“Did you make someone angry?” Lamont asked, changing the subject defensively. “You seem to get the worst jobs.”
Everything was quiet as the command deck doors slid automatically closed behind Lamont. At the moment, even the normal shuffle of documents and personnel from one area of the control deck to another was absent. Glancing through the large rectangular windows placed at regular intervals in the hall, he could see third-shift men and women sitting at their consoles with cups of coffee or gathered around display monitors in small clusters of chairs. He would have been hard-pressed to recall the names of the twenty-odd members of the graveyard shift; even he was typically in bed at this time of day.
He didn’t feel like going to bed now, he realized. Stepping into the lift at the end of the hall, his hand hovered over the simple button panel. After a moment’s thought, he pressed the uppermost of the three destination buttons. The lift carried him up past the crew deck to the colonist deck.
The doors slid open again to reveal a view that was almost surreal in its loveliness. The open deck was bathed in the deep blue light of the gas giant, the cloudy visage of which mostly filled the view of the panoramic windows at the front of the deck. At the back of the deck, the neat rows of windows for the colonist apartments were mostly dark, with a few exceptions. The globes of the lamps, styled like street lights, glowed pink to simulate sunrise, rendering the whole scene in an edenic magenta hue. In the open area between the cabins and the windows, Lamont was met with a sight that he found charmingly comical: Several dozen brightly colored chickens were wandering in clusters around the deck, pecking at pellets of food that had been scattered across the normally spotless faux turf floor for them. Standing among them was Abner Wade. The stocky young colonist was immediately recognizable because the vacuum pack he wore on his back now was visually similar to the sanitization kit he wore when Lamont had seen him on many occasions, cleaning the command deck. Connected to the pack was a wand, which Abner was holding to the floor as he followed behind the chickens, carefully cleaning up the droppings that the birds left behind with impressive frequency.
With no other humans in sight, Lamont snapped a quick photo of the scene with his recorder and made his way toward Abner, gingerly avoiding the chickens and anything that they might leave behind. The birds regarded him from the sides of their cocked heads with a casual kind of predatoriness that the newspaperman found unsettling.
“They ain’t going to attack you,” Abner said seriously. The statement was followed by the quiet whirr-thunk of the vacuum as it sucked up a bit of refuse.
“I know that,” Lamont assured him as he stepped around the birds, hands held up at the level of his chest.
“You don’t look like you know it,” The colonist observed.
“Did you make someone angry?” Lamont asked, changing the subject defensively. “You seem to get the worst jobs.”
The young man shook his head gravely. He was built thickly, but without appearing overweight. His face was round and friendly, clean-shaven and topped with close-cropped yellow hair. His simple earnestness made Lamont feel immediately sorry for his jab. “No, sir,” The colonist answered. “This is one of the most important jobs. We couldn’t grow a thing without it.”
“Ah, of course,” Lamont murmured. As was so often the case, he was struck by the practical efficiency of these people. Even the most seemingly bizarre practices were part of a carefully regulated system. He found himself wondering if that same sentiment applied in some way he couldn’t fathom to their ecstatic prayer services.
“Mr. Townsend?” Abner asked, interrupting the journalist’s musing. “The weird music y’all played today. We were all wondering—did it come from there?” He tossed his head in the direction of the window, and the dull glint of the structure that was suspended in darkness before the ship.
Nov 8, 2021: ETT inspires me to look up the effectiveness of using chicken manure as fertilizer.
This weekend, I noticed that the old WESTWARD comic site is now gone and the domain is released and available. Sad to see the archive go under.