27 AUGUST 1998
— NEW YORK
What attracted me was the ritual of the drug, not the drug itself. I’d buy half a gram, planning that it would last me the weekend doing a blow here and a blow there. On Friday night, after my shower, I would flip on the ballgame, take a picture frame off the wall, tap a small pile onto the glass, and chop it extra fine with a single-edge razor. I’d shape the lines, long thin ones that curved like the branches of willow trees. And each time a different batter stepped into the box, I’d trail my straw down another line.
By the time I left to pick up Stacey, the stuff would be gone. I’d be on the prowl again, not so much because I wanted to stay high, but because I craved the ritual. The tap tap tap of the bottle on the glass, the crunch of the fine grain beneath the edge of the blade, the pinch of the straw inside my nostril.
That’s how I got fucked.
—Testimony of Jack O’Neill
Fabio Bianco convened a teleconference of the directorates of the three arms of Trikon International before leaving Lausanne. There was little resistance to his proposal to take personal charge of the research operation on Trikon Station. The vote was nearly unanimous.
Bianco thought wryly that they were probably hoping he would stay on the space station and out of their way.
He then leaned on the European Space Agency to use its good offices to obtain him a pass on one of the American aerospace planes. Although the space-plane fleet was slated to begin regular commercial flights to orbiting installations later in the year, passes were available to space agency employees, government officials, politicians seeking reelection, and well-connected members of the media.
Within twenty-four hours, every aspect of Bianco’s trip to Trikon Station was arranged. His only problem was with his nephew Ugo, who told him upon boarding the Venice-bound train in Ouchy that flying into orbit with his ailments was suicidal.
“Nonsense,” said Bianco, “Micro-gee will cure me.”
He waved until the train went out of sight.
The aerospace plane was scheduled to depart from Edwards Space Center in California. Bianco decided to fly to New York, where he would receive final clearance for the flight and spend the intervening two days at Trikon International’s offices near the United Nations.
He rose from the galley proofs spread across his desk and shuffled to the office window. Smoke from a New Jersey waterfront fire combined with a temperature inversion to paint the sky a flat gray. A tugboat chugged up the East River, its sluggish wake barely disturbing the purple oil slick that extended from shore to shore. Directly below, traffic on First Avenue was snarled by a bus-and-truck accident. Shirtless cabbies stood on the hoods of their taxis and yelled curses at the emergency workers trying to pry the vehicles apart.
The long, awkward galleys were for an article due to be published in an obscure Canadian scientific journal the following January. Bianco had heard rumors of the article while he was still in Lausanne, and upon his arrival in New York had ordered the Trikon staff to fetch him a copy. The article was as interesting as it was frightening. The media had been full of stories about a mysterious series of whale beachings a week or so ago. Now a research scientist had come up with a theory about the cause of the whale deaths. Bianco shuddered at the implications.
“Jonathan Eldredge is on the line,” a female voice announced over the intercom.
Bianco turned away from the window just as Eldredge’s image snapped onto the telephone monitor. Eldredge was a youthful-looking man with stylishly coiffed blond hair and an eternal tan. He was an expert in international finance rather than a scientist, and had been wooed away from the economics department of Stanford University shortly after Trikon International’s founding to serve as president of Trikon’s North American arm.
“I received a memo from Thora Skillen,” said Bianco after the two men had exchanged pleasantries. “She complains about a man named Hugh O’Donnell. She says that he is uncooperative and disregards established laboratory procedures. She also says that her lab module is too small to accommodate two separate projects. Two separate projects? What does that mean? Someone is using Trikon facilities and is not contributing to our toxic-waste microbe project?”