“I mean, he didn’t act like someone on Ecstasy,” said Roberts, making a poor attempt at constricting his nasal passages as he spoke. “Did he?”
“I was not present to witness his behavior.”
“He didn’t,” said Roberts, more to himself than to Ramsanjawi. “I mean, the stuff I gave him looked more rocky than Ecstasy because there weren’t any gelatin capsules. But it was Ecstasy, wasn’t it?”
Ramsanjawi shrugged.
“It was, wasn’t it?”
“I’m afraid Mr. Cramer is a rather unbalanced personality,” said Ramsanjawi. “I am mystified why NASA and ESA named him to the Mars Project.”
“That’s a lie! Russ Cramer is just as sane as anybody.”
“I beg to differ, Mr. Roberts. Russell Cramer has a modicum of scientific intelligence that is hampered by a willingness to believe the unbelievable.”
A Cheshire grin slowly spread across Ramsanjawi’s dark face.
Roberts grasped its meaning. “You didn’t? Did you? You planted the microorganisms in that soil sample? You couldn’t have!”
“My actions with respect to that soil sample or to Russell Cramer are no concern of yours,” said Ramsanjawi. “But what I choose to dispense to you is very much your concern.”
“You wouldn’t. You . . .” Roberts’s voice trailed off and his eyes glazed over in fear as he remembered the time Ramsanjawi had given him a specially treated dosage of fentanyl that mimicked the symptoms of heroin withdrawal. For an entire night, Roberts writhed in his sleep compartment, his body racked by alternating currents of chills and sweats, cramps and nausea. And all because he had failed to deliver a sample from one of David Nutt’s test tubes on time.
“Why wouldn’t I?” Ramsanjawi’s voice wove through the thick curtain of the memory. “You haven’t held up your end of our latest bargain.”
“I can’t get close to him,” said Roberts.
“That is absurd. You are his technician.”
“But he works completely alone. He ignores Skillen’s procedures and protocol. I haven’t seen the inside of his lab since the day we moved in his equipment. Honest!”
“These are all routine hurdles,” Ramsanjawi said. “My patience is wearing thin.”
“A little more time,” whined Roberts. “I promise. I’ll get into his lab. I’ll bring you samples of his work.”
“Forget about his work. I have other plans for that when the time comes. Meanwhile, concentrate on his movements. I want a detailed log on everything he does, even something as innocuous as a sneeze.”
“Okay. Yeah. I can do that. That’ll be no sweat. No sweat.”
“Enough simpering,” said Ramsanjawi. With a flick of his hand, he sent a tiny brown bottle tumbling in Roberts’s direction.
Roberts caught the bottle and fumbled with its cap.
“Don’t take that here,” Ramsanjawi said with disgust.
But Roberts did not listen. He pulled off the cap and hungrily devoured the white pill inside.
After Roberts left, Ramsanjawi reached for a bunch of grapes clipped to the wall. He pulled off a single grape and mashed it between his teeth, enjoying the sensation of the juice squirting inside his mouth. Most people are like grapes, he thought. They resist you at first, but once you break through their skin you find only the soft pulp of human weakness.
Ramsanjawi was skilled at identifying the weaknesses in people, and at conjuring ways of exploiting them. He knew that Roberts, with his absurd dreams of composing rock music, would see drugs as a necessary aid to the inspiration he so completely lacked; risky, perhaps, but controllable. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, Ramsanjawi chuckled to himself. Roberts believed his pitiful understanding of chemistry could protect him against becoming addicted. Foolish boy.
Ramsanjawi knew that Cramer’s obsession with finding life in the Martian soil made him receptive to the new avenues of thought drugs allegedly produced. Now, with the judicious use of synthetic drugs that he manufactured while his underlings slaved over genetically engineered microbes, he had reduced both men to his only true allies: fear and confusion. Roberts was too scared of withdrawal from his fentanyl dependency not to puncture Hugh O’Donnell’s mysterious veneer; the rest of the station was confused about Cramer’s sudden psychosis.
Ramsanjawi thrived on chaos. It reminded him of his birthplace—Jaipur in the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan. His father, a rug merchant, had been murdered in a dispute with a Pakistani trader. His mother, herself an orphan, was unable to arrange a new marriage that would have allowed her to support her five children. Chakra, the oldest, took to living in the streets of Jaipur. He was not alone. Depressed economic conditions, drought, and lack of arable land in Rajasthan drove people to Jaipur by the thousands. The broad avenues and colonnaded walkways, once the pride of northwestern India, disappeared beneath the huts of squatters and the ramshackle booths of sidewalk vendors. A bowl of rice or a piece of bread became luxuries.