Story Excerpt
Nothing I Like to do Pays Well
by Peter Wood
The Corporate Meeting in the Armpit of the Galaxy
Even seventy-five light-years from Earth, I couldn’t escape corporate briefings and committee meetings. We had a half dozen a week on Zebulon, the moon of a gas giant.
I tried to get comfortable in one of the rickety plastic chairs that should have been replaced a decade ago. I glanced at the faded photos of the Blue Ridge Park-way that covered the walls and wished I was anywhere but here.
Galactic Products, our boss, had already scheduled four briefings this week in our teeny tiny conference room, and it was only Tuesday. The pencil pushers from North Carolina never seemed to grasp that maybe the staff scientists on the company’s research station might have more of a clue about how to survive on Zebulon than middle managers who I doubted had ever ventured outside the Research Triangle Park in Raleigh.
My name is Tina Mayfield. I’m forty-two. I have a PhD and two master’s degrees in less than marketable fields. I’d taken a job at GP in the armpit of the galaxy to avoid paying student loans.
Imelda Trask, GP corporate vice president and the commander of our cozy little habitat dome, shut off the screen. “So . . . I’m going to need one volunteer to check out the tunnel with me tomorrow.”
None of the glorified graduate assistants or failed high school science teachers—GP didn’t pay enough to get anyone with better credentials—raised their hands. Not the xenobiologist or the astrophysicist. Not the meteorologist. Not one of the geologists. Who could blame them? It was cold out there—two hundred and fifty degrees Kelvin on the balmiest of summer days. None wanted to fishtail it sixty plus miles round trip from the base to a perfectly ordinary cavern entrance.
Corporate postulated that a cavern thirty miles from the base needed to be inspected right away. They didn’t explain why. Nobody believed them, even if a surface mapping satellite had uncovered something “unique.” Dozens of scientific teams over the years had taken readings at plenty of the tunnel heads that seemed to be everywhere and found nothing unique yet.
I tried to look inconspicuous. Damned hard to do when you’re in a room with less than a dozen people, even if I had sat in the back.
Making a journey with the boss even less enticing, Imelda hated small talk. Galactic Products ignored a lot of safety measures, but there could be no avoiding the two passengers per all-terrain vehicle rule. The transport couldn’t start without a second person.
Imelda made a beeline for me.
With the boss’s attention on me, everybody else got the hell out of the conference room. Winston, the unshaven xenobiologist who hadn’t changed clothes in three days and never seemed to do any research, gave me a smirk before heading to the lounge to watch more ESPN. A perfect company toady, he had cozied up to Imelda from day one, but even he didn’t want to go joy riding with the base commander.
I pretended to be a team player. “I’m the only medic. I can’t leave. The base needs me, Imelda.”
You’d think Imelda might have valued my services after our only doctor had had a nervous breakdown and left a year earlier than contracted. But my boss had never been impressed that I had three months of emergency medical training from my failed experiment as a paramedic on Titan half a dozen jobs ago.
“I am not unsympathetic, Tina.” Imelda nodded and adopted a serious look—like a psychiatrist considering a revelation from a patient. With her short, cropped hair and librarian glasses she sort of looked like a psychiatrist. Her acting like a good leader might convince somebody who didn’t know her well that she was giving my concerns the utmost consideration. “I’d like to help you out, but my hands are tied. You know the way Corporate sees the loan forgiveness program. They’re just waiting for an excuse to cut you off. Refusing a work assignment could violate your contract. This isn’t me. It’s company policy. Unofficial. I hate it as much as you do.”
I doubted that. I recognized an obvious game of corporate good cop bad cop when I saw it. Still, bottom line, I didn’t have the savings to make payments that dwarfed my monthly salary.
Better wear layers. I was going to the tunnels in the morning.
Blessed Are the Beer Makers
Brother Jimmy—or more accurately Abbot Jaime—took a long swig of his second beer. In his jeans and NC State Wolfpack sweatshirt, he didn’t exactly make one think of a monk. No robe or tunic or cowl. Certainly, no vow of silence. “Don’t you guys know something more about Zebulon than anyone in Raleigh?” he asked.
I sipped my beer. “You’d think, but who listens to us? Their precious satellite says there’s something worth checking out. Just like every other time.” The monastery brewed a damned tasty chocolate stout. And I had to hand it to the brothers for not jumping on the IPA bandwagon.
GP didn’t have the fifty thousand square foot habitat dome to itself, even if it had paid the setup costs for one of its dozens of cookie-cutter habitat domes on dozens of cookie-cutter worlds. GP got exclusive rights to Zebulon by agreeing to fund the research station and use the facilities only for environmentally safe scientific study.
And the company got priceless public relations capital by supporting both the Church and Science. Never mind the reality that GP had paid almost nothing for upkeep over the years. The Catholic Church kept their clergy comfortable, so why would the corporation pay anything it didn’t have to?
Jimmy guzzled the last of his beer. He strolled over to the keg and topped off his mug. “You want a refill, Doc?”
“No, thanks.” I stared at the tiny bubbles floating to the top of my stein. “I’m hoping you can go with me tomorrow. You could be the papal observer.”
“Papal observer? We haven’t invoked that in years.”
“It’s part of the agreement with GP, Jimmy. Imelda can’t turn you down.”
“Can’t make it, Doc.” Jimmy burped. “Gotta work on my thesis.” He gave a little wave to the framed photo of Pope Mary above the keg.
I admired the monk. I had milked the student lifestyle for a decade and change before Appalachian State University had finally kicked me to the curb and forced me to finish my doctorate. But I had nothing on Jimmy. He’d been fine-tuning his thesis on the Book of Acts and Astrophysics for twenty years. The Church paid all his bills. He had a good thing going, even if every so often he had short stints in less desirable locales like Zebulon or Florida.
“Give me a break, Jimmy. You’ve got nothing that can’t be postponed. It’s not like there’s some cutting-edge Notre Dame philosophy research you’re waiting on.”
“How do you know?” He cocked an eyebrow and sat down on a leather recliner. He made no effort to explain what sort of pressing deadline he faced.
“Look, Jimmy, I need you,” I said after a few beats. “I don’t believe anything GP says and I don’t trust Imelda. If she tries to do something illegal or just stupid, I can’t stop her, but you’ve got the goddamned Catholic Church behind you.”
“Rome’s seventy-five light-years away, Doc.” He brushed back his scraggly gray hair. “I can’t come. I’m busy.”
I should have led with my strongest argument. I held out my battered paperback copy of True Grit, a 1960s anti-Western novel that subverts traditional genre stereotypes—at least according to the back cover. A teen protagonist avenges the death of her father. I think they made a movie from it.
Jimmy about salivated. He reached for the book. “Is this for me?”
I yanked it back. Physical copies of books still could be frustratingly rare even after artificial intelligence kept rewriting the endings of the online versions. Just another way of telling us to leave them alone. Every task for humans ended up being a waste of time by the machines’ definition. Huckleberry Finn drowning in the first hundred pages was sort of interesting, I guess, but I preferred my books without meddling. “I’m not giving it to you. You can borrow it if you come.”
“I’ll go,” he said after fifteen or twenty seconds.
“You’ll be with the only medic. If you get a headache or something, I’ll lookout for you.” I held out my glass. “I’ll take that refill now.”
Jimmy took my glass and filled it to the brim with delicious chocolate stout.