Space Inc (anthology)

Riggers by Michael E. Picray

The Solar Sail Factory Ship Inner Space cruised ten million miles above the plane of the ecliptic. If a rocket were launched nearly straight up from the North geographic pole of the Earth, it would have hit the Inner Space right in the center of its wheel spokes, where the main zero G factory works were located. Radiating outward from this center body was the structure that supported the solar sails. The ship’s wheeled shape seemed to be rolling through space as it spun to maintain the stability of the structure, and to keep tension on the fabric of the sails.

On the far side of the sun from the Inner Space, a sunspot formed. The opposing magnetic fields formed a loop between them that ran across the neutral line, thus achieving stability. As the sunspot rotated toward the Earth, the magnetic environment changed and the loop twisted, creating a shear that pointed along the neutral dividing line. The change in the magnetic field caused a filament suspended above the surface of the sun to collapse. Seconds later a solar flare, formed by a tremendous explosion of gases and solar material, and heated to one million degrees Celsius, leaped into the lower heliosphere at nearly 1800 kilometers per second, toward the area commonly known as inner space. At this temperature, electrons were stripped from component atoms and sent spaceward as ionized particles, accompanied by gamma rays and X-rays. A shock wave from this explosion raced across the intervening space.

On Earth, the solar weather forecasters sent out a general warning that a Coronal Mass Ejection, a CME, had occurred and applied their formulas to project the exact path of the Solar Particle Storm. The Solar Sail Factory Ship Inner Space was centered in that path in four dimensions. A specific warning was sent.

But aboard the Inner Space a small resistor in the electronic tracking system of the Main Radio Antenna Array, after working faithfully for nearly fifteen years, failed. Since the highly directional array still functioned within defined parameters, the redundant systems did not kick on-line and take over tracking. At a distance of ten million miles it doesn’t take much variance to miss a target. The highly-directional antenna array still functioned, but it was no longer pointed at the Earth.

Master Rigger John “Cap” Hardesty, senior rigger aboard the Inner Space, released the stay-brake. Centrifugal force began to act on the bright silver two-seat creeper’s boxy shape, and slowly began pushing it out Radial Arm Three’s guide wire toward the rim of the sail. At the same time, an automated weight began its journey out Radial Arm Eleven, providing the balance so necessary to the stability of the structure. The grabber-gears attached to the undercarriage of the creeper were crawling along the radial with agonizing slowness, metering its speed, keeping it from flying out to the rim and being flung into space. The seat next to Cap’s held Apprentice Rigger Bob “Ace” Harley.

“I’ve been aboard for two months,” Harley was saying, “and this is the first time I get to go out on the sails.”

Cap responded, “When I first came aboard, I lived to come out here.” He reached a hand forward and tweaked the tension adjustment on the Alpha set of clamps. They had a tendency to expand and drag as the friction heated them. Then he leaned back in the driver’s seat. “I got over it.”

Cap’s adjustment of the clamps required Harley to lean into his own control panel and loosen the forward set of grabbers so that they operated smoothly and didn’t bind on the cable. Cap watched him fuss and fidget with them, first turning the knob the wrong way and tightening, then nearly losing the wire as he loosened them too much. Although Cap saw everything, he said nothing. The kid had to learn, and hands-on experience was still the best teacher.

“Why don’t you like going out anymore?” Harley asked.

Cap continued to look out the port, listening to the muted ticking sound as the grabber-gears meshed with the radial track. Eventually he spoke. “What do they tell you kids these days when you come up here? What do they tell you about the dangers?”

“Well, they tell us that radiation can kill us, but everybody knows that.” Harley thought back to his orientation training. “They tell us that working here is safer than being a farmer on Earth, that we’ll get less radiation than the farmer will. Oh, and they tell us to listen to you when you tell us how to do things so we don’t get hurt.”

Cap nodded his head. “That’s about what I figured.”

Harley looked startled. “Did they lie to us?”

Cap’s face acquired a grim smirk. “No. They didn’t lie. They just left out a few things. Like they probably used the words ‘on average’ when they told you that bit about the farmers and the radiation, didn’t they? What they told you is absolute truth, as far as it goes. Those radiation risk estimates they told you about are based on increased rates of cancer. But if you get zapped out here and die quickly, you’ll never have a chance to get cancer. You won’t even be a statistic.

“How do you think you got your job? Did you think we were building an addition to the factory and needed extra riggers?” Cap’s voice sneered, and then became hard and flat. “You are here because the guy you replaced isn’t, and I’m here to tell you that he didn’t get old and retire. I’ve been up here on rotation with Beta-partners for five years and I’m the senior rigger. What does that tell you? It should tell you that up here we live until we die, and that’s all we expect.” He paused. “They told you about Beta-partners, didn’t they?”

Harley looked confident. “Yes, sir. A Beta-partner is your opposite number so that you can rotate back to the Earth to rebuild muscle tone and bone mass, and therefore not become debilitated by working for extended periods in space. The Company can employ you longer that way and it spends less in training costs, allowing them to pay us more. I haven’t met my Beta-partner yet.”

Cap nodded his head. “You probably never will. You’re up, he’s down, with no overlap. You’re a smart kid. You know about redundancy in space systems? Your Beta is also your spare, your replacement if something happens to you. There is one advantage to the system for you, though. It allows you to get out of the radiation up here for a while.”

Harley nodded in understanding. Then he got a concerned look on his face. “Cap? What do we do if the gears slip?”

Cap could see all of Harley’s gauges from his own seat and had noticed the progress indicator showing zero progress some time ago. He had been wondering how long it would take the kid to notice. The kid was quicker than some, slower than others. Cap leaned over and looked at the indicator, then straightened up and looked out his porthole. “Sometimes not much,” he said and pointed out Harley’s port.

Harley looked outside and saw that their progress continued. Then he looked back at the indicator, which still said that the creeper wasn’t moving, and got a puzzled look on his face.

Cap reached under the control panel’s bottom lip and took a large screwdriver from a homemade rack. He gave the progress indicator gauge a hard whack with the handle. The gauge immediately jumped from zero to their earlier indicated speed. “Sometimes ya gotta do a field calibration with a technical tool,” he explained. “I used to keep a little tack hammer under there, but the brass figured out what I did with it and took it away from me. When they still didn’t replace the indicator, I ‘found’ that screwdriver in one of the shops and nobody’s the wiser.” Harley smiled, nodding. Cap went on to explain, “I think the indicator locking up like that has something to do with the centrifugal force out here near the rim. At C 20, we will weigh an apparent 1.5 times our Earth normal. Then, too,” he grinned as he put the screwdriver back, “some things just act differently out here.”

After he straightened up, he gave Harley a speculative look. “So, Ace. What made you want to come into space? The pay? Running away from an ugly girlfriend?”

Harley flushed. “You’ll laugh at me if I tell you.”

“No. I won’t. Trust me,” Cap encouraged and grinned benignly.

Harley chuckled. “Okay. I came into space because I wanted to be a part of it. I mean here we are, human beings expanding out into the universe, going out to explore the galaxy! This has got to be the grandest time in history.” He paused, and his face fell. “But most of the people down there don’t even pay attention to it anymore. We’re just part of the little lights in the sky. They don’t care.” He looked directly at Cap. “I want to be part of it. I want my kids and their kids to be able to say that their dad was up here doing something to help us get to the stars!”

Further small talk was suspended when the creeper lurched as it hit the end-of-radial stop block, which automatically shut down the grabber-gears and engaged the safety clamps.

Cap reached down and reengaged the stay-brake. “Well, here we are, Ace; the end of the line. Concentric Stiffener Ring #20, home of random effects, edge monsters, and the place voted most likely to need repair. You now know what it’s like to be on the edge of one of those toy disks the kids throw around.” He double-checked the safety equipment’s indicators, and his voice grew serious. “On this trip your primary function will be just to watch me. Next time, if you’re really polite and beg a lot, I might let you handle the waldos.”

The Master Rigger stood in order to reach a contraption that was all wires and joints with two gloves on the end. Then he leaned his body back and pulled until the contraption started to move toward him. He quickly put his forearms on the gloves and bore down with his full weight. The machine rode smoothly to just above his chair and then he sat down, putting the gloves on while Harley watched. Cap reached with the gloves to take hold of a helmet that was also wired and put it on. A display screen automatically folded down in front of Harley so he could see what Cap saw in the helmet, and Cap began giving voice commands.

“Butthead. Access C3. Repair arm to gross position nine zero degrees left, SS plus max extension.”

Then he started teaching Harley. “As you may be aware, waldos are remote manipulation units that allow us to work with things that are in hostile environments. To use them you need several things. First you need the computer’s name, which in this case is Butthead.” Harley grinned as Cap went on in a dry tone. “The next time we come out you’ll be sitting here. There will be an initialization sequence and, if it suits you, you can name the computer whatever you want. If you rename it, you’d better remember the name. It won’t work for you unless you do, and you can’t rename it.

“Second you’ll need an access code. When I tell them to, the central office will issue you one. No need to worry about someone else using it. It’s keyed to your voice.”

Harley looked puzzled. “Then why have a code? If it’s keyed to my voice, why can’t I just tell it what I want it to do?”

Cap sighed at the familiar question. “Because when they designed these systems, they didn’t think being ten million miles from Earth and moving at over 1.5 million miles a day just to keep up with the ball of dirt was sufficient security. The waldo is top secret equipment that has only been around since Adam and Eve got caught with their fig leaves down. How should I know why they did it? Sometimes I think they do things like this just to give us something to bitch about. So, of course, we oblige them.

“Third, you need to learn the abbreviations we use with the computer. For example…”

“I know them,” Harley interrupted. “They’ve had us memorizing them for the past two months and practicing with waldo simulators. You just told the computer to swing the arm out ninety degrees and as high as it would go over the sail surface.”

Cap turned so Harley could see his face through the helmet and winked. “You got the basics. There are some commands we taught the computers that the boss doesn’t know about. You’ll learn those in time.” As soon as he had the waldos in position, he nodded his head toward the screen. “Now watch this real close. The sail is thin enough to slip between one second and the next, and as fragile as anything ever made. That’s why we have to be out here fixing it all the time. If God so much as farts, we get a hole in it.

“Butthead, Access C3. Hold access code to terminate. View equals three meters squared.” The view on the screen widened until it showed the requested area. The reason the sensors were reporting slackness in the sail became readily apparent. They could both see that it had torn loose at the corner and was slowly flapping in the solar wind.

“Crap!” Cap said to himself. “The bugger is loose. There’ll be no safe, secure job today.” He put the waldos away and then called the ship. “Bridge, C3.”

The bridge answered, “C3.”

“Bridge, we have a corner tear at R3/C20.”

“Roger C3. I hear a corner tear at R3/C20. What do you recommend?”

Cap responded, “Recommend forty percent reduction of spin and five percent reduction of area, then EVA to reattach.”

“Roger. I hear a request for four zero percent reduction of ship spin and take in the sails to reduce total area by point zero fiver, then EVA to reattach. Stand by, C3.”

Cap turned to Harley. “They will, of course, deny the request because to reduce sail area means to slow down. To slow down means to fall behind the Earth. To fall behind means that they’ll have to fire the ion engines to catch up… which means they’ll have to spend a lot of money. The question our Captain and CEO is now asking himself is why he should spend a lot of money and risk his performance bonus just to make a sail rigger’s job easier. The answer will be that he shouldn’t, that’s what we get paid for, and he’ll say no. Which should take him about… five… four… three… two… one… zero seconds to do.”

Exactly when Cap said zero, the radio scratched to life. “C3, Bridge.”

“C3.”

“C3, it has been determined that the repair as described can be effected without reducing area or spin. You have permission to go EVA and proceed with repair while observing all safety regulations and procedures. Space weather is in a no-warning condition.”

“Roger, Bridge.” Cap turned the radio off.

Harley brightened. “Actually, this is something I’ve always wanted to do. To be outside with nothing between me and the stars but a sheet of plastic over my face!”

Cap smiled grimly and nodded his head. “Well, a sheet of plastic and a couple of million miles of vacuum. Helmet on, Ace! It’s time you and Daddy went for a little walk, and we have to hustle. If we don’t get that beast fixed in short order, it could shred the whole sail. In the time it takes to mount a replacement sail, the whole ship would be unbalanced. To prevent that, they’d have to roll all sails, which would get really expensive! Then, since it will no doubt be our fault, you and Daddy will be out of a job No brave new galaxy for you. No comfy retirement for me.”

“Ace? Take hold of this sail clamp.” Cap handed Harley a device that looked like a spring clip that was six inches wide with padded strips where the clamp faces would come together on each side of the sail, squeezing it between them. “Clamp it there. Yeah, good. Now, pull! Harder!” Waving a hand at Harley to ease off, Cap stopped pulling. “Crap. It’s not going to work. Whatever tore through here must have taken a piece of the sail with it. Take your clamp and tie it off with a snap line so it will hold that piece of sail about where it belongs.”

“Does this mean they’ll have to let tension off the sail so we can fix it?” Harley asked.

“Not in this life,” Cap laughed cynically. “No. What that means is that instead of taking us half an hour to fix, it will take two hours. See, we have to get another piece of sail from the patch box on the back of our sailcreeper, then fuse it to this one and seal it down with the sealing kit. The glue stuff takes a long time to set, and we have to hold the sail in place until it does. One screwup and we start all over.”

Cap heard the sigh in Harley’s suit-to-suit microphone. Then Harley said, “Well, it’ll give me more time to look around, I guess.”

Cap laughed. “Yeah. That’s about all you’ll be able to do while it sets.” Then he called the bridge. “Bridge, C3.”

“Bridge.”

“Bridge, mere is a piece of sail missing here. We plan to effect a patch. Estimated repair time is two hours. Submitting modified recommendation.”

“C3, stand by.”

On his suit-to-suit radio Cap said, “Why don’t we go ahead and get the patch gear out while they’re dithering. It’ll save us some time.”

Harley answered, “But don’t they have to authorize us to use that stuff?”

Cap shook his helmeted head. “So what else are they going to do? Tell us to forget it; the ship is beyond repair and to call a tow truck? Come on. This thin stuff is really hard to corral if it gets away from you. And grab a couple more snap lines. We’ll use them to tie the stuff down until we’re ready for it. You set something down out here on the rim without attaching it to something and ka-zing! Off it goes into the dark, and your pay gets docked for the replacement. Ever price a wrench that has to come ten million miles?”

Once all the equipment and supplies were gathered, they settled back to take it easy until the official go-ahead. They were lying on the inner surface of the concentric ring looking “up” toward the rest of the ship. The inner rings and sail supports blocked the ship itself from view, and the glare of the reflected sun on the sails blotted out the stars on the sunward side, but they could see the stars streaking overhead on the shadowed side of it as they wheeled through space.

Bored, Cap decided to tease the kid. “If someone was on the top of this thing up there and fell, could we catch them before they dropped past us into space?”

Harley responded, “Nope.”

“Why not?” Cap asked.

“Well, I could give you the long-winded answer that they would go the other way because of centrifugal force, but that wouldn’t be as much fun. I think that if someone fell this way instead of that way, it would have to be Fat Jim. Fat Jim is so fat I doubt that even centrifugal force could budge him if he didn’t want to go. So, if he fell this way, it would be on purpose, and I don’t know about you, but I’m not getting under him!”

“Fat Jim?” Cap asked, thinking perhaps the teasing had been turned around.

“Yeah. He’s a guy I met on Earth who really wanted to come up here. He got perfect scores on all his tests, but he just couldn’t make weight. I heard a Company guy say that no matter how good Jim’s scores were they could spend the same money and boost three riggers up here instead of just one. Last I heard, Jim was still down there trying, but they might have changed their minds. Let’s face it. There are only just so many crazy people around.”

The radio call intruded on their stargazing. “C3, Bridge.”

“C3.”

“You are authorized to proceed with the repair plan as modified. Bridge out.”

“C3, out,” Cap said. Then in the suit radio he said to Harley, “Okay. Time to get to work.” He grabbed a sail clamp and held it up for Harley. “Now this is a sail clamp. If it looks familiar and the name sounds familiar, that’s because I just showed you one of these and told you about it a little bit ago. You even used one. It is not a doohickey. It is not a thingamajig. It is not a dweedle-bob. Learning proper nomenclature is important.” He handed the sail clamp to Harley.

“Now, you take that sail clamp and clamp it onto the sail, but not just anywhere. You must first locate an imaginary line-segment that runs from one edge of the sail to the other edge of the sail with no tears intersecting that line.” He took a marker from a pocket in his suit and eyeballed the sail material. After several false starts, he put the soft marker point on the sail and made a decisive line across the corner. “So. Then you apply your sail clamp anywhere on the tear side of the sail material.” He watched as Harley did so.

“Good. Next, you take another sail clamp and do it again only at a different spot. When the entire line is ‘edged’ with sail clamps, we take the snap cords and snap them to the little snaps on the sail clamps, so, and then pull them until our guts pop out, then hook the little hook on the other end of the line to a cleat. Then we tighten the cord with the little ratchet provided for that purpose, thereby stretching the material until it is as firm as a board.”

They hooked the snap cords to the sail clamps, then hooked the other ends to the cleats and tightened them down. “Next, we measure the size of the hole, add a factor of fifty percent, and cut the material.” Cap took a small cutter from another pocket and expertly slashed the sail material before returning the cutter to the pocket and reclamping the unused material to the ring.

“Then we just lightly stretch the material over the sail to make sure it will fit; smooth that little corner over there.” Cap pointed to the errant material. Harley ran his gauntlet over the spot. Cap nodded the upper half of his suit. “Yeah. That’s good. Now we glue it down.” The “glue” was a tube of sealer. He rolled the material back, smeared the glue over the joint area, then replaced the patch material and pressed it down into the glue. The operation was completed when he took out a small electronic tool and slowly passed it over the joint, fusing the materials together much like a welder fuses metal. Then he stood up on me ring. “Now we put the material and tools away except for the cords and clamps that are in use, and wait. It takes approximately an hour for the sealant to achieve maximum strength.” Cap looked at his wrist chrono. “Tie yourself down if you’re going to take a nap,” he warned. “Keep in mind that although your safety tether will stop you from flying off into space, it won’t make you lighter. If you fall off, when you reach the end of your tether centrifugal force will make you weigh an apparent 1.5 to 1.75 times your Earth normal weight. Then a shuttle will have to go after you, as you won’t be able to climb the rope—especially in a suit that weighs as much as you do. All the tether really does is make you easy to find and hard to catch. Any questions?”

Harley was looking closely at the shiny sail material. “How do you see the edge of this stuff? It just kind of disappears into nothing.”

“With a microscope. We don’t worry about the actual edge too much. We just grab it where we can see it and go with it.”

Harley looked out over the sails. “So the sunlight hits the sails and pushes us along. Pretty simple, huh?”

Cap agreed. “Yeah. When a photon hits the sail, it bounces off and gives us a teensy push. The part I don’t get is they tell me that when it does that it gives up twice the momentum it had coming in. It’s like getting something for free. At least that’s what the physicists claim.”

Harley went on. “I don’t know how it does it either, but I know about the bouncing thing. When I was a kid, I had one of those solar cookers. You know, the ones where you stab a hot dog on a spike and the little curved dish focuses the sunlight on the dog and burns a hole in one spot while leaving the rest of it raw?”

Cap laughed, “I had one of those, too!”

They sat down on the ring to wait for the patch to set and watched the stars for a while without speaking. Then Harley broke the silence. “Are we there yet?”

They both laughed again and Gap looked at the kid. “Ace, you know? You’re all right. I think we’re going to get along.”

Harley looked out at the stars again and said, “I don’t know. I was looking for a rich wife. I don’t think you qualify.”

They both laughed as the stars wheeled overhead and they waited.

The radio instruments aboard the Inner Space first detected the CME as a slowly drifting type II radio emission, which was indicative of a CME heading their way. The onboard weather staff was rousted and sent to their computers and instruments to determine the severity and probable threat level and duration to the ship and its crew. Within fifteen minutes of the radio detection, the first highly-energized particles arrived. The weather section supervisor called the bridge on the intercom and suggested protective measures be taken just in case it turned out to be a bad storm. The watch officer called the Captain, who verbally approved the standard potential CME measures. The watch officer, after logging the series of orders, stuck his finger on the button for the external radiation storm warning light and then activated the GEMS unit, the Generated Magnetic Shield that mimicked the Earth’s own geomagnetic field and captured the ionized particles to keep them form getting to the main body of the ship.

Cap was thinking about his family dirtside when the radio intruded.

“C3, scratch skurtchh.”

Cap was puzzled. He keyed his radio. “Bridge, C3. You need something?”

The only answer he received was more noise. “Something wrong?” Harley asked.

“Don’t know. I think the bridge just tried to call me, but they were eaten by static. Maybe if I stand up I’ll get a better signal.”

The second Cap’s head cleared the thickness of the inner rings he knew they had trouble. A red strobe light was blinking on the top of the factory. “Ace, I want you to do just exactly as I say, no response, no argument, no bullshit. Got it? Now stand up and follow your tether to me.”

Harley did as he was told. As he was moving toward Cap, Cap raised his arm and pointed to the blinking red light. “Do you know what that is?”

Harley knew. They’d talked a lot about it in the classes. It was the radiation storm warning light.

Cap said, “That is a bucket full of shit and we are squarely in it.” Cap was afraid. He had never been outside when the red light was on. He could already see the auroral glow as the ship’s GEMS unit intercepted charged particles and protected the main ship. Out here on the sails, though, there was no GEMS.

As he began to lead Harley toward the creeper, he started to feel lighter on his feet. “They’re slowing the spin rate. That means they are going to take in the sails.” As he said it, he felt the direction that was “down” begin to change. “They’re precessing the wheel, too, turning it sideways so the peak of the radiation storm will hit the ship’s edge.”

Cap looked around as he moved, figuring angles. Then to Harley over the radio static he said, “We’re heading for the creeper. We gotta get behind it. That’s where we’ll have the most passive shielding.” Halfway to the creeper, they heard the high-pitched squeal of their active dosimeters. When they got to the shadowed side of the creeper, Cap squatted up against it and told Harley, “Hunker down. Smaller cross section gets you less total whole-body exposure.

“Bridge, C3 at D20. Mayday. Mayday.” Cap glanced toward the ship and saw the high-speed shuttle already on its way. Someone had remembered they were out here. He’d have to thank the officer of the watch.

The whole situation was unreal to Harley. He hadn’t enough experience or knowledge to be properly scared. So far it seemed like an adventure that he could write home about! “Funny,” Harley said. “I believe the fact that there is a ton of radiation zipping by me, but I don’t see a thing. A person should be able to see what might kill him.”

Cap nodded his helmet in agreement and pointed to the main ship. “You can, and that’s the worst view of it you’ll ever have… from outside the GEMS field.” They waited until the shuttle matched trajectories down light from the creeper. When the hatch opened, they scrambled inside and floated to the far side of the cargo area. The shuttle pilot in a full radiation protection suit looked at them to make sure they were clear of the hatch, then closed it and spun his craft around to streak for the ship’s hangar bay, bouncing them off of the aft bulkhead.

The fully suited hazard control crew met them in the hangar bay. They were escorted to a nearby decontamination area before their EVA suits were stripped off of them, then their Anti-Cs. The material was all put in a large foil bag with radiation symbols and the words “Danger! Radioactive Material” on it in case they had picked up charged particles. The radiation hazard evaluation team collected their dosimeter sets, the active dosimeters’ alarms screaming their electronic heads off at the indignity of being exposed to so much radiation. Then the riggers were scanned for discrete particles, issued new dosimeters, and escorted to sick bay. The medical team was waiting for them.

The doctor looked up from the records on his desk as Cap entered his office. “Master Rigger Hardesty? I thought you’d like to know that your lab results are in. How do you feel?”

Cap answered calmly. “Well, pretty much okay now that I quit barfing. I mean I think I might have a little temperature, and feel a bit tired, but I’ve felt worse. I’ll get over it.”

The doctor was nodding his head. “Well, that is consistent with your lymphocyte count and about what I expected.” The doctor made a note on the record before him, the silence in the room stretching as his stylus tapped data into the chart. Finally he sighed and looked into Cap’s expectant eyes. He quietly said, “I’m afraid I have some bad news for you. Your lymphocyte count was really low. It was just above fifty percent. Do you know what that means?”

Cap’s mind went blank, then seeing the doctor was waiting for a response said, “Yeah, I know what it means. It means I’ve got anywhere from a couple of hours to a week of feeling normal, then my body parts start falling off. How much radiation did we get?”

The doctor looked at the chart. “Not enough to make body parts fall off, at least. There’s actually no way to tell for sure exactly how much. It was significant. Apprentice Rigger Harley got the most, I believe.”

Cap stiffened in surprise. “How could he get the most? We were standing side by side! Besides, I have four-plus years of accumulated dose.”

The doctor shuffled the records and read for a second. “As of right now he’s almost caught up. We wondered the same thing, so we checked it out. A careful analysis of the sensors indicated that a heavy dose covered your location from the shadowed side. The preliminary incident report suggests that as we took in the sails, something—a gust, a surge of photons and charged particulate matter, maybe even a filament plug in the solar wind—caused a sail to dimple. In short, it acted like a dish and focused on your area. Rigger Harley must have been on the side the beam came in from. It’s the only explanation that works.”

Cap’s face became wary as he asked, “Are we treatable?”

The doctor nodded, “I believe so.”

“Believe so? Can’t you do better than that?” Cap demanded.

The doctor responded quickly. “I’m sorry, no. In a week, as soon as the storm is over and it’s safe to do so without getting you additional exposure, we’ll ship you both to one of the orbital treatment centers and get things rolling. While you’re up here, we’ll want to see you at least once a day at a consistent time. Meanwhile, you just take it easy and rest. I’m taking you off the duty roster. If your symptoms change, call us. We’ll do all we can for you, but we are not set up to do the major work in these cases. We can, however, make it somewhat easier for you, you know.” The doctor’s eyes had drifted down to the desk as he spoke. Now he made direct eye contact. “I’m terribly sorry. I do wish there was something more I could do.”

Cap nodded in understanding and resolved to put a good face on the situation. “That’s okay, Doc. It’s not your fault.” He rose slowly to his feet. “See you tomorrow, then. Thanks,” Cap said as he stuck out his hand and shook the doctor’s. Then he turned and left the office.

Harley was in the tiny waiting room, waiting for his turn. In a small voice he asked, “Well, Cap. We gonna live?”

Cap smiled grimly and said, “At least until we die, Ace.” Cap could see that the situation was finally becoming real to the kid. He sat down and watched Harley go into the office and close the door. A few minutes later he came out with a numb expression on his face and they both left the office and headed for the inner spaces where their rooms were and where there was less spin-gravity.

Feeling that something needed to be said, Cap finally spoke. “Well, Ace, looks like we’re going to be grounded.”

Harley cleared his throat before he said, “Yeah. Short career, huh? They said we were probably treatable.” Harley looked searchingly at Cap. “What do you think? I mean you’ve seen this sort of thing before. What are our chances?”

Cap turned and looked full at him and lifted an eyebrow. “Of what?”

“Of living. Of surviving this?” Harley’s eyes drilled into Cap’s.

Cap answered as he made the transition from light on his feet to weightless and began pulling himself along the passageway by grabbing the rings on the bulkheads. “Like I said before, Ace. We’ll live until we die. A man can’t ask for more man that, now, can he?”

As Harley less gracefully followed Cap along the grabrings, he thought about what Cap said and finally understood what Cap had been telling him since their first conversation. It was an attitude, a necessary attitude for those who worked under dangerous conditions. Soldiers, high steel walkers, deep-sea construction workers, space workers were all subject to it because they worked in unforgiving environments. “You live until you die.” He liked it. It struck him as funny that he had no sooner learned it than he wouldn’t need it any more.

Michael E. Picray was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and left the state at the first reasonable opportunity. A graduate of Northwest Missouri State University (‘91) with a major in accounting, he now resides in Missouri with his wife and such children who have not yet lost all patience with him and moved out. In “Riggers,” he combines firsthand knowledge of the blue-collar world with his experience as a U.S. Navy veteran to provide a view of working in space from near the bottom of the human food chain. “If we could send humanity into space without sending people, it would he perfect.” Mike hopes you enjoy the story and thanks Julie E. Czerneda, the editor, for putting up with him along the way.