Ben Bova - The Trikon Deception

“I defer to the wisdom of Professor Bianco,” he finally said.

Skillen and Oyamo started to protest, but Dan cut them off.

“Is there anything else that concerns me or the crew?” he said.

“There is,” said Jaeckle. “What precautions have you taken to protect us from O’Donnell?”

“He is bound and tethered to the aft bulkhead of the rumpus room. That’s where he’ll stay. He also has a full-time guard.”

“You had Russell Cramer bound and tethered and guarded,” said Jaeckle. “And you saw fit to have him drugged, too. And he hadn’t even killed anyone.”

“Different situations,” said Dan. “At the time, we thought Cramer was suffering from Orbital Dementia, and the medical officer sedated him to prevent any injury to himself and others. O’Donnell ingested a huge amount of fentanyl. Lorraine believes sedation at this point could be harmful.”

“What do you mean that you thought at the time Russell Cramer was suffering from Orbital Dementia? Was there another cause for his behavior?”

“I meant exactly what I said.”

“You mean you don’t think so now?” Jaeckle pressed.

“What I think and why I think it is no concern of yours.”

“Russell Cramer is one of my people.”

“Russell Cramer is no longer aboard this station, which makes him completely irrelevant to this discussion,” said Dan. He pulled loose from his foot restraints and glided toward the open doorway of his office. “Any other requests or suggestions?”

No one said a word. The only sound was Jaeckle snorting angrily at having been rebuffed.

“Good. I have work to do.” Dan pulled himself through the doorway and slid the door shut. He was pissed off himself. A few moments later, as the voices of the scientists receded toward the tunnel, he thought about his reference to Lorraine. In connection with Russell Cramer, she was “the medical officer”; now she was just Lorraine. He wondered what the psych-types on Earth would think about that.

Activities in the Mars module had returned almost to normal. Cautious, fearful talk about the murder of Aaron Weiss soon enough gave way to more animated discussions of Mars-related experiments. Kurt Jaeckle, however, felt anything but normal as his mind circled endlessly within the narrow confines of his office. Unlike his colleagues, neither Mars nor Aaron Weiss was uppermost in his mind. His main concern was Carla Sue Gamble.

Throughout his entire life, Jaeckle always had been careful in his dealings with women. His watchword was power. Never allow a woman to have power over you. Be charming and gallant, witty and intelligent. But never reveal the part of yourself that is most important to you. Knowledge is power, and what every woman wants is power over men.

Now Carla Sue had the power. She had disguised her all-consuming jealousy as a desire to travel to Mars, but the fact remained that no one wanted—no one deserved—to stand on the surface of the red planet as much as he. And now, in this empire that bore the imprint of his hand, in this first way station on his lifetime journey to Mars, he was being victimized by the most primal of human instincts.

The communications blackout might actually be beneficial, he thought as he cracked his accordion door for a peek at the module. He had time to reason with Carla Sue before she could set any foolish plan in motion.

Jaeckle closed the door and booted up his computer. Carla Sue had been working on a long-term project of trying to cultivate terrestrial bacteria in samples of Martian soil returned by the unmanned space probes. The purpose was to determine if earthly life-forms could survive under the subzero temperatures and desert-dry conditions on Mars. If they could, it would be important evidence that native life might exist in those frozen red sands. It would also be a warning that astronauts from Earth could contaminate the planet’s soil with their own microbes.

Her progress seemed to vary in direct proportion to his interest in her. It had lagged seriously during his ill-fated affair with Lorraine Renoir.

Jaeckle summoned Carla Sue’s project files to his computer screen and hastily reviewed her work. A thrill coursed through his body. The microbe-growing project was completely stalled. He quickly tapped out a message for Carla Sue to report to his office immediately. She did not acknowledge, but two minutes later there was a sharp rap on the doorjamb.

Carla Sue had her hair pulled back and knotted, which made her face resemble a beachball with a face painted on it. It was not a happy face as she eyed Jaeckle with her arms folded in front of the hint of breasts that puffed out her uniform shirt.

“I think we have a problem,” said Jaeckle. “I’ve been reviewing your microbe contamination project. Your work has been inadequate.”

“In what way?” said Carla Sue. “I surely haven’t conclusively proved that bacteria can grow under Martian conditions. But I didn’t expect to at this point. You didn’t expect it, either.”

Jaeckle fought the impulse to wince as Carla Sue spat an almost exact quote back in his face. He immediately reversed field.

“That isn’t the point,” he said. “You haven’t logged any tangible results in the past several days.”

“The hell I haven’t, Professor Jaeckle.”

“The computer doesn’t lie,” said Jaeckle, directing her attention to the screen with an arrogant wave of his hand.

Carla Sue squinted at the data display. “That’s all wrong.”

Jaeckle laughed. Without asking permission, Carla Sue brushed past him and quickly typed in a set of commands. The screen changed several times, showing page after page of fresh data.

“You obviously didn’t look at my work very closely, did you, Kurt?” she said. “I guess even my scientific work is yesterday’s news in your book.”

Jaeckle’s embarrassment blossomed into raw anger. He envisioned his face on supermarket tabloids, the brutality and depravity of his private life at once trumpeted and trivialized along with stories of UFOs, alien kidnappings, and Bigfoot. He grabbed her by the shirt just above the bump of her breasts.

“Listen to me, goddammit!” he hissed.

Carla Sue, six inches taller, managed to slip a foot into an anchoring loop. She brought her hands up between Jaeckle’s arms and, with a snap of her wrists, broke his grip. He sailed backward into the rear partition of the office.

They stared at each other—Jaeckle with the horror of realizing he had just lost his composure, Carla Sue with a measure of sad understanding, even pity. She opened the door and slipped out of the office.

Jaeckle did not pursue her. There was no sense in losing his dignity in front of the rest of the Martians. He waited until he knew she would be at her workstation, then keyed an urgent, heartfelt apology into his computer. The stress of the mission was beginning to take its toll, he stated. He was only human.

The more he typed the better he felt. Grabbing Carla Sue was not the end of his world. It was a minor faux pas, something he certainly could repair with politeness, a few well-chosen words, an exaggerated respect for her scientific abilities.

He almost convinced himself.

Fifteen meters away, Carla Sue saw the apology gushing across her screen. She had realized when she embarked on her gambit that her position among the Martians would be changed forever. But she was surprised that Jaeckle had overreacted so quickly.

She wiped Jaeckle’s words from the monitor and stared at her keyboard, wondering whether she should respond.

You’ve already rolled the dice, Carla Sue, she said to herself. You’re in this for the duration.

Her fingers moved across the keys: YOU HAVE JUST PROVEN LAVERNE NELSON’S ALLEGATIONS.