“And tomorrow’s agenda?” he asked.
A wintry smile, all the colder for the desert heat he had just been in. “You will be given that if you are invited back.”
Flaco saw what she meant when he entered the auditorium where the opening meeting was to be held. It was laid out like a movie theater, with a stage and a screen up front and rows of seats on risers. There were easily two hundred men in the room. Some pasty-faced Anglos, but mostly a mixture of bronze and ebony. Young, strong, and immortal. Thin, burly, bearded, clean-shaven. A handful of women, each one the target of a dozen men. Flaco was surprised that so many men had volunteered their personal time just for the chance to be picked for one of the fifty slots.
Eh, ¿por qué no? The pay was generous, and later you could point to the sky and tell your grandchildren that you had built a star. It would be a thing to be proud of.
The men sat scattered around the auditorium, some chatting in groups, twisting around in their seats and leaning over the backs, or standing in the aisles, or lounging against the wall under the projection booth—chattering in a hodgepodge of languages that blended into an unintelligible buzz. Most of them sat alone, slouched in the padded seats with their arms folded, waiting for something to happen. A few were sleeping.
There was a group of ten men—mostly chunky, mostly blond and paleeyed—who sat together and talked among themselves in a gargling language. Russians, Flaco guessed. He knew the “consortium” that was building the station included Russians—and Brazilians, Germans and Japanese, as well—and he wondered if there were some sort of quota system in place: so many welders or pipe fitters from each nationality. Flaco wouldn’t mind losing his slot to a better rigger—well, not too much—but it would not be right to lose it to a lesser man just because the lesser man held the right passport.
Tonio caught up with him and, a few moments later, Sepp. The German was frowning over his packet of forms. Tonio pointed. “I see three seats,” he said and started down the aisle. Flaco and Sepp followed him. Funny, thought Flaco, how three men who have just met can become partners. He wondered how many of the other chatting groups were like his own: friends who were also strangers.
The first speaker was a suit, so Flaco gave him a special sort of attention. The suits would not make the decisions that mattered (unless there really were quotas to be juggled) but the suits usually knew all about “purpose and scope.” Some guys didn’t care about that. As long as you did what the crew boss told you and you got paid on time, what did it matter? But a man who knew what he was building and why did a better job building it, and that might matter when they picked the crew.
The video they showed on the pixwall was beautiful, backed by lively, inspiring music and narrated by a voice underlaid with lots of authoritative bass. Flaco would have sworn the space station was the real thing, if he hadn’t known the “real thing” was still unfinished. And maybe parts of the video were real. Who knew? That movie last year where the star had OD’d in the middle of filming—you could hardly tell which scenes had the live actor and which the morphed reconstructions.
The video started with a view of a Space Shuttle launch while the Voice explained how the external tanks were once jettisoned to burn up over the Indian Ocean. “…But Ourkind soon found a use for these enormous containers. A frugal sense of recycling, plus a dream…”
Animation, Flaco decided as the camera “followed” the Shuttle all the way into orbit itself. Space launches were cheaper than they used to be, but they still wouldn’t have had a “camera ship” flying side-by-side with the Shuttle, would they? Flaco held his breath when the background faded to the black of space. The pixwall was a maxscreen wraparound, so it was almost like wearing a virtchhat, which was almost, like, for real.
“Now, when the Shuttle is finished with the external tank, NASA drops it off in orbit for pick-up.” The video showed a smiling Shuttle pilot waving through his front viewport to a crew of spacesuited figures wearing the LEO “Roaring Lion” icon.
“Our guys,” the Voice continued in a folksy tone, “attach the booster rockets, just as the great Forrest Calhoun and Ned DuBois did when they salvaged the very first external tank in 2007—after a programming error accidentally put it into orbit.”
Flaco flexed his hands and studied the action intently. Animation or actual film, that was a rigging job. He nudged Tonio with his elbow and jerked his head at the screen. Tonio grinned and nodded. Yeah, they teach us the proper method, you bet, but it couldn’t be too hard if a couple of amateurs had done it first.
“LEO brings these tanks up to the construction site at orbit 250-E, where they are now being configured into a new space station…” Now Flaco was certain the video was morphed. He watched men stringing cables and nudging the huge tanks into line, head-to-tail to form the hub shaft, fitting the others in pairs around it to form the pinwheel, ready now for the welders, pipe fitters, and other trades. Construction wasn’t anywhere near that stage yet. “…Each tank provides over two-and-a-half kilosteres of living space. That’s ninety thousand cubic feet. Enough cubic for a hundred people to live and work comfortably. More, if they’re friendly.”
People living in cast-off containers sounded a lot like a shantytown to Flaco, and some of the newsnets were calling it just that. But none of those newsers were hiring riggers, and something cheap-but-real beat a deluxe daydream any day.
When the rah-rah and the flag-waving were done—and they really did wave flags: full of stars, stripes, double-headed eagles, and all sorts of stuff to celebrate the international nature of the job—the suits handed things over to the hard hats, who gave a series of briefings a whole lot more practical and a whole lot less inspiring. The morgue shot of the Brazilian welder whose hardsuit had ruptured sent a dozen of the men out of the auditorium. One of the external tank modules would be named Anselmo Takeuchi in his honor, they announced. Cold comfort to his family, but a grander monument than most construction workers ever got. Flaco hoped they wouldn’t have to name all twelve tanks, but figured there’d be more than one placard welded in place before completion.
A good thing indeed that Serafina was not here…
One of the men they introduced was Morris Tucker, who would boss one of the rigging crews. Tucker stood and nodded to the assembly, but didn’t speak; but then he never had been a man of words. Flaco had worked with Tucker on a couple of O&P jobs. He figured “Meat” would be a tough boss, but fair; and hoped he would draw the man’s crew after he was picked.
After the introductions, O&P marched them through a battery of medical and psychological examinations. Flaco’s original application had included a complete physical exam, but LEO was taking nothing for granted. Doctors and nurses in white coats poked him and prodded him and extracted fluids by a variety of means, and they looked into places that he wouldn’t even let Serafina look.
In one room they put him in a virtch helmet and all of a sudden he was standing on a girder a long ways up in the air. He had to “walk” to the other end. When he glanced “down,” people and cars were so small they looked like pepper on a table cloth. When they told him to walk back again, the ground was so far down that airplanes flew below him.
He hated the pencil and paper tests most of all. A lot of the questions didn’t make any sense. Which would you rather be: a ballet dancer or a hockey player? What did that have to do with rigging a job? Ballet dancers were all swish, but hockey players were dumber than a stone. So, which was the right answer for getting the job? I’d rather be dumb, or swish? Psycho-testing. See if you’re a psycho. He wondered if the tests were really any good.