Titan

by Bova, Ben

  “Ah yes,” Urbain murmured, recognizing the somber-faced younger man. “Tavalera is his name, I believe.”

  And there was Eberly, of course, with his claque following wherever he went. Urbain suppressed a frown. The chief administrator was totally in his element, surrounded by admirers, smiling and chatting and laughing with them.

  Gaeta, Urbain said to himself. I must get to Gaeta.

  He saw that the stuntman and Dr. Cardenas were standing by the lake’s edge, deep in earnest conversation with Wunderly. Strange, he thought. Wunderly should be the center of attention at this reception, yet she is off to one edge of the crowd with her little circle of friends. Urbain shook his head. She has much to learn about the politics of science, he told himself.

  Taking his wife’s free hand, Urbain said to the women she was chatting with, “Excuse us, if you please. I must speak with Dr. Wunderly for a few moments.”

  And he led Jeanmarie toward the little group at the water’s edge.

  Wunderly was babbling away nonstop to Kris Cardenas. Gaeta stood with the two women, barely understanding a word of what Wunderly was saying.

  “ … So when Da’ud showed me the graphs he’d worked up I ran through the vids of the ring spokes and sure enough they correlated to five nines,” Wunderly gushed.

  “The spokes correlate with Titan’s position?” Cardenas asked.

  Gesticulating so forcefully that she sloshed champagne onto the grass, making Gaeta jump nimbly out of the way, Wunderly said, “Yes! We’d wondered what caused the spokes and now we’ve got an explanation! Just in time for me to go back to Earth.”

  “The spokes?” Gaeta asked, frowning slightly. “You mean those lanes of dust in the rings?”

  Wunderly nodded vigorously. “The dust lanes that rise above the plane of the ring particles and then drift down again.”

  “Like they’re doing the wave at a ball game,” Gaeta said.

  “The wave?” Wunderly looked puzzled.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the gathering of partygoers, Yolanda Negroponte was deep in conversation with four of the biologists who had just arrived from Earth.

  She had come to the reception alone, dressed in a simple off-white miniskirted frock that showed her long legs to advantage. She had phoned Habib several times during the course of the day to ask him to escort her to the party, but he had not answered her calls. Now she stood at the center of the little group of newcomers, trying to keep up the conversation with them while looking out over their heads, scanning the crowd for Habib.

  He’s afraid of me, she said to herself. I came on too strong. Yet she knew that if she did not pursue Habib he would drift away from her. Why must he be so difficult? she asked herself.

  And why must you insist on going after him? asked a voice in her mind. There are lots of other men here. You could have your pick of them. But it was handsome, gentle, shy Habib who interested her. He was such a tiger when he got angry.

  “Have you done a DNA analysis yet?”

  Negroponte barely heard the question. It took an effort for her to focus on the quartet of biologists around her: two men, two women.

  “Preliminary,” she responded. “The cellular structure has a nucleus and what appears to be nucleic acids, although their chemical composition is completely different from terrestrial DNA.”

  “And their structure? Is it a double helix, like ours, or triple, like the Martian biota?”

  Negroponte shook her head slightly. “There’s no evidence of helical structure at all.”

  “Not helical?”

  “We’ve done gamma-ray diffraction and MRF microscopy. The nucleic acids appear to be a crystalline lattice.”

  “That’s impossible!”

  Negroponte smiled knowingly at the flustered little man, who didn’t quite came up to her shoulder. “Come to my lab tomorrow and I’ll show you.”

  Then her smile widened into genuine warmth. She saw Habib among the partygoers, looking very handsome in a forest green suit. And he was pushing his way through the crowd, heading toward her with a champagne flute in each hand.

  “Look at how beautifully the lake reflects the lights of the shell and the land above,” said Jeanmarie to her husband. He ignored her, his attention bent on Wunderly, Gaeta and Cardenas standing down by the water’s edge.

  “Good evening,” Urbain said as he and his wife got to within earshot. “Are you enjoying the reception?”

  Wunderly grinned at her boss. “The food’s good,” she answered, eying the nearest table. It was laden with finger foods and surrounded by guests. Robot waiters from the Bistro, squat little flat-topped machines that rolled silently on tiny trunions, were busily bringing up replenishment trays, marching like a line of ants from the restaurant in the village to the tables scattered across the grass.

  “You have made a great contribution to science,” Urbain said graciously to Wunderly. “I will be sorry to see you leave the habitat.”

  Both he and Wunderly knew that Urbain had opposed her single-minded concentration on the rings. Urbain had wanted everyone on his staff to focus on Titan; Wunderly had held out stubbornly—and won.

  “I couldn’t have made the contribution without you, Dr. Urbain,” she said, equally congenial. “I owe all my success to you.”

  “Not at all,” he said. But he beamed at her.

  “I think we made another major breakthrough today,” Wunderly said.

  “Oh?”

  “The spokes in the rings correlate with the positions of Titan and the outer moons!”

  Urbain stared at her for a moment. “Are you certain of this?”

  “Da’ud Habib’s done the correlation and I checked it with the vids we have of the spoke actions.”

  “But what could be the cause of this?” Urbain was suddenly engrossed. “Could it be gravitational?”

  “I think it’s electromagnetic,” Wunderly said. “Electromagnetic force is orders of magnitude stronger than gravitational.”

  “Yes, true. And Saturn’s electromagnetic field is very powerful.”

  “And it extends way out beyond the orbits of the major moons.”

  “True. We must calculate the energies involved.”

  Kris Cardenas butted in, “From what Nadia tells me, this also explains the electromagnetic surges from Saturn that’ve been causing power outages here.”

  “A useful byproduct,” Urbain granted. But his attention was entirely focused on Wunderly’s news. He forgot that he was hosting this reception; he forgot about the party altogether. He even forgot that he needed to ask Gaeta to go down to his stranded Alpha on the surface of Titan.

  4 MAY 2096: NIGHT

  Some party,” Tavalera said, as he strolled slowly with Holly up the gently rising walkway toward Athens.

  “Enjoy yourself?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Holly gazed up at the lights over their heads: unwinking pinpoints, the stars of this inside-out habitat of theirs.

  They ambled along the lane, passing through pools of light from the street lamps, then into stretches of shadow, walking slowly, as if reluctant to get home.

  “The ship that brought the scientists will be leaving in a week,” Tavalera said at last.

  “Nadia’s going back to Earth with them,” said Holly.

  “She’ll be back.”

  “I guess.”

  Tavalera stopped and reached for Holly’s shoulders, turning her to face him. They were in the shadows between streetlamps, their features barely discernable.

  “I could go back on that ship,” he said. “I checked with Eberly. He said the New Morality’ll pay half my fare and the habitat will kick in the other half.”

  Sudden anger flared in Holly’s gut. “Eberly! He’ll pay to get rid of you just to hurt me,” she said.

  “Would it hurt you? If I left?”

  “Of course it would.”

  “Really?” His voice brimmed with joyous disbelief.

  She grabbed him by t
he ears and kissed him. “Raoul, you can be a real dimdumb. I love you!”

  “I love you, too, Holly,” he said.

  Even in the nighttime darkness she could see the toothy grin splitting his face. He looks so super when he smiles. Then she thought, I ought to make him smile more.

  “Holly,” he said, his smile withering, replaced by dead seriousness. “Holly … will you come with me? Back to Earth? For real?”

  She didn’t hesitate a moment. “Back to Earth or anywhere else, Raoul. Anywhere.”

  “You will?” His voice jumped an octave.

  “F’real,” she said, totally certain. “I’ve never seen Earth. I was born there and lived my first life there, but I don’t remember any of that.”

  “I’ll take you to the Grand Canyon,” Tavalera said, suddenly bursting with enthusiasm. “The Taj Mahal. The pyramids!”

  “I want to see West Texas. Pancho and I were born there.”

  “Most of it’s under the Sea of Mexico.”

  “Then we can go scuba diving.”

  “We could scuba through Manhattan, too. And Miami.”

  “Cosmic!”

  “Then you’ll come on the ship with me?”

  Holly took a breath. “I can’t go until the elections, Raoul.”

  “Oh.” His voice fell. “That.”

  “Don’t sweat it,” Holly said happily. “Malcolm’s gonna beat me by a landslide and then I’ll be free to go wherever you want.”

  “But if you win?”

  “No chance of that,” she assured him. And herself. “Soon’s the election returns are counted we can snag a ship and zip back to Earth together.”

  “Together,” he breathed.

  “First ship out after the elections.”

  He murmured, “We can get married back home. My parents’ d like that.”

  “So would I.”

  They started walking up the sloping path again. Tavalera blurted, “But what if you win?”

  “I won’t.”

  “You could. You got more than seven thousand signatures on your petition. What if they all vote for you?”

  “They won’t. Berkowitz has been running polls. This morning’s shows me behind, sixty-two to thirty-two with six percent undecided.”

  “You could quit,” Tavalera suggested. “Resign. Come with me now, right away.”

  Holly shook her head. “I wouldn’t give Malcolm the satisfaction. Let him sweat out the vote count. He’s gonna win, but I won’t let him win by default.”

  Tavalera said nothing.

  “I mean, I wouldn’t mind losing by a decent percentage, but this is cosmic.”

  With a small shrug Tavalera replied, “People wanna mine the rings. They wanna get rich.”

  “I guess.”

  If she wins I’ll never see her again, Tavalera thought. Even if she loses, she could change her mind and stay here.

  As if she could read his mind, Holly said, “Don’t stress out on it, Raoul. I’m gonna get my butt whupped so bad on election day that I won’t ever want to show my face in this habitat again.”

  He wished he believed her. “You think Eberly really talked with people at Selene?” he mused aloud. “And the rock rats?”

  “He said he did.”

  “But did he really? Maybe he was just saying that to impress the voters.”

  Holly brightened a little. “I could check.”

  He felt happy to see her smile, at least a little. Still, as they walked back through the pools of light and shadow toward their apartments, Tavalera wished he’d kept his big mouth shut.

  Eduoard Urbain grew more nervous and fretful as the reception dwindled down. People were leaving, in couples or larger groups. The laughter was dying away; the last drinks were finished. As the host of the party, Urbain had torn himself away from Wunderly at last and, at Jeanmarie’s prompting, posted himself by the path that led back to Athens so he could bid a formal good night to the departing guests. Human waiters from the Bistro were piling emptied glassware onto the little flat-topped robots that scooted back to the restaurant in Athens.

  Gaeta had not yet left the party. He was strolling slowly with Cardenas along the edge of the lake. Urbain saw him bend down, pick up a pebble and hurl it into the water. Ripples spread on the still surface, circles within circles. How like a little boy, Urbain thought. There must be much of the adventurous little boy in him still.

  “Are you going to ask him?” His wife’s voice was soft, almost a whisper, but yet it made Urbain’s insides jump.

  He nodded nervously. “Yes. I must.”

  “Then now is the moment,” Jeanmarie said.

  “Yes,” he repeated. “I know.”

  He took his wife’s outstretched hand and together they walked down the grassy slope to the water’s edge.

  Cardenas noticed them approaching. Smiling, she said, “A lovely party, Eduoard. Jeanmarie, you must be proud of your husband.”

  “I am,” said Jeanmarie. “He is a man of many accomplishments.”

  Gaeta grinned lazily at them. “This was better than that New Year’s Eve bash.”

  Urbain felt his cheeks grow warm. “Thank you. Thank you.”

  Cardenas glanced at her wristwatch. “Well, we’d better get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a working day.”

  “Yes,” Urbain murmured while his mind raced, trying to find some opening, some way to get around to what he wanted to ask.

  Jeanmarie understood. She asked Cardenas, “How is your work on the new antenna system going?”

  “Very smoothly,” Cardenas replied. “I’ll be able to deliver the nanos to you by the end of the week, at most. Only a couple of final tests left to do.”

  “They will be safe?” Jeanmarie asked.

  “That’s what we’ll be testing for. The nanos are all programmed and capable of building a new antenna on the lander. Now we’re making certain they’ll switch themselves off and go inert once the task is finished.”

  “Excellent,” Urbain said.

  “I’m curious, though,” Cardenas went on. “How do you intend to get the package down to your lander?”

  Urbain coughed slightly. “We know Alpha’s position. We have her under constant surveillance.”

  Gaeta said, “So?”

  Taking a deep breath, like a man about to plunge over a precipice, Urbain replied, “I need you to take the nanomachines to Alpha.”

  For an instant neither Gaeta nor Cardenas replied. Urbain blinked once and felt his wife’s hand tensing in his.

  Gaeta laughed. “Now you want me to go down to the surface? No shit.”

  “No!” Cardenas snapped. “Manny’s not going anywhere. He’s retired.”

  “But this is important,” Urbain said.

  “Wait a minute,” Gaeta said, a lopsided smile stretching across his beat-up features. “When I first came here it was to go down there, to be the first man to set foot on Titan’s surface. And you refused. I thought you’d pop your cork!”

  “That was for a stunt, a publicity adventure. What I ask you now is for science.”

  “You said you didn’t want to take the chance of contaminating the life-forms.”

  “And you, Dr. Cardenas,” Urbain countered, turning toward the nanotechnology expert, “told me that you could decontaminate his suit with nanomachines.”

  “I don’t care what I said,” Cardenas said hotly. “Manny’s not going to Titan. Period!”

  “Now wait a minute, Kris,” Gaeta said, still grinning. “This is big. I could get Fritz and a top crew here for this stunt.”

  “It’s not a stunt!” Urbain insisted.

  “You’re not going!” Cardenas repeated, just as adamantly.

  Jeanmarie said, “Don’t you see, Dr. Cardenas? Mr. Gaeta is my husband’s last hope. His career, the entire investigation of Titan’s surface, depends on him.”

  “Your husband’s career,” Cardenas replied. “Manny’s life.”

  “But—”

  “He could get killed down t
here.”

  “Hold on, Kris,” Gaeta said. “If I could get Fritz and his people to run the mission I could be the first human being on Titan. That’s worth a lot.”

  “Is it worth your life?”

  “It won’t be that dangerous,” Gaeta said. “I go down, put your package of nanos on the lander and come back up. Piece of cake.”

  “Manny, no. I can’t go through this again.”

  “Last time, Kris.”

  “That’s what you said about going to the rings for Wunderly.”

  “And I got through that okay, didn’t I?”

  Urbain could see the fire in Cardenas’s eyes. And the desire in Gaeta’s.

  “Look,” Gaeta said to her. “Lemme call Fritz, see what he thinks. He wouldn’t let me stick my head in a noose.”

  “Not much.”

  “And if Fritz thinks this stunt is worthwhile, he’ll zoom out here on a torch ship and run the whole operation. Just like old times.”

  Cardenas started to reply but no words came from her mouth, only a half-strangled sound that might have been a sigh or a growl or a muffled wail of despair. She stamped off toward the path that led to the village. Gaeta hurried to catch up with her.

  “He will do it,” Urbain said, his voice shaky, breathless.

  “Yes,” said Jeanmarie. “I only hope that it will not destroy his relationship with Dr. Cardenas.”

  Urbain almost said, What of it? But one look at his wife’s distraught face made him hold his tongue.

  20 MAY 2096: SIMULATIONS LABORATORY

  Fritz von Helmholtz fought back the smile that wanted to form on his normally stem face. This morning his team of technicians had towed the massive excursion suit into the sim lab and stood it up on its feet. Gaeta had climbed into the armored suit with all the grinning enthusiasm of a little boy.

  “Ready for the sim run.” Gaeta’s voice, clearly excited, came from the communications computer’s speaker.

  Von Helmholtz turned to the technician at the main console. “Initiate the landing procedure,” he said calmly.