Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

Quality of Life

Written by Benjamin Crowell

Illustrated by: Lee Kuruganti

It's not easy to barricade a door in zero gravity. Lee looked at the shambles she'd made of her apartment. She'd torn out every article of furniture she could detach, and tried to wedge it all into the little entry hall so that the door couldn't be opened. It was all flimsy stuff, though—even these days, with nuclear rockets, it was still expensive to lift anything heavy into orbit.

She had no idea if it would be enough of a barrier to keep out her would-be rescuers. It sounded like things were getting a little chaotic, so yeah, maybe. Under normal circumstances, they'd surely find some way to handle an old rich bitch refusing to be evacuated from the station—but the whole reason for the evacuation was that these weren't normal circumstances, so maybe they'd just take the hint and bug off. Well, she wasn't going back down there, no way. Gravity would mean wheelchairs and motorized beds. Hmph! Take you to the potty, watch to make sure you didn't fall in.

No thank you. Lee intended to stay right where she was, in orbit. Hell, a hundred and six years ought to be enough for anyone. And riding down in a ball of fire, on a space station reentering the atmosphere—now that had style!

****

What could be more frustrating? You get all nerved up for a good pissing match, and then they stand you up. No busybodies insisting on saving your life, no fresh-faced young astronauts pleading ever-so-sincerely. So now the irony of biology took over: she was hungry, and her belly didn't care that it was all going to be over in a few days anyway. Her larder was empty, and it was time to go shopping.

She opened the door for the first time in two days, and launched herself down the corridor. The lights were on, but it looked like nobody else was home. Someone's ball-point pen was floating loose, and she reached out and grabbed it absentmindedly as she went by.

She came around the corner into the observation lounge. Drop-dead-gorgeous view of Earth. She wondered idly what continent her ashes would flutter down over. Turn another corner, and there was someone there, floating with his back to her. One of the other residents of the geriatric wing?

"Hello?"

No response, no movement. Was he asleep? She grabbed a railing and tapped him on the shoulder.

"Sir? Excuse me?"

He didn't answer, but her tap had started him rotating slowly. She retreated a short distance back along the railing to keep his feet from hitting her, and then his face slowly rotated into view, upside-down from her perspective. Dead. She remembered his face. Larry? Carey? Didn't have all his marbles left, but he'd been a nice enough guy. He'd been a diabetic, and both those feet were prostheses. He'd probably been left behind, and died because he didn't get his medication.

It didn't paint a pretty picture, did it? Not enough lifeboats on the Titanic. Women, children, and scoundrels first. With hindsight, it wasn't so surprising that the evacuation had been a mess. First Brazil had canceled their lunar program, and all those handsome Brazilian boys had gone home. After that, SkyLife's bottom line had sunk into the red, and this silly asteroid scare had been the last straw. Their shares were trading almost in the penny stock range these days—she'd picked some up herself when the price had first dipped below two bucks—and with their market capitalization that low, it meant that their investors had written off the station itself as a complete loss. You couldn't even salvage the office furniture out of a bankrupt orbital business. She'd been naive to think they'd try so hard to make her leave. If they couldn't afford the boosts to keep their main asset out of the stratosphere, then it shouldn't have been a surprise that they'd cut corners on the evacuation.

She went through his pockets and fished out his wallet: Carey Guelich. She should call his family and let them know. It seemed wrong to leave him floating out here in the corridor. She found his apartment number on his ID, towed him down the hall to it, and used his thumbprint to open the door and deposit him inside. Poor guy. Even on a good day, he hadn't always seemed too sure of what was going on. He'd probably been scared and confused when he died. She felt a twinge of guilt for huddling in her room, thinking only of herself while he'd been out there dying.

She went on to the station's little overpriced grocery store. Its storefront was closed and locked. Well, that figured. The glass looked pretty flimsy, though—everybody used lightweight construction materials up here. She went back to her apartment, got her biggest barbell (four kilograms worth of inertia), and returned to the store. She flung it at the glass, and it shattered with a satisfying crash. All those boring sessions of waving the weights around had come in handy after all. An alarm went off, but at least it was safety glass, so not much was left floating around. The cleaning bots would get it.

She found herself a bag of pre-sliced bagels and a tub of cream cheese, and spread the cream cheese onto a slice with a finger. She'd paid an obscene amount of money for dental work last year, booking an appointment every time the dentist came up from the surface. Objectively, it was a sorry waste of money, but she was still glad to have a working set of choppers today, especially because the bagel was a little stale. Come to think of it, if she only had a few days left to live, maybe she should take the opportunity to eat some of the foods the dentist had warned her away from. Hadn't she seen some beef jerky by the register?

The alarm was still sounding. She set herself gliding up the aisle toward the checkout counter, and was confronted by a metal spider the size of a small dog, crouching on a rack of potato chips. She grabbed a rail and brought herself to a panicky stop, sending a bunch of plastic beer bulbs flying out of their holders.

"Ms. Lewicki?"

It was a human voice, coming from the spider. She realized how foolish she'd been. It was just a waldo, probably controlled by someone down on the surface. Two of its legs were actually short little arms, with manlike hands on the ends.

"Yes?" She tried to regain her dignity, realizing how she must look. She stuck her hand into the pocket of her robe, and furtively tried to wipe the cream cheese off of her finger.

"I'm glad we found you. Please don't be alarmed." It turned around so that it was right-side up from her point of view.

"Who are you?"

"Joao Linhares. I'm in Sao Paulo."

"Joao?" She recalled a dark brown kid with the muscles of a dancer. "We met, didn't we?"

"Yes, you bought me a drink, if I recall correctly."

"So now they've got you doing waldo work?"

"Yes. With the cancellation of the moon program . . ." The spider turned its palms up, and managed to suggest a Latin-style shrug, despite its lack of shoulders. He even made the binocular cameras rise a little to suggest raising his eyebrows.

"Yeah, that was a shame. You know, I saw the first moon landing in 1969. They let us out of Sunday school, and I stayed glued to the tube all day. It was amazing what they could do back then, with just chemical rockets." She realized she was babbling to cover up her embarrassment. "You must think I'm pretty stupid."

"I cannot imagine why you say that, Lee. But perhaps we can go somewhere more commodious to talk."

****

It seemed like yesterday that she had floated here in the big, fancy Stardust Lounge with Joao. It was surprisingly easy to forget that the waldo wasn't really him.

"Is anybody else listening in on this channel?" Lee asked.

"I am afraid yes, but it is not public. Only the other people working directly on the mission can hear, plus my boss, her boss, the boss of her boss, and so on."

"Well, that's all right. What exactly is your mission?"

"Indirectly, it may be to save your life, but I regret to say that that may still be impossible, and it is not the most important part of the mission. This waldo did not come in a crewed vehicle, and we do not have one that can be launched very soon."

"That's okay. I didn't miss the evacuation by accident, Joao. I have Guillain-Barre syndrome—you know, like Roosevelt. My legs work, but not well enough to walk. Down on the surface, my quality of life wouldn't be much to speak of. I was lucky to be able to afford to live up here, but everybody has to die someday. I made the decision to die on reentry, instead of lying in a hospital bed, waiting to catch pneumonia. I'm actually glad they didn't send you back here just for my sake, but then why did they?"

"You know about the Meyer-Iwakura object?"

"The asteroid? It's supposed to miss Earth, right?"

"It is not an asteroid. It is an alien spacecraft."

"You're kidding."

"No. We think it must be uncrewed. The acceleration is very high, and also it is emitting a great quantity of radiation, so probably nothing could stay alive inside it. It is like a car's engine, you know—there is waste heat, and it must get rid of it by radiating."

"Fantastic! Too bad I'm not going to live long enough to see what happens when it lands."

"Probably it can't land. Its trajectory is a very exact mathematical shape, and when we extrapolate, it makes a flyby. There has been much worry about the gamma radiation. It emits seventy terawatts of gammas, and if the flyby is close enough, that can have bad effects. Indonesia and Malaysia will be near its point of closest approach, and there have been riots in Jakarta. The radio emissions are also very strong, and already it is making interference. The first job I had to do here at the station was to install a laser link."

"So what does all this have to do with me, or the station?"

"As it is getting closer, we are collecting more and more precise tracking data. If it continues the same mathematical pattern, it will match orbits exactly with this station."

"Jesus."

"Yes." The spider crossed itself.

"When does it get here?"

"That is the problem. It gets here in three days, and unless we can do something, the station will have reentered before then."

"That's a hell of a note. Quite a coincidence, that they're catching the human race with our pants down like this." She thought of the image she must have presented to the Brazilians, back there in the grocery store.

"It is not completely a coincidence. There was an attempt to keep the trajectory data secret, but the astronomers, they do not like to be censored. A few weeks ago, the error bars became small enough that they could see the probe will be coming somewhat close to the station. SkyLife's stock went down very rapidly,"—the spider made a diving motion with one hand—"and their creditors became worried about 'preserving assets and minimizing liability.' "

"And now it turns out the station was exactly where the bug-eyed monsters were planning to pull over and take a snapshot."

"Yes."

"Can we, uh, ask them to change their itinerary a little?"

"We have tried to send them messages by radio, but we don't hope very much for it to work. Their receiver would be surrounded by their own radio noise. It is like trying to talk to someone on the telephone while a nuclear bomb is exploding in his living room."

"So what's your plan?"

"The station's solar panels are like sails that catch the wind. If we can detach them, the station can stay up for longer. With only one person inside, life support can run from the fuel cells."

"You said 'we'?"

"Yes. This waldo is made for working on small communications satellites, and the satellites are made so they can be worked on by such a waldo. This station was not designed that way. We have attempted to plan a disassembly using only the waldo, and it cannot be done."

"You need another pair of hands, and I'm it."

"If you are willing." The Latin shrug again.

"Of course I'm willing. Able is a different matter. I've never been in a spacesuit, and I'm not that strong, even in my upper body. I do all my exercises, and the zero-g drugs these days are wonderful, but I'm just not as fit as I was in my nineties. Do you realistically think I could do it?"

"Our engineers have made a procedure that we think can work."

****

She'd always enjoyed socializing with the professional astronauts (especially the Brazilians,