Tom Ligon - The Delicate Crunch of Marshmallows

Illustration by Vincent Di Fate

Zerk Peterson grabbed Farouk Karis by the collar of his jumpsuit and threw the man so hard he nearly matched station spin. Farouk tumbled through the air across the shop deck, clawing for something to halt his trajectory. He snagged a fabricator with one hand and slammed ungracefully into a tool cart, cutting his forehead on a spare carbide cutter.

Farouk vaulted down from the cart nimbly in the low gravity and stormed back toward Zerk, who stood his ground. Several technologists watched in shock, uncertain of what they should do, as the two circled each other like a couple of amateur gladiators. Zerk lunged at Farouk, who dodged the attack easily. The left over energy from the clumsy move left Zerk unbalanced, and he stumbled. Farouk took advantage of the situation and planted a perfect right cross on Zerk’s jaw. Zerk recoiled, then renewed his assault, and the two men locked into a clinch, tumbled onto the floor, and left a trail of blood, sweat, and drill bits across the deck.

Their co-workers finally came to their senses and separated the two combatants, who by that time were too winded even to shout genetically improbable insinuations regarding their opponent’s ancestry.

“I don’t want to hear your damned excuses,” Erica Thompson told Zerk, still bleeding as he sat in a chair in front of her desk. “You are supposed to be a professional, not some brawling dockwalloper.”

Zerk struggled to sit still and take it. Inside he was still seething with unfocused anger, and he was unable to find anything to vent it on harmlessly. Erica wasn’t helping matters.

“Look, we’ve all got problems,” Erica continued. “You ought to try my job sometime. I’m stuck between you guys and the Powers that Be. Everybody up here is bitching and moaning that they can’t get what they need to build the ship, and our ‘benefactors’ down on Earth are screaming for my head each time we miss a milestone. The only way we can pull through this is by working as a team. The more we fight each other, the worse it gets. It’s a lose-lose game.”

Zerk started to say something, and almost choked on the words. He sat there with an excuse stuck in his throat, and could almost feel Erica’s fingers squeezing on his windpipe, preventing him from purging the poison from his system. Instead of a word, a hoarse croak emerged. He broke into tears.

“Aw, fer Christsake, here we go.” Erica slumped tiredly into her work-seat. “Go ahead, dump on Auntie E.”

It took Zerk the better part of a minute to regain enough control to speak. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happened to me. I haven’t been in a fight since grade school. It was like someone else took over. And I know the thing that set me off wasn’t Farouk’s fault.”

“So I guess now I have to hear what it was,” Erica sighed, “even if it doesn’t make any difference. Oh, go ahead.”

“My project is the main air circulator for the ship,” Zerk said with a distinct quaver in his voice. “I’m way behind, and since it gets built right into the personnel core, I’ve got half a dozen people’s projects waiting on me. But I can’t get the materials I need, and I can’t get time on the fabricators, so I keep getting further behind. Then when I came down to use the time I had reserved on the fab, I found Farouk working on it. Someone had bumped me off the schedule for his project.”

“Farouk is building form hardware for the core casting,” Erica observed. “That’s pretty important to the schedule, too.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Zerk agreed unenthusiastically. “But I’ve been told my pay will be docked if my project is late. I’ll admit, I’ve made a couple of mistakes on it, but probably 90 percent of the delays aren’t my fault. It takes two hours to do a ten-minute job because we don’t have the right tools.”

“Then make the tools,” Erica said firmly. “Besides, they won’t dock you very much, and God knows we’re all up to our ears in money with nothing to spend it on. Hey, cheer up! Think of all the money you’ll have saved up by the time we get this baby finished!”

The effect that had on Zerk was the exact opposite of Erica’s intent. His face shriveled into a painful grimace and turned two shades redder.

“Ah, methinks I hit a nerve,” Erica commented. “What happened?”

Zerk sniffed a couple of times, then let out a heavy sigh. “All my life I wanted a piece of wild mountainside to call my own. Once I saved up enough from my earnings here, I had my agent buy a place I used to visit when I was a kid. Beautiful. About a thousand acres, bordering a lake, with a little patch of pasture for a horse or two. A place where speed is not measured in fractions of cee, and the rocks stay put instead of drifting around. Cost a bundle, but I could afford it.”

“Sounds like something I used to dream of,” Erica nodded. “So what went wrong?”

“Turns out the last president’s mother was born there. A local group had it declared a historical landmark and sued me for an easement to it. I didn’t fight them. So they put up a stone marker on this little bluff where her trailer had been, opened it to the public, and there was an accident. A little girl fell from the bluff and was crippled for life. The group hadn’t bothered to get insurance, and I wasn’t covered as a public park.”

“Aw, geez, gawdamned lawyers,” Erica snorted. “Took you for the whole damned thing, lock, stock, and barrel, didn’t they?”

Zerk shrugged with resignation. “And still get most of every paycheck. Probably will until I die. Hell, I expected it from the lawyers. It was the judge and jury that surprised me. The judge cited me with contempt for not being at the trial in person. Didn’t matter a bit that I had no way to get back from the Belt to Earth. And the jury seemed to think I made too much money for the work I was doing. Dr. Thompson, you wouldn’t believe how little respect we get down there.”

“Want to bet? That’s all I hear from ’em. Considering how much personal risk we each took to come up here, how little support they send compared to what they expect us to produce, and how stinking rich they expect to get on asteroid materials, I’d say we work pretty cheaply.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re right.” Zerk put his arms on Erica’s desk and laid his forehead against them. “Maybe this whole damned idea was screwed up from the start. What idiot decided a few hundred people could come up here in a couple of habitat modules with minimal tools and build a fleet of fusion-powered ships, anyway?”

Erica hesitated before answering. “Me.”

“Sorry.”

“So am I, sometimes. Look, the concept is sound. This place is just dripping with raw materials. The Belt miners are only shipping back the rare earths and other high value stuff. The cost of raising materials to Earth orbit is too high for building large ships. The economics of this approach are good. And we’ll have more help arriving in about a month.”

Zerk raised his head for a moment. “Great, another week and a half lost as we lash everything down, spin down the station, mate up a pair of habitat modules, spin back up, fix everything that went out of kilter in zero g, and find everything that wasn’t lashed down and floated into a corner. And let’s not even think about the toilet situation. I sure as hell hope they brought their own tools.”

“Yup. And everything we said we needed two years ago.”