Who is this O’Donnell and why is he here? she asked herself as she booted up her personal computer. He isn’t part of the ordinary Trikon staff. His work was to be kept separate from everyone else’s, she had been told pointedly by the corporate brass in New York. Why? What will he be doing? Nobody back Earthside had been able to find out a thing about him, so far.
The only possible answer frightened her. He’s been sent here to spy on me. They suspect me and they’ve sent a security agent to catch me up.
I’m all alone up here, Skillen realized. There’s no one here to help me. It’s all well and good for the sisters back Earthside to tell one another how much they hate the idea of bioengineering, how wrong and dangerous it is to tinker with genes, even the genes of microbes. They can sit back there and tell themselves how they’d blow up Trikon Station if they had the chance. But they’re not here to help me. I’m alone. It’s up to me.
Kurt Jaeckle forced his left hand down to the keyboard and saw a character appear on the screen of his word processor. Z. Goddammit, he had aimed for A. He found the backspace key, deleted the Z, and carefully moved his forefinger to A.
Typing had been tedious drudgery on Earth, but in micro-gee it was downright physically exhausting. He could not find a comfortable level for the machine and constantly fought the natural tendency of his hands to float above the keyboard. After a half hour of typing, he usually had a ribbon of sharp pain running from his shoulders to the tip of his forefingers.
Even on Earth, where gravity aided the fingers and secretaries were plentiful, Jaeckle insisted on typing his own scripts. He knew that words made dollars fall like manna and that dollars would shape the future of the Mars Project. He wanted no one fooling around with his words.
Strangely, he had found long ago that dictating into a tape recorder never produced the results he wanted. His vocabulary was richer, his phrases stronger, when he wrote them out—even though the text was meant to be spoken aloud.
As usual, Jaeckle was three scripts ahead of schedule. This one, which was devoted to the practical problems of routine medical care in micro-gee, would be the first with Lorraine Renoir as his assistant. The transition was planned. He would broadcast his next show with Carla Sue, then inform her afterwards that the network no longer needed her services. She’d bitch, but he’d have prepared a host of reasonable excuses and arguments to blunt her rage. After all, this isn’t Hollywood; it’s a space station.
He would broadcast the second show by himself. That script was a beauty. Completely devoted to the practical benefits of a manned expedition to Mars, it advanced and then neatly punctured in classical Ciceronean fashion all of the arguments against such a trip. The medical show would be the perfect segue for Lorraine Renoir’s debut. By then, Carla Sue’s rage would have run its course. He hoped so, anyway.
Now all that remained was for Lorraine to agree to his proposal. He thought of the time he saw her pedaling the stationary cycle in the ex/rec room. She wore a tank top and flight pants. Her arm muscles strained and her stubby French braid bobbed against the nape of her neck. A thin saucer of sweat pooled in the depression between her shoulder blades and threatened to break free with each stroke of her legs. She stopped, dabbed herself with a towel, then unzipped the vents of her flight pants. When she resumed pumping, the vents spread like the petals of a flower to reveal round thighs and firm calves.
He imagined her speaking the words that slowly appeared on the screen. She had a breathy, throaty voice that rolled slightly over her r’s and l’s. It was much more pleasant than Carla Sue’s twang, which lately sounded like an out-of-tune banjo.
A knock on the bulkhead interrupted his reverie. Without unlooping his feet, he pushed himself within reach of the door latch. From outside, fingers curled around the edge of the accordion door and swept it open.