Their living quarters were about the size of anemic telephone booths, little more than a closet with a mesh sleeping bag tacked to one wall.
“We sleep standing up?” Harry asked the guy who was showing them the facilities.
The guy smirked at him. “Standing up, on your head, sideways, or inside out. Makes no difference in zero G.”
Harry nodded. I should have known that, he said to himself. They told us about it back at the training base.
Three days of orientation, learning how to move and walk and eat and even crap in zero G. Harry thought that maybe the bosses were also using the three days to see who got accustomed to zero G well enough to be allowed to work, and who they’d have to send home.
Harry loved zero G. He got a kick out of propelling himself down a corridor like a human torpedo, just flicking his fingertips against the walls every few meters as he sailed along. He never got dizzy, never got disoriented. The food tasted pretty bland, but he hadn’t come up here for the food. He laughed the first time he sat on the toilet and realized he had to buckle up the seat belt or he’d take off like a slow, lumbering rocket.
He slept okay, except he kept waking up every hour or so. The second day, during the routine medical exam, the doc asked him if he found it uncomfortable to sleep with a headband. Before Harry could answer, though, the doctor said, “Oh, that’s right. You’re probably used to wearing a headband, aren’t you?”
Harry grunted. When he got back to his cubicle, he checked out the orientation video on the computer built into the compartment’s wall. The headband was to keep your head from nodding back and forth in your sleep. In microgravity, the video explained, blood pumping through the arteries in your neck made your head bob up and down while you slept, unless you attached the headband to the wall. Harry slept through the night from then on.
Their crew supervisor was a pugnacious little Irishman with thinning red hair and fire in his eye. After their three days’ orientation, he called the dozen newcomers to a big, metal-walled enclosure with a high ceiling ribbed with steel girders. The place looked like an empty airplane hangar to Harry.
“You know many people have killed themselves on this project so far?” he snarled at the assembled newbies.
“Eighteen,” he answered his own question. “Eighteen assholes who didn’t follow procedures. Dead. One of them took four other guys with him.”
Nobody said a word. They just stood in front of the super with their feet secured by floor loops, weaving slightly like long grasses in a gentle breeze.
“You know how many of my crew have killed themselves?” he demanded. “None. Zip. Zero. And you know why? I’ll tell you. Because I’ll rip the lungs out of any jerkoff asshole who goes one millionth of a millimeter off the authorized procedures.”
Harry thought the guy was pretty small for such tough talk, but thought, what the hell, he’s just trying to scare us.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to do anything,” the super went on, his face getting splotchy red. “The right way is what I tell you. Anything else is wrong. Anything! Got that?”
A couple of people replied with “Yes, sir,” and “Got it.” Most just mumbled. Harry said nothing.
“You,” the super snapped, pointing at Harry. “Twelvetoes. You got that?”
“I got it,” Harry muttered.
“I didn’t hear you.”
Harry tapped his temple lightly. “It’s all right here, chief.”
The supervisor glared at him. Harry stood his ground, quiet and impassive. But inwardly he was asking the spider, “Is this the monster I’m gonna slay?”
The spider did not answer.
“All right,” the super said at last. “Time for you rookies to see what you’re in for.”
He led the twelve of them, bobbing like corks in water, out of the hangar and down a long, narrow, tubular corridor. To Harry it seemed more like a tunnel, except that the floor and curving walls were made of what looked like smooth, polished aluminum. Maybe not. He put out a hand and brushed his fingertips against the surface. Feels more like plastic than metal, Harry thought.
“Okay, stop here,” said the super.
Stopping was easier said than done in zero G. People bumped into one another and jostled around a bit while the super hovered at the head of the group, hands on hips, and glowered at them. Harry, back near the end of the queue, managed to brush against one of the better-looking women, a Hispanic with big, dark eyes and a well-rounded figure.
“Sorry,” he muttered to her.
“Da nada,” she replied, with a smile that might have been shy. Harry read the nametag pinned above her left breast pocket: Marta Santos.
“All right now,” the super called to them, tugging a palmcomp from the hip pocket of his coveralls. “Take a look.”
He pecked at the handheld, and suddenly the opaque tube became as transparent as glass. Everybody gasped.
They were hanging in the middle of a gigantic spiderwork of curving metal girders, like being inside a dirigible’s frame, except that the girders went on and on for miles. And beyond it, Harry saw the immense, curving bulk of Earth, deep blue gleaming ocean, brighter than the purest turquoise. Streams of clouds so white it hurt his eyes to look at them. He blinked, then looked again. He saw long rows of waves flowing across the ocean, and the cloud-etched edge of land, with gray wrinkles of mountains off in the distance. Beyond the flank of the curving world and its thin glowing skin of air was the utterly black emptiness of space.
We’re in
