by Bova, Ben
He was afraid to go, Cardenas said to herself. He didn’t want to do this mission. He said he was a fugitive from the law of averages. But he’s out there now, risking his neck for Nadia. Cardenas shook her head, No, not just for Nadia. For all of us. His damned macho sense of honor. Come back to me, Manny. Don’t get yourself killed out there. Come back to me.
Tavalera was pouring himself a mug of coffee from the urn they had plugged in earlier. He looked serious, too, almost grim. But then Raoul always looks sour, Cardenas told herself. She wanted to ask the men if everything was all right, but she didn’t want to interfere with their work, distract them. And she didn’t want to seem like a worried, nagging “little woman.”
“Go for separation in five minutes, on my mark,” Pancho’s voice came through, sounding calm, professional. “Mark. Five minutes to separation.”
“Copy five minutes.” Manny’s voice.
“You want some coffee?”
Cardenas almost jumped. Tavalera startled her, she had been concentrating on the voices from the spacecraft so completely.
“Look, Doc,” Tavalera said gently, “it’s gonna be a long mission. Have a seat, try to relax. He’s gonna be fine.”
“I know, Raoul. I know, but I can’t help worrying.”
He pushed the coffee mug into her hand. “At least sit down. You don’t want to be on your feet all through this.”
Fighting the fears bubbling inside her, Cardenas went to the folding chair beside Timoshenko and sat down. I shouldn’t be drinking coffee, she told herself, sipping the steaming brew gingerly. I’m keyed up enough already.
As if he could read her thoughts, Timoshenko grinned slyly at her. “What we need is vodka, no?”
Tavalera said, “When they get back we’ll break out some champagne.”
Wanamaker’s voice said from the flimsy’s tiny speaker, “Separation complete. All systems in the green.”
“I’m outside.” Gaeta’s voice. “Heading into the B ring.”
He’s outside. Cardenas’s breath caught in her throat. He’s on his own now.
Nadia Wunderly was not a religious person, but she had painted a replica of an old Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign that she had remembered from her childhood, a set of colored circles nested within one another, barely twelve centimeters across. It was perched atop the desktop screen in her cramped office, to keep evil spirits away. It’s nonsense, Nadia told herself. But somehow she felt better with it there.
The mission was going smoothly so far. Manny was outside now and Pancho was maneuvering the transfer craft to the underside of the B ring, through the Cassini gap between the A and B rings, to the spot where she would pick up Manny.
After he’s gone through the ring and collected my samples, Wunderly said silently. She suppressed an urge to reach up and touch the hex sign.
As she’d expected, Eberly’s opening statement was devoted almost entirely to the idea of mining the rings.
“There is wealth out there,” he told the audience in the rich measured tones he used for swaying crowds. “The most valuable commodity in the solar system is water, and we have within our grasp many billions of tons of frozen water. It will be the highest priority of my second term of office to begin mining the rings of Saturn and make every single person in the habitat as wealthy as an Earthly millionaire.”
They applauded lustily. Holly sat there on the stage and watched the audience roar its approval, clapping and even whistling, more than half of them rising to their feet for a standing ovation.
Wilmot waited several moments, then calmly walked to the lectern and made a shushing motion with both hands. Slowly the crowd stopped and sat down again.
I should’ve brought a claque with me, Holly thought. She mentally kicked herself for not organizing a band of loyal supporters to give her the kind of ovation that Eberly had arranged for himself.
“And now the challenger,” said Professor Wilmot, turning slightly toward Holly, “Ms. Holly Lane, formerly head of the human resources department.”
A scattering of polite applause rippled through the auditorium. Better’n nothing, Holly thought, as she stepped up to the lectern. Her prepared speech appeared on the built-in screen.
“There are other kinds of riches besides money,” she began, looking out over the sea of faces. “For good and proper reasons, we all agreed to the Zero Population Growth protocol when we started this voyage to Saturn. But that was then, and this is now.”
She saw a few heads nodding here and there. All women’s.
“This habitat is our home. Most of us will spend the rest of our lives here, some by choice, many because they wouldn’t be allowed to return to Earth.” She took a breath. “Well, if this is our home, then we should make it as much of a home as we can. I don’t mean just the physical environment. I mean that sooner or later we should begin to bring children into our world. Otherwise we’re living in a barren, empty shell. We need the warmth, the love, the humanness of raising families.”
“Do we need the aggravation?” someone in the back yelled. A man’s voice.
Heads turned to find the heckler. One of Eberly’s flacks, Holly knew. Several people laughed.
She put on a smile. “We need a future,” she replied. “Children represent the future, and without them this community will just grow older and eventually die out.”
As Holly continued speaking, Eduoard Urbain turned to his wife and whispered, “This is nonsense. Population growth would destroy this habitat.”
She nodded, knowing that what her husband meant was that population growth would threaten his work.
12 APRIL 2096: INTO THE RING
Manny Gaeta squinted against the glare. Even though the suit’s visor was heavily tinted, Saturn’s B ring was so bright it almost made his eyes tear. Glittering brilliant jewels of ice stretched as far as he could see in every direction.
Despite himself, he grinned. Yes, the fear was there, deep inside him. But so was the excitement, the exultation. What was that old line: To boldly go where no one has gone before. That’s me. Boldly. Here alone, in the suit, heading into the blindingly dazzling rings, Gaeta knew that if he had to die he wanted to die this way, doing what no one else had ever dared to try.
“Closing in,” he muttered into his helmet microphone.
He glanced at the lidar display on the left side of the helmet. It was breaking up into hash. Shouldn’t do that, he said to himself, shaking his head.
“Your altimeter reading is breaking up.” Wanamaker’s voice sounded slightly edgy, through the helmet’s earphones.
“The laser beam is getting scattered too much by the ice particles,” he replied.
“It’s gonna be tough for you to judge distances, then,” Pancho said.
“I can eyeball it.”
“Anything hitting you?” Wanamaker asked.
“Not yet. I’m still more than two hundred klicks from the main body of the ring.”
“Movin’ fast, though. We got a good fix on your beacon; you’re doin’ twelve hundred an hour.”
“I’d better slow down.”
“Retro burn programmed for six minutes from now,” said Wanamaker. “Do you want to override it and go manual?”
Staring out at the overwhelming field of gleaming white, Gaeta said, “No, let the program ride.”
“Tell me when you start getting pinged,” said Pancho.
“Right,” Gaeta replied. But he thought, What can they do about it? They’ll be pushing over to the other side of the ring in another ten minutes.
Unless something goes wrong, answered a voice in his head. They’ll hang here as long as they can, just in case some malfunction pops up. They’ll fish you out.
Yeah, Gaeta said to himself. If they can.
A tiny red light winked at him from the rim of the helmet’s displays. Impact, Gaeta realized. The display went dark immediately. One little ice flake hit me. A scout?
Holly was surprised at the questions from the audience. Almost
all of them were from women, and they all wanted to know how soon the ZPG protocol could be lifted.
“The first step is to get six thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven signatures on our petition,” she answered, more than once. “We can’t do a thing until we have enough signers.”
Eberly’s people asked questions, too: mostly about how much money could be brought in from mining Saturn’s rings. But Professor Wilmot picked the questioners from a sea of waving hands and he picked mostly women.
Through it all, Eberly was strangely quiet. Not that he didn’t speak well or answer questions, but he ignored the population growth question almost entirely. Holly had expected him to paint dreadful word pictures of how the habitat would be overrun with babies and sink into a squalling, poverty-stricken disaster. But he didn’t. He spoke positively about how wealthy the habitat could become by mining the rings. To Holly, he seemed to be avoiding the ZPG issue altogether.
Until Professor Wilmot called on Jeanmarie Urbain.
She stood up, impeccably clad in a dark short-sleeved sheath adorned tastefully with hints of jewelry: clearly the best-dressed woman in the auditorium. Holly though she looked a bit nervous, almost timid, while the automatic microphones along the auditorium’s side walls focused on her. Her husband, seated beside her, looked more annoyed than pleased that his wife was asking a question.
“Go ahead, Madame Urbain,” said Wilmot gently.
“My question is for Mr. Eberly,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “Sir, what will happen to the research programs that the scientists are conducting if our habitat’s resources must be devoted more and more to a growing population?”
Eberly came out of his chair as if propelled by a spring, smiling widely. It’s a setup, Holly realized. He coached her to ask that question.
By the time Eberly had crossed the three steps between his chair and the lectern, he had changed his expression. The smile was gone; he looked somber, almost grim.
“As we all understand,” he began, his voice low, controlled, “the main purpose of this habitat was to carry out scientific studies of the planet Saturn, its rings and its moons. But if we must divert more and more of our resources to accommodating a constantly growing population, we will have less and less to devote to the science work.”
Holly wanted to object, but Eberly wasn’t finished.
“Scientific information is our major export product, as of now,” he went on. “Essentially, the International Consortium of Universities back on Earth pays us to provide data about the Saturn system. It’s not enough to keep our entire population going, of course. The major part of our economy is internal: we grow our own food, we provide goods and services for one another, we have built a strong internal economy for ourselves.”
He bowed his head and hesitated a heartbeat. Then, looking up again, he said, “But if our population begins to grow unchecked, and we have no other external sources of income, then our economy will be forced to provide food and shelter and education and, eventually, jobs for our growing population. The scientists will have to depend exclusively on whatever funding the ICU provides, which won’t be enough to sustain them at their current level of activity. We will have to cut back on our science programs, which means the ICU will cut back on its funding. A vicious circle.”
Dozens of hands went up in the audience. But Eberly still wasn’t finished. “However,” he said, his voice stronger, “I can see a way out of this dilemma.” He allowed a small smile to creep across his face. “To allow population growth we need a new source of income. Hanging out there before our very eyes is that source: the rings of Saturn. Once we begin selling water to Selene and Ceres and the other human establishments off-Earth, we will have a source of income that will allow us to end the zero-growth protocol once and for all!”
Eberly’s flacks along the side walls immediately began applauding, and quickly most of the rest of the audience joined in. Holly sat on the stage, stunned at the simplicity of his scheme. She watched, crestfallen, as the audience got to its feet, applauding. She wanted to rush to the lectern and tell them that no one would be allowed to mine the rings until it was absolutely established that there were no organisms living there that might be hurt.
But she knew it would be useless. Eberly had taken her own campaign issue and turned it against her. You want population growth? Mine the rings to pay for it.
Nadia’s going to die when she hears about this, Holly said to herself. And Malcolm’s going to win reelection by a landslide.
Nadia Wunderly was in her cluttered office, totally engrossed at the view from Gaeta’s helmet camera that was displayed on her desktop screen. It was like falling from a cliff down into a gleaming glacier. The screen was filled with glittering bits of ice, interwoven strands curled and entwined so intricately that her fastest computer program could not model them in real time. Manny’s falling into the ring, she knew; he’ll plough right through it like a meteor crashing into the ice particles.
“Retro burn complete.” Gaeta’s voice came through the computer’s speakers.
“Copy retro complete.” Wanamaker’s voice. “Your velocity vector is on the money.”
At Wunderly’s insistence they had slowed Gaeta’s approach to the ring. Even though it was by far the densest of Saturn’s rings, she had argued, the B ring was scarcely two kilometers thick. If Gaeta didn’t slow down he would zip through the ring too fast to collect any samples. Gaeta had reluctantly agreed. The first time he’d gone to the rings his trajectory had been arranged so he would glide along inside the B ring for more than ten minutes, and that had nearly killed him. Now he was diving through, in and out, but slowly enough to have a good chance to pick up samples of the ice particles and the creatures that lived in them.
If they’re really there, Wunderly found herself thinking. If they really exist and they’re not just a wish-dream of mine.
“Sample boxes open,” she heard Wanamaker’s voice.
“Boxes open, check,” Gaeta confirmed.
“We’re reading the temperature inside the boxes as within three degrees of ambient,” said Wanamaker.
“Good,” replied Gaeta. “Don’t wanna toast these babies once we get ’em in the samplers.”
Wunderly recalled that the first time Gaeta had gone through the rings the ice creatures had coated his suit so thickly it had become impossible for him to move his limbs or even communicate with the controllers. This time they had put miniature heating coils on his comm antennas. It didn’t take much energy to keep the antennas above the rings’ ambient temperature of -178 degrees Celsius. But they had to keep the rest of the suit cold, especially the sample boxes.
He was getting close enough now that she could see individual chunks of ice on her display screen. No way to judge sizes, although some of the pieces were obviously much larger than others.
“Getting dinged pretty good now,” Gaeta reported. “Lots of impacts.”
“Sizes?” Wanamaker asked.
“Nothing big enough to shake me,” said Gaeta, “but the impact counter is lighting up like a video game display now.”
Don’t let him get struck by a big one, Wunderly pleaded silently. She knew there were chunks of ice as big as trailer trucks in the rings. Don’t let him get hurt, she prayed to a god she didn’t really believe in.
12 APRIL 2096: ENCOUNTER
Here we go,” said Pancho, trying consciously to keep her tongue from between her teeth. She’d lacerated her tongue badly once in the crash landing of a Clippership, back in her early astronaut days. For years afterward she’d carried a protective mouthpiece with her when she flew, but seldom remembered to put it in place when she needed it.
Now she stood at the controls of the transfer craft and watched through the observation port in front of her as she dived the little vehicle through the Cassini gap between the A and B rings.
She could see glittering bits of ice racing toward her, pinging the craft’s hull, hitting the port’s transparent glasst
eel.
“Some gap,” she said. “Lots of crap in here.”
Wanamaker, standing beside her, paid no attention. He was in contact with Gaeta, who was just entering the B ring.
“Starting to ice up,” Gaeta was saying. “It’s getting tough to move my arms and legs.”
Wanamaker glanced at the readouts on the panel at his side. “Internal temperature holding okay,” he said.
“So far,” answered Gaeta.
Pancho wished she had viewports on the sides of the cramped cockpit, or cameras out there, at least. She wanted to see more than just the straight-ahead view. She wanted to see the rings and their ragged edges as she dove the spacecraft in between them. She wanted to be able to yell “Yahoo” as she dived through the plane of the rings. As it was, she couldn’t see the rings, couldn’t even see the huge glowing curve of Saturn’s massive bulk. Nothing but star-flecked darkness out there and swarms of ice particles zooming at her. It was like driving in the dark of night through a raging blizzard.
Gaeta had two contradictory worries wrestling in the back of his head. Will I be in the ring long enough to get a decent sampling for Nadia? Will I be in the ring so long that these fregado ring particles will cover me with ice the way they did last time? Damned near killed me.
The icy ring was spread out before him now, like a vast field of glittering snow stretching as far as he could see. Off in the distance to his right was a smear of darker stuff, like dust or carbon soot. Coming up fast, in spite of the retro burn. Glancing at the displays splashed in color along the bottom of his visor, he saw that all the suit’s functions were still in the green, except that when he tried to move his arms or legs the servomotors went into the red. Encased in ice, he realized.