Erik opens the big door to the first of the walk-in food freezers. It smells like a camel caravan had died in there several days ago. The second one smelled worse. By the time we got to the third one I guess our noses were suffering from sensory overload: it only smelled as bad as rancid milk poured over horse manure.
Jean kept her oh-so-proper attitude, but her face looked like she had stopped breathing. Erik was giving me a sort of hangdog grin, like he expected me to blame him for the catastrophe.
I kept my cool. I did not puke or even gag. I just raised my clenched fists over my head and uttered a heartfelt, “Son of a BITCH!”
Jean couldn’t control her ladylike instincts any further; she yanked a facial tissue from a pocket in her blouse, pressed it to her face, and fled back toward her quarters.
I left Erik there and zipped back to the lounge to call the passengers together to ask for volunteers to help with the cleanup.
It’s a very nice lounge, if I say so myself. Plush chairs, deep carpeting, big video screens that can serve as windows to the splendors of the universe outside. At the moment they were showing a video of some tropical beach: gentle waves lapping in, palm trees swaying against a clean blue sky, no people in sight. Must have been a clip from some travel agency’s come-on. There hasn’t been a beach that clean and empty of tourists since the first commercial flights of the hypersonic airliners.
“Wait just a moment, Sam,” said Lowell Hubble, our pipe-smoking astronomer. No tobacco, of course, that stuff had been outlawed way back in ’08 or ’09. Whatever he had in the blackened, long-stemmed pipe he always held clamped in his teeth was smokeless and sweet-smelling. I think it was a bubblegum derivative.
“Are you telling us,” he said from around the pipe, “that our food supply is ruined?”
“Most of the frozen food, yes,” I admitted. “Looks that way. I need some help checking out the situation.”
“We’ll starve!” Rick Darling yelped.
“You’ll starve last,” quipped Grace Harcourt. Good old Grace: she could be tough or tender, and she knew when to be which.
Darling stuck out his lower lip at her. The others were staring at me apprehensively. They had been sitting in the recliner chairs scattered about the room; now they were hunching forward tensely on the front two inches of each chair. I was standing in front of the bar, trying to look cool and competent.
“Nobody’s going to starve,” I told them. “It’s only the frozen food that’s affected and I think we can save a good deal of it, if we move quickly enough.”
“Isn’t all the food frozen?” asked Bo Williams, our Pulitzer Prize author, the man who had already signed a megabuck contract to write the book about this voyage. Bo looked more like a professional wrestler than an author: shaved bullet head, no neck, heavy shoulders and torso, bulging gut.
“Most of it. But we have a backup supply of packaged food. And the reprocessors, of course.”
“Canned food.” Darling shuddered.
“Some of it’s canned. Most of it’s been preserved by irradiation. Food’s been stored for half a century and more that way.”
“Radiation?” Sheena Chang’s big eyes went wider than usual. She was wearing violet contacts to go with the color of her outfit, a Frederick’s of Hollywood version of a flight suit, real tight, with lots of zippers.
“It’s all right,” Hubble said, leaning over from his chair to pat her hand reassuringly. “Nothing to worry about.”
“What was that about reprocessors?” Grace asked.
This was not a subject I wanted to discuss in any detail. “We can recycle the food, to a certain extent.”
“Recycle?” For once I was not happy that Grace was a newshound.
“It’s been done on space stations and long-duration missions.” I tried to pass the whole thing off. “The Mars expedition has a recycling system.”
“The food we eat will be recycled?” Damn Grace and her goddamned tenacity!
“Right,” I snapped. “Now, I need …”
Rick Darling was catching on. “You mean our garbage will be recycled into fresh food?”
“Not just our garbage, sweetheart,” Grace told him.
Jean Margaux, she who gave the impression she did not do that sort of thing, stared at me as if I had insulted her entire family tree.
Marjorie Dupray said grimly, “I’ll starve first.”
Marj wouldn’t have far to go before she starved. She was all skin and bones already. As usual, she was wearing the crummiest clothes of the group: a shapeless sweater of dingy gray and baggy oversized slacks decorated with fake machine oil stains. But I knew that underneath that camouflage was a body as sleek and responsive as a racing yacht.
“Nobody needs to starve,” I said, getting irritated with the bunch of them. Maybe this was the Ship of Fools, after all.
“Sure,” Darling groused. “We can spend the next year and a half eating recycled…”
“Don’t say it!” Jean snapped. “I can’t bear even to think of it.”
“Let’s see how much of the frozen food we can rescue,” I urged. “Who’s gonna help us clean up the freezers?”
Not a hand was raised. None of my partners would volunteer to help.
“That’s the crew’s responsibility; not ours,” said the always gracious Jean Margaux.
The others agreed.
It was grisly work.
We had to go in there and see what was spoiled beyond recovery, what could be saved if we cooked it immediately, and what was still reasonably okay. At the same time I wanted to figure out how all three freezers could fail without any warning lights showing up on the command console.
Erik and I did the dirty work with the food. Will checked out the freezers’ electrical systems. He wore an oxygen mask with a little supply bottle on the belt of his flight suit. Sensitive kid.
“Where I grew up in South Philadelphia used to smell like this,” he grumbled through the clear plastic mask as he entered the first of the freezers. “I never thought I’d get a whiff of home out here in space.”
“Don’t get homesick on me,” I told him. “Just find out what went wrong.”
About half of the food had turned to green slime, really putrid. The stench didn’t seem to affect Erik at all; he just cleaned away with the same obtuse smile on his chiselled features as ever.
“Doesn’t the smell bother you?” I asked him.
“What smell?”
“For chrissakes, you’re the one who reported it in the first place!”
“Oh that. Yeah, it is rather annoying, isn’t it?”
I just shook my head and Erik went back to work in blond, blue-eyed innocence.
So we shoveled several tons of spoiled food into the reprocessor, which chugged and burped and buzzed for hours on end, turning out neat little bricks of stuff, some colored reddish gray, others colored greenish gray. They were supposed to be synthetic meat and synthetic vegetables. I nibbled on one each, then wished we had brought a cargo bay filled with Worcester sauce, ketchup, soy sauce, and Texas three-alarm salsa.
Will Bassinio just showed me what went wrong with the freezers.
He looked really worn out when he reported to me this morning in the command center. Eyes red from lack of sleep, a black ring around his nose and mouth from the oxygen mask he’d been wearing for nearly twelve hours straight. He didn’t smell so good, either. The rotting food had impregnated his coveralls.