Malone’s aerie consisted of one wall on which were located a semicircular sort of desk and communications center, a bank of display screens that were all blankly gray at the moment, and an airtight hatch that led to the spokes that radiated out to the various wheels. The rest of the chamber was a transparent glassteel bubble from which Malone could watch the station’s loading dock—and the overwhelming majesty of the huge, curved, incredibly blue and white-flecked Earth as it slid past endlessly, massive, brilliant, ever-changing, ever-beautiful.
To Jade, though, it seemed as if they were hanging in empty space itself, unprotected by anything at all, and falling, falling, falling toward the ponderous world that filled her peripheral vision. The background rumble of the bearings that bore the massive station’s rotation while the hub remained static sounded to her like the insistent bass growl of a giant grinding wheel that was pressing the breath out of her.
She swallowed bile, felt it burn in her throat, and tried to concentrate on the job at hand.
She said to Malone, “I’ve been assigned to do a biography of Mr. Gunn for the Solar News Network….”
Despite himself, Malone suddenly chuckled. “First time I ever heard him called Mr. Gunn.”
“Oh?” Jade’s microchip recorder, imbedded in her belt buckle, was already on, of course. “What did the people here call him?”
That lean, angular black face took on an almost thoughtful look. “Oh … Sam, mostly. ‘That tricky bastard,’ a good many times.” Malone actually laughed. “Plenty times I heard him called a womanizing sonofabitch.”
“What did you call him?”
The suspicion came back into Malone’s eyes. “He was my friend. I called him Sam.”
Silence stretched between them, hanging as weightlessly as their bodies. Jade turned her head slightly and found herself staring at the vast bulk of Earth. Her adoptive mother was down there, somewhere, living her own life without a thought about the daughter she had run away from. And her real mother? Was she on Earth, too, forever separated from the baby she had borne, the baby she had left abandoned, alone, friendless and loveless?
Jade’s mind screamed as if she were falling down an elevator shaft. Her stomach churned queasily. She could not tear her eyes away from the world drifting past, so far below them, so compellingly near. She felt herself being drawn toward it, dropping through the emptiness, spinning down the deep swirling vortex Malone’s long-fingered hand squeezed her shoulder hard enough to hurt. She snapped her attention to his dark, unsmiling face as he grasped her other shoulder and held her firmly in his strong hands.
“You were drifting,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“Was I… ?”
“It’s all right,” he said. “Gets everybody, at first. Don’t be scared. You’re perfectly safe.”
His powerful hands steadied her. She fought down the panic surging inside.
“If you got to upchuck, go ahead and do it. Nothing to be ashamed of.” His grin returned. “Only, use the bags they gave you, please.”
He looked almost handsome when he smiled, she thought. After another moment he released her. She took a deep breath and dabbed at the beads of perspiration on her forehead. The retch bags that the technicians had attached to her belt were a symbol to her now. I won’t need them, she insisted to herself. I’m not going to let this get to me. I’m not going to let them get to me.
“I… didn’t think … didn’t realize that zero gravity would affect me.”
“Why not? It gets to everybody, one way or another.”
“I’m from Selene,” Jade said. “I’ve lived all my life under lunar gravity.”
Malone gazed at her thoughtfully. “Still a big difference between one-sixth g and none at all, I guess.”
“Yes.” It was still difficult to breathe. “I guess there is.”
“Feel better?” he asked.
There was real concern in his eyes; “I think I’ll be all right. Thanks.”
“De nada,” he said. “I didn’t know you’d never been in weightlessness before.”
His attitude had changed, she saw. The sullenness had thawed. He had insisted on conducting the interview in the station’s zero-gravity area. He had allowed no alternative. But she was grateful that his shell of distrust seemed to have cracked.
It took several moments before she could say, “I’m not here to do a hatchet job on Mr. Gunn.”
Malone made a small shrug. “Doesn’t make much difference, one way or th’other. He’s dead; nothing you can say will hurt him now.”
“But we know so little about him. I suppose he’s the most famous enigma in the solar system.”
The black man made no response.
“The key question, I suppose … the thing our viewers will be most curious about, is why Sam Gunn exiled himself up here. Why did he turn his back on Earth?”
Malone snorted with disdain. “He didn’t! Those motherfuckers turned their backs on him.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s a long story,” Malone said.
“That’s all right. I’ve got as much time as it takes.” Even as she said it Jade wished that Malone would volunteer to return back to the lunar-g wheel, where the gravity was normal. But she dared not ask the man to leave his office. Once a subject starts talking, never interrupt! That was the cardinal rule of a successful interview. Jumbo Jim had drilled that into her. Besides, she was determined not to let weightlessness get the better of her.
“Would you believe,” Malone was saying, “that it all started with a cold?”
“A cold?”
“Sam came down with a cold in the head. That’s how the whole thing began.”
“Tell me about it.”
Isolation Area
Sam was a feisty little bastard—Malone reminisced—full of piss and vinegar. If there was ten different ways in the regulations to do a job, he’d find an eleventh, maybe a twelfth or a fourteenth, just because he couldn’t abide being bound by the regs. A free spirit, I guess you’d call him.
He’d had his troubles with the brass in Houston and Washington. Why he ever became an astronaut in the first place is beyond me. Maybe he thought he’d be like a pioneer out on the frontier, on his own, way out in space. How he made it through training and into flight operations is something I’ll never figure out. I just don’t feature Sam sitting still long enough to get through kindergarten, let alone flight school and astronaut training.
Anyway, when I first met him he was finished as an astronaut. He had put in seven years, which he said was a Biblical amount of time, and he wanted out. And the agency was glad to get rid of him, believe me. But he had this cold in the head and they wouldn’t let him go back Earthside until it cleared up.
“Six billion people down there with colds, the flu, bad sinuses and postnasal drips and those assholes in Houston won’t let me go back until this goddamned sniffle clears up.”
Those were the first words Sam ever said to me. He had been assigned to my special isolation ward, where I had reigned alone for nearly four years. Alpha was under construction then. We were in the old Mac-Dac Shack, a glorified tin can that passed for a space station back in those primitive days. It didn’t spin, it just hung there. Everything inside was weightless.
My isolation ward was a cramped compartment with four zero-gee sleep restraints Velcroed to the four walls together with lockers to stow personal gear. Nobody but me had ever been in it until that morning. Sam shuffled over to the bed next to mine, towing his travel-bag like a kid with a sinking balloon.
“Just don’t sneeze in my direction, Sniffles,” I growled at him.