He bounced from job to job, always learning new tricks of the trades, never finding the true path that would bring him peace and harmony. The days blurred into an unending sameness: crawl out of bed, clamber along the girders of a new high-rise, wait for the end of the week. The nights were a blur, too: beer, booze, women he hardly ever saw more than once.
Now and then Harry wondered where he was going. “There’s more to life than this,” the spider whispered to him in his sleep. “Yeah, sure,” Harry whispered back. “But what? How do I find it?”
One night while Harry was working on the big Atlanta Renewal Project, the high steel crew threw a going-away party for Jesse Ali, the best welder in the gang.
“So, where’s Jesse going?” Harry asked a buddy, beer in hand.
The buddy took a swig of his own beer, then laughed. “He’s got a good job, Harry. Great job. It’s out of this world.” Then he laughed as if he’d made a joke.
“But where is it? Are they hiring?”
“Go ask him,” the buddy said.
Harry wormed his way through the gang clustered at the bar and finally made it to Jesse’s side.
“Gonna miss you, Jess,” he said. Shouted, actually, over the noise of the raucous crowd.
Ali smiled brightly. “Christ, Harry, that’s the longest sentence you ever said to me, man.”
Harry looked down at the steel-tipped toes of his brogans. He had never been much for conversation, yet his curiosity about Jesse’s new job was butting its head against his natural reticence. But the spider in his pocket whispered, “Ask him. Don’t be afraid. Ask him.”
Harry summoned up his courage. “So, where you goin’?”
Ali’s grin got wider. He pointed a long, skinny finger straight up in the air.
Harry said nothing, but the puzzlement must have shown clearly on his face.
“In space, man,” Ali explained. “They’re building a great big habitat in orbit. Miles long. It’ll take years to finish. I’ll be able to retire by the time the job’s done.”
Harry digested that information. “It’ll take that long?”
The black man laughed. “Nah. But the pay’s that good.”
“They lookin’ for people?”
With a nod, Ali said, “Yeah. You hafta go through a couple months’ training first. Half pay.”
“Okay.”
“No beer up there, Harry. No gravity, either. I don’t think you’d like it.”
“Maybe,” said Harry.
“No bars. No strip joints.”
“They got women, though, don’t they?”
“Like Yablonski,” said Ali, naming one of the crew who was tougher than any two of the guys.
Harry nodded. “I seen worse.”
Ali threw his head back and roared with laughter. Harry drifted away, had a few more beers, then walked slowly through the magnolia-scented evening back to the barracks where most of the construction crew was housed.
Before he drifted to sleep, the spider urged him, “Go apply for the job. What do you have to lose?”
It was tough, every step of the way. The woman behind the desk where Harry applied for a position with the space construction outfit clearly didn’t like him. She frowned at him and she scowled at her computer screen when his dossier came up. But she passed him on to a man who sat in a private cubicle and had pictures of his wife and kids pinned to the partitions.
“We are an equal opportunity employer,” he said, with a brittle smile on his face.
Then he waited for Harry to say something. But Harry didn’t know what he should say, so he remained silent.
The man’s smile faded. “You’ll be living for months at a time in zero gravity, you know,” he said. “It effects your bones, your heart. You might not be fit to work again when you return to Earth.”
Harry just shrugged, thinking that these whites were trying to scare him.
They put him through a whole day of physical examinations. Then two days of tests. Not like tests in school; they were interested in his physical stamina and his knowledge of welding and construction techniques.
They hired Harry, after warning him that he had to endure two months of training at half the pay he would start making if he finished the training okay. Half pay was still a little more than Harry was making on the Atlanta Renewal Project. He signed on the dotted line.
So Harry flew to Hunstville, Alabama, in a company tilt-
rotor plane. They gave him a private room, all to himself, in a seedy-looking six-story apartment building on the edge of what had once been a big base for the space agency, before the government sold it off to private interests.
His training was intense. Like being in the army, almost, although all Harry knew about being in the army was what he’d heard from other construction workers. The deal was, they told you something once. You either got it or you flunked out. No second chances.
“Up there in orbit,” the instructors would hammer home, time and again, “there won’t be a second chance. You screw up, you’re dead. And probably a lot of other people get killed too.”
Harry began to understand why there was no beer up there. Nor was there any at the training center. He missed it, missed the comfort of a night out with the gang, missed the laughs and the eventual oblivion where nobody could bother him, and everything was dark and quiet and peaceful and even the spider kept silent.
The first time they put him in the water tank, Harry nearly freaked. It was deep, like maybe as deep as his apartment building was high. He was zipped into a white spacesuit, like a mummy with a bubble helmet on top, and there were three or four guys swimming around him in trunks and scuba gear. But to a
