Uranus

by Ben Bova

  Until, as he passed them, one half whispered, “Hello, Doc.”

  Slowing his pace, Tómas asked, “Do I know you?”

  “Naw. But we know you.”

  They weren’t kids, Tómas realized as the three of them surrounded him. Two grabbed his arms and the third smashed a paralyzing blow to his nose. Tómas’s head snapped back. He struggled to free his arms. A punch to his kidney collapsed him and he sagged to the ground.

  One of his assailants pulled a hammer from his jacket. “Compliments of Noel Dacco, pal.” He smashed Tómas’s left leg just below the kneecap. The pain was shattering. Then another crushing blow to his head and Tómas blacked out.

  When he regained consciousness he was lying on the passageway floor, bleeding, his leg broken and his skull fractured. As if from an incredible distance he could hear the sound of a trio of footfalls running away.

  BOOK SIX

  THE SAINT

  KYLE UMBER

  Kyle Umber always insisted that he was not a saint.

  “You have to be dead before you can be made a saint,” he would say, with that boyish smile of his. “I’m still alive and kicking.”

  Now, though, as he knelt alone in his private quarters, the memory of that little piece of self-serving humility bedeviled him. The arrogance of it. The self-important smugness. Here we have several thousand migrants from Earth—the poor, the hopeless, the lost—and I joke about being worthy of sainthood.

  He had been on his knees for the better part of an hour, vainly seeking a path out of the trap he’d built for himself. You don’t run this habitat, he realized. Evan Waxman does. And you let him do it! You stood aside, content to be admired by the poor souls arriving here, and let Evan take up the controls of the habitat.

  Rust. Narcotics. God knows what else is taking place in that tower Evan’s built, right under my nose. And I’ve been too vain, too conceited, too stupid to take notice of it.

  Fool. Blind, arrogant, trusting fool.

  I’ve let Evan place me on a pedestal. And now I don’t know how to climb down off it and take control of Haven back into my own hands.

  Pride, Reverend Umber told himself. The sin of pride.

  Umber remembered the words of St. Augustine: It was pride that changed angels into devils.

  Pride. Blind, stupid, self-glorifying pride. The sin from which all others arise.

  Slowly, painfully, Umber struggled to his feet. All around him lay the trappings of power, the ornaments of selfish pride. His quarters resembled a scene out of ancient royalty: luxurious damask draperies and silken bed linens, bejeweled chandeliers and fine graceful furniture.

  All the embellishments of wealth and power. Useless. Vain, self-glorifying, self-defeating pride.

  I wanted to create a new heaven, here among the distant worlds, far from the corruption and temptations of Earth. And all I’ve accomplished is to create a center for drugs, narcotics, lustful sin. I’ve built a modern hell, not a new heaven.

  Tottering before his handsome desk, surrounded by lush foliage and exquisite furniture, Umber cried aloud, “Lord, show me the way!”

  But he heard no answer.

  * * *

  Raven was undressing for bed when the phone buzzed.

  It must be Tómas, she thought. For an instant she hesitated. After the way he behaved at dinner, why should I talk to him? But she was already leaning across her bed, reaching for the phone. He’s under tremendous stress, she told herself. I shouldn’t get frosty with him.

  The face in the phone screen was obviously a nurse. Tómas has been hurt. Badly. Raven pulled her discarded clothes back on and ran to the hospital.

  He was stretched out on the bed, one leg encased in a cast and raised in traction, a big bandage hiding one side of his face, his skull wrapped in more bandages.

  The doctor standing beside Raven, a plump red-haired woman, was saying in a whisper, “It’s the concussion that worries me most. They almost killed him.”

  “They?” Raven asked, tearing her eyes away from Tómas’s unconscious form. “Who?”

  The doctor made a small shrug. “We don’t know. He was found unconscious on the floor of the passageway. Surveillance video shows he was accosted by three young men.”

  Raven stared down at Tómas’s battered face. Who would do this? Why?

  The astronomer’s eyes fluttered open. Bloodshot, unfocused, blinking. Then they stopped at Raven’s form standing beside the bed.

  He made a groaning sound.

  She flung herself onto his prostrate form, cradling his bandaged face in her hands. He winced deeply.

  “Tómas!” she sobbed.

  He croaked, “Raven. I’m sorry.”

  “Who did this to you?”

  Tómas did not answer. All he could remember was the suddenness of the attack. The pain. His helplessness. But he recognized that Raven was here, sobbing uncontrollably as she lay sprawled across his chest.

  He smiled faintly as he slid back into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  The following morning Evan Waxman strolled through his outer domain and into his private office, smiling at his assistants as they sat at their desks, already busy with their morning assignments.

  Sliding into his handsome, comfortable chair, he told his desktop computer to present a summary of the week’s production figures. He smiled as the numbers showed that sales of various narcotics were climbing nicely.

  Then an attention-demanding star flashed in the corner of his screen. With a puzzled frown Waxman told the computer to present the relevant data.

  The screen showed the passageway from the shuttle docking area. A man was being viciously assaulted by a trio of thugs wearing gray hooded jackets. Waxman couldn’t make out their faces. They swiftly beat their victim and left him sprawled unconscious on the passageway floor as they ran away.

  Waxman stared at the scene, his eyes wide with surprised disbelief. A mugging! Here in Haven? Outrageous. Unacceptable. Umber will hit the ceiling when he learns of this.

  “Phone,” Waxman commanded. “Get me the security department. Top priority!”

  The screen immediately showed a young woman wearing police blue. Waxman demanded to speak to the chief. The woman swiftly connected him.

  Before Waxman could speak a word, the security chief—a grizzled, gray-haired man in a tight-fitting blue uniform—said, “This is about the incident last night, isn’t it?”

  “Incident?” Waxman snapped. “We can’t have that kind of violence here! What the hell happened?”

  “We’re trying to put the pieces together,” said the security chief, his beefy face showing concern, almost anger. “Seems like a random act of violence.”

  “Random act? You mean those thugs were just having fun?”

  “Could be,” said the chief.

  “Who are they? Have you identified them?”

  “Not yet. Those hoods they were wearing hid their faces pretty effectively.”

  “Well find them!” Waxman demanded. “Find them quickly! We can’t have this kind of violence here!”

  As reasonably as he could, the chief said, “You’ve got to expect little outbreaks like this from time to time. After all, this habitat is filled with the dregs of society.”

  “You let them get away with this and pretty soon the whole damned colony will become a battleground! Find them! Quickly!”

  The chief nodded. “Right.”

  Waxman’s screen went blank. He leaned back in his self-adjusting chair, thinking, Umber will go berserk the minute he learns of this. He’ll blame me for it!

  REACTIONS

  Kyle Umber sat open-mouthed with shock as he watched the video of the attack on Tómas Gomez.

  “This is terrible!” he exclaimed.

  Evan Waxman, standing anxiously before Umber’s ornate desk nodded unhappily. “The victim was one of the astronomers: Tómas Gomez.”

  “How badly was he hurt?”

  “Broken leg, broken nose, fractured skull.�
�

  “Good lord!”

  “The assailants said something to him, but the surveillance system couldn’t make out the words.”

  “I’ve got to go to the poor man,” Umber said, pushing himself up from his desk chair.

  “We’re trying to amplify the words, maybe they’ll give us a clue as to who the ruffians were.”

  As he came around his desk, Umber said, “And why they did such a senseless act of violence. Why would they do this?”

  Waxman said, “Young thugs. They don’t need a reason.”

  “No,” Umber disagreed. “Every human action has a motivation behind it. The motivation might seem farfetched, outrageous, but every action has a cause.”

  Waxman shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “I’m going to the hospital, Evan. Please let me know if you learn anything about this.”

  “I will.”

  “Immediately.”

  “Certainly.”

  Umber hurried out of his ornate office. Waxman watched him leave, then headed for the meeting that the chief of security had set up for him. With a Sergeant Jacobi.

  * * *

  “Frankly,” said Jacobi, “I’m surprised that we haven’t seen more of this kind of thing.”

  Waxman was sitting before Jacobi’s desk, a standard-issue gray metal type shoehorned into the sergeant’s narrow office; it was nothing more than a closet-sized space partitioned off from the rest of the station by flimsy shoulder-high panels. The area was barely big enough for the two of them, and Waxman could hear the daily chatter of the security people filling the air outside the cubicle.

  Through gritted teeth, he said to Jacobi, “You’d better nail these thugs before other would-be vandals start terrorizing the people.”

  Jacobi nodded. “We’re devoting all our resources to it, but there isn’t much to go on. Their faces were pretty well obscured by the hoods on their jackets—”

  “You have voiceprints of what they said, don’t you?”

  With a sad shake of his head, Jacobi replied, “Not clear enough for voiceprint ID, I’m afraid.”

  Waxman stared at the sergeant. “Then what are you doing?”

  “Initiating regular patrols along the passageways,” Jacobi answered. “The obvious presence of security patrols is the best way to prevent future incidents.”

  “But what about finding the kids who attacked Dr. Gomez?”

  “We’re bringing in kids by the carload and questioning them closely. Sooner or later we’ll get a lead.”

  “Sooner or later,” Waxman echoed.

  “Police work takes time, and patience.”

  For several moments Waxman simply sat in the uncomfortable straight-back chair, glaring at Jacobi. At last he got to his feet.

  “Keep me informed of how the investigation is progressing,” he said. Then he turned and left Jacobi sitting at his desk.

  Watching his retreating back, Jacobi said to himself, Sure. I’ll send you written reports every day for the next week, then weekly, and then I’ll stop. You won’t pay them any attention and in a few weeks the whole affair will be forgotten.

  He smiled knowingly.

  * * *

  Alicia could see how upset Raven was. The morning flow of customers was on the slow side, yet Raven hardly responded to the women’s questions and comments.

  The crowd thinned to only two shoppers as the noon hour approached. Alicia pulled Raven aside and told her, in a low voice, that she should go to the hospital to visit Tómas.

  “And leave you alone here?” Raven objected.

  “I can handle things for a while,” Alicia replied. “You go and see Tómas.”

  “You’re sure?”

  With a smile, Alicia said, “I’m sure.”

  It wasn’t until nearly closing time that Raven returned. She looked worried.

  Alicia waited until the last customer sauntered out of the boutique. Then, as she lowered the window blinds, she asked, “So how is he today?”

  Raven was obviously tense: her hands clenched into fists, her face looked strained, upset.

  “He can’t remember very much about the attack,” she said. “It’s all a blur in his mind.”

  “I suppose that’s typical.”

  Raven nodded tightly. “That’s what the doctor said. She told me he was recuperating normally. But he can’t remember what happened! Not any details.”

  “Nothing to worry about,” Alicia said, trying to sound comforting, sure of herself.

  “I’m worried,” Raven replied.

  Alicia went to her and wrapped her arms around Raven’s shoulders. “He’s going to be fine.”

  “But who would do this to him?” Raven said, tearfully. “Why? Who would want to hurt him?”

  “Some people are crazy,” Alicia said.

  “But we were all tested during the trip out here,” Raven pointed out. “The psychotechnicians weeded out the violent ones.”

  Alicia pulled up one of the wheeled chairs from the counter and sat Raven on it. Then she went to the water fountain and poured out a cupful.

  Handing the cup to Raven, she said, “When I lived back in Chicago, there were plenty of cases of sidewalk violence. You couldn’t walk alone in some neighborhoods. People carried guns and knives.”

  “Not here in Haven.”

  “I hope not,” said Alicia. “It would be awful if this habitat sank into that kind of mess.”

  FRUSTRATIONS

  “It’s all a blur,” Tómas muttered. “It happened so fast.…”

  Sitting beside the astronomer’s bed, Kyle Umber nodded sympathetically. “But you don’t remember what they said to you?”

  Tómas started to shake his head, winced with pain, and said merely, “No, I don’t.”

  “You can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt you?”

  “Only that guy who tried to rape Raven, but he’s halfway back to Earth by now.”

  “Noel Dacco.”

  “Yes.”

  Umber sighed. “We’ve never had an incident like this, not in the three years since we opened Haven to immigration.”

  Through the dull pain throbbing behind his eyes, Tómas thought, It’s like he’s blaming me for the attack. Like it’s my own fault.

  The minister leaned over and lightly patted Tómas’s uninjured leg. “Well, I’m sure the security chief and his sergeant Jacobi will get to the bottom of this. In the meantime, you relax and get well.”

  Tómas smiled weakly. “I don’t have anything else to do, do I?”

  Umber pushed himself to his feet. “God be with you.”

  “And with you, sir.”

  Umber left the narrow enclosure. Gomez stared at the door as it slid closed behind him. Then he shut his eyes and drifted to sleep.

  He dreamed. He saw the planet Uranus surrounded by dozens of tiny moons whirling around it in hyperkinetic orbits. Then a huge moon came hurtling out of the darkness of space and smashed into the planet. The small satellites were swirled into a frenzy of new orbits, many of them flying completely away from Uranus. The planet itself tilted over on its side as huge clouds of gas and debris erupted from beneath its clouds and spurted into space.

  Tómas saw it all clearly. So clearly it hurt his eyes, numbed his soul.

  And a voice from deep within him said, “Find the wanderers, Tómas. Find the wanderers.”

  He asked, “How? How can I find a moon torn loose from its orbit when I don’t know what its original orbit was?”

  He heard no answer.

  * * *

  Kyle Umber returned to the security department’s headquarters and asked the chief to allow him to review the surveillance videos of the passageway where Gomez had been attacked.

  The security chief looked surprised. “I doubt that you’ll see anything that Sergeant Jacobi and his team haven’t noticed.”

  Umber smiled tightly and nodded. “Probably not. But I would like to try.”

  With a cocked brow, the chief asked, “You’re su
re?”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves, you know.”

  Suppressing a sigh, the chief spoke into his desktop phone and called for an assistant to bring Umber down to the security camera monitoring center.

  It was a small, tight circular room, its curving walls covered with monitoring screens that showed every passageway and public space in the habitat. Umber’s guide, a petite brunette young woman in a snugly form-fitting blue uniform, showed him to a vacant desk. As he slid into its chair, she tapped the viewscreen built into the tiny table before him.

  “It’s voice activated,” she said. “Just tell the screen what you want to see: call up the list of cameras, pick the one you’re looking for. That’s all there is to it.” Then she added, “Oh, and tell the screen the time you’re interested in. Otherwise you’ll have to wade through weeks of observations.”

  Umber nodded gratefully. With the young woman standing behind him, he plowed through a diagram showing the locations of the surveillance cameras. He found the one he wanted, then ordered the monitor to start one hour before the attack on Dr. Gomez.

  The screen showed an empty passageway. Umber asked for fast-forward.

  A trio of young men walked into the scene, ridiculously jerky in the fast-forward mode. Their faces were shaded by the hoods on their dark gray jackets.

  “Normal speed, please,” said Umber.

  The screen went totally blank. Then bright red lettering announced, FOOTAGE UNAVAILABLE. SECURITY INVESTIGATION IN PROGRESS.

  Umber stared at the words for a silent moment, then turned to the young woman. “How do I get to see this footage?”

  She seemed just as surprised as he. “I guess you’ll have to talk to Sergeant Jacobi. He’s in charge of the investigation.”

  SEARCHING

  His cold gray eyes focused on Reverend Umber, Sergeant Jacobi said, “I’m afraid that footage is being studied by our analysis team. I really wouldn’t want to interrupt their work.”