Figure something out?”

“I think so,” she said. She felt ungainly and floppy, and kept having to remember to put the next foot down.

A tall, thin woman in a jumpsuit said to Clover, “Dr. Clover? I’m Sandra Chapman. I’ve read your ‘Possible Aspects of Alien Cultures’ about two hundred times and I have a lot of questions for you. Here, let me take the cat. Put your foot down. Now the next one, down. You’ll get it.”

Becca, Clover, and their guides got on an electric cart, which whirred away, leaving Sandy behind with a heavyset, middle-aged balding fellow, who introduced himself as Joe Martinez.

“I’m a handyman up here. I’m going to show you around. We need to get your camera gear,” he said. “The other folks are going to take the lift out to one of the habitats, where they’ll have some ‘gravity.’ You and I’ll head over to Engineering. It’s down the axle where the solar arrays and physical plant are. It’ll be zero-gee the whole way, which will give you a chance to practice your movement skills.”

They found his camera case—Martinez said his personal effects would be delivered to his cabin and tied it into another cart. “You don’t actually sit down on these things so much as just hang on,” Martinez said, as they started down the central tube.

The inside of the axle looked like the inside of some… well… science fiction movie tunnel, Sandy decided. An ice-white rectangular tube lined with pipes ranging in size from five or six centimeters to thirty centimeters, all neatly labeled and color-coded.

Sandy held on and asked, “What are we doing?”

“I was told that you’re going to be the primary cinematographer, as well as the documentarian on this mission with Ms. Fiorella. You’ll have to do a lot of EVAs, so, we thought as long as you’re up here, we’d check you out on an egg, and let you figure out how to shoot from one.”

“Sort of like a test, to see if I can shoot from one,” Sandy said.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Martinez said. “Some people find eggs to be pretty intuitive, but I’ve had Ultra Stars up here who froze the first time we put them in one. We sort of need to find out where you’re at.”

“Gotcha,” Sandy said.

Sandy thought they might have been pulled a hundred meters down the axle when they arrived at what Martinez called the egg crate. A dozen eggs hung from overhead mechanical arms, each in a separate cubicle, much like a series of garages. Each cubicle was an air lock, with an elevator-sized area between two inner doors, and an outer door that opened to space.

“There are interlocks that prevent the space door from being open when either of the inner doors is open,” Martinez said. “We have two inner doors… just in case. In fact, everything has a just-in-case safety factor built in.”

He pointed at an egg: “This one is yours.”

They cycled through the air lock, and Martinez showed Sandy how to climb into the pilot’s seat, how to strap himself down. “You fly it in shirtsleeves—anything that would wreck an egg wouldn’t be salvaged by wearing a pressure suit. An egg sort of is a pressure suit—it’s just bigger, heavier, and more capable.”

“I was in one once,” Sandy told him. “At Disneyland.”

“Yeah, that’s a pretty good one,” Martinez said. “Not nearly as much fun, though—you still get dragged down by gravity. With these babies, you fly.”

Martinez spent an hour running him through the egg’s controls. At the basic level, there wasn’t much to it. The joystick and some push buttons controlled the low-power thrusters. Grips on either side controlled the manipulator arms. “Looks like an old-fashioned video game,” Sandy observed.

“You play those?” Martinez’s face lit up.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with them. Played ’em, took ’em apart, put them back together again. Sometimes they still worked when I got done with them.”

“What was your best old game?” Martinez asked.

“Jeez… if you put a gun to my head, I’d say, Hi-Speed Ass-Teroids.”

Martinez: “No! You got one?”

“Somewhere. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the left-hand wiper, though.”

“Oh, man. You gotta get that up here.”

When Sandy had the major controls down, Martinez asked, “You wanna go out and play in the yard?”

“Can we?”

“That’s why we’re here.”

Martinez slaved Sandy’s egg to his own, so that he could override Sandy’s controls if he needed to. “That’s not likely unless you get really disoriented. The thing is equipped with safeties up the wazoo. You can’t spin it too fast or ram it into anything. Proximity and acceleration sensors and overrides won’t allow it. You can’t blow yourself out of orbit. And if you think of some other way to wreck it… don’t do it.”

“Gotta take my cameras,” Sandy said.

“Yeah. There’s an equipment rack just to the left of your seat,” Martinez said. “I’ll take us free of the dock. Once we’re well clear of the station, I’ll let you mess around for a while and then I’ll hand the controls over to you and you can try it for real.”

When Sandy was set, Martinez moved to the next air lock over and strapped himself into another egg: Sandy could watch him through a hardened glass window that separated the two compartments.

A few seconds later, Martinez spoke to him through a speaker set into the bulkhead behind his head: “You ready?”

“All set.”

“Opening the air locks.”

The outer doors rolled back, and the overhead mechanical arm pushed them out of the station, then retracted. They were floating free, and Martinez said, “I’ll take us out to the playground.”

They slowly jetted away from the station, and Sandy had his first good, long look at the Resort.

The living modules, the habitats, rotated about the main axle at a leisurely one revolution per minute, attached by hundred-meter-long elevator shafts at both ends, which conveyed personnel and cargo to and from the center axle. Computer-controlled counterweights piggybacked on the shafts, a few tons of dead weight that slid in and out to keep everything in balance as equipment and personnel moved around the modules.

The one RPM rotation of the habitats produced enough centrifugal force to simulate one-tenth of Earth gravity in the living quarters. Because of the distance between the tubes and the axle, the rotation actually looked quite swift from Sandy’s viewpoint outside the ship. An egg that was motionless relative to the center axis, if struck by a moving tube, would be batted away like a tennis ball. The egg’s proximity alerts would not permit that, and it had never happened, but it was a theoretical possibility, given a dead egg.

The habitats themselves were squarish tubes, ten meters on a side and a hundred meters long, with meter-thick walls. The walls were slabs of self-healing structured foam that was less dense than air. The foam was inter-layered with ceramic-composite and carbon fiber fabric, designed to be resistant to micrometeorite impacts. Anything smaller than a millimeter or so shattered against the fabric layers in the wall.

A centimeter-sized rock could punch its way entirely through and exit the far side, but that wasn’t a fatal accident as long as it didn’t hit anyone on its way through. The foam could fill in a several-centimeter-diameter hole in seconds. In the thirty years the station had been operational, an impact like that had happened only once. A researcher’s quarters had been trashed as it went through, but she’d been working, so all she suffered was considerable aggravation and the irrevocable loss of a childhood teddy bear that had been unlucky enough to be in the meteorite’s path.

When they were a few hundred meters out, Martinez said, “I’m giving you your controls. Try not to screw it up, but if you do, I’ve still got you.”

“Got it.” Sandy sat there for a minute, looking around. Strapped into the egg’s chair, he was as comfortable as he had been on the shuttle. Not even his subconscious had to think about what to do with body parts and zero-gee. All that surfing: sometimes you’d get driven under by a big wave, and you needed to relax, and let it happen, but always remain aware of where “up” was. Where the air was.

And the view here was much better than anything he’d had in the Pacific: his own personal window into the universe.

“You just gonna sit there?” Martinez called.

“Just soaking in the view. You’ve got one hell of a backyard,” Sandy said. He started to laugh, and didn’t stop for a moment, his first good laugh since the day he left for Argentina. He felt like somebody had just taken two hundred pounds of lead off his back.

Martinez laughed with him, the pure joy of being outside.

They worked it for an hour, Martinez pushing Sandy to react more and more quickly to weird, unnatural commands. He fumbled a few times, but got it right more often than not. As they worked, station personnel would sometimes pause at a nearby view window and watch them play.

For some reason that Sandy didn’t know at the time, the station wall behind the port was painted black. He found out later that the paint job cut down internal reflections, so if you were contemplating, say, the Milky Way, you could really see the Milky Way. What he saw with his art history eye, though, was that when the station personnel paused by the window, framed in a rectangle slightly wider than it was high, they looked like paintings by Caravaggio.

Sandy unhitched the lid of his camera case and pulled out a Red. He pressed it up against the egg’s window, using the front-edge electro-adhesive grips to hold it in place. Then he nudged the controller and sent the egg into a very slow spin, doing a fifteen-second pan of Habitat 1, the earth, and the black, starry space surrounding it all.

He killed his rotation with the window facing the station and did a slow zoom-in on the viewing port. He moved closer, and closer, until he was hovering just outside, and his proximity alarm beeped.

Martinez said, “You’re getting pretty tight there.”

“I know,” Sandy said. “Give me a second.” Sandy unstuck the Red, selected a 100mm zoom setting. A crewman walked past the window, paused to look at the egg hovering outside, then went on, but Sandy had time to do a basic reading on the light coming off his face.

“Hey, Joe, how much of a hassle would it be to get Fiorella over by that observation window?”

“Depends on what she’s doing,” Martinez said. “We’ve got links to all you new guys, let me try her.”

“Thanks.”

Joe came back a moment later. “She’s at Starbucks, probably fifty meters away. What’s up?”

“Can you link me to her?”

“Sure. Hold one…”

Fiorella came up: “What?”

“I need you to walk fifty meters down the hall, or whatever, to the viewport. I’m outside in an egg. I want to look at the light on your face. Do an establishing shot.”

After a second of silence, probably calculating exactly how much she hated him, Sandy thought, Fiorella said, “Okay.”

A minute later, she appeared at the window. The reflected sunlight off her hair was spectacular, maybe too spectacular.

“What do you want me to do?” she asked.

“Let me get a read…” Sandy thumbed down the red-gain, just a bit, because he wanted to keep the play of light off her hair, added a touch of color to her face, brought up her cheekbones, deepened a few shadows, then said, “Look sort of pensively off to your left, as though you’re watching construction work…. Tip your head just a millimeter or so to the right, I need to get that reflection off your nose…. Step five centimeters back…. Okay, hold that… one, two, three. Now slowly, slowly turn back to your right, turn your shoulder as you survey the scene…. Shit, I’m losing your hair. Let’s do that again. I need to make the background a little denser, and I need you to do all that over again, and talk, tell people what you’re seeing out there.”

They worked it for five minutes, then Sandy said, “Okay, I got it.”

“Send it to me,” Fiorella said.

“Don’t have your phone number.”

He could see her sub-vocalizing, talking to her implants, and then she said aloud, “You should have it.”

Sandy checked his wrist-wrap, saved the number, and sent the vid file. “You’ve got the file. I’ll talk to you when I get back inside.”

Martinez called: “You ready to go back in?”

“I’m ready, but I don’t want to.”

“I’m getting hungry out here.”

“Then let’s go. I’ve got some vid to look at.”

Inside the air lock, Sandy popped the egg’s door, then relaxed back in the seat, pulled the monitor out of the Red, and skipped through his survey footage to the shots of Fiorella. Martinez cycled through the double doors to look over his shoulder.

When the last of the shots ran out, Sandy asked, “What do you think?”

“You’re a natural on the egg. You could get a job up here. And if Fiorella doesn’t like that vid, she’s nuts. She’s a redheaded Venus.”

“Thank you. Listen, how hard is it to alter the canopy on the egg?”

“What do you need?”

“I need to inset some ports. I need to take out a few chunks of standard glass and replace it with optical glass. Shooting through the standard canopy glass degrades the image. That’s okay for the propaganda vid, but if we want the highest level of detail on the documentary stuff, I’ll need optical glass.”

“I can do the insets if you can get the glass, and if it can pass the stress tests,” Martinez said.

“We’d probably need some clip-on covers—lens caps—when we’re not actually using the glass, protect it from scratches.”

“We’ve got a good fabrication shop up here, shouldn’t be a problem,” Martinez said. “Shoot me some specs on size and I’ll print them for you.”

“I’ll talk to Leica, see what they can get us,” Sandy said. “I’ll try to get the specs to you soon as I hear from them.” He thought for a moment. “Is your stuff sophisticated enough to print a guitar?”

“You gotta be kidding me—you play?”

“Yeah. You too?”

“I’ve printed maybe twenty guitars since I’ve been here,” Martinez said. “Shoved all but two of them into the recycling, but I’ve got a Les Paul replica that’s so sweet you won’t believe it. Right now, me and another guy are about halfway done printing a piano—like a whole fucking grand piano with strings—but making pianists happy is a lot harder than getting a guitar right.”

“We could start a band,” Sandy said, with his toothy grin.

“We got a band—in fact, there are five or six bands, if string quartets count as bands,” Martinez said. “Music is big up here. Everybody’s a specialist in something, with not a lot of overlap. Music is one thing you can do in low gravity without complications, and it’s a good way for people to get together.”

They headed back down the corridor to the lift that would take them to Habitat 1, talking about cameras, video games, and guitars—a friendship being formed. On the way, Sandy’s wrist-wrap tingled: Crow.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“What’d you do?” Crow asked.

“I was getting checked out on an egg,” Sandy said.

“I mean, what did you do with Fiorella?”

“Took some pictures of her. Why?”

“She mentioned that it’s barely possible that she might be able to work with you, after all.”