“You must be O’Donnell,” said a female voice, sharp as a whipcrack.
O’Donnell pushed aside the canisters and saw an unsmiling woman with a strong jawline, chiseled nose, and a salt-and-pepper crewcut.
“I’m Thora Skillen, coordinating scientist for this laboratory.” She extended her hand through the open door. It was red and blistered, as if she washed with hydrochloric acid. Her lab smock was blotched with faint yellow stains like amoebae. “Trikon certainly threw us a curve adding you. This was the only space available.”
“Tight, but I’ll manage.”
“Trikon informed me that you brought your own materials and supplies but will occasionally require use of our hardware.” Skillen pressed her palms against each of the canisters as if to divine their contents. “Remember that my people have preference.”
“You won’t even know I’m here,” said O’Donnell.
“I hope not,” Skillen said. She seemed coiled with an inner tension, almost vibrating with barely suppressed hostility. “I will cooperate with you as long as it doesn’t interfere with my group’s work. But I will not sacrifice my project for yours, whatever it is.”
She jutted out her chin, nodded in a combination of warning and farewell, and sailed back into The Bakery.
“Charming, isn’t she?” said Roberts.
“I’ve met worse,” O’Donnell said, silently adding, But I’m not sure where.
“Thora baby is the hardest of the hard-asses. When I heard she wasn’t going back Earthside this rotation, I almost decided to go back myself. Could have, too. I’ve been here six months.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Not ready yet. Got to have a lot more songs down before I hit the studios. By the way, what are you working on that you rate your own lab?”
O’Donnell ignored the question as he studied the walls, figuring how he would arrange his equipment.
“Oh, shit!” Roberts blurted.
O’Donnell turned in time to see the lid of the first canister fly open. The effect was textbook jack-in-the-box. Books, diskettes, micro-gee vials, beakers, jars, bottles, test tubes spewed out and swarmed around the room.
O’Donnell lunged past Roberts and pulled the door shut before anything could escape into The Bakery.
“Sorry,” Roberts said with a laugh. “You should see when that happens in the big lab. Sometimes we don’t find things for weeks.”
O’Donnell grunted, unamused.
“Don’t sweat the details, man. If you ever can’t find anything, check the ventilators. Everything ends up stuck to them eventually. Small stuff, anyway. You’ll get used to it. Becomes second nature after you’ve been here awhile.”
Roberts easily began picking objects out of the air. O’Donnell wasn’t as dexterous and batted away as many things as he caught.
“Hey, what’s this?” said Roberts. He waved a glassine bag containing powdery red soil.
“Dirt.”
“I know it’s dirt. Where’s it from?”
O’Donnell squinted in thought. “Georgia.”
“Georgia in the United States?”
“Yes, Georgia in the United States.”
“You could have been talking about the Georgia in Russia.” Roberts held the bag up to the light. “Never seen dirt like this before. This is redder than the soil from Mars. I know. One of my buddies has been analyzing the Mars soil. Says he found evidence of life in it, but nobody believes him. What’re you doing with this?”
“Part of my experiment.”
“Will you stop talking to me like I’m a kid,” said Roberts. “I know this is soil and I know it’s part of your experiment.”
O’Donnell looked at the scarecrow face, the brick-red hair matted beneath its net, the bony elbows and knees. He had been with Roberts barely an hour and already he wished that the young tech had been scared Earthside by the personable Ms. Skillen.
“You people are working on phase one of a very complicated project,” he said. “I’m working on phase two.”
Roberts’s face lit up with recognition.
“I get it. This soil contains toxic wastes already neutralized by microbes.”
“Right,” O’Donnell lied. “And I’m here to test whether it will be as useful as everyone expects.”
They swept the rest of the flying objects into the opened canister and closed the lid. O’Donnell inspected the door that separated his lab from The Bakery. The latch was broken beyond repair, but the outside surface had a hasp and eyelet.
“Are there any padlocks lying around?” he said.
“Not lying. Floating around, maybe.” Roberts’s grin vanished when he saw that O’Donnell did not smile. “I’m pretty friendly with some of the crew. They might have one.”
“See what you can do,” said O’Donnell. “One with a combination rather than a key.
“Oh sure, I’ll just trot down to the hardware store.”
O’Donnell frowned.
“I’m going, I’m going.”
After Roberts sailed away, O’Donnell closed the door as best he could. He popped the lock of the second canister and opened the lid slowly. Simi Bioengineering, his immediate employer and a member corporation of the North American arm of Trikon International, had rushed it to Cape Canaveral after the incident that led to the station’s power-down. It housed the most powerful and sophisticated laptop computer available. The station’s mainframe and terminals were off limits to O’Donnell. No one would have an opportunity to steal his data files.
He deflated an air bladder. Behind it were several dozen plant sprigs tightly bound in glass jars. The roots were swaddled with moist cotton pads and the leaves were carefully positioned so they would not bend or break inside the jars.
He unbound one of the jars and spread it open. The leaves were oblong and shiny. Healthy. Lethal. A chill coursed through his body and he shuddered involuntarily.
He was damned glad Roberts hadn’t seen these.
Thora Skillen’s cubbyhole office was at the opposite end of The Bakery from O’Donnell’s makeshift lab. She pushed herself past the open door and slid it shut.
Who is this O’Donnell and why is he here? she asked herself as she booted up her personal computer. He isn’t part of the ordinary Trikon staff. His work was to be kept separate from everyone else’s, she had been told pointedly by the corporate brass in New York. Why? What will he be doing? Nobody back Earthside had been able to find out a thing about him, so far.
The only possible answer frightened her. He’s been sent here to spy on me. They suspect me and they’ve sent a security agent to catch me up.
I’m all alone up here, Skillen realized. There’s no one here to help me. It’s all well and good for the sisters back Earthside to tell one another how much they hate the idea of bioengineering, how wrong and dangerous it is to tinker with genes, even the genes of microbes. They can sit back there and tell themselves how they’d blow up Trikon Station if they had the chance. But they’re not here to help me. I’m alone. It’s up to me.
Kurt Jaeckle forced his left hand down to the keyboard and saw a character appear on the screen of his word processor. Z. Goddammit, he had aimed for A. He found the backspace key, deleted the Z, and carefully moved his forefinger to A.
Typing had been tedious drudgery on Earth, but in micro-gee it was downright physically exhausting. He could not find a comfortable level for the machine and constantly fought the natural tendency of his hands to float above the keyboard. After a half hour of typing, he usually had a ribbon of sharp pain running from his shoulders to the tip of his forefingers.
Even on Earth, where gravity aided the fingers and secretaries were plentiful, Jaeckle insisted on typing his own scripts. He knew that words made dollars fall like manna and that dollars would shape the future of the Mars Project. He wanted no one fooling around with his words.