for, perhaps the government and Skycorp should have called the whole shebang Project Prometheus. It fit with the rest of mythology, but… well, it wasn’t used after all. All the science fiction writers had already overused the name.
8
The Whiteroom
H OOKER’S REMINISCING WAS INTERRUPTED by the inaudible yet tactile thump of the ferry docking with Vulcan Station.
“All right, coffee break’s over!” someone up in the front of the narrow compartment said loudly. “Everybody, back on your heads!”
There were just as many crewmen asking what was so funny as there were who were snickering at the punch line of the old joke. Seat belts were unbuckled and the men in the spacecraft began to float out of their couches, each reaching up to grab the rail running the length of the compartment’s ceiling. It took a moment for Hooker to bring himself back from the remembered evening in the bar. For an instant, as he took in the weird sight of crewmen gently floating above his head, he found himself weighing this reality against that mind’s eye vision. The former was sorely lacking in appeal.
Unfastening his own seat belt, he pushed himself up with the toes of his sneakers and grabbed the overhead rail. He bumped into Mike Webb, the beamjack who had been sitting next to him, and muttered an apology. From the front of the cabin he could hear the slow hiss of the hatch being undogged and opened. The line of crewmen began to ease toward the airlock hatch, pulling themselves hand over hand along the rail. It was then that Hooker realized he had made a slight mistake upon boarding the ferry.
The problem was that he had been one of the first to board the spacecraft at Olympus. It was something most of the men who worked shifts at the powersat project tried to avoid; he could only blame his lack of forethought on the crummy day he’d already had.
The first crewmen to board the ferry had to go to the back of the cabin to get seated. Because there was only one hatch in the ferry, at the bow, it meant that the last beamjack aboard at Olympus was the first to get out at Vulcan. It made no difference when the ferry was returning to Olympus from Vulcan; one simply crawled out into the Docks and headed for the rim modules. But the crews coming aboard Vulcan had to be processed through the whiteroom, and there lay the rub.
The whiteroom was in the second hotdog affixed to Vulcan’s outer skin; four such modules were attached to Module B, joined together by metal sleeves, and anchored near an airlock in the construction shack. Vulcan had been designed so that the modules could be moved about the space platform as necessity dictated, since pressurized areas were a secondary consideration aboard the construction shack.
The whiteroom, like the rest of the hotdogs, was a narrow compartment in which only a few crewmen could fit at a single time. It was where the beamjacks climbed into their suits and replenished their oxygen tanks before going to work on the powersat. Suit-up was a long, clumsy procedure. Even the comparatively lightweight suits worn by the pod pilots took five or ten minutes of work to don; the bulky hard suits worn by the men doing EVA jobs took as long as twenty minutes to struggle into, depending on the dexterity of the individual.
Which meant that the last guys aboard the ferry when it came over from Olympus sometimes had to hang around—literally—for up to an hour, waiting for the persons ahead to suit up, pressurize, check themselves, clock in and cycle through the airlock. Once, Command had tried to control the situation by giving beamjacks revolving numbers for their boarding rank and docking work—time for the minutes wasted in the whiteroom; but the first part of this arrangement fell apart when crewmen started ignoring the boarding rank (because of apathy, or feeling as if they were getting the same bad seats over again). The second part fell through when the union found out about it and raised hell with
8
The Whiteroom
H OOKER’S REMINISCING WAS INTERRUPTED by the inaudible yet tactile thump of the ferry docking with Vulcan Station.
“All right, coffee break’s over!” someone up in the front of the narrow compartment said loudly. “Everybody, back on your heads!”
There were just as many crewmen asking what was so funny as there were who were snickering at the punch line of the old joke. Seat belts were unbuckled and the men in the spacecraft began to float out of their couches, each reaching up to grab the rail running the length of the compartment’s ceiling. It took a moment for Hooker to bring himself back from the remembered evening in the bar. For an instant, as he took in the weird sight of crewmen gently floating above his head, he found himself weighing this reality against that mind’s eye vision. The former was sorely lacking in appeal.
Unfastening his own seat belt, he pushed himself up with the toes of his sneakers and grabbed the overhead rail. He bumped into Mike Webb, the beamjack who had been sitting next to him, and muttered an apology. From the front of the cabin he could hear the slow hiss of the hatch being undogged and opened. The line of crewmen began to ease toward the airlock hatch, pulling themselves hand over hand along the rail. It was then that Hooker realized he had made a slight mistake upon boarding the ferry.
The problem was that he had been one of the first to board the spacecraft at Olympus. It was something most of the men who worked shifts at the powersat project tried to avoid; he could only blame his lack of forethought on the crummy day he’d already had.
The first crewmen to board the ferry had to go to the back of the cabin to get seated. Because there was only one hatch in the ferry, at the bow, it meant that the last beamjack aboard at Olympus was the first to get out at Vulcan. It made no difference when the ferry was returning to Olympus from Vulcan; one simply crawled out into the Docks and headed for the rim modules. But the crews coming aboard Vulcan had to be processed through the whiteroom, and there lay the rub.
The whiteroom was in the second hotdog affixed to Vulcan’s outer skin; four such modules were attached to Module B, joined together by metal sleeves, and anchored near an airlock in the construction shack. Vulcan had been designed so that the modules could be moved about the space platform as necessity dictated, since pressurized areas were a secondary consideration aboard the construction shack.
The whiteroom, like the rest of the hotdogs, was a narrow compartment in which only a few crewmen could fit at a single time. It was where the beamjacks climbed into their suits and replenished their oxygen tanks before going to work on the powersat. Suit-up was a long, clumsy procedure. Even the comparatively lightweight suits worn by the pod pilots took five or ten minutes of work to don; the bulky hard suits worn by the men doing EVA jobs took as long as twenty minutes to struggle into, depending on the dexterity of the individual.
Which meant that the last guys aboard the ferry when it came over from Olympus sometimes had to hang around—literally—for up to an hour, waiting for the persons ahead to suit up, pressurize, check themselves, clock in and cycle through the airlock. Once, Command had tried to control the situation by giving beamjacks revolving numbers for their boarding rank and docking work—time for the minutes wasted in the whiteroom; but the first part of this arrangement fell apart when crewmen started ignoring the boarding rank (because of apathy, or feeling as if they were getting the same bad seats over again). The second part fell through when the union found out about it and raised hell with
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