Free Orbital Decay by Allen Steele Page A

desperation slide back the little cover and shove their gloved finger down on the red panic button.
    Nothing would happen. Nothing could happen. The button was a dead switch, wired to absolutely nothing in the chest control unit, not so much as a light. But it made people who were panicky feel like something was being accomplished; occasionally, it had the effect of buying time for confused people to think out a solution. No one knew where the idea of a panic button originated, but most agreed that it was a nifty idea.

6
Hooker Remembers (A Night on the Town)
    A FEW MINUTES BEFORE Virgin Bruce docked at Olympus Station, an interorbital ferry set out from Skycan and headed for Project Franklin.
    The ferry was a modified OTV, its stern engine removed and replaced with a docking adapter matching the one at the front, its propulsion coming from thrusters arrayed around its cylindrical fuselage, piloted by remote control from Olympus Station. The interior resembled the cramped interior of a Greyhound bus; twenty acceleration couches left over from its service as a shuttle’s passenger module were arranged in two rows down the length of the compartment. There were no viewports, only a single TV monitor at the forward end; really, there was nothing to do during the fifteen-minute trip to Vulcan except stare at the back of the couch in front and breathe the oxygen pumped in to offset decompression sickness. If anyone were allowed to smoke in space, the cabin’s NO SMOKING signs would have been lit, and everyone knew better than to unbuckle their seat belts while the ferry was under thrust. It all made for a boring fifteen minutes.
    Hooker sat in the back of the compartment, plastic time-card in hand, and stared at the back of another beamjack’s head, his eyes following the aimless drift of a lock of hair that bristled out from under the band of the guy’s cap. Another beamjack, Mike Webb, was sitting next to him, but Hooker didn’t feel like carrying on small talk. He simply sat and waited for the trip to end, pondering his own dark thoughts.
    For some reason the trip to the meteorology deck had left him more depressed than he’d been before he’d gone there. That had never been the case in the past; a few minutes with the telescope used to refresh him, used to remind him that there was still a Gulf of Mexico waiting for his return from two years in space.
    He remembered when he could daydream about it, that day of coming home: feeling the thump of the landing gear cranking down, the slight wobble as the elevons airbraked the final approach, then the smooth jar of the shuttle’s touchdown on the Cape’s landing strip, the spaceship whisking past palmettos and Spanish bayonette, white sand kicking up in the noonday sun; then, finally, climbing put of the cool white metal womb into tropical heat, feeling the coastal breeze on his skin. He would bum a cigarette from one of the ground crew and wander off down the runway, sauntering away from the slow ticking of cooling metal and the whine of machinery being moved into place. Where ’ re you going , Popeye ? someone would ask. Out to the beach. I’m goin ’ fishing , he’d reply. Don ’ t you want your check ? someone else would ask, as an awed silence fell over the processing area. Send it to my bank , he’d throw over his shoulder.
    Somehow, he had stopped having that daydream. It had happened at about the same time he had started losing track of the days.
    Hooker stared at a loose rivet on the couch in front of him. He remembered looking at the sailboat through the telescope. Had he seen a girl on the boat, a sliver of suntanned skin against the whitewashed deck? She had blond hair and wore a blue bikini; she was lying face down with her arms crossed under her head; there had been sweat on her back, small thick beads beginning to roll down the cleft in her buttocks, where it disappeared into her bikini bottom. He could see that sweat from twenty-two thousand three