by Ben Bova
Dan fought back murderous fury and the terrible fear that clawed at his chest as he watched the space station begin to wobble and sway. Through the heavily tinted visor of his helmet he saw the bulbous, burnt-orange structure of the detached Mars module begin to drift away, like a rudderless ship caught by an evil tide. The broad wings of the solar panels were swaying, undulating visibly. Dan knew they would break up within minutes.
We’re all going to die, said a voice inside his head. We’re going to die and it’s my fault. All my own goddamned stupid fault.
The Mars module was about five meters starboard of the station’s leading edge and drifting slowly. Dan flew the MMU into that gap. Both hatches appeared to be properly sealed. Dan jetted around to the aft end of the module. The only way to see inside was through the observation blister—if the lid of the clamshell was retracted.
It was.
Inside the blister, a male and a female Martian clutched each other while their crimson flight suits, turned inside out but still attached to their wrists and ankles, billowed around them.
“What the hell!” Dan yelled into his helmet microphone.
“Don’t know,” said O’Donnell. “Look there.”
Beyond the Martians coupling and through the open door of the blister, Kurt Jaeckle bounced between the floor and ceiling of the module, cushioning each landing with his hands and feet. There was an unmistakable expression of glee on his face, the kind Dan expected Jaeckle would wear if he ever landed on Mars.
“This module isn’t going anywhere,” said Dan as he tapped out a tiny blast from the retrothrusters. “We’d better get inside.”
“But it’s drifting away!” O’Donnell’s voice in his earphones sounded demanding, urgent, but not panicked. That’s something, at least, Dan said to himself.
Aloud, he answered, “It’s sealed tight. It’s got no propulsion. It’ll drift, but we’ll be able to get it and reattach after we get the station straightened away.”
O’Donnell did not answer. Dan hoped his tone of command instilled more confidence than he actually felt. Maybe they could get the Martians back before the damned ET drifted too far. Maybe. It depended on what the hell was going on in the station itself.
Dan looked carefully at each of the other modules as he and O’Donnell looped toward the main airlock. Nothing else was obviously amiss. There was no voice traffic over any of the comm channels and the single life-support alarm still blared.
It seemed to take hours to get to the airlock, detach the MMU, open the hatch, and go inside. Dan looked through the tiny portholes of the airlock’s inner hatch as he started the repressurization pumps. Halfway down the connecting tunnel, Stu Roberts jerked about as if holding the end of a live wire.
“What the hell’s he doing?” Dan muttered over the clattering of the pumps.
O’Donnell nudged Dan away.
“Giving a rock concert,” he said matter-of-factly. “Does that every day.”
O’Donnell’s interpretation lent a crude logic to Roberts’s movements. The young tech windmilled his arm across the strings of an air guitar, pounded invisible drums, and ran his fingers along the keys of an imaginary piano. Two pairs of European couples, their lab uniforms disheveled and torn, popped out of ELM. They whirled and tumbled, their faces contorted in silent laughter. Hisashi Oyamo followed, bare to the waist. He pounded his beach-ball gut with his fists as he drifted near Roberts.
Dan tried calling Lorraine. Static crackled on Channel D. O’Donnell cut in on Channel C. “Green light, Dan.” The airlock pressure had equalized.
“Don’t open your helmet!” Dan snapped. “We’re keeping the suits on. I show one life-support alarm sounding. Everybody’s acting so weird, maybe there’s something in the air.”
“Like what?”
“Who the hell knows? But the suits stay on.”
Suddenly, Dan’s comm unit exploded into a synthesized cacophony of Klaxons, horns, buzzers, and bells. The airlock seemed to slide sideways and both men tumbled toward its outer hatch.
“What—?” O’Donnell gasped.
Outside the hatch’s porthole, the stars seemed to slant dizzyingly across the black sky. But Dan didn’t need a visual to know what was happening.
“The station!” he yelled. “It’s gone into a tumble!”
4 SEPTEMBER 1998
TRIKON STATION
Sometime earlier, while Dan was prebreathing pure oxygen in preparation for visiting the observatory, Chakra Ramsanjawi had sailed forth from his compartment in Hab 1 wearing an emergency breathing mask and a tank strapped to his back that held a three-hour air supply. The time was 0945 hours, and no one was in the connecting tunnel to notice him. The Martians and Trikon scientists were at workstations in their respective science modules. Freddy Aviles was still sleeping off the side effects of the previous night’s interrogation. Stanley was on duty in the command module in Tighe’s usual place.
Ramsanjawi slipped into the logistics module. From beneath his kurta, he removed a small cylinder made of rubber and plastic. With a flick of his hands, he broke the impermeable inner partition that separated the two highly reactive gases he had toiled through the night to create. The cylinder seemed to come alive in his fingers as the two gases combined with a hiss.
He spent a minute analyzing the spaghetti of wires, hoses, and ducts that comprised the veins and arteries of the life-support system. Then, using the same type of screwdriver he had provided Aaron Weiss, he quickly removed a protective collar and sliced open a duct. An alarm would sound in the command module, but that was no matter. The surprise he had dreamed up for the people of Trikon Station was so fast-acting that he doubted anyone would have time to respond.
He pushed the cylinder into the air duct, punctured its rubber seal with the blade of the screwdriver, then quickly replaced the collar over the slit.
The hatch darkened; someone had reacted quickly to the alarm. Ramsanjawi hid himself behind a wall of cylinders and watched crewman Stanley trace along the duct system in search of the problem. Within minutes the sandy-haired Aussie found the collar and inspected it carefully, rubbing his jaw and comparing the actual duct work with a binder of specs tethered to his belt. He was about to detach the collar when he suddenly began to whistle. He flung his screwdriver away. It clattered among the supply cylinders, bouncing so close to Ramsanjawi’s head that the Indian flinched.
Stanley’s whistling quickened into a snappy polka. He locked his hands at the base of his spine and moved his legs like a figure skater.
Ramsanjawi stole out of hiding. He edged past Stanley, carefully avoiding the strong, fluid movements of the crewman’s feet. Stanley did not miss a note. His eyes fell directly on Ramsanjawi without acknowledging his presence, preferring, Ramsanjawi knew, the pageant playing within his mind.
Ramsanjawi waited at the hatch, smiling behind his oxygen mask. Another minute or two and everyone would be occupied with their own personal dreams. The treasures in O’Donnell’s lab would belong to him.
Kurt Jaeckle had taken the scent wafting through his office to be lilacs. His nose trembled as if he were about to sneeze, but he pinched his nostrils and the urge passed. The scent seemed stronger, and for a moment he thought he saw a thin purple plume curling out of the air vent. He waved his hand and the plume—if it ever existed—dissipated. He drew two long draughts of air deep into his lungs. The air was sweet, so sweet.
Suddenly, Jaeckle had an idea. It was such a great idea, such a fantastic notion, that he wondered why it had not occurred to him long before. He opened the accordion door and twirled out his office.
The Martians were at their workstations, but no one seemed interested in work. They moved their hands toward their gaping mouths as if the air were made of custard.
“Friends, Romans, fellow Martians,” Jaeckle called in his most stentorian voice. “This is the day we have hoped and prayed and worked for over so many long, hard years. We are about to set out for the red planet Mars, at last. This is history! All in fa
vor, say aye!”
The response shook the entire module.
“All opposed, say no.”
The Martians fell silent, except for a couple of giggles.
“Fantastic!” Jaeckle clapped his hands. “Let’s take this sucker to Mars.”
As the Martians applauded, Jaeckle pressed the two closest males into securing the twin hatches at the junction between the module and the connecting tunnel.
“Where’s Carla Sue?” one asked with a laugh. “Yeah, I haven’t seen her,” giggled the other.
“She didn’t want to come,” said Jaeckle. “Imagine that. She said she didn’t want to come to Mars.”
“Well, fuck her, then.”
“I did,” Jaeckle said, grinning. “Early and often.” He felt he would burst with laughter.
Fabio Bianco had been arguing with Thora Skillen in The Bakery when the scent of flowers tickled his nose. The topic of the argument was O’Donnell’s lab. Skillen still insisted that the American/Canadian contingent was the rightful custodian of O’Donnell’s data and threatened to present the issue to Jonathan Eldredge as soon as communications with the ground were restored. Bianco remained adamantly opposed and privately thought it quite amusing that Skillen would invoke the very person who had arranged for O’Donnell’s presence on the station.
The scent immediately reminded Bianco of the perfume worn by a waitress who worked in a Venetian cafe he had frequented as a young man. Imagine that, a part of his mind marveled. I have not even thought about her in fifty years, yet she returns to me. No matter how hot and crowded the cafe may have been, she always seemed as clean and as fresh as dew on a morning flower. Young Fabio would drink espresso until his nerve endings sizzled just for the pleasure of gazing at her.
Bianco breathed deeply, reveling in the memory from his youth. The edges of his vision purpled, then cleared. Thora Skillen’s marble-white skin had deepened to the color of mocha. Her sharp, angular features had softened into graceful curves. Her salt-and-pepper buzz cut had sprouted into long auburn tresses sparkling with a hint of Mediterranean sunlight.
“Bella,” he said, brushing her cheeks with his knuckles. “Molta bella.”
In Skillen’s eyes, Fabio Bianco was her father, the father she feared and hated, the father she loved beyond all others. Just as she had always longed for him to do, her father embraced her lovingly. Skillen took her father’s trembling hand and worked it beneath her lab smock.
Lance Muncie had taken almost half an hour to don his EMU. He wasn’t about to let the rock music that suddenly boomed outside his compartment destroy his concentration. With great care, he took the helmet in both his hands, gazing upon it for a solemn moment as he imagined a Crusader knight would have gazed on his armored headpiece.
A flowery smell filled the compartment. Lance coughed so hard the helmet popped out of his hands. He hated flowery perfumes, and this one made him feel light-headed. But he passed it off as excitement. This was the greatest day of his life, the day he would leave his mark. Carla Sue had been punished. And now the rest of these godless scientists would meet their deserved end.
He secured the helmet and activated the suit’s air supply. The rock music faded to a muffled drumbeat. After a few breaths, his light-headedness disappeared. He felt strong as a bull, keen as a knife.
He swept aside the accordion door of his compartment.
He felt worthy.
Chakra Ramsanjawi had waited inside the logistics module until he was certain that everyone on board was under the influence of the Lethe. He heard the distant echo of the Mars module erupting into a series of cheers led by Kurt Jaeckle and saw the two male Martians closing their hatch. Guessing what Jaeckle intended, he made certain that the connecting tunnel was properly sealed from his side before he moved on. There was no sense stealing the anticoca gene if he did not survive to profit by it.
As he swam down the connecting tunnel, he heard the blare of music from Stu Roberts’s portable CD player. Roberts himself twitched like a one-man band, and a pair of Japanese techs cavorted in something that resembled a piscine mating dance. Even Oyamo, so stoic and staid during their chess matches, cut loose. He accompanied Roberts’s performance by pounding his bare belly with his fists.
Ramsanjawi stopped in ELM to grab a small satchel from his office. The scene inside the module was as raucous as in the connecting tunnel. Finally, he pulled himself into The Bakery. The module was decorated with multicolored clouds as the techs and scientists, laughing uproariously, tossed broken vials between workstations. In the center of the aisle, Fabio Bianco and Thora Skillen had found each other.
Ramsanjawi hastily removed the hinges from the lab door. He had not been able to synthesize a great quantity of Lethe from available materials. The drug’s effects would begin to wear off soon after the ventilation system purged itself and everyone breathed clean air again.
He first concentrated on the coca plants. He noted those that flourished and those that ailed and the covered culture dishes of microbe colonies that O’Donnell had employed to deliver the genetic mechanism. The ailing plants were O’Donnell’s failures; the healthy ones were possible successes. He snipped a leaf and a portion of root from each healthy plant. He labelled the samples, bound them in plastic, and placed them in his satchel. Then he turned to the flat round culture dishes. From his review of O’Donnell’s computer data, he knew that only a dozen or so of the glass dishes contained promising genetic material. Using tiny pneumatic test tubes, he began taking samples of each. Since liquids did not pour in micro-gee, the task was far more tedious than simply lopping off a leaf or snipping a section of root.
He was nearly finished collecting his samples when a Canadian scientist banged into the lab.
“We’re havin’ a party, eh?” said the scientist. His lab smock was so splashed with colored liquids it looked like a tie-dyed shirt.
Ramsanjawi waved him away. The scientist stared at him oddly, as if confused by Ramsanjawi’s breathing apparatus.
“Some mask you have there, eh?”
Instinctively, Ramsanjawi moved to protect the flexible plastic tube that looped over his shoulder and connected with the air tank on his back. He picked a greenish vial from the wall rack and ceremoniously smashed it against the Canadian’s shoulder. Most of the liquid sailed in a flurry of tiny green balls, but some was absorbed into the cotton of the smock.
“Hey, that’s cool,” said the Canadian, gaping at his newest splash of color. He snatched a yellow vial from the wall. “This one is pretty.”
It also was one of the solutions Ramsanjawi wanted to steal. The Canadian held it up to the light with one eye closed like a stupid drunk. Ramsanjawi carefully extricated the vial from the Canadian’s fingers. The Canadian did not protest. He simply started to look for another pretty color.
Ramsanjawi had a brainstorm. Rather than close up the lab and feign ignorance about its missing contents, he would induce The Bakery’s revelers to destroy it. He scooped a handful of vials from the wall and tossed them out of the lab. The Canadian, laughing, sailed after them. Ramsanjawi heaved another batch. Then he returned to the task of collecting the last of the samples.
Lorraine had been talking with Stanley when the alarm sounded, indicating a problem with the life-support system. Stanley explained that the problem was undoubtedly minor—the computers were so sensitive they sounded alarms for virtually any reason—but he sailed off to investigate. It was then, as Lorraine watched the yellow light flashing within the computer-generated diagram of the logistics module, that the aroma of flowers enveloped her like a shower of rose petals.
Suddenly, Lorraine had the maddest, most uncontrollable urge to be with Dan. Her heart swelled in her chest. Soft laughter bubbled in her throat. This was utter nonsense. She was a doctor, a medical officer on a space station. She wasn’t a schoolgirl.
Nonsense aside, she sailed to Dan’s office door. Biting her lip to keep her laughter at bay, she peeled off her hairnet and opened the col
lar of her shirt enough to reveal a hint of cleavage. Steady now, she told herself, no time to be immature.
Poised to dive into his arms, she gracefully swept open the door. The office was empty except for the bonsai bird fluttering in the sudden breeze. Of course, she remembered, he had gone to the observatory for some silly reason. But she could reach him on Channel D. D for Dan. She undipped the headset from the comm console and called to him over the radio.
“Hi, Dan. Oh, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I want you to know that I really do care about you. Maybe it’s because I can’t see you right now. Sometimes it’s easier to say things over a gadget rather than in person.”
“Lorraine,” he said.
His voice sounded so sweet, so kind. She wanted to caress him, nuzzle him, press her lips over every inch of that beloved face. Instead, she hugged the headset against her breasts. She closed her eyes and rocked her arms as his words poured directly into her heart. He was shy, he told her, and unsure of himself after his divorce. For months he had watched her from afar, wanting her but uncertain how to approach her. So he clothed his words in jargon and buried his feelings in a professional relationship. But all that had changed— he had changed. He had developed a new appreciation for her. Oh hell, he might as well say it. … He loved her.
“I love you too,” she whispered as she cuddled the headset. “I love you too.”
She had no idea how many times she repeated her words. A hundred times, maybe a thousand. She felt her body swaying back and forth, as if she were in her grandfather’s wonderful old rocking chair. She opened her eyes and saw him at the command and control center, still dressed in his space suit, like a knight in pure white armor.
She flung herself out of the office, and suddenly the module tilted drunkenly. Lorraine put out her hands to cushion her fall to the floor. Dan’s feet were anchored beneath the computer console, his gloved fingers flicking across the keyboard like a grand maestro, but he too swayed and had to grab at the edge of the console to steady himself.
