“You sound like a television producer.”
“Unfortunately, it’s what I have to be. I hope you understand that.”
Jaeckle pushed himself away from Tighe’s office and headed for the hatch. As he passed the infirmary he peeked in at Dr. Renoir with his telegenic charm on full beam. Tighe grimaced sourly. Nothing in his conversation with Kurt Jaeckle bothered Tighe as much as the sight of him talking to Lorraine Renoir.
He waited until Jaeckle pushed himself through the hatchway before he started for the doctor’s office. Why does my weekly blood-pressure check have to come on a morning like this? Damned pressure must be high enough to pop my eyeballs.
Dr. Renoir saw him approaching and waved an upstretched finger at him. “I’m rather busy right now, Dan,” she said. “Can we make it this afternoon? Say, two P.M.?”
A wave of relief and gratitude washed over him. He nodded, trying to keep his emotions from showing on his face. “Fourteen hundred hours,” he said.
Lorraine smiled at him. “Right. Fourteen hundred hours.”
Not trusting himself to say anything more, Tighe turned back toward his office. You’ve got two hours and some to get your pressure down to where it ought to be, he told himself. A part of his mind noticed that Dr. Renoir did not seem particularly busy; there was no one in her infirmary; she was not working on her computer or on the phone.
But he ignored the observation. She’s a doctor, he reminded himself. She can ground you for good.
15 AUGUST 1998
THE MARS MODULE
The concept of using biological techniques to repair ecological damage is called bioremediation. Bioremediation was first tried in a major way in the late 1980s, when bacteria were used to help clean up crude oil spilled into the ocean by tankers.
After the Exxon Valdez spilled 10.1 million gallons of crude oil over 368 miles of Alaskan shoreline in 1989, Exxon researchers sprayed some seventy miles of beaches around Prince William Sound with a fertilizer called Inipol that had been developed by the French petroleum company Elf Aquitaine. The aim of the $10-million experiment was to stimulate the growth of bacteria that already existed naturally in the environment and were known to consume hydrocarbons. The beaches sprayed showed dramatic improvement over areas not sprayed, often within fifteen days.
In June 1990 the supertanker Mega Borg caught fire and released nearly four million gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico. Microbial strains specially developed at the University of Texas to eat a wide variety of crude oils helped to clean up the spill. The microbes were engineered to die off once the oil that served as their food was consumed.
In the aftermath of the environmentally horrendous Middle East war of 1991, genetically engineered microbes helped to digest the hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil deliberately pumped into the Persian Gulf by the Iraqi army. The microbes converted millions of gallons of crude oil into relatively harmless methane and carbon dioxide.
Researchers have suggested using genetically engineered microbes to break down a wide variety of toxic and even radioactive wastes.
Trikon’s goal is to develop bioremediation techniques, using genetically engineered microorganisms, to help reverse the environmental damage done to our planet by generations of air, water, and soil pollution.
—Trikon International media release
After leaving Tighe and Lorraine in the command module, Kurt Jaeckle made his way down the station’s central tunnel until he passed through the double hatch marking the boundary between Trikon Station proper and the Mars module.
The Mars Project was a joint effort between NASA and the European Space Agency to test humans for a planned flight to Mars. Twelve men and women had been selected to spend two full years in space. The original purpose of the project was to simulate the rigors of an actual flight to Mars. This gradually metamorphosed into a study of the subtle stressed microgravity places on the human body and the not-so-subtle conflicts that can arise when people live in close quarters for extended periods of time. Finally, it degenerated into a hodgepodge of conflicting and overlapping experiments as different factions within the two space agencies overlaid their pet projects onto the original scheme.