David closed the door and turned down toward his workstation. With the tube stations running, his parents back at the house, and the lower university open, the lab was the place he disliked least. The long muscles in his back and legs still ached a little after his night sampling his own wares, and he was half relieved that he could tell Leelee he’d tried it and half relieved that his schedule wouldn’t let him try it again. The whole thing had been like having a very long, pleasant, but kind of boring dream. And it had left his head feeling a little hazy in a way he didn’t enjoy.
His lab work was almost at its final phase. The terminal built into his desk was arranged to display the data on all seven studies that were making up the complex tissue of his senior labs. They were all built around the single unified idea of trying to build complex cell structures that would sequester ferrous products. It wasn’t a holy grail, but it was a good, solid puzzle with a lot of applications for the terraforming efforts if it worked out. With the day out of lab, he had a double handful of data to look over and incorporate.
And so did everyone else.
“Hey? Big Dave?”
Steppan was one of the other four students under Mr. Oke. He stood in the doorway, leaning on a crutch and smiling uncomfortably. He was pale as bleached flour and allergic to the pharmaceutical cocktail that kept bones dense and muscles functioning in the low Martian gravity. He’s broken his leg twice since the year began.
“Hey,” David said.
“Pretty crazy about that tube blowout, eh?”
“Bizarre,” David said.
“So look, I was wondering…ah…”
“You need something,” David said.
“Yeah.”
David tapped his wide fingers across the display screen, letting the data batch process without him. Steppan limped into the room. With both of them there, the lab seemed too small.
“I’ve got an anomaly on one of my runs. I mean way off. Three standard deviations.”
“You’re f**ked, cousin.”
“I know. I think I may have gotten some bad reagent.”
“Bad? Or wrong?”
“Wrong would be bad. Anyway, I know you’ve got some extras, and I was wondering—”
“Extras?”
A little knot squeezed in David’s chest. Steppan shrugged and looked away like he’d said something he hadn’t wanted to.
“Sure. It’s no big deal, right? But my chromium stuff has a lot of the same reagents. If I can scrounge enough together to do another run, I could discard the bad data.”
“I don’t have that much stuff.”
Steppan nodded, his head bowed down, eyes to the floor. He licked his lips, and David could see the desperation in the way he held his shoulders. David had imagined a million times what it would be like if his labs went pear-shaped. Especially right before placements. It was everyone’s nightmare.
“Sure you do,” Steppan said. “You’re always getting equipment and supplies out of that other locker, right? I mean. You know.”
“I don’t know,” David said. His mouth tasted like copper.
“Sure you do,” Steppan said, not looking up.
The tension in the room was vicious. Steppan hung his head like a whipped dog, but he wouldn’t back away. The walls were too close, the air too stale. Steppan was breathing all the oxygen. The boy’s gaze flickered up to meet David’s and then away again. How much did Steppan know? How much did he suspect? Who else knew?
“I’ll help you,” David said, speaking like the words would cut his tongue if he spoke too fast. “You let me know what you need for another run, and I’ll help you get it, okay? You can have a fresh run. We’ll make the dataset work.”
“Sure, thanks,” Steppan said. The relief in his shoulders wasn’t faked. “Thank you.”
“Does Mr. Oke know about the other locker?”
“No,” Steppan said with a grin that was almost camaraderie. “And never will, right?”
So instead of working his datasets, David spent the morning going through the labs, looking for anyone he knew well enough to talk to. There were fewer than he’d hoped for, and the tension in the air made people short-tempered. Everyone was behind. Everyone had their own problems. Everyone was worried about their labs and their placements and whatever issues their families put on them. By afternoon, he’d given up. The only option left was to get on the network and order a fresh supply for Steppan from the distributor. It didn’t take out too much from his secret account, and he wasn’t the only one scrambling at the last minute to supply a lab. It was usually students buying their own things, he thought, but it wouldn’t seem that odd to have someone doing a favor for a friend. As long as no one asked where the money came from, he’d be fine. When he got back to his actual labs, he felt like he’d already done a full day’s work and he’d hardly started.
The hours passed quickly. By dinnertime, he’d cleared and processed all the data from the day the tubes went down and started on the data for the day after. Just in time for the data that had been accruing while he’d been wandering around the labs to start showing up in the queue. With each batch file that appeared, David felt the night stretching out ahead of him. Maybe he just wouldn’t sleep. If he could get through tomorrow, he’d have the whole backlog cleared. Unless someone blew something up, or Steppan decided he wanted something else to keep quiet, or Aunt Bobbie decided to come lift weights at him or something. David tried to stretch the headache out of the base of his skull and got back to work.
At seven minutes past dinnertime, his hand terminal chimed. He accepted the connection with his thumb.
“You aren’t coming home for dinner?” his mother asked. Her voice was tinny and small, like air pressed into a straw.
“No,” David replied. “I’ve got to finish my datasets.”
“I thought they gave you the daytime to do that,” she said. On the hand terminal screen, she looked different than in person. Not older or younger, but both. It was like being shrunk down rubbed out all the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth, but at the same time it made all the gray show in her hair.
“I had some other stuff I needed to take care of.”
The small screen version of her face went cool and distant. The tightness in David’s shoulders started to feel like a weight.
“Time management is an important skill, David,” she said, as if it were just a random thought. Not anything to do with him.