Free Orbital Decay by Allen Steele

bored,” Felapolous said to Wallace. “Let them keep the cats as pets. It’ll be good for them.”
    “How can they be bored?” Wallace retorted. “They’re participating in the ultimate human adventure. They’re making the conquest of space.”
    “Henry,” Felapolous replied, “man can’t live on starlight alone.”
    The deciding factor in the argument, however, rested in the instinctive behavior of the cats themselves. Put a male cat and a female cat together for a little while, and guess what happens?
    Unfortunately, Lou Maynard was unable to follow his first paper, “Observations On The Adaptive Behavior of Domestic Cats To Microgravity” with a hot sequel, “The Results of Feline Inbreeding In Microgravitational Conditions.” Like humans, Spoker and ZeeGee desired privacy for their mating practices; unlike the male and female crew members on Olympus Station, they got what they wanted. Two months later, a crewman named Ralph Conte came off his shift, went to his bunk in Module 14, opened the curtain, and was surprised (and, to his credit, even somewhat excited) to find ZeeGee nursing a litter of six tiny kittens, born while he was out on the powersat welding girders together.
    This event was almost enough to cause a mutiny when H.G. Wallace let it be known that he considered two to be company and eight a crowd, and that he intended to ship the whole bunch back to earth in the next OTV destined for rendezvous with a shuttle in low Earth orbit. By the time it filtered down through the crew, scuttlebutt had it that Wallace secretly intended to throw all the kitties out through an airlock in the Docks. Had Doc Felapolous not interceded and acted again as the station’s mediator, it is possible that the first full-scale mutiny in space would have occurred, with perhaps H.G. Wallace being the one who would have gone spacewalking without the benefit of a tetherline—perhaps without a spacesuit as well.
    In the compromise which was reached, ZeeGee and Spoker were sent back to Earth once the kittens were old enough to be weaned. It was also agreed that the two males of the litter would be neutered before they reached reproductive maturity, to prevent any further increase in the feline population. Wallace grumbled a little because his vision of stellar conquest did not include cats among his stalwart crew, and the male members of the crew blanched somewhat at the mention of other males becoming eunuchs, but a compromise was better than no agreement at all. When Skycorp questioned the logic of keeping the offspring aboard, Dr. Maynard told them that his next research project was to be the adaptive behavior in microgravitational conditions of felines born outside an Earthlike environment, et cetera.
    New crewmen who were being broken in as beamjacks were issued a chest control unit for their spacesuits, which included a recessed button covered by a sliding safety plate. Asked what this button was for, the Vulcan Station crewman fitting them into their suits would say, “Oh, that. Well, I’m not supposed to tell you this, but if anything goes drastically wrong—I mean, really wrong, where nothing you can think of helps you and no one else can do anything for you—push that button.”
    Once in a while the rejoinder was, “Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one before.” But most of the time, the next questions were “What is it? What does it do?”
    The whiteroom assistant would wink knowingly and say, “That’s the panic button. It’ll bring help.” No one ever believed it immediately.
    Now and then, greenhorns would find themselves in a situation in which they felt helpless and beyond assistance: becoming untethered while on EVA, having a girder slip out of hand and go floating away out of reach, finding themselves in an uncontrolled roll or pitch because of a misfire by their MMUs. After trying everything they had been taught, and after yelling fruitlessly for help over the comlink, sometimes they would in