John Sandford - Saturn Run

“We can get you that. Figure something out?”

“I think so,” she said. She felt ungainly and floppy, and kept having to remember to put the next foot down.

A tall, thin woman in a jumpsuit said to Clover, “Dr. Clover? I’m Sandra Chapman. I’ve read your ‘Possible Aspects of Alien Cultures’ about two hundred times and I have a lot of questions for you. Here, let me take the cat. Put your foot down. Now the next one, down. You’ll get it.”

Becca, Clover, and their guides got on an electric cart, which whirred away, leaving Sandy behind with a heavyset, middle-aged balding fellow, who introduced himself as Joe Martinez.

“I’m a handyman up here. I’m going to show you around. We need to get your camera gear,” he said. “The other folks are going to take the lift out to one of the habitats, where they’ll have some ‘gravity.’ You and I’ll head over to Engineering. It’s down the axle where the solar arrays and physical plant are. It’ll be zero-gee the whole way, which will give you a chance to practice your movement skills.”

They found his camera case—Martinez said his personal effects would be delivered to his cabin and tied it into another cart. “You don’t actually sit down on these things so much as just hang on,” Martinez said, as they started down the central tube.

The inside of the axle looked like the inside of some… well… science fiction movie tunnel, Sandy decided. An ice-white rectangular tube lined with pipes ranging in size from five or six centimeters to thirty centimeters, all neatly labeled and color-coded.

Sandy held on and asked, “What are we doing?”

“I was told that you’re going to be the primary cinematographer, as well as the documentarian on this mission with Ms. Fiorella. You’ll have to do a lot of EVAs, so, we thought as long as you’re up here, we’d check you out on an egg, and let you figure out how to shoot from one.”

“Sort of like a test, to see if I can shoot from one,” Sandy said.

“I wasn’t going to say that,” Martinez said. “Some people find eggs to be pretty intuitive, but I’ve had Ultra Stars up here who froze the first time we put them in one. We sort of need to find out where you’re at.”

“Gotcha,” Sandy said.

Sandy thought they might have been pulled a hundred meters down the axle when they arrived at what Martinez called the egg crate. A dozen eggs hung from overhead mechanical arms, each in a separate cubicle, much like a series of garages. Each cubicle was an air lock, with an elevator-sized area between two inner doors, and an outer door that opened to space.

“There are interlocks that prevent the space door from being open when either of the inner doors is open,” Martinez said. “We have two inner doors… just in case. In fact, everything has a just-in-case safety factor built in.”

He pointed at an egg: “This one is yours.”

They cycled through the air lock, and Martinez showed Sandy how to climb into the pilot’s seat, how to strap himself down. “You fly it in shirtsleeves—anything that would wreck an egg wouldn’t be salvaged by wearing a pressure suit. An egg sort of is a pressure suit—it’s just bigger, heavier, and more capable.”

“I was in one once,” Sandy told him. “At Disneyland.”

“Yeah, that’s a pretty good one,” Martinez said. “Not nearly as much fun, though—you still get dragged down by gravity. With these babies, you fly.”

Martinez spent an hour running him through the egg’s controls. At the basic level, there wasn’t much to it. The joystick and some push buttons controlled the low-power thrusters. Grips on either side controlled the manipulator arms. “Looks like an old-fashioned video game,” Sandy observed.

“You play those?” Martinez’s face lit up.

“When I was a kid, I was obsessed with them. Played ’em, took ’em apart, put them back together again. Sometimes they still worked when I got done with them.”

“What was your best old game?” Martinez asked.

“Jeez… if you put a gun to my head, I’d say, Hi-Speed Ass-Teroids .”

Martinez: “No! You got one?”

“Somewhere. There’s something fundamentally wrong with the left-hand wiper, though.”

“Oh, man. You gotta get that up here.”

When Sandy had the major controls down, Martinez asked, “You wanna go out and play in the yard?”

“Can we?”

“That’s why we’re here.”

Martinez slaved Sandy’s egg to his own, so that he could override Sandy’s controls if he needed to. “That’s not likely unless you get really disoriented. The thing is equipped with safeties up the wazoo. You can’t spin it too fast or ram it into anything. Proximity and acceleration sensors and overrides won’t allow it. You can’t blow yourself out of orbit. And if you think of some other way to wreck it… don’t do it.”

“Gotta take my cameras,” Sandy said.

“Yeah. There’s an equipment rack just to the left of your seat,” Martinez said. “I’ll take us free of the dock. Once we’re well clear of the station, I’ll let you mess around for a while and then I’ll hand the controls over to you and you can try it for real.”

When Sandy was set, Martinez moved to the next air lock over and strapped himself into another egg: Sandy could watch him through a hardened glass window that separated the two compartments.

A few seconds later, Martinez spoke to him through a speaker set into the bulkhead behind his head: “You ready?”

“All set.”

“Opening the air locks.”

The outer doors rolled back, and the overhead mechanical arm pushed them out of the station, then retracted. They were floating free, and Martinez said, “I’ll take us out to the playground.”

They slowly jetted away from the station, and Sandy had his first good, long look at the Resort.

The living modules, the habitats, rotated about the main axle at a leisurely one revolution per minute, attached by hundred-meter-long elevator shafts at both ends, which conveyed personnel and cargo to and from the center axle. Computer-controlled counterweights piggybacked on the shafts, a few tons of dead weight that slid in and out to keep everything in balance as equipment and personnel moved around the modules.

The one RPM rotation of the habitats produced enough centrifugal force to simulate one-tenth of Earth gravity in the living quarters. Because of the distance between the tubes and the axle, the rotation actually looked quite swift from Sandy’s viewpoint outside the ship. An egg that was motionless relative to the center axis, if struck by a moving tube, would be batted away like a tennis ball. The egg’s proximity alerts would not permit that, and it had never happened, but it was a theoretical possibility, given a dead egg.

The habitats themselves were squarish tubes, ten meters on a side and a hundred meters long, with meter-thick walls. The walls were slabs of self-healing structured foam that was less dense than air. The foam was inter-layered with ceramic-composite and carbon fiber fabric, designed to be resistant to micrometeorite impacts. Anything smaller than a millimeter or so shattered against the fabric layers in the wall.

A centimeter-sized rock could punch its way entirely through and exit the far side, but that wasn’t a fatal accident as long as it didn’t hit anyone on its way through. The foam could fill in a several-centimeter-diameter hole in seconds. In the thirty years the station had been operational, an impact like that had happened only once. A researcher’s quarters had been trashed as it went through, but she’d been working, so all she suffered was considerable aggravation and the irrevocable loss of a childhood teddy bear that had been unlucky enough to be in the meteorite’s path.