Johnson ruled with an aluminum fist. No matter how many tasks mission control loaded on us, Johnson never argued with them. He pushed us to do everything those clowns on the ground could think of, and to do it on time and according to regulations. No shortcuts, no flimflams. Naturally, the more we accomplished the more mission control thought up for us to do. Worse, Johnson asked mission control for more tasks. He volunteered for more jobs for us to do. We were working, working, working all the time, every day, without a break.
“He’s gonna kill us with overwork,” grumbled Roger Cranston, our structural specialist.
“The way I figure it,” Sam said, “is that Jay-Cubed wants us to do all the tasks that the next crew is supposed to do. That way the agency can cut the next mission and save seventy million bucks or so.”
Al Dupres agreed sourly. “He works us to death and then he gets a big kiss on the cheek from Washington.” Al was French-Canadian, the agency’s token international representative.
Sam started muttering about Captain Bligh and the good ship Bounty.
They were right. Johnson was so eager to look good to the agency that he was starting to go a little whacko. Some of it was Sam’s fault, of course. But I really think zero-gee affected the flow of blood to his brain. That, and the news about Gloria Lamour, which affected his blood flow elsewhere.
We were six weeks into the mission. Sam had kept his nose pretty clean, stuck to his duties as logistics officer and all the other jobs the skipper thought up for him, kept out of Johnson’s silver-fox hair as much as he could.
Oh, he had loosened the screw-top on the commander’s coffee squeeze-bulb one morning, so that Johnson splashed the stuff all over the command module. Imagine ten thousand little bubbles of coffee (heavy on the cream) spattering all over, floating and scattering like ten thousand teeny fireflies. Johnson sputtered and cursed and glowered at Sam, his coveralls soaked from collar to crotch.
I nearly choked, trying not to laugh. Sam put on a look of innocence that would have made the angels sigh. He offered to chase down each and every bubble and clean up the mess. Johnson just glowered at him while the bubbles slowly wafted into the air vent above the command console.
Then there was the water bag in the commander’s sleep cocoon. And the gremlin in the computer system that printed out random graffiti like: Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God. Or: Where is Fletcher Christian when we really need him?
Commander Johnson started muttering to himself a lot, and staring at Sam when the little guy’s back was to him. It was an evil, red-eyed stare. Sent chills up my spine.
Then I found out about the CERV test.
Crew Emergency Reentry Vehicle, CERV. Lifeboats for the space station. We called them “capsules.” Suppose something goes really wrong on the station, like we’re hit by a meteor. (More likely, we would’ve been hit by a piece of man-made junk. There were millions of bits of debris floating around out there in those days.) If the station’s so badly damaged we have to abandon ship, we jump into the capsules and ride back down to Earth.
Nobody’d done it, up to then. The lifeboats had been tested with dummies inside them, but not real live human beings. Not yet.
I was on duty at the communications console in the command module that morning when Commander Johnson was on the horn with Houston. All of a sudden my screen breaks up into fuzz and crackles.
“This is a scrambled transmission,” the commander said in his monotone, from his station at the command console, three feet to my right. He plugged in a headset and clipped the earphone on. And he smiled at me.
I took the hint and made my way to the galley for a squeeze of coffee, more stunned by that smile than curious about his scrambled conversation with mission control. When I got back Johnson was humming tunelessly to himself. The headset was off and he was still smiling. It was a ghastly smile.
Although we put in a lot of overtime hours to finish the tasks our commander so obligingly piled on us, Johnson himself left the command module precisely at seven each evening, ate a solitary meal in the wardroom and then got eight full hours of sleep. His conscience was perfectly at ease, and he apparently had no idea whose face was on the reverse of the darts target.
As soon as he left that evening I pecked out the subroutine I had put into the comm computer and reviewed his scrambled transmission to Houston. He may be the skipper, but I’m the comm officer and nothing goes in or out without me seeing it.
The breath gushed out of me when I read the file. No wonder the skipper had smiled.
I called Sam and got him to meet me in the wardroom. The commander had assigned him to getting the toilet in the unoccupied laboratory module to work, so that the scientists who’d eventually be coming up could crap in their own territory. In addition to all his regular duties, of course.
“A CERV test, huh,” Sam said when I told him. “We don’t have enough to do; he’s gonna throw a lifeboat drill at us.”
“Worse than that,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Sam was hovering a few inches off the floor. He liked to do that; made him feel taller.
Chairs are useless in zero-gee. I had my feet firmly anchored in the foot loops set into the floor around the wardroom table. Otherwise a weightless body would drift all over the place. Except for Sam, who somehow managed to keep himself put.
Leaning closer toward Sam, I whispered, “It won’t be just a drill. He’s going to pop one of the lifeboats and send it into a real reentry trajectory.”
“No shit?”
“No shit. He got permission from Houston this morning for a full balls-out test.”
Sam grabbed the edge of the galley table and pulled himself so close to me I could count the pale freckles on his snub of a nose. Sudden understanding lit up those blue-green eyes of his.
“I’ll bet I know who’s going to be on the lifeboat that gets to take the long fall,” he whispered back at me.
I nodded.
“That’s why he smiled at me this evening.”
“He’s been working out every detail in the computer,” I said, my voice as low as a guy planning a bank heist, even though we were alone in the wardroom. “He’s going to make certain you’re in the lab module by yourself so you’ll be the only one in the lifeboat there. Then he’s going to pop it off.”
The thought of riding one of those uncontrolled little capsules through the blazing heat of reentry and then landing God knows where—maybe the middle of the ocean, maybe the middle of the Gobi Desert—it scared the hell out of me. Strangely, Sam grinned.
“You want to be the first guy who tries out one of those capsules?” I asked.
“Hell no,” he said. “But suppose our noble liege-lord happens to make a small mistake and he’s the one to take the ride back home?”
I felt my jaw drop open. “How’re you going to …”
Sam grinned his widest. “Wouldn’t it be poetic if we could arrange things so that ol’ Cap’n Bligh himself gets to take the fall?”
I stared at him. “You’re crazy.”
“That’s what they said about Orville and Wilbur, pal.”
The next week was very intense. Sam didn’t say another word to me about it, but I knew he was hacking into the commander’s comm link each night and trying to ferret out every last detail of the upcoming lifeboat drill. Commander Johnson played everything close to the vest, though. He never let on, except that he smiled whenever he saw Sam, the sort of smile that a homicidal maniac might give his next victim. I even thought I heard him cackling to himself once or twice.