by Ben Bova
O’Donnell sighed with satisfaction. He brought the test tube back to his lab, where he placed it on a rack within a lightproof box, and removed another test tube from a different rack along the wall. The solution in this test tube was the color of beet juice.
Stu Roberts drifted into The Bakery while O’Donnell was watching the second test tube whirling in the centrifuge. Roberts’s red hair was severely tangled beneath his hair net and his eyes squinted against the powerful fluorescent that illuminated the lab. Obviously, he had just tumbled out of his sleep restraint.
O’Donnell nodded to Roberts, then returned his attention to the centrifuge. The tech continued down the aisle, fussing with different workstations as he passed. He finally stopped at the sterilizer and began loading the previous day’s dirty glassware.
As the sterilizer hissed and rumbled, Roberts watched O’Donnell bring test tube after test tube from his lab to the centrifuge. He spoke not a word to Roberts, and the technician remained silent also. The weirdo hasn’t let me inside his lab since day one, Roberts grumbled to himself. Every time I offer to help him he brushes me off. He might know sixties music. He might be able to rap about The Who, the Stones, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. But he’s just as much of an asshole as Dave Nutt, in his own way. Of course, there’s always the chance…
“Need any help?” he called.
“No, thanks,” said O’Donnell, his eyes fixed on the centrifuge.
“I mean, I could ferry that stuff back and forth for you.”
“It’s no trouble. Thanks.”
Not this time, either, thought Roberts. He smiles, but he stays miles away. Damn!
Roberts clung to the door of the sterilizer and closed his eyes. I’m nothing but a glorified dishwasher to him, he told himself. The machine’s constant vibration soothed the taut muscles of his back and neck. The serenity didn’t last long. The shrill voice of Thora Skillen knifed through The Bakery.
“Dr. O’Donnell, what are you doing at that centrifuge?”
“Spinning test tubes,” said O’Donnell.
“Did you obtain permission from me?”
“At seven A.M.? None of your people are ever here before eight.”
“I don’t care what time it is,” said Skillen. She wore her usual stained smock. A vein stood out in the middle of her forehead, continuing the ridge formed by her chin and chiseled nose. “My people may require use of this lab’s hardware at any time. That is why we have established procedures.”
“I’m on my last tube.”
“You’re damned right you are. Next time you will be allowed a block of time no longer than fifteen minutes. Your tech is to arrange it for you.”
Roberts floated toward the centrifuge.
“It’s my fault,” he said. “He told me that he wanted to use the ’fuge this morning. I was supposed to arrange it with you. I must’ve forgot.”
Skillen’s suspicious eyes darted from Roberts to O’Donnell and back again. The anger drained out of her face, as if berating a mere tech was less satisfying than a fellow scientist. O’Donnell maintained a poker face. He knew he hadn’t told Roberts of his intention to use the centrifuge. He never told Roberts anything.
“Very well, Mr. Roberts,” said Skillen. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”
She swept out of The Bakery. O’Donnell looked at Roberts. The tech smiled as if to say, You owe me one.
“Millions of you are sitting in kitchens across the United States, stirring no-cal sweetener into your instant coffee and listening to your soy sausages and cholesterol-free eggs sizzling in your microwave ovens. You watch me during breakfast as I babble incessantly about different aspects of our two-year Mars Project. You must wonder exactly how the manned exploration of such a distant world would affect you, if at all. Today, I plan to tell you.”
“Cut!” shouted the meteorology payload specialist who doubled as camera and sound man for the weekly broadcasts to “Good Morning, World.”
Kurt Jaeckle, suspended against a backdrop of full-color photographs of Mars taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, looked over the top of his reading glasses.
“The sound from the boom mike is weak,” said the cameraman.
Jaeckle floated to the elbow of the aluminum boom, loosened a large wing nut, and tapped the arm with the heel of his hand.
“I don’t want the mike in the picture,” he said. “I want nothing distracting attention from me—and Mars.”
“Don’t worry,” said the cameraman.
Jaeckle returned to his position and ran through the opening lines of his script, this time from memory. The cameraman gave him a thumbs-up. Audio and video were perfect.
Jaeckle noticed a rustling in the black curtain that covered the rumpus room’s entry hatch during broadcasts. A hand parted the curtain and Carla Sue Gamble sailed through, her blond hair floating freely like a globe of light. Jaeckle immediately resumed reciting his lines. He concentrated solely on the camera lens, but he could see Carla Sue in the background. With her slightly crouched micro-gee posture and skinny limbs wrapped in black exercise tights, she reminded him of a wingless four-legged mosquito flitting at the edge of his vision. Just as much a nuisance, too, he feared. He stopped his recitation and drew his finger across his neck.
“Take a break,” he said. The cameraman shut off the equipment and knifed through the curtained hatch.
“You don’t give me a script and now you’re rehearsing by yourself.” Carla Sue lurched forward, but stopped herself with a handhold before butting Jaeckle’s chest with her head. “Am I supposed to draw my own conclusion?”
“Now, Carla.” Jaeckle unhooked his reading glasses from behind his ears and slowly folded them into his pocket, all the while trying to remember exactly what he had told her. Two deep lines ran down the corners of her mouth, and for a moment he thought of her not as a mosquito but as a ventriloquist’s dummy. “I meant to explain everything.”
“What’s there to explain? You’re cutting me out. I understand. I just wish you had the balls to tell me.”
“Carla, you misinterpret—”
“I haven’t seen you in four days. Four nights, to be more precise. I’m no fool.”
“The final decision wasn’t made until last night,” said Jaeckle. “Jared Lewis called me this morning to tell me. A marketing survey showed that ratings would improve if I went on alone.”
“Alone?”
“Don’t take it personally, Carla. Neither of us are media personalities, thank God. We don’t need these cameras to put bread on our tables. We have Mars.”
“Alone, you said.”
“That’s right,” said Jaeckle. “I can’t fathom how they arrive at these decisions.”
Carla Sue’s dummy jaw clamped shut. The two buttonholes that were her nostrils flared.
“If you don’t need an assistant, why is Lorraine Renoir reading a script? Explain that unfathomable mystery to me, Professor Jaeckle. And don’t give me any of your guff about it being a network idea to put Miss Florence Nightingale on television.”
“She is a physician,” said Jaeckle. “The next show is devoted to the problems of administering medical treatment in micro-gee. She is the only person on board qualified to discuss the subject.”
“What else is she qualified for?”
“I resent your implication.”
“You resent me hitting the nail square on the head,” said Carla Sue. “But let me tell you something right now. I’m not one of your starry-eyed grad students who took a tumble with you for a grade. I never expected us to last. But I do expect to land on Mars someday. And if I don’t, you can be damn sure that you won’t either.”
With that, Carla Sue spiraled away and punched through the curtain.
Thora Skillen reached her sleep cubicle and slid the door tightly shut. O’Donnell worried her. None of her contacts Earthside had been able to glean a shred of information about him. He was not a security agent, that much seemed sure. He certainly acted like
a research scientist, and a damned reclusive one at that.
What is he doing here? The question pounded at her.
Her chest hurt. She knew it was psychosomatic, but the pain was real nonetheless. One of the things the Earthside medical people hoped to determine was how well she resisted infection. They had put her on antibiotics, of course. And then thrown her into this tightly confined space station where anyone with the slightest sniffle quickly spread it to one and all. It was like living through the first week of kindergarten every month; you could tell how long it had been since the shuttle’s last docking by the coughs and sneezes echoing through the station.
She was providing them with the data they sought, Thora told herself grimly. They must be very happy with that. Their experimental animal is behaving well for them.
So far, she thought. So far so good. But time is running out.
She opened the compartment where she kept the antibiotic pills. The bottle was nearly empty, she saw. I’ll have to get Lorraine to give me a refill. She’ll probably want to change the prescription, too. Antibiotics lose their effectiveness over time; your body adapts to them.
Using a long-nosed tweezers, Thora extracted two of the pills from the bottle, then turned toward the door, intending to get a cup of water at the washroom. She stopped, turned back, and took two aspirin, as well. The pain might be psychosomatic, but it hurt.
Russell Cramer paused at the access door to the Mars module’s internal tunnel. It was midafternoon and the module was abuzz with activity. Centrifuges whirred. Computer terminals chirped. The other Martians huddled in groups as they discussed findings about the meteorology and geology of the red planet. But his workstation was silent, and would remain so for another two weeks. They were all making progress but he was not.
Cramer opened the door and edged one foot outside as if testing the water of a swimming pool. He wanted someone, anyone, to see him heading for the blister, but no one paid him any mind. They were busy. They were working. He was about to spend two hours in solitary confinement.
Finally, one of the women noticed him.
“Have fun, Russell,” she called.
Cramer hauled himself into the tunnel and slammed the door.
Cramer belonged to the group with Earth-viewing privileges. In the observation blister he pressed a button on the control panel and the lower portion of the clamshell peeled back. Trikon Station was flying over the eastern Atlantic. Cloud cover was sparse and the ocean was a brilliant, iridescent blue. The sun’s reflection off the water traced a fuzzy round highlight eastward directly beneath the station. But Cramer was not interested in gazing at the spectacular scenery curving majestically beneath him. He was too angry at Kurt Jaeckle to enjoy anything.
Cramer didn’t think he was sick. He didn’t think he was crazy, Sure, he had some trouble sleeping, a few bad dreams. Nothing serious. Nothing that would have warranted discussion on Earth, let alone medical treatment. Everyone was too cautious up here.
But maybe caution hadn’t been the reason for Jaeckle’s order that he spend double time in the blister. People had warned him that Jaeckle’s polished manners concealed a snake’s cunning. Maybe he was less concerned with Cramer’s health than with the newly arrived Martian soil sample. Maybe Jaeckle was using these two-hour time blocks to analyze the samples without him. He was screwing around with Carla Sue Gamble, the backup biochemist. Maybe he’s giving the new soil sample to her!
Cramer dived out of the blister and back into the tunnel. He eased open the access door and peered into the laboratory section. His workstation was unoccupied. He closed the door and noted the time, deciding to check his workstation at fifteen-minute intervals. No one was going to discover life in that soil before him. Not Carla Sue. Not even Jaeckle himself.
The station crossed a thin band of green that was the coast of Morocco. Within minutes, the entire visible world dissolved into the burning browns and reds of the Sahara Desert Sand dunes corrugated the surface in the long shadows of late afternoon. A dust storm formed a blurry corkscrew. Station personnel agreed that the Sahara, with its animated tableaux of shifting sands, was the most spectacular sight visible from the blister. The Martians had a special affinity for the desert because it resembled so much the spacecraft photos of Mars.
But Cramer was not interested. He felt antsy as hell. He shot himself from one end of the blister to the other in a micro-gee version of pacing the floor. Two hours in the blister. One and a third orbits of the earth. Thirty-five thousand miles. Some people didn’t travel that far in their entire lives.
Cramer patted the breast pocket of his shirt. The tiny bottle felt hot to the touch, or was it his imagination? Three yellow rocks remained. One could make these two hours seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Thirty-five thousand miles in a second. Not quite the speed of light. But not bad, either.
He worked the bottle out of his pocket. It was less than an inch long and barely half that in diameter. Dark brown glass with a black plastic cap. He unscrewed the cap carefully. If the rocks jack-in-the-boxed out, they would be lost forever in the brightness of the blister.
Cramer had been stunned by Kurt Jaeckle’s refusal to release the news of the discovery of life in the Martian soil samples. He had spent a couple of days sulking in his sleep compartment and refusing to take exercise until he realized that he still held the key to his own success. He had found the microorganisms once; he could do it again.
He had thrown himself into the task, twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch at his workstation, wolfing down meals, skipping R and R in the blister. But he just could not repeat that one, slim result that had shown a trace of living cells in a sample of Martian soil. All the other soil samples were sterile, and the one glimmer of life he had found had been destroyed in the tests that showed it existed. All he had was a set of curves on a computer screen. Even that one soil sample refused to give any further positive results.
As his failures mounted he grew increasingly depressed. One night, while listening to music in Stu Roberts’s sleep compartment, he confided his troubles.
“I know all about it,” said Roberts.
“You do?”
“Sure. Everyone on the station knows you found living organisms in one of the soil samples. We’re all waiting for you to duplicate the results.”
“I can’t,” wailed Cramer. “I just can’t.”
“Sure you can.”
“I can’t, I tell you. I’ve done the experiment every way I know how. There’s nothing in that soil anymore.”
“You just need to think of things in a different way.” Roberts fished a pencil and a sheet of paper out of a compartment. He pressed the paper against the wall and drew a figure. “What’s that?”
“A hexagon,” Cramer answered.
Roberts drew another figure and asked Cramer to identify it.
“A snake,” said Cramer. “Eating its tail.”
“Remember your freshman chemistry?” Roberts asked. “The story about Kekule being stumped by the molecular structure of benzene and then dreaming about a serpent eating its tail? Then he proved benzene’s structure is hexagonal, right?”
“Yeah, but how does that relate to life on Mars?”
“You need to dream about a serpent eating its tail,” said Roberts. “So to speak, that is.”
“I don’t dream of anything,” Cramer said.
“That’s where this comes in.” Roberts wormed a small brown bottle out of his shirt pocket and let it hover in midair between them.
“What is it?”
“MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. It’s a mild stimulant and hallucinogenic. Just the thing you need to get over your experimental hurdle. It heightens self-awareness, enhances sensory perceptions, generally helps you see things in a different way.”
Cramer held the tiny bottle up to the light. Two capsules danced inside.
“Any side effects?”
“Not a one,” said Roberts. “Hell, this stuff was legal until 1985.”
“I use it when I’m stuck with my music. You know, I hit a block, can’t get the notes down right. Just one swallow and the next thing I know I’ve got half a ton of paper covered with notes. Good stuff, too. Better’n I write cold.”
Cramer licked his lips. “But it’s illegal, isn’t it? If anybody found out…”
“Hey, you don’t want it, don’t take it. I don’t give a shit either way.”
Cramer refused the capsules that first time. Roberts shrugged and changed the subject. But two sleepless nights later Cramer came back to the technician’s quarters and asked if he could “just try out one capsule.” Roberts gave him three.
With them he felt alert, brilliant, powerful. The hallucinations were mild, just as Roberts had said. An inanimate object might wiggle in the corner of his eye. Flashing circles might appear, only to vanish when he blinked. An occasional bad dream might disturb his sleep. But these were mere trifles compared to the benefits of a keen mind.
Yet despite his enhanced perceptions, the Martian soil samples remained stubbornly, stupidly barren. He knew that Jaeckle and all the others were laughing at him behind his back. He knew that Mars was holding its secrets away from him deliberately.
Cramer stared at the reddening desert as he worked saliva into his mouth. The rocks were drier than the capsules Roberts usually gave him and needed lubrication going down. He popped one well back in his throat and swallowed.
The effect wasn’t quite instantaneous. He had enough time for a second look at his workstation and Jaeckle’s office. Both were as before.
He returned to the blister and steadied himself as best he could in its exact center. He closed his eyes, folded his arms, and crossed his legs at the ankles. Then he proceeded to drift, feeling great waves of energy course through his body as the drug entered his bloodstream. Time refused to speed up, but he didn’t care. His senses grew, intertwined, then blossomed into pleasantly confounding combinations. He could hear the orange paint on the outer skin of the Mars module. He could smell the hum of the station ventilators. He could see the words of the other Martians oozing through the seam of the door like green gunk.
