The Trikon Deception

by Ben Bova

  “Thank you.” Unconsciously, Tighe made a stiff little bow.

  “It is my pleasure to help you, Commander.” Oyamo bowed in return.

  “What the hell was that all about?” Jeffries asked once they were back in the connecting tunnel.

  Tighe huffed a humorless laugh. “Oyamo just as much as told me that one of his people swiped Nutt’s file, but now that he knows there’s a bug in it, he won’t download the file. At least, not here aboard the station.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Nothing’s sure, Jeff.” Tighe could feel a sullen anger welling up inside him as they floated back toward the command module. “Except that we can’t keep the power-down going forever. The bastard’s got me there.”

  “Then whoever stole the files is going to carry them home, after all.”

  “Right. I hope he chokes on them,” Tighe said with real fervor.

  Hisashi Oyamo ran his right hand across his burly chest as he watched the two Americans duck through the hatch and leave Jasmine. His fingers pressed against the computer disk in the breast pocket of his smock.

  Typical American impetuousness, he thought. Power-down the entire station! Does the commander truly believe that someone clever enough to break into another scientist’s files would be so stupid as to attempt to access the stolen material while still aboard the station, where anyone might catch him simply by monitoring the computers?

  Still, Oyamo had not expected the files to be bugged. It was kind of the commander to inform me of that fact, he said to himself. It would have caused great unhappiness in Tokyo if one of our mainframes were ruined by the Yankee virus.

  Turning back to his technicians, he barked an order. They sprang into instant activity.

  Oyamo nodded to himself. It is well. What we cannot buy from the money-mad Americans or the bickering Europeans we can steal. The warrior uses whatever means come to hand; there is no shame in seizing opportunity. Japan’s destiny is to lead the world out of the morass these Westerners have created. It is the duty of every Japanese to use every atom of his strength and intelligence toward that goal.

  Dan Tighe shut down his communications console after completing his official report to Tom Henderson at ground control in Houston. The time was 1130 hours, CDT. Three hours of emergency power-down and twenty minutes’ explanation to the Earthside brass. He hoped the rest of the day would be less eventful.

  Henderson had been just as unhappy as Tighe about the situation.

  “You mean whoever stole the data still has the disk? With the bug in it?”

  Tighe had nodded sourly. “Not much more I can do about it, Tom. Can’t keep the station powered down forever.”

  “Yeah, I know, but…”

  “Whoever’s got the disk knows that if he tries to run it he’s going to jam the mainframe.”

  Henderson had been silent for a moment. Then, “Better pop an unscheduled CERV test.”

  “Right. Good idea.” But Tighe pictured in his mind the bitching the scientists would do if he called a surprise emergency evacuation drill on top of the power-down.

  Tighe let his feet slide out of the restraining loops and floated toward the ceiling of his cubbyhole office. The bonsai bird circled on its tether in an eddy of air. Tighe noticed a twig springing out from the bird’s belly. He pulled the bird to the floor, secured himself, and carefully snipped the offending twig with a pair of shears from his toiletry compartment. He had requisitioned tiny scissors, the kind suitable for trimming a mustache or beard. But the cretin in the Trikon supply depot ground-side had sent him heavy-duty shears. His bonsai bird hadn’t suffered from an errant snip. Not yet, anyway.

  There was a knock on the bulkhead.

  “Just a minute,” said Tighe. He inspected the bird carefully, then nudged it back toward the ceiling.

  Kurt Jaeckle slid the folding door back. The office was not big enough for two people to fit comfortably, so he hovered in the doorway.

  “I want to apologize for my behavior in the connecting tunnel,” he said.

  “Sure you do. That’s exactly what Jeffries told me you intended.”

  “I was angry.”

  “A lot of people were angry,” said Tighe. “I would have been angry if I’d had time to think about it. Bugs on a space station, as dependent as we are on computers. Some people are crazy.”

  “That’s part of the reason I’m here. I think we need a set of ground rules for emergencies.”

  “We have ’em. I followed them.”

  “Then we should rethink them. Abruptly shutting down power to the science modules has its consequences.”

  “I know all about them,” said Tighe. “Unfortunately, the only way to cut off the computer terminals from the mainframe was to go to auxiliary power.”

  “That is entirely my point,” Jaeckle said slowly, carefully. He seemed to be planning each word as he spoke. “Your only move was to disconnect the terminals which, through no fault of your own, necessarily cut off power to the science modules. That being the case, you should have warned us.”

  “There was no time for any warnings.”

  “Dr. Ramsanjawi informed me that the download occurred at two A.M. and was discovered at eight. That’s six hours, Dan,” said Jaeckle.

  “Dr. Ramsanjawi, huh?” said Tighe. It wasn’t the first time that Jaeckle had proposed a novel way of running the station after consulting with the Indian scientist.

  “We both decided that an extra few minutes would not have been critical. It would have saved a month’s work in his case and my television broadcast.”

  “Your goddamn show,” muttered Tighe.

  Jaeckle put on a diplomatic smile. It made his gaunt, high-domed face look almost like a death’s skull. “Look, Dan. I know you were dead set against the Mars module becoming a part of the station. And I know you hate the idea of my TV broadcasts.”

  “I think that this station could accomplish much more in the way of terrestrial research if we didn’t have to coordinate our orbits for TBC.”

  “But we are accomplishing things,” said Jaeckle. “Trikon, the Mars Project. Just the fact that the first commercial industrial space station exists at all is a blessing. It is a toehold in the heavens for every man, woman, and child on Earth.”

  Tighe rubbed wearily at his eyes. On Earth, Jaeckle’s stentorian voice and skill at popularizing science commanded thousands of dollars in lecture fees and enthralled millions. On the station, he had lost none of his penchant for making speeches.

  “But it is not enough,” continued Jaeckle. “If we are to establish bases on the moon, if we are to travel to Mars, we need the backing of the people. We must beat them into a frenzy of scientific interest, the way it was in the sixties. We can’t have them asking why billions of dollars are being shot into the sky rather than spent on Earth. You and I know the reality. But they don’t. That is why the power-down was so critical.”

  “How the hell did we get from our toehold in the heavens to this morning’s incident?” asked Tighe.

  “There were millions of people tuned to their sets this morning when Carla Sue and I were explaining the importance of exercise,” said Jaeckle. “Halfway through the script, the screen cut to black. The vice-president in charge of programming has been trying to reach me like mad. I don’t know what the hell I’m going to tell him. They were caught completely unaware in New York.”

  “’Good Morning, World’ will survive,” said Tighe.

  “Sure it will. But will the Mars program? Millions of people thought the show was cut because of ineptitude.”

  “Close. It was pure stupidity,” said Tighe. “Are you now about to tell me I should have waited until your broadcast was over?”

  “Of course not. But the warning would have made a difference,” said Jaeckle, “I could have informed the studio, then put our situation into perspective for the audience. The dedicated scientists, the brave crew, the station commander faced with a critical decision. It would have been great drama
.”

  “We’ve got enough drama up here,” Tighe grumbled. “Whoever stole those files still has the damned bugged disk.”

  “Drama sells,” said Jaeckle, unperturbed. “All it would have taken was a warning and a two-minute delay of the power-down. Who knows how many millions of dollars it would have generated for the space program?”

  “You sound like a television producer.”

  “Unfortunately, it’s what I have to be. I hope you understand that.”

  Jaeckle pushed himself away from Tighe’s office and headed for the hatch. As he passed the infirmary he peeked in at Dr. Renoir with his telegenic charm on full beam. Tighe grimaced sourly. Nothing in his conversation with Kurt Jaeckle bothered Tighe as much as the sight of him talking to Lorraine Renoir.

  He waited until Jaeckle pushed himself through the hatchway before he started for the doctor’s office. Why does my weekly blood-pressure check have to come on a morning like this? Damned pressure must be high enough to pop my eyeballs.

  Dr. Renoir saw him approaching and waved an upstretched finger at him. “I’m rather busy right now, Dan,” she said. “Can we make it this afternoon? Say, two P.M.?”

  A wave of relief and gratitude washed over him. He nodded, trying to keep his emotions from showing on his face. “Fourteen hundred hours,” he said.

  Lorraine smiled at him. “Right. Fourteen hundred hours.”

  Not trusting himself to say anything more, Tighe turned back toward his office. You’ve got two hours and some to get your pressure down to where it ought to be, he told himself. A part of his mind noticed that Dr. Renoir did not seem particularly busy; there was no one in her infirmary; she was not working on her computer or on the phone.

  But he ignored the observation. She’s a doctor, he reminded himself. She can ground you for good.

  15 AUGUST 1998

  THE MARS MODULE

  The concept of using biological techniques to repair ecological damage is called bioremediation. Bioremediation was first tried in a major way in the late 1980s, when bacteria were used to help clean up crude oil spilled into the ocean by tankers.

  After the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.1 million gallons of crude oil over 368 miles of Alaskan shoreline in 1989, Exxon researchers sprayed some seventy miles of beaches around Prince William Sound with a fertilizer called Inipol that had been developed by the French petroleum company Elf Aquitaine. The aim of the $10-million experiment was to stimulate the growth of bacteria that already existed naturally in the environment and were known to consume hydrocarbons. The beaches sprayed showed dramatic improvement over areas not sprayed, often within fifteen days.

  In June 1990 the supertanker Mega Borg caught fire and released nearly four million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Microbial strains specially developed at the University of Texas to eat a wide variety of crude oils helped to clean up the spill. The microbes were engineered to die off once the oil that served as their food was consumed.

  In the aftermath of the environmentally horrendous Middle East war of 1991, genetically engineered microbes helped to digest the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil deliberately pumped into the Persian Gulf by the Iraqi army. The microbes converted millions of gallons of crude oil into relatively harmless methane and carbon dioxide.

  Researchers have suggested using genetically engineered microbes to break down a wide variety of toxic and even radioactive wastes.

  Trikon’s goal is to develop bioremediation techniques, using genetically engineered microorganisms, to help reverse the environmental damage done to our planet by generations of air, water, and soil pollution.

  —Trikon International media release

  After leaving Tighe and Lorraine in the command module, Kurt Jaeckle made his way down the station’s central tunnel until he passed through the double hatch marking the boundary between Trikon Station proper and the Mars module.

  The Mars Project was a joint effort between NASA and the European Space Agency to test humans for a planned flight to Mars. Twelve men and women had been selected to spend two full years in space. The original purpose of the project was to simulate the rigors of an actual flight to Mars. This gradually metamorphosed into a study of the subtle stressed microgravity places on the human body and the not-so-subtle conflicts that can arise when people live in close quarters for extended periods of time. Finally, it degenerated into a hodgepodge of conflicting and overlapping experiments as different factions within the two space agencies overlaid their pet projects onto the original scheme.

  The greatest conflict centered on the role of the Martians within the Trikon Station community. “Purists” contended that the Mars facility should be a self-sufficient module and the Martians completely segregated from the other people on the station. “Realists” believed that total separation was logistically impossible. Besides, they argued, interaction with outsiders would not invalidate the results because the actual Martian travelers would be able to communicate with Earth, albeit electronically.

  The philosophical argument raged for months, and in the end both sides won—and lost. The Martians were divided into two groups of six persons each. One group was allowed to interact with the general station population. They slept in the habitation modules, ate their meals in the wardroom, and spent their leisure time in the exercise and recreation area. The other group never left the Mars module and were shielded from any visitors. In the first six months of the project, no serious differences between the two groups had emerged.

  The Mars module was a shuttle external propellant tank adapted for scientific use by a technique known as the “wet workshop.” Unlike the station’s lab and hab modules, which had been completely outfitted on the ground and transported to the station on heavy-lift boosters, only the major structural elements of the eventual Mars module—flooring, workstation wells, bulkheads, internal tunnel—were built into the tank’s two internal sections. The tank was then filled with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen; these powered the Constellation’s engines as the shuttle flew into orbit. Since safety considerations required the shuttle engines to shut down before the fuel was completely expended, small amounts of these propellants remained floating weightlessly inside the tank after it achieved orbit.

  The liquid hydrogen was removed by a clever pumping device conceived by a former Apollo astronaut working for Trikon as a consultant. The liquid oxygen was simply heated by sunlight until it turned into its gaseous, breathable state.

  On subsequent shuttle flights, teams of mission specialists brought up the office facilities, compartments, galleys, and workstation equipment; they installed them in the larger of the ET’s two sections, the huge volume that had contained liquid hydrogen fuel. The former liquid oxygen volume, located at the tapered front end of the tank, was converted into an observation blister. The ET was then attached to the trailing edge of Trikon Station’s skeleton, its own internal tunnel an extension of the connecting tunnel that ran the length of the station’s main horizontal truss.

  The Martians themselves were payload specialists from several different scientific disciplines. Their workdays were devoted to Mars-related experiments. A meteorologist studied Martian weather patterns using data gathered by satellites orbiting the red planet. Two biochemists searched for signs of life in soil returned from Mars in the US-USSR robot probes landed on the Martian surface a few years earlier. A geologist examined rocks for clues to Mars’s distant past. All the while, the participants were tested, probed, and analyzed by physicians and psychologists on the ground.

  Kurt Jaeckle was the leader of the Mars Project. An internationally renowned astronomer on permanent leave from a professorship at Johns Hopkins University, he had defeated an equally famous French exobiologist in the contest for project leader. Then, through shrewd negotiating, he had arranged for the Mars module to be attached to the privately owned Trikon Station rather than to Freedom, the United States’ space station. The main reason for the switch was that Jaeckle had secretly cooke
d up a live-television contract with TBC and the Canadian Broadcasting Company.

  Jaeckle swam down the Mars module’s internal tunnel, heading for his own office. The tunnel had been a hasty design addition, its purpose to provide all station personnel with direct access to the module’s elaborate observation blister without chance encounters with the segregated Martians. The tunnel was two meters in diameter, its flat gray walls a dim contrast to the brighter Trikon connecting tunnel. Several doors along its length opened into the module’s working and living areas.

  Jaeckle entered through the first access door and directed himself across the spacious open expanse of the module’s laboratory section toward his office, located in the fore starboard corner. All of the Martians were busily at work and only one, Russell Cramer, noticed Jaeckle’s entry. Cramer stared at Jaeckle from his workstation five meters away. His jowly face was expressionless, but seemed to demand an acknowledgment. Jaeckle obliged with a wave. Cramer, without responding, returned his attention to his microscope.

  I must have a word with him, thought Jaeckle. He stopped at his office door and consulted the blister reservation list attached to the bulkhead. Carla Sue Gamble was in the observation blister now. As usual, none of the other Martians had reserved the following hour. Jaeckle wrote his name into the next slot.

  Inside his office, Jaeckle powered up his communications console and called TBC headquarters in New York City. As Mars Project head, he was exempt from Trikon’s restrictions on secured communications and had a selection of voice encryption chips at his disposal. The chips broke up the voice transmission into meaningless signals that would be reassembled by another chip at the receiving station. Eavesdropping ham-radio operators would hear nothing but Chinese violins. Jaeckle didn’t often use encryption when talking to TBC, but today the language could become dicey. He pressed a chip into its slot.

  The link was shunted from receptionist to secretary to executive secretary and finally to Jared Lewis, the vice president in charge of “Good Morning, World.”