by Ben Bova
“Is that why you wanted to see me?”
Bianco nodded.
“No need to be so formal, Professor. I’m at your disposal.”
The meeting took place in the area outside Dan’s office and included the three coordinating scientists, Bianco, and Kurt Jaeckle. There was some discussion among the scientists about whether Jaeckle should be allowed to participate since he technically was not a Trikon employee. Bianco pointed out that Jaeckle’s presence could be helpful because he had been on the station longer than any of the other scientists. So Jaeckle remained.
As the meeting was about to begin, Freddy Aviles poked out of the utilities section. Dan motioned for him to stick around. Thora Skillen was the first to speak.
“We have requests and recommendations regarding this newest development.” She had been the most strident in her dislike of O’Donnell, and she fairly quivered as she fought to contain her I-told-you-so grin. “We had to rearrange The Bakery to accommodate O’Donnell’s lab. And as you know, space is at a premium.”
“His lab is not to be disturbed in any way until the investigators arrive on Constellation.” Dan nodded toward Freddy. “My crew will enforce that order. Anyone violating it will be sent down on Constellation. I don’t care who it is.”
Dan looked to Bianco for support. Bianco picked up on the cue and nodded.
“And after that, I assume O’Donnell’s lab may be dismantled,” said Skillen.
“Lab space is an issue for Trikon, not me,” Dan replied.
Hisashi Oyamo raised his hand. “What about O’Donnell’s data?”
“The data would be ours,” said Skillen.
“With all due respect, I disagree,” said Oyamo. “First, O’Donnell has been treated as an outcast the entire time he has been on Trikon Station. Second, this project is a cooperative effort, which indicates that whatever data he has obtained should be shared.”
Everyone’s eyes instinctively turned toward Bianco.
“I am not sure who would be entitled to O’Donnell’s files,” said the old scientist. “It should be subject to prior review.”
“Do we hear you correctly?” asked Oyamo, plainly astonished. “Fabio Bianco, the champion of international cooperation, siding with the Americans?”
“I have not sided with anyone,” Bianco said. “I simply expressed doubts pending a further determination.”
Oyamo turned toward Chakra Ramsanjawi. The Indian had been completely silent since the meeting began. His kurta was belted and his clasped hands rose and fell with each breath that passed through his nostrils.
“What do you think?” asked Oyamo.
Ramsanjawi looked for a long moment at each of his Trikon colleagues. He deliberately ignored Jaeckle, Dan, and Freddy.
“I defer to the wisdom of Professor Bianco,” he finally said.
Skillen and Oyamo started to protest, but Dan cut them off.
“Is there anything else that concerns me or the crew?” he said.
“There is,” said Jaeckle. “What precautions have you taken to protect us from O’Donnell?”
“He is bound and tethered to the aft bulkhead of the rumpus room. That’s where he’ll stay. He also has a full-time guard.”
“You had Russell Cramer bound and tethered and guarded,” said Jaeckle. “And you saw fit to have him drugged, too. And he hadn’t even killed anyone.”
“Different situations,” said Dan. “At the time, we thought Cramer was suffering from Orbital Dementia, and the medical officer sedated him to prevent any injury to himself and others. O’Donnell ingested a huge amount of fentanyl. Lorraine believes sedation at this point could be harmful.”
“What do you mean that you thought at the time Russell Cramer was suffering from Orbital Dementia? Was there another cause for his behavior?”
“I meant exactly what I said.”
“You mean you don’t think so now?” Jaeckle pressed.
“What I think and why I think it is no concern of yours.”
“Russell Cramer is one of my people.”
“Russell Cramer is no longer aboard this station, which makes him completely irrelevant to this discussion,” said Dan. He pulled loose from his foot restraints and glided toward the open doorway of his office. “Any other requests or suggestions?”
No one said a word. The only sound was Jaeckle snorting angrily at having been rebuffed.
“Good. I have work to do.” Dan pulled himself through the doorway and slid the door shut. He was pissed off himself. A few moments later, as the voices of the scientists receded toward the tunnel, he thought about his reference to Lorraine. In connection with Russell Cramer, she was “the medical officer”; now she was just Lorraine. He wondered what the psych-types on Earth would think about that.
Activities in the Mars module had returned almost to normal. Cautious, fearful talk about the murder of Aaron Weiss soon enough gave way to more animated discussions of Mars-related experiments. Kurt Jaeckle, however, felt anything but normal as his mind circled endlessly within the narrow confines of his office. Unlike his colleagues, neither Mars nor Aaron Weiss was uppermost in his mind. His main concern was Carla Sue Gamble.
Throughout his entire life, Jaeckle always had been careful in his dealings with women. His watchword was power. Never allow a woman to have power over you. Be charming and gallant, witty and intelligent. But never reveal the part of yourself that is most important to you. Knowledge is power, and what every woman wants is power over men.
Now Carla Sue had the power. She had disguised her all-consuming jealousy as a desire to travel to Mars, but the fact remained that no one wanted—no one deserved—to stand on the surface of the red planet as much as he. And now, in this empire that bore the imprint of his hand, in this first way station on his lifetime journey to Mars, he was being victimized by the most primal of human instincts.
The communications blackout might actually be beneficial, he thought as he cracked his accordion door for a peek at the module. He had time to reason with Carla Sue before she could set any foolish plan in motion.
Jaeckle closed the door and booted up his computer. Carla Sue had been working on a long-term project of trying to cultivate terrestrial bacteria in samples of Martian soil returned by the unmanned space probes. The purpose was to determine if earthly life-forms could survive under the subzero temperatures and desert-dry conditions on Mars. If they could, it would be important evidence that native life might exist in those frozen red sands. It would also be a warning that astronauts from Earth could contaminate the planet’s soil with their own microbes.
Her progress seemed to vary in direct proportion to his interest in her. It had lagged seriously during his ill-fated affair with Lorraine Renoir.
Jaeckle summoned Carla Sue’s project files to his computer screen and hastily reviewed her work. A thrill coursed through his body. The microbe-growing project was completely stalled. He quickly tapped out a message for Carla Sue to report to his office immediately. She did not acknowledge, but two minutes later there was a sharp rap on the doorjamb.
Carla Sue had her hair pulled back and knotted, which made her face resemble a beachball with a face painted on it. It was not a happy face as she eyed Jaeckle with her arms folded in front of the hint of breasts that puffed out her uniform shirt.
“I think we have a problem,” said Jaeckle. “I’ve been reviewing your microbe contamination project. Your work has been inadequate.”
“In what way?” said Carla Sue. “I surely haven’t conclusively proved that bacteria can grow under Martian conditions. But I didn’t expect to at this point. You didn’t expect it, either.”
Jaeckle fought the impulse to wince as Carla Sue spat an almost exact quote back in his face. He immediately reversed field.
“That isn’t the point,” he said. “You haven’t logged any tangible results in the past several days.”
“The hell I haven’t, Professor Jaeckle.”
“The computer doesn’t lie,” s
aid Jaeckle, directing her attention to the screen with an arrogant wave of his hand.
Carla Sue squinted at the data display. “That’s all wrong.”
Jaeckle laughed. Without asking permission, Carla Sue brushed past him and quickly typed in a set of commands. The screen changed several times, showing page after page of fresh data.
“You obviously didn’t look at my work very closely, did you, Kurt?” she said. “I guess even my scientific work is yesterday’s news in your book.”
Jaeckle’s embarrassment blossomed into raw anger. He envisioned his face on supermarket tabloids, the brutality and depravity of his private life at once trumpeted and trivialized along with stories of UFOs, alien kidnappings, and Bigfoot. He grabbed her by the shirt just above the bump of her breasts.
“Listen to me, goddammit!” he hissed.
Carla Sue, six inches taller, managed to slip a foot into an anchoring loop. She brought her hands up between Jaeckle’s arms and, with a snap of her wrists, broke his grip. He sailed backward into the rear partition of the office.
They stared at each other—Jaeckle with the horror of realizing he had just lost his composure, Carla Sue with a measure of sad understanding, even pity. She opened the door and slipped out of the office.
Jaeckle did not pursue her. There was no sense in losing his dignity in front of the rest of the Martians. He waited until he knew she would be at her workstation, then keyed an urgent, heartfelt apology into his computer. The stress of the mission was beginning to take its toll, he stated. He was only human.
The more he typed the better he felt. Grabbing Carla Sue was not the end of his world. It was a minor faux pas, something he certainly could repair with politeness, a few well-chosen words, an exaggerated respect for her scientific abilities.
He almost convinced himself.
Fifteen meters away, Carla Sue saw the apology gushing across her screen. She had realized when she embarked on her gambit that her position among the Martians would be changed forever. But she was surprised that Jaeckle had overreacted so quickly.
She wiped Jaeckle’s words from the monitor and stared at her keyboard, wondering whether she should respond.
You’ve already rolled the dice, Carla Sue, she said to herself. You’re in this for the duration.
Her fingers moved across the keys: YOU HAVE JUST PROVEN LAVERNE NELSON’S ALLEGATIONS.
Satisfied, she transmitted the words to Jaeckle.
Now I need to get me some protection, she thought.
O’Donnell did not even attempt to speak during the first few hours of captivity in the rumpus room. His body seemed to be processing the last remnants of the fentanyl in spasms. At different intervals his limbs went numb, his vision blurred, and his whole body shuddered.
In between these episodes, he tried to piece together what had happened. The last thing he remembered was brushing his teeth. The toothpaste had tasted funny, and as an ex-coke addict he knew that the gums were efficient at absorbing drugs into the bloodstream. But the method was less important than the motive. Who would want him drugged? Did that same person want Aaron Weiss dead? And why?
By the time O’Donnell felt well enough to speak, Lance Muncie was on guard duty. Lance did not come very close, preferring to hover near the variable-gravity centrifuge. Although nothing seemed to occupy him other than his thoughts, he pointedly refused to meet O’Donnell’s eyes. Still, O’Donnell decided to venture a question. “What happened, Lance?”
“I’m not supposed to talk to you.”
“Who told you?”
“Commander Tighe. It’s his orders.” Lance pulled himself to the other side of the centrifuge.
“You mean you people are going to keep me tied up here and no one’s going to tell me what’s going on?”
“You already know.”
“The hell I do.”
“I can’t talk to you.”
“Then listen to me. Dan thinks I killed Weiss. Now why would I do a thing like that?”
Lance did not answer. He positioned himself on the carpeted surface of the jogging track and began to run. He moved slowly at first with bent legs and a stooped torso.
“You know me, Lance,” continued O’Donnell. “We did the Cape together. We bounced around in the Vomit Comet together. We flew up here together. Do I look like a person who’d kill someone?”
Lance’s strides grew longer and more fluid. His posture straightened as he gained speed.
“Just shake your head, Lance. If you can’t say I didn’t do it, at least let me know you hear me.”
But Lance ran on. His thundering feet created such a racket that O’Donnell gave up trying to prod him into conversation. Lance eventually slackened his pace. He hunched forward and bumped the heels of his hands against the running surface to dampen his momentum. As Lance drifted in a long lazy circle around the inside of the track, O’Donnell noticed Carla Sue hovering in the tunnel. Lance saw her at the same time.
“This module is off limits,” he snapped.
But Carla Sue squirmed her sleek body through the hatch.
“Lance, I just need to see you for a minute.”
“It’s off limits,” he said. “No exceptions.”
“Well, you’ll just have to make an exception for me.” Carla Sue pulled up in front of him and arranged her lips in a pucker. Lance dodged her kiss.
“My, my, we’re all business, aren’t we?” she teased.
“What do you want, Carla Sue?”
“I was scared, what with all this talk about murder and such.”
“There’s nothing to be scared of.” Lance nodded in O’Donnell’s direction as if to say the situation was under control.
“Well, I was worried about you.”
“Worried about me?” Lance blurted.
“Why, yes,” she said, rubbing both hands along his biceps. “I know you’re a big strong man, but I worry just the same.”
“You can’t stay here,” Lance said. He was virtually pleading.
“I’ve booked an hour in the observation blister,” she whispered, patting his chest. He grabbed her wrist, then quickly released it.
“Okay, Lance,” she said. “I won’t trouble you none. But when you’re off duty, come to the blister. I’ll be waiting.”
She gave him a quick peck on the cheek and flew out of the room. O’Donnell could see that Carla Sue’s visit had shaken Lance. His face was flushed as if he had just been sitting in front of a raging fire.
“What’s she into you for?” called O’Donnell.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You remember the bartender at the Cape,” said O’Donnell. “He said Carla Sue belonged to Jaeckle.”
“She does not.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” said O’Donnell. “But he made sense when he said to keep away from Carla Sue.”
“She’s okay,” Lance said.
“If she’s so okay, why did you chase her out of here?”
“Orders.”
“Orders my ass. If I had someone like her puckering those lips at me, I’d forget orders pretty damn quick,” said O’Donnell. He paused to let the words sink in. “Unless of course I thought she was using me too.”
“She’s not using me,” said Lance.
“I guess you’d know,” O’Donnell said with a smile.
Lance suddenly flew at him. He crashed into O’Donnell’s chest with his shoulder, then grabbed two wads of O’Donnell’s shirt.
“You think it’s funny, huh?” he yelled. “You think it’s funny she used me!”
Lance braced himself on the floor and punched O’Donnell squarely in the stomach. O’Donnell’s head snapped forward. A gasp of saliva shot out of his mouth and the top of the helmet banged against Lance’s cheek and jaw, opening a large red gash.
“Son of a bitch!” screamed Lance.
O’Donnell felt Lance’s knee explode into his groin. Stars obliterated his vision, and he sagged away from the bulkhead as f
ar as the tethers would allow. A hand grabbed his chin as if lining up his head for a haymaker.
“Lance!”
Through his blurry vision, O’Donnell saw Dan and Freddy hurtling toward them. They pulled Lance away.
“What the hell is going on here, Muncie?” Dan barked.
Lance sniffed back a wad of snot and tamped his sleeve against the gash on his face.
“He suckered me, sir. Said he couldn’t breathe and wanted me to loosen the tape a little. When I tried to, he butted me with his head.”
O’Donnell was gasping desperately, eyes rolling with pain. Could he be that crazy? Dan asked himself. Start a fight with his hands tied? Can drugs scramble your brain that badly?
“You damn fool,” Dan said to Muncie. “Go get cleaned up.”
By midafternoon, the people on Trikon Station had returned to a semblance of their normal daily routines. Stanley relieved Freddy, who had relieved Lance, and accomplished the tricky maneuver of feeding O’Donnell from a collection of squeeze bottles. O’Donnell, still smarting from Lance’s attack, meekly cooperated.
At 1500 hours, Dan called Lance and Freddy to his office. He had attended several meetings, both in person and over his comm link Earthside, since the discovery of Weiss’s body early that morning. He hoped that this one would be the last.
“Keeping O’Donnell in the rumpus room is causing logistical problems,” he said. “And some of the scientists are concerned for their own safety.”
“Like who?” Freddy asked.
“Jaeckle, for one.”
“Wimp,” said Freddy. He looked at Lance and nodded.
“Maybe he has a valid point for a change,” said Dan. “Anyway, I’ve decided it’s best to move O’Donnell.”
“Where to?” said Freddy.
“The observatory.”
“Ain’t that going a little too far?”
“Not after this latest incident,” Dan said. “Putting him in the observatory poses the fewest logistical problems and requires the least manpower,”
“Hokay,” said Freddy. It was obvious he disagreed with the decision, but it was just as obvious that Dan would not be swayed. “Who gonna move him?”