Orbital Decay Read online

  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

  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

  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.