Sectret of The Marauder Satellite (v1.0) Read online

  I filed her pretty far back.

  I haven’t been too careful with my details so far—Bix says that I have an inherently disordered mind; I’m always digressing on my digressions—so let me fill you in a bit.

  I was born in 1966.1 used to take a lot of kidding about how unlucky that is for a spaceman—1966 is the year we lost our first space team. But even at that, they were wrong: I was lucky.

  We put our first men on the moon in 1972.1 remember the tremendous hullabulloo on TV—they’d interrupted Capt. Whizz and His Intergalactic Patrol to broadcast all these terribly dull scenes of men sitting around talking to each other and looking at monitors, and eveiy so often announcing something or other.

  By 1978 we had the primary wheel of the space station in orbit. It was staffed entirely by the military by then, but NASA had already taken the space program out of the hands of the military, and the new training program was five years under way.

  There are two good reasons for training your spaceman early and using him while he’s young. The first reason is the one that’s been a cliche in science fiction for the last three decades: a man is at his physical prime between ages fifteen and twenty-five, centering between eighteen and twenty-one. He’ll never again have such finely toned reflexes, either physical or mental. And for all the computers they’ve put into orbit, we’ve had to depend time and again on human reflex. The second reason is one they didn’t discover until they started orbiting men: Prolonged weightlessness in older men produces something they call hypotension. Basically, the older you are, the harder time you have readjusting to standard gravity after being weightless, say, for two weeks or longer. Your heart and circulatory system find it easy to take weightlessness— much easier—but the older you are, the less easy it is to go back to full-time work again.

  This doesn’t matter for a lot up in the tin can, of course, where one G is maintained on the rims. But an active spaceman may spend a lot of time up there when he’s not -on the rim, or even in the Station itself. And he’s got to be able to take the transitions.

  So they grab ’em young. They grabbed me young. When I was twelve I was popped into the NASA training academy—usually referred to as the Space School—and given five years of intensive schooling and training, rarely with any time off for good behavior.

  I graduated just before I turned eighteen. I’d had all they could give me—and about all I could take of them. I was as prepared for space as I’d ever be. So, in 1984, they shipped me up to my brave new world: space.

  We were flown east to New York City first. We were getting a three-day stopover, a chance for one last wild fling before departure. I’m sure I don’t know what they expected. I’m not one for sight-seeing, so I decided I’d ride the subways, peering out of the front window in the first car. That had been one of my favorite pastimes in Chicago and the Bay Area.

  They put us in a quiet hotel, just east of Central Park. I had my own room, which was no great difference to me, since I wasn’t that close to any of the guys along on the trip anyway. There were seven of us, and neither of the close friends I’d made in school had graduated yet. I was left with guys who had their own friendships and cliques, of which I was no part.

  It occurs to me that I haven’t actually described myself.

  I suppose this is because I take myself for granted, having lived with me for a good number of years—most of my life, actually—and my mental image of myself doesn’t match up too closely with what a stranger might make of me.

  I’m a little short—five feet eleven inches—and stocky. I have dirty blond hair, the kind which is just nondescript enough that no one is quite sure whether to call it blond or brown. I’ve been shaving since I was fourteen, but it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t; my beard is all but invisible. This used to bother me, but it doesn’t anymore. Sometimes I skip days between shaves. I was one of those who matured early. I remember in the gym, getting pinned on the wrestling mat and hearing somebody say, “Hey, what ugly hairy legs.” I threw the guy I was wrestling. And I went through pimples two years before my classmates, to my early unhappiness and later glee.

  What else? I like to think of myself as hard-bitten, a realist. Practical, the sort to order his life. Bix tells me that this is purest baloney; that I am an incurable dreamer, always messy, and blessed with a cluttered, disorderly mind. Take your pick. From the way this is going, I’d say Bix is closer to the truth. But I’ll get to Bix later, if I can ever untangle my chronology and tell this story right.

  Meeting Mary again seemed at first the purest coincidence .

  I’d wandered down to the lobby, after shaking off Mr. Farnsworth, one of our chaperons, telling him I just wanted to wander over to the park and get a little sun.

  " Watch yourself, Paul, " he said. " That park has a bad reputation:” I told him I thought I could handle myself—I’d had Marine training in self-defense, after all—and left him standing by the elevator with his mouth open as the doors closed. You’d think that if you were old enough to risk your life in space, you might be trusted to behave intelligently in New York City. (Bix tells me that it was only the government’s investment in me that Farnsworth was safeguarding.)

  When I went over to the lobby candy counter to buy peanuts for squirrel-feeding, I heard somebody call behind me. I turned around.

  And there was this girl. She was slender, sort of leggy, actually, with long hair that curled down over her shoulders. She wore glasses, and a smile. The smile was what did it: I remembered that smile.

  “Hi,” she said. “Remember me?”

  “Mary Cramer,” I said. “Star of stage, screen, and TV. How could I forget you? You outscored me.”

  “I heard you were staying here,” she said. “Are you going down to the Cape from here?”

  “Thursday,” I said. “We’ve got three days’ leave to enjoy ourselves in the Big City.”

  “Have you made any plans?” she asked.

  “Not really.” I wondered what all this was leading up to.

  “Daddy is staying here,” she said. “How would you like to have dinner with us?”

  Now you’ll have to take this on faith, but the prospect of dinner with Maxfield Cramer was a good deal more interesting to me than Mary was. Cramer was one of those men like the legendary Von Braun; there’d been a time in the not very distant past when I’d worshiped him. Mary—well, Mary was a pretty seventeen-year-old, and smart, and entered in my file of future wife material, but at this moment no great attraction to me.

  So I was mostly being polite and returning invitation for invitation when, after I accepted hers, I said, “I’m going across the street to the park. Want to come along?” “Sure,” she said. “Why not?” She noticed the bag of peanuts. “Going to feed the squirrels? Those are the salted kind. You’d have much better luck with the kind that have shells.”

  “If the squirrels don’t care for them,” I said, “I’ll eat them myself.” I was wondering why I was feeling vaguely irritated. And why I hadn’t thought about the difference in peanuts myself.

  The street was full of sunshine, flapping pigeons, and cars. It was a pleasant day, and one, I’m told, that was typical of the city. A vague mist seemed to hang in the sky, so that the sunshine was yellower, and when you look down a long avenue, the more distant buildings become progressively lighter shades of gray. There’s a smell to these days, too, although I can’t quite pin it down. Sort of like the seashore; not a waterfront smell, but yet the smell of water. Right now, where I’m writing this, I’m breathing canned, recycled air, and despite all attempts, it smells of too many people closed in among themselves, and it carries the sharpness of ozone and air-freshening scents. And that peculiar, far-off smell of New York City—sort of cool, salty, and humid, blended with the smell of trees and fresh-mown grass in the park—makes me feel a sad tingle of homesickness,' despite everything.

  We crossed over into the park and followed one of the winding paths past baseball fields, flower gardens, a lake wi
th people rowing on it, and up a series of hills. Finally we stopped, pausing to rest on a park bench in a secluded copse of trees. The path forked as it rose up for the next hill, and an outcropping of rock sat in the center of the fork, with an old gnarled tree growing over it and stretching out over us. I opened my bag of peanuts.

  A squirrel scampered down the tree and out onto the rock overlooking us. It rose up and clutched a forepaw to its breast. It looked very plaintive and sad; less a beggar than someone desperately in need but too proud to seek charity. “Hey, there,” I said, and held out a peanut in my hand.

  I’ve since learned that the squirrels in Central Park have their humans so perfectly trained that whether or not you have anything, you will automatically make the gesture of offering something to the little beasts. And you’ll feel guilty if your hand is empty.

  The squirrel jumped down to the walk and scampered closer, in a sort of sidewise, skittish motion. I flipped my peanut out at it. The squirrel jumped back, then eagerly forward, to snatch at the peanut, and then made a great leap with it back to the edge of the rock.

  I never got to find out whether it liked salted peanuts.

  That backward leap was the tip-off—we’d been so engrossed in the squirrel that we’d been oblivious to the approach of strangers. I looked up.

  There were five of them in immediate sight, and I had no idea if there were more. They all looked to be my age or younger, but there’s where the resemblance stopped.

  I made it a point to find out about these types afterward, and I was told that they were “an unfortunate product of urban conditions.” What that means is, they are what happens when you overcrowd a city, hike the rents way up, put half the families on welfare, and then start shuttling them from slum to slum in the name of urban renewal—which always somehow seems to accommodate fewer people than it dispossesses. I know a guy up here in the Station who is one of the aerospace military team. He comes from Harlem, but I don’t hold that against him. He told me he was born in a tenement where he shared two rooms with his family of eight and a population of rats at least equal in number. Theoretically at least, he could’ve been one of those guys in the park—for all I know, maybe one of his brothers was—but he pulled himself out of it. Why? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem right to say that some people are born bad, but at the same time I can’t quite go along with those social-worker types who want to blame everything on everyone else but the kid himself. There’s got to be an answer somewhere in between, but I haven’t got it. Neither, I suspect, has anyone else.

  Anyway, to put it in plain language, these guys who were ringing us were members of a gang—kid gangsters, really—which made Central Park a cruising ground. They were looking for what trouble they could find, and right now we were It.

  “Hey, look a' blondy, feedin’ the squirrels," said one of them with a sneer.

  “Hey, don’t stop just ’cause we’re here,” said a short little guy with a bandanna tied around his head.

  "Yeah, we like to feed the squirrels, ” the first one said. With a sort of negligent move he batted the bag of peanuts from my hand, and they spilled on the ground.

  I didn’t do anything. I didn’t want to start any real trouble, not with Mary there. And I am very realistic about myself. I can handle myself pretty nicely, but against five—very likely carrying knives? Bad odds. So I sat there and took it.

  “Hey, you spilled your peanuts," the leader said. “Better pick them up before somebody walks on ’em.’’

  “That’s all right," I said quietly.

  “Hey, what’d I say? Pick ’em up, buddy.’’

  “Let the squirrels have them," I said.

  He cuffed me against the back of my neck, driving me off the bench and onto my knees. “Pick them up he repeated. He clubbed me on the back of my neck again. “With your mouth, buddy. Just like a squirrel.’’

  Well, there’s a limit. I mean, I didn’t think it would matter to him that squirrels usually use their forepaws— their hands—to pick things up. And I’d been pushed about as far as I could let myself go. Mary still worried me, though. If I started something, well, she was just a girl, and I didn’t like to think about it.

  So I hesitated, and the guy started to kick at me.

  Mary let out a good, healthy scream. It was loud.

  I grabbed the foot that was aimed at me and stood up, twisting. The guy landed on his face in the dust.

  The next three seconds were kaleidoscopic. One of them jumped me, getting on my back and trying to choke me with his arm around my neck. I threw him. Then I heard a thin, high-pitched scream, and saw another one clutching his arm, which was sticking out at the wrong angle. He was backing away from Mary.

  Then, simultaneously it seemed, there were police whistles, and the area was empty, except for us.

  Chapter 2

  Naturally, that wasn’t the end of it.

  The next three hours were punctuated by lectures. The first lecture was from a police sergeant, who asked me what I thought I was doing, “bringing a nice girl into a park like this.” ’ You could see he had his own ideas. If you ask me, he was a lot more interested in scaring honest citizens out of the park than he was in making it safe for them.

  Then there was Mr. Farnsworth, who was absolutely shocked that I would expose Mary to “that sort of thing.’ ’

  “Well, I don’t know,” I said. “She took pretty good care of herself. "It was very illuminating to discover that . Mary knew karate.

  “Young man,” Mr. Farnsworth said, his face as livid as raw liver, “that is exactly the sort of flippant remark I would expect of you. You seem to have absolutely no awareness of anyone but yourself. You seem to feel that by having escaped the serious consequences of your foolishness that you are above reproach. I would like to ask you just one question: Did you know beforehand that Miss Cramer could defend herself against such an attack?’ ’

  “No, sir,” I said.

  “Very well,” he nodded. “I trust I have made my point.”

  Win one, lose one.

  “Conditions aren’t good here in the East, Paul,” Dr. Cramer told me. I sawed at my meat and kept my mouth shut. This man was not another Farnsworth.

  Dr. Cramer had a face like that of your friendly neighborhood pharmacist: wise and twinkling eyes, which seemed to crinkle every time he laughed; a firm Jaw getting just a little jowly, strong flat-planed cheeks, and a receding hairline behind which the hair was as dark as Mary’s. I was having dinner with Mary and her father. Each of us struggled not to say what we each privately thought about the hotel’s room-service fare.

  “The jet streams have been changing their patterns erratically for over twenty years now—that’s one of the weather situations we’ve been studying up on the Station—and the results are right at hand. They’ve been having five-year drought cycles all over the eastern part of the country for a full generation. Think about that, Paul.”

  I thought about it. “You mean the farm disaster programs, sir? But the East doesn’t grow much these days, and the Midwest has been getting along all right. I mean, there’s no crush on food—we’re still feeding half of Asia on our surpluses. The eastern farms were mostly two-bit farms to start out with.”

  “Yes, they were. And they didn’t lend themselves to amalgamation—to corporate ownership. So they were run by families, Paul. And while we don’t need their food, they do. Every time the government buys a wiped-out farm, Paul, the people leave. They’re leaving homes that may .have been in the family for generations. They’re leaving a drought-devastated battlefield, with charity money in their pockets, and little prospects for a new career. Most of those families will end up in the big cities, on welfare. Most of the men will be embittered, just as the coal miners in the Appalachia region were in the previous generation. They’ve lost their homes, and more important, the dignity of work. They will be on the dole for the rest of their lives.”

  “Oh, now, come on,” I said. ‘‘That’s too much. There
are new jobs opening up every day—plenty of retraining programs. There’s plenty of work!”

  “Sure—for trained technicians, for men with skills. You’re a very young man, Paul. Life is still opening up for you, and you’ve trained for a forward-looking career. But—let’s just suppose that next week the government voted to close down the space program. What then?” “Huh? They wouldn’t do that. That’s ridiculous!”

  "Is it? The government has spent more money on the space effort now than it has for every war effort of this century. Did you know that? Every year, Congress budgets billions for the continuing space program—more than any other single program or department. In three days, Paul, you and I and your classmates will be taking a rocket up from Cape Kennedy, which will eat sizably into that budget, just for its launching and use.

  "And so far the space program has not begun to pay off in a tangible way. So far it has not returned even pennies on each dollar it swallows up.”

  “Are you serious, sir? Would they—could they close it all down?” For some reason the muscles in my stomach were clenched and knotting, and the roast cardboard on my plate did not even smell appetizing.