Lifeline

“I’ll take over his duties,” Brahms said, sighing. How could McLaris have done such a thing? He eased back, breathing slowly, slapping a mask of composure on his face. Brahms hated himself for these lapses into weakness, these brief moments without control. He had never been so quick to anger before.

“Okay.” Drury shrugged. “How about a game of checkers, anybody?”

Brahms bristled. “Fifteen hundred people have their throats up against the razor blade right now—we have to find a way to survive!”

Brushing aside the associate director’s retort, Drury spread his meaty hands. “Oh, things’ll work out in the end. Positive thinking, Curtis. Give it a whirl.”

“Get the hell out of here!”

Waving, Drury left, wandering back out into the corridor of administrative offices. The silica-fiber carpeting muffled his footsteps.

Drury had been with the parent company for the past fourteen years. He was a competent manager, but not truly gifted. Brahms, who had done the numbers himself, knew that Drury had not scored well on the Efficiency Study.

Four months before, Brahms’s supervisor back on Earth had spent hours briefing him about what the company expected. The bookkeepers and resource managers looked with glee upon the enormous profits generated from the exotic products created on Orbitech 1.

In such isolation the entire political and social structure of the station could be compared to the frontier days of Earth. Orbitechnologies wanted to know how well the colony was doing in relation to how well it could be doing. Was it operating at its greatest efficiency? They wanted Curtis Brahms to go up and find out, to make suggestions for improvement. He had a knack for learning things like that.

As the Earth-to-orbit vehicle took Brahms up to rendezvous with the shuttle-tug that would carry him out to L-5, he simmered with excitement. Brahms felt so proud, so sure of himself. He could almost smell something in the air, like a premonition.

Before he had left, Forbes ran a small article spotlighting him as an up-and-coming manager, loaded with administrative dynamite and filled with new perspectives and ideas. Prime time had come for Curtis Brahms. Everything would fall into place at the moment he stepped out onto the docking bay of Orbitech 1 and got to work.

He did not ever intend a vendetta against the former director. Instead, he approached his Efficiency Study with a single-minded insistence to get it done right. Brahms saw this as a great chance to put a gold star on his own career, but he also derived immense satisfaction just from making things work better.

Bright-sounding progress reports and extravagant promises from Roha Ombalal would no longer be sufficient for Orbitechnologies. Brahms had a gut-level feeling that Ombalal was an incompetent director, but he waited until the hard numbers tallied on the spreadsheets.

He developed broad criteria for assessing efficiency. The fifteen hundred people had to fit together as a unit. Productivity must be maximized; waste must be minimized; but the people themselves must remain satisfied as well, which seemed to be the most difficult factor to measure.

Brahms set up an extensive survey form on the Orbitech 1 computers, which processed the demographic data and scored people on numerous criteria, such as their material productivity, their health, the quality and speed of their work, their ability to get things accomplished by a deadline. Then he rated the “fuzzy” factors, such as their general attitude, their ability to work and live with others as a community so that Orbitech 1 was more than just a giant factory in space.

Over the months, Brahms dug into every detail of the workers’ lives. He studied how happy they were, trying to find which ones wanted to go back to Earth, which ones were still afraid or uncomfortable about living in space, and which ones felt exhilarated and honored to be on the station. He encouraged them to be honest, and thought he had been fairly successful.

Brahms conducted a dozen interviews per day, every day of the week. He watched tapes of the interviews over again to double-check his impressions, then beamed them back to Earth for secondary analysis by one of the company’s other teams.

He spent weeks collating information, massaging numbers through a new computer model developed at Orbitechnologies. Looking at his preliminary results, Brahms called about a hundred of the people back again for a second interview. Brahms chose these interviewees carefully and watched their responses as he asked them questions about other colonists. By studying the way they responded to the questions, he gained a second impression about them, and gleaned some information about other colonists.