Chapter 1: The Maytag Repairman

Introduction

I’M THE ONE who broke the story, so I guess I’m the one who gets to write the book. I’ll call it a perk of being a newspaper man. Heaven knows there aren’t many. Late nights, tight deadlines, hangovers, and the news never cooperates by happening when it’s convenient to get it in the paper. But it’s my life. Or it was.

I wasn’t present for everything that I’ll tell you here, but I’ll tell the story with the authority of having listened carefully to the people who were there and made the news happen. Which is where this story starts.

Byline: I’m Ramsey Smith, reporter. Orlando and the world are my beat.

Time: 15 or 20 Years from Now

IT WAS A LONELY JOB but he supposed someone had to do it. Jack Adams looked at his tiny viewscreen at the world below. He had to admit it was beautiful. Of course, he’d seen the same view of Earth every day. He crossed another one off his digital calendar that told him no matter how many times he saw the sun rise, he’d still only been out for a hundred twenty days according to the calendar.

For the 300,290th time, he started humming the tune to the old Glen Campbell song, “Wichita Lineman.” In thirty minutes, he’d intercept the next satellite that needed maintenance. Oh, NASA, Roscosmos, and CNSA had been so clever in the race to get satellites into space, ever since Sputnik I launched in 1957. (And burned up on re-entry in 1958.) They ran communications, GPS, surveillance, and television. But the big powers had forgotten all about maintenance. The stupid buzzards had figured that when a satellite failed, they’d just ship another one.

Only space flight had become expensive and all the major powers had cut their space programs back to near zero. They hadn’t bothered with maintenance of satellites until cellular communications started to fail and people’s ever-present smartphones started coming up blank. It was obvious someone needed to do something. Jack’s company was ready. RESCUE solicited funds from each of the organizations and with leased rockets from companies who thought they’d be selling tourist trips into space, they launched RESCUE I, the manned space capsule shuttle which could keep satellites flying.

It was pretty simple, really. Giving Jack a toolbox and a space suit with a rocket booster was a lot cheaper than launching new satellites. And the company wasn’t really American, even though Jack was. RESCUE, like most tech support, was based in India. The country’s standard of living was increasing daily at the same rate that the big three were decreasing. Big dreams. NASA was still banking everything on a manned mission to Mars. If they could just find someone stupid enough to go.

Jack was pretty content. He’d never been comfortable around most people. Floating around for four months hadn’t distorted his view on life a bit. Even his sex life wasn’t that different. He talked to Evelyn each time his circuit of the world brought him across Des Moines, Iowa during daylight hours. On Saturdays they had space phone sex.

Collision avoidance alerts suddenly sounded in Jack’s capsule, a kind of mini space shuttle. It wasn’t the first time in four months. There was a surprising amount of space junk floating around at 200 to 1200 miles above Earth. Even the old space station, currently maintained by a crew of three women who continued to carry out various experiments as contracted by different corporations, had encountered and been damaged by junk.