Soon as I slid into the booth Sam starts in, bam, with no preliminaries. “How d’you like to be a junk collector?”
“Huh?”
Jabbing a thumb toward the ceiling he says, “You know how many pieces of junk are floating around in low orbit? Thousands! Millions!”
He’s talking in a kind of a low voice, like he doesn’t want anybody to hear him.
I said back to him, “Tell me about it. On my last mission the damned canopy window got starred by a stray piece of crap. If it’d been any bigger…”
There truly were thousands of pieces of debris floating in orbit around the Earth back then. All kinds of junk: discarded equipment, flakes of paint, pieces of rocket motors, chunks of crap of all kinds. Legend had it that there was still an old Hasselblad camera that Mike Collins had fumbled away during the Gemini 10 mission floating around out there. And a thermal glove from somebody else.
In fact, if you started counting the really tiny stuff, too small to track by radar, there might actually have been millions of bits of debris in orbit. A cloud of debris, a layer of man-made pollution, right in the area where we were putting space stations in permanent orbits.
Sam hunched across the table, making a shushing gesture with both his hands. “That’s just it! Somebody’s gonna make a fuckin’ fortune cleaning up that orbiting junk, getting rid of it, making those low orbits safe to fly in.”
I gave him a sidelong look. Sam was trying to keep his expression serious, but a grin was worming its way out. His face always reminded me of a leprechaun: round, freckled, wiry red hair, the disposition of an imp who never grew up.
“To say nothing,” he damn near whispered, “of what they’ll pay to remove defunct commsats from geosynchronous orbit.”
He didn’t really say “geosynchronous orbit,” he called it “GEO” like we all do. “LEO” is low Earth orbit. GEO is 22,300 miles up, over the equator. That’s where all the communications satellites were. We damned near got into a shooting war with half a dozen equatorial nations in South America and Africa over GEO rights—but that’s a different story.
“Who’s going to pay you to collect junk?” I asked. Damned if my voice didn’t come out as low as his.
Sam looked very pleased with himself. “Our dear old Uncle Sam, at first. Then the fat-cat corporations.”
Turns out that Sam had a friend who worked in the Department of Commerce, of all places, up in Washington. I got the impression that the friend was not a female, which surprised me. Seemed that the friend was a Commerce Department bureaucrat, of all things. I just couldn’t picture Sam being chummy with a desk-jockey. It seemed strange, not like him at all.
Anyway, Commerce had just signed off on an agreement with the space agency to provide funding for removing junk from orbit. Like all government programs, there was to be a series of experimental missions before anything else happened. What the government calls a “feasibility study.” At least two competing contractors would be funded for the feasibility study.
The winner of the competition, Sam told me, would get an exclusive contract to remove debris and other junk from LEO on an ongoing basis.
“They’ve gotta do something to protect the space station,” Sam said.
“Freedom?”
He bobbed his head up and down. “Sooner or later she’s gonna get hit by something big enough to cause real damage.”
“The station’s already been dinged here and there. Little stuff, but some of it causes damage. They’ve got guys going EVA almost every day for inspection and repair.”
“And the corporations who own the commsats are going-to be watching this competition very closely,” Sam went on, grinning from ear to ear.
I knew that GEO was getting so crowded that the International Telecommunications Authority had put a moratorium on launching new commsats. The communications companies were only being allowed to replace old satellites that had gone dead. They were howling about how their industry was being stifled.
“Worse than that,” Sam added. “The best slots along the GEO are already so damned crowded that the commsat signals are interfering with one another. Indonesia’s getting porno movies from the Polynesian satellite!”
That made me laugh out loud. Must have played holy hob with Indonesia’s family planning program.
“How much do you think Turner or Toshiba would pay to have dead commsats removed from orbit so new ones can be spotted in the best locations?” Sam asked.
“Zillions,” I said.
“At least!”
I thought it over for all of ten seconds. “Why me?” I asked Sam. I mean, we had been buddies but not all that close.
“You wanna fly, don’tcha? Handling an OMV, going after stray pieces of junk, that’s going to call for real flying!”
An OMV was an orbital maneuvering vehicle: sort of a little sports car built to zip around from the space station to other satellites; never comes back to Earth. Compared to driving the space shuttle, flying an OMV would be like racing at Le Mans.
I managed to keep a grip on my enthusiasm, though. Sam wasn’t acting out of altruism, I figured. Not without some other reason to go along with it. I just sat there sipping at my beer and saying nothing.
He couldn’t keep quiet for long. “Besides,” he finally burst out, “I need somebody with a good reputation to front the organization. If those goons in Washington see my name on top of our proposal they’ll send it to the Marianas Trench and deep-six it.”
That made sense. Washington was full of bureaucrats who’d love to see Sam mashed into corn fritters. Except, apparently, for his one friend at Commerce.
“Will you let me be president of the company?” I asked.
He nodded. The corners of his mouth tightened, but he nodded.
I let my enthusiasm show a little. I grinned and stuck my hand out over the table. Sam grinned back and we shook hands between the beer bottles.
But I had a problem. I would have to quit the agency. I couldn’t be a government employee—even on long-term leave—and work for a private company. Washington’s ethics rules were very specific about that. Oh yeah, Sam formed a private company to tackle the job. Very private: he owned it all. He called it VCI. That stood for Vacuum Cleaners, Inc. Cute.
I solved my problem with a single night’s sleepless tussling. The next morning I resigned from the agency. Hell, if Sam’s plan worked I’d be getting more flying time than a dozen shuttle-jockeys. And I’d be doing some real flying, not just driving a big bus.
If things didn’t work out with Sam I could always re-up with the agency. They’d take me back, I felt sure, although all my seniority and pension would be gone. What the hell. It was only money. Most of my salary went to my first three wives anyway.
Jade nearly dropped the tall frosty glass from which she had been sipping.
“Your first three wives?” she gulped.
Johansen inched back in the fabric-covered slingchair. He looked flustered, embarrassed. “Uh, I’ve been married six times,” he said, in a low fumbling voice.
“Six?”
He seemed to be mentally counting. Then he nodded, “Yeah, six. Funny thing, Sam always had the reputation for chasing … women. But somehow I always wound up getting married.”
Jade’s heart fluttered with disappointment. Yet a tiny voice deep within her noted that seven is a lucky number. She felt shocked, confused.
It took an effort of will to pull her eyes away from Johansen and gaze out at the scenery. The patio on which they sat hung out over the curving landscape of the gigantic habitat. Jade saw gentle grassy hills with a lazy stream meandering among them, in the distance a little village that looked like a scene for a Christmas card except there was no snow. Farther still there were farms, kilometers off, like a checkerboard of different shades of green. Her eyes followed the curve of this vast structure, up and up, woods and fields and more villages overhead, all the way around until her gaze settled on Johansen’s relaxed, smiling face once again.