by Ben Bova
At last he found what he was looking for: the blood-pressure cuff. With a grunt of satisfaction he rolled up the left sleeve of his coveralls and wrapped the plastic around his biceps. Taking a deep breath that was supposed to calm him, he inflated the cuff and then read off the glowing digital numbers on its tiny electronic display: 163 over 101. The readout was adjusted for the effects of microgravity. Not bad, he thought. But not good enough.
The command module was the smallest of all the sections that made up the Trikon space station, and the most densely packed. While the laboratory and habitat modules were each fifteen meters long, the command module’s cylinder was half that length. It was jammed with computer systems that tracked everything and everyone aboard the station, communications gear that kept Tighe and his crew in constant touch with Earth, and a command and control center that maintained the station’s life-support systems and external equipment. Dan’s office and the infirmary were wedged into opposite ends of the cramped module. Next to the cubbyhole infirmary was the sick bay: three sleep restraints fastened against the only bare spot on any of the walls. As if to compensate for the crowding, it was the only module with a view: a trio of small flused-silica viewing ports were built into the bulkhead at the command and control station.
Tighe anchored his slippered feet in the loops at the base of the chest-high desk that held his personal computer and tapped out the instructions that patched it into the station’s communications network. He plugged in the headset and clamped it on, adjusting the pin-sized microphone in front of his mouth. Make it fast, he told himself. Give yourself a few minutes to trim the bonsai and relax before you let her take your blood pressure.
The daily transmission from Earth began precisely on time.
“Houston to Trikon Station,” scratched a voice. The display screen unscrambled to reveal the bullet head of Tom Henderson, ceiling lights gleaming on his bald dome.
“This is Trikon. I read you, Houston,” replied Tighe.
“Hello, Dan. How you doin’, boy? You look redder’n a beet.”
“I ran out of razor blades and had to use the wind-up. Beats the hell out of your face.”
“Looks like you’ll have to make do without blades for a few days more. Hurricane Caroline is stalled in the Atlantic, so the shuttle’s being delayed.”
“How long?”
“Three days, maybe five. Depends on when Caroline clears out.”
“Christ,” said Tighe. “I have a frazzled crew, a bunch of immature scientists, and now this.”
“Can’t do anything about Mother Nature,” said Henderson. “And you forgot the Martians.”
“I’m trying to forget about them.”
The two men ran through their daily housekeeping chores—analyzing the amount of food, water, air, and fuel remaining on board, plotting the orbital path, coordinating the photographs that would be taken by the camera array on the station’s nadir platform. Meteorologists were especially anxious to get all the photos of Caroline that they could provide. One task originally scheduled for today’s communication—fixing the rendezvous with the shuttle-would have to wait.
“One more thing,” said Henderson. “Trikon has added another scientist to the next rotation. His name is Hugh O’Donnell. American biochemist. I don’t have his file yet, but I see that he has standing orders to report to your medical officer on a daily basis.”
“Health risk?”
“Looks it.” Henderson arched his eyebrows. “I’ll shoot you his file as soon as I receive it.”
“Keep me posted on the shuttle.”
“Roger that,” said Henderson. “Out,”
Tighe removed the headset and clipped it to its receptacle on the wall. It was important to fasten down everything in microgravity. Otherwise they somehow floated away, lost until they turned up stuck to an intake ventilator grid. Tighe remembered waking up in the middle of the night on his first shuttle flight to find a green snake gliding toward him. It took him a couple of panicked heartbeats to realize that it was the garden hose that one of the mission specialists had brought aboard for a botany experiment. The jerk hadn’t tied it down properly and it was undulating like a cobra across the mid-deck section where the crew slept.
Then he remembered his last shuttle flight, and felt his pulse quickening with anger. The bonsai bird hovered near his shoulder. He nuzzled its beak. Calm me down, pal, he said to the green bird. Calm me down before they throw me out of this job, too.
Somebody rapped on the bulkhead. Before Tighe could answer, the accordion door squealed back and Dave Nutt pushed through. He was gasping for air. His T-shirt had come untucked from his nylon pants and rode up over his paunchy stomach.
“What’s wrong, Dave?” Tighe liked Nutt; otherwise he would have snapped at him for barging into his office. Nutt was dedicated and sober, not at all like the other cases of arrested development Trikon called scientists. But now he was wild-eyed, panting, his hair and beard beaded with perspiration.
“My computer!” heaved Nutt. “Someone’s tampered with it!”
“What? How?”
“Downloaded my research files.”
The scientists were always complaining to Tighe about people tampering with their work. Although the corporations that made up the Trikon consortium were supposed to be working cooperatively, industrial espionage seemed to be the major industry aboard the station. Most of the accusations were false alarms bred by overactive imaginations or personal animosities among the scientists. Or at least they could not be proved to Tighe’s satisfaction.
“How do you know?” Tighe asked.
“I have a subprogram that logs every use. Somebody went into our module at two a.m. and downloaded my goddamned files!”
“I’d better take a look,” said Tighe, mentally postponing his date with the doctor.
Stu Roberts was still in The Bakery when Tighe and Nutt arrived. Now that Nutt had taken the extreme step of actively involving the station commander, Roberts decided to lie low and let the scientist embarrass himself. He hovered on the edge of audibility as Nutt gave Tighe a fevered explanation of the messages appearing on the computer monitor.
Tighe had only a general idea of the work being conducted in the three Trikon laboratory modules. He knew that the project involved microbial genetics: the scientists were trying to engineer a bug that would eat pollutants or toxic wastes or something like that. His interest in the bug was purely practical. As station commander, he constantly worried about containment of all the potentially toxic agents used by the scientists in their research. Accidental release of bacteria, caustic chemicals, or pollutants could wreak havoc in the delicately controlled environment of the station. In space you cannot open a window for fresh air. One mistake with chemical or biological materials could kill everyone aboard very swiftly.
Tighe had worked with many scientists during his years in the Air Force and with NASA. He was accustomed to competing philosophies because scientists and the military usually were at odds. But on Trikon Station there were cliques within cliques. The Americans stayed with the Americans. The Japanese stayed with the Japanese. And the Europeans, true to their history, fought among themselves as well as with all the others. While the corporations that employed them trumpeted the benefits of cooperative research in slick brochures and television specials, the scientists were more competitive than Olympic athletes. They never traded information willingly and regarded each other with the warmth of professional assassins. The situation was particularly tense just prior to a rotation. Every ninety days a third of the scientific staff was replaced by new people from Earth. That was when a successful industrial spy could take his loot back home.
“That’s what happened,” said Nutt, winding up his explanation.
Tighe leaned close to the keyboard as if scrutinizing it for fingerprints. He realized how ridiculous he must have looked and pushed himself away.
“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.
“Search everybod
y on the station! Force whoever downloaded the files to turn them over.”
“I’m not a policeman.”
“This is very sensitive material! It’s…”
“And I’m in a very sensitive position. I’m not just dealing with an international contingent of scientists. There’s a couple of dozen governments who view these scientists as diplomats. If I start strong-arming people without good cause, the shit will fall on my head, nobody else’s.”
“You’re saying I should work for six months, have my results stolen, and do absolutely nothing about it?”
“The files are still in your computer, right?” said Tighe. “They’ve been copied, not stolen.”
Nutt reluctantly nodded.
“Then consider yourself a benefactor of mankind.”
“The hell I will!”
“You’re supposed to be working cooperatively with all the others, aren’t you? Why the panic?”
“I want the credit!” Nutt snarled through gritted teeth. “I did the work and I want the credit for it. The work’s got to be published in my name. A scientist’s reputation depends on his publications, his discoveries. Don’t you understand that?”
Roberts decided it bad gone far enough. Gliding over toward his flustered boss and the tight-lipped station commander, he interrupted, “Hey, there’s really no problem.”
Tighe looked at Roberts, then cocked his head toward Nutt. The scientist’s bearded, puffy face twisted into a grimace of exasperation.
“Explain yourself,” Tighe said to Roberts.
“Dave put that security subprogram into his PC because he was worried about theft. I had a suspicion that the subprogram could be fooled, so I played around with it. Sure enough, I was able to hack into the files and download them.”
Roberts produced a diskette from a pouch pocket of his pants.
“You did it!” screamed Nutt. He pushed himself at Roberts and knocked the diskette out of his hand. The diskette skittered crazily in midair while the two men tumbled in a confusion of arms and legs. Tighe pried them apart.
“Explain yourself,” Tighe said again to Roberts. “Fast.”
“That wasn’t Dave’s files,” said Roberts, rubbing his forehead gingerly. “It was another subprogram I wrote to protect the files. Whoever downloaded them will never be able to access them, not without jamming his own computer.”
Tighe shot a look at Nutt, who was glaring at the technician.
“Say that again,” Tighe commanded Roberts.
“I wrote in a bug that’s programmed to be triggered by an unauthorized download. When somebody tries to access the stolen files, his monitor will fill with I AM A THIEF in big yellow characters and the bug will replicate itself in his computer.”
Tighe suddenly grabbed Roberts by the front of his coveralls.
“Can you delete that program?”
“I think so.”
“Don’t tell me what you think.” Tighe wedged one foot into a floor loop and shook Roberts as if he were made of straw. “Yes or no? Can you delete it without starting the bug?”
“Yeah…Yes!”
“Do it. Top priority. And when you’re finished, find that disk and break it into little pieces. If we’re fast enough and lucky enough, we just might get through this alive.”
Tighe pulled himself into a tuck and shot like a torpedo through the hatchway.
“Am I missing something?” said Roberts.
“You fucking idiot!” screamed Nutt. “The computer terminals are all tied into the station’s mainframe! If whoever downloaded the file tries to access them here, that bug will worm its way into life support and kill us all!”
15 AUGUST 1998
FLORIDA
The Earth is dying. The human race is rushing headlong toward extinction.
The problem is not for our grandchildren, or our children. The problem is ours. It is happening now. The dying has already begun.
We are killing ourselves. Smog chokes our cities. Farmlands are becoming barren while megatons of chemical fertilizers poison groundwater. Deserts are expanding, and rain forests are rapidly being destroyed. The ozone layer is being eaten away by pollution. Global temperatures are rising toward the greenhouse level.
Worst of all, the oceans—the great embracing mother seas that are the foundation of all life on our planet—the oceans are being fouled so thoroughly that all life will die off in a few short years.
We do not have a century to clean up the environment. We do not even have decades. The oceans are already beginning to die. We are in a race against our own extinction.
And while the Earth dies, most people go about their daily lives as if nothing is happening. Unthinking, uncaring, they are helping to kill the Earth, murdering their own world, committing mass suicide.
A few persons are aware of the danger. Very few. Some try to get their fellow humans to pay attention, to stop fouling the Earth. Some even blame our modern technology for polluting our air and water to the point where the entire environment is beginning to collapse around us.
They are almost right.
The basic problem is that human habits change slowly, so slowly. A hundred thousand years ago, what did it matter to a Stone Age hunter that his campfire sent smoke into the air, or that he urinated into a clear mountain brook? But today, with six billion humans burning and urinating, life on Earth cannot survive much longer.
There are those who say we must stop all technology and return to a simpler way of life. How can that be done without killing most of the people on Earth? We depend on our technology to produce food for us, to give us heat and light, to protect us against disease. To stop our technology would mean allowing billions to starve and freeze and die.
Instead of stopping technology, we must invent new technologies, clean and efficient ways to do all that our old technologies have done for us—without polluting our world to death.
And we must invent a means to clean up the filth that is choking our air and our water, destroying the atmosphere and the oceans. We need that now, if we are to survive the next few years.
That is why I created Trikon. To save the world. To save the human race.
But salvation means change, and most people fear change more than anything else. To save the Earth means that we must engage in genetic research. There is no other way. Only by developing new forms of life, creating microbes that can eat up our pollutants and convert them into harmless biodegradable waste matter, can we hope to cleanse the Earth quickly enough to avert our own destruction.
Yet to the great masses of people all around the Earth, genetic research is new, and what is new to them is terrifying.
So I decided that the genetic research would have to be done in orbit, entirely off the Earth. Too many important people are frightened of having something go wrong, causing a man-made plague or some other disaster. It is a foolish fear, but it is very real.
In the U.S. and many other nations, it is impossible to do the research that we need. The U.S. Supreme Court, no less, decided against field testing of genetically altered plants and bacteria, stating that “damage to the environment from testing cannot be ruled out to a scientific certainty,” even though there have been no recorded incidents of accidental release of genetically altered organisms into the environment.
This proved to me that the pressures against genetic experiments are getting worse. We want to save the world, but the world does not trust us!
There is literally nowhere on Earth that scientists can do the research that needs to be done. That is why we needed a research laboratory in space. No national government would do it. No single corporation could afford to risk the necessary investment capital. That is why Trikon Station had to be a multinational effort by the multinational corporations.
To save the world. To keep the human rate from going the way of the dinosaurs.
—From a speech by Fabio Bianco, CEO, Trikon International, to the United Nations Committee on the Global Environmental Crisis, 22 April
1997 (Earth Day)
Hugh O’Donnell trembled, soaked with sweat.
“Don’t worry, O’Donnell, my main man. No jury in this state will convict you.”
Pancho Weinstein, Esq., directed O’Donnell’s attention to the jury box. One juror drooled, another played solitaire, a third had his hand stuffed into his shirt a la Napoleon. All were cross-eyed.
O’Donnell turned back to the gallery where Stacey, his live-in girlfriend, sat in the first row. She wore black stockings and a miniskirt short enough to reveal the garters crossing her thighs.
“I’m cold,” she said with a pout.
Weinstein plucked O’Donnell’s motorcycle jacket from the back of his chair and tossed it to Stacey. She smiled and drew her tongue across her lips.
“Order!” The judge banged a ball peen hammer, then affixed a surgeon’s lamp to his forehead. “I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”
A bailiff wearing polka-dot suspenders danced into the center of the courtroom.
“Foundation for Thus ’n Such versus Agri Bio Futuro Tech Something or Other,” he announced through a megaphone. “Aw hell, read the program.”
“Oh, that one,” said the judge. “The defendant is directed to rise so we all can take a look at his mug.”
Weinstein elbowed O’Donnell in the ribs, then blew Stacey a kiss. O’Donnell struggled to his feet. The people in the gallery hissed. At the opposite table, the foundation’s attorney floated on a perfect cumulus cloud. He was dressed in a long white robe; a halo circled his head.
“What’ll it be?” said the judge. “Testimony evaluated by an impartial jury, or would you two rather just duke it out?”
“Duke it out,” said O’Donnell.
“That’s what I say,” said the judge. “Let’s hear the evidence.”
A young boy materialized on the witness stand. He looked like a normal teenager except for the tomato plant growing out of his shoulder. The tomatoes were ripe enough to pick.
“I grew up next to a field sprayed with SuperGro Microbial Frost Retardant produced by that man.” The boy leveled a leafy finger at O’Donnell. “The tomatoes were very juicy.”
