Titan

by Bova, Ben

  Eberly steepled his fingers in front of his face, letting silence fall. He knew bluff was an important part of politics, but he also knew that one had to be prepared to back up a bluff with action, if necessary.

  “I don’t care what the ICU or the IAA or any Earthbound gang of bureaucrats say. We will mine the rings. With or without their approval.”

  “They will stop you.”

  “How? They have no jurisdiction here.”

  “The IAA has jurisdiction throughout the solar system,” Urbain countered. “Selene and the other lunar settlements, the asteroid miners, all the research stations on Mars, Jupiter and Venus, even the Yamagata solar power project at Mercury acknowledges the IAA’s authority.”

  “Ah,” said Eberly, pointing his index finger like a pistol. 4acknowledge the IAA’s authority. They have agreed to it. We haven’t.”

  “Not officially, perhaps, but that is merely a matter of form.”

  Eberly leaned forward in his chair, excitement rising in him. Yes, he said to himself. I could do it. They would follow me. I could get the people of this habitat to follow where I lead and respect me for my courageous leadership.

  Misunderstanding his silence, Urbain went on, “So you see, the IAA must—”

  “To hell with the IAA!” Eberly snapped. “I’m going to put it to a vote. Make a ballot referendum out of it. The people will vote to refute the IAA. They’ll vote for total independence of every vestige of domination by Earth.”

  Urbain paled. “Then the IAA would have no recourse but to send troops here to enforce their ruling.”

  “Really? Do you think they’d risk a war?”

  “You would fight them? With what?”

  “With every weapon we can build or borrow,” Eberly said, already envisioning himself leading his people, rallying his troops. “And remember, this habitat is a lot sturdier than the spacecraft the IAA would send. We could hurt them a lot more than they could hurt us.”

  “You are mad,” Urbain whispered.

  Eberly laughed at him. “It won’t come to actual fighting, I’m sure. Those Earthworms will try to negotiate with us first. And I’ll let them. I’ll spend months engaged in discussions and meetings with the IAA’s bureaucrats. I’ll talk and they’ll talk, for months and months and months.”

  “But in the end—”

  “And while we are engaged in those oh-so-earnest negotiations, we’ll start mining the rings. I’ll present the Earthworms with a fait accompli. We’ll mine the rings and they’ll do nothing to stop us.”

  “But you’ll be killing an alien life-form!” Urbain pleaded. “That is against everything we stand for! Everything we believe in!”

  “Everything you scientists believe in, perhaps. But I imagine that even some of the scientists on your staff wouldn’t protest against getting rich from mining the rings. People believe in their own well-being, first and foremost.”

  “No,” Urbain said weakly. “That is not so.”

  “Isn’t it?” Eberly smiled his warmest. “I’ll leave a large section of the rings free from mining operations. I’ll put Dr. Wunderly in charge of preserving and protecting her precious little ice bugs. There’s no reason why the people of this community can’t get rich without completely destroying the ice creatures.”

  Urbain sat there in front of Eberly’s desk, speechless.

  Wunderly had thought she was too keyed up to sleep, but she zonked out the minute her head finally hit her pillow. And awoke bright and eager, full of energy.

  This is the first day of the rest of your life, she told her smiling image in the lavatory mirror. You’re going to be a famous woman, Nadia. Time to start looking the part.

  As she dressed she told the phone on her night table to make an appointment with Kris Cardenas as early this morning as possible. Within seconds the phone confirmed that Dr. Cardenas would see her anytime before noon, in her laboratory.

  Glancing at the digital clock readout on the phone’s screen, Wunderly realized it was already well past nine. You’ve overslept, she berated herself. Then she grinned. So what? I’m entitled.

  Negroponte woke late, also. Habib was still sound asleep beside her, snoring softly.

  Nadia was right, the biologist told herself, as she slipped out of her bed. Don’t send him signals and wait for him to interpret them. Be direct. Be honest.

  And most of all, she thought, get to him before anyone else does. Especially Nadia.

  She was toweling off after her shower when she heard Habib’s voice from the bedroom. “I … I have to go.”

  “Come in,” Negroponte said, sliding back the lavatory door. “I’m decent,” she added with a wolfish grin, as she tucked the towel around her.

  Habib was already partially dressed. He was sitting on the edge of the thoroughly rumpled bed, pulling on his suede loafers.

  “No, not that,” he said, looking a little red-faced. “I have to go back to my place. I have a meeting with Timoshenko at ten and I have to shower and change and—”

  She sat on the bed beside him. “You’re embarrassed?”

  “No!” he said. Then, “Well, yes, slightly.”

  “No need to be. You were very good.”

  “You were wonderful.”

  “You could phone your ten o’clock and cancel the meeting.”

  “Oh no, I couldn’t do that. It’s important.”

  She smiled and patted his thigh. “I understand.”

  Habib practically ran from her apartment. Negroponte got up from the bed and went back into the lavatory, disconcerted by how alone she felt.

  Cardenas didn’t know how to break the news to Wunderly, so she stalled for time to think of a way.

  “You’re going back to Earth, Nadia?” she asked.

  Wunderly was grinning happily as she stood before Cardenas’s workbench in the nano lab. Tavalera was nowhere in sight; the lab was empty except for the two of them.

  Nodding, she answered, “I’ll be going back with the team of scientists who’re coming out here. I’m going to be famous, Kris.”

  “You deserve it,” Cardenas said. “You’ve worked very hard for it.”

  Wunderly’s smile faded a bit. “I can’t go back with nanomachines inside me. They won’t allow anybody—”

  “I know,” Cardenas said. “The flatlanders are scared shitless of nanotechnology.”

  Her expression growing even more serious, Wunderly said, “So you’ll have to flush the bugs out of me before I can go back.”

  Biting her lip, Cardenas decided the best way was to be direct and quick, like sticking someone with a needle.

  “Nadia, you don’t have any nanomachines inside you. You never did.”

  Wunderly seemed to hold her breath.

  “You did it all on your own, Nadia,” Cardenas went on. “You lost all that weight on your own.”

  Wunderly’s smile returned, bigger than ever. “You faked it! You never injected me with nanobugs!”

  “That’s right.”

  “I did it by myself!”

  “Diet and exercise,” said Cardenas. “Works every time.”

  Flinging her arms around Cardenas’s neck, Wunderly exclaimed, “Kris, you’re marvelous! You—I mean—this is the best present anyone’s ever given to me!”

  “I lied to you,” Cardenas said softly.

  “You gave me a magic potion. Just like a fairy godmother.”

  Cardenas nodded. “And you did all the work.”

  “I did it by myself.” Wunderly seemed genuinely thrilled by the news.

  “You certainly did.”

  “So I can keep on doing it, taking care of myself, watching my weight.”

  “And looking better and better.”

  “Kris, I love you!”

  Cardenas smiled back at her. “Just make sure you look good at the Nobel ceremonies.”

  PROFESSOR WILMOT’S ORAL DIARY

  Tomorrow is the first of May. No spring fertility rites in this habitat, of course. These people have
their fertility rites all year ’round, actually.

  However, tomorrow evening there will be the second of three debates between our two candidates for chief administrator.

  Although a lot has happened since the first debate, not much has changed. The scientists have proven that Saturn’s rings actually do harbor living microorganisms in their particles of ice. The ICU has already dispatched a shipload of science people to come and see for themselves. Urbain is in his glory, taking as much credit for the discovery as he can grab despite the fact that he initially opposed investigating the rings at all. Ah well, the rings have taken the spotlight away from Urbain’s failed lander on Titan. The useless hulk is still incommunicado: silent as a stone.

  Politically, Eberly is insisting that the rings can still be mined for their water without disrupting the ice creatures. The scientists disagree, naturally, but Urbain has been strangely muted on the subject. The woman who made the discovery, Dr. Wunderly, is up in arms against Eberly but I doubt that it will do her any good. Clever politician that he is, Eberly has offered to put her in charge of environmental protection of the rings—while he moves ahead with plans to mine them!

  It appears that Holly Lane’s petition to overthrow the ZPG protocol will succeed. She claims to have more than seven thousand signatures, more than enough to repeal the protocol The signatures need to be verified, of course, but that’s merely a matter of form. Unless Eberly pulls some new trick.

  At the end of the day, however, the petition might not matter one way or the other. From all that I can see and hear, these people want to mine the rings. They want to get rich. And Eberly has told them once they begin bringing in money from the mining, then they can repeal the zero-growth protocol and start enlarging the habitat’s population.

  It would seem that Eberly has everything his own way. He’s even hinted that he would defy an IAA injunction against mining the rings. He’s taken the pose that he would rather fight than give in to what he calls “Earthbound bureaucrats.”

  We shall see what we shall see.

  1 MAY 2096: THE SECOND DEBATE

  Zeke Berkowitz smiled professionally into the middle of the three cameras facing him and the two candidates, who sat at the table flanking him. Each camera was mounted on a self-balancing monopod. Two communications technicians were working behind the cameras; there were no other people in the studio. Berkowitz’s smile was pleasant, unforced, but it had a sly edge to it: the professional newsman’s subtle declaration that he knew more than his audience did.

  As the digital clock on the studio’s far wall clicked to 16:00, Berkowitz said, “Good evening, and welcome to the second of three debates between the two candidates running for the office of chief administrator.”

  Berkowitz noted with pleasure the real-time readout of his audience’s size displayed on a monitor beside the clock. Virtually every household in the habitat was watching the debate. Good, he thought. Very good. But then he reminded himself that all entertainment broadcasts had been suspended for the length of this debate. People could watch vids from their personal libraries, if they chose; otherwise, the debate was the only show on the air throughout the habitat.

  He introduced the two candidates and explained that each of them would have five minutes to make an opening statement, then the floor would be thrown open to questions phoned in by the viewers.

  “Holly Lane, formerly chief of human resources, will give her opening statement first.”

  Holly inadvertently licked her lips as all three cameras swiveled slightly to focus on her.

  She tried to smile as she began: “Hi. You all know me, I guess, and what I’m trying to accomplish in this election. Thanks to your help, we’ve signed more than seven thousand people up for our petition to repeal the Zero Population Growth protocol. Seven thousand three hundred and fourteen, to be exact.”

  Holly had not written out a prepared speech. The display screen built into the tabletop before her showed only rough notes of the points she planned to make.

  “The human resources department is going to verify the signatures over the next few days, so if you get a call from one of my former workers, be nice to her. Or him.

  “Once the signatures are confirmed, it’ll be up to the chief administrator to declare the ZPG rule no longer valid. I expect he’ll drag his feet on this, ’cause he’s never been in favor of allowing women to decide their own lives.”

  Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eberly shift unhappily in his chair. Zinged him, she thought.

  “The real question, though,” Holly went on, “is how we handle population growth once the ZPG rule is abolished. We all know that uncontrolled population growth could ruin this habitat. On the other hand, that sort of scenario seems kinda remote, far off in the future. After all, we could double our population tomorrow and still have room for plenty more people.

  “But the problem is real. We mustn’t grow beyond our means. We don’t want to expand our population so fast that our standard of living goes down. We don’t want to become overpopulated and poor, like so many countries back Earthside did.

  “Can we regulate our growth without government rules? Without laws and protocols? I believe we can. I believe we’ve got to, because the alternative is pretty messy.”

  Holly glanced at Eberly, then focused back on the cameras. “Now look at the problem from the other side. How can the government stop us from having babies? Is my opponent willing to force women to abort when they get pregnant? Is he going to create a police force that’ll snoop into every bedroom in this habitat?”

  With a shake of her head, Holly concluded, “It’s either the one or the other. Either we take the responsibility into our own hands and control population growth through individual responsibility, or we face a police state that’ll put women under surveillance twenty-four seven.”

  She looked at Berkowitz, then back at the cameras. “That’s all I’ve got to say. Thank you.”

  Berkowitz smiled noncommittally. “Thank you, Ms. Lane. And now,” he turned toward Eberly, “our incumbent chief administrator, Malcolm Eberly.”

  Eberly gave his brightest smile to the cameras, plucked a sheet of flimsy from the breast pocket of his tunic and ostentatiously crumpled it in his fist.

  “I had prepared an opening statement,” he began, “but in the light of my opponent’s scare tactics, I feel it’s necessary—vital, really—to set the record straight.”

  Holly craned her neck slightly to peek at the screen displaying Eberly’s speech. It showed exactly what he was saying, almost word for word. He knew what I was going to say! she realized. He had me figured out before I even opened my mouth. She felt crushed. What chance do I have? He’s way ahead of me all the time.

  “I was against the petition to repeal the ZPG protocol, yes, that’s true,” Eberly said smoothly. “I was against it because I didn’t feel it was necessary. I knew, as all of you did, that sooner or later we would lift the ZPG restriction. It was only a matter of time.”

  He turned to Holly and gave her a pitying look. “My opponent paints a dire picture of either explosive population growth that swamps our economic capabilities or a police state in which women are held in a sort of reproductive bondage. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  “I have pointed out the path to a balanced, fair and free society, a society in which women can choose to have babies because we have the economic growth to match our population growth.”

  He paused for a dramatic moment. Then, “That economic growth will come from mining Saturn’s rings. You—the men and women of this community—will become wealthy from selling water to the human establishments on the Moon and the asteroids, on Mars and the other planets.

  “I know there have been objections to my plan. I know that the scientists have found microscopic creatures living within the ice particles. But I am certain that we can mine the rings without unduly harming these microbes. The rings are huge, vast, and our mining operations would hardly scratch them.”
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  Spreading his arms as if in supplication, Eberly said, “We can grow wealthy, and the wealth we generate will support population growth. When the time comes we can build new habitats, new centers of human society that can grow and spread across the solar system or even out toward the stars themselves. The future is in our hands! We don’t have to fear runaway growth or a static, brutal police state. We can be the progenitor of new worlds, worlds that we build with our own hands, our own minds, our own hearts.”

  Holly thought she could hear the applause from every household in habitat Goddard.

  Estela Yañez watched Eberly on the wall screen of her living room with narrowed eyes. Turning to her husband, sitting on the sofa beside her, she asked, “Is he right? Can they mine the rings without destroying the creatures living there?”

  Yañez shrugged elaborately. “Estela, my dear, he is the chief administrator. He has access to much more information on the subject than we do.”

  The screen now showed Berkowitz, who was explaining that the candidates would now take questions phoned in from the viewing audience.

  “But do you believe him?”

  “Why should I not believe him? Do you think he would lie about something so important?”

  Estela pursed her lips. “I have seen politicians lie before.”

  “Wait.” Yañez held up a hand. “Listen. Someone is asking the same question.”

  The screen showed Eberly again, sitting behind the table and smiling benignly.

  “Yes,” he was saying, “I know that the scientists want to declare the rings off-limits for mining. But don’t you think that’s an overreaction on their part? After all, the rings contain more than five hundred thousand million million tons of water ice. And how much will we be taking away from that staggering amount? A pittance. A millionth of a percent, at most.”

  The caller’s voice insisted, “Yes, but won’t even a small amount kill off the creatures living in the ice?”