by Ben Bova
“Not a bad idea after tonight’s performance,” said Stanley.
Ramsanjawi fiddled with a harness until Stanley was gone. Then he settled into the pilot’s seat. The controls were rudimentary—flat panel displays and two hand controllers, one a T-handle for maneuvering and the other a pistol grip for attitude control. Six months training in order to fly this contraption. Ridiculous! He could fly it right now, if the situation arose.
18 AUGUST 1998
LAUSANNE
Of all the problems facing space workers who spend months aboard a station such as Trikon, the worst is boredom. Although we designed Trikon Station with the help of a small army of ergonomists, environmental psychologists, and experienced astronauts, there was no way around the fact that a space station is a small, cramped, and terribly limited closed system.
The danger that this raised was, of course, that the space workers might resort to altering their internal environments in order to relieve the monotony. That is, they might turn to using drugs. Remember, we were dealing with very bright men and women, mostly young, mostly with personalities bordering on the aggressive side. In addition, most of them were biologists, chemists, and biochem technicians! They could invent new drugs easily; they had all the equipment and raw material that they needed.
I was very concerned about this possibility, so much so that I insisted that the medical officer of Trikon Station be equipped to test for narcotics of every type. I had Trikon’s medical staff develop procedures for testing individuals suspected of drug abuse.
Some of the medical researchers wanted to go even further. They wanted to experiment with a controlled drug program for long-duration space flights, to develop specific recreational drugs that would have no dangerous aftereffects. I absolutely forbade it. I knew that such an experiment would be both dangerous and foolish.
—From the diary of Fabio Bianco, CEO, Trikon International
Fabio Bianco peeled back the curtains on a bright August afternoon. In the distance, a sliver of Lake Geneva sparkled in the sunlight. The peaks of the Jura Mountains fell away from Mont Tendre and formed a scalloped horizon of white and gray against the brilliant blue sky.
Lausanne was so different from New York, Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, or any of the other cities Bianco visited in his capacity as CEO of Trikon International. The Swiss city’s cleanliness was seductive. Casting an eye across that sweep of water, mountains, and sky, feeling a snap in the midsummer air, one could almost believe that the world was not collapsing into filth.
Bianco let the curtains fall together, and for a moment the room went black. His tired old eyes reacted slowly these days. The onset of cataracts? Why not. He was afflicted by every other malady of old age.
The room slowly brightened. As usual, he had taken a suite: bedroom, bath, and sitting room for solitary meals, balcony, and an alcove with a desk, several electrical outlets, and a telephone jack. On one side of the desk was a laptop computer, its fuzzy white cursor blinking slowly on the blue field of an otherwise empty screen. On the other side was a portable laser printer. A rivulet of accordion paper tumbled from the printer to the thickly carpeted floor.
“You look tired, Uncle,” said Ugo. He had dragged an ottoman across from the deeply cushioned sofa and leaned with his elbows on the desk.
“Mezzo-mezz’,” said Bianco, fluttering a hand.
He was very thin, fragile, his wispy white hair almost entirely gone. Once he had been able to glare down anyone who dared stand against him, his face as haughty as any Caesar’s with its proud Roman nose and penetrating brown eyes. Now, riddled with hypertension, ulcers, a weakening heart, he felt old and used up. But the will remained. The drive to master whoever or whatever stood in his way, even if it was his own slowly failing body.
He pulled open the mouth of a black satchel resting on the floor and plunged his hand into it. Made of the finest calfskin, the satchel was a gift from an old friend who was also Bianco’s physician. It was stuffed with all manner of medical necessities: transdermal nitroglycerin pads, vitamins, anti-inflammatories, an extra pair of reading glasses, and pills to regulate blood pressure, heart rhythm, cholesterol, and water retention. He dug out his antacid and swigged it directly from the bottle. It tasted more like chalk than cherry.
“Your ulcer is bad today?”
“Always bad,” said Bianco. “Meeting with the French makes it worse.”
“I thought you were meeting with more than just the French.”
“The French, the Germans, the Swiss, the Swedes, all of the member nations of the United Europe arm of Trikon will be present,” said Bianco. “But it is from the French I expect the trouble. They have been miffed ever since the Board appointed Chakra Ramsanjawi over Jean-Pierre Delemonde as chief coordinating scientist of Trikon UE. I expect they will use the recent incident aboard Trikon Station as a pretext for pulling out.”
“Let them,” said Ugo. “If United Europe can survive without the British, Trikon UE could survive without the French.”
Bianco looked at his nephew. The young man’s shoulder muscles rippled defiantly beneath his open-necked shirt. His black hair fell like fine fur on his collar. His brown eyes gleamed in a sliver of sunlight poking through the curtains. The light projected a silhouette of Ugo’s head on the alcove wall. His profile was strong, classical Roman. Family and friends often remarked that Ugo was the image of the young Fabio. Yes, I looked like that once, Bianco thought to himself. Long ago. Long ago.
With a sigh and a shrug of his frail shoulders he told his nephew, “We need everyone, Ugo, even the goddamned French.”
“If it were up to me…” Ugo began.
The laptop suddenly beeped and its cursor began to run across the screen, leaving trails of characters in its wake.
“Momenta. Rome is calling,” said Bianco. He fumbled for his reading glasses.
The words scrolled up the screen in French, the language of Trikon UE: AN ADDRESS BY FABIO BIANCO, CEO, TRIKON INTERNATIONAL, TO THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND MEMBER CORPORATIONS OF TRIKON UNITED EUROPE. ANNUAL MEETING. 19 AUGUST 1998.
The printer started to hum. Rather than strain to read the letters on the laptop’s screen, Bianco waited for the pages rolling out of the printer. The typescript was large enough so that he did not need his glasses. Bianco was not pleased with what he read. The French syntax was strained and the verbs were bland and weak. Worse, it attempted to avoid the truth. The sole allusion to the theft of the American computer files was a single sentence on page two: AN UNFORTUNATE MISAPPLICATION OF DATA.
As soon as the transmission ended, Bianco fired off a return message. I WILL NOT STAND BEFORE THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND DISPENSE OLIVE OIL. His forefingers hammered at the keys of the laptop. I WANT THE TRUTH, LA VERITA. CAPISCE?
The Rome office of Trikon UE acknowledged his ire. Bianco ripped the pages from the printer and tore the speech into confetti.
“Speech writers think they have words for all occasions. I expect enough displeasure without inviting the Board to brand me a weakling.” He gripped his desk as pain ripped across his stomach like a bolt of forked lightning.
“Are you all right, Uncle?”
“Fine. Just some pain. I’ll be—” With a trembling hand, he reached into his satchel. He gulped antacid ravenously.
“Do you want me to call the hotel doctor?”
Bianco waved away the suggestion. He placed the bottle uncapped on his desk and reclined his chair.
“You want to rest now? I can come back at dinnertime.”
“No, Ugo. I am fine. I want you to stay. I want to ask you a question.” Bianco closed his eyes. “Remember when we would sit in the garden of your mother’s house and talk about the world in the year 2000?”
“I said there would be soccer games on the moon,” said Ugo. “With a field six times as long and six times as wide and a dome pumped full of air. What a fool I was. Playing soccer on the moon! Now we can’t even play in England.”
“You were merely being a bo
y,” said Bianco. “I was the fool, a grown man who foresaw an international consortium and a space station where the brightest minds from every nation could solve the problems created during centuries of ignorance.”
“You have come closer with your prediction than I have with mine.”
“But it is not good enough, Ugo. The space station is our perfect laboratory not because it is free of gravity but because it is free of borders and free of competition. It provides us with an endless view of the very world we are trying to save.
“But I learned too late that man is a stubborn creature. He will bring his politics and his competition with him. The people working on the project care only about dollars and lire and yen and who claims the glory.”
“They are scientists, Uncle. They should know better.”
“They know,” said Bianco. “But they forget. I don’t have the answer. Maybe I should return to research myself.”
“You can’t go to the space station with your condition.”
“My doctor treats my condition with pills and warnings to avoid spicy foods. I do not obey because spicy foods are one of the few pleasures left me, other than watching beautiful women stroll the piazzas on a summer evening.”
“There are no women strolling piazzas on Trikon Station,” said Ugo.
“Nor are there spicy foods.”
Bianco’s voice trailed off. He breathed deeply and cleared his mind with a relaxation method suggested by an old friend of his from Bangkok. The reclining chair felt feather soft, almost like a cloud. He had an impression of Ugo rising from the ottoman and drawing the curtains tightly against the lowering sun. He heard, as if from a great distance, the door of the suite clicking shut. He pictured Ugo tiptoeing on the luxurious carpeting out in the corridor.
Bianco drifted off into a dream. He stood alone in the middle of a vast plain. Lightning flickered in the distance, backlighting gray clouds that boiled into thunderheads. He held a sledgehammer with one hand, a wooden stake with the other. A voice commanded him to drive the stake into the ground. But the soil turned to concrete wherever he placed its point.
He awoke to find Ugo reading a newspaper in the sitting room. His young nephew pulled open the curtains. The mountains stood purple against the faint orange of the sunset.
“What time is it?”
“Almost nine. You were tired, Uncle.”
“Tired?” said Bianco. “Now I will be a cripple from this chair, eh?”
He shuffled into the bathroom to wash for dinner. The fluorescent bulbs raised a harsh image in the mirror. He almost laughed at himself. He certainly no longer resembled Ugo. His eyeballs were shattered with arteries, his strong nose had melted into a lumpy mass of flesh, his few remaining wisps of hair formed a tonsure on his freckled skull. Fabio Bianco, scientist-monk, Fra CEO.
They took a taxi to Ouchy and dined on a terrace overlooking Lake Geneva. The air was calm except for an occasional breeze that disturbed the reflections of shore lights on the glassy water. A jetliner’s contrail, illuminated by the moon, passed through the bowl on the Big Dipper.
After they returned to the hotel Bianco lay on the bed long into the night with the lights out and the television playing without sound. He used the remote control to spin the dial. There were so many channels, so much information. Talk shows, game shows, police shows, music shows. When he was a boy, he would lie awake on a summer night with nothing but the music of his neighbor’s mandolin floating through the open window. He would hear the mandolin telling him his future, the loves he would have, the great things he would accomplish, even the pain he would endure.
The local Swiss channel was showing a special report about the pollution that was strangling Venice. He watched mechanical harvesters scooping algae from the lagoon by the ton and still the water looked like a salad. He turned on the sound and heard that this summer was the worst ever. The smell was so terrible that the flow of tourists had dwindled to almost nothing. Swarms of flies thick as thunderclouds stopped trains when the wind shifted and blew them over Mestre. Their engineers could not see. Yet one of the harried scientists told the TV interviewer that Venice’s lagoon was so polluted with chemicals that nothing should be alive in it.
With a pained sigh Bianco switched channels again.
An all-news station from Atlanta in the United States showed a man with gray curls and a rumpled tweed hat broadcasting from a rocky coastline. The sky was thick with rain clouds. WHALE DEATHS was superimposed on the screen. Bianco raised the volume.
“Aaron Weiss reporting. Behind me is the Bay of Fundy. Beyond that misty horizon, two Canadian trawlers are steaming home pulling a sad cargo behind them—four right whales found dead and floating fifty miles west of Sable Island. This brings to thirty-four the number of right whales that have died this summer on North American shores or in coastal waters.”
The picture changed to show a blond woman wearing scuba gear and standing on the stern of a research vessel. Graphics identified her as Dr. Helga Knuttsen, marine biologist, Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
“The preliminary results of autopsies performed on two right whales found off Nauset Beach, Cape Cod, indicate that the cause of death was starvation. The ocean contains a wealth of food. Unfortunately, right whales can only eat a diet of plankton.”
Weiss’s voice-over returned to explain that not all marine biologists were convinced that starvation was the cause of death. The picture cut to a man with a white beard and a leathery face creased with deep wrinkles. He was Professor Theodore Adamski of Sea World, San Diego.
“The fact that these right whales may have died of starvation does not inexorably point to the conclusion that the main staple of their diet has disappeared. Each of these whales has been found a significant distance from summer feeding waters, which is equally consistent with a disease resulting in disorientation. Two or three dozen whale deaths sounds like a staggering number, and the general public as well as marine biologists are understandably concerned. However, the number is well within the normal range of attrition.”
The picture returned to Aaron Weiss. His expression and voice turned somber.
“This reporter has dedicated the last ten days solely to investigating the story of the dying whales. It is too early to predict when these deaths will end and whether they have any hidden implications for the two-legged mammals that make their home on dry land. This is Aaron Weiss reporting from the Bay of Fundy, Nova Scotia, Canada.”
Bianco clicked off the television and groped in the dark for his bathrobe draped over the foot of the bed. Knotting the robe around his waist, he shuffled out to the balcony. A couple crossed the street in front of the hotel, their arms around each other’s shoulders. A taxi with a sputtering engine turned a corner, leaving Lausanne completely still. Bianco cupped his hands around his eyes in order to blot out the streetlights and gazed up at the sky. The moon was long gone, and thickening clouds scudded across the stars.
He waited, waited…
And there it was! A gleaming star, rising up beyond the mountains, brighter than all the others, moving steadily, purposefully, across the sky. Trikon Station.
Bianco fought down the urge to shout to the rooftops and wake up all of Lausanne so they could see and admire. He wanted to say to them all, Look! A man-made star is passing through our sky! Is it not beautiful?
Instead he watched in silence, a satisfied smile growing on his dry old lips, as the satellite sailed majestically, silently, across the night sky. He knew that tomorrow he would find the words to soothe the French. That no longer worried him. Something else was gnawing at him.
The report from Venice and Aaron Weiss’s story of the whale deaths. The two accounts twined together in his mind, not quite touching, but so close together. So close.
At last Fabio Bianco smiled to himself. He knew that once again he had heard the mandolin.
18 AUGUST 1998
TRIKON STATION
She packed my bags last night
Preflight
Zero hour, nine A.M.
And I’m gonna be high as a kite by then,
—“Rocket Man”
Elton John
Here am I sitting in a tin can
Far above the world
Planet Earth is blue
And there’s nothing I can do.
—“Space Oddity”
David Bowie
Ashes to ashes
Funk to funky
We know Major Tom’s a junkie
Strung out in Heaven’s high,
Hitting an all-time low.
—“Ashes to Ashes”
David Bowie
Hugh O’Donnell searched The Bakery, the wardroom, the exercise area, and the rumpus room without any luck. The tech who had been assigned the task of helping him unstow his scientific gear from the logistics module was nowhere to be found. O’Donnell parked himself at the end of the connecting tunnel and took a deep breath. The tunnel looked like a tropical aquarium at feeding time. Human fish dressed in iridescent reds and blues darted against the greenish backdrop. Some shoved bullet-shaped metal canisters while others shouted instructions.
A crewman hovered just outside the logistics entry hatch. As each canister was pushed out of the module, the crewman entered data into a hand-held computer. O’Donnell flattened himself against the wall as a procession of four Martians and two canisters surged past.
“I’m looking for Stu Roberts.”
“The great songwriter?” The crewman laughed. “Check his compartment. Hab One.”
O’Donnell navigated through the currents of moving bodies and pulled himself into the relative silence of Habitation Module 1. Moving slowly down the aisle, he read the names on the black-and-white plastic tags fixed to the bulkhead next to each compartment’s door.