by Ben Bova
“I’ve tested the original sample every way I know how,” Cramer wailed. “What else is there to do?”
“This isn’t a race, Russell. The Mars Project is not designed to determine who will make the greatest scientific discovery. It is a test of endurance and mental toughness. Right now, you are failing.”
The words seemed to sting Cramer physically. His head snapped back.
“You’ve been talking to Dr. Renoir,” he said.
“She told me you consulted her about a problem,” said Jaeckle.
“That bitch!”
“Russell—”
“She didn’t tell me she was going to you. Goddamn her!”
“Now you wait one second, Mr. Cramer,” boomed Jaeckle. “Dr. Renoir followed proper procedures in informing me about your medical complaint. And those same procedures require me to report to Commander Tighe if I feel your situation warrants it. So you had better remember who you are talking to. Okay?”
Cramer nodded meekly, but his mouth was still set in anger.
“Okay,” said Jaeckle. “Let’s start from the beginning. Dr. Renoir told me you are having trouble sleeping.”
“Had trouble,” said Cramer. “Not anymore. Hell, I slept all morning. That’s why I was in my compartment.”
“Glad to hear that,” said Jaeckle. “But I’ve come across something else. You haven’t been taking the prescribed amount of time in the blister. Any reason for that?”
“I couldn’t afford the time away from my work.”
“I thought as much. Look, Russell, a good number of very intelligent people put a lot of thought into the Mars Project. Some of their ideas are damned good and some may be damned bad. But good or bad we’re up here to test them so that when there is an actual manned flight to Mars—and I hope you and I are both on it—we know every inch of the psychological and physiological territory. Two hours per week in the observation blister may sound like an inefficient use of time, but it is very necessary. The records show that you haven’t been in the blister in four weeks. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t notice; that Dr. Renoir, an outsider, had to tell me there was something wrong with one of my people, my hand-picked people. I am ordering you to double up your sessions.”
“Four hours a week! Professor Jaeckle!”
“The new soil sample will remain locked away until your blister time is brought current.”
“That isn’t fair,” whined Cramer.
“It is completely fair. And it’s damned preferable to you being sent Earthside on Constellation next time those Trikon clowns rotate.” Jaeckle removed a folded sheet of paper from behind a bungee cord and handed it to Cramer. “That is your blister schedule. I want each session verified by a different member of the group.”
21 AUGUST 1998
TRIKON STATION
In planning Trikon Station, much thought was devoted to whether the station should be constructed for a micro-gee environment or an artificial gravity environment. Artificial gravity could be induced by spinning the station around its center of mass. The resulting centrifugal force would create an artificial gravity gradient that would increase as one moved farther from the center.
Planners, however, opted for a micro-gee, or virtually weightless, environment in order to allow for the greatest adaptation for future use of the station’s facilities. The term weightlessness is used to describe the orbital condition where all objects tend to float. Strictly speaking, there is only one point or line of reference in any sizable orbiting structure that allows true weightlessness. That point or line is along the structure’s center of mass.
On Trikon Station, you will not be able to detect the subtle gradations within the micro-gee environment without highly sensitive accelerometers. However, for materials science and manufacturing, the minuscule differences can be crucial. Any experiment or process that requires very low gravity (on the order of one millionth of a g) can be ruined if the facility is displaced too far from the center of mass.
At the present time, Trikon Station is not devoted to crystal or pharmaceutical production or experimentation. Attempting such projects in the future will undoubtedly require a reconfiguring of the laboratory modules in order to obtain proper micro-gee management.
—from The Trikon Space Station Orientation Manual
Dan Tighe lingered in the wardroom long after the end of the dinner hour. In his hand was a Mackintosh apple. Trikon dieticians routinely included seasonal fruits in the regular ninety-day food supplies. Fresh fruit was a luxury in orbit, and station personnel devoured it quickly. The Mackintosh was the first sign that summer was ending in North America.
The wardroom ceilings automatically dimmed with the pastoral sunset depicted on the viewscreens along the galley wall. Six identical sunsets, side by side. All six combined couldn’t compare to being outdoors and watching the real thing, Dan thought.
He took a bite of the apple, slurping in the tart juices that oozed beneath the broken skin. Hisashi Oyamo and Chakra Ramsanjawi floated lazily through the wardroom on the way to their nightly chess match in the ex/rec area. Ramsanjawi threatened Oyamo with a new gambit he had devised on ELM’s computer terminal. Oyamo laughed derisively. Neither paid Dan any attention.
Dan nibbled the apple down to the core with a minimum of juice and pulp escaping to the vents. Presently, the person he had been waiting for appeared. Lorraine Renoir mixed herself a squeeze bottle of coffee at the galley designated for after-hours snacks. She noticed Dan and floated in his direction.
“Eating all the fresh fruit, I see,” she said.
“My procedure for preventing scurvy.”
“Bad choice. Citrus fruits prevent scurvy.”
“What do you expect from an old Air Force man?” he asked.
“Not much,” said Lorraine, with a smile.
Her eyes searched him in a silence that lengthened past lighthearted banter. Dan drove his teeth into the apple’s core, liberating a seed that bobbed against the roof of his mouth. Extricating the seed with his finger would be in poor taste, so he swallowed it.
“Tom Henderson tells me we have a health risk on board.”
“Who might that be?” said Lorraine.
“New Trikon scientist named Hugh O’Donnell.”
“What makes you think he’s a health risk?”
Dan made a smile for her. “His standing orders to report to you every day.”
Lorraine shot a quick burst of coffee into her mouth. She had sought out Dan to discuss Kurt Jaeckle’s offer. But now she felt the same resentment that rose like bile in her throat whenever someone attempted to compromise her position as medical officer. The Russell Cramer issue was murky; the Hugh O’Donnell issue was clear. She might disapprove of his former drug use and dislike his irreverent altitude, but she had an ethical duty to keep his medical history in strictest confidence. No matter how much Dan smiled or crinkled the corners of his sky-blue eyes, O’Donnell’s past was none of his business. At least not at this stage.
“You have standing orders to report to me every week,” she said. “Does that make you a health risk?”
His smile vanished. “Only to myself,” he muttered.
Without realizing it she leaned toward him, put her hand on his sleeve. “Oh Dan, your blood pressure’s all right up here. Your hypertension is more an emotional problem than a physical one.”
“Yeah, sure. And what happens if it goes up again?”
“It won’t. Not in micro-gee.”
“But if it does?”
She fixed him with her dark, serious brown eyes. “It won’t. Trust me.”
If I can’t trust my own heart, Dan thought, how can I trust you? Or anybody else?
Lorraine seemed to realize she was clutching his arm. She released her hold and said, “At any rate, Hugh O’Donnell is not what you would consider a health risk.”
Feeling glad that she had switched the subject back to its original theme, he replied, “Tom Henderson sent me O’Donnell’s bio, and I was a
little confused.”
“What’s confusing about his bio?”
“Nothing, so far as it goes,” said Dan. “Except it doesn’t go very far: He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1984, then he popped up working for Simi Bioengineering, a member of Trikon NA, in 1996. Nothing in between. Since he reports to you every day, it makes sense that you would know about his activities during those twelve years.”
“I’ve seen him exactly five times, including the day he arrived. We haven’t delved into his distant past.”
“Will you tell me if you discover anything pertinent?”
“Pertinent to what?”
“The safety of this station.”
“Do you see him as a safety risk?”
“I don’t have overwhelming confidence in Trikon’s selection of personnel.”
Lorraine felt her brows knitting, felt the simmering anger that always came over her when someone tried to invade her professional territory. And she felt confusion, too. She did not want to be angry with Dan. Yet she was.
“Do you see him as a safety risk?” she repeated stiffly.
“Not yet.”
“Neither do I,” she said. “If and when I do, I will discuss the problem with his immediate supervisor and with you. But since I don’t perceive him as a safety risk, I have an ethical obligation to honor his confidences.”
“Thank you for your cooperation,” Dan said icily. He pushed away from the table and sailed toward the wardroom hatch, pausing only to slam dunk the apple core into a waste receptacle.
Lorraine took another sip of coffee, but a constriction in her throat prevented her from swallowing. She forced down the coffee and realized that her hands were shaking.
“Dammit!” she whispered to herself.
She sailed to the hatch. He was at the far end of the connecting tunnel, swimming swiftly with an occasional stroke against one of the side walls.
“Dammit,” she repeated.
Games came easily to Chakra Ramsanjawi. During his boyhood years in England, he had mastered physical games like squash, tennis, and cricket. He had even tried rugby, although his early years of malnutrition prevented him from developing the sheer body strength necessary to survive the violent scrums.
As he developed into manhood and the sedentary career that rusted his physical abilities, he turned his focus to mental games—especially those that required unorthodox modes of thought. Chess was his passion; he spent long hours huddled over a board in a dimly lit reading room of the London men’s club he had joined along with Sir Derek.
On Trikon Station surprisingly few people played chess. Stu Roberts had challenged him to a game after boasting about having been dormitory champ in college. Ramsanjawi concluded that it must have been a dormitory full of cretins. Roberts’s mind was too scattered, too full of frivolous songs to assemble the requisite concentration. He quickly knuckled under to Ramsanjawi’s opening gambit, threw up his arms in mock despair, and never played again. Oyamo was the only worthy opponent on the station, and even the Japanese scientist was hardly fitting competition, Ramsanjawi thought.
As he floated through the wardroom, Ramsanjawi noticed Dan Tighe eating an apple by himself at one of the tables. It was not unlike the American station commander to eat in solitude, but Ramsanjawi sensed a special purpose in Tighe’s presence. In the ex/rec room Ramsanjawi positioned himself so that he could watch the commander through the doorway.
Oyamo settled opposite and began to set up the game. The magnetized figures had been designed with space-age motifs. The pawns wore EMU space suits. The knights were sleek aerospace planes. The rooks were fanciful third-generation space stations.
Ramsanjawi noticed Lorraine Renoir join Tighe at his table. He could not hear what they were saying, but it was obvious they were annoyed with each other.
Oyamo attacked with his knights and bishops. Ramsanjawi was so intent on the brewing argument that he failed to pay attention to the game. Oyamo’s opening moves had him on the run.
A surge of adrenaline swept away Ramsanjawi’s interest in the wardroom encounter. He moved swiftly to the attack, capturing one of Oyamo’s bishops, both of his knights, and putting the space queen in jeopardy. Many an Englishman’s competitive fire had been stoked on the playing fields of Eton. Ramsanjawi’s had been fanned by the youthful Derek Brock-Smythe.
They had been an odd pair; Derek porcelain white and exquisitely tiny, Chakra dark and lithe despite a belly distended from years of poor diet. Derek’s tongue was sharp and he was in constant nervous motion. Chakra was shy, his movements languorous, almost lazy. Derek resented the filthy interloper and only grudgingly obeyed his parents’ commands to be civil to his Indian adopted brother. Cagily, he resorted to competition in order to make Chakra feel unwelcome. But Derek’s problem was that he was not very good at sports. He challenged Chakra at tennis, squash, and croquet, and Chakra always won. He even challenged Chakra to a footrace, but his mincing gait was no match for Chakra’s nimble strides.
As one unusually warm summer drew to a close, Derek challenged Chakra to golf, a game neither supposedly ever had played, at a course outside at Bath. During the round, it became apparent to Chakra that he had been duped. Derek had secretly played the game all summer and had received instruction from a battery of professionals.
Chakra did not know golf, but he knew physics. He hung in the match long enough for the increasingly nervous Derek to self-destruct, as he always did in their competitions. Chakra won the last hole, and with it the match. He could still see Derek, stomping furiously next to the flagstick in the orange light of dusk and shouting, “You may have beaten me. But you’ll never be an aristocrat. You’ll never be a true Englishman. Never! Never! Never!”
Ramsanjawi deftly removed Oyamo’s space queen from the board and bore down on the king. The Japanese amused him, trying so hard to look inscrutable, impassive. Yet every time Ramsanjawi leaned forward across the board, Oyamo leaned back. As if an invisible force kept them apart by a rigid full meter. The Japanese are trained to remain that distance away, Ramsanjawi reflected. It is a cultural trait, quite unconscious. Like their fanatical insistence on cleanliness and bathing.
Oyamo allowed Ramsanjawi to pursue his king for eleven moves before finally placing himself in checkmate. It pleased this would-be Englishman to win at chess. It loosened his braggart’s tongue.
As they set up for another game Oyamo deftly moved the topic of their conversation to their work. He knew that progress among the Europeans was painfully slow, and for some reason Ramsanjawi did not seem worried by it. The Americans would slow down, too, now that Nutt had left the station. He had been the only one among them with any flash of inspiration, any drive at all.
Oyamo grunted and nodded and let Ramsanjawi talk away in his strange mixture of Oxford and Delhi. The bloated Indian thinks we are playing chess. Oyamo knew better.
23 AUGUST 1998
TRIKON STATION
LAST TESTAMENT OF THORA SKILLEN
It seems strange to be writing to a dead person, Melissa, but you were always the only one I could confide in. Soon I will be joining you, but before I do I need to tell you how much I depended on you, how much I miss you, how much I love you.
You always thought I was the strong one, I know. But without you I would be nothing. I protected you against Father, true; that was easy to do. I hadn’t the real strength I needed to protect myself.
When I watched you dying, week after week, month after month, I realized that my whole life had been a lie. At first I felt guilty that it was you who was dying, the good one, while I was being allowed to live. But less than two weeks after we buried you, they told me I had cystic fibrosis, too. A bad gene, they said. What irony! A molecular geneticist with a bad gene.
It was at that moment that I realized how much of a lie I had been living. My so-called brilliant career has been based on using their antidiscrimination rules against them. They couldn’t refuse to hire me, they couldn’t refuse to promo
te me. That would be discrimination against women, against lesbians, against the diseased. That’s how I got here to Trikon Station over the heads of better scientists.
Of course, they saw a chance to use me as a guinea pig in this weightless environment. They got something out of me, after all. So be it.
I belong to an organization of sisters now. Not sisters in the same sense we are, so close that not even death can entirely separate us. But my new sisters care for me, and I for them. They have helped me to advance through the labyrinth of male-dominated corporate organizations, helped me to get to Trikon Station.
The work here is the most advanced genetic engineering yet attempted. Not satisfied with having already ruined the Earth, they want to defile outer space and make more genetically altered microbes that will cause more problems for the world. My task is to keep that from happening, to make this research so painfully slow and expensive that they will eventually abandon it.
But another idea keeps running through my mind. How delicious it would be if everyone here died of some toxic microbe that they themselves have concocted! That will show the world how wrong it is to meddle with life. That will put an end to their constant interference with nature.
Do I have the skill to pull it off? I have the nerve—I think. When you know you’re going to die anyway, what difference does it make?
Whatever happens, I will be with you soon. Our loneliness will end forever.
In the darkness of his compartment, Dan Tighe unhitched himself from his sleep restraint, floating out like a dolphin leaving the womb. He flexed his shoulders and straightened his knees, savoring the welcome sensation of morning in his muscles and bones. Rather than switch on the light, he groped along the array of storage compartments for his toiletry kit and a fresh towel. Then he carefully pulled back the accordion door, still wearing the wrinkled, faded coveralls he had slept in.
