“The best ones I need for my shuttle pilots. Don’t forget, you can’t even get to the spacecraft without a shuttle ride.And the short-range economy is going to be in Earth orbit for a while.”
“So these are the dregs, in other words.”
“As a matter of fact,Takahashi is a pretty high-ranking officer of this company, and the oldest son of the head of the Tokyo office. His loyalty is impeccable, and he’s one of my strongest and smartest people. Kane is family, and there is nothing wrong with his mind. He and Phut both showed great loyalty and courage in the war, and they’re two of the best helicopter pilots in Texas. Lena and Walker are strong, capable, bright,
and physically fit.”
“But the risks involved...”
“We’ve been over that.You said we were in an adversarial position, and this is an example. Some of the decisions you’re unhappy about may be company decisions, which is to say decisions made in a larger framework than the one you’re responsible for.Those are the kind of decisions you’re just going to have to live with.”
“Even if it jeopardizes the mission?”
“I’m sure you’ll manage,”Morgan said.“I have every confidence in you.”
On the third day, Reese took them to 15 Gs. Phut’s trachea blocked with vomit and Lena had to clear it with her finger and give him mouth-to-mouth. Morgan had been watching from the doorway, lurking, Reese thought, just like he did in the old days.
“I’m washing him out,” Reese said, and Morgan only nodded.
Phut’s dismissal broke the tension in the crew, and for the first time Reese began to think they might make it.That afternoon he let them on the Mars Mission Module in Building Five. Reese had asked Morgan to have it fixed, and Morgan had done so, quietly and invisibly, taking away the blue painted exterior stairs that the tourists had used, stripping out the plastic sheets that sealed off the Command Center, patching the cutaway sections of the hull.
Reese watched them crawling through the four hideously familiar levels, quarters at the bottom, then Wardroom, Health Maintenance, and Command, each just twelve feet in diameter, knowing how soon they would all learn to detest the sight of the light-brown walls, the gridded metal floors. Reese had spent three years of his life, nine months at a time, in various duplicates of the Mission Module, and still at least three or four times a month he had claustrophobic, slow-motion dreams of drifting between the levels.
At the end of the second week, exhausted by the fourteen-hour days, Reese gave them the evening off.They could only learn so much, he told himself, and even Takahashi was starting to show signs of stress, confusing his right and left hands while running the shuttle trainer, questioning the relevance of graviton theory in the classroom.
Reese was collapsed sideways across his bed when Kane knocked on his door.“I’m going in to town,” Kane said.“You want to come along?”
He was back behind his mirrorshades, as close to relaxed as Reese had seen him in the last two weeks, wearing a loose cotton-knit pullover and fatigue pants.
“Sure,” Reese said impulsively.“What are we doing?”
“Bringing in some stuff from the downtown office. Maybe get a bite to eat while we’re down there.”
They took the elevator to the roof, where a late-model four-seat helicopter was moored.
“You fly these?” Kane asked, and Reese shook his head.“It’s nice,” Kane said.“A real power trip. Planes just go fast.This’ll do anything you want it to.”
Kane took them up smoothly into the fading sunlight. Gray, four-lane highways squared the jsc; beyond it, Clear Lake’s muddy water picked up muted blues from the sky.As Kane heeled the copter over, Reese could finally see what happened to Clear Lake City.The residential areas were mostly burned to the ground, and the storefronts were glassless and hollow.
“I didn’t know the riots spread this far,” Reese shouted, over the thudding of the rotors.
“Used to be a rich neighborhood.That’s all it took. Somebody finally figured out that nobody gave a shit if the people who were starving just burned down their own houses.This piece of work got them a lot of attention, but no food. By that time the government didn’t have any money to give them.”
“What’s the population now?”
“Nobody knows for sure. Probably around a million five or so.”
“Jesus.”
“A lot of that’s because of people moving out to Smithville and LaGrange and getting the hell away from here.There’s farmland out there and cattle and it’s a lot easier to get by. I mean, a million people didn’t die here.A lot, but less than a million.”
Kane tilted the rotors into the wind, and the copter shot forward, making for the cluster of reflective-glassed buildings to the north and west. Underneath them flowed a procession of warehouses, factories, and swamps, all of them flanked by scraggly pines and scrub brush.
“Looks like Morgan’s the only corporation in town.”
“There are others,” Kane said.“The worst part was currency— nobody wanted dollars and we had to get changed over to an electronic transfer system before things could get rolling again. Of course, we make the computers to handle those transfers.”
The “we” surprised Reese, giving him a sudden insight into Kane’s character. Kane might be the only one of the crew, he realized, who saw Pulsystems as more than just Morgan.
“A lot of these places,” Kane went on, waving his hand,“belong to the majors now. They’ll be up and running again in a couple years.”
The industrial wasteland gave way to poorer neighborhoods, the hulks of rusting cars cluttering the streets or sitting up on blocks in front yards, icons of an obsolete god.A few trash fires smoldered weakly, spreading a faint haze through the evening and blurring the knots of people on the corners who drank from refillable beer bottles and leaned against light poles that had lost any other usefulness.
On the average, Reese knew, less than half of them had jobs and the rest collected what Pulsystems and the other major corporations euphemistically called a “pension,” paid out of a fund that all the corporations supported. During his days on the line at Pulsystems, Reese had heard one management trainee refer to it as the “riot prevention tax.”
The result was a supposedly temporary phase of cable tv addiction that would eventually give way to a new age of cottage industry and informed consumerism. Reese did not expect the new age in his lifetime, not on Earth.The entire planet seemed in decay and he wanted away from it, back into space where he belonged.
As they began to thread their way into downtown Houston through the jungle of gold- and blue- and brown-tinted glass, Reese noticed that only the smaller buildings were missing panes, that the largest were clean and intact. Kane brought the helicopter down onto a yellow-painted target on the roof of one of the nearly identical towers in the center of the city.
Reese waited while Kane called the elevator, using both a laser key and a combination typed into the elevator console.When they finally got inside they dropped to the second floor quickly enough to simulate low gravity.
Morgan’s’ office seemed cluttered and lived-in, with no sign of imposed aesthetics.The wooden desk was old and stained, while the chair behind it was a modern sculpture of chrome and steel. One set of bookshelves had been built into the wall while another was bolted together from perforated metal.
The paneled walls were hung with framed photographs, most of them the obvious shots of Morgan with assorted celebrities; a few of them, though, showed a clear mountain stream with a cabin in the background.They seemed to go with a shelf of books on fly-fishing.The other shelves held bound printouts, self-help books from Machiavelli to Dale Carnegie, biographies of astronauts, the usual dictionaries and references. Most of the books were paperbacks, with broken spines and dogeared pages, victims of hard use.