“So’s my own work,” Larkin retorted.
Surprisingly, Chang said, “I can rearrange schedule. It can be altered.”
“What?” Larkin looked astounded.
Chang almost smiled. “You will work same number of hours at the dig. I will stretch out your commitment, give you more time in your lab.”
Jamie asked, “Carter, is that agreeable to you?”
Carleton hesitated, then mumbled, “As long as I have the manpower I need to keep the excavation work going.”
“Zeke?”
Reluctantly, Larkin nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so. If I can spend more time in my lab.”
“Good,” said Chang.
“Thank you, Dr. Chang,” said Jamie gratefully. “You’ve solved the problem.” Silently he added, For the time being. Until the next flare-up.
Then Larkin muttered, “It doesn’t make any difference, anyway. We’ll all be packing up and leaving here before another year is up.”
Jamie didn’t have the heart to contradict him.
From her desk just inside the infirmary’s entrance Vijay could see just about the whole interior of the dome. She watched Larkin and Carleton leave Chang’s office and walk toward the cafeteria without so much as glancing at each other. As if each one of them is totally alone, she thought. Neither one of them wants to acknowledge the presence of the other. Well, at least they’re not screaming at each other.
Jamie was still in the mission director’s office with Chang. He’ll prob’ly be in there for a while yet, Vijay realized. They must have a lot to hash over.
Turning slightly, she saw Larkin get in line at the cafeteria’s counter. Carleton went past him to the coffee urn, poured himself a mug, then looked around for a place to sit. He found an empty table by the curving wall of the dome and sat there, alone, while Larkin filled his tray and joined three other men and women at a table on the other side of the cafeteria. As far away from Carleton as they could get, Vijay saw.
The cafeteria seemed unusually quiet, she thought, conversations muted, little knots of men and women talking in subdued tones, as if they were afraid of being overheard.
It took Vijay a few moments to decide, but then she shut down her desktop computer and went to the cafeteria’s trio of urns to make herself a cup of tea. The water wasn’t much more than tepid and the urns themselves looked dull, almost grimy. Maintenance is slipping, she thought, as she made her way through the tables toward Carleton.
“Mind if I join you?” she asked as she took the chair across the small table from him.
Carleton smirked at her. “You’re not afraid of catching it?”
“Catching? What?”
“Carleton’s disease. It’s something like leprosy. Nobody wants to be near you.” He gestured with one hand; all the tables next to theirs were empty, unoccupied.
“That’s a bit melodramatic, i’n’t it?”
“A bit, perhaps,” he admitted with a slightly sheepish grin. “But they all think of me as some kind of ogre now. The big, bad taskmaster who’s abusing his volunteer helpers.”
Vijay took a sip of the lukewarm tea, then asked, “How do you feel about it?”
He stared at her for a long moment. “This is a psych quiz, isn’t it?”
She lowered her eyes, then replied, “The emotional stability of this group is as important as its physical health. You know that.”
“And I’m a threat to the group’s emotional stability,” he muttered.
Vijay smiled at him. “It’s not about you, Carter.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Not entirely. There are two hundred and some other people here, y’know.”
“Most of whom would gladly push me out the airlock in my Jockey shorts.”
“You are a narcissist,” she said, laughing.
He cocked his head to one side. “It is the stars, the stars above us, govern our conditions.”
“What’s that from? Shakespeare?”
“King Lear, if I remember correctly.”
“Di’n’t Shakespeare also say that the fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves?”
Nodding, Carleton said, “That’s from Julius Caesar.”
“So which is it? The stars or ourselves?”
“Both,” he said, with a tired sigh. “Neither.”
More seriously, Vijay asked, “Are you going to be all right?”
“Me? I’m fine. Go do a psych profile on that hotheaded biologist if you’re looking for a troublemaker.”
“Maybe I should,” she said.
“There you are!” Turning, Vijay saw Jamie approaching their table. She broke into a big smile.
“I thought you were going to stay in Chang’s office all night,” she said.
Jamie pulled a chair from one of the unoccupied tables and sat between Carleton and Vijay. “He needed to have his feathers smoothed a little. He doesn’t show it much, but he gets just as worked up as any of us.”
“You don’t,” Carleton said. “You’re always as cool as a sea breeze.”
“Not inside,” Jamie said. Turning to Vijay, “Had dinner yet?”
“Not yet.”
Looking back at Carleton, Jamie asked, “Would you like to join us?”
Carleton’s eyes nickered from Jamie to Vijay and back again. Then he said, “No thanks. I’m not very hungry this evening.”
He got to his feet and walked away without another word.
Vijay watched him go. “He’s a ticking bomb,” she murmured.
“Just what we need,” said Jamie.
Heading toward his quarters, Carleton had to pass the table where Larkin was sitting with another man and two women. He nodded graciously to them; the lean-faced biologist gave him a wary nod back.
Halfway across the dome, Carleton looked back over his shoulder at Waterman and his wife, standing at the service counter loading their trays, smiling at each other.
She’s beautiful, and therefore to be woo’d, he quoted to himself. She is a woman, therefore to be won.
Tithonium Base: Midnight
Billy Graycloud sipped at a lukewarm mug of coffee as he watched the computer’s latest run scroll down the desktop monitor screen. Outside the partitions of the comm center the dome was dark, shadowy. Everybody else was asleep, Graycloud thought. He had volunteered for the night shift at the comm center so that he could work on his attempt to translate the Martian pictographs. No disturbances. The dome’s life-support systems were running smoothly enough and the occasional message from Earth was never so important that it couldn’t wait until morning to be read and acted on.
Volunteered. Graycloud mulled the word around in his mind. The idea of volunteering had caused a big blowup a few hours earlier. Zeke Larkin and Dr. Carleton were sore enough to start socking each other, Graycloud thought. Right there at the lockers alongside the main airlock. In front of everybody. For a while Graycloud thought that maybe one of them was high on drugs. Maybe both of them.
Even Chang got into it. But then Dr. Waterman came on the scene and calmed them all down. Sitting bleary eyed at the central console in the communications center, Graycloud wondered what Dr. Waterman had done, what he had said, to put an end to the fight. He had no doubt that Dr. W had been the peacemaker. No doubt at all.
Graycloud had been one of the volunteers out at the dig when Larkin had exploded. Dr. Carleton had been pretty bossy, Graycloud thought, but the anthropologist was always a hard-ass out there. He called it his dig and that’s the way he thought of it. Volunteers like me are just supposed to do what we’re told and not talk back.
So what? he asked himself. Why did Larkin get so uptight? Graycloud yawned and stretched his arms over his head. Forget about it. Dr. W smoothed things over. Get back to your own work and stop rehashing what happened this afternoon.