Titan

by Bova, Ben

  Eberly’s smile grew tolerant. “My friend, people have been mining the metals and minerals on Earth for thousands of years. Have they killed off the microscopic bugs that live in those rocks? No, not at all.”

  Yañez turned to his wife. “There. You see?”

  As the two-hour-long debate wound to its conclusion Holly felt drained, defeated. Eberly had deflected the ZPG issue and turned it into a reinforcement for his scheme to mine the rings. When she’d asked him what he’d do when the IAA forbade mining, he’d smiled and said that he was certain he could negotiate the matter.

  “This doesn’t have to be an either/or confrontation,” Eberly said. “I’m certain that, with patience and good will on both sides, we can work out a compromise that will allow us to mine the rings and still allow the scientists to study their bugs.”

  Before Holly could rebut, Eberly added, “There’s no need for hysteria or scare tactics.”

  Holly had no response for that.

  A caller brought up the power outages that still afflicted the habitat sporadically. Eberly smoothly replied:

  “Our engineers and computer people have determined that the problem is coming from surges in Saturn’s electromagnetic field. They’ve figured out how to predict the surges, and we’re now setting up protective systems that will eliminate the outages within a few weeks.”

  Eberly then winked outrageously for the cameras. “The problem will be solved by election day, I promise you.”

  All the calls seemed to be for Eberly. Of course, Holly realized. He’s planted these callers. His people are swamping the phone lines.

  “How do we know,” a man asked, “that there’s really a market for water from the rings?”

  Beaming as if he’d been waiting for this one all evening, Eberly answered, “You know, I asked myself that very question, a few weeks ago. Are we fooling ourselves by assuming that the settlements on the Moon and the Asteroid Belt and elsewhere will buy water ice from us?”

  He hesitated a dramatic moment, then proceeded, “So I called the leaders of Selene and Ceres. They’ve assured me that they’ll buy water from us, and at a price that will give us a twenty percent profit margin!”

  Holly knew there was no way she could beat this man. No way at all.

  2 MAY 2096: NANOLAB

  Yes,” Kris Cardenas said to Urbain’s image on her wall screen, “given these specs we can generate nanomachines that will build a new antenna system on Alpha.”

  Urbain appeared to be seated at the desk in his office. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his face seemed thinner, more lined than Cardenas remembered it from earlier meetings. She was no physician, but it looked to her as if the chief scientist was under tremendous stress.

  He nodded somberly. “Good. Can you proceed to build the devices at once?”

  Cardenas nodded back at him. “I’ll give it my highest priority.”

  “How soon will they be done?”

  Calculating mentally and adding a generous safety factor, Cardenas said, “In ten days. A week, if everything goes smoothly.”

  Urbain sighed as if he were about to sign a pact in blood. “Very well, then. Please proceed as quickly as you can.”

  “Fine,” Cardenas said. “But once we’ve produced the nanos for you, how are you going to get them to your machine down on Titan’s surface?”

  Urbain didn’t answer. He had already broken the phone connection before Cardenas finished her question. The wall went back to displaying one of her favorite paintings, an Impressionist street scene from nineteenth-century Paris.

  Swiveling her chair, she looked out across the nanotechnology lab from the alcove that she used as her office. Tavalera was just coming in through the airlock door.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he called, as he walked past the work benches toward her. “I had breakfast with Timoshenko and we got to talking about beefing up the protection on the superconductor shielding.”

  Cardenas got up from her chair, thinking, We’re getting popular. It’s taken a year for people to get over their fear of nanos and come to us for help. Now Timoshenko wants us, and Urbain has finally decided to let us help him.

  The question popped into her mind again. How will Urbain get our nanos to his machine on Titan’s surface?

  “Uh, I need some advice,” Tavalera said. He looked distressed, embarrassed.

  Cardenas smiled at him. “It’s easy to get advice, Raoul.” She gestured to the wheeled chair beside her desk and they both sat down. “What’s the problem?”

  “There’s a ship coming from Earth.”

  “With a contingent of scientists to look at Wunderly’s bugs,” Cardenas said. “Nadia’s planning to go back to Earth with them.”

  Tavalera nodded somberly. “I could hitch a ride home with them.”

  Cardenas understood. “Is that what you want to do?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  She studied his long, gloomy face. “You’d like Holly to come with you, wouldn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” It came out as a long, sorrowful groan. “But I know she won’t.”

  “Raoul, she can’t. She’s running for election.”

  “I know.”

  “She can’t leave the habitat. Even if she wanted to.”

  “Which she doesn’t.”

  Cardenas thought for a moment. “What do you want to do, Raoul?”

  He looked away from her, studied his shoes. “I want to go back home,” he muttered, without lifting his face.

  Cardenas waited, and sure enough he added, “And I want Holly to come with me.”

  “You can’t have both.”

  “I know. But you asked me what I want. That’s what I want.”

  She hesitated, then decided to plunge ahead. “Have you asked Holly what she wants?”

  Still looking down, Tavalera replied, “She wants to be chief administrator of this place. She’ll never go back to Earth.”

  “Has she told you that?”

  “I know she won’t.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  Tavalera shook his head. “What good would it do?”

  “I don’t know, Raoul. But at the very least you should talk this over with her.”

  The sour expression on his face showed what he thought of the idea. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”

  Timoshenko was coasting along the outer hull of habitat Goddard, unencumbered by a space suit. The virtual reality program allowed him to see what the maintenance robot saw, feel whatever it touched with its pair of steel grippers. While the robot trundled along the guideway built into the hull, Timoshenko felt that he was walking—no, not walking, gliding on ice, skating the way he used to do in Gorky Park with Katrina.

  She wasn’t coming to him. Timoshenko had checked the passenger manifest for the ship bringing a load of scientists to Goddard, and her name was not on the list. He had tried putting through a call to her, but of course the operators in Moscow refused to allow it: he was a nonperson, an exile, not permitted to speak to law-abiding citizens. With a sinking heart, he realized that if somehow he did manage to get a message to Katrina then she would be breaking the law; she would get into trouble with the authorities.

  In desperation, he had asked Eberly to contact her as he had before. He practically begged the chief administrator to do this favor for him. Eberly, wise in the ways of collecting gratitude, had told him that he had specifically asked the authorities in Moscow and even the main office of the Holy Disciples for permission to speak to the woman. She had refused to reply to his call.

  Refused, Timoshenko repeated to himself. Refused. She doesn’t want to come out here. She doesn’t want to be with me. She said she would, when there didn’t appear to be a chance in hell of doing it. Easy enough for her to say it then. But now, now when there’s a ship she can get onto and really come to me, she refuses.

  Timoshenko looked out at the curving hull of the habitat, and the black infinity of space beyond it. The robot was built to inspec
t the hull, not gaze at the stars. It could not lift its eyes to search for the blue gleam in that emptiness that was Earth.

  I don’t blame her, he told himself. This is exile, far from everything and everyone she knows. Everyone except me. Why should she give up her whole life to come here and be with me? I don’t blame her. I don’t. No matter how fancy they’ve made this flying stovepipe, it’s still a place of exile, a high-tech Siberia. She’s right not to come here. I don’t want her to give up her life on Earth just for me. I had my chance to make her happy and I ruined it. She’s right to stay away from me.

  As he glided along the curving shape of the hull, it occurred to him that Eberly had lied. Eberly had told him that Katrina wanted to join him here, to share his exile, share his life. That had been a lie, Timoshenko realized now. Eberly had twisted him into taking this job as chief of maintenance by dangling the prospect of Katrina’s joining him here. Had the man lied to him?

  Timoshenko blanked the VR program, lifted the goggles off his head and pulled off the sensor gloves. He knew some of the people in the communications department; one fellow in particular had become a drinking buddy. He called that man and, after a little wheedling, got him to check on the chief administrator’s calls to Russia.

  “Nothing in the log,” the beefy-faced comm clerk told him.

  “Nothing?” Timoshenko asked.

  “Eberly hasn’t put in any calls to Russia. Not one.”

  Numb with grief and rising anger, Timoshenko nodded, thanked his pal and broke the phone connection. Eberly lied to me. The devious bastard twisted me around his little finger. He used the possibility that Katrina might come here to me to get me to do what he wanted me to. The lying, smug-faced son of a bitch.

  How to get back at him? Timoshenko wondered, feeling the heat of his rage burning inside him. The answer was astoundingly simple. Kill him. Kill the bastard and all those around him. Kill him and kill yourself. Destroy this habitat and end this exile once and for all. Put an end to everything and everybody. It wouldn’t be difficult. In fact, it could be done with ease.

  4 MAY 2096: MIDMORNING

  Da’ud Habib tried to get in a workout at the health center first thing every morning, before anyone else got there, but then he realized that Negroponte just happened to be exercising in a form-fitting sweat suit at the same time each day. Just as she just happened to be in the cafeteria when he came in for lunch. Invariably, she sat at his table. When he would show up later than usual she would move from the table she’d been sitting at to be with him.

  The woman is pursuing me, he told himself. At first it was flattering, but it soon became an embarrassment. Negroponte thinks I’m some lover out of the Arabian Nights, he thought. A hawk-eyed emir who’s going to carry her off on his steed to his tent in the desert. Nothing could be farther from reality.

  Habib had been born in Vancouver of an immigrant Palestinian family and raised in the faith of Islam. Bookish and deeply interested in computers, he was actually rather shy around women. Throughout his university years, with his exotic good looks he had never had trouble finding women; they found him. His difficulty had always been in getting rid of them. While he enjoyed sex, he had no desire to marry or even to live with a woman. There was too much else to do; tying himself down to a woman would get in the way of his studies, his career. There would be time for marriage and children later, he thought.

  He had chosen to join Dr. Urbain’s scientific staff when his former faculty advisor had phoned him and suggested he do so.

  “It’s an opportunity, Da’ud,” the graying professor had told him.

  “Five years?” Habib questioned.

  “When you return to Earth you’ll have your pick of universities eager to take you on. Even the New Morality will look favorably on you.”

  “Why should they?”

  “They want this habitat to succeed, to become an example of how people can live off-Earth.”

  “Most of the habitat’s people will be exiles, won’t they?”

  The professor had grinned knowingly. “Yes, but there are lots of other bright young men and women whom the New Morality would like to see move off this world.”

  “I don’t see how my going out there with them—”

  “Trust me, Dau’ud. It’s a better opportunity for you than anything you can hope for here on Earth.”

  Habib thought he heard a veiled message: spend the five years on this Saturn mission or find the New Morality blocking your applications to the better schools. He was no fighter. He did what his advisor suggested.

  It was like living in a university town, to a great extent. And the work was fascinating—at first. Habib directed the programming of the bulky probe Urbain was building, his cherished Titan Alpha. It was a fascinating challenge to program the complex machine so that it could operate independently in the alien environment of Titan’s surface, flexible enough to cope with unknowns and to learn from the surroundings in which it found itself.

  Then Alpha had landed and gone silent, and Urbain had gone slightly insane. Habib felt certain that there was a hitch in the programming somewhere, but though he spent night and day trying to find an error, so far he could discern nothing wrong with the programming.

  There were lots of women available in the habitat, and although he tried to remain free of entanglements, his normal male hormones made their demands on him. He was surprised, though, when Dr. Wunderly asked him to go to the New Year’s Eve party with her. He agreed, even though he would not have thought to ask her. Nadia Wunderly was not the most attractive woman he knew, yet she seemed to genuinely like him; more important, she was just as wrapped up in her work as he was in his. She would not try to force a commitment upon him.

  He felt certain Negroponte would. Yet, with her tall, ample figure and almond-eyed face she was powerfully attractive.

  Habib got through his abbreviated workout, showered and changed back into his workaday tunic and slacks, then headed for his eleven o’clock meeting with Timoshenko. At last he had something solid to show the maintenance chief. Mathematics is so much simpler than women, he thought. A mathematical relationship remains fixed unless some discernable value produces a change. A relationship with a woman is always changing, often for no recognizable reason.

  Habib got to Timoshenko’s office and slid open the door to the anteroom. Three engineers were sitting with their heads bent over display screens. The chief of maintenance did not have a personal assistant. He believed that computers could do the routine office work; each of his employees was actively engaged in maintaining the habitat’s myriad mechanical, hydraulic, electrical and electronic systems.

  Habib went straight to the door of Timoshenko’s private office.

  “He’s not in,” said one of the engineers, barely looking up from her desktop screen. “Hasn’t been in yet this morning.”

  “But we have a meeting scheduled for eleven.”

  “You’re three minutes early,” came Timoshenko’s voice from behind him.

  Turning, Habib saw the Russian walking toward him. Timoshenko looked terrible: his eyes red and puffy, as if he had not slept all night.

  “I have good news for you,” Habib said, by way of greeting.

  “Good,” said Timoshenko, almost in a growl. “I could use some news that’s good, for a change.”

  Five minutes later, Habib was sitting beside Timoshenko at the little round table in a corner of the maintenance chief’s office. One wall screen was filled with a set of graphs displaying complex curves.

  “So you’re telling me that Titan is causing the power surges?” Timoshenko asked, eying the graphs suspiciously.

  “I don’t know if Titan is the cause of the surges,” Habib replied, “but they correlate very closely with the position of Titan and the other major moons in their orbits around Saturn.”

  Timoshenko grunted.

  Pointing to the graphs, Habib explained, “We get the power surges whenever Titan and the other major moons line up on
the same side of Saturn.”

  In a heavy low voice Timoshenko muttered, “That’s why the surges are grouped approximately every two weeks. Titan’s orbit is sixteen days.”

  “Yes. And it explains why you can go for months without any surges at all: that’s when the outer moons are not on the same side of the planet as Titan.”

  “You’re certain of this?”

  “The mathematics are definitive,” Habib said with some pungency in his tone. He didn’t like having his calculations questioned.

  “But what’s causing it? What we have here looks like astrology, not physics.”

  Habib shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Wunderly or one of the astrophysicists. I am a mathematician.” Pointing to the wall screen display, he added, “You asked me to tell you how to predict when the surges will come and that’s what I’ve done.”

  Timoshenko nodded. “Yes. So you have.” Turning slightly in his chair he called out, “Phone! Get Dr. Wunderly. Top priority.”

  4 MAY 2096: EVENING

  The cocktail reception was ostensibly to welcome the shipload of biologists and planetary scientists who had arrived from Earth in the wake of Wunderly’s confirmation that Saturn’s rings harbored living organisms. Urbain’s entire scientific staff, as well as the habitat’s most prominent citizens were there to greet the newcomers.

  Ordinarily, Urbain would not have invited Manuel Gaeta. After all, the man was not a scientist: nothing more than an entertainer, a stunt performer, little more than a trained ape. But Gaeta was living with Dr. Cardenas, who was a Nobel laureate. Urbain could not invite her without having him come along.

  Besides, Urbain needed this trained ape.

  The party was at the lovely lakeside bandshell, at the foot of the gentle hill on which the village of Athens was built. Champagne flute in hand, Urbain saw Pancho Lane and her sister with a pair of men he couldn’t quite place. He leaned toward his wife and asked her who they were. Jeanmarie told him that the older, taller of the two men was Pancho’s companion, a former admiral. The other was the engineer that the habitat had taken in when it passed Jupiter.