I had feared, in those first few moments, that seeing this little bundle of dribble floating through the cabin would make some of the passengers queasy. I was just starting to tell myself I was wrong when I heard the first retching heave from behind me. It finally caught up with them; the baby’s antics had taken their minds off that falling sensation you get when zero g first hits you. But now the law of averages took its toll.
One woman. That’s all it took. One of those gargling groans and inside of two minutes almost everybody in the cabin is grabbing for their whoopie bags and making miserable noises. I turned up the air vent over my seat to max, but the stench couldn’t be avoided. Even Melinda started to look a little green, although Larry was as unaffected as I was and little T.J. thought all the noise was hysterically funny He threw out raspberries at everybody.
When we finally got docked we needed the station’s full medical crew and a fumigation squad to clean out the cabin.
Three couples flatly refused to come aboard Heaven; green as guacamole, they canceled their vacations on the spot, demanded their money back, and rode in misery back to Earth. The other eight couples were all honeymooners. They wouldn’t cancel, but they looked pretty damned unhappy.
I went straight from the dock to my cubbyhole of an office in the hotel.
“There’s gotta be a way to get rid of that baby,” I muttered as I slid my slippered feet into their restraint loops. I tend to talk to myself when I’m upset.
My office was a marvel of zero g ergonomic engineering: compact as a fighter plane’s cockpit, cozy as a squirrel’s nest, with everything I needed at my fingertips, whether it was up over my head or wherever. I scrolled through three hours worth of rules and regulations, insurance, safety, travel rights, even family law. Nothing there that would prevent parents from bringing babies onto a space station.
I was staring bleary-eyed at old maritime law statutes on my display screen, hoping that as owner of the hotel I had the same rights as the captain of a ship and could make unwanted passengers walk the plank. No such luck. Then the phone light blinked. I punched the key and growled, “What?”
A familiar voice said coyly, “Senator Meyers would like the pleasure of your company.”
“Jill? Is that you?” I cleared my display screen and punched up the phone image. Sure enough, it was Sen. Jill Meyers (R-NH).
Everybody said that Jill looked enough like me to be my sister. If so, what we did back in our youthful NASA days would have to be called incest. Jill had a pert round face, bright as a new penny, with a scattering of freckles across her button of a nose. OK, so I look kind of like that, too. But her hair is a mousy brown and straight as a plumb line, while mine is on the russet side and curls so tight you can break a comb on it.
Let me get one thing absolutely clear. I am taller than she. Jill is not quite five-foot three, whereas I am five-five, no matter what my detractors claim.
“Where are you?” I asked.
“Roughly fifty meters away from you,” she said, grinning.
“Here? In Heaven?” That was not the best news in the world for me. I had come up to my zero g hotel to get away from Jill.
See, I had been sort of courting her down in Washington because she’s a ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee and I needed a favor or two from her. She was perfectly happy to do me the favor or two, but she made it clear she was looking for a husband. Jill had been widowed maybe ten years earlier. I had never been married and had no intention of starting now. I like women way too much to marry one of them.
“Yes, I’m here in Heaven,” Jill said, with a big grin. “Came up on the same flight you did.”
“But I didn’t see you.”
“Senators ride first class, Sam.”
I made a frown. “At the taxpayers’ expense.”
“In this case, it was at the expense of Rockledge International Corporation. Feel better?”
No, I didn’t feel better. Not at all. “Rockledge? How come?”
“I’ve been invited to inspect their research facilities here at their space station,” Jill said. “Pierre D’Argent himself is escorting me.”
I growled.
Maybe I should tell you that the Rockledge space station was built of three concentric wheels. The outermost wheel spun around at a rate that gave it the feeling of regular Earth gravity: one g. The second wheel, closer to the hub, was at roughly one-third g: the gravity level of Mars. The innermost wheel was at one-sixth g, same as the Moon. And the hub, of course, was just about zero gravity. The scientists call it microgravity but it’s so close to zero g that for all intents and purposes you’re weightless at the hub.
I had rented half the hub from Rockledge for my Hotel Heaven. Zero g for lovers. OK, so it’s not exactly zero g, so what? I had built thirty lovely little minisuites around the rim of the hub and still had enough room left over to set up a padded gym where you could play anything from volleyball to blind-man’s bluff in weightlessness.
Once I realized that most tourists got sick their first day or so in orbit, I tried to rent space down at the outermost wheel, so my customers could stay at normal Earth gravity and visit the zero g section when they wanted to play—or try weightless sex. No dice. D’Argent wouldn’t rent any of it to me. He claimed Rockledge was using the rest of the station—-all of it—for their research labs and their staff. Which was bullcrap.
I did manage to get them to rent me a small section in the innermost wheel, where everything was one-sixth g. I set up my restaurant there, so my customers could at least have their meals in some comfort. Called it the Lunar Eclipse. Best damned restaurant off Earth. Also the only one, at that time. Lots of spilled drinks and wine, though. Pouring liquids in low gravity takes some training. We had to work hard to teach our waiters and waitresses how to do it. I personally supervised the waitress training. It was one of the few bright spots in this black hole that was engulfing me.
“How about lunch?” Jill asked me, with a bright happy smile.
“Yeah,” I said, feeling trapped. “How about it?”
“What a charming invitation,” said Jill. “I’ll see you at the restaurant in fifteen minutes.”
Now here’s the deal. The first big industrial boom in orbit was just starting to take off. Major corporations like Rockledge were beginning to realize that they could make profits from manufacturing in orbit.
They had problems with workers getting space sick, of course, but they weren’t as badly affected as I was with Heaven. There’s a big difference between losing the first two days of a week-long vacation because you’re nauseous and losing the first two days of a ninety-day work contract. Still, Rockledge was searching for a cure. Right there on the same space station as my Hotel Heaven.
Anyway, I figured that the next step in space industrialization would be to start digging up the raw materials for the orbital factories from the Moon and the asteroids. A helluva lot cheaper than hauling them up from Earth, once you get a critical mass of mining equipment in place. The way I saw it, once we could start mining the Moon and some of the near-approach asteroids, the boom in orbital manufacturing would really take off. I’d make zillions!
And I was right, of course, although it didn’t exactly develop the way I thought it would.
I wanted to get there first. Start mining the Moon, grab an asteroid or two. Megafortunes awaited the person who could strike those bonanzas.
But the goddamned honeymoon hotel was bleeding me to death. Unless and until somebody came up with a cure for space sickness, Heaven was going to be a financial bottomless pit. I was losing a bundle trying to keep the hotel open, and the day D’Argent became Rockledge’s CEO he doubled my rent, sweetheart that he is.