The Trikon Deception

15 AUGUST 1998 TRIKON STATION

The station had been in operation for more than a year on the day when the trouble began.

David Nutt still encountered that moment of vertigo, that feeling that his insides were adrift and he was falling into a strange pastel-colored abyss. Everything was shifting, swirling like a kaleidoscope.

Clutching at the metal edge of the entry hatch, Dave took a deep breath and lined himself up with the strip of black tape stuck onto the bottom of its lip.

“This side down, stupid,” he muttered to himself.

The pastels tumbled into perspective. A long cylinder with a pale blue-floor and yellow ceiling. Silver and white equipment in racks along the walls. Ovens, centrifuge, microscopes all where they should be, and right-side-up. But it didn’t help that the damned technician was floating almost on his head at the far end of the lab.

The American scientific laboratory module had been nicknamed The Bakery by an earlier rotation of researchers. The pastel colors were the brainchildren of a team of psychologists who had never left the ground. Nutt was grateful for their help. After six months aboard Trikon Station, he still had trouble orienting himself whenever he moved from one module to another. In the microgravity world of the space station, with everything weightless, he had trouble telling up from down without help. If he pulled himself through the hatch at any angle except true vertical The Bakery became a distorted alien world and his guts would start churning. Nutt was a confirmed “flatlander.” He felt queasy unless he had his feet on a solid floor, even in the almost-zero gravity of the space station.

Fifteen meters away, at the far end of the cylinder, Stu Roberts was loading tempered glassware into the two huge microwave ovens that had inspired the lab’s nickname. His thick mop of brick-red hair was puffed up into a wild, waving nest of weightless microgravity snakes. The mesh hairnet he was supposed to be wearing was nowhere in sight. His white coveralls looked grimy and spattered. Thin-faced, lean, and loose-jointed as a scarecrow, Roberts was making this rotation the longest six months of Nutt’s life.

Roberts fancied himself a creative soul. Simple tasks such as sterilizing glassware and monitoring experiments were too easy for him, so he constantly poked himself into Nutt’s research. He invented shortcuts, misused organic material, and analyzed data in ways that only he could interpret, all with an irrepressible cheerfulness that irritated Nutt beyond measure.

Roberts closed the oven door, then floated upside down over to the keyboard that controlled the ovens and other equipment and deftly tapped out a combination. He clamped a pair of earphones over his wild hair and immediately started to convulse, feet kicking wildly and arms flailing at tiny spheres of color that bubbled up around his head. A stranger might have thought that Roberts was being electrocuted or zapped by lethal microwaves. Dave knew better.

Heaving a sigh, Nutt pulled himself through the hatch. Properly oriented, he could maneuver through the narrow confines of The Bakery fairly well. It was almost like swimming in air instead of water. The microscope and centrifuge workstations slid quickly past before he grabbed a handhold and steadied himself at the refrigeration section. Roberts’s convulsions had slowed down. He was moving in time to rock music from a portable compact-disc player Velcroed to the ceiling between the strips of fluorescent lights. Nutt could hear its thin wail and the thump of a heavy bass beat. The kid must have the earphones up to max, he thought. He’ll be deaf before he’s thirty.

The colored spheres floating around Roberts’s red mane were globules of water shot through with dyes used for experiments, the kid’s version of psychedelic lighting effects.

Roberts’s back was still to him, twitching in time to the music. Nutt pushed himself past the module’s computer terminal, reached the CD player, and cut off the music.

“Circus time is over,” he said.

Roberts abruptly turned his head. His body automatically twisted in the opposite direction; his flailing arms made the colored spheres scatter. He caught himself and for a moment hung in midair, a lean youthful scarecrow in dirty white laboratory coveralls hovering a scant few inches in front of the bearded, puffy-faced “old man” of nearly forty who was his boss. Nutt was slightly pudgy and potbellied back on Earth; in the weightlessness of the station his body fluids had shifted to make him look even rounder.

“Aw, Dave,” Roberts whined as he yanked off the earphones, “you never let me have any fun.”

“Fun is for the ex/rec room. Find your hairnet and do something about those spheres. If one of them gets into a specimen you’ll have ruined six months’ work.”

Roberts hung up the earphones and then shepherded the spheres into a group and pressed them against the door of a small freezer. They adhered to the cold surface and formed perfect hemispheres. Soon they would evaporate and leave smudges of food coloring that could be wiped off with a damp cloth.

“Did you unzip the wrong end of your sleep restraint?” asked Roberts. One of the most annoying things about the kid was that he constantly tried to adapt Earthbound cliches to the realities of life on a space station. Few translated well. “I thought you were happy about going home.”

“I’m damn happy about going home. But there’s this little matter of a report I have to write in order to justify all the money we’re being paid.”

Nutt shoved himself backwards to the computer terminal and slipped his stockinged feet into a pair of loops attached to the floor. Chairs were useless in microgravity; it took more work to force the body into a sitting position than to stay on one’s feet. All the work surfaces were breast high because under the weightless conditions one’s arms tended to float up almost to shoulder level.

Standing at the chest-high desk, his body hunched slightly in a zero-gee crouch, Nutt began pecking at the computer keyboard. After the obligatory beeps and grunts, the display screen lit up in bright blue and spelled out in cheery yellow letters: GOOD MORNING! TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE!

Another of Roberts’s little cutenesses. Nutt cast the technician a sour look.

He entered his password, received clearance, and typed in the preliminary set of instructions he had written with the help of a programmer back on Earth. The computer responded with the date and the time that each file had lust been accessed.

Nutt felt his heart spasm in his chest.

“Were you in here last night?”

“When?” asked Roberts.

“Two a.m.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“What about Wilson and the other techs?”

“Beats me,” said Roberts.

“The computer says my files were last accessed at two A.M.,” said Nutt. He typed in another command; the computer responded with another message. “Holy shit! There’s been a download!”

“What?”

“A download.” Nutt typed furiously, his stomach wrenching with each response that played across the monitor screen. “The genetic files. Goddammit! Some sonofabitch copied all my genetic files!”

“Dave, there’s no problem.”

“No problem? Six fucking months of work stolen and you say no problem?”

“If you’ll let me explain…”

“Explain what? The computer’s already explained everything. Somebody slipped in here at two this morning and downloaded all the genetic files!”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” said Roberts.

“Nothing to worry about!” Nutt shouted. “I’m not talking about a glitch in an experiment! I’m talking about a career at stake. My career!”

Nutt unlooped his feet and pushed away from the computer and its terrible string of messages so hard that he sailed across the width of the lab and banged his head against a cabinet on the opposite wall. The pain stunned him momentarily. He tumbled slowly, running his fingers through his hair and checking for blood. Roberts grabbed his arm to steady his movement, but the touch only angered him.

“I’ve got to tell Tighe.” Nutt yanked away from Roberts’s grip, spinning himself halfway toward the hatch.

“Dave, don’t!”

But Nutt swam away toward the hatch, his shouted curses fading to echoes.

“Well, if you want to make an asshole of yourself, be my guest,” said Roberts to the empty lab. He patted the hip pocket of his coveralls.

Mission control for Trikon Station was at Houston. Many of the consortium’s European members had objected, but it made more sense to lease time and equipment from NASA’s existing Manned Space Center than to build an entirely new complex somewhere else.

So it was at 0753 hours central daylight time that Commander Dan Tighe closed the light-blue plastic accordion-fold door of the cramped cubbyhole that served as his office. It was no larger than a telephone booth wedged into a forward corner of the command module.

His regular morning call to Mission Control was scheduled for 0800, as usual. And after that he was supposed to see the station doctor for his weekly exam. Like most fliers, Dan Tighe did not trust doctors, not even attractive female doctors. He rummaged through the small cabinet built into the corner of his office where the curving shell of the module met the forward bulkhead. His face, red and chafed, was set in a grim scowl of determination.

It was a face built of contradictions: finely sculpted cheekbones and a hawk’s nose that had been broken long ago when he had crash-landed a crippled jet fighter. Strong stubborn jaw with a mouth that seemed almost too small for it, lips as thin and sensitive as a poet’s. He kept his dark brown hair short enough to meet the old military regulations, but combed it forward to conceal his receding hairline. The gray at his temples bothered him, even though women called it distinguished.

And the eyes: electric blue, vital, brilliant. The eyes of an eagle, a flier, probing incessantly, never still, never satisfied. But now they were wary, guarded, the eyes of a man who had been defeated and banished. The eyes of a man who wanted to be alone in the cockpit of a nimble supersonic jet, but found himself smothered in the responsibilities of commanding a glorified schoolhouse that plodded along a fixed and calculated orbit—and in danger of losing even that.

A small bonsai bush trimmed into the shape of a bird floated at the end of a tether attached to the wall of his cramped office. Tighe whispered to it, “Sorry, no time for you this morning,” and gently pushed it out of his way as he searched through the Velcro-lined shelves of the narrow cabinet.

At last he found what he was looking for: the blood-pressure cuff. With a grunt of satisfaction he rolled up the left sleeve of his coveralls and wrapped the plastic around his biceps. Taking a deep breath that was supposed to calm him, he inflated the cuff and then read off the glowing digital numbers on its tiny electronic display: 163 over 101. The readout was adjusted for the effects of microgravity. Not bad, he thought. But not good enough.

The command module was the smallest of all the sections that made up the Trikon space station, and the most densely packed. While the laboratory and habitat modules were each fifteen meters long, the command module’s cylinder was half that length. It was jammed with computer systems that tracked everything and everyone aboard the station, communications gear that kept Tighe and his crew in constant touch with Earth, and a command and control center that maintained the station’s life-support systems and external equipment. Dan’s office and the infirmary were wedged into opposite ends of the cramped module. Next to the cubbyhole infirmary was the sick bay: three sleep restraints fastened against the only bare spot on any of the walls. As if to compensate for the crowding, it was the only module with a view: a trio of small flused-silica viewing ports were built into the bulkhead at the command and control station.

Tighe anchored his slippered feet in the loops at the base of the chest-high desk that held his personal computer and tapped out the instructions that patched it into the station’s communications network. He plugged in the headset and clamped it on, adjusting the pin-sized microphone in front of his mouth. Make it fast, he told himself. Give yourself a few minutes to trim the bonsai and relax before you let her take your blood pressure.

The daily transmission from Earth began precisely on time.

“Houston to Trikon Station,” scratched a voice. The display screen unscrambled to reveal the bullet head of Tom Henderson, ceiling lights gleaming on his bald dome.

“This is Trikon. I read you, Houston,” replied Tighe.

“Hello, Dan. How you doin’, boy? You look redder’n a beet.”

“I ran out of razor blades and had to use the wind-up. Beats the hell out of your face.”

“Looks like you’ll have to make do without blades for a few days more. Hurricane Caroline is stalled in the Atlantic, so the shuttle’s being delayed.”

“How long?”

“Three days, maybe five. Depends on when Caroline clears out.”

“Christ,” said Tighe. “I have a frazzled crew, a bunch of immature scientists, and now this.”

“Can’t do anything about Mother Nature,” said Henderson. “And you forgot the Martians.”

“I’m trying to forget about them.”

The two men ran through their daily housekeeping chores—analyzing the amount of food, water, air, and fuel remaining on board, plotting the orbital path, coordinating the photographs that would be taken by the camera array on the station’s nadir platform. Meteorologists were especially anxious to get all the photos of Caroline that they could provide. One task originally scheduled for today’s communication—fixing the rendezvous with the shuttle-would have to wait.

“One more thing,” said Henderson. “Trikon has added another scientist to the next rotation. His name is Hugh O’Donnell. American biochemist. I don’t have his file yet, but I see that he has standing orders to report to your medical officer on a daily basis.”

“Health risk?”

“Looks it.” Henderson arched his eyebrows. “I’ll shoot you his file as soon as I receive it.”

“Keep me posted on the shuttle.”

“Roger that,” said Henderson. “Out,”

Tighe removed the headset and clipped it to its receptacle on the wall. It was important to fasten down everything in microgravity. Otherwise they somehow floated away, lost until they turned up stuck to an intake ventilator grid. Tighe remembered waking up in the middle of the night on his first shuttle flight to find a green snake gliding toward him. It took him a couple of panicked heartbeats to realize that it was the garden hose that one of the mission specialists had brought aboard for a botany experiment. The jerk hadn’t tied it down properly and it was undulating like a cobra across the mid-deck section where the crew slept.

Then he remembered his last shuttle flight, and felt his pulse quickening with anger. The bonsai bird hovered near his shoulder. He nuzzled its beak. Calm me down, pal, he said to the green bird. Calm me down before they throw me out of this job, too.

Somebody rapped on the bulkhead. Before Tighe could answer, the accordion door squealed back and Dave Nutt pushed through. He was gasping for air. His T-shirt had come untucked from his nylon pants and rode up over his paunchy stomach.

“What’s wrong, Dave?” Tighe liked Nutt; otherwise he would have snapped at him for barging into his office. Nutt was dedicated and sober, not at all like the other cases of arrested development Trikon called scientists. But now he was wild-eyed, panting, his hair and beard beaded with perspiration.

“My computer!” heaved Nutt. “Someone’s tampered with it!”

“What? How?”

“Downloaded my research files.”

The scientists were always complaining to Tighe about people tampering with their work. Although the corporations that made up the Trikon consortium were supposed to be working cooperatively, industrial espionage seemed to be the major industry aboard the station. Most of the accusations were false alarms bred by overactive imaginations or personal animosities among the scientists. Or at least they could not be proved to Tighe’s satisfaction.

“How do you know?” Tighe asked.

“I have a subprogram that logs every use. Somebody went into our module at two a.m. and downloaded my goddamned files!”

“I’d better take a look,” said Tighe, mentally postponing his date with the doctor.

Stu Roberts was still in The Bakery when Tighe and Nutt arrived. Now that Nutt had taken the extreme step of actively involving the station commander, Roberts decided to lie low and let the scientist embarrass himself. He hovered on the edge of audibility as Nutt gave Tighe a fevered explanation of the messages appearing on the computer monitor.

Tighe had only a general idea of the work being conducted in the three Trikon laboratory modules. He knew that the project involved microbial genetics: the scientists were trying to engineer a bug that would eat pollutants or toxic wastes or something like that. His interest in the bug was purely practical. As station commander, he constantly worried about containment of all the potentially toxic agents used by the scientists in their research. Accidental release of bacteria, caustic chemicals, or pollutants could wreak havoc in the delicately controlled environment of the station. In space you cannot open a window for fresh air. One mistake with chemical or biological materials could kill everyone aboard very swiftly.

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!”