But Ombalal was not a successful administrator—he had his priorities all wrong.
The Indian chemist had wanted everyone to like him, wanted the Orbitech 1 people to think of him as a benevolent manager, someone they could talk to.
To foster his image, or maybe just to avoid his other duties, Ombalal had spent a great deal of time wandering through the labs, looking at all the work being done. Occasionally, he would become fascinated with the research, interfering and not getting his own administrative work done. Some of the scientists may have loved him for his genuine interest; others thought he was harassing them, getting in the way.
But what could the parent corporation expect? Orbitechnologies had a consistent policy of “rewarding” brilliant researchers with promotions into administrative posts. Brahms stated his own position frequently: “I wouldn’t put a scientist in an important managerial position any more than I would put an administrator in a lab doing research.”
When Orbitechnologies finally relieved the director of his duties and ordered Brahms to replace him, Ombalal’s family had been sent home, but he had been allowed to stay for a while, as a figurehead, only to save face.
Roha Ombalal had been devastated, wide-eyed and baffled at his misfortune. Brahms could tell that the director had never failed like this before, and he still didn’t seem to grasp what exactly he had done wrong.
“Knock, knock?”
Brahms looked up and scowled at the obese man who strode into his office. Tim Drury, the Maintenance/Services Division leader, began to speak, but Brahms held up his hand, indicating Terachyk intent at the terminal.
“Don’t disturb him. He’s doing something for me.”
Drury shrugged. “Question—when are we going to start getting things back to normal? We’ve told everybody they have a few days off to recover from the shock, but some service parts have already started fizzling. My people are going to have to go back to their maintenance duties before long. It’s going to be dregs for their morale if they’re the only ones back on the job.” Drury threw a glance at Ombalal and lowered his voice. He knew who really made the decisions. “Are you going to restart the production lines, Curtis?”
“I’m just the associate director.” Brahms kept his gaze on Ombalal, trying to spark some life in the man.
“Ask me if it makes any difference now.” Drury rolled his eyes. He didn’t seem to realize what Brahms was trying to do.
Drury had long, curly blond hair and a bushy reddish mustache poised on his upper lip as if it intended to launch itself off at any moment. And he was huge.
Brahms disliked people who had such low self-esteem that they allowed themselves to get so enormously fat. “A lazy body is the sign of a lazy mind” he had always believed. Brahms kept himself in good shape, reveling in the fine-tuned feel to his body. But Drury was always so good-natured it was difficult to be angry at the man.
Ombalal finally spoke. “He is correct, Mr. Brahms. Do not let me hold you back.”
Brahms removed his glasses, blinking in the light. “Well we have the raw materials to last us a while. Just no food. Yes, all divisions will return to work. It’ll distract them, keep them quiet for a little longer. Until we can think of something.”
Drury smirked. “How can the universe bear to go on without a continual supply of our no-smear lipstick? Or airy-but-durable single-molecular weaves for the height of fashion!” He paused. “But what about Production Division? Who’s going to fill McLaris’s place—now that he’s taken, er, a brief leave of absence?” The heavyset man made a maddeningly aloof smile.
Once again, Brahms burned. McLaris’s theft of the shuttle-tug was an appalling betrayal of Brahms’s leadership—a betrayal of all the good people on Orbitech 1. Not only had McLaris taken the last working shuttle, but he had shocked the colonists, called attention to their desperate situation, before Brahms could find a way to solve things. McLaris had stolen their icon of hope, the symbol that allowed them to think they still had a link with Earth. Even now, McLaris was en route to the Moon, safe and free, leaving the rest of them trapped. Trapped.
Brahms threw a glance at Ombalal, hoping that the man might volunteer for McLaris’s former position. The station director continued to stare at his large feet.
“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.