The Trikon Deception

27 AUGUST 1998 TRIKON STATION

Hugh O’Donnell felt intensely alive. He awoke each day without need of an alarm clock and performed his morning ablutions while 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.

O’Donnell sighed with satisfaction. He brought the test tube back to his lab, where he placed it on a rack within a lightproof box, and removed another test tube from a different rack along the wall. The solution in this test tube was the color of beet juice.

Stu Roberts drifted into The Bakery while O’Donnell was watching the second test tube whirling in the centrifuge. Roberts’s red hair was severely tangled beneath his hair net and his eyes squinted against the powerful fluorescent that illuminated the lab. Obviously, he had just tumbled out of his sleep restraint.

O’Donnell nodded to Roberts, then returned his attention to the centrifuge. The tech continued down the aisle, fussing with different workstations as he passed. He finally stopped at the sterilizer and began loading the previous day’s dirty glassware.

As the sterilizer hissed and rumbled, Roberts watched O’Donnell bring test tube after test tube from his lab to the centrifuge. He spoke not a word to Roberts, and the technician remained silent also. The weirdo hasn’t let me inside his lab since day one, Roberts grumbled to himself. Every time I offer to help him he brushes me off. He might know sixties music. He might be able to rap about The Who, the Stones, and Creedence Clearwater Revival. But he’s just as much of an asshole as Dave Nutt, in his own way. Of course, there’s always the chance…

“Need any help?” he called.

“No, thanks,” said O’Donnell, his eyes fixed on the centrifuge.

“I mean, I could ferry that stuff back and forth for you.”

“It’s no trouble. Thanks.”

Not this time, either, thought Roberts. He smiles, but he stays miles away. Damn!

Roberts clung to the door of the sterilizer and closed his eyes. I’m nothing but a glorified dishwasher to him, he told himself. The machine’s constant vibration soothed the taut muscles of his back and neck. The serenity didn’t last long. The shrill voice of Thora Skillen knifed through The Bakery.

“Dr. O’Donnell, what are you doing at that centrifuge?”

“Spinning test tubes,” said O’Donnell.

“Did you obtain permission from me?”

“At seven A.M.? None of your people are ever here before eight.”

“I don’t care what time it is,” said Skillen. She wore her usual stained smock. A vein stood out in the middle of her forehead, continuing the ridge formed by her chin and chiseled nose. “My people may require use of this lab’s hardware at any time. That is why we have established procedures.”

“I’m on my last tube.”

“You’re damned right you are. Next time you will be allowed a block of time no longer than fifteen minutes. Your tech is to arrange it for you.”

Roberts floated toward the centrifuge.

“It’s my fault,” he said. “He told me that he wanted to use the ’fuge this morning. I was supposed to arrange it with you. I must’ve forgot.”

Skillen’s suspicious eyes darted from Roberts to O’Donnell and back again. The anger drained out of her face, as if berating a mere tech was less satisfying than a fellow scientist. O’Donnell maintained a poker face. He knew he hadn’t told Roberts of his intention to use the centrifuge. He never told Roberts anything.

“Very well, Mr. Roberts,” said Skillen. “See that it doesn’t happen again.”

She swept out of The Bakery. O’Donnell looked at Roberts. The tech smiled as if to say, You owe me one.

“Millions of you are sitting in kitchens across the United States, stirring no-cal sweetener into your instant coffee and listening to your soy sausages and cholesterol-free eggs sizzling in your microwave ovens. You watch me during breakfast as I babble incessantly about different aspects of our two-year Mars Project. You must wonder exactly how the manned exploration of such a distant world would affect you, if at all. Today, I plan to tell you.”

“Cut!” shouted the meteorology payload specialist who doubled as camera and sound man for the weekly broadcasts to “Good Morning, World.”

Kurt Jaeckle, suspended against a backdrop of full-color photographs of Mars taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, looked over the top of his reading glasses.

“The sound from the boom mike is weak,” said the cameraman.

Jaeckle floated to the elbow of the aluminum boom, loosened a large wing nut, and tapped the arm with the heel of his hand.

“I don’t want the mike in the picture,” he said. “I want nothing distracting attention from me—and Mars.”

“Don’t worry,” said the cameraman.

Jaeckle returned to his position and ran through the opening lines of his script, this time from memory. The cameraman gave him a thumbs-up. Audio and video were perfect.

Jaeckle noticed a rustling in the black curtain that covered the rumpus room’s entry hatch during broadcasts. A hand parted the curtain and Carla Sue Gamble sailed through, her blond hair floating freely like a globe of light. Jaeckle immediately resumed reciting his lines. He concentrated solely on the camera lens, but he could see Carla Sue in the background. With her slightly crouched micro-gee posture and skinny limbs wrapped in black exercise tights, she reminded him of a wingless four-legged mosquito flitting at the edge of his vision. Just as much a nuisance, too, he feared. He stopped his recitation and drew his finger across his neck.

“Take a break,” he said. The cameraman shut off the equipment and knifed through the curtained hatch.

“You don’t give me a script and now you’re rehearsing by yourself.” Carla Sue lurched forward, but stopped herself with a handhold before butting Jaeckle’s chest with her head. “Am I supposed to draw my own conclusion?”

“Now, Carla.” Jaeckle unhooked his reading glasses from behind his ears and slowly folded them into his pocket, all the while trying to remember exactly what he had told her. Two deep lines ran down the corners of her mouth, and for a moment he thought of her not as a mosquito but as a ventriloquist’s dummy. “I meant to explain everything.”

“What’s there to explain? You’re cutting me out. I understand. I just wish you had the balls to tell me.”

“Carla, you misinterpret—”

“I haven’t seen you in four days. Four nights, to be more precise. I’m no fool.”

“The final decision wasn’t made until last night,” said Jaeckle. “Jared Lewis called me this morning to tell me. A marketing survey showed that ratings would improve if I went on alone.”

“Alone?”

“Don’t take it personally, Carla. Neither of us are media personalities, thank God. We don’t need these cameras to put bread on our tables. We have Mars.”

“Alone, you said.”

“That’s right,” said Jaeckle. “I can’t fathom how they arrive at these decisions.”

Carla Sue’s dummy jaw clamped shut. The two buttonholes that were her nostrils flared.

“If you don’t need an assistant, why is Lorraine Renoir reading a script? Explain that unfathomable mystery to me, Professor Jaeckle. And don’t give me any of your guff about it being a network idea to put Miss Florence Nightingale on television.”

“She is a physician,” said Jaeckle. “The next show is devoted to the problems of administering medical treatment in micro-gee. She is the only person on board qualified to discuss the subject.”

“What else is she qualified for?”

“I resent your implication.”

“You resent me hitting the nail square on the head,” said Carla Sue. “But let me tell you something right now. I’m not one of your starry-eyed grad students who took a tumble with you for a grade. I never expected us to last. But I do expect to land on Mars someday. And if I don’t, you can be damn sure that you won’t either.”

With that, Carla Sue spiraled away and punched through the curtain.

Thora Skillen reached her sleep cubicle and slid the door tightly shut. O’Donnell worried her. None of her contacts Earthside had been able to glean a shred of information about him. He was not a security agent, that much seemed sure. He certainly acted like a research scientist, and a damned reclusive one at that.

What is he doing here? The question pounded at her.

Her chest hurt. She knew it was psychosomatic, but the pain was real nonetheless. One of the things the Earthside medical people hoped to determine was how well she resisted infection. They had put her on antibiotics, of course. And then thrown her into this tightly confined space station where anyone with the slightest sniffle quickly spread it to one and all. It was like living through the first week of kindergarten every month; you could tell how long it had been since the shuttle’s last docking by the coughs and sneezes echoing through the station.

She was providing them with the data they sought, Thora told herself grimly. They must be very happy with that. Their experimental animal is behaving well for them.

So far, she thought. So far so good. But time is running out.

She opened the compartment where she kept the antibiotic pills. The bottle was nearly empty, she saw. I’ll have to get Lorraine to give me a refill. She’ll probably want to change the prescription, too. Antibiotics lose their effectiveness over time; your body adapts to them.

Using a long-nosed tweezers, Thora extracted two of the pills from the bottle, then turned toward the door, intending to get a cup of water at the washroom. She stopped, turned back, and took two aspirin, as well. The pain might be psychosomatic, but it hurt.

Russell Cramer paused at the access door to the Mars module’s internal tunnel. It was midafternoon and the module was abuzz with activity. Centrifuges whirred. Computer terminals chirped. The other Martians huddled in groups as they discussed findings about the meteorology and geology of the red planet. But his workstation was silent, and would remain so for another two weeks. They were all making progress but he was not.

Cramer opened the door and edged one foot outside as if testing the water of a swimming pool. He wanted someone, anyone, to see him heading for the blister, but no one paid him any mind. They were busy. They were working. He was about to spend two hours in solitary confinement.

Finally, one of the women noticed him.

“Have fun, Russell,” she called.

Cramer hauled himself into the tunnel and slammed the door.

Cramer belonged to the group with Earth-viewing privileges. In the observation blister he pressed a button on the control panel and the lower portion of the clamshell peeled back. Trikon Station was flying over the eastern Atlantic. Cloud cover was sparse and the ocean was a brilliant, iridescent blue. The sun’s reflection off the water traced a fuzzy round highlight eastward directly beneath the station. But Cramer was not interested in gazing at the spectacular scenery curving majestically beneath him. He was too angry at Kurt Jaeckle to enjoy anything.

Cramer didn’t think he was sick. He didn’t think he was crazy, Sure, he had some trouble sleeping, a few bad dreams. Nothing serious. Nothing that would have warranted discussion on Earth, let alone medical treatment. Everyone was too cautious up here.

But maybe caution hadn’t been the reason for Jaeckle’s order that he spend double time in the blister. People had warned him that Jaeckle’s polished manners concealed a snake’s cunning. Maybe he was less concerned with Cramer’s health than with the newly arrived Martian soil sample. Maybe Jaeckle was using these two-hour time blocks to analyze the samples without him. He was screwing around with Carla Sue Gamble, the backup biochemist. Maybe he’s giving the new soil sample to her!

Cramer dived out of the blister and back into the tunnel. He eased open the access door and peered into the laboratory section. His workstation was unoccupied. He closed the door and noted the time, deciding to check his workstation at fifteen-minute intervals. No one was going to discover life in that soil before him. Not Carla Sue. Not even Jaeckle himself.

The station crossed a thin band of green that was the coast of Morocco. Within minutes, the entire visible world dissolved into the burning browns and reds of the Sahara Desert Sand dunes corrugated the surface in the long shadows of late afternoon. A dust storm formed a blurry corkscrew. Station personnel agreed that the Sahara, with its animated tableaux of shifting sands, was the most spectacular sight visible from the blister. The Martians had a special affinity for the desert because it resembled so much the spacecraft photos of Mars.

But Cramer was not interested. He felt antsy as hell. He shot himself from one end of the blister to the other in a micro-gee version of pacing the floor. Two hours in the blister. One and a third orbits of the earth. Thirty-five thousand miles. Some people didn’t travel that far in their entire lives.

Cramer patted the breast pocket of his shirt. The tiny bottle felt hot to the touch, or was it his imagination? Three yellow rocks remained. One could make these two hours seem to pass in the blink of an eye. Thirty-five thousand miles in a second. Not quite the speed of light. But not bad, either.

He worked the bottle out of his pocket. It was less than an inch long and barely half that in diameter. Dark brown glass with a black plastic cap. He unscrewed the cap carefully. If the rocks jack-in-the-boxed out, they would be lost forever in the brightness of the blister.

Cramer had been stunned by Kurt Jaeckle’s refusal to release the news of the discovery of life in the Martian soil samples. He had spent a couple of days sulking in his sleep compartment and refusing to take exercise until he realized that he still held the key to his own success. He had found the microorganisms once; he could do it again.

He had thrown himself into the task, twelve, fourteen hours at a stretch at his workstation, wolfing down meals, skipping R and R in the blister. But he just could not repeat that one, slim result that had shown a trace of living cells in a sample of Martian soil. All the other soil samples were sterile, and the one glimmer of life he had found had been destroyed in the tests that showed it existed. All he had was a set of curves on a computer screen. Even that one soil sample refused to give any further positive results.

As his failures mounted he grew increasingly depressed. One night, while listening to music in Stu Roberts’s sleep compartment, he confided his troubles.

“I know all about it,” said Roberts.

“You do?”

“Sure. Everyone on the station knows you found living organisms in one of the soil samples. We’re all waiting for you to duplicate the results.”

“I can’t,” wailed Cramer. “I just can’t.”

“Sure you can.”

“I can’t, I tell you. I’ve done the experiment every way I know how. There’s nothing in that soil anymore.”

“You just need to think of things in a different way.” Roberts fished a pencil and a sheet of paper out of a compartment. He pressed the paper against the wall and drew a figure. “What’s that?”

“A hexagon,” Cramer answered.

Roberts drew another figure and asked Cramer to identify it.

“A snake,” said Cramer. “Eating its tail.”

“Remember your freshman chemistry?” Roberts asked. “The story about Kekule being stumped by the molecular structure of benzene and then dreaming about a serpent eating its tail? Then he proved benzene’s structure is hexagonal, right?”

“Yeah, but how does that relate to life on Mars?”

“You need to dream about a serpent eating its tail,” said Roberts. “So to speak, that is.”

“I don’t dream of anything,” Cramer said.

“That’s where this comes in.” Roberts wormed a small brown bottle out of his shirt pocket and let it hover in midair between them.

“What is it?”

“MDMA, better known as Ecstasy. It’s a mild stimulant and hallucinogenic. Just the thing you need to get over your experimental hurdle. It heightens self-awareness, enhances sensory perceptions, generally helps you see things in a different way.”

Cramer held the tiny bottle up to the light. Two capsules danced inside.

“Any side effects?”

“Not a one,” said Roberts. “Hell, this stuff was legal until 1985.”

“Where did you get it?”

“I use it when I’m stuck with my music. You know, I hit a block, can’t get the notes down right. Just one swallow and the next thing I know I’ve got half a ton of paper covered with notes. Good stuff, too. Better’n I write cold.”

Cramer licked his lips. “But it’s illegal, isn’t it? If anybody found out…”

“Hey, you don’t want it, don’t take it. I don’t give a shit either way.”

Cramer refused the capsules that first time. Roberts shrugged and changed the subject. But two sleepless nights later Cramer came back to the technician’s quarters and asked if he could “just try out one capsule.” Roberts gave him three.

With them he felt alert, brilliant, powerful. The hallucinations were mild, just as Roberts had said. An inanimate object might wiggle in the corner of his eye. Flashing circles might appear, only to vanish when he blinked. An occasional bad dream might disturb his sleep. But these were mere trifles compared to the benefits of a keen mind.

Yet despite his enhanced perceptions, the Martian soil samples remained stubbornly, stupidly barren. He knew that Jaeckle and all the others were laughing at him behind his back. He knew that Mars was holding its secrets away from him deliberately.

Cramer stared at the reddening desert as he worked saliva into his mouth. The rocks were drier than the capsules Roberts usually gave him and needed lubrication going down. He popped one well back in his throat and swallowed.

The effect wasn’t quite instantaneous. He had enough time for a second look at his workstation and Jaeckle’s office. Both were as before.

He returned to the blister and steadied himself as best he could in its exact center. He closed his eyes, folded his arms, and crossed his legs at the ankles. Then he proceeded to drift, feeling great waves of energy course through his body as the drug entered his bloodstream. Time refused to speed up, but he didn’t care. His senses grew, intertwined, then blossomed into pleasantly confounding combinations. He could hear the orange paint on the outer skin of the Mars module. He could smell the hum of the station ventilators. He could see the words of the other Martians oozing through the seam of the door like green gunk.

A flash of searing heat disrupted his fantasy. His eyes flashed wide. The Sahara was fiery red. Storms roiled, sending aloft great spirals of sand that buffeted the station like giant handfuls of gravel. A huge figure of a bearded man with long hair and a flowing robe loomed out of the clouds. He beckoned to Cramer with outstretched hands.

The heat was unbearable. Cramer tore at the collar of his shirt, ripped at the drawstring of his pants. His nightmare had come true. They were falling. The station was plummeting through the atmosphere. The entire sky glowed with the heat of their descent. The bearded man beckoned.

Cramer clamped his teeth over his wrist. He pushed his free hand against the dome. Molten plastic burned his fingers. The cries of his fellow Martians resounded through the station. The bearded man drew back his lips in a Satanic grin.

Cramer screamed.

Dan Tighe and Freddy Aviles were reviewing the progress of the computer reconfiguration project when a voice burst over the command module’s loudspeaker.

“Emergency! Mars module! Emergency!”

Dan and Freddy locked eyes. A second later they were in the connecting tunnel, propelling themselves hand over hand toward a knot of people gathered at the Mars module’s entry hatch. Shrieks echoed within.

Dan peeled bodies away and dove inside. At the far end of the internal tunnel, the door to the observation blister floated free of its broken hinges. Torn plastic seals bobbed in the doorway like the waving arms of an octopus.

“We’re falling, we’re falling!” someone was screaming.

Dan turned to the entry hatch and yelled at the circle of faces. “Find Dr. Renoir. Tell her to bring sedatives. Fast! Freddy, get something to restrain him.”

Tighe dove headfirst through the nearest access door and found himself beside Kurt Jaeckle. The professor’s normally olive skin was ghostly white, his deep-set eyes wide in fear and confusion.

Near the aft end of the module, three Martians cowered in cubbyholes formed by different workstations. A fourth drifted like a broken rag doll, his face bloodied and his shirt tattered. Smashed lab equipment and glassware hung in the air. In the middle of it all Russell Cramer whirled like a dervish, buck-naked.

“We’re falling! The station is crashing! Don’t you feel it?” His voice was guttural as if coming from deep within his chest. He grabbed the unconscious Martian by the remains of his shirt and slapped his face. “We’re burning up! Do something!”

The Martian’s head waggled. In disgust, Cramer flung him toward the rear of the module.

“I don’t know what happened,” Jaeckle whispered, his words coming in a rush. “He was in the blister for about half an hour. He started screaming, broke down the door, and attacked people.”

Dan listened without taking his eyes off Cramer. The Martian tumbled around the module, punching equipment with fists that streamed ribbons of blood and terrorizing his fellow Martians with threats of death.

Freddy settled next to Dan. Draped between his hands was a nylon net he had taken from a storage compartment in the command module. Dan shot a glance at the access door. Lorraine Renoir displayed a syringe.

“Stay off my left flank,” Dan told Freddy. “I’ll try to draw him in. When he goes for me, net him.” He turned to Lorraine. “Wait until we have him under control.”

Cramer acted as if blind to everything in the module. He twisted his limbs and babbled a steady stream of nonsense. Balls of white saliva spewed from his mouth and gathered in tiny clouds around his head.

Dan and Freddy edged forward. Twenty feet, fifteen feet, twelve feet. At ten feet, they stopped. Cramer sensed they were close.

“Aye, Commander Tiger, come to see the fire, huh?” Cramer slowly turned his head toward them. His eyes rolled back in their sockets.

Dan tensed his grip on a handhold. He wanted to be able to fly backwards when Cramer lunged forward. But Cramer retreated toward the unconscious Martian, who bobbed against a workstation.

“Tiger sees the fire, the fire wants Tiger.”

Cramer grabbed the unconscious man by the shirt and flung him like a missile toward Dan and Freddy. They tried to stop the Martian, but he barrelled through their arms. Jaeckle prevented him from crashing into the wall. Two other Martians pulled him into the tunnel.

“Tiger sees the fire, the fire wants Tiger.”

Dan and Freddy resumed their careful approach. Cramer’s eyes were unfocused, but he knew they were coming. His doggerel sounded more urgent with each repetition.

“Tiger sees the fire, the fire wants Tiger!”

Cramer suddenly gathered himself into a cannonball and shot forward. Dan pulled back and Freddy threw the net. It snared Cramer, but his fist shot free before Dan could react and caught him squarely in the jaw. Dan’s vision blurred. When it cleared, Freddy’s powerful arms had Cramer locked in a bear hug.

“Feet! Feet!” Freddy yelled.

Cramer kicked wildly, sending them into a tumble that smashed Freddy’s back against a metal cabinet. Dan tackled Cramer and managed to pin both feet against his shoulder. He looped his other arm around a handhold to stop Cramer from moving. Lorraine Renoir swept overhead. Cramer yelped as she jammed the hypodermic into his buttock. A moment later, he went limp.

“Get some duct tape,” Dan said to Freddy.

“Are you all right, Dan?” Lorraine asked, breathless, wide-eyed.

“I’m goddamn lucky it wasn’t my nose,” Dan said as he rubbed his bruised chin.

Dan summoned Muncie and Stanley to transfer the sedated Cramer into the rumpus room. Meanwhile, he ordered the Mars module cleared of all personnel to allow an inventory of the damage.

“I can’t permit that,” protested Jaeckle. “Six of my people aren’t to interact with anyone. It would ruin the entire project.”

Dan shook his head. Jaeckle hadn’t been long in shedding his fear and resuming his contrary personality.

“Then lock them in their compartments,” barked Dan. “My people have their own duties to perform.”

Freddy volunteered to inspect the blister. The dome, normally so clear as to be invisible, was smeared with Cramer’s handprints. A crimson shirt and flight pants wafted in currents of air. As Freddy gathered the clothes he felt something small and hard in the sleeve pocket of Cramer’s shirt. He unzipped the pocket and scooped out the brown bottle. Two tiny rocks floated inside. Freddy stuffed the bottle into his own pocket and gathered the clothes into a bundle.

They were in the rumpus room. Cramer, still sedated, was bound hand and foot with duct tape and secured with bungee cords to the rear bulkhead not far from Dan’s bonsai menagerie. A plastic helmet was tightly strapped under his chin to prevent him from injuring his head. Lorraine, Jaeckle, and Dan gathered in a circle near the centrifuge.

“You were treating him for what?” Dan asked.

Lorraine and Jaeckle looked at each other like game-show contestants deciding on the correct answer.

“Overwork,” said Jaeckle.

“Sleep disorder,” said Lorraine at the same time.

“Well, which is it?” Dan snapped.

Lorraine and Jaeckle each took a deep breath.

“He came to me several weeks ago complaining of bad dreams and an inability to sleep,” said Lorraine. “I told him he should cease exercising at least three hours before sleep time. The complaints seemed to disappear. Two weeks ago, he returned and demanded that I prescribe sleeping pills. I gave him a placebo and ordered him to report to me on a daily basis. He never did. When I confronted him, his reaction was testy.”

“Someone on the station was acting in this manner and you kept that information to yourself?”

“I didn’t,” said Lorraine. “I reported my observations to Professor Jaeckle as Cramer’s immediate superior.”

“That’s right, Dan,” said Jaeckle. “Dr. Renoir and I conferred at great length. I reviewed my records and discovered that Cramer had not been spending the required amount of R and R time in the observation blister. Instead, he had been working too hard on analyzing Martian soil samples. I relieved him of his research duties until he brought his blister time current. He was on his second two-hour stint in the blister when this happened.”

“How did he behave during the first?” asked Dan.

Jaeckle looked at Lorraine and shrugged. “Fine.”

Dan sensed something conspiratorial passing between Jaeckle and Lorraine.

“I don’t like the way this was handled,” he said.

“We complied with the regulations,” said Jaeckle.

“Technically, but I expect more than a technical reading of the regs. From both of you.” Dan looked at Lorraine, but she refused to meet his eyes. “I want full written reports from each of you by oh-eight-hundred hours tomorrow.”

“What do you intend to do with Cramer?” asked Jaeckle.

“A Trikon bigwig is coming up here by aerospace plane in a few days,” said Dan. “Cramer will be on the return flight.”

“You can’t do that! He’s vital to the project!”

“The hell I can’t,” said Dan. “Cramer trashed your module, trashed himself, and damn near killed one of your personnel. And all because he couldn’t take a little R and R. Not on my station, Professor Jaeckle. Not on your life.”

Stu Roberts peeled open the accordion door of Chakra Ramsanjawi’s office in ELM and dove inside. He fought for breath with long rasping heaves as his trembling hands pawed at the retracted door.

Ramsanjawi was bellied up to his computer console. His kurta billowed out from his back and the ceiling lights glittered on the greasy sheen of his black hair.

“Close the door, please,” he said without taking his eyes off the computer display.

Roberts, still panting, finally worked his fingers around the handle and slid the door shut.

“Cramer. Did you hear? Crazy. He—”

“Just one moment, please.” Ramsanjawi’s singsong voice matched the rhythm of his stubby fingers as they worked the computer keyboard. He typed unperturbed for several minutes, saved his work, then removed one foot from a loop so that he could turn his rotund body in Roberts’s direction. Roberts was calmer now, but his eyes still had the terrified look of a hunted animal.

“As you were saying,” said Ramsanjawi.

“Cramer went crazy in the observation blister,” said Roberts. “He beat up a couple of Martians and had to be restrained by the crew. He’s tied up in the rumpus room.”

“I detected a disturbance in the tunnel,” said Ramsanjawi. “That would explain it.”

“He went crazy, man. He freaked out.”

“That is truly unfortunate.”

“You don’t suppose—” Roberts’s eyes locked as an idea slowly fit together in his head. “You don’t suppose that the Ecstacy did it?”

Ramsanjawi said nothing. He smoothed the front of his kurta along the outline of his generous stomach. The loose garment was so much more comfortable than the ridiculous flight suit that had been issued to him.

“I mean, he didn’t act like someone on Ecstasy,” said Roberts, making a poor attempt at constricting his nasal passages as he spoke. “Did he?”

“I was not present to witness his behavior.”

“He didn’t,” said Roberts, more to himself than to Ramsanjawi. “I mean, the stuff I gave him looked more rocky than Ecstasy because there weren’t any gelatin capsules. But it was Ecstasy, wasn’t it?”

Ramsanjawi shrugged.

“It was, wasn’t it?”

“I’m afraid Mr. Cramer is a rather unbalanced personality,” said Ramsanjawi. “I am mystified why NASA and ESA named him to the Mars Project.”

“That’s a lie! Russ Cramer is just as sane as anybody.”

“I beg to differ, Mr. Roberts. Russell Cramer has a modicum of scientific intelligence that is hampered by a willingness to believe the unbelievable.”

A Cheshire grin slowly spread across Ramsanjawi’s dark face.

Roberts grasped its meaning. “You didn’t? Did you? You planted the microorganisms in that soil sample? You couldn’t have!”

“My actions with respect to that soil sample or to Russell Cramer are no concern of yours,” said Ramsanjawi. “But what I choose to dispense to you is very much your concern.”

“You wouldn’t. You…” Roberts’s voice trailed off and his eyes glazed over in fear as he remembered the time Ramsanjawi had given him a specially treated dosage of fentanyl that mimicked the symptoms of heroin withdrawal. For an entire night, Roberts writhed in his sleep compartment, his body racked by alternating currents of chills and sweats, cramps and nausea. And all because he had failed to deliver a sample from one of David Nutt’s test tubes on time.

“Why wouldn’t I?” Ramsanjawi’s voice wove through the thick curtain of the memory. “You haven’t held up your end of our latest bargain.”

“I can’t get close to him,” said Roberts.

“That is absurd. You are his technician.”

“But he works completely alone. He ignores Skillen’s procedures and protocol. I haven’t seen the inside of his lab since the day we moved in his equipment. Honest!”

“These are all routine hurdles,” Ramsanjawi said. “My patience is wearing thin.”

“A little more time,” whined Roberts. “I promise. I’ll get into his lab. I’ll bring you samples of his work.”

“Forget about his work. I have other plans for that when the time comes. Meanwhile, concentrate on his movements. I want a detailed log on everything he does, even something as innocuous as a sneeze.”

“Okay. Yeah. I can do that. That’ll be no sweat. No sweat.”

“Enough simpering,” said Ramsanjawi. With a flick of his hand, he sent a tiny brown bottle tumbling in Roberts’s direction.

Roberts caught the bottle and fumbled with its cap.

“Don’t take that here,” Ramsanjawi said with disgust.

But Roberts did not listen. He pulled off the cap and hungrily devoured the white pill inside.

After Roberts left, Ramsanjawi reached for a bunch of grapes clipped to the wall. He pulled off a single grape and mashed it between his teeth, enjoying the sensation of the juice squirting inside his mouth. Most people are like grapes, he thought. They resist you at first, but once you break through their skin you find only the soft pulp of human weakness.

Ramsanjawi was skilled at identifying the weaknesses in people, and at conjuring ways of exploiting them. He knew that Roberts, with his absurd dreams of composing rock music, would see drugs as a necessary aid to the inspiration he so completely lacked; risky, perhaps, but controllable. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Ramsanjawi chuckled to himself. Roberts believed his pitiful understanding of chemistry could protect him against becoming addicted. Foolish boy.

Ramsanjawi knew that Cramer’s obsession with finding life in the Martian soil made him receptive to the new avenues of thought drugs allegedly produced. Now, with the judicious use of synthetic drugs that he manufactured while his underlings slaved over genetically engineered microbes, he had reduced both men to his only true allies: fear and confusion. Roberts was too scared of withdrawal from his fentanyl dependency not to puncture Hugh O’Donnell’s mysterious veneer; the rest of the station was confused about Cramer’s sudden psychosis.

Ramsanjawi thrived on chaos. It reminded him of his birthplace—Jaipur in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan. His father, a rug merchant, had been murdered in a dispute with a Pakistani trader. His mother, herself an orphan, was unable to arrange a new marriage that would have allowed her to support her five children. Chakra, the oldest, took to living in the streets of Jaipur. He was not alone. Depressed economic conditions, drought, and lack of arable land in Rajasthan drove people to Jaipur by the thousands. The broad avenues and colonnaded walkways, once the pride of northwestern India, disappeared beneath the huts of squatters and the ramshackle booths of sidewalk vendors. A bowl of rice or a piece of bread became luxuries.

But family ties are strong. Chakra’s aunt worked as a cleaning woman for an agency that provided servants for tourists and business visitors. One English couple required a guide for their travels through the region. His aunt told his mother, and his mother bathed scrawny young Chakra and dressed him in the best western clothes she could borrow. He was presented to the English couple as their guide: old enough to know the area, young enough to be a tenth the price of a regular guide.

The man was Sir Walter Brock, the woman was Lady Elizabeth Smythe. They were quite wealthy and, Chakra could see, given to occasional bleedings of the heart. As they toured the countryside, he regaled them with the knowledge he had squirreled away during his last year of schooling—science, art, the history of this corner of the Commonwealth.

It was Lady Elizabeth who suggested that they bring this marvelous, forlorn boy back to England. Sir Walter wondered whether that was proper; they had their son Derek’s feelings to consider. Nonsense, said Lady Elizabeth, Derek and Chakra would get along swimmingly.

Ramsanjawi pulled the empty sac of the grape skin from his mouth. How sweet, how naive Lady Elizabeth, his English mumsy, had been.