by Ben Bova
“Racial epithets are not in the Trikon spirit,” O’Donnell said, working to keep his face straight. “It says so in the orientation manual.”
“Those fairy tales! And see that one over there with the yellow tent for a shirt? He’s Dr. Chakra Ramsanjawi, the former pride of Oxford.”
“He looks pretty dark for a Brit.”
“He’s the head of the European section.”
“I thought the Brits weren’t involved in Trikon,” said O’Donnell.
“They aren’t. Politics keeps them at arm’s length from the rest of United Europe, so they decided to keep their scientists out of Trikon. Personally, I think they regret it.”
“Then why is Ramsanjawi here?”
“He’s had a hard-on for the Brits ever since he was dismissed as head of the biochem department at Oxford. Sex and drug scandal. You know, the type of story that keeps the tabloids in the black. He swears he’s innocent of all charges. Trikon is his way of sticking it in the Brits’ ear.”
“Did he break into your computer files, too?”
“Not that I can prove.” With some effort, Nutt forced himself lower and covered his mouth with his free hand. “When I came here six months ago the United Europe lab was a joke. They didn’t know a microbe from a bathrobe. Then Ramsanjawi comes up here and bingo, they know everything we Americans and the Canadians took months to synthesize and more. You tell me they aren’t stealing.”
“I can’t. But, Dave, how do you know what they know?” O’Donnell smiled impishly.
“Stick it, O’Donnell, willya?” Nutt yanked his food tray out of its bin and floated off.
Good thing he’s leaving, O’Donnell thought. Guy’s like a live bomb, ready to go off any minute.
O’Donnell ate slowly and carefully. Surface tension held the food in the containers and on his utensils, although the mixed vegetables escaped if he loaded too many onto his fork. Crumbs from his bread spiraled up into the vent like a lilliputian dust devil.
The music hid most of the dinnertime chatter. The only distinct voices he could hear belonged to Freddy Aviles and Lance Muncie.
“You din’ finish, man.”
“I’ve had enough.”
“Thought you were feeling better.”
“I am.”
“So why don’ you finish?”
“I know my digestive system better’n you do, okay, Freddy? I’ve had enough.”
A wide-hipped man wearing a red flight suit emblazoned with the circle and arrow insignia of the Mars Project maneuvered through the tables. His eyelids blinked rapidly and his head bobbed like a chicken’s. He looked at everyone in the wardroom, obviously considering and rejecting them as companions for his evening meal, then sank into footloops at O’Donnell’s table. Despite his girth, his shoulders were narrow and his collarbones resembled a pair of twigs beneath the fabric of his flight suit. His brown hair was greased and plastered across his forehead for maximum coverage. Unbound by a hairnet, one strand had worked free and stood upright like an antenna. The name tag above the project insignia read: R. cramer.
“Howdy, pal,” said O’Donnell. He extended his hand. Cramer did not look up from his tray, although O’Donnell detected a grunt that might have been a greeting. O’Donnell’s hand dangled unshaken in the wash of the vent. He saved face by nipping at a bread crumb with his fingers.
Cramer went at his food like a man with palsy. No amount of surface tension could have bonded the food to his shaking fork. Crumbs and vegetables soon formed a cloud above his tray, drifting slowly upward. He tried batting an errant cube of brown mystery meat toward his mouth, and grew increasingly angry with each miss. Finally, he let it float up into the vent.
“Are these strawberries always this bad?” asked O’Donnell.
“You should have rehydrated them,” said Cramer. He swiped at another cube of meat, but succeeded only in shooting it through the doorway to the exercise room. He slammed his fork against the table. “Damn!”
O’Donnell took his tray to the nearest galley and zapped his strawberries with a jet of cold water. He considered joining Freddy and Muncie. Even they would be better company than Cramer. But when he noticed Dr. Renoir hovering close to Cramer’s ear, he glided back to his place and tried to look as if he weren’t eavesdropping. Their topic of conversation seemed important, and they both kept their voices almost too low to hear.
“—supposed to meet at sixteen hundred hours,” she was saying.
Cramer cast a wary glance at O’Donnell as he replied, “I was busy.”
“Too busy to keep our meeting?”
He turned back to the doctor, whispering urgently, “I was at a very delicate point in an experiment. I couldn’t just leave.”
“You could have arranged another time.”
“I can’t foresee what I’ll be doing every minute of the day. Jesus!”
Cramer unlooped himself and barreled toward the door, grazing the back of a Japanese tech with his foot. Startled, the Japanese flinched. Then he regained his self-control and discreetly did not react any further.
“Lover’s quarrel or professional disagreement?” O’Donnell asked the doctor.
“Either way, it wouldn’t be any of your business.” A vein in her neck pulsed rapidly.
“Touché,” said O’Donnell.
Dr. Lorraine Renoir considered her life to be a conflicting mix of opposing forces and conflicting situations. She had grown up in Quebec City, where French and English uneasily coexisted, where the ancient walled city towered over glitzy condominiums lining the St. Lawrence River, where the European elegance of the Chateau Frontenac competed with the New World efficiency of the Marriotts and Hiltons. The conflict followed her through McGill University, where she bucked the chauvinism of her male classmates and teachers to graduate summa cum laude in physics, tempered with a minor in French art. Later, in medical school, she was looked on as an oddity, a real scientist among all the younger pre-med graduates pursuing dreams of quick wealth. The clashing forces weaved through her own bilingualism and even showed themselves in her body: her thick legs and sunken cheeks on Earth, her shapely figure and full face in microgravity.
She had expected the post on Trikon Station would reconcile the opposing forces in her life. The station provided the perfect environment for a physician who had a keen interest in biophysics. This was not the mere practice of medicine. The effects of microgravity upon the human body permeated every aspect of a person’s health from postnasal drip to heart arhythmia to calcium depletion.
Even her love of fine art found expression in the space station. The Earth, as seen from the observation blister, was the most splendid work of art she had ever seen. She thrilled at the thought of Monet or Cezanne trying to catch its ever-changing glory on canvas.
But what she had found was an even more complicated mix: a multinational population with different attitudes toward health and personal hygiene, ego clashes among the leaders of the various subgroups, and a rotation schedule that seemed to push people just slightly beyond their limits. Layered over these conflicts was a slowly disappearing region called medical ethics. On Earth she would never have dreamed of discussing a patient’s problems with a third party without the patient’s consent. But on Trikon Station, the doctor-patient privilege evaporated whenever she reasonably believed that withholding the information could jeopardize the safety of others.
Reasonable belief. She had no idea what the words actually meant. Did they mean the reasonable belief of a thirty-two-year-old female physician hurtling around the world in a closed system at more than twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour at an altitude of almost five hundred kilometers? Or did they mean the cool judgment of an ethics committee meeting behind the closed doors of a Canadian Medical Association boardroom? Lorraine Renoir did not know.
And then there were the men aboard the station. Lorraine had been warned that Trikon, despite its technological sophistication, would be more like a frontier outpost than a modern research
laboratory. That did not bother her; she almost enjoyed the attention she received, although it complicated her position of trust and authority even further.
Even the famous Kurt Jaeckle was beaming his photogenic smile at her. The one man who seemed to avoid her was the station commander. The only times they spoke more than a few words to one another were when she gave him his weekly cardiovascular exam. Even then he was guarded, almost hostile. Lorraine realized that Tighe saw her as an enemy, the woman who could have him fired from his post. In Dan Tighe, all Lorraine’s contradictions and conflicts coalesced into a single whirlpool of turmoil.
It was evening according to the clock. The shuttle had returned to Earth, taking the departing rotation with it. The bulk of the station’s population was in the wardroom or the ex/rec area. Hab 1 was quiet.
Lorraine knocked on the compartment doorjamb. There was a rumble, then the accordion door peeled back. Stereo headphones covered Kurt Jaeckle’s ears and a pair of reading glasses bobbed on his nose.
“Lorraine, what a pleasant coincidence,” he said, smiling. He pulled the headphones down around his neck and folded his glasses into a pocket. The strains of a Mozart piano concerto issued thinly from the headphones.
“I’m afraid I’m not here by coincidence or for pleasant conversation,” said Lorraine. “I need to talk to you about Russell Cramer. He’s been behaving strangely.”
Jaeckle’s smile vanished. “We had best talk in here,” he said, sliding the door shut behind her. “We’ve all been out of sorts lately. That power outage two days ago on top of six months in space is not conducive to good humor.”
“His behavior goes beyond just being out of sorts. Did you know that he consulted me about a problem?”
“I didn’t,” said Jaeckle. “When was that?”
“Four weeks ago. His complaint was that he couldn’t sleep.”
“Was our regimen the reason?”
“Actually, no. He said the trouble began with a dream of the station falling from the sky. He described the dream quite vividly. The dominant images were the modules glowing red from atmospheric friction and the screams of the people inside. He said he could identify each person from their cries.”
“What action did you take?” Jaeckle asked.
“I’m hesitant to prescribe drugs unless absolutely necessary. So I suggested that he not exercise within three hours of his normal sleep time.”
“I noticed that he altered his exercise schedule,” said Jaeckle.
“It seemed to work until yesterday. He came to me with the same complaint. I’d never seen him so agitated, so I gave him a placebo and told him I wanted to see him at sixteen hundred hours today. But he never appeared. When I found him in the wardroom this evening, he said that he was unable to keep the appointment because he had been involved in an experiment.”
“I can vouch for that,” said Jaeckle. “When exactly did you say his trouble sleeping began?”
“Four weeks ago,” said Lorraine.
Jaeckle removed a clipboard thick with papers from behind a bungee cord. He released one of the two clips attached to the board and the papers spread out like a fan.
“Cramer is our chief biochemist,” he said. “He’s been working with soil samples that one of the Martian landers brought back. Four weeks ago, he obtained a result in an experiment that he swears indicates the presence of microorganisms in the Martian soil. The evidence was fleeting at best, and had completely disappeared by the time I reached his workstation. He begged and pleaded with me to issue a media release, but I refused to do so unless he could duplicate the experiment. He’s been trying ever since.”
“Trying hard enough to be frustrated by failure?” asked Lorraine.
“Wouldn’t surprise me. A day rarely goes by that he doesn’t argue with me over releasing the original results. I would dearly love to issue that media release, but I simply can’t until we are absolutely sure there is life in that soil. Cramer doesn’t understand public relations.”
“Whatever the reason, it seems to me that Mr. Cramer is showing the early signs of Orbital Dementia,” Lorraine said. “He is agitated and cranky and his failure to keep his appointment with me is definite evidence of reclusiveness.”
“Are you certain of your diagnosis?”
“One is never certain of Orbital Dementia,” said Lorraine. “In its early stages the symptoms are far from clear.”
“We wouldn’t want to make a mistake,” Jaeckle said. “I wouldn’t want a run-of-the-mill bad mood to threaten a young man’s career.”
“No,” said Lorraine. “But protocol requires me to report my concerns to the young man’s immediate superior. If I’m not satisfied with the action taken by the superior, I am required to go to the commander.”
“I appreciate that. The same protocol requires me to pass on my own report to the station commander. I will investigate Mr. Cramer’s behavior at once. You may consider it done.”
“Thank you.” Lorraine turned toward the door.
“Lorraine,” said Jaeckle. “I meant it that your visit here was a pleasant coincidence. I wanted to speak to you about something.”
She slowly turned back and steadied herself by extending a hand to the wall.
“I need an assistant for my next several television shows. I would like her to be you.”
Lorraine felt a mild shock of surprise. A pleasant shock. “But you already have an assistant.”
“I know, but the producer wants a change. Something about it being necessary for ratings. It’s all very esoteric.”
“I’m not sure I have the time.”
“I can promise you that it will not interfere with your duties. And if you would prefer, I can clear it with Dan.”
“I can speak to him myself, thanks,” said Lorraine. “Let me think about it.”
She pushed herself out of the compartment, leaving a delicate spoor of perfume in her wake.
Jaeckle waited until Lorraine was gone, then made a beeline to his office in the Mars module. She’s certainly good to look at, he thought. Nice throaty voice, too. Sexy. But how competent is she? Orbital Dementia is more of an accusation than a diagnosis. It could begin and end with Russ Cramer. Or it could infect the entire project like influenza. Or a witch hunt.
At his office, he quickly called up the project’s computerized records and paged through Russell Cramer’s personnel file. I’ve got to nip this problem quickly, Jaeckle told himself.
The Klaxons belonged to fire engines. Hugh O’Donnell lay in his bedroom with the windows open and the shades pulled back. Red emergency lights licked the ceiling as the engines passed.
He tried to push off the bed, but found himself restrained. The Klaxons whooped louder. He pushed harder. The restraints snapped. He sailed toward the open window, his fingers clawing for something to grab. He struck a solid wall. Still, the Klaxons whooped. He rubbed his forehead, stared at the unfastened straps of his sleep restraint.
“The first night,” he groaned. “Shit.”
Wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, he looped his glasses around his ears and dove out of his compartment. People swarmed in the aisle of Hab 2. Muncie. Freddy. Techs and scientists from the shuttle trip. Most of them in rumpled flight suits; a few in pajamas or skivvies. O’Donnell fell in behind them. Like a lemming, he thought, a goddamn lemming looking for a cliff.
They curved out of Hab 2 and flew down the connecting tunnel, arms pumping, feet kicking, everyone keeping pace. Chakra Ramsanjawi popped out of Hab 1 and joined the rush, his kurta flapping like a flag. The group bottlenecked at CERV Port 1. There were grunts, shouts, complaints, shoulders banged and knees skinned. Crewman Stanley, flattened against the tunnel wall and holding a stopwatch, yelled for everyone to hurry.
Eventually, they worked through the port and into the chamber beyond. O’Donnell found the last unoccupied harness and stretched the straps across his chest. Stanley strapped himself into the chair facing a tiny instrument panel.
“Thi
s is CERV One, officially known as crew emergency reentry vehicle one, affectionately known as a lifeboat,” said Stanley, with just a trace of the outback in his voice. He had awkwardly turned himself around so that he could see the fifteen panting souls pressed shoulder to shoulder along the padded walls. One of the women was clutching a flimsy robe to her hunched-over body. A newcomer, O’Donnell recognized her from the flight up. This sure discourages you from sleeping in the nude, he told himself wistfully.
Stanley ignored the blonde’s dishabille. “You’ll notice that it is not very comfortable, not elaborately instrumented, and allows almost zero visibility. It isn’t designed for sightseeing jaunts. It’s designed to take sixteen people to Earth in case of an emergency.
“There are four CERVs docked at all times. Another one is across the tunnel, two more are at the far end of the tunnel. You are all designated for CERV One. In the event of an evacuation order, you come here from wherever you are. Understand?”
There were murmurs of assent. Ramsanjawi snorted. His hands worked at the harness, but the buckles kept bouncing away from each other.
“Problems, Dr. Ramsanjawi?” asked Stanley.
“This damnable buckle is defective.”
“None of them ever seem to work for you,” Stanley said.
O’Donnell, strapped into the harness next to Ramsanjawi, helped snap the buckle into place, his nostrils twitching at the cloying perfume that overlaid a more pungent body odor. Ramsanjawi scowled.
“This drill took forty seconds,” said Stanley. “Excluding Dr. Ramsanjawi’s continuing tribulations. Not bad, but there is room for improvement.”
“When do we learn to fly it?” asked a tech.
“You don’t. All you need to know is how to get into it, and fast. As for flying, each crewman is a certified CERV pilot. The training takes six months. All right—that’s it until next time.”
One by one, the people unharnessed themselves and filed out until only Ramsanjawi remained.
“May I have permission to linger and familiarize myself with these buckles?”