Globular One
By Stephen W. Cote
Ruffus Floyd, Pablo Rodriguez, and the wicked bird of prey, the X-5, were not only not on the Globular One, they didn't exist, as far as the public and United Nations were concerned.
Pablo Rodriguez hung motionless in the spongespace outside the X-5, reading Tolstoy's War and Peace for the third time by the light of the Earth. He had already read Gone With The Wind eight times and Thomas Muchetto had physically threatened him if he quoted "frankly my dear, I don't give a damn" one more time.
The Globular One's crew, minus Pablo Rodriguez, who did not exist, often worked overtime in order to finish Globular One before schedule. Without gravity, everyone had fear of falling grossly out of shape until Pablo pointed out that the friction created in a spongespace environment could be used for a workout room. Thus, every morning at eight thirty, Pablo, Ruffus, Martin, Kyle Michaels, Laurance Cavanough, Thomas Muchetto, and William Weinhardt, left the Globular One and worked out for one hour.
Thomas Muchetto made a motion with his hand for everyone to cut off their public broadcast communications, then pointed at Pablo to turn his personal mike on. "The worl' canna hear us. Where is everyone with their assignmen'?"
Kyle Michaels, Globular One's logistics specialist, shook his head. "Tom, you're lisp is coming back. Take your estrogen."
Pablo stuck out his tongue, a pink tablet melting away on the pink muscle. "No way am I goin' gay! Futh Sth.G.I."
Kyle flashed Pablo the bird. "Yours is coming back also, Pablo. Hey, Doc, are you letting them skip on their medication?"
William Weinhardt, Globular One's physician, shook his head. "No. Fighting a physical affliction with chemicals only does so much. The super tropical estrogen I made for them will stunt their, um," he broke off, swimming through the spongespace to the side of Globular One.
"Homothecual Tendethies!" Pablo exclaimed.
"Christ," Martin rolled his eyes. "Do you realize how happy I am you don't exist? If the public ever caught wind of you talking like that, you would have every sexually disillusioned person on the face of the planet up in arms."
"Yeah, knock it off, Pablo," Thomas said. He winced, "damn, I think I'm going to need a bra."
William struggled with an access panel. Laurance Cavanough, Globular One's external engineer, swam over to his side and reminded him how to remove it. William paused once the panel was removed and turned around to face the others. "I'll give you some metabolic catalysts so any excess fatty tissue is burned up. Both of you will be walking scarecrows, but you'll be straight - much to all of our own thanks - and you won't get any breasts."
"So where are all of you?" Thomas perched himself on the folded up atmospheric wing of the X-5. "Laurance?"
"The shuttle is going to be in orbit in ten days. I have a solar shield set up to cover the spongespace hanger." Laurance swam upwards, hanging upside down from one of the NeoLyte beams. "The first three modules will be dropped of then. A joyce-cross, and two storage facilities. Ten days after that, the Russian's Mir will transfer its crew quarters and we'll have to figure out how to do something with it. The Mir will be spun into a burn-out orbit and land somewhere in the South Pacific as a smoldering cinder."
Thomas nodded, swinging his legs. "William?"
William had pulled out the spongespace hose while Laurance had been talking. He let the hose hang motionless and yawned. "I'll have the brandy pellets ready in two days."
Thomas looked at William skeptically. "When you send your report to everyone on Earth, they aren't going to want to read that you've been spending your time making concentrated brandy, super tropic estrogen tablets to fight homosexual tendencies, metabolic catalysts to fight the side affects of the estrogen, and what was that other one?"
"The LSD?" Ruffus offered.
Thomas nodded. "Exactly. They didn't want Dr. Leery up here."
William rolled his eyes. "Bloody shame, Thomas, you really think I'll send them that? I'll make some graphs and take some readings of the stars, use your physical reports, spin some magnets and grow some plants for them. Don't deny me my play, Tom."
Thomas smiled. "Hey, as long as none of this shows up in the blood tests, Will, no worries, right? Kyle, how are our stores?"
"We're going to need more spongespace. If Dr. Leery over there would hurry up and figure out how to synthesize it, we'd be a lot better. As it is, we're using over fifteen pounds of it a day with everyone out here exercising in it. Our water is getting sucked up into the black hole," he jabbed a gloved finger at the X-5, "and everyone is eating Dr. Leery's candy and no one has so much as touched our five hundred dollar a plate dinners. So, when we get resupplied, we won't have enough of what we need, and way too much of what we don't want."
Thomas slid off the wing, looking down at the spinning blue and green ball of Earth. "You don't actually think I'd make you eat that stuff, do you? It's almost as bad as Pentagon coffee." He shuddered.
"Hey," Martin exclaimed, "I like that coffee."
Thomas turned to Martin. "Alright, your turn, you sick bastard." He smiled darkly, "I can't believe you'd drink that stuff by choice." He pushed off of the X-5 and swam through the spongespace to get out of the way of William who was spraying a fresh coating around in the NeoLyte skeleton frame. "How is Globular One?"
Martin became serious. "I'm worried about the shuttle, Tom. I've heard rumors they're going to drop a twenty four hour cam over our heads."
"We can just accidentally break it, Marty," Tom said.
"Not the electronic kind, Tom." Marty swam over next to Ruffus. "Some psychologist from Japan. The moment they see the X-5 and Dr. Leery's lab, they're going to know something is up."
William returned the spongespace hose to the access panel. "Would you stop calling me that please? My stuff is clean."
Ruffus laughed, his chortle making his transmission crackle. "This is one serious group of misfits."
"Don't worry about it, Marty," Tom said. "We can just say the X-5 is a shuttle or something."
Ruffus coughed. "What? Nobody would be stupid enough to believe that. It has one seat and looks nothing like a shuttle."
"You think whoever they send up will know? If worse comes to worse, we'll send Pablo around the moon with it until we figure something out. He can set up a spongespace hangar over there easy enough and have plenty of time to read War and Peace. Again." Tom stopped then looked to Ruffus and Pablo. "How is the X-5?"
"Cherry," Pablo smiled.
"If the speed demon would slow down once in a while, it might be better. There is too much debris up here to be going that fast and the static shields don't do a whole lot once it's outside of a gravity field. Other than that, I've been trying to work out the logistics of sneaking up a suitable cannon for it." Ruffus shrugged and looked back at Thomas.
"Wait, a space cannon? What is it and how big is it?" Thoms slowly edged his way back to the Globular One.
"It's a rail gun, mostly," Martin interjected. "And the newest version would take two shuttle loads, since it is a two gun system, one gun to a shuttle."
Thomas stared slack jawed at Ruffus and Martin. "This should be good. How the hell are you going to sneak something the size of two shuttle cargo bays up here without anyone noticing?"
"We were thinking of sending Pablo over to the Hubble Telescope and smearing some spongespace on one of the lenses." Martin looked between Pablo, Thomas and Ruffus. "Then we wait for them to notice, wait a few weeks for them to figure out it isn't on their end, another week for them to decide to fix it, and low and behold, we have our two shuttles."
"Wait, wait," William said. "How do you get them to believe that two shuttle bays filled with cannons for the X-5 are holding replacement lenses?"
"Everything like that is shipped in sealed containers. We just swap what they are given," Ruffus said benignly.
"Just like that?" Thomas said in disbelief.
"Sure, the same Mexican factory makes all that stuff, from military rifles to NeoLyte beams." Martin looked at Ruffus, who was fidgeting.
"It's a Canadian factory, Marty," Ruffus said. "The Mexican factory manufactures something else."
Martin shrugged. "Anyway, once again, the big problem is someone will find out."
"Alright, gentlemen, one last question." Thomas kept everyone from entering Globular One for another few minutes. "If Marty's rumors are true, what will we do about another crew member?"
Everyone shrugged. It seemed the appropriate thing to do.
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Last Updated: Mar 3, 1996