William E

William E. Lopez

Approx. 1,994 words

There were 9 crew members aboard the space station. Now, one is dead. What happened?

A Murder in Orbit

W. E. Lopez

Roger Halpern quickly turned off the alarm bells before the entire nine member crew of the Hi-Test space station was awakened.

“What the hell is that racket?” George Marcos asked while climbing the crew ladder from the deck below.

“Bio-metric data readout,” Roger explained, “critically low readings from Sam’s bio-transponder. We’ve got to get to his cabin immediately.”

“I’m right behind you, Roger,” George said. “Let’s move!”

The Hi-Test platform was a cylinder one hundred and sixty feet across but only forty feet high. Rotating around its central axis at a fraction more than six rpm, the station had an artificial gravity, equal that on Earth, created by centripetal force. The mission to Mars in 2014 had revealed that humans would not fair well during periods of extended weightlessness, and the mission to Jupiter would be more than twice as long.

Dave Velasquez and Ruth Moore reached the control room as Roger and George were running to Sam Dunn’s cabin. They quickly joined the parade.

Roger arrived first with the others just behind. He tried the door latch and found it locked. “Bust it in,” George shouted. “It’s only thin aluminum.”

“Yeah, but braced to withstand normal atmospheric pressure in case of a hull breach. I can’t bust down a door designed to hold back twelve tons of air pressure.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Ruth, eager to know what the cause of the emergency was.

“Sam’s bio-metric readings are critically low,” replied George. “He must be in some kind of trouble.”

“How can we get in to help him?” Dave asked.

“Get back to the control room and call up the security program for crew privacy. Over ride the lock manually.”

Dave didn’t hesitate. He did an about face and raced back to the control room. Seconds later his Latin accented voice came over the PA. “All station readouts are in the green, George. The computer’s asking for a password.”

“Type in ‘black coffee’ and hit enter.”

After an audible click, the door opened easily when Roger turned the latch again. Ruth Moore rushed to the bunk where Sam Dunn lay. “He’s not breathing,” she said, “and I can’t get a pulse. I’d say he’s dead.”

“Not possible,” put in Roger Halpern. “NASA would never put an astronaut into space unless he was in perfect health. Something had to have killed Sam.”

“In a locked room?” George asked. “Next you’ll be telling me the butler did it.” He turned to Ruth and said, “What if we give him straight oxygen? How about jump-starting his heart with the defibrillator?”

“Look at the tell-tales on his wrist transponder, absolutely flat.”

“We can’t rule out murder,” Roger Halpern said gravely. “One of us could be a killer.”

“Ridiculous, Roger. There’s no blood, no sign of any wound or trauma, and the door was locked from the inside.”

“What if the killer used the computer to over ride the security routine the way we did?” Ruth asked.

George turned to Roger. “You’re the computer nerd,” he said. “Would that be possible?”

“Sure, I could do it because I have administrator privileges on the computer. But I didn’t kill Sam.”

“Are you absolutely certain no one else could have, Roger?”

“Almost, but I’ll do a check run anyway.”

“Hey! Where is everyone?” Dr. Taylor Corbin said over the intercom.

“We’re in the captain’s cabin, Taylor. I’ll need you to do a preliminary autopsy.”

“Autopsy! You mean someone’s dead?”

“Have you ever done an autopsy on a living person, Taylor? Of course someone’s dead. Sam Dunn. In his cabin, which was locked from the inside. It’s quite the mystery.”

“I’ll be right there,” Dr. Corbin said.

George clicked the intercom, “Do what you can, I’ll be in the control room. I have to inform Houston.” He shut off and told Ruth, “Wait for the doctor. Tell him everything we’ve found and make note of everything he does. We’ll need witnesses for the investigation.”

“Right, George.”

* * *

“Houston’s standing by,” Roger reported when George entered the control room.

“Thanks, Roger.” He grabbed the mike and sat down to make as complete a report as possible with his limited understanding of the situation.

When he had finished, Houston asked him to switch to private mode and use the earphones. George complied with the instructions from ground control and listened intently for the next eight minutes. When he signed off and switched the com network back to public he turned to Roger. “I want you to go through the computer logs and report everything that’s happened during the last hour. I’ll be in the ward room if you need me.”

“You’ve got it, George.”

Leaving the control room, Roger went to the ward room where he poured a large mug of black coffee. Rich Henderson and Steve Delahunt were just finishing their breakfast rations.

“Heard the alarm bells, but they were turned off almost as suddenly as they started,” Steve said. “Another test?”

“I wish,” George answered. “No, the computer is programmed to alert us all should there be any condition requiring investigation. Sam’s bio readout suddenly stopped. He’s dead.”

“That can’t be,” Rich said. “Sam’s only thirty-five and in better health than any of us, except for….”

“Except for what…” George asked?

“Well, look, it’s probably nothing, but you know that Dr. Corbin has been treating Sam for a psych condition, don’t you?”

“Of course, everyone knew that. Sam has the worst case of agoraphobia I’ve ever seen. He just can’t stand large, empty spaces, and that’s all we have outside Hi-Test, a billion-trillion miles of open space. But, Sam locked himself in his cabin. He couldn’t have suffered an attack of the heebie-jeebies and gone into cardiac arrest.”

“I told you it was nothing. I’m sorry I brought it up,” Rich said.

“Look, I’ve got to get a handle on this. If you two are done, how about giving me some time alone to think this over?”

“Sure, George,” Steve said. “I’m scheduled for the treadmill in fifteen minutes anyway. Guess I’ll do some warm up exercises. Come on, Rich. Let’s give the man some room.”

After Rich and Steve left the ward room, George tried to examine the problem from all possible angles. He was interrupted when Dr. Corbin entered fifteen minutes later. “I’ve got a preliminary report for you, Skipper. Body temperature was 95.3 Fahrenheit, a little cooler than I would have expected for such a recent death. Tox screen showed no evidence of prescription drugs, or recreational drugs. No signs of heart attack or injury to the body. His heart and brain simply ceased to function. There was nothing for me to look for.”

“It’s a strange one, doc. Have you ever heard of anything like this before?”

Taylor Corbin hesitated a moment. “Outside of sudden infant death syndrome, no, I don’t think I have. But I’m a psychologist, not a medical doctor. I’ve had the required medical training, but no internship or residency. I’m a shrink and I could be wrong about Sam’s corpse.”

“I know your limitations, Taylor. How about asking Ruth to double check your conclusions? She’s had advanced first aid and emergency training. While that doesn’t make her a doctor either, perhaps with two heads comparing notes…?”

“Yes, I’ll ask her, George. Right away,” he said as he left the ward room.

Alone again, George sipped at his coffee. He wasn’t alone long when Roger Halpern entered, poured a cup of coffee and sat down across from him. “I’ve finished scanning the computer logs, George. I found two interesting items, both of which were coded to be self-deleting. But the person who wrote the code didn’t understand when a file is deleted from the computer, only the index pointing to the file is changed. The binary code remains on the hard drive until it is overwritten by new code.”

“Is this significant,” George asked?

“I’d say it was,” Roger began; then he continued to describe what he had found. “So I logged onto the Internet and did a little research. I found that the French Academíe du Mediciné investigated this phenomenon in 1853 when the topic was called Mesmerism, after an early practitioner.

“To investigate the limits of mesmerism, they asked a condemned criminal to volunteer for execution in a humane and painless manner. They hypnotized the subject strapped to a table. Then they told him the veins in his wrists would be cut open with a scalpel and blood would flow. To heighten the effect they poured warm water over the man’s wrists. He died within nine minutes without having been touched, except by the water.”

“You mean he died because he thought he was bleeding to death?”

“Exactly, George.”

“Now we know how it could have been done, but how do we connect that to the probable killer? You needn’t answer, I think I know.”

George Marcos reached for the intercom mike and issued an all hands order. “All hands, this is the co-pilot, now in command of the Hi-Test mission. I want everyone assembled in the control room immediately. All hands, all personnel, assemble in the control room.” He put down the mike and said to Roger. “Let’s go, buddy. I’ve got to arrest someone. Now where the hell can we lock up a prisoner?”

* * *

The control room was crowded and over flowing when all eight remaining crew members assembled. Wayne Preston and Mickey Cobb, the Chief Reactor Engineer and his assistant, ended up standing in the corridor.

“I regret to have to inform everyone that Doctor Corbin is now under arrest; charged with the murder of Captain Sam Dunn.”

“What!” Corbin exasperated. “Have you lost your mind?”

“We might never have found you out, doctor, except for those two scraps of code you inserted into the computer, the first to activate the private intercom from your cabin to Sam’s, and the second to delete the record of the first and then delete itself. You were in voice communication with Sam’s cabin for exactly twenty-seven minutes just before he died.”

All eyes were on the doctor as he said, “And I suppose I killed him through the intercom? You’re joking!” The doctor looked smug and expected George Marcos to make a fool of him self.

“At first I had no idea, until Rich reminded me that you had been treating Sam for the past several months, for a severe case of agoraphobia. Part of that treatment included hypnosis, a specialty of psychologists and psychiatrists.”

“You mean you believe Dr. Corbin killed Sam by hypnosis?” Ruth asked. “I’ve never heard of such a thing! It sounds like a Hollywood writer’s gimmick in a low budget mystery film, George.”

“I had never heard of anything like it either, Ruth, until Roger told me about an interesting case in France, way back in 1853. But Dr. Corbin would surely have known of the case since training in hypnosis is part of his specialty, and he’s had months to gain Sam’s confidence and willing cooperation.

“Add that to the report I received from Houston earlier, a report that Dr. Corbin and Sam’s wife have been having a serious affair for the past eight months, and it all boils down to a murder in orbit. It was a pretty slick trick, I’ll admit, but those two snippets of code on the computer hard drive will convict you, Dr. Corbin.

“Wayne, you and Mickey take him to hydroponics Bay 3. Use whatever force is necessary. We don’t have any way of confining Dr. Corbin, but I think fifteen feet of eighth-inch cable fastened to a deck fitting and to his neck will keep him from causing any trouble.”

“Aye, aye, Skipper,” Wayne Preston said. The two engineers advanced upon the doctor and took him in tow.

“Roger, make a note for me. Future space missions can’t spare the room to have a brig installed, but we can surely carry along a couple pair of hand cuffs.”

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