He ambled over to me in the zero-gee strides we all learn to make: maintain just enough contact with the carpeted flooring to keep from floating off toward the ceiling. As Sam approached my bunk the head nurse pushed through the ward’s swinging doors with a trayful of the morning’s indignities for me.
“Rockledge Industries just won the contract for running this tin can. The medical staff still belongs to the government, but everybody else will be replaced by Rockledge employees. I’m in charge of the whole place.”
Behind him, the head nurse’s eyes goggled, her mouth sagged open, and the tray slid from her hand. It just hung there, revolving slowly as she turned a full one-eighty and flew out of the ward without a word. Or maybe she was screaming so high that no human ear could hear it, like a bat.
“You’re in charge of this place?” I was laughing at the drama that had been played out behind Sam’s back. “No shit?”
Sam seemed happy that I seemed pleased. “I got a five-year contract.”
We got to be really friends then. Not lovers. Sam was the most heterosexual man I have ever seen. One of the shrinks aboard the station told me Sam had a Casanova complex: he had to take a shot at any and every female creature he saw. I don’t know how good his batting average was, but he surely kept busy—and grinning.
“The thrill is in the chase, Omar, not the capture,” he said to me many times. Then he would always add, “As long as you get laid.”
But Sam could be a true friend, caring, understanding, bringing out the best in a man. Or a woman, for that matter. I saw him help many of the station’s female employees, nurses, technicians, scientists, completely aside from his amorous pursuits. He knew when to put his Casanova complex in the back seat. He was a surprisingly efficient administrator and a helluva good leader. Everybody liked him. Even the head nurse grew to grant him a grudging respect, although she certainly didn’t want anybody to know it, especially Sam.
Of course, knowing Sam you might expect that he would have trouble with the chain of command. He had gotten himself out of the space agency, and it was hard to tell who was happier about it, him or the agency. You could hear sighs of relief from Houston and Washington all the way up to where we were, the agency was so glad to be rid of the pestering little squirt who never followed regulations.
It didn’t take long for Sam to find out that Rockledge Industries, Inc. had its own bureaucracy, its own sets of regulations, and its own frustrations.
“You’d think a multibillion-dollar company would want to make all the profits it can,” Sam grumbled to me, about six months after he had returned to the Shack. “Half the facilities on Alpha are empty, right? They overbuilt, right? So I show them how to turn Alpha into a tourist resort and they reject the goddamned idea. ‘We are not in the tourism business,’ they say. Goddamned assholes.”
I found it hard to believe that Rockledge didn’t understand what a bonanza they could reap from space tourism. It’s not just twenty-twenty hindsight; Sam had me convinced then and there that tourism would be worth a fortune to Alpha. But Rockledge just failed to see it, no matter how hard Sam tried to convince them. Maybe the harder he tried the less they liked the idea. Some outfits are like that. The old Not-Invented-Here syndrome. Or more likely, the old If-Sam’s-For-It-I’m-Against-It syndrome.
Sam spent weeks muttering about faceless bureaucrats who sat on their brains, and how much money a zero-gravity honeymoon hotel could make. At least, that’s what I thought he was doing.
The big crisis was mostly my fault. Looking back on it, if I could have figured out a different way to handle things, I would have. But you know how it is when your emotions are all churned up; you don’t see any alternatives. Truthfully, I still don’t see how I could have done anything else except what I did.
They told me I was cured.
Yeah, I know I said they never used words like that, but they changed their tune. After more than five years in the isolation ward of the station, the medics asked me to join them in the conference room. I expected another one of their dreary meetings; they made me attend them at least once a month, said it was important for me to “maintain a positive interaction with the research staff.” So I dragged myself down to the conference room.
They were all grinning at me, around the table. Buckets of champagne stood at either end, with more bottles stashed where the slide projector usually hung.
I was cured. The genetic manipulations had finally worked. My body’s immune system was back to normal. My case would be in the medical journals; future generations would bless my memory (but not my name: they would protect my anonymity). I could go back home, back to Earth.
Only, I didn’t want to go.
“You don’t want to go?” Sam’s pudgy little face was screwing up into an incredulous expression that mixed equal amounts of surprise, disapproval, and curiosity.
“Back to Earth? No, I don’t want to go,” I said. “I want to stay here. Or maybe go live on Alpha or one of the new stations they’re building.”
“But why?” Sam asked.
We were in his office, a tiny cubbyhole that had originally been a storage locker for fresh food. I mean, space in the Shack was tight. I thought I could still smell onions or something faintly pungent. Sam had walled the chamber with blue-colored spongy plastic, so naturally it came to be known as the Blue Grotto. There were no chairs in the Grotto, of course; chairs are useless in zero-gee. We just hung in midair. You could nudge your back against the slightly rough wall surfacing and that would hold you in place well enough. There wasn’t any room to drift around. Two people were all the chamber could hold comfortably. Sam’s computer terminal was built into the wall; there was no furniture in the Grotto, no room for any.
“I got nothing to go back for,” I answered, “and a lot of crap waiting for me that I’d just as soon avoid.”
“But it’s Earth,” he said. “The world …”
So I told him about it. The whole story, end to end.
I had been a soldier, back in that nasty little bitch of a war in Mexico. Nothing glamorous, not even patriotism. I had joined the Army because it was the only way for a kid from my part of Little Rock to get a college education. They paid for my education and right afterward they pinned a lieutenant’s gold bars on my shoulders and stuck me inside a heavy tank.
Well, you know how well the tanks did in those Mexican hills. Nothing to shoot at but cactus, and we were great big noisy targets for those smart little missiles they brought in from Korea or wherever.
They knocked out my tank, I was the only one of the crew to survive. I wound up in an Army hospital in Texas where they tried to put my spine back together again. That’s where I contracted AIDS, from one of the male nurses who wanted to prove to me that I hadn’t lost my virility. He was a very sweet kid, very caring. But I never saw him again once they decided to ship me to the isolation ward up in orbit.
Now it was five years later. I was cured of AIDS, a sort of anonymous hero, but everything else was still the same. Earth would be still the same, except that every friend I had ever known was five years’ distance from me. My parents had killed themselves in an automobile wreck when I was in college. I had no sisters or brothers. I had no job prospects. Soldiers coming back five years after the war weren’t greeted with parades and confetti, and all the computer stuff I had learned in college was obsolete by now. Not even the Army used that generation of software any more.
And Earth was dirty, crowded, noisy, dangerous—it was also heavy, a full one g. I tried a couple days in the one-g wheel over at Alpha and knew that I could never live in Earth’s full gravity again. Not voluntarily.