Ben Bova: The Trikon Deception

Tighe had worked with many scientists during his years in the Air Force and with NASA. He was accustomed to competing philosophies because scientists and the military usually were at odds. But on Trikon Station there were cliques within cliques. The Americans stayed with the Americans. The Japanese stayed with the Japanese. And the Europeans, true to their history, fought among themselves as well as with all the others. While the corporations that employed them trumpeted the benefits of cooperative research in slick brochures and television specials, the scientists were more competitive than Olympic athletes. They never traded information willingly and regarded each other with the warmth of professional assassins. The situation was particularly tense just prior to a rotation. Every ninety days a third of the scientific staff was replaced by new people from Earth. That was when a successful industrial spy could take his loot back home.

“That’s what happened,” said Nutt, winding up his explanation.

Tighe leaned close to the keyboard as if scrutinizing it for fingerprints. He realized how ridiculous he must have looked and pushed himself away.

“What do you want me to do about it?” he asked.

“Search everybody on the station! Force whoever downloaded the files to turn them over.”

“I’m not a policeman.”

“This is very sensitive material! It’s…”

“And I’m in a very sensitive position. I’m not just dealing with an international contingent of scientists. There’s a couple of dozen governments who view these scientists as diplomats. If I start strong-arming people without good cause, the shit will fall on my head, nobody else’s.”

“You’re saying I should work for six months, have my results stolen, and do absolutely nothing about it?”

“The files are still in your computer, right?” said Tighe. “They’ve been copied, not stolen.”

Nutt reluctantly nodded.

“Then consider yourself a benefactor of mankind.”

“The hell I will!”

“You’re supposed to be working cooperatively with all the others, aren’t you? Why the panic?”

“I want the credit!” Nutt snarled through gritted teeth. “I did the work and I want the credit for it. The work’s got to be published in my name. A scientist’s reputation depends on his publications, his discoveries. Don’t you understand that?”

Roberts decided it bad gone far enough. Gliding over toward his flustered boss and the tight-lipped station commander, he interrupted, “Hey, there’s really no problem.”

Tighe looked at Roberts, then cocked his head toward Nutt. The scientist’s bearded, puffy face twisted into a grimace of exasperation.

“Explain yourself,” Tighe said to Roberts.

“Dave put that security subprogram into his PC because he was worried about theft. I had a suspicion that the subprogram could be fooled, so I played around with it. Sure enough, I was able to hack into the files and download them.”

Roberts produced a diskette from a pouch pocket of his pants.

“You did it!” screamed Nutt. He pushed himself at Roberts and knocked the diskette out of his hand. The diskette skittered crazily in midair while the two men tumbled in a confusion of arms and legs. Tighe pried them apart.

“Explain yourself,” Tighe said again to Roberts. “Fast.”

“That wasn’t Dave’s files,” said Roberts, rubbing his forehead gingerly. “It was another subprogram I wrote to protect the files. Whoever downloaded them will never be able to access them, not without jamming his own computer.”

Tighe shot a look at Nutt, who was glaring at the technician.

“Say that again,” Tighe commanded Roberts.

“I wrote in a bug that’s programmed to be triggered by an unauthorized download. When somebody tries to access the stolen files, his monitor will fill with I AM A THIEF in big yellow characters and the bug will replicate itself in his computer.”

Tighe suddenly grabbed Roberts by the front of his coveralls.

“Can you delete that program?”

“I think so.”

“Don’t tell me what you think.” Tighe wedged one foot into a floor loop and shook Roberts as if he were made of straw. “Yes or no? Can you delete it without starting the bug?”

“Yeah…Yes!”

“Do it. Top priority. And when you’re finished, find that disk and break it into little pieces. If we’re fast enough and lucky enough, we just might get through this alive.”

Tighe pulled himself into a tuck and shot like a torpedo through the hatchway.

“Am I missing something?” said Roberts.

“You fucking idiot!” screamed Nutt. “The computer terminals are all tied into the station’s mainframe! If whoever downloaded the file tries to access them here, that bug will worm its way into life support and kill us all!”

The Earth is dying. The human race is rushing headlong toward extinction.

The problem is not for our grandchildren, or our children. The problem is ours. It is happening now. The dying has already begun.

We are killing ourselves. Smog chokes our cities. Farmlands are becoming barren while megatons of chemical fertilizers poison groundwater. Deserts are expanding, and rain forests are rapidly being destroyed. The ozone layer is being eaten away by pollution. Global temperatures are rising toward the greenhouse level.

Worst of all, the oceans — the great embracing mother seas that are the foundation of all life on our planet — the oceans are being fouled so thoroughly that all life will die off in a few short years.

We do not have a century to clean up the environment. We do not even have decades. The oceans are already beginning to die. We are in a race against our own extinction.

And while the Earth dies, most people go about their daily lives as if nothing is happening. Unthinking, uncaring, they are helping to kill the Earth, murdering their own world, committing mass suicide.

A few persons are aware of the danger. Very few. Some try to get their fellow humans to pay attention, to stop fouling the Earth. Some even blame our modern technology for polluting our air and water to the point where the entire environment is beginning to collapse around us.

They are almost right.

The basic problem is that human habits change slowly, so slowly. A hundred thousand years ago, what did it matter to a Stone Age hunter that his campfire sent smoke into the air, or that he urinated into a clear mountain brook? But today, with six billion humans burning and urinating, life on Earth cannot survive much longer.

There are those who say we must stop all technology and return to a simpler way of life. How can that be done without killing most of the people on Earth? We depend on our technology to produce food for us, to give us heat and light, to protect us against disease. To stop our technology would mean allowing billions to starve and freeze and die.

Instead of stopping technology, we must invent new technologies, clean and efficient ways to do all that our old technologies have done for us — without polluting our world to death.

And we must invent a means to clean up the filth that is choking our air and our water, destroying the atmosphere and the oceans. We need that now, if we are to survive the next few years.

That is why I created Trikon. To save the world. To save the human race.

But salvation means change, and most people fear change more than anything else. To save the Earth means that we must engage in genetic research. There is no other way. Only by developing new forms of life, creating microbes that can eat up our pollutants and convert them into harmless biodegradable waste matter, can we hope to cleanse the Earth quickly enough to avert our own destruction.