The Trikon Deception

21 AUGUST 1998 TRIKON STATION

Dan Tighe lingered in the wardroom long after the end of the dinner hour. In his hand was a Mackintosh apple. Trikon dieticians routinely included seasonal fruits in the regular ninety-day food supplies. Fresh fruit was a luxury in orbit, and station personnel devoured it quickly. The Mackintosh was the first sign that summer was ending in North America.

The wardroom ceilings automatically dimmed with the pastoral sunset depicted on the viewscreens along the galley wall. Six identical sunsets, side by side. All six combined couldn’t compare to being outdoors and watching the real thing, Dan thought.

He took a bite of the apple, slurping in the tart juices that oozed beneath the broken skin. Hisashi Oyamo and Chakra Ramsanjawi floated lazily through the wardroom on the way to their nightly chess match in the ex/rec area. Ramsanjawi threatened Oyamo with a new gambit he had devised on ELM’s computer terminal. Oyamo laughed derisively. Neither paid Dan any attention.

Dan nibbled the apple down to the core with a minimum of juice and pulp escaping to the vents. Presently, the person he had been waiting for appeared. Lorraine Renoir mixed herself a squeeze bottle of coffee at the galley designated for after-hours snacks. She noticed Dan and floated in his direction.

“Eating all the fresh fruit, I see,” she said.

“My procedure for preventing scurvy.”

“Bad choice. Citrus fruits prevent scurvy.”

“What do you expect from an old Air Force man?” he asked.

“Not much,” said Lorraine, with a smile.

Her eyes searched him in a silence that lengthened past lighthearted banter. Dan drove his teeth into the apple’s core, liberating a seed that bobbed against the roof of his mouth. Extricating the seed with his finger would be in poor taste, so he swallowed it.

“Tom Henderson tells me we have a health risk on board.”

“Who might that be?” said Lorraine.

“New Trikon scientist named Hugh O’Donnell.”

“What makes you think he’s a health risk?”

Dan made a smile for her. “His standing orders to report to you every day.”

Lorraine shot a quick burst of coffee into her mouth. She had sought out Dan to discuss Kurt Jaeckle’s offer. But now she felt the same resentment that rose like bile in her throat whenever someone attempted to compromise her position as medical officer. The Russell Cramer issue was murky; the Hugh O’Donnell issue was clear. She might disapprove of his former drug use and dislike his irreverent altitude, but she had an ethical duty to keep his medical history in strictest confidence. No matter how much Dan smiled or crinkled the corners of his sky-blue eyes, O’Donnell’s past was none of his business. At least not at this stage.

“You have standing orders to report to me every week,” she said. “Does that make you a health risk?”

His smile vanished. “Only to myself,” he muttered.

Without realizing it she leaned toward him, put her hand on his sleeve. “Oh Dan, your blood pressure’s all right up here. Your hypertension is more an emotional problem than a physical one.”

“Yeah, sure. And what happens if it goes up again?”

“It won’t. Not in micro-gee.”

“But if it does?”

She fixed him with her dark, serious brown eyes. “It won’t. Trust me.”

If I can’t trust my own heart, Dan thought, how can I trust you? Or anybody else?

Lorraine seemed to realize she was clutching his arm. She released her hold and said, “At any rate, Hugh O’Donnell is not what you would consider a health risk.”

Feeling glad that she had switched the subject back to its original theme, he replied, “Tom Henderson sent me O’Donnell’s bio, and I was a little confused.”

“What’s confusing about his bio?”

“Nothing, so far as it goes,” said Dan. “Except it doesn’t go very far: He graduated from the University of Oregon in 1984, then he popped up working for Simi Bioengineering, a member of Trikon NA, in 1996. Nothing in between. Since he reports to you every day, it makes sense that you would know about his activities during those twelve years.”

“I’ve seen him exactly five times, including the day he arrived. We haven’t delved into his distant past.”

“Will you tell me if you discover anything pertinent?”

“Pertinent to what?”

“The safety of this station.”

“Do you see him as a safety risk?”

“I don’t have overwhelming confidence in Trikon’s selection of personnel.”

Lorraine felt her brows knitting, felt the simmering anger that always came over her when someone tried to invade her professional territory. And she felt confusion, too. She did not want to be angry with Dan. Yet she was.

“Do you see him as a safety risk?” she repeated stiffly.

“Not yet.”

“Neither do I,” she said. “If and when I do, I will discuss the problem with his immediate supervisor and with you. But since I don’t perceive him as a safety risk, I have an ethical obligation to honor his confidences.”

“Thank you for your cooperation,” Dan said icily. He pushed away from the table and sailed toward the wardroom hatch, pausing only to slam dunk the apple core into a waste receptacle.

Lorraine took another sip of coffee, but a constriction in her throat prevented her from swallowing. She forced down the coffee and realized that her hands were shaking.

“Dammit!” she whispered to herself.

She sailed to the hatch. He was at the far end of the connecting tunnel, swimming swiftly with an occasional stroke against one of the side walls.

“Dammit,” she repeated.

Games came easily to Chakra Ramsanjawi. During his boyhood years in England, he had mastered physical games like squash, tennis, and cricket. He had even tried rugby, although his early years of malnutrition prevented him from developing the sheer body strength necessary to survive the violent scrums.

As he developed into manhood and the sedentary career that rusted his physical abilities, he turned his focus to mental games—especially those that required unorthodox modes of thought. Chess was his passion; he spent long hours huddled over a board in a dimly lit reading room of the London men’s club he had joined along with Sir Derek.

On Trikon Station surprisingly few people played chess. Stu Roberts had challenged him to a game after boasting about having been dormitory champ in college. Ramsanjawi concluded that it must have been a dormitory full of cretins. Roberts’s mind was too scattered, too full of frivolous songs to assemble the requisite concentration. He quickly knuckled under to Ramsanjawi’s opening gambit, threw up his arms in mock despair, and never played again. Oyamo was the only worthy opponent on the station, and even the Japanese scientist was hardly fitting competition, Ramsanjawi thought.

As he floated through the wardroom, Ramsanjawi noticed Dan Tighe eating an apple by himself at one of the tables. It was not unlike the American station commander to eat in solitude, but Ramsanjawi sensed a special purpose in Tighe’s presence. In the ex/rec room Ramsanjawi positioned himself so that he could watch the commander through the doorway.

Oyamo settled opposite and began to set up the game. The magnetized figures had been designed with space-age motifs. The pawns wore EMU space suits. The knights were sleek aerospace planes. The rooks were fanciful third-generation space stations.

Ramsanjawi noticed Lorraine Renoir join Tighe at his table. He could not hear what they were saying, but it was obvious they were annoyed with each other.

Oyamo attacked with his knights and bishops. Ramsanjawi was so intent on the brewing argument that he failed to pay attention to the game. Oyamo’s opening moves had him on the run.

A surge of adrenaline swept away Ramsanjawi’s interest in the wardroom encounter. He moved swiftly to the attack, capturing one of Oyamo’s bishops, both of his knights, and putting the space queen in jeopardy. Many an Englishman’s competitive fire had been stoked on the playing fields of Eton. Ramsanjawi’s had been fanned by the youthful Derek Brock-Smythe.

They had been an odd pair; Derek porcelain white and exquisitely tiny, Chakra dark and lithe despite a belly distended from years of poor diet. Derek’s tongue was sharp and he was in constant nervous motion. Chakra was shy, his movements languorous, almost lazy. Derek resented the filthy interloper and only grudgingly obeyed his parents’ commands to be civil to his Indian adopted brother. Cagily, he resorted to competition in order to make Chakra feel unwelcome. But Derek’s problem was that he was not very good at sports. He challenged Chakra at tennis, squash, and croquet, and Chakra always won. He even challenged Chakra to a footrace, but his mincing gait was no match for Chakra’s nimble strides.

As one unusually warm summer drew to a close, Derek challenged Chakra to golf, a game neither supposedly ever had played, at a course outside at Bath. During the round, it became apparent to Chakra that he had been duped. Derek had secretly played the game all summer and had received instruction from a battery of professionals.

Chakra did not know golf, but he knew physics. He hung in the match long enough for the increasingly nervous Derek to self-destruct, as he always did in their competitions. Chakra won the last hole, and with it the match. He could still see Derek, stomping furiously next to the flagstick in the orange light of dusk and shouting, “You may have beaten me. But you’ll never be an aristocrat. You’ll never be a true Englishman. Never! Never! Never!”

Ramsanjawi deftly removed Oyamo’s space queen from the board and bore down on the king. The Japanese amused him, trying so hard to look inscrutable, impassive. Yet every time Ramsanjawi leaned forward across the board, Oyamo leaned back. As if an invisible force kept them apart by a rigid full meter. The Japanese are trained to remain that distance away, Ramsanjawi reflected. It is a cultural trait, quite unconscious. Like their fanatical insistence on cleanliness and bathing.

Oyamo allowed Ramsanjawi to pursue his king for eleven moves before finally placing himself in checkmate. It pleased this would-be Englishman to win at chess. It loosened his braggart’s tongue.

As they set up for another game Oyamo deftly moved the topic of their conversation to their work. He knew that progress among the Europeans was painfully slow, and for some reason Ramsanjawi did not seem worried by it. The Americans would slow down, too, now that Nutt had left the station. He had been the only one among them with any flash of inspiration, any drive at all.

Oyamo grunted and nodded and let Ramsanjawi talk away in his strange mixture of Oxford and Delhi. The bloated Indian thinks we are playing chess. Oyamo knew better.