The six tables poked up from the floor like truncated mushrooms. Above each table was an inverted bowl attached to the ceiling by thin pipes. Looking like Art Deco chandeliers, the bowls were actually vents that gently sucked crumbs and errant bits of food onto removable grids. Each table had four bins for holding the magnetized food trays. This limited the wardroom capacity to twenty-four; meals had to be staggered, since the station’s normal population was more than double the wardroom’s capacity. On rotation days it got even worse, with new personnel arriving before the old ones could depart.
Despite its high-tech ambience, the wardroom had the feel of a small-town general store. Except for a few days after a rotation, everybody knew everybody else. A nod or a glance often told as much as words; more, sometimes. Groups combined and recombined from meal to meal as alliances were forged and friendships made—or broken.
O’Donnell found the wardroom crowded when he pulled himself through the hatchway for his first meal. From the pantry he selected a tray of soup, smoked turkey, mixed vegetables, bread, strawberries, and apple juice. Just as he had been taught at his abbreviated preflight briefings, he attached his tray to the magnetic strips on the fold-down door of the galley, placed the turkey and mixed vegetables in the microwave oven, and rehydrated the soup by injecting it with a blast of hot water.
All of the tables were occupied, though none by four people. Three Japanese gathered around one table, their heads bobbing in unison as they efficiently moved precise cuts of food from tray to mouth with their chopsticks. A heavyset dark man with a billowing saffron shirt bellied up to another table, his spindly arms working his utensils like pistons. Lance Muncie and Freddy Aviles were together near the doorway to the ex/rec room.
O’Donnell opted for a table occupied by a pudgy, bearded man wearing a Trikon USA T-shirt. He chose the table less for the man’s nationality than for the amount of food remaining on his tray: He was almost finished with his dinner.
They introduced themselves. The bearded man was David Nutt. He explained that he was due to return to the States on Constellation.
“And not a day too soon, either. I’m not thrilled with the prospect of readjusting to gravity after six months, but this place is played out for me. You’re a biochemist? Microbiologist? What?”
O’Donnell pushed a valved straw into his apple juice.
“That’s the best policy. Don’t answer any questions, not even those asked by compatriots.” Nutt beckoned O’Donnell to lean closer and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Watch your ass and watch your data. See that Jap over there, the fat one with the crewcut? He’s Hisashi Oyamo, head of the Japanese group. He’ll kill you with politeness. All bowing and hissing. But one of those little pricks with him stole genetic data files from my computer.”
“So I heard,” said O’Donnell. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” said Nutt bitterly. “Oyamo called Tighe’s bluff and now the damned Jap’s going back home with my data on a bugged disk. They’ll figure out a way to get past the bug and then they’ll have everything I’ve worked six months to accomplish. Fucking zipperheads.”
“Racial epithets are not in the Trikon spirit,” O’Donnell said, working to keep his face straight. “It says so in the orientation manual.”
“Those fairy tales! And see that one over there with the yellow tent for a shirt? He’s Dr. Chakra Ramsanjawi, the former pride of Oxford.”
“He looks pretty dark for a Brit.”
“He’s the head of the European section.”
“I thought the Brits weren’t involved in Trikon,” said O’Donnell.
“They aren’t. Politics keeps them at arm’s length from the rest of United Europe, so they decided to keep their scientists out of Trikon. Personally, I think they regret it.”
“Then why is Ramsanjawi here?”
“He’s had a hard-on for the Brits ever since he was dismissed as head of the biochem department at Oxford. Sex and drug scandal. You know, the type of story that keeps the tabloids in the black. He swears he’s innocent of all charges. Trikon is his way of sticking it in the Brits’ ear.”
“Did he break into your computer files, too?”
“Not that I can prove.” With some effort, Nutt forced himself lower and covered his mouth with his free hand. “When I came here six months ago the United Europe lab was a joke. They didn’t know a microbe from a bathrobe. Then Ramsanjawi comes up here and bingo, they know everything we Americans and the Canadians took months to synthesize and more. You tell me they aren’t stealing.”
“I can’t. But, Dave, how do you know what they know?” O’Donnell smiled impishly.
“Stick it, O’Donnell, willya?” Nutt yanked his food tray out of its bin and floated off.
Good thing he’s leaving, O’Donnell thought. Guy’s like a live bomb, ready to go off any minute.
O’Donnell ate slowly and carefully. Surface tension held the food in the containers and on his utensils, although the mixed vegetables escaped if he loaded too many onto his fork. Crumbs from his bread spiraled up into the vent like a lilliputian dust devil.
The music hid most of the dinnertime chatter. The only distinct voices he could hear belonged to Freddy Aviles and Lance Muncie.
“You din’ finish, man.”
“I’ve had enough.”
“Thought you were feeling better.”
“I am.”
“So why don’ you finish?”
“I know my digestive system better’n you do, okay, Freddy? I’ve had enough.”
A wide-hipped man wearing a red flight suit emblazoned with the circle and arrow insignia of the Mars Project maneuvered through the tables. His eyelids blinked rapidly and his head bobbed like a chicken’s. He looked at everyone in the wardroom, obviously considering and rejecting them as companions for his evening meal, then sank into footloops at O’Donnell’s table. Despite his girth, his shoulders were narrow and his collarbones resembled a pair of twigs beneath the fabric of his flight suit. His brown hair was greased and plastered across his forehead for maximum coverage. Unbound by a hairnet, one strand had worked free and stood upright like an antenna. The name tag above the project insignia read: R. cramer.
“Howdy, pal,” said O’Donnell. He extended his hand. Cramer did not look up from his tray, although O’Donnell detected a grunt that might have been a greeting. O’Donnell’s hand dangled unshaken in the wash of the vent. He saved face by nipping at a bread crumb with his fingers.
Cramer went at his food like a man with palsy. No amount of surface tension could have bonded the food to his shaking fork. Crumbs and vegetables soon formed a cloud above his tray, drifting slowly upward. He tried batting an errant cube of brown mystery meat toward his mouth, and grew increasingly angry with each miss. Finally, he let it float up into the vent.
“Are these strawberries always this bad?” asked O’Donnell.
“You should have rehydrated them,” said Cramer. He swiped at another cube of meat, but succeeded only in shooting it through the doorway to the exercise room. He slammed his fork against the table. “Damn!”
O’Donnell took his tray to the nearest galley and zapped his strawberries with a jet of cold water. He considered joining Freddy and Muncie. Even they would be better company than Cramer. But when he noticed Dr. Renoir hovering close to Cramer’s ear, he glided back to his place and tried to look as if he weren’t eavesdropping. Their topic of conversation seemed important, and they both kept their voices almost too low to hear.
“—supposed to meet at sixteen hundred hours,” she was saying.