Harry said nothing, but the puzzlement must have shown clearly on his face.
“In space, man,” Ali explained. “They’re building a great big habitat in orbit. Miles long. It’ll take years to finish. I’ll be able to retire by the time the job’s done.”
Harry digested that information. “It’ll take that long?”
The black man laughed. “Naw. But the pay’s that good.”
“They lookin’ for people?”
With a nod, Ali said, “Yeah. You hafta go through a couple months’ training first. Half pay.”
“Okay.”
“No beer up there, Harry. No gravity, either. I don’t think you’d like it.”
“Maybe,” said Harry.
“No bars. No strip joints.”
“They got women, though, don’t they?”
“Like Yablonski,” said Ali, naming one of the crew who was tougher than any two of the guys.
Harry nodded. “I seen worse.”
Ali threw his head back and roared with laughter. Harry drifted away, had a few more beers, then walked slowly through the magnolia-scented evening back to the barracks where most of the construction crew was housed.
Before he drifted to sleep the spider urged him, “Go apply for the job. What do you have to lose?”
It was tough, every step of the way. The woman behind the desk where Harry applied for a position with the space construction outfit clearly didn’t like him. She frowned at him and she scowled at her computer screen when his dossier came up. But she passed him on to a man who sat in a private cubicle and had pictures of his wife and kids pinned to the partitions.
“We are an equal opportunity employer,” he said, with a brittle smile on his face.
Then he waited for Harry to say something. But Harry didn’t know what he should say, so he remained silent.
The man’s smile faded. “You’ll be living for months at a time in zero gravity, you know,” he said. “It affects your bones, your heart. You might not be fit to work again when you return to Earth.”
Harry just shrugged, thinking that these whites were trying to scare him.
They put him through a whole day of physical examinations. Then two days of tests. Not like tests in school; they were interested in his physical stamina and his knowledge of welding and construction techniques.
They hired Harry, after warning him that he had to endure two months of training at half the pay he would start making if he finished the training okay. Half pay was still a little more than Harry was making on the Atlanta Renewal Project. He signed on the dotted line.
So Harry flew to Hunstville, Alabama, in a company tiltrotor plane. They gave him a private room, all to himself, in a seedy-looking six-story apartment building on the edge of what had once been a big base for the space agency, before the government sold it off to private interests.
His training was intense. Like being in the army, almost, although all Harry knew about being in the army was what he’d heard from other construction workers. The deal was, they told you something only once. You either got it or you flunked out. No second chances.
“Up there in orbit,” the instructors would hammer home, time and again, “there won’t be a second chance. You screw up, you’re dead. And probably a lot of other people get killed, too.”
Harry began to understand why there was no beer up there. Nor was there any at the training center. He missed it, missed the comfort of a night out with the gang, missed the laughs and the eventual oblivion where nobody could bother him and everything was dark and quiet and peaceful and even the spider kept silent.
The first time they put him in the water tank Harry nearly freaked. It was deep, like maybe as deep as his apartment building was high. He was zipped into a white space suit, like a mummy with a bubble helmet on top, and there were three or four guys swimming around him in trunks and scuba gear. But to a man who grew up in the desert, this much water was scary.
“We use the buoyancy tank to simulate the microgravity you’ll experience in orbit,” the instructor told the class. “You will practice construction techniques in the tank.”
As he sank into the water for the first time, almost petrified with fear, the spider told Harry, “This is an ordeal you must pass. Be brave. Show no fear.”
For days on end Harry suited up and sank into the deep, clear water to work on make-believe pieces of the structure he’d be building up in space. Each day started with fear, but he battled against it and tried to do the work they wanted him to do. The fear never went away, but Harry completed every task they gave him.
When his two months of training ended, the man in charge of the operation called Harry into his office. He was an Asian of some sort: Chinese, Japanese, maybe Korean.
“To tell you the truth, Harry,” he said, “I didn’t think you’d make it. You have a reputation for being a carouser, you know.”
Harry said nothing. The pictures on the man’s wall, behind his desk, were all of rockets taking off on pillars of flame and smoke.
The man broke into a reluctant smile. “But you passed every test we threw at you.” He got to his feet and stretched his hand out over his desk. “Congratulations, Harry. You’re one of us now.”
Harry took his proffered hand. He left the office feeling pretty good about himself. He thought about going off the base and finding a nice friendly bar someplace. But as he dug his hand into his pants pocket and felt the obsidian spider there, he decided against it. That night, as he was drowsing off to sleep, the spider told him, “Now you face the biggest test of all.”
Launching off the Earth was like nothing Harry had ever even dreamed of. The Clippership rocket was a squat cone; its shape reminded Harry of a big teepee made of gleaming metal. Inside, the circular passenger compartment was decked out like an airliner’s, with six short rows of padded reclinable chairs, each of them occupied by a worker riding up to orbit. There was even a pair of flight attendants, one man and one woman.
As he clicked the safety harness over his shoulders and lap, Harry expected they would be blasted off the ground like a bullet fired from a thirty-aught. It wasn’t that bad, though in some ways it was worse. The rockets lit off with a roar that rattled Harry deep inside his bones. He felt pressed down into his seat while the land outside the little round window three seats away tilted and then seemed to fly away.
The roaring and rattling wouldn’t stop. For the flash of a moment Harry wondered if this was the demon he was supposed to slay, a dragon made of metal and plastic with the fiery breath of its rockets pushing it off the Earth.
And then it all ended. The noise and shaking suddenly cut off and Harry felt his stomach drop away. For an instant Harry felt himself falling, dropping off into nothingness. Then he took a breath and saw that his arms had floated up from the seat’s armrests. Zero-gee. The instructors always called it microgravity, but to Harry it was zero-gee. And it felt good.
At the school they had tried to scare him about zero-gee with stories of how you get sick and heave and get so dizzy you can’t move your head without feeling like it’s going to burst. Harry didn’t feel any of that. He felt as if he were floating in the water tank again, but this was better, much better. There wasn’t any water. He couldn’t help grinning. This is great, he said to himself.
