Donald E. Westlake

“ Half a dozen times since they'd come out here, he'd been at the point of telling Ricks to go back inside, to have Mendel send out a crewman instead. He wasn't sure what had stopped him. It wasn't the way Ricks saw it; he wasn't looking for a whipping boy, to take the blame for him if he lost the cargo. Glenn Blair didn't pass the buck, he never had and he never would. He'd been given this job in the first place because he was a man who could handle responsibility, whose pride lay in his ability to complete his own jobs, not in any ability to oversee the work of others. ”

“ Blair told him, "you'll be running around as happy as a feather in an updraft. Once you get used to it, there's nothing in the universe as much fun as weighing only one-quarter what you're used to."
"I hope I get used to it soon," said Standish, "before I starve to death."
Blair led the way down the ladder and through the companionway to the Station. The three passengers were introduced to Irv Mendel, who told them how much they'd enjoy quarter-G in a couple days, and then they were shown their cubicles, in Section One, which would be their home for the next fifteen days. ”

“ When they passed one another in a corridor, they looked straight ahead with no acknowledgment.
Ricks now looked truculent and determined. Blair grimaced at the sight of him and snapped, "All right, Ricks, what is it? I don't have time for hand-holding right now."
"You're going outside," said Ricks, "to help fix the strike. I want to go out with you."
"What? Go to hell!"
"You're going to need more than one man out there."
"We'll get an experienced crewman. You've never been outside in vacuum in your life. ”

“ The sun, incredibly bright and fierce when seen without the protection of miles of atmosphere, glares out eternally at its domain, heating whatever it touches, leaving to frigid cold whatever lies in shadow. The twenty-four hour day is a fact of Earth, not a fact of the universe. ”

“ Blair nodded. "I'm going to. Get into your suit. But just let me tell you something first. This isn't a game. If you flub, it counts. You're going to be living on the Moon for the next two years. That's a small community; everybody knows everybody else. If you flub, those are going to be two miserable years for you, sonny. You're going to be the boy who lost the cargo for QB, and nobody'll let you forget it."
Ricks' face was pale, but his grin sardonic. "All right, Cargomaster," he said. "I can handle that job, too. ”

“ No matter how much he wills it otherwise, Man is a parochial creature, a native of a planet and not of all space. Whatever else he leaves behind him when he roves beyond his own globe, he takes with him his ingrained ideas of night and day. ”

“ Blair looked at him and grimaced, then motioned for Ricks to open his faceplate. Ricks reached up, switched off the radio, and removed his helmet. He managed a grin. "Kind of nice in here," he said. "Set up a bar, put a couple of chairs around, it could be real liveable." But he heard the tremor in his voice, and he knew that Blair heard it, too.
Blair said, "Get on down by the elevator with Standish and Miller. If you hear another bell, a few notes lower than the first one, with a triple-beep in it, clap the helmet on. Otherwise, keep it off. You don't have canned air to waste." ”

“ Standish has a pretty weak stomach, it may take him a while to get adjusted, but I think he'll just grin and bear it. Miller's all right. I'm not too sure about Ricks. He's pushing himself a little hard, one of these guys who wants to be an old salt before he ever gets into the water. If he cracks, he may do it in style."
Mendel leaned back in his chair, arms behind his head. "You know," he said, "when I was a kid, all I ever wanted was to get out here in space. I grew up reading about Moon-shots and orbiting satellites and I thought, 'By Golly, there's the frontier of tomorrow. ”

“ Just before we blast, you dig your chin down into that pillow hard. If you have your mouth open, you're liable to get up to the Station minus a few teeth. In front of each bunk here, you see these three lights. The green one means you can relax, talk if you want to, readjust your position, whatever you want. The orange one means a blast within one minute, and the red one means a blast within ten seconds. The red one stays on throughout a blast. Okay?"
Ricks said, "The company had us play with these cribs. ”

“ I'm always pleased to get my human cargo to the Pod alive. Let's get into the bunks now and get ourselves ready. Blast is due in a couple minutes."
Blair saw to it that the three engineers were properly situated in their bunks, and then he crawled into the one nearest Ricks. He had the feeling that young man would be needing his hand held in just a few minutes.
Harvey Ricks was not a crybaby. Way back in grammar school, he was known as the kid who couldn't be made to cry. A lot of the other kids tried it, and some of them were pretty ingenious, but no one ever succeeded. ”

“ I'm Cargomaster on this trip, and you boys are part of the cargo. You've got any questions or problems, bring them to me. I'm liaison between you and the rest of the Transit personnel. Okay?"
One of the engineers said, "If we decide we can't take it we shouldn't bug the working types, is that it?"
"You're Ricks? Yes, Ricks, that's exactly it. None of you people have been off-planet before, so you can't make any sure statements about how you'll act. A good quarter of our first-time passengers are plenty scared. It's nothing to be ashamed of. ”

“ Blair disappeared, through the bulkhead doorway to Section Three, and Ricks turned the other way, walking down the corridor and right to the elevator. Standish and Miller were standing there, helmets on but faceplates open, and Ricks felt somewhat better. His helmet was in his hand.
As he came up to them, Standish said, "What do you suppose it is?" His pale face was even paler now, his large eyes larger.
Ricks shrugged. "It's probably just a drill. Get us new boys all lathered up, just in case we weren't taking it all seriously." ”

“ Did you ever see a man that's gone suddenly to vacuum?"
"Irv, look at your blasted pressure gauge!"
"It's down."
"It's down less than half a point, Irv, and that's because you've stopped pumping air in there. Listen, that QB cargo isn't hermetically sealed. If it doesn't get good air, it can rot."
"It can rot right now, for all of me. I'm not touching Section Five or anything in it. We'll get in touch with QB, and let them send a couple of reeps up here. It's their job, not ours." ”

“ With no books, no motion pictures, no cheerful distractions for their minds, the men of QB would falter. Irritations would mount, squabbles would turn to hatreds, aggravations to bloody vendettas. Efficiency would collapse, morale disappear. Statistically, there would be within the first sixty days five suicides and eight murders.
Entertainment. Tinsel. But, to the men of QB, as vital as food.
Glenn Blair patted the aluminum crates, and grinned with relief.
Now that it was over, Harvey Ricks was terrified. Before he'd gone out, he'd been too full of the challenge he'd hurled at Blair ”

“ Wiley nodded. "We'll try to lower the pressure slow and easy. Have you cut off the air supply in that section?"
"First thing," said Mendel.
"Good. We'll need two guys on the outside to give us a hand. Do you want to, Glenn?"
"Damn right," said Blair. He got to his feet. "I'll suit up."
Wiley stopped him at the door. "Don't worry, boy," he said. "Nobody's going to blame you if it goes wrong."
Blair studied him, then said, "Tell me, Ed. If that shipment doesn't get out to QB, will it be a very pleasant place to live the next few months." ”

“ Ricks held the other end, where the cables met.
"It's going to want to drift to the left," said Blair. "Make sure it doesn't. Keep all four cables taut. It's the same as flying a kite. If you let it dip, it'll crash into the rim here. If it's crumpled, we can't use it. And we don't have any spares handy."
"I'll keep it up," promised Ricks.
Dan backed the gripper reep until the cables stretched taut from Ricks to the panel, and then released his hold on the panel, which immediately drifted to the left, not maintaining the speed of the Station's spin. ”

“ If pressure's going down that slow right now, it means the meteor's partially plugging the leak."
"And what happens when you guys yank the meteor out? Same difference."
"Not the same," said Mendel. "This way, nobody gets killed."
Blair shrugged angrily.
Wiley said, "Maybe we can work something. Vacuum won't hurt the goodies, will it?"
"It may explode the cases," said Blair. "That shouldn't do too much damage. I'm worried about it being flipped outside. The cases'll burst, and the whole shipment'll be scattered to hell-angone." ”

“ Besides, I like the soft life."
"You want it really soft," Mendel told him, "you put in for station duty. All we do is float around and around, draw our pay, and look at the pretty scenery."
"If that boy Ricks blows up," Blair said, "we'll both have plenty to do. I'm going to rack out, I'll see you later."
"See you, nursemaid."
Blair took the elevator down to the outer ring, and went to his cubicle in Section Two, next to the one occupied by Ricks, across the corridor from Standish and Miller. He stretched out on his bed and half-dozed, as his body gradually got reoriented to quarter-gravity. ”

“ And if QB falls apart, the whole system falls apart, because it's QB's job to run maintenance for the rest of us."
"I know that," said Mendel, "I know it well. Every word you say is absolutely true. But I still say they can re-order."
"And I say it'll take three months at the very least to fill the new order! We can't even put the order in until we can prove to the ground-pounders' satisfaction that this batch is destroyed, and we won't be able to do that till the reeps get here and patch the hole. ”

“ I can be your whipping boy." He spun around, and out of the cubicle.
Fists clenched tight, Blair glowered at the empty doorway.
Ricks nervously followed Blair and Wiley out through the personnel hatch and onto the grid outside the Station. His meeting with Wiley had been a simple exchange of names, with no questions asked and no explanations given. Apparently, Wiley had no idea he was merely a passenger on the Station, and not a crew member. Irv Mendel, on the other hand, had pointedly ignored him. Ricks got the impression that Mendel and Blair had argued about him, and that Mendel had lost. ”

“ Ricks, a little ways to the left, was still maneuvering the replacement panel back and forth, though his arms seemed to be sagging somewhat by now. Blair said, "Okay, Ricks, bring it in."
"Anything you say, Admiral."
Blair helped him ease the panel down close enough for each of them to grab an edge. They released the cable clips, and Blair one-handed bunched the cable together until he could slip it back onto the catch on his suit. Together, they turned the panel around and held it flat. On Earth, this reinforced thickness of hull would have weighed nearly two hundred pounds. ”

“ Their cargo was almost exclusively manufactured items from the factories on the Moon. Manufacturers had discovered, to their astonishment, that the lighter gravity and the accessible vacuum and the ready availability of free raw materials on the Moon more than offset the additional cost of labor and buildings and transportation. In the last fifteen years, the Moon had become studded with heavily-automated factories, producing everything from delicate electronic equipment to razor blades. ”

“ There were two kinds of reeps, and three of each kind. There was the gripper reep, with arms designed for holding and manipulating, and the fixer reep, with arms for welding and cutting.
When the call came in from Station One, QB was three-quarters around the Earth-side of its orbit. The radioman on duty got the approximate dimensions of the meteor now jammed into the outer edge of the Station, and its approximate placement, and passed this information on to the Dispatcher Office. A call then went down to the Supply Department for Part X-102-W, outer hull replacement panel. ”

“ Ricks walked back to the rim. When he got there, Wiley's ship was in place, two of the side rockets firing sporadically, keeping it still in relation to the motion of the Station. The two side arms clung to jagged tears in the rim metal, next to the meteor, while the top and bottom arms, working to the pre-measurements of a small computer tape, inched across the metal, cutting implements extended, scoring not deep enough to cut completely through the hull. ”

“ Interplanetal maintained a Moon Division, which built computers and office equipment for lease to the other Moon industries, and all personnel there were volunteers on a two-year contract. It was inevitable that Harvey Ricks would volunteer. ”

“ Sections Five, Six and Seven were cargo holds, and Sections One, Two and Three were transient quarters. (The three engineers were in Section Two.) Sections Four, Eight and Twelve contained the utilities, the sources of light and heat and air, as well as the chow hall and food storage. At the bulkhead separating each Section, floor and ceiling met at an angle of thirty degrees. A man could do a loop-the-loop simply by walking dead ahead down the main corridor until he came back to his starting point. ”

“ The radioman at QB got in touch with the radioman at Station One and told him to expect the two reeps in fourteen days, approximately twelve hours before the Station was scheduled to make contact with the barbell from Station Three. ”