Lifeline

Chapter 5

ORBITECH 1—Day 2

Curtis Brahms unsealed the desk and withdrew his bronze-rimmed eyeglasses. He slid them on, careful not to disturb his precise blond hair. The lenses in the glasses were blanks, for show only, but they made him look older. At twenty-nine, the youngest associate director ever, Brahms felt too self-conscious of his wunderkind status. And right now he needed to command respect. He insisted on holding the meeting in his own office chamber.

The actual director of Orbitech 1, Roha Ombalal, slouched next to him in shock. His expression showed little life. Ombalal had spent half a day poring over the detailed disaster plan developed by the Orbitechnologies Corporation years before. Brahms had heard him mumbling to himself, astonished and dismayed because “the plan was supposed to cover every emergency!”

Indeed, Orbitechnologies had not thought of every scenario. They had not even designed life-support pods into the station: Brahms felt sure that they hadn’t considered it cost-effective to provide “lifeboats” for all fifteen hundred inhabitants.

Across from him sat the R & D Division leader, Allen Terachyk, who looked little better than Ombalal—a wrong word might bring down his mental house of cards, and Brahms didn’t have time for that. He needed Terachyk to help him find the right information. Ombalal could be ignored for the moment.

“Well, Allen? Do you think you can do it?” Brahms added a distinct compassionate tone to his voice. Terachyk was six years older than Brahms, and kept his brown hair cropped very close to his head. Black-framed eyeglasses stood out heavily on his face.

Terachyk blinked at Brahms, his expression as blank and open as a test pattern. Brahms kept his face carefully neutral and reached over to turn on the desktop computer terminal. He swiveled the holoscreen to face Terachyk. Terachyk remained sitting with his hands folded in his lap. Ombalal blinked, but offered no assistance.

Brahms scowled. This was like trying to work with mannequins. He picked up the keypad and dropped it in Terachyk’s lap.

“Allen? Hello? Is anybody in there? Come on, you came up through Computer Applications—I need that information. Do you still remember how to get it?”

Terachyk squinted at the holoscreen and stared at the keypad in his lap. “Ask me in a couple days, Curtis—I’ll be all right then.”

“We don’t have a couple days, Allen. I have to know now.”

“Dammit, can’t you have a little compassion?” Terachyk flared up. “What difference does it make?”

Brahms set his mouth. He always worked very hard at showing compassion; he considered it one of his strong points.

Terachyk had been on Orbitech 1 for more than three years, and he was due to be rotated home in four months. He’d been a model employee, one of the most exceptional workers on the colony. A wife and four sons waited for him in Baltimore.

Or had. From the first scattered reports they’d received, Baltimore had been obliterated in the War.

Two months before, Ombalal’s wife and children had been sent home under some sort of cover story that no one believed. On company orders, Ombalal remained on Orbitech 1, his self-esteem badly hurt, while Brahms took over the station.

Brahms tapped his fingernails on the desktop. Ombalal knew he had no part in the discussion. “Allen, listen to me. The other people here haven’t figured out how desperate our situation is. They’re still going to be waiting for rescue ships.”

“McLaris figured it out,” Terachyk mumbled.

Brahms reddened but maintained his control. He saw bright white light behind his eyes, but he blinked it away. “You and I both know that Orbitech 1 was never meant to be self-sufficient. We have fifteen hundred employees here—tap into the database, get the exact inventory of our supplies. You can determine how much our gardens will produce right now. Model our consumption rate. Run a worst-case study. Use different rationing schemes.”

Terachyk kept his eyes turned away from the associate director, but he seemed to be paying attention. Brahms studied him, made a flash analysis of his reactions—yes, it was obvious. Terachyk would resent being brought back to the real world and its problems. He might turn his despair into anger toward Brahms for pulling him out of his misery.

But Brahms was willing to take that chance. He needed the colony to survive; he didn’t give a damn what the employees thought of his methods. Orbitech 1 had been left in his care, not Ombalal’s—Orbitechnologies had made that perfectly clear.

Brahms spoke quietly to Terachyk. “I have to know how long we can last, Allen. And I have to know before people start asking those questions.”

A moment passed.

Reluctantly, Terachyk logged on. He flashed a bitter glance at Brahms, then stared at the screen. In a few moments, his fingers picked up speed as he allowed the problem to distract him from his own memories.

Brahms nodded in encouragement. Push the right buttons, and he knew he could get the right reactions.

He watched Terachyk work. Nothing was routine anymore, nothing straightforward. Brahms was being sent through the fire, given an impossible task to manage. He felt himself hardening, rising to the job that had to be done. The people of Orbitech 1 were lucky to have him—they would have no chance at all relying on Ombalal.

Brahms studied the dark-skinned man. Roha Ombalal had been a brilliant chemist but was an utterly incompetent manager. The tall Indian had a soft, gentle voice with the potential for projecting a great deal of authority. Brahms had envied Ombalal for that, but scorned him for not making use of his gift. He could have been a perfect leader image, paternal and intelligent—all the things that Brahms, with his youth and clean-cut, boyish appearance, did not have.

But Ombalal was not a successful administrator—he had his priorities all wrong.

The Indian chemist had wanted everyone to like him, wanted the Orbitech 1 people to think of him as a benevolent manager, someone they could talk to.

To foster his image, or maybe just to avoid his other duties, Ombalal had spent a great deal of time wandering through the labs, looking at all the work being done. Occasionally, he would become fascinated with the research, interfering and not getting his own administrative work done. Some of the scientists may have loved him for his genuine interest; others thought he was harassing them, getting in the way.

But what could the parent corporation expect? Orbitechnologies had a consistent policy of “rewarding” brilliant researchers with promotions into administrative posts. Brahms stated his own position frequently: “I wouldn’t put a scientist in an important managerial position any more than I would put an administrator in a lab doing research.”

When Orbitechnologies finally relieved the director of his duties and ordered Brahms to replace him, Ombalal’s family had been sent home, but he had been allowed to stay for a while, as a figurehead, only to save face.

Roha Ombalal had been devastated, wide-eyed and baffled at his misfortune. Brahms could tell that the director had never failed like this before, and he still didn’t seem to grasp what exactly he had done wrong.

“Knock, knock?”

Brahms looked up and scowled at the obese man who strode into his office. Tim Drury, the Maintenance/Services Division leader, began to speak, but Brahms held up his hand, indicating Terachyk intent at the terminal.

“Don’t disturb him. He’s doing something for me.”

Drury shrugged. “Question—when are we going to start getting things back to normal? We’ve told everybody they have a few days off to recover from the shock, but some service parts have already started fizzling. My people are going to have to go back to their maintenance duties before long. It’s going to be dregs for their morale if they’re the only ones back on the job.” Drury threw a glance at Ombalal and lowered his voice. He knew who really made the decisions. “Are you going to restart the production lines, Curtis?”

“I’m just the associate director.” Brahms kept his gaze on Ombalal, trying to spark some life in the man.

“Ask me if it makes any difference now.” Drury rolled his eyes. He didn’t seem to realize what Brahms was trying to do.

Drury had long, curly blond hair and a bushy reddish mustache poised on his upper lip as if it intended to launch itself off at any moment. And he was huge.

Brahms disliked people who had such low self-esteem that they allowed themselves to get so enormously fat. “A lazy body is the sign of a lazy mind” he had always believed. Brahms kept himself in good shape, reveling in the fine-tuned feel to his body. But Drury was always so good-natured it was difficult to be angry at the man.

Ombalal finally spoke. “He is correct, Mr. Brahms. Do not let me hold you back.”

Brahms removed his glasses, blinking in the light. “Well we have the raw materials to last us a while. Just no food. Yes, all divisions will return to work. It’ll distract them, keep them quiet for a little longer. Until we can think of something.”

Drury smirked. “How can the universe bear to go on without a continual supply of our no-smear lipstick? Or airy-but-durable single-molecular weaves for the height of fashion!” He paused. “But what about Production Division? Who’s going to fill McLaris’s place—now that he’s taken, er, a brief leave of absence?” The heavyset man made a maddeningly aloof smile.

Once again, Brahms burned. McLaris’s theft of the shuttle-tug was an appalling betrayal of Brahms’s leadership—a betrayal of all the good people on Orbitech 1. Not only had McLaris taken the last working shuttle, but he had shocked the colonists, called attention to their desperate situation, before Brahms could find a way to solve things. McLaris had stolen their icon of hope, the symbol that allowed them to think they still had a link with Earth. Even now, McLaris was en route to the Moon, safe and free, leaving the rest of them trapped. Trapped.

Brahms threw a glance at Ombalal, hoping that the man might volunteer for McLaris’s former position. The station director continued to stare at his large feet.

“I’ll take over his duties,” Brahms said, sighing. How could McLaris have done such a thing? He eased back, breathing slowly, slapping a mask of composure on his face. Brahms hated himself for these lapses into weakness, these brief moments without control. He had never been so quick to anger before.

“Okay.” Drury shrugged. “How about a game of checkers, anybody?”

Brahms bristled. “Fifteen hundred people have their throats up against the razor blade right now—we have to find a way to survive!”

Brushing aside the associate director’s retort, Drury spread his meaty hands. “Oh, things’ll work out in the end. Positive thinking, Curtis. Give it a whirl.”

“Get the hell out of here!”

Waving, Drury left, wandering back out into the corridor of administrative offices. The silica-fiber carpeting muffled his footsteps.

Drury had been with the parent company for the past fourteen years. He was a competent manager, but not truly gifted. Brahms, who had done the numbers himself, knew that Drury had not scored well on the Efficiency Study.

Four months before, Brahms’s supervisor back on Earth had spent hours briefing him about what the company expected. The bookkeepers and resource managers looked with glee upon the enormous profits generated from the exotic products created on Orbitech 1.

In such isolation the entire political and social structure of the station could be compared to the frontier days of Earth. Orbitechnologies wanted to know how well the colony was doing in relation to how well it could be doing. Was it operating at its greatest efficiency? They wanted Curtis Brahms to go up and find out, to make suggestions for improvement. He had a knack for learning things like that.

As the Earth-to-orbit vehicle took Brahms up to rendezvous with the shuttle-tug that would carry him out to L-5, he simmered with excitement. Brahms felt so proud, so sure of himself. He could almost smell something in the air, like a premonition.

Before he had left, Forbes ran a small article spotlighting him as an up-and-coming manager, loaded with administrative dynamite and filled with new perspectives and ideas. Prime time had come for Curtis Brahms. Everything would fall into place at the moment he stepped out onto the docking bay of Orbitech 1 and got to work.

He did not ever intend a vendetta against the former director. Instead, he approached his Efficiency Study with a single-minded insistence to get it done right. Brahms saw this as a great chance to put a gold star on his own career, but he also derived immense satisfaction just from making things work better.

Bright-sounding progress reports and extravagant promises from Roha Ombalal would no longer be sufficient for Orbitechnologies. Brahms had a gut-level feeling that Ombalal was an incompetent director, but he waited until the hard numbers tallied on the spreadsheets.

He developed broad criteria for assessing efficiency. The fifteen hundred people had to fit together as a unit. Productivity must be maximized; waste must be minimized; but the people themselves must remain satisfied as well, which seemed to be the most difficult factor to measure.

Brahms set up an extensive survey form on the Orbitech 1 computers, which processed the demographic data and scored people on numerous criteria, such as their material productivity, their health, the quality and speed of their work, their ability to get things accomplished by a deadline. Then he rated the “fuzzy” factors, such as their general attitude, their ability to work and live with others as a community so that Orbitech 1 was more than just a giant factory in space.

Over the months, Brahms dug into every detail of the workers’ lives. He studied how happy they were, trying to find which ones wanted to go back to Earth, which ones were still afraid or uncomfortable about living in space, and which ones felt exhilarated and honored to be on the station. He encouraged them to be honest, and thought he had been fairly successful.

Brahms conducted a dozen interviews per day, every day of the week. He watched tapes of the interviews over again to double-check his impressions, then beamed them back to Earth for secondary analysis by one of the company’s other teams.

He spent weeks collating information, massaging numbers through a new computer model developed at Orbitechnologies. Looking at his preliminary results, Brahms called about a hundred of the people back again for a second interview. Brahms chose these interviewees carefully and watched their responses as he asked them questions about other colonists. By studying the way they responded to the questions, he gained a second impression about them, and gleaned some information about other colonists.

After four months of wearing himself thin, convincing everyone on the station that he was too cold and too hard, Brahms packaged up the results of his study and transmitted them to Earth. Orbitechnologies thanked him, told him to remain on the colony until further notice, and kept silent for a week while they interpreted the results.

Brahms waited, exhausted but utterly satisfied with his efforts. He was optimistic, hoping that with his background, some lucky breaks, and a hell of a lot of hard work on other projects, he might have a chance as associate director of Orbitech 2, the companion station now under construction at L-4.

Then Orbitechnologies unexpectedly relieved Roha Ombalal of most of his duties, and told Brahms to step in as associate director. He drifted in a state of shock for several days, not fully comprehending his good fortune and sudden responsibilities, until the day Ombalal’s wife had cursed him, just before she and her children had gone back to Earth in disgrace.

“No.” Allen Terachyk broke Brahms’s concentration. “We won’t last long.” Terachyk stood up and turned to leave the office. He hung his head and snuffled down the corridor without speaking further.

Brahms stopped himself from going after him. On the holoscreen glimmered the results of Terachyk’s model. His eyes widened at the numbers. With the recent arrival of the Miranda they had just restocked all their stores, and Terachyk hadn’t spent too much time with various rationing schemes, but in the simplistic, conservative one he had applied, the results still shocked Brahms.

Four months.

All the people on Orbitech 1, all fifteen hundred, would starve in four months.

Their gardens were ornamental—bright flowers and the occasional luxury of fresh fruit. Orbitech 1 was not designed to be self-sufficient.

Earth could never recover in that time. Sixty years before, one shuttle had blown up and stalled the U.S. space program for years. Now the War had driven the entire industrial base to its knees … and Orbitech 1 had only four months until it ran out of food.

Too many people, and not enough supplies. They couldn’t all survive. He looked at the numbers again; they were too large and too small. Fifteen hundred people. Four months.

We can’t all survive.

He looked to Ombalal. The man stared at the holoscreen, unblinking, as if he had expected nothing else.

Orbitech 1 had its scientists and researchers, whom Brahms respected and admired—but he did not worship them. As part of the big machine of the colony, all pieces had to fit together. The researchers, with their special skills, were just doing their job, as Brahms expected everyone to do.

The colony also had its production people, its workers, its maintenance people, its electronics technicians, its custodians, its medical officers, its gardener, the Personnel and Administration divisions, and they had families. All facets of society were reflected in Orbitech 1—they had to be able to make it a viable community.

We can’t all survive!

How long would it take him to find a way for the colony to live through this? He couldn’t do it alone—and he didn’t intend to. They all had to make a massive, concerted effort. All of the collective resources of Orbitech 1 had to pull together as a team to find a way. But how could they possibly discover a radical new means of survival, develop it, and implement it in time to make any difference?

Fifteen hundred. There were still too many people. Four months. The time was still too short. He had to do something—riots would start once people found out they only had four months to live. But how could he stop it?

Brahms felt a drop of sweat trickle in a cold path down his back. His throat went dry. Fewer people would be able to survive longer on the same amount of supplies.

They couldn’t all survive anyway.

Brahms closed his eyes and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes again, the numbers on the screen were still the same.

The associate director got up from his desk. Ombalal had closed his eyes, as if trying to hold back tears. Useless man. Brahms thought briefly about calling for an attendant, but hesitated a moment, then turned instead to the holo unit and punched up a d-cube of Prokofiev’s “Kije Suite.” The mixed melancholy and optimism of the music would help him think.

As the d-cube played, Brahms used his thumbprint to unseal one of the compartments in the restricted file recessed into the wall. He found the duplicate memory cube containing the confidential results of his Efficiency Study.

Brahms held the hologram memory cube in his hand. It was cold and had sharp corners. He felt as if his insides had turned to metal—bright chrome. He stared at the cube, still reluctant to consider the possibility at hand.

He moved to Ombalal and turned the cube right before the station director’s eyes. Brahms said, “Do you know what this is?”

Ombalal blinked. “A data cube, of course.”

“Ah, but what’s on it?” Brahms squatted down and searched Ombalal’s eyes. He whispered, “We can’t all survive. But some of our people are more likely than others to come up with a solution—they’ve shown it by their track record. We might have a chance.”

Standing, he pushed the cube into a slot in his desktop, and listened to the quiet whirring as the internal computer read the information into Brahms’s private directory.

He pulled the keypad toward him, saved Allen Terachyk’s analysis, then called up the results of his Efficiency Study. As he scrolled down through the names and scores on the holoscreen, he looked at the rankings, forcing himself not to think of faces, of people—only numbers and names.

We can’t all survive.

He turned to Ombalal. The director’s eyes were wide with horror.

Brahms hesitated a long time before choosing the first name, the one with the lowest score. His eyes felt dry and gummy, yet he couldn’t seem to find the energy to blink.

But once he had chosen the first name, the rest came easier.