Analog SFF, January-February 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He interrupted his chewing to say, “That was the boss lady pagin’ you again, Mikey.”

  “Yup.”

  “Seems to want to see a lot of you,” said the guy with a grin.

  Mike wondered whether to tell him what he looked like, grinning with his mouth full. But being foreman meant that there was lots of stuff Mike couldn't do. At least, that's what it meant to him. “You take care of your work, Hernie, and I'll take care of mine,” he said instead. He knew Ahearn hated being called “Hernie.”

  “Hey, mate, I thought you said we're all in this together.” The man grinned again.

  He tended to go back to his Australian roots when he was madder than usual.

  “Well, we will be,” said Mike. “We'll all be in the same ship headed back to Earth if this contamination problem isn't sorted out. Which might not be such a bad thing.”

  “It's nothin’ to do with me,” said Ahearn immediately. “It started three months ago.”

  That was when Mike arrived. The guy never missed a chance to point that out.

  “The rest of us,” Ahearn was going on, “worked with an old hand here for months at first. You learn all sortsa tips and tricks.”

  Mike felt like saying, “Aw. You're depressed you couldn't spend more time with me, teaching me how to keep shit out of drinking water. I'm touched.” But he managed to keep his mouth shut long enough for someone else to start talking, and the moment passed. One of these days it might not.

  “Might just be the Station getting old,” said the veteran of many space stations, practically right back to the first one ever built.

  “Old!” piped up Jessica. “This one was built five years ago! And it's not like we've been slouches maintaining it.”

  She'd been there right from the start, and nobody was going to tell her she'd been doing a bad job, no matter how many stations he'd worked on.

  “You can take care of it like the family jewels,” the veteran argued. “That's not the point. It's the hard radiation. The seals give out. You shoulda seen the moon base after two years. Dust everywhere.”

  “I still say we oughta look at what changed three months ago,” Ahearn said again. “New policies, all that stuff.”

  “Christ on a bike, Artie,” said Jessica. “You keep tryin’ to pin it to three months. Three months ago is when we started finding it. Nobody knows when it started. What changed three months ago was that Mike had us looking in places we didn't check before.”

  “Maybe messin’ with the system is what gave us the contamination. Have you thought of that? I mean, sure, management likes to hear rosy scenarios, but we're tryin’ to solve a problem here.”

  Jessica stared at her plate for a second. When she looked up, she stared just as fixedly at Ahearn.

  “Well, here's another thing to think of. We've chlorinated, like, five times since we found the stuff. It keeps reappearing. Almost like someone's putting it there.”

  “What are you sayin'?” demanded Ahearn.

  “I'm not sayin’ any more than you are with your ‘three months’ all the time.”

  Mike could see Ahearn get livid. Literally. His red complexion went white around his mouth, and his lips peeled back from his teeth in a vicious grin.

  “You sure work hard at tryin’ to get the easy jobs.” His glance flicked at Mike.

  Jessica carefully separated out the recyclables and the dishes on her brown tray, even though she hadn't eaten all of her lunch.

  She stood up. “You got ketchup all over your face, Hernie,” she said.

  He touched his face before he could stop himself, and Mike almost laughed.

  Jessica was all the way across the canteen and cleaning off her tray before anyone said anything.

  Mike leaned back in his chair and looked at the man, who was using his napkin for the first time. “Artie Ahearn,” he said, being all formal to tell him that this was his foreman speaking and not pushover Mikey. “You said it yourself. I think we're in this together. So when I give out the scut work, I give some to everybody, including me. But I could do the assignments the way they do them back on Earth. Based on length of service as a journeyman.” Ahearn was the most recent hire on Mike's crew, except for Mike himself, who hadn't been a mere journeyman in years.

  The man got whiter around the mouth, but didn't say anything.

  Mike didn't say anything either. He was busy wondering just how far Hernia-boy was willing to go to make him look bad. And if it was far enough to be actual sabotage, he'd better start watching his back with every ounce of smarts that he had, because Ahearn was always damn good at what he did. There was a reason why he thought he was going to be the next foreman.

  Sabotage made a lot of sense, now that Jessica had mentioned it. It was probably the only thing that could explain the way the stuff kept showing up where it shouldn't. He ought to have thought of it himself, except he never did. He always assumed people would treat him the way he treated them ... and then wound up wondering why he was shipping out to Jupiter with one suitcase to his name.

  Of course, if he was going to start being suspicious, to be fair he had to be suspicious of everybody. Including, for instance, Jessica. She had a face like a cherub, and had shown him all over the Station when he arrived. She was always helpful. She didn't look like a plumber, which was also nice. And she was carrying a difficult past, just like him. There was something to do with her family and a stepfather she didn't talk about.

  But a pleasant manner didn't mean a thing. It wouldn't be the first time he'd been successfully lied to. And everybody who wound up here, in the Foreignest of Legions, had something they were leaving behind. Even Ahearn. His personnel record had one line noting that his wife had died in a traffic accident.

  What it came down to, thought Mike, was that he just didn't know. If it was accidental contamination, he had no idea how it was happening. If it was sabotage, he knew even less. Except that in that case, there were ways to find out more.

  He set the whole crew to sterilizing everything one more time. The water system would have to be shut down and flushed. There were groans everywhere. There were even groans over the PA system.

  Then, by himself, when he was sure nobody was watching, he rigged up three of the tiny robot cams normally used to inspect blocked pipes. If somebody really was contaminating the pipes on purpose, that somebody was going to jail.

  “What are the robocams for?” Jessica asked the next day.

  Mike said nothing. He didn't have any quick excuse handy. He hadn't realized he was going to need one.

  She started looking embarrassed. “Uh, it's no big deal. I was just curious. I happened to notice that you were in the pipe closet when I was on my way to my dorm. Um...”

  She trailed off, looked at the floor, and then at a console near the wall.

  Mike's first thought was, Why the hell is she following me around, keeping an eye on me? His second thought was that she wouldn't be letting him know she'd noticed if she had a guilty conscience.

  “Anyway,” she continued, “I just wondered if Ahearn is supposed to be doing a surface check. ‘Cause he's up there.”

  “Checking the outside of the sterilizer tanks, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  Mike went over to the terminal by the wall, and called up his duty rosters. “I thought so. He's supposed to be doing that two weeks from now.”

  He stared at the console and thought. He could call the man's suit radio and ask what the hell he was doing, but if he was up to no good, the direct approach wouldn't achieve anything and it would let him know he was being watched.

  If Hernia-boy was taking secret trips to the surface, and somehow introducing contaminants into the sterilizer tanks from the outside, that would explain a lot. Mike had better get himself up there immediately and follow Ahearn's footsteps, testing for E. coli the whole way, before the hard radiation had time to disintegrate everything to its component atoms.

  “Okay,” said Mike. “His suit coordinates say h
e was at tank four.” He opened a cabinet and pulled out a completely new test kit. “We just sterilized everything. Let's go see what we find. I'd like you to be there to document everything I do.”

  Jessica acquired a look of grim, uncherubic satisfaction.

  “You really don't like the guy, do you?” said Mike as they walked toward tank four.

  She blushed furiously and didn't say anything. Gradually the red receded, although she still had a suffused, fixed look. It was funny, thought Mike, how that look marked a blush even on people who didn't turn visibly red, such as black people like himself. It was almost as if the mind's eye could detect infrared.

  She finally spoke, now that she had a hold of herself and was almost back to her normal pink. “It's not that at all. I'm just trying to help.”

  “Hey, don't get me wrong. I think you're far from alone when it comes to Ahearn.”

  “Yeah. Right.” She still looked furious, and she was turning red again. “I'm probably alone in him propositioning me, though, first chance he got.”

  “Say what?”

  “Just what I said.”

  “That's against every rule in the book. If you want to complain about him, I'll back you all the way. And I'll read him the riot act.”

  Jessica grinned without any humor. “You don't like the fellow much either, eh?”

  Mike skipped a beat, then said, “It's not that at all. I'm just trying to help.”

  Her smile became genuine for a heartbeat, and vanished. “What I really want is to turn him into mincemeat myself. But he just grins down at me from up near the ceiling and acts like I'm nobody.”

  They'd reached tank four, and Mike knelt down to open the kit and start the testing procedure. He told her to turn on her comm's camera, and sat back while the test strips took their minute to show a reaction.

  “You know,” he said, “he may have hit on you, but he can't stand you. You have achieved that.”

  Jessica glanced at him, surprised, and smiled as she looked away. This time the smile stayed there.

  Then the kit beeped, and Mike pulled out the test strip, and they both stared.

  Positive.

  “Okay. Out to the surface. Double quick. Before every trace of the stuff degrades. Where's Hernia-boy?” Mike checked his whereabouts. “In the suit storage room. So he's down and out. Let's go.”

  Following the exact path Ahearn had taken, they reached a spot right at the edge of the top side of tank four where the infrared signature of escaping heat gave off a faint glow on the scanner, indicating a breach in the tank's hull. And all around the leak, trampled into the dirty surface ice, were still traces of E. coli.

  * * * *

  Mike stood in the boss's office, feeling jumpy. It wasn't the first time he'd had to report on a firing offense, but it always made him feel bad. By way of easing into it, he said Ahearn had taken an unscheduled trip to the surface.

  “Yes,” said the boss. “He just reported to me, barely half an hour ago that there was a leak up there.”

  “He did?” Why in hell was he reporting something that would allow the sabotage to be traced to him? And why wasn't the boss wondering that it hadn't been reported to Mike, as it normally should have been?"Did he also mention that after he'd been there, E. coli contamination showed up in tank four and around the hull breach?”

  “What?”

  Mike explained exactly what he'd done.

  The boss pushed a button on her intercom. “Mr. Ahearn? Come to my office, please. As quickly as is compatible with safety.”

  That was spacespeak for “Get your butt in here instantly.”

  He appeared in less than a minute by the wall clock, looking worried.

  The boss said without any preamble, “Apparently, there was something you overlooked in your earlier report. E. coli contamination followed your activities. Can you explain that?”

  “What? What're you sayin', m-ma'am?” demanded Ahearn.

  “Contamination was found in tank four, after you were busy with it at the surface. And a subsequent check of the surface found contamination there, too. Careless work,” she said, narrow eyed. “You could have at least not spilled it all over everywhere.”

  “But, but I didn't! I was up there checkin’ for leaks. Old Jim mentioned leaks at lunch, and that area around tank four has been lookin’ strange to me for weeks—something about the way the ice there looks, grayer, or something—so I thought I'd go up and check. And there was a damn leak. I didn't do anything but look for it. I didn't spill anything. I didn't do anything but look for it!”

  Suddenly he turned on Mike. “And I suppose you found all this contamination.”

  The next thing he was going to say hit Mike like a brick. I bet you put it there. Of course. This was the man's frame. Why hadn't he thought of that? But what Hernia-boy didn't know was that Jessica had documented every step Mike took.

  “Well, good for you,” said Ahearn. “Now all you gotta do is find out who did it, because it wasn't me.”

  “And who do you suggest?” said Mike. “Nobody's been up there in days, except you. The tanks were sterilized yesterday, and minutes after you're up there, E. coli shows up.”

  “How should I know who did it? If I was going to do something like that, I sure as hell wouldn't sign out a suit, all legal and proper, and then do it while I had the transponder and locator going full blast.”

  True, thought Mike. That didn't make a lot of sense. Besides, now if anyone pointed out that there was no record of Mike being up there, it would be proof of guilt rather than innocence.

  “You want to find out who did it, go test every arse on the Station.”

  “That wouldn't be any use, Mr. Ahearn.” The boss didn't look like she believed a word he said. “The test strips ID it as one of the commonest strains. Everybody on this Station probably has it. Including you.”

  “It wasn't me, I tell you! Hell, he's just throwin’ this out, trying to see what'll stick to the wall. Where's the container I'm supposed to have carried the stuff around in? Where's the new water ice where I supposedly spilled everything? Huh? Where is it?” He turned on Mike again. “He's just tryin’ to put it on me to save his own job.”

  Hernia-boy. Always the charmer, thought Mike. But some of what he said was true: finding him together with E. coli was not the same as finding him causing it.

  Although it sure felt like a “beyond a reasonable doubt” situation.

  But it didn't feel like a frame. If it was one, then why wasn't Hernie framing? He was just yelling that it wasn't him with the desperate conviction of a man without an alibi. It would make a lot more sense to have an elaborate lie ready, if he was really guilty.

  It wasn't fair to fire someone just because he couldn't prove he was innocent.

  “Ma'am,” said Mike, “he does have a point. It looks bad, but there isn't any proof. We should make sure we know what we're dealing with, one hundred percent, before taking other steps.”

  “We do know what we're dealing with,” said the boss. “E. coli in the sterilizer. And I, for one, have had enough of dealing with it. I'll need your signature and thumb scan, Mike, on the form stating the facts in the case.”

  But Mike was no longer happy with the facts in the case. One of his workers was on the line, and there were too many things that didn't fit, especially the fact that Ahearn was just making helpless assertions nobody would believe.

  Mike departed from the policy of a lifetime. “No, ma'am,” he said. “I'm sorry, but I can't do that until we actually have all the facts in the case. I feel very strongly that we must have proof before one of my crew gets terminated.”

  “Mike Warner, are you seriously telling me you want this department to pay thousands of credits for the microarray scans station enforcement will require to prove exact matches between this contamination and whatever they find after searching Mr. Ahearn's effects? All just to reach the obvious conclusion?”

  “When it's obvious, I'll sign the forms. Right now, I t
hink Ahearn has valid objections.”

  “Mike, with all the extra costs of the contamination—which has happened on your watch, I might add—this department is so over budget, I'll be lucky if I don't wind up having a little chat with the head of Support Services in Geneva. Scans will push us right over the edge. If it was actually necessary, I wouldn't hesitate, of course, but this is just a waste.”

  Mike looked at his feet, set his mouth, and replied. “Ma'am, unless we have proof, I'll support Mr. Ahearn if he applies to the union for legal representation to sue for wrongful dismissal.”

  There was silence. The boss stared at him. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Hernie staring at him with his mouth open. It didn't improve his looks.

  The boss's eyes narrowed. Always a bad sign.

  “Well, if you feel that strongly about it, that's your right, of course. However, the whole Department will have to economize to make up for the added costs. There won't be enough money for any discretionary items. Like private quarters for upper-level staff.” She was looking at Mike. “You're sure you feel all that expense is necessary?”

  Mike looked at his boots again. Man, she sure didn't want to talk to anyone in Geneva.... And he sure didn't want to lose his one little bit of privacy for the sake of Hernie “Charming” Ahearn.... On the other hand, he did want to be able to face himself in the mirror. He tried to think fast.

  “How about if I tried to make the case a bit more solid before we have to spend money on lab work? Enforcement would want us to prove that the contaminant, and what's on the space suit boots, and whatever they decide needs testing in his personal stuff is all the exact same thing. I've actually done a couple of full microarray genome scans—”