The Trikon Deception Page 16

  “You talk with her about you coming up here?” he asked.

  “Of course we did. I told her that it was only six months, but that it would be very good for my long-range career plans. After that, we could talk about getting married.”

  “Hmmm. I see,” said Freddy.

  “What does that mean? Did I do something wrong?”

  “No, I just found the relay I was lookin’ for.”

  “Anyway,” Lance continued, “now I’m not so sure about getting married.”

  “Because you can’t get her on the phone?”

  “Yeah. No. Well, yeah,” said Lance. “That’s never happened. It’s like a sign.”

  “Sign of what?”

  “That something is wrong. People don’t always tell you. They give you signs.”

  “Maybe she just don’ expect you to call.”

  “I always have before.”

  “You weren’ in space before.”

  “But I always called.”

  “You know what you beginning to sound like, man? The catechism the nuns taught me in school. ‘Who made me?’ ‘God made me.’ ‘Who God?’ ‘God the Supreme Being Who made all things.’”

  “What’s wrong with that?” said Lance.

  Freddy shook his head. “Lemme see the next page.”

  They floated in silence, Freddy tracing computer circuits and Lance mulling over his crisis with Becky. The Swedish tech swam down the tunnel.

  He nodded to the two crewmen, then disappeared into the observation blister. As soon as the door closed, Freddy chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?” said Lance.

  “Look at your watch and tell me when ten minutes is up.”

  Lance obeyed, assuming that the ten-minute period was related to Freddy’s work. He signaled when the time had passed. Moments later, a female Martian appeared. She ignored the two crewmen and made straight for the observation blister. The door opened and she slipped inside.

  Freddy laughed.

  “Now what’s so funny?” said Lance.

  “I been in here the last two nights. Same thing. He goes into the blister and ten minutes later some chick shows up. Last night it was one of the Europeans. Wonder what’d happen if two showed up.”

  “There would be a fight.”

  “Or maybe our friend’d need some help.” Freddy winked.

  “Not from me,” said Lance.

  “Can you imagine? I had a water-bed once, till my cousin Felix used it one night and forgot to take his boots off. Thought I was floating then, but that’d be nothing compared to this. All kinds of tumbling, all kinds of angles. And with the Earth and stars right outside the window. Beats lookin’ across an air shaft, eh?”

  “I never have.”

  “Tha’s right. No air shafts in Kansas.”

  There was a thud against the blister door.

  “What’s that?” Lance blurted.

  “Newton’s Law.”

  Freddy left Lance with instructions to keep a close eye on the circuitry, then headed for the command module to test the adjustments he had made to the relay. The project that Commander Tighe had assigned him was far less complicated than he had expected. If necessary, he could have reconfigured the entire computer system in two or three evenings. But Freddy was in no rush.

  As he approached the command module, Freddy noticed two figures slipping out of The Bakery. Even at a distance of one hundred feet, he recognized the red mop of Stu Roberts and the ample ass of Russell Cramer. The two men entered Hab 1.

  Freddy knifed past the command module. The test he was about to run could wait. As he passed the hatch to Hab 1, he could see Roberts and Cramer at the door to Roberts’s compartment. Freddy cast his eyes up and down the tunnel. No one was in sight. He pulled himself into The Bakery. Like the Mars module, it was in nighttime illumination: pools of dim light and long stretches of shadow. Freddy nosed up to the tiny lab assigned to Hugh O’Donnell. The door was closed. The strip of cellophane tape O’Donnell stretched across the padlock each night to reveal signs of intrusion was undisturbed.

  Dart throwing was easy in micro-gee, thought Hugh O’Donnell. Since the dart flew in a precisely straight line, rather than arc toward the floor in response to gravity, all you needed were an accurate aim and a correct release point in your throwing motion.

  The darts were little more than plastic soda straws tipped with Velcro. O’Donnell threw three of them at the dart board, retrieved them, and returned to the foot loops at the far end of the ex/rec area. Over and over again. He never tired of throwing bull’s-eyes.

  Directly below the darts’ flight path, Chakra Ramsanjawi and Hisashi Oyamo huddled over their chessboard. They played silently, although each one would chuckle when he removed one of the other’s pieces from the board. Occasionally, Ramsanjawi cast a baleful glance in O’Donnell’s direction, as if the incessant flight of the darts disturbed his concentration. O’Donnell ignored him.

  “Care for a game?”

  Dan Tighe hovered in the entryway.

  “Why not?” said O’Donnell. He removed his three darts from the board while Dan rummaged through one of the recreation compartments for three more.

  As they played, Dan scrutinized O’Donnell’s every movement. The scientist threw darts as silently and as intensely as Ramsanjawi and Oyamo concentrated on their chess. He would close one eye, tense his body, and move his throwing hand back and forth repeatedly as if it were on an invisible track before he exhaled deeply and launched the dart on its dead-straight path. There was a rigidity about O’Donnell’s movements that was completely at odds with his lanky, loose-jointed frame. Dan sensed an inability, or an unwillingness, to relax. He couldn’t decide which.

  “I see you’re still shaving,” Dan said between rounds. “I thought after a few days you’d grow a beard like everyone else.”

  “You haven’t,” said O’Donnell. He started to aim.

  “I’ve mastered the long, slow strokes.”

  “Really?” said O’Donnell, taking his eye off the target. “I suppose your face is red from windburn.”

  “Yeah, well—I guess I really don’t like beards.”

  O’Donnell said nothing. He fired one dart and settled into his aiming ritual with a second.

  “I’m divorced,” said Dan.

  “And your ex-wife had a beard.”

  “Funny.” Dan forced a laugh. “That isn’t it. The lawyer who raked me over the coals had a beard. I can still see him running this tiny little comb through it like it was a mink stole. That was after my ex-wife won the custody battle for my kid. I wanted to talk to the guy, tell him what a lousy job he had done taking my son away from me. But he was too interested in preening his goddamned beard.”

  “I guess that would make me shave every day,” said O’Donnell.

  “You know, I hate those guys,” Dan said with sudden intensity. His sky-blue eyes were focused on a point in his own past. “They come into your life, wreck it, and then go back to their offices to count their money. And what the hell are you left with? A mess. A big goddamn mess they made for you because they were charging by the hour.”

  “They don’t always go back to their offices,” said O’Donnell. “Sometimes they stay around and finish you off.”

  O’Donnell threw his last dart and slipped his feet from the loops. Dan took his place and fired three quick shots. None hit their marks.

  “What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

  O’Donnell floated slowly toward the board to retrieve his darts. He realized he shouldn’t talk about his past, but sometimes he just couldn’t keep it bottled up. Dr. Renoir was a woman. He could put his brain in neutral, disengage his mouth, and rap with her as he had rapped with chicks in bars. Dan Tighe was different. He might actually understand.

  “My lawyer sold me out,” said O’Donnell. “He charged me fifty grand for a settlement that I could have gotten myself when the case began. I had only twenty grand left, so he took my lady.”

  D
an grimaced.

  “I guess she was worth thirty grand. I don’t know anymore.”

  “Doesn’t sound like the normal divorce case to me.”

  “It wasn’t,” said O’Donnell. A smile creased his face. Telling this story would be fun, as long as he avoided specifics. “You are looking at the first man to be completely and utterly rifkin-ized.”

  “Now what the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that a bunch of know-nothings brought me and my company into court and obtained an injunction removing EPA approval of several genetically engineered microbes I designed for agricultural use. Of course, it happened just before my company was about to go public. The investors evaporated, the company tanked, and my lawyer waltzed off with my last dollar and my girlfriend.”

  “When was that?”

  “A few years back. Lots of it is a blur, for one reason or another.”

  “How did you end up here?”

  “I eventually went to work for a company large enough and established enough to have a high-powered set of lawyers of their own. The board voted to join Trikon NA. So here I am, property of Trikon.”

  They tossed several rounds of darts in silence. Ramsanjawi chattered happily as he chased Oyamo’s king across the board and eventually proclaimed checkmate. Oyamo sulked and asked for another game.

  Dan mulled over what O’Donnell had told him. The scientist seemed candid about career and women, the two most important aspects of a young man’s life. But something was missing. Dan felt it in the vagueness of the dates and the blur O’Donnell said his life once had been.

  “Tell me something,” O’Donnell said.

  “What?”

  O’Donnell aimed and fired another bull’s-eye. “The orientation manual says you grow taller in microgravity; your spine unbends when you’re weightless.”

  “That’s right,” said Tighe. “That’s why they make your flight suits extra long for your size.”

  “But I don’t seem to be any taller, really.”

  Tighe chuckled. “If you had a full-length mirror you’d see why.”

  O’Donnell hiked his eyebrows questioningly.

  “Well, look at me,” Tighe said. Standing in the foot restraints, he knew he was bent over in the semi-question-mark posture known as the microgravity crouch.

  “Am I doing that?” O’Donnell asked.

  “Sure. Straighten yourself up. Go on, try it.”

  O’Donnell strained for a moment. His back straightened, his shoulders squared. But with a puff of held-back breath he quickly relaxed and went back to the more comfortable crouch.

  “In micro-gee,” Dan explained, “the spine does unbend. But the muscles tend to pull you into a sort of fetal crouch.”

  “O’Donnell the ape-man.” Hugh grinned at himself and scratched under his armpit.

  Tighe laughed. He was starting to like O’Donnell. Then he caught himself with the memory of who he was and what his responsibilities were.

  “Play you for a drink,” he said.

  “There’s liquor on board?” O’Donnell looked startled.

  “No, but the loser can pay Earthside.”

  “Let’s play for a soda,” said O’Donnell.

  Tighe nodded. Inwardly, he realized that he had expected just such a response from Hugh O’Donnell.

  Freddy Aviles moved silently through Hab 1. Most of the sleep compartments were darkened. A few leaked pinpricks of light through the seals of their accordion doors. As Freddy drifted toward the rear of the module, he became aware of a dull, rhythmic vibration. The sound strengthened and finally resolved into music as Freddy steadied himself outside Stu Roberts’s compartment. Freddy recognized the exquisitely clear electric guitar riffs that seemed to curl in arabesques against a heavy Latin backbeat. He had heard this music on boom boxes all over the South Bronx. Carlos Santana. Still a rock icon after thirty years.

  Freddy slipped into the Whit, which abutted Roberts’s compartment. He removed a tiny sound amplifier from a sleeve pouch and pressed its suction end against the wall. The music was so loud that Carlos Santana seemed to be picking guitar strings inside the convolutions of Freddy’s brain. Freddy adjusted the amplifier to mute as much of the music as possible.

  “This doesn’t look like the same stuff.”

  “It is.”

  “But it looks jagged.”

  “The man downstairs didn’t put any gelatin capsules in the last shipment. That’s why it looks like a rock.”

  “It’s yellower, too.”

  “Hey, take your business elsewhere if you don’t like it.”

  “Sorry. It’s all right. It’s just that—”

  “Goddammit, it’s the same stuff. Take my word for it. Do you want the shit, or not?”

  “Yeah, I want it.”

  Someone turned the music louder and drowned out the voices. Freddy coiled his amplifier into a tiny bundle and slipped out of Hab 1. Better run that relay test quickly, he thought. Otherwise, Lance might become suspicious.

  27 AUGUST 1998

  TRIKON STATION

  Trikon Station has been equipped with state-of-the-art extravehicular mobility units (EMUs) designed through the combined efforts of NASA, ESA, and Trikon International’s own aerospace division. These space suits are sleeker than the suits you may remember from photos of the Apollo lunar program or more recent American space shuttle flights.

  The suit itself is constructed with layers of various insulation materials, a gas-tight bladder, a heat-resistant comfort layer, and protective outer layers of glass fibers and Teflon. The bubble helmet is made of a high-strength Lexan plastic.

  The suit is ribbed at all joints and at the shoulders and waist to provide increased mobility. The self-contained life-support system will allow you to perform routine tasks safely and comfortably for up to six hours. There is an umbilical option if a longer duration is dictated. The suit also is equipped with multichannel communications units. During EVA, you may select one or more channels over which to conduct your communications. Special channels allow you to monitor the station’s internal alarm system or voice traffic over the station’s intercom.

  The most innovative feature is the force-multiplier glove. Since all EMUs are internally pressurized, the limbs and appendages tend to become rigid in the vacuum of space. As a result, even the simple task of gripping a tool produces extreme fatigue since you must exert muscular energy just to keep the glove fingers grasping the tool. Force-multiplier gloves have solved this problem. Once you begin to move your fingers, the finger pressure is sensed inside the glove and the force multiplier’s miniaturized servomotors will complete the movement and hold the position until a countermovement signals their release. In essence, the force-multiplier system is akin to the power steering system of an automobile.

  One drawback of the EMUs you will be using is that they are pressurized to only six pounds per square inch. The atmosphere within Trikon Station, composed of 20% oxygen and 80% nitrogen, is pressurized to standard sea-level pressure of 14.7 psi. Since you will be going from a higher to a lower pressure when suited up for EVA, you must purge your bloodstream of dissolved nitrogen gas prior to depressurizing the airlock and being exposed to the vacuum of space. This is accomplished by prebreathing pure oxygen provided at the EMU servicing panel located in each airlock. Prebreathing oxygen will gradually remove the nitrogen from your bloodstream so there will be none left to bubble out of solution in the blood as the pressure drops during depressurization of the airlock.

  A graph/chart is prominently displayed in each airlock showing the amount of prebreathe required if station pressure is less than normal. It is imperative that you follow these guidelines. Failure to do so may result in a potentially disabling gas embolism, such as the familiar “bends” experienced by deep-sea divers.

  —from The Trikon Station Orientation Manual

  Hugh O’Donnell felt intensely alive. He awoke each day without need of an alarm clock and performed his morning ablutions w
hile the rest of the station slept. It occurred to him that he never explained to Dan Tighe exactly why he refused to grow a beard. Part of the reason was simple vanity: his beard contained far more gray than the hair on his head. But the main reason was the regimen stressed by the counselors at the substance abuse clinic: male patients were required to shave every day. The rationale was not predicated on some archaic notion equating facial hair with drug abuse. The idea was that each patient would forever be in danger of reverting to his habit if he allowed his life to wander from an established routine. For a male, a daily shave was the perfect object lesson.

  It was the routine of life aboard Trikon Station that allowed O’Donnell to flourish. Each day, he accomplished three solid hours of work in his lab before reporting to Lorraine Renoir for his required session. Then it was a quick breakfast in the wardroom before returning to the lab for another three-hour stint. The lengths of his afternoons and evenings were dictated by the pace and progress of his work, but they rarely came to less than another eight hours.

  After dinner each evening, he threw darts with Dan Tighe. He knew that the commander was pumping him for information about himself, and he deliberately refused to display any pique as he carefully sidestepped any questions relating to his former habit. He liked Tighe and sensed that Tighe liked him in the way veterans of the same war will appreciate each other. They played for sodas to be paid Earthside. The nature of O’Donnell’s work never entered the conversation.

  The fourteen-hour workdays began to show a cumulative effect. O’Donnell was confident that he would complete his project within the three-month period allotted him. After that, the world would never be the same. Or so he hoped.

  O’Donnell cracked his lab door and peered into The Bakery. It was still early morning and the workstations were unoccupied. He slipped outside, one hand cupping a test tube filled with a solution approximately the color of seawater, and locked the door behind him. Even though he would be only a few feet away, he took no chances of unwanted eyes peeking into his lab while he was busy at the centrifuge. He anchored himself to the floor, slid open the clear plastic cover, and secured the micro-gee test tube to the centrifuge’s arm. He adjusted the proper settings and pressed the button. Instantly, the centrifuge whirred to life. The arm and the test tube whizzed to a blur. After precisely one minute the motor cut off and the centrifuge wound down to a stop. The solution had migrated into three distinct bands: clear, green, and brown.