by Ben Bova
A sudden, ear-piercing screech sent a tingle up O’Donnell’s spine. It settled into a throbbing whine that he followed to the last compartment. The passageway seemed to pulsate with rock music. The accordion door was vibrating from the sound volume.
O’Donnell braced himself against the opposite partition and pounded on Roberts’s bulkhead. But knocking was no match for the noise inside. O’Donnell finally wrenched open the accordion door. Roberts was suspended in the center of his compartment, both feet kicked up behind his ass and his bandannaed head thrown back to expose a bony Adam’s apple twitching beneath pale skin.
Roberts windmilled his right arm across the strings of an invisible guitar in rhythm with the pounding chords and wailed out the lyrics to “Acid Queen”. On each revolution, his knuckles grazed silk-screen posters of ancient rock stars bellying from the compartment’s wall.
“Excuse me, Mr. Townshend,” shouted O’Donnell. “Can I interrupt your performance for about two hours?”
Roberts brought his arm down for a final, ear-splitting chord. He writhed as if squeezing every decibel out of his imaginary guitar until the last note died away. Then he fell out of character.
“You knew who I was imitating,” he said in awed disbelief. He turned off his portable CD player before the next song could begin.
“Sure. Peter Townshend. The Who. Tommy was a classic.” O’Donnell mimed hiking the guitar out of Roberts’s hands and smashing it against the wall.
“Wow, they even trashed their instruments after every performance! Hey, who are you?”
O’Donnell introduced himself and offered his hand. He was not surprised when Roberts grasped it thumb to thumb in a handshake popular during the sixties.
“Hey, guess this one.” Roberts untied his bandanna. His hair exploded into a wavy mass of red curls. He placed the invisible guitar on the back of his neck and started to twang a psychedelic rendition of “The Star-spangled Banner.”
“Hendrix,” said O’Donnell quickly, hoping that the correct answer would not encourage another round of Name That Rock Star.
“That’s outtasight,” said Roberts. “And you’re a scientist working for Trikon? Where the hell they dig you up?”
“I’ve been around,” said O’Donnell.
“Been around long enough to have gone to Woodstock?” There was awe in his voice.
“I was exactly five years old when the Woodstock Nation had its three days in the sun.”
“Oh.” Roberts’s disappointment was palpable. “You look older.” Then he brightened. “How come you know so much about old-time rock and roll? I thought I was the only one keeping the faith alive.”
“I’m not keeping anything alive other than me.”
“Dig that,” said Roberts. “We have a real bunch of survivors up here. Anyway, it’ll be more fun working with you than with Dave Nutt. What an uptight cat. Now he was old enough to have gone to Woodstock, and he didn’t. Probably spent the weekend in the library, if I know him. Damn, I wish I could have gone. Joplin, Hendrix. All the great ones died before I was born.”
“Time marches on,” said O’Donnell, making a point of looking at his watch.
“Ain’t that a bitch. I’m a composer, y’know. Been writing like mad. This job up here is just to put the bread on the table. Once I get back to the States I’ll be the first rock composer to’ve been in orbit. I can’t miss!”
“Good for you,” said O’Donnell, without enthusiasm. Rather than prolong the discussion, he backed away from the compartment. To his amazement, Roberts took the hint.
“One thing you gotta remember about me,” Roberts said as he tamed his wild mop with a hairnet. “I’m a real traditionalist when it comes to music.”
The logistics module had been virtually picked clean of scientific-gear canisters by the time O’Donnell and Roberts entered the hatchway.
O’Donnell found one canister with his name stenciled in black secured to the wall behind a waste drum. Roberts found another adjacent to the food supplies.
The canisters were made of medium-gauge aluminum. Each one was four feet long and three feet in diameter, the maximum size that could pass through Trikon Station’s interior hatchways. Inflatable bladders within the canisters cushioned the contents during lift-off. Depending upon the nature of the equipment, a fully loaded canister on Earth could weigh up to two hundred pounds. On Trikon Station, a person could easily lift the weightless canister with the touch of a finger. But maneuvering it was another matter. Regulations required that two people guide the bulky canisters from the logistics module to the labs, to avoid damaging equipment along the narrow aisles.
O’Donnell and Roberts guided the first canister through the connecting tunnel with little problem. The young tech chattered incessantly about rock music, and O’Donnell nodded at all the pauses. At The Bakery, Roberts directed O’Donnell past the people already at their workstations to a partitioned area located in the starboard forward corner of the module. The cubicle was almost the same size as Dr. Renoir’s office, but it appeared much larger since it was totally empty.
“We called it our overflow storage room,” explained Roberts after they jockeyed the canister through its narrow door. He switched on the drafting lamp bolted to a metal runner on the ceiling. “I wondered why they made us clean it out. It’s gonna be your personal lab.”
“Not very bright in here,” said O’Donnell, seeing that the room was separated from the track of fluorescent lights running down the center of the module.
“I can rustle up a few more lamps for you.”
“Do it. Full-spectrum bulbs,” said O’Donnell.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get them.” Roberts fingered a pair of clips attached to vertical runners on the walls. “You can attach equipment to these. I’d put all your bulky stuff here.” He rapped his knuckles against the bulkhead of the module’s exterior shell. “None of this shit weighs anything, but if you accidentally bump against something bulky you could dislodge the partition.”
As they exited the compartment, O’Donnell realized that the other scientists and technicians were eyeing him from their workstations throughout The Bakery. Some were openly staring. He tried closing the door, but it did not latch properly.
“Is the canister safe in here?”
“No sweat,” said Roberts.
They floated the second canister through the connecting tunnel and into The Bakery. Again, O’Donnell felt many pairs of eyes boring into his back as he and Roberts stood the canister on end and spun it into the storage room. His lab suddenly seemed quite congested.
“You must be O’Donnell,” said a female voice, sharp as a whipcrack.
O’Donnell pushed aside the canisters and saw an unsmiling woman with a strong jawline, chiseled nose, and a salt-and-pepper crewcut.
“I’m Thora Skillen, coordinating scientist for this laboratory.” She extended her hand through the open door. It was red and blistered, as if she washed with hydrochloric acid. Her lab smock was blotched with faint yellow stains like amoebae. “Trikon certainly threw us a curve adding you. This was the only space available.”
“Tight, but I’ll manage.”
“Trikon informed me that you brought your own materials and supplies but will occasionally require use of our hardware.” Skillen pressed her palms against each of the canisters as if to divine their contents. “Remember that my people have preference.”
“You won’t even know I’m here,” said O’Donnell.
“I hope not,” Skillen said. She seemed coiled with an inner tension, almost vibrating with barely suppressed hostility. “I will cooperate with you as long as it doesn’t interfere with my group’s work. But I will not sacrifice my project for yours, whatever it is.”
She jutted out her chin, nodded in a combination of warning and farewell, and sailed back into The Bakery.
“Charming, isn’t she?” said Roberts.
“I’ve met worse,” O’Donnell said, silently adding, But I’m not sure where.
“Thora baby is the hardest of the hard-asses. When I heard she wasn’t going back Earthside this rotation, I almost decided to go back myself. Could have, too. I’ve been here six months.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Not ready yet. Got to have a lot more songs down before I hit the studios. By the way, what are you working on that you rate your own lab?”
O’Donnell ignored the question as he studied the walls, figuring how he would arrange his equipment.
“Oh, shit!” Roberts blurted.
O’Donnell turned in time to see the lid of the first canister fly open. The effect was textbook jack-in-the-box. Books, diskettes, micro-gee vials, beakers, jars, bottles, test tubes spewed out and swarmed around the room.
O’Donnell lunged past Roberts and pulled the door shut before anything could escape into The Bakery.
“Sorry,” Roberts said with a laugh. “You should see when that happens in the big lab. Sometimes we don’t find things for weeks.”
O’Donnell grunted, unamused.
“Don’t sweat the details, man. If you ever can’t find anything, check the ventilators. Everything ends up stuck to them eventually. Small stuff, anyway. You’ll get used to it. Becomes second nature after you’ve been here awhile.”
Roberts easily began picking objects out of the air. O’Donnell wasn’t as dexterous and batted away as many things as he caught.
“Hey, what’s this?” said Roberts. He waved a glassine bag containing powdery red soil.
“Dirt.”
“I know it’s dirt. Where’s it from?”
O’Donnell squinted in thought. “Georgia.”
“Georgia in the United States?”
“Yes, Georgia in the United States.”
“You could have been talking about the Georgia in Russia.” Roberts held the bag up to the light. “Never seen dirt like this before. This is redder than the soil from Mars. I know. One of my buddies has been analyzing the Mars soil. Says he found evidence of life in it, but nobody believes him. What’re you doing with this?”
“Part of my experiment.”
“Will you stop talking to me like I’m a kid,” said Roberts. “I know this is soil and I know it’s part of your experiment.”
O’Donnell looked at the scarecrow face, the brick-red hair matted beneath its net, the bony elbows and knees. He had been with Roberts barely an hour and already he wished that the young tech had been scared Earthside by the personable Ms. Skillen.
“You people are working on phase one of a very complicated project,” he said. “I’m working on phase two.”
Roberts’s face lit up with recognition.
“I get it. This soil contains toxic wastes already neutralized by microbes.”
“Right,” O’Donnell lied. “And I’m here to test whether it will be as useful as everyone expects.”
They swept the rest of the flying objects into the opened canister and closed the lid. O’Donnell inspected the door that separated his lab from The Bakery. The latch was broken beyond repair, but the outside surface had a hasp and eyelet.
“Are there any padlocks lying around?” he said.
“Not lying. Floating around, maybe.” Roberts’s grin vanished when he saw that O’Donnell did not smile. “I’m pretty friendly with some of the crew. They might have one.”
“See what you can do,” said O’Donnell. “One with a combination rather than a key.
“Oh sure, I’ll just trot down to the hardware store.”
O’Donnell frowned.
“I’m going, I’m going.”
After Roberts sailed away, O’Donnell closed the door as best he could. He popped the lock of the second canister and opened the lid slowly. Simi Bioengineering, his immediate employer and a member corporation of the North American arm of Trikon International, had rushed it to Cape Canaveral after the incident that led to the station’s power-down. It housed the most powerful and sophisticated laptop computer available. The station’s mainframe and terminals were off limits to O’Donnell. No one would have an opportunity to steal his data files.
He deflated an air bladder. Behind it were several dozen plant sprigs tightly bound in glass jars. The roots were swaddled with moist cotton pads and the leaves were carefully positioned so they would not bend or break inside the jars.
He unbound one of the jars and spread it open. The leaves were oblong and shiny. Healthy. Lethal. A chill coursed through his body and he shuddered involuntarily.
He was damned glad Roberts hadn’t seen these.
Thora Skillen’s cubbyhole office was at the opposite end of The Bakery from O’Donnell’s makeshift lab. She pushed herself past the open door and slid it shut.
Who is this O’Donnell and why is he here? she asked herself as she booted up her personal computer. He isn’t part of the ordinary Trikon staff. His work was to be kept separate from everyone else’s, she had been told pointedly by the corporate brass in New York. Why? What will he be doing? Nobody back Earthside had been able to find out a thing about him, so far.
The only possible answer frightened her. He’s been sent here to spy on me. They suspect me and they’ve sent a security agent to catch me up.
I’m all alone up here, Skillen realized. There’s no one here to help me. It’s all well and good for the sisters back Earthside to tell one another how much they hate the idea of bioengineering, how wrong and dangerous it is to tinker with genes, even the genes of microbes. They can sit back there and tell themselves how they’d blow up Trikon Station if they had the chance. But they’re not here to help me. I’m alone. It’s up to me.
Kurt Jaeckle forced his left hand down to the keyboard and saw a character appear on the screen of his word processor. Z. Goddammit, he had aimed for A. He found the backspace key, deleted the Z, and carefully moved his forefinger to A.
Typing had been tedious drudgery on Earth, but in micro-gee it was downright physically exhausting. He could not find a comfortable level for the machine and constantly fought the natural tendency of his hands to float above the keyboard. After a half hour of typing, he usually had a ribbon of sharp pain running from his shoulders to the tip of his forefingers.
Even on Earth, where gravity aided the fingers and secretaries were plentiful, Jaeckle insisted on typing his own scripts. He knew that words made dollars fall like manna and that dollars would shape the future of the Mars Project. He wanted no one fooling around with his words.
Strangely, he had found long ago that dictating into a tape recorder never produced the results he wanted. His vocabulary was richer, his phrases stronger, when he wrote them out—even though the text was meant to be spoken aloud.
As usual, Jaeckle was three scripts ahead of schedule. This one, which was devoted to the practical problems of routine medical care in micro-gee, would be the first with Lorraine Renoir as his assistant. The transition was planned. He would broadcast his next show with Carla Sue, then inform her afterwards that the network no longer needed her services. She’d bitch, but he’d have prepared a host of reasonable excuses and arguments to blunt her rage. After all, this isn’t Hollywood; it’s a space station.
He would broadcast the second show by himself. That script was a beauty. Completely devoted to the practical benefits of a manned expedition to Mars, it advanced and then neatly punctured in classical Ciceronean fashion all of the arguments against such a trip. The medical show would be the perfect segue for Lorraine Renoir’s debut. By then, Carla Sue’s rage would have run its course. He hoped so, anyway.
Now all that remained was for Lorraine to agree to his proposal. He thought of the time he saw her pedaling the stationary cycle in the ex/rec room. She wore a tank top and flight pants. Her arm muscles strained and her stubby French braid bobbed against the nape of her neck. A thin saucer of sweat pooled in the depression between her shoulder blades and threatened to break free with each stroke of her legs. She stopped, dabbed herself with a towel, then unzipped the vents of her flight pants. When sh
e resumed pumping, the vents spread like the petals of a flower to reveal round thighs and firm calves.
He imagined her speaking the words that slowly appeared on the screen. She had a breathy, throaty voice that rolled slightly over her r’s and l’s. It was much more pleasant than Carla Sue’s twang, which lately sounded like an out-of-tune banjo.
A knock on the bulkhead interrupted his reverie. Without unlooping his feet, he pushed himself within reach of the door latch. From outside, fingers curled around the edge of the accordion door and swept it open.
Russell Cramer hovered in the doorway. The zipper of his nylon shirt was pulled down to the bulge of his stomach. Pencils bristled out of the pockets of his flight pants. His jowls glistened with sweat.
“I didn’t see you in the wardroom this morning,” said Jaeckle. “Nor did you help with the scientific resupply.”
“I was in my compartment,” said Cramer. “Everyone knew.”
“Why didn’t everyone tell me when I asked for you?”
“They knew,” said Cramer. His upper lip quivered. “Did it arrive?”
“Did what arrive?”
“The new batch of Martian soil. It was supposed to be in our delivery.”
“It was,” said Jaeckle.
“Good.” Cramer reached for a clip that usually held a gaggle of keys to various storage compartments in the Mars module. The clip was empty.
“The keys are in my pocket,” said Jaeckle.
“I need them.”
“You don’t need them.”
“How else am I going to get the new soil sample?”
“You aren’t going to analyze that sample yet.”
“But that soil is from the Martian south pole! If life exists there, it could be in that sample.”
Jaeckle unlooped his feet. He was much smaller than Cramer and needed to bob up from the floor to face him eye to eye. “I don’t want you testing that new soil sample for a few days.”
“But, Professor, I was so close on the other sample! This new one could yield the results we’ve been looking for!”
“Russell, I wish you would understand. This project still has eighteen months to run. You are the principal biochemist in our group. You are the top specialist for analyzing the Martian soil samples. No one else approaches your qualifications.”
