The band played on

Murdock refused to look back as the boys left the stands. He went across the field, past the school buildings, on toward the main sections of the base--the business part, where the life-line to the space station and the moon was maintained. A job, he told himself, was a job. It was a word he would never have used six ships and fifteen years before.

The storm flag was up on the control tower, he saw. Worse, the guy cables were all tight, anchoring the three-stage ships firmly down in their blast deflection pits. There were no tractors or tankers on the rocket field to service the big ships. He stared through the thickening gloom toward the bay, but there was no activity there, either. The stage recovery boats were all in port, with their handling cranes folded down. Obviously, no flight was scheduled.

It didn't fit with predictions. Hurricane Greta was hustling northward out to sea, and the low ceiling and high winds were supposed to be the tag end of that disturbance, due to clear by mid-day. This didn't look that way; it looked more as if the weather men on the station had goofed for the first time in ten years.

Murdock stared down the line toward his own ship, set apart from the others, swaying slightly as the wind hit it. Getting it up through the weather was going to be hell, even if he got clearance, but he couldn't wait much longer. Greta had already put him four days behind his normal schedule, and he'd been counting on making the trip today.

There was a flash bulletin posted outside the weather shack, surrounded by a group of young majors and colonels from the pilot squad. Murdock stepped around them and into the building. He was glad to see that the man on duty was Collins, one of the few technicians left over from the old days on the Island.

Collins looked up from his scowling study of the maps and saluted casually without rising. "Hi, Tommy. How's the hog business?"

"Lousy," Murdock told him. "I'm going to have a hungry bunch of pigs if I don't get another load down. What gives with the storm signals? I thought Greta blew over."

Collins pawed the last cigarette out of a pack and shook his head as he lighted up. "This is Hulda, they tell me. Our geniuses on the station missed it--claimed Hulda was covered by Greta until she grew bigger. We're just beginning to feel her. No flights for maybe five days more."

"Hell!" It was worse than Murdock had feared. He twisted the weather maps to study them, unbelievingly. Unlike the newer pilots, he'd spent enough time in the weather shack to be able to read a map or a radar screen almost as well as Collins. "The station couldn't have goofed that much, Bill!"

"Did, though. Something's funny up there. Bailey and the other brass are holding some pow-wow about it now, over at Communications. It's boiling up to a first-class mess."

One of the teletypes began chattering, and Collins turned to it. Murdock moved outside where a thin rain was beginning to fall, whipping about in the gusts of wind. He headed for the control tower, knowing it was probably useless. In that, he was right; no clearances for flight could be given without General Bailey's okay, and Bailey was still tied up in conference, apparently.

He borrowed a raincape and went out across the field toward his ship. The rain was getting heavier, and the Mollyann was grunting and creaking in her pit as he neared her. The guying had been well enough done, however, and she was in no danger that he could see. He checked the pit gauges and records. She'd been loaded with a cargo of heavy machinery, and her stage tanks were fully fueled. At least, if he could get clearance, she was ready to go. She was the oldest ship on the field, but her friction-burned skin covered sound construction and he had supervised her last overhaul himself.

Then he felt the wind picking up again, and his stomach knotted. He moved around to the more sheltered side of the ship, cursing the meteorologists on the station. If they'd predicted this correctly, he could have arranged to take off during the comparative lull between storms. Even that would have been bad enough, but now....

Abruptly, a ragged klaxon shrieked through the air in a series of short bursts, sounding assembly for the pilots. Murdock hesitated, then shrugged and headed out into the rain. He could ignore the signal if he chose, since he'd been on detached duty for years, except when actually scheduled for flight; yet it was probably his best chance to see Bailey. He slogged along while the other pilots trotted across the field toward Briefing on the double. Even now, covered with slickers and tramping through mud, they seemed to be on parade drill, as if a drum were beating out the time for them.

Murdock found a seat at the rear, separate from the others, out of old habit. Up front, an improvised crap game was going on; elsewhere, they were huddled in little groups, their young faces too bright and confident. Nobody noticed him until Colonel Lawrence Hennings glanced up from the crap game. "Hi, Tommy. Want in?"

Murdock shook his head, smiling briefly. "Can't afford it this week," he explained.

A cat could look at royalty; and royalty was free to look at or speak to anyone--even a man who ferried garbage for the station. At the moment, Hennings was king, even in this crowd of self-determined heroes. There was always one man who was the top dog. Hennings' current position seemed as inevitable as Murdock's own had become.

Damn it, someone had to carry the waste down from the station. The men up there couldn't just shove it out into space to have it follow their orbit and pile up around them; shooting it back to burn up in Earth's atmosphere had been suggested, but that took more fuel in the long run than bringing it down by ship. With nearly eight hundred men in the doubly expanded station, there was a lot of garbage, too. The job was as important as carrying the supplies up, and took just as much piloting skill. Only there was no band playing when the garbage ship took off, and there could never be a hero's mantle over the garbage man.

It had simply been his bad luck that he was pilot for the first load back. The heat of landing leaked through the red-hot skin of the cargo section, and the wastes boiled and steamed through the whole ship and plated themselves against the hull when it began to cool, until no amount of washing could clean it completely; after that, the ship was considered good for nothing but the carrying of garbage down and lifting such things as machine parts, where the smell wouldn't matter. He'd gone on detached duty at once, exiled from the pilot shack; it was probably only imagination, but the other men swore they couldn't sleep in the same room with him.

He'd made something of a joke of it at first, while he waited for his transfer at the end of the year. He'd finally consented to a second year when they couldn't get anyone else for the job. And by the end of five years of it, he knew he was stuck; even a transfer wouldn't erase his reputation as the garbage man, or give him the promotions and chances for leadership the others got. Oh, there were advantages in freedom, but if there had been anything outside of the service he could do....

The side door opened suddenly and General Bailey came in. He looked older than his forty years, and the expression on his face sobered the pilots almost at once. He took his time in dropping to the chair behind the table, giving them a chance to come to order. Murdock braced himself, watching as the man took out a cigarette. Then, as it was tapped sharply on the table to pack the end, he nodded. It was going to be a call for volunteers! The picture of the weather outside raced through his mind, twisting at his stomach, but he slid forward on his seat, ready to stand at once.

"At ease, men." Bailey took his time lighting the cigarette, and then plunged into things. "A lot of you have been cursing the station for their forecast. Well, you can forget that--we're damned lucky they could spot Hulda at all. They're in bad shape. Know what acrolein is? You've all had courses in atmospherics. How about it?"

The answer came out in pieces from several of the pilots. Acrolein was one of the thirty-odd poisons that had to be filtered from the air in the station, though it presented no problem in the huge atmosphere of Earth. It could get into the air from the overcooking of an egg or the burning of several proteins. "You can get it from some of the plastics, too," one of the men added.

Bailey nodded. "You can. And that's the way they got it, from an accident in the shops. They got enough to overload their filters, and the replacements aren't enough to handle it. They're all being poisoned up there--just enough to muddle their thinking at first, but getting worse all the time. They can't wait for Hulda to pass. They've got to have new filters at once. And that means--"