Lifeline

Chapter 23

ORBITECH 1—Day 30

Chief assessor on Orbitech 1—she liked the sound of that. Linda Arnando brushed at the shoulders of her clean green uniform. She felt tired but exhilarated, like a marathon runner who had finished an impossible race and won by the barest of margins, but won, nevertheless.

She’d have to see if Brahms would let her wear some sort of badge to denote her rank.

Linda knew the game. Much of it had been unpleasant, but she had played along and followed the rules, because getting ahead was The Most Important Thing. Too many women balked at the harsh world of corporate politics, refused to let themselves be used, and then whined that they had never gotten a chance. But being named chief assessor made up for all the humiliation.

If Orbitech 1 didn’t get out of this mess, then at least she had finished up on top.

Speaking of finishing up on top.… She allowed her eyes to wander over some of the men in line—men who had never noticed her before, but did now. It was a marvelous switch.

Linda stood in cafeteria complex nine of the administrative torus, watching people queue up for their daily rations. A hand-painted sign proclaiming “Alferd Packard Memorial Cafeteria” adorned the entrance. She made a mental note to check out what that meant after the meal. She didn’t like it when other people knew things she did not. As Chief Assessor, she could find out whatever she wanted.

Brahms had his armed watchers patrolling the halls, dressed in spring-green, nearly indestructible weavewire jumpsuits that had been destined for Earth before the War. The watchers supposedly kept everyone calm after the riot that had killed Ombalal, but people still seemed uneasy. Someone had used one of the permanent no-smear lipstick tubes from the Orbitech cosmetics labs to scrawl graffiti on the clean wall of one of the corridors:

“REDUCTION IN FORCE? Why not streamline the management structure instead?”

And thanks to the wonderful polymer base of the lipstick, someone would have to use sandblasting equipment to remove it from the wall.

Behind the counters in the cafeteria complex, four other watchers scanned ID cards to make sure no one tried to get a double allotment. The computerized distributors monitored rations to the nearest few grams per person.

Brahms had selected the watchers from their profiles in his precious Efficiency Study. She’d never seen a man squeeze so much out of one set of data. Linda frowned, but accepted it. She knew what Brahms was doing—it wasn’t a pleasant thing. It wasn’t an easy thing. But he was doing what he had to.

In one of their meetings, Linda had suggested a rationing methodology she thought would increase the incentive of the workers—rations would start out at some minimum and then be increased on the basis of productivity, as a kind of reward system.

Allen Terachyk sat silent and brooding in the meeting, as usual. Brahms raised his eyebrows at Linda’s suggestion and removed his unnecessary eyeglasses. He glanced at her, then at Terachyk, then back at her. With his face naked and open, Linda thought he appeared fragile, like a wounded child. His cheekbones shone smooth from where he had rubbed them, but his sharp blue eyes looked active, ready to pop out of his face and flit around the station where he could watch everyone.

“I’m not sure we can get any better incentive than the implied threat of another RIF.” His teeth were very small when he smiled.

Now, at the head of the ration line, one of the watchers stiffened and yelled at the man handing him a card. The red light on the ID reader blinked on and off. Linda recognized the burly, red-haired watcher as a former researcher, but she didn’t know his name. For show, she knew she should go over and make herself visible by the commotion.

“Don’t try to pull one over on me,” the watcher said.

“But it’s not for me. My wife is in our quarters and she’s not feeling well. I want to bring it to her.”

“She’ll have to come herself.”

Exasperated, the man in line put his hands on his hips. “But if you’d check, you’ll see that she hasn’t used her card yet today.”

“Then bring her card here.”

“And waste a trip to the other torus? I’m just trying to make things more efficient.” The word carried a stinger of sarcasm.

Linda Arnando stepped up and scowled at the man. He had a quiet intelligence about him and neatly trimmed brown hair that was thinning on top. His hands were pale and very clean, as if he scrubbed them often. His name badge read “Daniel Aiken.”

“You may think you have a perfectly valid complaint, Mr. Aiken.” Linda felt herself taking charge, wielding her authority. The watcher looked relieved. “But we had equally valid reasons when we decided to allow no exceptions.”

She lowered her voice, speaking to him only.

“Morale around here is low enough without you causing a fuss. Just do as you’re told, or I can see to it that your rations are cut off entirely for a few days, all right? None of these people would mind if you don’t get your share.”

Daniel Aiken shook as if unaccustomed to losing his temper. He remained silent and finally turned to depart. He moved out the door, awkward, seething with anger and helplessness. Linda placed a strained smile on her face, motioned for the rest of the line to proceed, and then she too left.

Food was tight enough, and getting tighter. As chief assessor, Linda Arnando could alter some figures, but since Brahms was such a stickler on “being fair” to everyone, she couldn’t do it for just anybody, no matter how indignant they became. She increased her own rations only when she felt particularly weak, when she couldn’t function properly.

Linda went back to the office and set about planning which research teams she would investigate next. On her desk an electrostatic “perpetual motion” toy clicked away, silver balls whirling in orbits that wouldn’t decay for five years.

She ran her hands over her desktop, then activated the inset terminal. She and Terachyk had divided up the various laboratory efforts, the administrative groups, the performance appraisals.

Linda Arnando didn’t know much about the detailed research. Her specialty was management psychology—how employees worked together, how they got the job done. She was good at finding out who the most useful employees were.

Linda logged in to the confidential employee data base and used her Assessor password, which gave her access to all levels of information. Whether she understood the details or not, she had a sixth sense that allowed her to cut through the extraneous stuff, get a good feel for what was useful and what was BS.

Tapping a fingernail on the textured metal surface, she called up the file on Daniel Aiken. She wanted to see about this man who was trying to do things so much more efficiently.

The list identified Aiken as an organic chemist specializing in photosynthetic processes. His wife Sheila worked as an electronics engineer with a focus on communications. Daniel Aiken had an average score in the Efficiency Study; Sheila had done a bit better.

Aiken’s stated primary project was investigating ways to synthesize sugar molecules using the raw elemental materials available on Orbitech 1, which could chemically create basic foodstuff for them out of the remaining lunar debris left in the stable Lagrange point. An admirable project, Linda thought—and Aiken seemed to be making rapid progress, too. According to the available log summaries, he had made several amazing breakthroughs since the first RIF.

There we go: incentive in action.

But Aiken had run up against the same problem many other Orbitech 1 researchers had encountered. The lunar rocks sent up by the mass driver on Clavius Base were rich in some materials, yet had the Moon’s own limitations in others. Mainly they were hindered by lack of hydrogen, the lightest element, which had escaped away into space because of the Moon’s small mass and low gravity.

Aiken needed elemental hydrogen to fill in the blanks in the sugar molecules. Other researchers needed it to develop rocket fuel to help the colonists escape.

Linda smiled ironically. For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost … for want of hydrogen, the colony was lost.

She looked at some of Aiken’s results. Impressive. She scanned the dates of his test runs, accessed his log entries, and called up the times of his data manipulations.

Something didn’t look right. Linda stepped back.

She accessed the rough files in his personal directory, not just the summaries he would expect people to look at. She read the last entries, wondering what he had done to some of his results. She could not understand the science, but she could spot the gaps in his entries.

Many of his test runs had not been impressive at all. He showed some progress, but nothing to get excited about. He had logged his results, mentioning a few directions he might wish to pursue.

And then the RIF had happened.

The following day, Aiken had opened his old data files again and changed some of the numbers. He had tried to wipe out evidence of his tampering, but Linda could call up the original tags on the files, the coded dates and times of input.

She knew how to do such manipulation—she had done the same type of thing at times to get herself extra rations. But she knew how to cover her trail,Aiken didn’t.

She frowned. The data points he had changed were the outlying values—the ones that put his results into question. Everything looked nice and pretty once he brought them in line.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Linda said to herself.

She made a mental note of his office number and the location of his living quarters. Then she smiled. It felt good to be on the other side, for once.

“Now then, Dr. Aiken.” Linda drifted back in a net chair in his laboratory cubicle. She turned her head, and rich dark hair moved in front of her face, then upward. She brushed it back down, keeping herself neat. Her lips were bright red from the sparkle lipstick she had applied.

She smelled chemicals—an acrid mixture of experiments not sealed entirely in fume-confinement zones. The strange scents changed from moment to moment as they crawled through the air on currents stirred by the ventilators.

Orbitech 1’s successful zero-G pharmaceutical production processes had been developed in this section. Other designated laboratory areas were defined in a three-dimensional matrix throughout the colony’s nonrotating central cylinder, color-coded to research topics.

Daniel Aiken nodded at her, looking tense. That would make things easier.

He was middle-aged, reasonably fit. Linda found him attractive in a puppy-dog sort of way. She studied her fingernails, drawing out the silence. She had applied some of the garish Orbitech cosmetics to make her nails swirl with changing, oily color.

“As chief assessor, it is my job to look into all these different projects and find the ones with the greatest merit—the ones that have the most bearing on our survival. Your work could have very important implications. I’m sure you realize that, Dr. Aiken.” She paused. “Actually, I think I’m going to call you Daniel.” She said it as a statement, not asking permission.

“I remember you from the cafeteria. Tell me, what does the name Alferd Packard mean—from the sign by the door?”

Aiken allowed a thin smile. “I did my graduate work at the University of Colorado. The main cafeteria is named after him.” To Linda’s blank stare he continued, “Packard led an expedition up in the Rockies and they got trapped in the snow. The next spring he was the only member to return. He was accused of cannibalism.”

Linda set her mouth in distaste. “That’s rather sick humor for a cafeteria.”

Aiken blinked and avoided her eyes. “Since the RIF, I think we’ve all been a little morbid around here.” He muttered something else noncommittal, and she slid her hook in deeper.

“But back to your research. I found it very interesting, with most impressive results.” Linda glanced up at him. “In fact, the numbers were even more impressive after you altered your data.”

Aiken’s eyes widened. His shock could not have been more absolute if she had suddenly pulled out a knife and slashed him. Linda’s smile was brittle, glistening red from the lipstick.

Aiken tried to stammer something, but she made a shushing motion that sent her drifting away in the net chair. Linda could see him squirming—it made her feel light-headed.

He could no longer restrain himself. “I just needed more time! My project is going to work, but I’ve had a small setback, and I … didn’t think it was fair. If I get a little more time, I—I could make this breakthrough so we can all survive.”

“Of course, I understand.” She kept her voice even, her rigid smile in place. Poor man. He had it so difficult. If only he had a little more time …

She wondered just what he’d had to go through to get to his position, what he’d had to do to get his biochemistry degree. How did he have to degrade himself? Where did he have to crawl? Whose back did he have to stab? Whose rear end did he have to kiss?

Linda Arnando thought of the men she’d slept with, all the condescension she had taken from supposed “equals,” the ways they had abused their positions of power, tried to crush her down.

But she had come through it all, and now the shoe was on the other foot, wasn’t it?

“You realize, don’t you, that when I tell Director Brahms about this, he’s likely to have you thrown out the airlock as an example. At the very least, he’ll put your name at the top of the next RIF list.”

She raised her eyebrows and waited, trying to predict what he would do next. Aiken stared at her, baffled. She opened her palms to him, waiting.

Finally, he got the idea. “All right, Ms. Arnando—”

“Chief Assessor Arnando!”

“Chief Assessor Arnando.” He drew out each word, refusing to meet her eyes. “What do you want? What is it I have to do?”

She thought of all the times she had been in Aiken’s position. Perhaps it didn’t have anything to do with lust or sex. It was power—the ability to make someone do something he didn’t want to do.

She leaned forward out of the net chair, got to her feet, and moved around behind him. Aiken sat stiffly, afraid to move. He gripped the edge of his work surface. Around him the details of his lab—the enclosed petri dishes, the culture flasks, the fermentation locks—stood clean and quiet.

He jumped when she touched him.

Linda rubbed his neck, ran her fingernail down the side of his face, lingered on his lips, then traced down to where a few curly chest hairs stuck out from his lab smock.

“I think we could come to some … sort of agreement.”

Aiken sat perfectly still. It excited her. There was something like a rabbit about him. He swallowed, then spoke in a whisper, “My wife—”

Linda smiled. That made it even better; she had forgotten about his wife. “I think you can work something out, Daniel—considering the stakes.”

She moved to leave, but at the door of his cubicle she paused and turned. “You can find the location of my quarters. I’ll expect you there, oh, let’s say, twenty-two hundred hours?”

She knew from his schedule that he always spent time at home then.

Before he could stammer anything, she left.