The sight of the observatory growing smoothly beyond his visor returned Dan to the problems at hand. He nudged the translation control, brought the MMU to a stop less than a meter from the airlock, and docked to a fitting next to the airlock entry hatch. After some trouble disengaging himself, he tethered the MMU to the docking port and entered the observatory. As the airlock slowly repressurized, Dan stared down through the mesh-covered porthole. The raft of modules—so massive and labyrinthine when viewed up close—seemed like insignificant Tinkertoys against the luminescent Earth.
After the pressure equalized, Dan removed his helmet and pulled himself through the hatch into the observatory. O’Donnell floated near the apex of the conical interior. He obviously realized he had a visitor, but he kept his eye nestled against the lens of an optical telescope. His hair, which normally gave a slicked-back appearance when restrained by a net, floated out in a nest of spikes. His free hand twirled his glasses by the eyepiece.
“You ever see any of this stuff?” he said without taking his eye off the telescope. “Makes you appreciate how much our atmosphere distorts light rays.”
“Carla Sue Gamble has been murdered,” said Dan.
O’Donnell turned slowly, deliberately, toward him. “That’s funny, I don’t remember killing her.”
“You didn’t.”
“Whew, what a relief.” O’Donnell fixed his eye back on the telescope. “You have any idea where Neptune is? Been looking for that bastard for hours.”
Dan braced himself, then wrenched O’Donnell away from the telescope.
“Look, Hugh, I didn’t come here to bullshit about the sky. I want some answers. Now what in the good Christ is happening on my space station?”
“I fucked up,” O’Donnell said with sadness. “No, to be more precise, someone fucked me up.”
“That’s what you were trying to tell me back in the rumpus room?”
“I did a lot of drugs in my day, but I never fooled around with fentanyl. Too strong. No margin for error. People die doing that shit,” said O’Donnell. “It was in my toothpaste. Somehow. I remember it tasted funny. You can check it. There’s a trace left.”
“I will,” said Dan, knowing that the investigators would test it Earthside. “But who? Why?”
“Who could be anyone. Anybody on the station is capable of synthesizing fentanyl, except maybe you and your crew. And why? Well, there’s a damn good reason.”
“Such as?”
O’Donnell swam for the telescope, but Dan grabbed his shoulder. O’Donnell stared at him for a full minute. Then he told him.
He started with the legal assassination of his company, Agritech, Inc. His name was Jack O’Neill then, and he had already long been using drugs— principally cocaine and amphetamines—as a way of coping with his myriad personal and legal problems. But the injunction that the Foundation for Assessing Technology had won against his company accelerated his downward spiral into a plummeting nosedive. One night, after eluding a repo man who had come to claim his BMW, he tooled the barrios of East L.A. looking for a bag of blow. He scored five minutes before being arrested in a police sweep.
He spent a night and a day in an open-air holding pen in the Los Angeles
Coliseum. His polo shirt and penny loafers marked him as an outsider, maybe a police informer, and gangs of suspicious, angry detainees beat the shit out of him repeatedly. As dusk reddened the sky, two officers dragged him to a makeshift courtroom for arraignment. He was battered, bloody, and mumbling incoherently. A man in a blue suit, whom he took to be his court-appointed lawyer, spoke to the judge. The next thing he knew, he was seated with the man in the back of a gray car that hurtled away from the Coliseum.
The man identified himself only as Welch and stated he had posted bond for him. If O’Neill played ball, his arrest would be expunged and he would be given a new life and a new identity. If he didn’t play ball, he could spend the next ten years as a homicidal weight lifter’s jailhouse wife.
So he became Hugh O’Donnell. Welch supervised his therapy in a thousand-dollar-a-day substance abuse clinic and monitored his aftercare. One year later he was clean, and Welch installed him in a lab in the Tehachapi Mountains. The lab was supposedly owned by a company named Simi Bioengineering, but O’Donnell was convinced it was a government installation. He worked on several projects, each involving the removal of enzymes from various plants by genetic means. He suspected that these projects were mere dry runs for something much more important.