Lifeline

Daniel Aiken shook as if unaccustomed to losing his temper. He remained silent and finally turned to depart. He moved out the door, awkward, seething with anger and helplessness. Linda placed a strained smile on her face, motioned for the rest of the line to proceed, and then she too left.

Food was tight enough, and getting tighter. As chief assessor, Linda Arnando could alter some figures, but since Brahms was such a stickler on “being fair” to everyone, she couldn’t do it for just anybody, no matter how indignant they became. She increased her own rations only when she felt particularly weak, when she couldn’t function properly.

Linda went back to the office and set about planning which research teams she would investigate next. On her desk an electrostatic “perpetual motion” toy clicked away, silver balls whirling in orbits that wouldn’t decay for five years.

She ran her hands over her desktop, then activated the inset terminal. She and Terachyk had divided up the various laboratory efforts, the administrative groups, the performance appraisals.

Linda Arnando didn’t know much about the detailed research. Her specialty was management psychology—how employees worked together, how they got the job done. She was good at finding out who the most useful employees were.

Linda logged in to the confidential employee data base and used her Assessor password, which gave her access to all levels of information. Whether she understood the details or not, she had a sixth sense that allowed her to cut through the extraneous stuff, get a good feel for what was useful and what was BS.

Tapping a fingernail on the textured metal surface, she called up the file on Daniel Aiken. She wanted to see about this man who was trying to do things so much more efficiently.

The list identified Aiken as an organic chemist specializing in photosynthetic processes. His wife Sheila worked as an electronics engineer with a focus on communications. Daniel Aiken had an average score in the Efficiency Study; Sheila had done a bit better.

Aiken’s stated primary project was investigating ways to synthesize sugar molecules using the raw elemental materials available on Orbitech 1, which could chemically create basic foodstuff for them out of the remaining lunar debris left in the stable Lagrange point. An admirable project, Linda thought—and Aiken seemed to be making rapid progress, too. According to the available log summaries, he had made several amazing breakthroughs since the first RIF.

There we go: incentive in action.

But Aiken had run up against the same problem many other Orbitech 1 researchers had encountered. The lunar rocks sent up by the mass driver on Clavius Base were rich in some materials, yet had the Moon’s own limitations in others. Mainly they were hindered by lack of hydrogen, the lightest element, which had escaped away into space because of the Moon’s small mass and low gravity.

Aiken needed elemental hydrogen to fill in the blanks in the sugar molecules. Other researchers needed it to develop rocket fuel to help the colonists escape.

Linda smiled ironically. For want of a nail the shoe was lost, for want of a shoe the horse was lost … for want of hydrogen, the colony was lost.

She looked at some of Aiken’s results. Impressive. She scanned the dates of his test runs, accessed his log entries, and called up the times of his data manipulations.

Something didn’t look right. Linda stepped back.

She accessed the rough files in his personal directory, not just the summaries he would expect people to look at. She read the last entries, wondering what he had done to some of his results. She could not understand the science, but she could spot the gaps in his entries.

Many of his test runs had not been impressive at all. He showed some progress, but nothing to get excited about. He had logged his results, mentioning a few directions he might wish to pursue.

And then the RIF had happened.

The following day, Aiken had opened his old data files again and changed some of the numbers. He had tried to wipe out evidence of his tampering, but Linda could call up the original tags on the files, the coded dates and times of input.

She knew how to do such manipulation—she had done the same type of thing at times to get herself extra rations. But she knew how to cover her trail,Aiken didn’t.

She frowned. The data points he had changed were the outlying values—the ones that put his results into question. Everything looked nice and pretty once he brought them in line.

“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Linda said to herself.

She made a mental note of his office number and the location of his living quarters. Then she smiled. It felt good to be on the other side, for once.