«You let it bang into you and you’ll get crushed just like you would down on Earth.»
He went on like that for the whole shift. Harry tried to tune him out, wishing he had the powers of meditation that his great-uncle had talked about, back home. But it was impossible to escape the super’s screechy voice yammering in his helmet earphones. Little by little, though, Harry began to realize that the super was trying to educate him, trying to teach him how to survive in zero-gee, giving him tips that the training manuals never mentioned.
Instead of ignoring the little man’s insistent voice, Harry started to listen. Hard. The guy knew a lot more about this work than Harry did, and Harry decided he might as well learn if the super was willing to teach.
By the time they went back inside and began to worm themselves out of the spacesuits, Harry was grinning broadly.
The super scowled at him. «What’s so funny?»
Peeling off his sweat-soaked thermal undergarment, Harry shook his head. «Not funny. Just happy.»
«Happy? You sure don’t smell happy!»
Harry laughed. «Neither do you, chief.»
The super grumbled something too low for Harry to catch.
«Thanks, chief,» Harry said.
«For what?»
«For all that stuff you were telling me out there. Thanks.»
For once, the supervisor was speechless.
Days and weeks blurred into months of endless drudgery. Harry worked six days each week, the monotony of handling the big girders broken only by the never-ending thrill of watching the always-changing Earth sliding along below. Now and then the super would give him another impromptu lecture, but once they were inside again the super never socialized with Harry, nor with any of his crew.
«I don’t make friends with the lunks who work for me,» he explained gruffly. «I don’t want to be your friend. I’m your boss.»
Harry thought it over and decided the little guy was right. Most of the others on the crew were counting the days until their contracts were fulfilled and they could go back to Earth and never see the super again. Harry was toying with the idea of signing up for another tour when this one was finished. There was still plenty of work to do on the habitat, and there was talk of other habitats being started.
He spent some of his evenings with Goldman, more of them with the chemists who cooked up the recreational drugs. Goldman had spoken straight: The capsules were better than beer, a great high with no hangovers, no sickness.
He didn’t notice that he was actually craving the stuff, at first. Several months went by before Harry realized his insides got jumpy if he went a few days without popping a pill. And the highs seemed flatter. He started taking two at a time and felt better.
Then the morning came when his guts were so fluttery he wondered if he could crawl out of his sleeping bag. His hands shook noticeably. He called in sick.
«Yeah, the same thing happened to me,» Goldman said that evening, as they had dinner in her room. «I had to go to the infirmary and get my system cleaned out.»
«They do that?» Harry asked, surprised.
She tilted her head slightly. «They’re not supposed to. The regulations say they should report drug use, and the user has to be sent back Earthside for treatment.»
He looked at her. «But they didn’t send you back.»
«No,» said Goldman. «The guy I went to kept it quiet and treated me off the record.»
Harry could tell from the look on her face that the treatment wasn’t for free.
«I don’t have anything to pay him with,» he said.
Goldman said, «That’s okay, Harry. I’ll pay him. I got you into this shit, I’ll help you get off it.»
Harry shook his head. «I can’t do that.»
«I don’t mind,» she said. «He’s not a bad lay.»
«I can’t do it.»
She grasped both his ears and looked at him so closely that their noses touched. «Harry, sooner or later you’ll have to do something. It doesn’t get better all by itself. Addiction always gets worse.»
He shook his head again. «I’ll beat it on my own.»
He stayed away from the pills for nearly a whole week. By the fifth day, though, his supervisor ordered him to go to the infirmary.
«I’m not going to let you kill yourself out there,» the super snarled at him. «Or anybody else, either.»
«But they’ll send me back Earthside,» Harry said. Pleaded, really.
«They ought to shoot you out of a mother-humping cannon,» the super growled.
«I’ll beat it. Give me a chance.»
«The way your hands are shaking? The way your eyes look? You think I’m crazy?»
«Please,» Harry begged. It was the hardest word he had ever spoken in his whole life.
The super stared at him, his face splotchy red with anger, his eyes smoldering. At last he said, «You work alone. You kill yourself, that’s your problem, but I’m not going to let you kill anybody else.»
«Okay,» Harry agreed.
«And if you don’t start shaping up damned soon, you’re finished. Understand?»
«Yeah, but—»
«No buts. You shape up, or I’ll fire your ass back to Earth so fast, they’ll hear the sonic boom on Mars.»
So Harry got all the solo jobs: setting up packages of tools at the sites where the crew would be working next; hauling emergency tanks of oxygen; plugging in electronics boards in a new section after the crew finished putting it together; spraying heat-reflecting paint on slabs of the habitat’s outer skin. He worked slowly, methodically, because his hands were shaking most of the time and his vision went blurry now and then. He fought for control of his own body inside the confines of his space suit, which didn’t smell like a new car anymore; it smelled of sweat and piss and teeth-gritting agony.
He spent his nights alone, too, in his closet-sized quarters, fighting the need to down a few pills. Just a few. A couple, even; that’s all I need. Maybe just one would do it. Just one, for tonight. Just to get me through the night. I’ll be banging my head against the wall if I don’t get something to help me.
But the spider would tell him, «Fight the monster, Harry. Nobody said it would be easy. Fight it.»
The rest of the crew gave him odd looks in the mornings when he showed up for work. Harry thought it was because he looked so lousy, but finally one of the women asked him why the super was picking on him.
«Pickin’ on me?» Harry echoed, truly nonplussed.
«He’s giving you all the shit jobs, Twelvetoes.»
Harry couldn’t explain it to her. «I don’t mind,» he said, trying to make it sound cheerful.
She shook her head. «You’re the only Native American on the crew and you’re being kept separate from the rest of us, every shift. You should complain to the committee—»
«I got no complaints,» Harry said firmly.
«Then I’ll bring it up,» she flared.
«Don’t do me any favors.»
After that he was truly isolated. None of the crew would talk to him. They think I’m a coward, Harry said to himself. They think I’m letting the super shit on me.
He accepted their disdain. I’ve earned it, I guess, he told the spider. The spider agreed.
When the accident happened, Harry was literally a mile away. The crew was working on the habitat’s endcap assembly, where the curving girders came together and had to be welded precisely in place. The supervisor had Harry installing the big, thin, flexible sheets of honeycomb metal that served as a protective shield against micrometeoroid hits. Thin as they were, the bumpers would still adsorb the impact of a pebble-sized meteoroid and keep it from puncturing the habitat’s skin.