“Obviously not,” said Dan.
“Riding it on a bike compares with driving it in a car or tour bus like being in this station compares with a space walk.”
And that is your salvation, thought Dan as a few more pieces of the puzzle fell into place. Nice recovery, O’Donnell, but not good enough.
Kurt Jaeckle pressed a strip of rubber seal along the edge of the blister’s door. The new hinges were so stiff he could set the door at any angle without it flapping like a wing. The Mars module was quiet except for tiny bits of debris occasionally pinging against the ventilator grids. He didn’t notice Lorraine Renoir until she was at his shoulder.
“The chief scientist of the Mars Project is reduced to menial repair work?” she said, with a slight smile.
Jaeckle let his eyes meander from her toes to her hair, taking every possible moment to think of a clever rejoinder. She was barefoot. Her flight pants had been altered into shorts that clung to her hips like a second skin. Her breasts rose beneath her blue Trikon T-shirt with each breath.
“This isn’t repair work,” he said. “I’m a parent healing my child.”
“Tres corny, Professor.”
“I thought it was romantic,” said Jaeckle, reaching for her.
Lorraine shrugged and slipped away from Jaeckle to peer into the open mouth of the blister. The clamshell was retracted and the blister was bright with Earthglow. She felt a sense of vertigo, as if she could dive through that doorway and not stop falling until she landed on the tiny cotton swabs three hundred miles below. She looked again at Jaeckle. His brown eyes were piercing, penetrating. Maybe it wasn’t vertigo.
She always had been too analytical. She had never believed in Santa Claus. She never even believed in Bonhomme, which was astounding for a child growing up in Quebec City. During one Winter Carnival, she refused to join a group of classmates in front of the Ice Palace for a photograph with the seven-foot snowman who served as the carnival’s traditional master of ceremonies. He’s a figment of our imagination, she had said in English to her teacher.
Ever since Jaeckle had asked her to assist him on television, she had tried to look beyond the media personality that cloaked him like Bonhomme’s costume. She knew of Jaeckle’s reputation with women. She knew he wanted more from her than the TV show. Very deliberately, she decided to stop trying to analyze Jaeckle’s motives. She was finished with analysis. It hadn’t worked in her relationships on Earth, and it hadn’t worked on the station with Dan. She was constantly waiting for moments when the music would rise, the lights would dim, and the unseen audience would hold its collective breath. Russell Cramer’s episode and her accidental alliance with Jaeckle stripped away her complacency. This wasn’t theater, this was life. Time to meet Kurt Jaeckle. Time to find out what he’s really like—what I’m really like.
Lorraine flipped herself into the blister. Jaeckle followed, pulling the door closed behind him. The soft colors of twilight played through the dome.
“A parent healing your child,” Lorraine murmured to him. “Perhaps that is romantic, after all.”
“Am I a father figure to you?” he whispered back.
Before she could reply, his hands moved up her legs. His fingers were roughened from the repair work, and the scratchiness added to her excitement. He pulled her pants below her knees and kissed the insides of her thighs.
“Are you a naughty little girl?” Jaeckle crooned softly. “Do you want to be naughty for Daddy?”
Lorraine clutched at a handhold over her head and tried to move away from him, but Jaeckle held her legs firmly in the fading light as his tongue darted between her thighs.
The Rolls-Royce Corniche sped west from London on the M4. Early morning sunlight filtered weakly through clouds that bellied over the nearby hillocks. Rain hammered the pavement in a steady drone, punctuated by occasional cracks of thunder.
The Rolls was as large and sturdy as a fair-sized truck. Inside it, Harry Meade had no sense of the rainstorm lashing the south of England, hardly any sense of motion at all, the car rode so solidly on the smooth highway. The spacious rear compartment was completely soundproof and the windows were so darkly tinted that the streaking raindrops were invisible. He shifted his large frame within the cramped confines of the jumpseat. Sir Derek Brock-Smythe, dressed in a waistcoat, riding pants, and boots, reclined on a miniature leather chesterfield. A low mahogany table separated the two men.
Sir Derek traced esses in the air with a delicate finger as he speed-read several pages of typescript. On a shelf above the wet bar, brandy lapped gently in a Tyrone crystal decanter. Harry Meade licked his lips.
“Splendid,” said Sir Derek. He removed a fountain pen from his jacket pocket and drew neat circles around certain words on the pages. “This touching conversation between Chakra and his wife contains the key to neutralizing two particularly dastardly toxic-waste molecules. Hisashi Oyamo has no inkling how intelligent and accommodating he can be.”
Sir Derek hummed gaily as he continued extricating coded words from the transcript. Harry Meade pressed his face against the dark window glass. Within his pale reflection, there was only the barest hint of the Berkshire Downs. The island of hair left by his receding hairline looked scraggly. He wiped it with the palm of his hand.
Sir Derek’s humming stopped like the disconnect tone of an old English phone box. Harry Meade had only a general knowledge of the complex code Chakra Ramsanjawi employed to smuggle biochemical information out of Trikon Station over unsecured phone lines. But he knew enough to have recognized that the latter portion of the conversation was devoted to Hugh O’Donnell. Sir Derek was reading that portion now; he did not appear happy.
Meade returned his attention to the window. But instead of searching for landmarks in the dim countryside or features on his lined face, he concentrated on the reflection of Sir Derek flipping through the transcript. After several minutes, Sir Derek cleared his throat.
“Ring up the lab and transmit these pages posthaste,” he said as he tapped the first portion of the transcript into a uniform pile on the knee-high table.
Harry Meade scuttled off the jumpseat and took the pages in hand. Bending over double in a space tailored to Sir Derek’s proportions, he opened the jumpseat adjacent to the limousine’s communications center. The Lancashire lab’s fax number was stored in the machine’s memory. Harry secured a connection quickly. As he fed the pages into the machine, he cast an occasional glance at the window. Sir Derek was again busy circling words with his pen.
Sir Derek abruptly dropped the pages onto the table and got up from the leather couch. He was so tiny that he could almost stand erect inside the Corniche. Leaning forward over the mahogany table, he took the Tyrone decanter and a snifter from the shelf and poured a shot of brandy. Then he sat again facing Harry Meade, the snifter twinkling in his hands, the starched cuffs of his white shirt perfectly placed on his wrists, his booted heels pressed together on the exquisite Persian carpet, barely swaying as the Rolls negotiated a sweeping curve.
“What have you learned about Hugh O’Donnell?” he asked.
Meade heard the static that seemed to buzz between his ears whenever Sir Derek confronted him with the slightest bit of displeasure. What was the latest word on O’Donnell? He felt his fingers involuntarily gripping the lip of the jumpseat as he tried to gather his thoughts.
“We hacked into the computerized personnel files of Simi Bioengineering,” said Meade. “It doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know. He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1984 and has been working for Simi since ’96.”