Jim Baen's Universe

Introducing: Stories by new authors

Old Folks' Home

Written by John Kratman

Illustrated by Brian Brennan

Bobby Cullivan finished entering the staff schedules and leaned back in his chair, doing his best to ignore the arthritic twinge in his hip. It was nice to be calling the shots again.

His son, Joe, did a decent job managing the retirement station, but Bobby missed being in charge. Joe went down to Earth once every three months for a few weeks of high gravity and Bobby looked forward to his son's time away.

At ninety-two years old, Bobby had no interest in making the trip to Earth. After his last heart attack, his ticker just couldn't take the strain of a full gee anymore. The retirement station's simulated gravity was easy on old, tired bones, but it made going planetside harder and harder as the years wore on.

Bobby stood up and walked from his office to the station's great room. Mr. and Mrs. Silverstein were playing cribbage and watching the nightly news in their usual spot. They sat in thin plastic chairs in front of one of the viewports.

"Fifteen for two," Mrs. Silverstein said. She waved frantically at Bobby as he walked past. "Good evening, Bobby!"

"Ach," her husband said. He moved her cribbage peg forward with an angry swipe of his hand. "Enough with the waving! He sees you already."

"Good evening, Gertie. Evening, Saul." Bobby smiled and waved.

"'Good Evening' he says." Mr. Silverstein slapped his cards down on the table. "How about you make yourself useful, hotshot, and turn down the gravity? My feet are killing me!"

"Don't pay any attention to this mashuganah, Bobby. The gravity is fine." Mrs. Silverstein pushed a loose strand of silver hair behind her ear and winked at him. "He's always grumpy on his birthday."

"What? I should expect a call from my grandchildren on my one hundred and fifth birthday? God forbid I should get a little consideration!"

"They'll call, Saul." Mrs. Silverstein reached out and patted Mr. Silverstein's spotted hand. "You know how busy they are."

The comm unit sounded and Bobby rushed to a nearby console, relieved to get away. No one had called Mr. Silverstein the previous year, either. He toggled the reply button. "Happy Orbit Station here."

"Sir, this is the repair ship Abigail. We're with the Quality Shielding Company of Luna." It was a kid's voice, no older than twenty by the sound of it.

"We don't need any." Bobby reached out to push the button and close the channel.

"Can I talk to Mr. Cullivan?" Bobby's hand stopped a few millimeters from the contact.

"This is Mr. Cullivan."

"Ah, Joe Cullivan?"

"Oh, no. Joey's my son. He's not here."

Just then, a commotion broke out across from Bobby in the corner of the great room.

"You're a damned flirt, Gertie! That's what I'm upset about!" Mr. Silverstein shook his fist at his wife and stood up, knocking his chair over with a crash. He stomped over to her, his legs quivering with the effort, and waved his shriveled fist in her face.

Mrs. Silverstein wound up and struck Mr. Silverstein with the cribbage board. "Meshugenah!" He clutched his nose and let out a strangled howl. The crowd of old folks in the great room let out a collective cheer and shuffled over to watch the fight, happy for anything to break the monotony of their day.

"We need orderlies in here!" Bobby shouted toward the nurses' station. He pressed one ear closer to the wall mounted comm unit and covered the other with his hand.

"What was that?" he asked into it. "I didn't quite hear you."

"Well, ah, sir," the voice over the comm continued, "you've got a real problem with the shielding near your docking bay. The radiation membrane is coming loose and it looks like the impact shield is chewed up pretty bad. Your son said we should come over and get it fixed right away."

"Hmm. That's funny. He didn't mention it to me," Bobby said.

"Well, no need to worry. We'll get right to work." The comm unit clicked as the ship signed off. Bobby went over to the viewport, dodging the orderlies who were trying to get Mr. and Mrs. Silverstein calmed down. He toggled through a few camera views before he saw the ship. It was a crappy old tug, the standard type of ship used by the various blue-collar tradesmen who worked the stations. It was parked next to the stationary docking bay at the station's hub. The retirement home's ring turned at a stately two rotations per minute behind it.

Bobby saw a few smallish pieces of space junk impact the aluminum bumpers of the tug's shields. "More and more junk everyday. Damn young people don't respect anything."

After a moment's thought, he decided to check with Joey.

"Get me Joseph, planetside," he said into the com panel. A low-tone beep emanated from the unit.

"Hello?" Joe's wife answered after a small delay.

"Angie? It's Bobby. Is Joe there?"

"Oh, hi, Dad." She flipped the contact on her side and a video image of his daughter-in-law's pretty face filled the comm's screen. "He just went to the store with the girls. He should be back any minute. You want me to leave him a message?"

"Yeah, have him call me. There's a crew of workmen here to repair the shielding and I want to make sure he knows about it."

"I will," Angie said. "You take it slow, okay? You're not getting any younger."

"So I've noticed." He smiled and winked at her. "Bye, Angie. Kiss the girls for me." Bobby closed the contact and folded his arms in front of him, his smile melting into a frown. He toggled the camera back to the tug and saw the workmen exiting their ship.

"Screw this," he said to no one in particular. "I'm going out there."

He took the elevator to the hub. The transition from one-third a gee to weightlessness made him nauseous, but he was used to the sensation. By the time he was suited up, he felt fine.

Bobby cycled through the airlock. Four workmen were standing around surveying the hub's impact shield. A couple of them noticed Bobby and began unloading tools and attaching safety tethers to the station.

Bobby walked across the hull with the practiced ease of an old spacer, disengaging one magnetic boot at a time. He paused to look down at Earth. North America, green and beautiful, was directly beneath the station and Bobby spent a wistful moment thinking about fishing for stripers in Narragansett Bay as a boy.

"Long time ago." Bobby shook his head and walked over to the work crew. He looked over the shield with a critical eye and clicked on the general com channel for suit-to-suit. "It looks fine to me."

"Oh, no, sir." One of the workmen put out his hand. "I'm Tom, from Quality Shielding."

Bobby ignored his offer to shake and Tom drew back his gauntleted hand. "I ain't no 'sir,' young feller. I used to work for a living."

"All right, Mr. Cullivan, no offense meant. You've got some real problems here, though. Radiation leaks, worn out spots on the Whipple shield—a good piece of space junk or a solar flare and you can say 'bye-bye retirement station.'"

"Really?" Bobby had spent enough time on space stations and ships to see there was nothing wrong with the shield. He wasn't keen on talking about the weather with some guy trying to sell him something he didn't need.

One of the other workmen took a diamond bit cutter out of his toolkit and started removing the riveting that held the first layer of the Whipple strike shield to the deck. It was essentially a multi-ply aluminum mesh shield, designed to distribute impact as debris penetrated each stacked layer. Still effective, even though the design was well over a hundred years old.

"Hold on there, boy. Just when did my son tell you to fix this shield?"

"Called us yesterday. Told us it was a rush job," Tom said.

"Well . . . I want you to hold up for a few minutes until I talk to him. I'm not sure he understood what you guys meant to do." Bobby really wanted to tell them to buzz off, but Joe ran the station now. He didn't want to step on his son's toes.

"All right, but we got more than one job going right now, mister. You want to hold us up, we may not finish it for a while," Tom said.

"That's okay. He should be calling in soon and we'll straighten this all out." Bobby silently noted the registration numbers on the side of the crew's tug.

"If that's the way you want it." Tom turned to his work crew. "Hold up, everyone. Take five."

"Thank you." Bobby made his way back to the airlock and peeled off his suit, cursing the stiffness in his hands as he worked the latches and seals. On the way to his quarters, he asked one of the crew if Joe had called.

"Ten minutes ago," the crewman said. "Said you should call him back."

"Thanks." Bobby stopped for a cup of coffee in the galley and went to his room to call Earth. He dialed Joe at home.

"Hi, Dad." Joe looked a little tired, but it wasn't easy going back to full gravity, even for a relatively young man. "I hope that's decaf. You know you're supposed to lay off the caffeine."

"Oh, for Christ's sake. I'm not a baby, Joey. I can decide when I can have a cup of coffee."

Joey rolled his bloodshot eyes toward the ceiling. "Okay, Dad, forget I mentioned it. Angie told me the shielding company called you?"

"They didn't just call—they're here. Just showed up an hour ago and started peeling off the docking bay's Whipple shield." Bobby took a sip of his coffee. "Thought I should call you since the shield looked good to me when I went out there."

Joe's face paled. "I told them 'no,' for God's sake." He put his hand over his eyes and shook his head. "Those bastards have been on me for a month and I keep telling them we don't want any. The last time they called was last week."

"Did you tell them you were going planetside, smart guy?" Bobby asked.

"Ugh. I might have mentioned it, yeah." Joe sat up, and took his hand from his face. "Are they still there?"

"Yeah. I told them to hold on so I could straighten this out with you. They didn't get far." Bobby flipped on a viewer and toggled to the docking bay at the station's hub. "Oh, crap."

The workmen were tearing off the shield.

"What is it?"

"Gotta go." Bobby ran over to the sink and put his coffee cup in it. "Call the orbitmaster and tell him we got some people trying to steal our Whipple shield." He relayed the registration numbers of the tug, though he was sure they were fakes.

"Dad, remember your heart. Don't do anything crazy. I'l—" Bobby pushed the contact on the comm and broke the connection.

He took another look in the viewer. The workers had detached a large section of the shield and were maneuvering it over to the tug using their suit thrusters.

"Son of a bitch!" Bobby punched a security code on his console. The orderlies would evacuate the residents from the zero-g recreation rooms and the crew members from the docking bay. Without the Whipple shield, even the impact of a moderate-sized piece of space junk could mean disaster.

Bobby ran down the hallway which was blessedly clear of oldsters. "Damn thieving lowlifes," he muttered. He commandeered an elevator and gritted his teeth against the inevitable nausea the trip to the hub would cause.

He put his suit on in record time and cycled through the airlock. Exiting the station at high speed, he took long bounding leaps and activated his magnetic boots to keep him in contact with the deck. "Hold on, you bastards!"

If anyone picked up his comm transmission, it had the opposite effect. Bobby got most of the way to the tug before the engines flared up, spouting a jet of propellant twice as long as the ship.

But Bobby didn't slow. He jumped off the station's hull and sped toward the ship. He triggered a full burn of his maneuvering pack's available propellant. His suit was equipped with an emergency tether and magnet that rode on his left forearm and he fired it toward the tug.

It never even occurred to him that he would be stuck in orbit if the grapple connected with a plastic piece of the tug's hull. His forward momentum had carried him almost a half kilometer already and his maneuvering pack was now out of fuel.

The little magnet stuck to the tug and held fast. The grapple mechanism spun out the remainder of its cable and Bobby braced for the inevitable. All the slack went taut and the force of the tug's thrust nearly ripped his arm from its socket. Bobby's heart was pounding and he tried with all his might to steady his breathing. The tug's engine abruptly cut off and the pressure on his arm subsided as his relative speed matched the ship's. He managed to toggle the crank and the grapple mechanism dragged him toward the tug. He positioned his feet beneath him and activated the magnet mechanism of his boots, letting out a sigh of relief when they locked to the hull. His heart steadied a bit and he rolled his arm around its socket, grimacing at the pain.

After a moment, he drew the grapple and line back into the forearm spool. He hoped the thieves inside would mistake the noise of his impact for a piece of debris clanging off the tug's hull.

The purloined Whipple shield was about ten meters away, lashed down to the side of the ship. Bobby walked gingerly over to it, suddenly aware that he had no real plan as to what to do next.

The tug wasn't meant for deep space—that much was obvious. It was just an orbital ship. Bobby reasoned they were headed for a nearby station. There was nothing to do but cultivate patience. He found a handhold next to the shield and waited for