His chin slides off the desk. He spirals down in a long dizzying fall that ends in a chair. Across a table sits a man with a badge clipped to one lapel of his tight-fitting jacket and a name tag clipped to the other. The name tag says R. McQ. Welch. He has a pug nose and a bulldog’s chin.
“When I was a kid,” says Welch, “they had a saying, ‘You fall in horseshit, you come up with a diamond.’ I never believed it until just now.”
No trace of a smile eases Welch’s grim expression.
For the first time since he had arrived at Trikon Station, Hugh O’Donnell did not find The Bakery empty when he arrived shortly after artificial dawn had brightened the modules of the station. Microwave ovens buzzed, centrifuges whirled, techs floated from workstation to workstation like workers in a beehive. The entire American/Canadian contingent was present. Even Stu Roberts was awake, though he looked like he needed another couple hours of sleep.
O’Donnell grinned to himself as he floated past them all. Must be Bianco, he thought as he unfastened the padlock to his lab. From the first day of kindergarten through the last day before retirement, people constantly tried to fool the teacher, the boss, the authority figure. No one said a word to him, not even Roberts. It was if he did not exist, which suited him fine.
Once inside his own cubbyhole lab with the door pulled shut, O’Donnell pushed himself to the ceiling to inspect the dozen plants growing in the thin, saucer-shaped cases designed for micro-gee hydroponics.
“Goddammit.” He sighed bitterly. As he had suspected when he closed up the lab the previous night, all of the plants showed definite signs of regeneration. He was back to square one.
O’Donnell booted up his computer and scrolled through the genetic structures of the microbes he had applied to each of the twelve plants. The three-dimensional diagrams on the screen were relatively simple, not at all as complicated as human genes, not even as complicated as the genes he had altered when designing microbes for AgriTech, Inc. But his previous work had been dedicated to promoting the growth of plants. This project was bent on rendering them impotent.
For well over an hour, O’Donnell stared zombie-like at the screen as he used the cursor to rearrange molecules of RNA. There’s got to be some sequence that will completely inhibit the chemical process, he thought as his fingers tapped the keyboard.
Aaron Weiss told himself that the real advantage to spending the morning with Fabio Bianco was that it kept Kurt Jaeckle off his neck. The leader of the Martians had cornered Weiss at breakfast in the wardroom and droned on about the importance of his team, his work, his dreams, his goals—himself— until Bianco had shown up and rescued the reporter.
But now Weiss was gasping as he struggled to keep pace with Fabio Bianco. The old scientist was supposed to be a walking catalogue of every geriatric malady known to Western man. Yet he seemed spry as a young chicken and agile as a cat as he led Weiss down the length of the connecting tunnel.
“Must be the weightlessness,” Weiss muttered between gulps of air that never quite seemed to satisfy the aching in his lungs.
Bianco was in the middle of a lecture he had begun at breakfast.
“You ask why we need a space station for this research,” he said as his spindly arms moved surely from handhold to handhold. “The truth is that ninety percent of the research conducted on this station for this particular project can be performed on Earth at far less expense.”
“But not with as much fun,” said Weiss.
Bianco brought himself to a sudden stop. Weiss crashed into him, then tumbled backwards. His Minicam tugged at the cord around his neck. He managed to snag a handhold.
“Fun? We are not here for fun, Mr. Weiss. What we do here is serious, perhaps the most serious work being done anywhere, by anyone. What we are doing up here is creating new life-forms that will be completely subservient to man. There are people on Earth who do not want this work to be done.”