Murder in Orbit Page 6

Ron was one of a pair of chimps Dr. Durkin was using in his studies. Nancy was his mate.

  Right now Ron was sitting in the corner of his cage, looking depressed.

  “Poor fella,” I said, crossing to him. “You must be lonely.”

  I hoped nothing had happened to Nancy. I was fond of both chimps, and I enjoyed talking with them through the limited sign language they had been able to learn.

  “Where’s Nancy?” I repeated, signing it this time instead of speaking it out loud.

  “Don’t know,” signed Ron. Then he added, “Don’t feel good.”

  My heart went out to the miserable-looking chimp. I was about to open the cage to give him a cuddle when Dr. Durkin stepped into the lab.

  “Rusty!” he shouted. “For God’s sake, get away from that cage!”

  Chapter 10

  One-Way Ticket

  I jumped back as if I had just touched an electric fence.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. I was annoyed with myself because my hands were shaking.

  “Ron is sick,” said Dr. Durkin, “and I don’t know yet whether what he has is contagious.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Really, I’m surprised at you, Rusty. You can see there’s something wrong with that chimp. And you’ve certainly been trained not to approach a lab animal that’s ill when you don’t understand its condition. I know you and Ron are friends. But you know that any animal’s behavior becomes unpredictable when it’s ill. What if he had bitten you? You could have become infected, too!”

  I felt myself begin to blush. Dr. Durkin was right. Even if I didn’t really believe Ron would ever bite me, what I had done was still pretty stupid. Even worse in terms of my standing in the BS Factory, it was unprofessional. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Dr. Durkin took another deep breath. “Well, no harm done, I guess. But you gave me an awful scare. Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been wanting to apologize for the way I brushed past you in the hall the other day. I didn’t mean to be rude to you. I was angry with somebody else, and you just happened to get in my path.”

  “It’s all right,” I said with a shrug. Actually, I didn’t feel as casual as I was trying to act. I was fond of Dr. Durkin, and it had bothered me when he went rushing by that day. I hadn’t spent time brooding about it. (That would have been almost impossible, considering everything that had happened since then!) But even so, the fact that he took the time to apologize now made me feel good.

  “Just take it as an unwarranted salvo from the midst of a midlife crisis,” said Dr. Durkin. “By the way, if you happen to see Antoine, tell him I was looking for him.” He paused. “Well, now that the excitement’s all over, what brings you here?”

  I swallowed. After my stupid mistake and Dr. Durkin’s gracious apology, I felt lousy about not being completely straightforward with him.

  “I’m trying to contact a man named Hank Smollin. Somebody told me you might know where he is.”

  “Hardly. I fired him six months ago. What on earth would you want to talk to him for?”

  “Uh—someone gave me a message for him,” I said, trying not to sound too stupid while I absorbed this new piece of news. “They knew he used to work here and thought maybe I could find him for them.”

  “Why don’t ‘they’ just use the Directory? I can’t stand people who are lazy like that. You shouldn’t cater to them, Rusty. It only encourages them.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I’m too easy.”

  Millie wasn’t around when I got back to the landing area. But true to her word, the scooter was waiting.

  I took a piece of paper out of my backpack and scrawled her a note:

  Millie—

  You can stop asking around. I found out who Smollin worked for. Thanks for the help.

  —Rusty

  I stuck it on her clipboard, which was lying on her desk, and climbed into my scooter.

  Getting out of the BS Factory was a little trickier without Millie around. I had to go through a complicated set of procedures to activate the air locks. Though they were a pain in the neck, I didn’t really mind, because they were designed to prevent careless errors that might cause some kind of major accident.

  Pretty soon I was out in space again. I circled once around the BS Factory just to enjoy the view, then headed back toward the colony.

  How can I tell you about being in space? When you’re out there on your own, with nothing but a bit of metal between you and the void, it makes you feel incredibly tiny. Usually. Every once in a while, if I’m in a particularly good mood, just the opposite happens. I feel as if I merge into the void, somehow become a part of the whole thing, connected to it all.

  Then I feel enormous.

  Sometimes the whole thing just makes my brain start to spin around. I’ll stare at the stars and start thinking about how far away they are and about how some of the things I’m seeing aren’t stars at all, but whole other galaxies, with billions of stars of their own. And then that old question starts to rattle around inside me, the one about “It can’t possibly go on forever—but if it does have an end, what’s next?”

  I got thinking that way now, and I didn’t pay much attention to where I was heading. That’s not usually a big deal. The scooters have a pretty good range, and if you go flying off course, it’s no problem to get back. But when I returned my attention to what I was doing, I realized I did have a problem: The scooter wouldn’t respond to my commands.

  I twisted the steering mechanism.

  Nothing happened.

  I tried again, in the opposite direction.

  Nothing.

  I switched on the radio to call for help.

  Nothing. At least, not for a moment. Then, without my touching anything, the scooter suddenly shot forward, its speed quickly doubling, then tripling. Even worse, it veered away from the colony.

  That’s when I realized what was really going on: I had asked one too many questions in the wrong place and someone was getting nervous—someone who figured the best way to get rid of me was by sabotaging my scooter. This wasn’t just an equipment breakdown. It was another attempt at murder.

  Only this time the victim was going to be yours truly.

  I felt a commotion in my chest. Finally I realized it was my heart, trying to figure out some way to crawl into my throat.

  I twisted in my seat to look back at the colony. It was dwindling into the void behind me.

  Rapidly.

  Suddenly I found that I couldn’t breathe. It wasn’t that I was running out of air; that, at least, wouldn’t happen for a while yet. It was just that I was so frightened my lungs wouldn’t work.

  All I could do was sit there, twisted in my seat and frozen with terror, as I watched my world disappear behind me.

  Chapter 11

  The Stars

  The only part of my body that seemed to be working was my brain. Unfortunately, it wasn’t much use at the moment. All it wanted to do was tell me what was going to happen next. Against my will, I imagined myself hurtling past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and Saturn, on past the outer planets, out of the solar system, across the galaxy, into Deep Space, on and on and on, until I either crashed into a star (extremely unlikely) or space and time themselves finally came to an end. For one mad instant I consoled myself with the idea that at least I would finally get an answer to my question about the edges of the universe.

  Then some spoilsport in the back of my head whispered, “A fat lot of good that’s going to do a dead man, Bozo.”

  The words seemed oddly familiar. Where had I heard them before?

  Suddenly I realized that I hadn’t heard them, I had read them—in one of my grandfather’s books.

  The realization seemed to jolt me back into action. What would my grandfather do in a situation like this? More important, what would his great character, Lieutenant James D. Macdonald, do?

  I had read Gramps’s entire “Macdonald of Terra” series at least three times. The thi
ng I always admired most about the hero of the stories was the way he never lost his cool when he was in a tough situation. (Having always been inclined to do something stupid first and then try to fix it later, I thought this was a great trait.)

  “Okay, Rusty,” I told myself. “Can the panic. Let’s examine the situation and see if we can figure something out. Start by taking a deep breath.”

  I followed my own advice and was surprised to realize how long I had been holding my breath. I had been so frightened I hadn’t realized my lungs were screaming for air. Now the inrush of oxygen almost made me giddy.

  I sat quietly for a moment, trying to regulate my breathing, to calm myself enough so I could think.

  When I was ready, I began to take stock of the situation.

  It was clear that the scooter had been rigged to get rid of me. I suppose if I had been a mechanical genius I could have changed the programming and gotten myself back on course for the colony. Unfortunately, mechanics and programming were not my specialty. I simply didn’t have the knowledge to change the course of this thing. I was trapped on a one-way trip to nowhere.

  I thought about Macdonald of Terra again. His philosophy, which I guess was also my grandfather’s philosophy, went something like this: If you can’t go through the door, blast open a window.

  Unfortunately, blasting open a window in this thing wouldn’t do me much good. Then I realized I didn’t need to blast open anything. The scooter had a spring-operated safety ejection system that didn’t depend on the regular power source.

  So I could get free of the runaway scooter. On the other hand, considering the difficulty I had experienced trying to move even two meters in the null-gravity of Dr. Puckett’s office, I couldn’t see much point in trying to “swim” back to the colony from this distance.

  That was when the answer hit me. When I had realized I was late for my session in the BS Factory, I had left Cassie in such a rush that I hadn’t bothered to take off the belt they had given me in Dr. Puckett’s office. I did have a way back!

  I looked over my shoulder again. The colony was already a long way off—and the distance was increasing rapidly.

  I had to move fast.

  Tearing up the seat beside me, I wrenched out the emergency space suit stored there. Even though I had had to practice using it in order to get my license, putting on the suit in the tight confines of the scooter wasn’t easy. My knees and elbows kept getting stuck in different places. After a while I realized that part of the problem was that I was three inches taller than I had been when I took the test. I began to curse the growth spurt that had pleased me so much earlier in the year. Trying to pull the space suit over my shoulder while my knee was wedged under the control console, I was struck by a vision of myself dying in this position. Would I float through eternity this way, doomed by my own adolescent gawkiness? It seemed both ridiculous and terrifyingly possible.

  And it made me so mad I was able to wrench the suit into position, though I gave my bad hip an awful twist in the process.

  I put on the helmet, locked it into place, and then strapped on the air tanks, which consisted of three smallish canisters welded together. According to the directions printed on the outside, I had two hours’ worth of air. I looked back again and wondered if I could possibly make it to the colony in two hours. With only the air belt to give me impetus, I would head back a lot more slowly than the runaway scooter had taken me outward.

  Trying to ignore my throbbing hip, I strapped on the propulsion belt, which I had removed before I tried to put on the space suit. Then I began the series of operations that would free me from the scooter. There were three separate steps. (Probably to keep klutzes like me from accidentally blowing themselves into space while traveling back and forth between the colony and the substations.)

  I finished the sequence.

  Nothing happened.

  I screamed.

  Wouldn’t you?

  I mean, I thought I had just kissed off my last hope.

  Even so, I felt pretty silly when I realized the only thing wrong was that I had performed the operations in the reverse order.

  I tried again.

  Victory! The top of the scooter blew off, and I could feel the rush as the air around me was sucked into space.

  I went with it.

  I was separated from the scooter. But my momentum was still away from the colony. I had to change that, and fast.

  I touched the propulsion belt and started slowing myself down.

  It happened slowly.

  Very slowly.

  I thought about screaming again. I could see my home floating in the distance, and I knew that once I had myself moving in the right direction I would eventually reach it. What I didn’t know was whether I would still be alive when I got there.

  I twisted around and watched as the scooter continued its mad flight to nowhere. I thought about what it would mean if I was still on the thing.

  I thought about throwing up.

  Fortunately, my recent memory of what it was like to get sick in an enclosed space was strong enough to help me beat down my fluttering stomach.

  I turned back to my goal. I was still moving away from it. What a helpless feeling! Using the belt at full strength, all I had done so far was reduce my outward momentum. I wasn’t even heading in the right direction yet!

  I gave the belt another jab, then another. But I had to be careful. Once I got going the right way, I would still need the belt to correct my course occasionally. I couldn’t afford to use up all the power now.

  I focused my attention on the stars.

  After a while I began to think that even if I made it back alive, I wouldn’t be sane. I began to feel a terror unlike anything I have ever known.

  It came, at least in the beginning, from feeling small—as though I were less than a particle of dust floating in the darkness. With nothing to push against, nothing to pull against, I began to realize how dependent we are on the things around us. Take them away and you take away our ability to act, and to react. Out here in space my body was virtually useless.

  Then the vastness of what was around me began to sink in. Compared to the distances involved, I wasn’t a hair closer to the stars than someone standing on Earth and looking up at them. But when I turned the right way, there was no Earth; no colony; no runaway scooter. There was only me and the stars. Even now it makes tears well up in my eyes when I think about it.

  Not because it was so terrifying—though it was.

  It was just that, I guess. Those last two words. It was. It all existed, and I was part of it. Me and the stars.

  This sounds stupid. How can I possibly explain it to you? I felt like I was crawling over the face of the universe, and I was so tiny I was beneath notice—and at the same time I was so much a part of it that I felt as if my body had come apart at the seams and thrown my atoms around the curve of space. I was less than nothing. I was enormous beyond belief.

  For a time I don’t think I cared whether I was going to make it back or not.

  I hadn’t died. But in a very real way I had gone to heaven.

  The moment didn’t last. Sometime after I was swept away by all these cosmic feelings, a little beeper went off in my ear.

  It was the suit, warning me that my air supply was starting to run low.

  Life is weird. One minute you’re convinced you know the secret of the universe. The next you’re scared silly because you realize that you’re about to die for lack of a few cubic centimeters of oxygen.

  Chapter 12

  Deep Breaths and Fast Spurts

  If I learned anything from the following three minutes, it was that panic is not a useful emotion. At least, not when you’re trying to think clearly. Every now and then I still thank whatever powers there are that no one was around to see how I acted when my fear was at its height. (I’m not about to describe it here, either. I’ve been very honest in writing all this down so far, but some things are just too embarrassing to share.)
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  Anyway, after a few minutes the panic began to ebb, and I tried to take stock of the situation somewhat more rationally.

  Do you want to talk about stupid? Try this one on for size. After all that agony, I realized I didn’t have to find a new oxygen source. I had been wearing one all along.

  Remember the triple canisters of the air pack? (This is so humiliating; just writing it down makes me want to blush.) The beeping I had heard was actually a warning that the first canister was nearly empty. Each canister held two hours worth of air (not two hours total, as I had been thinking). So I still had another four hours before I started turning blue.

  The scary thing is, if I hadn’t figured out what was going on, I would have suffocated anyway. Death by Stupidity. How’s that for an awful way to go?

  I have no idea how far from home I really was. It’s almost impossible to estimate distances out there without something to judge against. Even so, I was pretty sure that while I had used up a third of my air I hadn’t covered anywhere near a third of the way back yet.

  So despite the reprieve, the basic situation was as deadly as ever. Yet the sudden discovery that I had another four hours to live, instead of just a few minutes, made the moment of doom seem days, even years away.

  After a while I began to think it might be preferable just to get things over with. I mean, as far as I could tell, I was going to spend four hours floating slowly toward home, all the while knowing I didn’t have a prayer of getting there alive. This would be followed by a few minutes of running out of air, followed by turning blue, followed by dying.

  It struck me as being a particularly grim way to spend the last 240 minutes of my life.

  “Macdonald of Terra would never give up in a spot like this,” I told myself.

  Macdonald was always on the verge of death and getting out of it in some unexpected manner. It was his trademark. And while it would probably make Gramps angry to be called a philosopher, there was one message that came shining through in all his books: Where there is life, there is hope.

  Most critics think this is pretty sappy. Maybe it is. Sappy or not, it helped keep me sane out there.