Hours later, Portia’s SPECTACL flagged an incoming chat and she
answered it, fully expecting it to be her parents looking for an update, though
they pretended not to care.
Instead, the man who appeared in the SPECTACL field was Portia's boss,
Mr. Edgley, the senior administrator at Commercial AeroSpace Traffic Control in
Houston. Although Edgley was wearing his
SPECTACL, he was calling Portia using his decades-old DeskLink. Typical.
“Ward Edgley here,” he said, the way people older than 50 identified
themselves because they couldn’t get used to the idea that you could see them
on the “phone”.
“Yes, hi, Mr. Edgley. How are you?”
“Very smiley-face, thank you.
Tell me, can you come back early?
We’re having trouble with the new recruits for the space station.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“They refuse to go,” said Mr. Edgley.
“Why?” asked Portia, though she already knew the answer.
“Commander Penrose quipped, and I quote: ‘if they want to turn me into
a garbage-man, I’m going back to working for the government. That way I can at least join the trash
collector’s union’ – unquote.”
“What about those pilots from the Air Force?”
“They say that it’s a stupid and boring mission and they’d rather
re-up than go up.” Mr. Edgley said this
as if the idea of going into space was so magnificent that any
assignment should be accepted as a gift from Heaven.
“Well, we can go back to the genetically enhanced chimps,” said
Portia.
"We can?" asked Edgley, excitedly.
“Not really, the super-chimps would go insane cooped up for a year,"
said Portia. "The problem is
they’re too intelligent."
"I've got a lot of money invested in those monkeys," snarled
Edgley. He needed Portia's signature on
the approval to use the chimps, mostly for plausible-deniability reasons.
“Look, I’ve had a near-tragedy in my family and I’m kind of stuck here
but I’ll have time to noodle out the problem.
Let’s talk again tomorrow, okay.”
“Think fast, that station must be orbiting and fully operational in 10
days.”
“Yes sir,” said Portia. “I’ll
get you a plan.” She said this with her
fingers crossed, knowing she was about as far away from a plan as she was from
Alpha Centauri.
Portia sat down beside Donny, her older brother, her friend and
tormenter. Staring at him, she couldn’t
concentrate on astronaut recruitment problems.
Instead, she wandered back through memories of their childhood.
Portia would stand in GoshJosh® jeans with the knees worn out, watching Donny and Mickey thumbing the controls on their e-Lation•II® players, both hiding in a dark basement on a bright summer day. At that time, Donny was one of the best and the brightest in grade school and, for her parents, Donny was always the main topic of conversation. Though Donny later graduated high school with high grades, he flunked out of Engineering School and then flunked out of Technical School, moved home and stayed in the basement for five years.
Comparatively speaking, Mickey went straight into his mother’s attic, bypassing the post-graduate flunking stage and Lyle didn’t even graduate from High School, though he was the only one with an actual job. (However, spinning Meatcycles™ at Gyroworld® couldn’t pay for basic rent and food and up ‘til now, Lyle had been residing in his parents’ garage – between the cars.)
But Donny and Mickey had, at one time, been bright enough to be candidates for the "most likely to succeed" designation in their high school yearbook, though they were also welcome among the "most likely to overdose" crowd as well.
Mickey had been a computer prodigy/freak -- he'd run circles around the School Board's I.T. Department and even the teachers relied on Mickey's advice. Someone in the neighborhood would get a virus and Mickey would wrestle it into submission and squeeze it out of the computer with a minimum of fuss; whereas the I.T. guys tended to erase the hard-drive and then leave behind 2 viruses that were worse than the first. Nevertheless, Mickey was so scattered and distracted that even his grades in Computer Studies tended to be barely a pass, despite the fact that he was in charge of the computer lab.
On the other hand, Portia remembered Donny bringing home high grades when they were kids. He had a few report cards dominated by “A”s and that was nearly impossible under the curriculum at the time.
Where was her brother going to live? He couldn’t live with her and her beau. In 2044, under-educated pheely-geeks couldn’t make enough money to rent a cardboard box in an alley, except maybe on a time-share.
As she sat in Donny’s hospital room, Portia scrolled the local classified job ads on her SPECTACL and tried not to think about her job. But how was she going to get trained Astronauts to pilot the Waste-REL?
The Waste-REL was a massive, nuclear-powered electro-graviton-magnet that was designed to attract and cling to the flotsam and jetsam left behind by the Astrospace industry. By 2044, tens of thousands of pieces of space junk were orbiting Earth, from ball bearings travelling faster than a bullet to dead satellites the size of a city bus. Every bit of this junk represented a threat to the viability of every new space mission undertaken by big multinational corporate behemoths like SOLTimeWorn Inc., The BazooPalookPatoot Company, Amazongzi Corp. or Creamy Fried Krispclots LLC.
The Waste-REL would solve the problem; it would float around attracting the material, getting bigger and bigger, until its orbit could no longer be sustained and a shuttle would be sent to extricate the human components before the whole mess plummeted to Earth and burned up on re-entry.
It was extricating the human components part that had more than one experienced Astronaut a little worried.
The entire purpose of the Waste-REL mission was to float about attracting large amounts of orbiting garbage to cling to the hull of the vessel. Among the real astronauts, the ones with the advance degrees in science and engineering, rumor had it that by the end of the mission the distance between the interior and what would effectively become the outside surface of the ship would be too dense to cut through with a nuclear bomb. One navigator, Dr. Pradeep Nidhish, calculated that it would cost $2 billion to extricate the crew from the space-junk encrusted Waste-REL but STC lawyers estimated it would cost only $300 million to shell out for a few elaborate state funerals and quickly settle a class-action law-suit filed by the astronaut’s families (and anyone the Waste-Rel killed when it landed).
Besides, no respectable Astronaut wanted to be the first garbage man in space. It was a dull, thankless job and required no more skill than a trained sloth to run the thing; except a sloth would become disoriented and possibly destructive if confined on the Waste-REL for as much as a year.Of course, Portia Summers, being a psychologist of little engineering brain, had no idea that her astronauts secretly suspected that the crew was effectively doomed to become collateral squishage.
“Too bad I can’t send up these three,” thought Portia, out loud. “Too bad I can’t just pack them off to Cocoa
Beach, put them on the rocket and fly them up there. If I kept them connected to their stupid box,
they’d never know… They could unhook to
eat, and make any manual adjustments required, but otherwise we could just –
just leave them under and let the computer do everything.” Portia laughed to herself.
This seemed like a really funny and stupid idea for another 26 seconds
-- then Portia called Mr. Edgley.
Next: Coping with the Pheel
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