Orbit

Chapter 33

Kip sniffs the air again, fearful of confirming what his senses perceive.

And yes, it is there. Faint, but there, and where there is some smelly evidence of the process of decomposition, there will be more.

He’s stopped typing, aware that his fanciful life story rewrite has wobbled too far afield. It’s not even a good fantasy, and it feels so narcissistic. No, he decides, he should be writing about something else, maybe how he wishes the world was, rather than how rich or famous he’d like to be.

Well, not famous. That’s never turned him on, though now he supposes he’ll be a tiny footnote in space history: “First contest-winning space tourist dies in orbit.”

With the odor, he can’t get Bill out of his mind. Of course he’s going to run out of breathable air anyway, but why hurry the moment?

Now, for some incomprehensible reason, he’s compelled to turn around and actually look at the bagged corpse as it floats Velcroed to the back wall.

What, he might have gone out for a stroll? Kip chides himself. How dumb that he has to actually look. But he had to.

Okay, there’s the space suit idea. Put him in it and seal it, but now it’s far too late for that.

He’s read about the hatch and the airlock now, and knows what he didn’t understand before: This isn’t like a Hollywood movie where the hero can pull a handle and blow anything in the airlock into space. Someone live has to be inside the airlock to work the outer door. So that leaves him getting into Campbell’s space suit, completely depressurizing the ship, opening both doors and floating Bill out, since there isn’t room for two of them in the lock. He’s tried to calculate how many hours of air would be lost, but he can’t find the formula. At least he’d have the air pack on the suit, but when that ran out, he might have nothing.

So, I sit here and die with a stench, or just die faster in clean air. Wonderful choice.

So far it isn’t that bad, though, he thinks. He has just a little over twenty-four hours anyway, according to his best calculation. So perhaps it won’t matter.

To be on the safe side, he carefully hauls the sealed space-suit pack out of the side locker along with the helmet and opens it up, spreading it out and trying to remember the steps they’d been taught on what to don first.

Just in case, he thinks, putting the suit aside and returning to the keyboard. Just in case.

For minutes he sits quietly, listening to the hiss of the air recirculation system that is now less than a day from betraying him, and thinking about the idealized “life” he’s constructed in words. He’s tried to make it work in his mind as well. Bianca, his Brazilian wife who never was, not only loved him and couldn’t wait for him to come home, she was the woman who was at his side in everything, personal and professional, willing to advise him and even counter him when he headed down the wrong track, but as loving and as caring for him as he was for her.

I think so many men forget, or maybe never know, the basics of how a woman’s mind works, which begins and often ends with the simple desire to be loved and cherished and not taken for granted. Expressions of love, tenderness, caring, attention, and appreciation are things we men want, so why do we forget that our ladies do, too? Yes, it’s true that as a rule women give sex to get love, while men give love to get sex, but once the contract is struck, it should be kept, even if it’s that basic.

He stops, thinking about Sharon, recognizing that the failures were not all hers, that he could have done so much better, even when he realized how self-absorbed and high maintenance she was.

Too bad, he thinks, I’ll never have the chance to put what I’ve learned into action.

He leans into the keyboard again.

Anyway, with Bianca, I had never even imagined that kind of relationship, where you just long to be with each other.

Okay, look… I have a confession to make, future reader. I did have a previous life, but I deleted it. There was no Bianca. It’s all my confused dream, my ideal, of what I would have liked my life to be like. I erased the real one because I wanted something better and more exciting, something filled with accomplishment, and I don’t want to go back now and remember—except for my kids, whom I love. My real kids. Jerrod, my firstborn, Julie, and my twins, Carly and Carrie. More than anything else about my life, I miss them the most. All of them.

True, I did make myself a well-known artist. But why did I stop there? I could have decided to make myself a king or a dictator or a Bill Gates billionaire—someone else rich and spectacular. But suddenly I’ve come to the conclusion that whoever I decide to be, I’m still me, regardless of the trappings, the money, the position, and all the education in the world. I think who we are remains the same, and I think inside each one of us is a little child who won’t tell the adult in us what’s wrong. I’m sure there’s a little girl in every woman and a little boy in every man. And very often that little child is still very upset over something that happened so far back he can’t recall the details, only the hurt. So I think in this “new” life of mine, what I tried to palm off on you had everything to do with that little boy in me and what he’s upset about, not Sharon, or even Lucy’s loss.

No, I think in the time I have remaining, which isn’t much now, if I could, I’d call my only sibling, my younger sister, and just tell her I love her. She’s down there, and I can almost see her with every pass, doing that ear tugging thing she’s done since childhood. But I can’t reach her now. It’s too late, and life’s been happening for two years without contact, and even the last time I talked with her, we were still so very much at arm’s length and… Dadlike. No “I love you’s.” My father never used the phrase. Phrases like that embarrassed him.

When I was born, Dad was forty-one. So many years later, here he was an infirm eighty-something, couldn’t take care of himself, and Mom was gone, so I had to act. I found a good retirement facility; I knew he hated it but he went quietly and I sold the house. I was very efficient and took a month off to get everything done. I thought he’d appreciate that—the efficiency. And once I’d made sure everything was okay, I said good-bye. With a handshake, the way he always dealt with me. I was just south in Tucson and I intended to come by at least every month—he was just a couple of hours up the road in Phoenix. But something always came up, and when I’d try to call too late at night, I’d get a small lecture from the night nurse. I didn’t like that, so I used it as a license to stop calling. So life slipped by and one night when I was lamenting the lack of open expressions of love in my family, I decided to go see him and tell him I loved him, words that had never been spoken between us. The decision made me feel good. I was going to take the time because I could never seem to find the right moment to call, and because he was getting very old and frail. I started looking for the right opportunity—which really means that I started making excuses why I didn’t have the time. I was still playing that game when word came that he’d died. Alone. Just up the road.

Every time this spacecraft soars over Phoenix I think about him. All those years, and I could never just call and say, “Hey, Dad, you know what? You don’t have to say anything, but I love you.”

The unique three-dimensional display in the middle of the circular command center is beginning to change, but only one technician sees it. The colored lines representing ground, tower, satellite, and fiber-optic connections across a quarter of the globe are shifting from green, the color of routine voice traffic, to yellow, orange, red, the colors of increased bandwidth utilization, the telltale indication that perhaps as many as a million people more than normal suddenly picked up their phones for a long distance call.

The technician keeps his eyes on the plasma display as he flails his right hand for the attention of the shift supervisor, whose eyes also go to the display. Both men stand in puzzled silence as a third checks with another major telephonic network, discovering the same sudden jump in activity there.

“Globecomm reports the same increase, including overseas traffic, and three of the cellular networks report the same. In fact, there are indications this is happening worldwide.”

More of the personnel in the control center join the head-scratching as they monitor the automatic rerouting of call overloads. Landlines that are normally standby-only have snapped into use, some routing through the old, almost decommissioned, AT&T land-based microwave system that first telephonically united the country in the nineteen fifties.

A young woman with pulled back hair and thick glasses leaves her position several tiers back and comes up quietly behind the supervisor, a laptop computer in her hands.

“I know what’s causing this. I just called my mother, too.”

“’Scuse me?” the supervisor says. “Everyone’s calling your mother?”

“No. Everyone’s calling someone they should have called long ago. It’s Kip Dawson, and what he just said.” She turns the laptop around so the team can read the words on the screen—as ten more trunk lines go red and a routing overload alarm sounds off somewhere in the command center.