Second Star (Star Svensdotter #1) Page 3

  “Be my guest.” Charlie waved an expansive hand. “Tell Paddy she can’t brew her poteen. When she stops laughing, you can track down her still. I figure it’s hung on the outside of any one of a thousand Ellfive airlocks. Not including the Frisbee, of course. Or either Doughnut.”

  Simon subsided, mumbling, and I said to my second in command, “Is there anything urgent I should take care of right away?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Not anything that can’t wait until tomorrow, anyway.”

  “Good. Why don’t you head on home, then?”

  They rose and then hesitated, exchanging one of those comprehensive looks that couples use to communicate with after they’ve been married for eleven years. Simon cleared his throat and spoke to a nonexistent spot somewhere over my left shoulder, his rumbling voice carefully devoid of any feeling that I might mistake for sympathy. “You sure you wouldn’t like to spend the night at our place? Elizabeth’s been talking of nothing but Auntie Star coming home for the past two days.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “You’re sure?” Charlie said in the same tone of voice, also to the nonexistent spot.

  “Goddammit, Charlie, I said I’m all right.”

  “You don’t look even close to all right to me.” She was going to say more until Simon placed a firm hand over her mouth and said to me, “Elizabeth took Hotstuff back to your place this morning. She looks ready to pop—Hotstuff, I mean, not Elizabeth—so you might find yourself up to your ankles in baby cats when you get home.”

  From somewhere I dredged up a wan smile. “I can hardly wait. Now get out of here. Give Elizabeth my love and tell her I’ll see her soon.”

  The firmness of my voice must have convinced them both. They left. “Pull up the drawbridge, Archy,” I said.

  “Consider it done, boss.” I heard the bolts in the door slide home.

  My knees unlocked and I slumped down into my chair. I silenced my communit and set my viewer to store any incoming calls. My hand was trembling so much it took me three times before I could set the correct code.

  Who would have thought the little man to have had so much blood in him?

  — 2 —

  Stranger in Town

  When a place gets crowded enough to require IDs, social collapse is not far away. It is time to go elsewhere. The best thing about space travel is that it made it possible to go elsewhere.

  —Lazarus Long

  THE FOLLOWING WEEK I plunged back into the countdown to commissioning. It was slow, painstaking, detailed work, involving checklists that in one continuous printout would stretch from Ellfive to Terra and back again. The difficulty lay in getting all the items on one checklist from one department signed off, punched by the relevant inspector, and cleared by the oversight committee all at the same time, so as to retire the list and commission the entire unit once and for all. The agronomics checklist was only one of many, if one of the most complicated, especially after I learned that the tomato plants were refusing to come into bloom and the second batch of bees died of starvation before we knew what was happening.

  Conchata Steinbrunner, the agronomics number two, was about ready to commit sideways. “The son-of-a-bitching bees, Star,” she kept repeating in helpless rage. “The son-of-a-bitching bees.” H2O shipments from Luna were still behind schedule, and although we had water enough, or at least ample supplies of hydrogen and oxygen to make enough water to support the recycling systems for the first load of colonists, I didn’t like being behind. I foresaw a trip to Copernicus Base in my near future and I wasn’t even psychic, and I was spending what I knew perfectly well was far too much time worrying over the solar activity reported on Hewie Seven.

  A week after my return I was standing by in the prefab shop watching the carpenters play with one-meter-by-three sheets of sheetrock. It was made of a new silicon-polymer composite a joint team of carpenters and chemists in the Frisbee had literally cooked up. The idea was to employ it as interior walls in residential construction, and today would see if the idea proved out. The carpenters laid out what looked like the entire inventory of the Ellfive tool crib and with great enthusiasm set about hammering, augering, sawing, routing, sanding and lathing, creating large mounds of sawdust and filling the air with cheerful curses.

  “That’s it, Star,” lead carpenter Lee Nakajima said at last. He mopped his forehead, leaving a wet smear of skin showing through the film of white dust. “She tests tougher than cedar, lighter than pine, and she’s got a density that makes her almost soundproof. Takes any kind of a nail or screw or bit and won’t splinter or split no matter what we do to her.”

  “Since when is sheetrock a she?” I inquired.

  “Since I spent every night for the last month with her at the shop, instead of home in bed with my wife, is when.”

  “Oh. Zerogee analysis come through?”

  “Molecule bleed-off is negligible. Structure maintains integrity to minus-oh-one and it can even keep a seal. For a while, anyway.”

  “All right, Lee,” I said, clapping him on the shoulder. “Damn good job, and a fast one, too. I’m doubling your crew’s bonus,” I added, raising my voice, and there was a loud cheer. “How soon can we get the stuff into production?”

  Lee grinned and said, “We’ve already got Dupont pouring it in the Frisbee.”

  “You were that sure it would test out, were you?” Another grin was all the answer I got and I said, “Okay. Let Roberta McInerny know when to expect delivery of this—uh—we’ll call it Leewall”—another cheer went up and Lee actually blushed—“in Shepard Subdivision.” I shook Lee’s hand warmly, turned to leave, and collided with Caleb Mbele O’Hara.

  He steadied me with both hands on my shoulders. “We’ve got to stop meeting like this,” he said.

  “O’Hara,” I said irritably, “you are beginning to haunt me. I can’t step outside my office without stumbling over you. Are you sure you aren’t twins?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He didn’t look at all sorry, he just looked big. He had looked big thrashing around on the end of a boathook in the cargo bay the day we arrived, but standing right next to me in the prefab shop the difference in size between the zerogee cheechako and a Kenilworth space tug was hardly worth mentioning. It was rare that I was able to look someone in the eye without leaning down. I could today. The experience was oddly disquieting. I took an unobtrusive step backward and said, “So what’s your problem? You’re the Ellfive security supervisor now, go secure something. Go find out how that Luddite got his bomb on board last week.”

  He stepped forward. “Nobody will talk to me about that, so I put Rex Toranaga on it.”

  I stood my ground. “Oh.” Airlock executions were not something we bragged about at Ellfive. I had no wish to become known as the Bloody Mary of the solar system and the news rarely went farther than Frank and Helen on Terra. I could hardly blast my own employees for being loyal and discreet.

  “Also,” O’Hara added, “I’m just beginning to find my way around. Ellfive’s a big place.”

  I looked at him for a long moment. His green eyes—they were beautiful eyes, large, thickly lashed, and uncomfortably alert—met mine with an expression of bland innocence. I sighed to myself and bowed to the inevitable. “Okay. I’m inspecting Valley One today. You want to ride along?”

  “Sounds good.” We walked down the corridor and up the stairs to the carport, O’Hara walking in front of me, and it wasn’t just my suspicious nature that kept me watching him. He walked like the cat who walked by himself, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone. He also walked with the careful nonchalance of someone who is never completely convinced that what is beneath each new step will bear up under the strain. I could relate.

  My car choked a little under our combined weights but managed to stagger into the air. As we rose, freed from the centrifugal gravity of the rim, our weight lessened and we proceeded smoothly down Valley One at a cruising altitude of three hundred
meters. “What’s this thing run on?” O’Hara said.

  “Compressed air. Hear the turbines?”

  He listened. “That hum?”

  “Yes. The air is sucked in through the forward intake, run through a compressor, and pushed out through vents in the hull and the tail. It’s the same principle as a balloon, after you blow it up and let it go, only controlled. The higher we get the less we weigh and the faster we go.”

  “How do you steer?”

  “Rudder and elevators, controlled by this yoke and these pedals. This is the throttle, although there are really only two speeds, stop and go. What with the increase in gravity the closer we get to the rim, takeoffs are rough and landings rougher. You haven’t taken the security aircar up yet?”

  “No.”

  I shook my head. “Get on the stick, O’Hara. Give Daedalus a call.”

  “Daedalus?”

  “The flight shop. They’ll set up an appointment for you with an aircar instructor. Tell them I said you have priority.”

  “Thank you.”

  I gave him a sharp look but the expression on his dark face remained uniformly meek. “Aloft, expect everything to happen in slow motion. An aircar’s airspeed can be measured in figures of one digit. With that little air pressure against the rudder she handles like an inner tube on the Great Salt Lake.”

  “Looks kind of like an inner tube, too,” he observed.

  I couldn’t deny it. On Ellfive function won out over form every time. “If you’re used to flying planes on Terra, an aircar takes some getting used to. One thing you must remember is to wipe down the intake at the end of each day. Our atmospheric humidity has increased to where the moisture tends to condense on the inside of the vents. It can be a problem if you don’t stay on top of it.”

  “I’ll remember,” he said obediently, and added, almost as if he couldn’t help himself, “I don’t want to be forever blowing bubbles over Ellfive.”

  He went back to looking over the side at the lush vegetation passing beneath us. Lush in comparison to this time last year, at any rate. The sun beat down on our heads from the solar window above us, the golden light only reflected glory in the windows on either side. It was enough to turn the tinted glass of all three a deep, beautiful blue. “Over there,” I said, pointing, “that’s Clarke Apartments, housing for singles.”

  O’Hara inspected the collection with interest. “What is that particular architectural style called?”

  I winced. “I don’t know. Iberian Art Deco is as good as anything, I suppose.” Or whatever you call turning loose an architect with visions of Addison Mizner dancing in her head, and then forgetting to check up on her for four weeks. Clarke was colorful, if nothing else.

  “What is that big white building there?”

  “McAuliffe School, grades one through twelve. Classes begin the second week in February.”

  “Hmm.” O’Hara craned his neck to look from the window overhead to the windows on either side. “This place is shaped like a pencil.”

  “A pencil thirty-two kilometers long and a little less than six and a half in diameter, with a total land area of thirteen hundred square kilometers,” I said dryly.

  “How much is habitable?”

  “About half. Every second surface of Ellfive’s hexagon is a valley three kilometers wide extending the length of the pencil, alternating with windows also three klicks wide. Ellfive’s axis points toward the sun and the cape of solar mirrors, one outside each of the three windows, reflects sunlight into the colony through tinted solar windows that makes our sky blue. Computerized adjustment of the angles of these mirrors fakes dawn, dusk, and passage of the sun across our sky, even though we complete a rotation every two minutes, providing the colony with earth-normal gravity. The days and nights are twelve hours long, by design, so that the transition from flatlander to farmer in the sky won’t be very traumatic. With a million or so colonists due in at regular intervals over the next year, the less trauma we have, the better.” O’Hara was smiling, and I broke off. “I’m sorry. Was I lecturing?”

  “You’ve said all this a few times before, I take it.”

  “I could recite it in my sleep.”

  “What’s this about flatlander trauma?”

  “Terran shrinks have been making dire predictions for years over the prospect of Ellfive raising a population of agoraphobics. Charlie—Dr.Quijance, Ellfive Med—says that’s crap. There’s six thousand meters of open air between the valleys, and what with more vegetation taking hold every day, the clouds are getting thicker all the time.” And then there were the viewports, big enough for two, with the entire universe drifting by the clear graphplex bubble every two minutes. I preferred climbing into my pressure suit and getting right out in the middle of it, although Charlie has informed me with what I can only describe as a salacious grin that the viewports give spectacular new meaning to what the French refer to as “the little death.” I couldn’t swear to it myself, and it didn’t have any bearing on Ellfive security anyway, which was a good thing since I sure as hell had no intention of sharing this titillating little tidbit with O’Hara. I said, “We might eventually have a problem with claustrophobia, especially with the Ellfive-born who go to school on Terra and have to learn to deal with finite horizons. Agoraphobia, no.”

  O’Hara grunted. “What’s that group of buildings? The white ones with the red roofs?”

  I answered by setting the aircar down on the perimeter of the housing site with my usual bone-jarring finesse. “Welcome to Shepard Subdivision. Single-family dwellings built around a community center and playground, close to shopping, restaurants, trolley, bike path, and schools.”

  O’Hara got out of the car and cast an appraising glance over the development. “I like the architecture. American Southwest, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. We were concerned with maintaining at least an illusion of privacy, and enclosed patios seemed to be the best way to go.”

  “What’s the material? It looks like adobe brick.”

  “It’s supposed to.”

  “Star!”

  I turned and waved. “Hello, Roberta. Caleb O’Hara, this is Roberta McInerny, Ellfive’s architect for family housing. This is Caleb O’Hara, the new security supervisor.”

  Roberta was a stocky woman in her mid-sixties with callused hands and graying hair caught in an untidy bun. She gave O’Hara a first cursory nod and then a second, more appraising and definitely more appreciative stare. If the man wasn’t handsome, he did have a certain battered masculinity that might appeal to some women. He had a high, broad forehead and thick straight brows. His nose, once high-bridged and aquiline, had been broken, several times with enthusiasm, each time in a different direction. An old scar split his right eyebrow, and his hair was a tight cap of black curls. His mouth was wide and expressive and his chin was very square and very firm, and his skin was such a warm, healthy brown that I felt anemic by comparison.

  O’Hara bore up calmly beneath her appraisal, and Roberta turned to me finally and said, “I heard about the Luddite, Star. Are you okay?”

  “I am just dandy,” I said.

  Roberta gave me a compassionate look that made me want to scream and with conspicuous tact changed the subject by handing me something. I took it automatically. “Look at this.”

  It was a terra cotta tile, dark red in color, half a cylinder in shape. It was the kind of tile you could see lining half the roofs of the surrounding subdivision and most of New Mexico. It wasn’t really terra-cotta, of course, the real stuff would have been prohibitive in lift costs from Terra. “What’s wrong with it?” I said.

  “Feel how much it weighs?”

  I hefted the piece experimentally in my hand. “So?”

  “So, feel how heavy this one is.”

  The second sample, although much the same in appearance, was considerably lighter in weight, and I raised one eyebrow at Roberta. She nodded. “The heavier one is from the second batch. The walls would need flying buttresses t
o hold up a roof full of these, Star. And you’ll like this.” She took the heavy sample from me and let it fall. It shattered on impact into a hundred pieces. I dropped the other. It bounced several times and remained intact.

  “More brittle, too,” I observed. Like Simon says, nothing gets by me.

  “You said it. The ceramics people have pulled this crap before, Star. Remember when George fiddled around with the formula for the piping in the sewage treatment plants and the waste bacteria ate right through it?”

  Did I ever, and I shuddered. “Only too well.”

  “Will you talk to him? I think he’s at STP One today.”

  “Right away.”

  “Thanks.”

  She went back to work, and O’Hara’s eyes followed her. “She wears brown.”

  “All construction personnel wear brown.”

  He looked at his own red jumpsuit, and from it to the gold one I was wearing. “Why the difference in color?”

  “Helps sometimes to tell the different departments at a glance. There’s blue for computer and life sciences, red for engineering and security, gold for administration, and so on.”

  “Color coding.”

  “Star Trek. Tradition is all. Would you like to see the inside of one of the homes?” He nodded and I showed him through the one nearest the aircar, which had three bedrooms, a family room, and two baths. It had the same smell all new houses do, even back on Terra, part sawdust although nothing on Ellfive was made of wood, part glue, and part clean, the edgy kind of clean that dares you to track in a single grain of dirt. The rooms were airy and spacious, with a window in each looking out on a patio of generous size filled in with a neat level of pulverized LIMSH waiting to be bullied into life. As we looked a ray of sun shifted and poured through the open roof in a golden stream.

  “Very nice,” O’Hara said.

  “Yeah, the new owners can plant whatever they want, grass or gardens. Or they can brick it over if they aren’t big on yard work. The family room is framed for a viewport that looks outside, as well as for an airlock, either of which can be installed on request.”