“Howdy, pal,” said O’Donnell. He extended his hand. Cramer did not look up from his tray, although O’Donnell detected a grunt that might have been a greeting. O’Donnell’s hand dangled unshaken in the wash of the vent. He saved face by nipping at a bread crumb with his fingers.
Cramer went at his food like a man with palsy. No amount of surface tension could have bonded the food to his shaking fork. Crumbs and vegetables soon formed a cloud above his tray, drifting slowly upward. He tried batting an errant cube of brown mystery meat toward his mouth, and grew increasingly angry with each miss. Finally, he let it float up into the vent.
“Are these strawberries always this bad?” asked O’Donnell.
“You should have rehydrated them,” said Cramer. He swiped at another cube of meat, but succeeded only in shooting it through the doorway to the exercise room. He slammed his fork against the table. “Damn!”
O’Donnell took his tray to the nearest galley and zapped his strawberries with a jet of cold water. He considered joining Freddy and Muncie. Even they would be better company than Cramer. But when he noticed Dr. Renoir hovering close to Cramer’s ear, he glided back to his place and tried to look as if he weren’t eavesdropping. Their topic of conversation seemed important, and they both kept their voices almost too low to hear.
“—supposed to meet at sixteen hundred hours,” she was saying.
Cramer cast a wary glance at O’Donnell as he replied, “I was busy.”
“Too busy to keep our meeting?”
He turned back to the doctor, whispering urgently, “I was at a very delicate point in an experiment. I couldn’t just leave.”
“You could have arranged another time.”
“I can’t foresee what I’ll be doing every minute of the day. Jesus!”
Cramer unlooped himself and barreled toward the door, grazing the back of a Japanese tech with his foot. Startled, the Japanese flinched. Then he regained his self-control and discreetly did not react any further.
“Lover’s quarrel or professional disagreement?” O’Donnell asked the doctor.
“Either way, it wouldn’t be any of your business.” A vein in her neck pulsed rapidly.
“Touché,” said O’Donnell.
Dr. Lorraine Renoir considered her life to be a conflicting mix of opposing forces and conflicting situations. She had grown up in Quebec City, where French and English uneasily coexisted, where the ancient walled city towered over glitzy condominiums lining the St. Lawrence River, where the European elegance of the Chateau Frontenac competed with the New World efficiency of the Marriotts and Hiltons. The conflict followed her through McGill University, where she bucked the chauvinism of her male classmates and teachers to graduate summa cum laude in physics, tempered with a minor in French art. Later, in medical school, she was looked on as an oddity, a real scientist among all the younger pre-med graduates pursuing dreams of quick wealth. The clashing forces weaved through her own bilingualism and even showed themselves in her body: her thick legs and sunken cheeks on Earth, her shapely figure and full face in microgravity.
She had expected the post on Trikon Station would reconcile the opposing forces in her life. The station provided the perfect environment for a physician who had a keen interest in biophysics. This was not the mere practice of medicine. The effects of microgravity upon the human body permeated every aspect of a person’s health from postnasal drip to heart arhythmia to calcium depletion.
Even her love of fine art found expression in the space station. The Earth, as seen from the observation blister, was the most splendid work of art she had ever seen. She thrilled at the thought of Monet or Cezanne trying to catch its ever-changing glory on canvas.
But what she had found was an even more complicated mix: a multinational population with different attitudes toward health and personal hygiene, ego clashes among the leaders of the various subgroups, and a rotation schedule that seemed to push people just slightly beyond their limits. Layered over these conflicts was a slowly disappearing region called medical ethics. On Earth she would never have dreamed of discussing a patient’s problems with a third party without the patient’s consent. But on Trikon Station, the doctor-patient privilege evaporated whenever she reasonably believed that withholding the information could jeopardize the safety of others.