Saturn gt-12

by Ben Bova

  He politely allowed Maronella to slide out into the aisle ahead of him and then followed her to the hatch. The sixteen men and women filed through the hatch, into an austere metal-walled chamber. An older man stood by the inner hatch, tall and heavyset; his thick head of hair was iron gray and he had a bushy gray moustache. His face looked rugged, weather-beaten, the corners of his eyes creased by long years of squinting in the open sun. He wore a comfortable suede pullover and rumpled tan jeans. Two younger men stood slightly behind him, clad in coveralls; obviously underlings of some sort.

  “Welcome to habitat Goddard,” he said, with a warm smile. “I’m Professor James Wilmot. Most of you have already met me, and for those of you who haven’t, I look forward to meeting you and discussing our future. But for now, let’s take a look at the world we’ll be inhabiting for at least the next five years.”

  With that, one of the young men behind him tapped the keyboard on the wall beside the hatch, and the massive steel door swung slowly inward. Eberly felt a puff of warm air touch his face, like the light touch of his mother’s faintly remembered caress.

  The group of sixteen department leaders started through the hatch. This is it, Eberly thought, feeling a new dread rising inside his guts. There’s no turning back now. This is the new world they want me to live in. This huge cylinder, this machine. I’m being exiled. All the way out to Saturn, that’s where they’re sending me. As far away as they can. I’ll never see Earth again.

  He was almost the last one in line; he heard the others oohing and aahing by the time he got to the open hatch and stepped through. Then he saw why.

  Stretching out in all directions around him was a green landscape, shining in warm sunlight. Gently rolling grassy hills, clumps of trees, little meandering streams spread out into the hazy distance. The group was standing on an elevated knoll, with a clear view of the habitat’s broad interior. Bushes thick with vivid red hibiscus and pale lavender oleanders lined both sides of a curving path that led down to a group of low buildings, white and gleaming in the sunlight that streamed in through the long windows. A Mediterranean village, Eberly thought, set on the gentle slope of a grassy hill, overlooking a shimmering blue lake.

  This is some travel brochure vision of what a perfect Mediterranean countryside would look like. Far in the distance he made out what looked like farmlands, square little fields that appeared to be recently plowed, and more clusters of whitewashed buildings. There was no horizon. Instead, the land simply curved up and up, hills and grass and trees and more little villages with their paved roads and sparkling streams, up and up on both sides until he was craning his neck looking straight overhead at still more of the carefully, lovingly landscaped greenery.

  “It’s breathtaking,” Maronella whispered.

  “Awesome,” said one of the others.

  Eberly thought, A virgin world, untouched by war or famine or hatred. Untouched by human emotions of any kind. Waiting to be shaped, controlled. Maybe it won’t be so bad here after all.

  “This must have cost a bloody fortune,” a young man said, in a strong, matter-of-fact voice. “How could the consortium afford it?”

  Professor Wilmot smiled and touched his moustache with a fingertip. “We got it in a bankruptcy sale, actually. The previous owners went broke trying to turn this into a retirement center.”

  “Who retires nowadays?”

  “That’s why they went bankrupt,” Wilmot replied.

  “Still… the cost…”

  “The International Consortium of Universities is not without resources,” said Wilmot. “And we have many alumni who can be very generous when properly approached.”

  “You mean when you twist their arms hard enough,” a woman joked. The others laughed; even Wilmot smiled good-naturedly.

  “Well,” the professor said. “This is it. This will be your home for the next five years, and even longer, for many of you.”

  “When do the others start coming up?”

  “As the personnel board approves applicants and they pass their final physical and psychological tests they will come aboard. We have about two-thirds of the available positions already filled, and more people are signing up at quite a brisk pace.”

  The others asked more questions and Wilmot patiently answered them. Eberly filtered their nattering out of his conscious attention. He peered intently at the vast expanse of the habitat, savoring this moment of discovery, his arrival into a new world. Ten thousand people, that’s all they’re going to permit to join us. But this habitat could hold a hundred thousand easily. A million, even!

  He thought of the squalor of his childhood days: eight, ten, twelve people to a room. And then the merciless discipline of the monastery schools. And prison.

  Ten thousand people, he mused. They will live in luxury here. They will live like kings!

  He smiled. No, he told himself. There will be only one king here. One master. This will be my kingdom, and everyone in it will bend to my will.

  VIENNA: SCHÖNBRUNN PRISON

  More than a full year before he had ever heard of habitat Goddard, Malcolm Eberly was abruptly released from prison after serving less than half his term for fraud and embezzlement.

  The rambling old Schönbrunn Palace had been turned into a prison in the aftermath of the Refugee Riots that had shattered much of Vienna and its surroundings. When Eberly first learned that he would serve his sentence in the Schönbrunn he had been hopeful: at least it wasn’t one of the grim state prisons where habitual criminals were held. He quickly learned that he was wrong: a prison is a prison is a prison, filled with thugs and perverts. Pain and humiliation were constant dangers; fear his constant companion.

  The morning had started like any other: Eberly was roused from sleep by the blast of the dawn whistle. He swung down from his top bunk and waited quietly while his three cell mates used the sink and toilet. He had become accustomed to the stench of the cell and quite early in his incarceration had learned that complaints led only to beatings, either by the guards or by his cell mates.

  There was a hierarchy among the convicts. Those connected with organized crime were at the top of the prestige chain. Murderers, even those poor wretches who killed in passion, were accorded more respect than thieves or kidnappers. Mere swindlers, which was Eberly’s rap, were far down the chain, doomed to perform services for their superiors whether they wanted to or not.

  Fortunately, Eberly maneuvered himself into a cell where the top con was a former garage mechanic from the Italian province of Calabria who had been declared guilty of banditry, terrorism, bank robbings, and murders. Although barely literate, the Calabrian was a born organizer: he ran his section of the prison like a medieval fiefdom, settling disputes and enforcing a rough kind of justice so thoroughly that the guards allowed him to keep the peace among the prisoners in his own rough manner. When Eberly discovered that he needed a man who could operate a computer to keep him in touch with his family in their mountaintop village and the remnants of his band, still hiding in the hills, Eberly became his secretary. After that, no one was allowed to molest him.

  It was the mind-numbing routine of each long, dull day that made Eberly sick to his soul. Once he came under the Calabrian’s protection, he got along well enough physically, but the drab sameness of the cell, the food, the stink, the stupid talk of the other convicts day after day, week after week, threatened to drive him mad. He tried to keep his mind engaged by daily visits to the prison library, where he could use the tightly-monitored computer to make at least a virtual connection to the world outside. Most of the entertainment sites were censored or cut off altogether, but the prison authorities allowed — even encouraged — using the educational sites. Desperately, Eberly enrolled in one course after another, usually finishing them far sooner than expected and rushing into the next.

  At first he took whatever courses came to hand: Renaissance painting, transactional psychology, municipal water recycling systematics, the poetry of Goethe. It didn’t matter
what the subject matter was; he needed to keep his mind occupied, needed to be out of this prison for a few hours each day, even if it was merely through the computer.

  Gradually, though, he found himself drawn to studies of history and politics. In time, he applied for a degree program at the Virtual University of Edinburgh.

  It was a great surprise when, one ordinary morning, the guard captain pulled him out of line as he and his cell mates shuffled to the cafeteria for their lukewarm breakfasts.

  The captain, stubble-jawed and humorless, tapped Eberly on the shoulder with his wand and said, “Follow me.”

  Eberly was so astonished that he blurted, “Why me? What’s wrong?”

  The captain held his wand under Eberly’s nose and fingered the voltage control. “No talking in line! Now follow me.”

  The other convicts marched by in silence, their heads facing straight ahead but their eyes shifting toward Eberly and the captain before looking away again. Eberly remembered what the wand felt like at full charge and let his chin sink to his chest as he dutifully followed the captain away from the cafeteria.

  The captain led him to a small, stuffy room up in the executive area where the warden and other prison administrators had their offices. The room had one window, tightly closed and so grimy that the morning sunlight hardly brightened it. An oblong table nearly filled the room, its veneer chipped and dull. Two men in expensive-looking business suits were seated at it, their chairs almost scraping the bare gray walls.

  “Sit,” said the captain, pointing with his wand to the chair at the foot of the table. Wondering what this was all about, and whether he would miss his breakfast, Eberly slowly sat down. The captain stepped out into the hallway and softly closed the door.

  “You are Malcolm Eberly?” said the man at the head of the table. He was rotund, fleshy-faced, his cheeks pink and his eyes set deep in his face. Eberly thought of a pig.

  “Yes, I am,” Eberly replied. Then he added, “Sir.”

  “Born Max Erlenmeyer, if our information is correct,” said the man at the pig’s right. He was prosperous-looking in an elegant dark blue suit and smooth, silver-gray hair. He had the look of a yachtsman to him: Eberly could picture him in a double-breasted blazer and a jaunty nautical cap.

  “I had my name legally changed when—”

  “That’s a lie,” said the yachtsman, as lightly as he might ask for a glass of water. An Englishman, from his accent, Eberly decided tentatively. That could be useful, perhaps.

  “But, sir—”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said the pig. “If you wish to be called Eberly, that is what we will call you. Fair enough?”

  Eberly nodded, completely baffled by them.

  “How would you like to be released from prison?” the pig asked.

  Eberly could feel his eyes go wide. But he quickly controlled his reactions and asked, “What would I have to do to be released?”

  “Nothing much,” said the yachtsman. “Merely fly out to the planet Saturn.”

  Gradually they revealed themselves. The fat one was from the Atlanta headquarters of the New Morality, the multinational fundament alist organization that had raised Eberly to manhood back in America.

  “We were very disappointed when you ran away from our monastery in Nebraska and took up a life of crime,” he said, genuine sadness on his puffy face.

  “Not a life of crime,” Eberly protested. “I made one mistake only, and now I’m suffering the consequences.”

  The yachtsman smiled knowingly. “Your mistake was getting caught. We are here to offer you another chance.”

  He was a Catholic, he claimed, working with the European Holy Disciples on various social programs. “Of which, you are one.”

  “Me?” Eberly asked, still puzzled. “I don’t understand.”

  “It’s really very simple,” said the pig, clasping his fat hands prayerfully on the tabletop. “The International Consortium of Universities is organizing an expedition to the planet Saturn.”

  “Ten thousand people in a self-contained habitat,” added the yachtsman.

  “Ten thousand so-called intellectuals,” the pig said, clear distaste in his expression. “Serving a cadre of scientists who wish to study the planet Saturn.”

  The yachtsman glanced sharply at his associate, then went on, “Many governments are allowing certain individuals to leave Earth. Glad to be rid of them, actually.”

  “The scientists are fairly prestigious men and women. They actually want to go to Saturn.”

  “And they are all secularists, of course,” the yachtsman added.

  “Of course,” said Eberly.

  “We know that many people want to escape from the lives they are leading,” the pig resumed. “They are unwilling to submit to the very necessary discipline that we of the New Morality impose.”

  “The same thing applies in Britain and Europe,” said the yachtsman. “The Holy Disciples cleaned up the cities, brought morality and order to the people, helped feed the starving and find jobs for the people who were wiped out by the greenhouse floods.”

  The pig was nodding.

  “But still, there are plenty of people who claim we’re stifling their individual freedoms. Their individual freedoms! It was all that liberty and license that led to the near-collapse of civilization.”

  “But the floods,” Eberly interjected. “The greenhouse warming and the droughts and all the other the environmental disasters.”

  “Visitations by an angry God,” said the pig firmly. “Warnings that we must return to His ways.”

  “Which we have done, by and large,” the yachtsman took up. “Even in the bloody Middle East the Sword of Islam has worked miracles.”

  “But now, with this mission to Saturn—”

  “Run by godless secularists.”

  “There will be ten thousand people trying to escape from the righteous path.”

  “We cannot allow that to happen.”

  “For their own good.”

  “Of course.”

  “Of course,” Eberly agreed meekly. Then he added, “But I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  “We want you to join them.”

  “And go all the way out to the planet Saturn?” Eberly squeaked.

  “Exactly,” the yachtsman replied.

  “You will be our representative aboard their habitat. We can place you in charge of their human resources department.”

  “So that you’ll have some hand in selecting who’s allowed to go.”

  The pig added, “Under our supervision, of course.”

  “In charge of human resources? You can do that?”

  “We have our ways,” said the yachtsman, grinning.

  “Your real task will be to set up a God-fearing government aboard that habitat,” the pig said. “We mustn’t allow the secularists to control the lives of those ten thousand souls!”

  “We mustn’t let that habitat turn into a cesspool of sin,” the yachtsman insisted.

  “A limited, closed environment like that will need a firm, well-controlled government. Otherwise they will destroy themselves, just as the people of so many cities did here on Earth.”

  “You’re too young to remember the food riots.”

  “I remember the fighting in St. Louis,” Eberly said, shuddering inwardly. “I remember the hunger. My sister dying from the wasting disease during the biowar.”

  “We don’t want that happening to those poor souls heading out for Saturn,” said the pig, his hands still folded.

  “Whether they realize it or not,” the yachtsman said, “they are going to need the kind of discipline and order that only we can provide them.”

  “And we are counting on you to lead them in the direction of righteousness.”

  “But I’m only one man,” said Eberly.

  “You’ll have help. We will plant a small but dedicated cadre of like-minded people on the habitat.”

  “And you want me to be their leader?”


  “Yes. You have the skills, we’ve seen that in your dossier. With God’s help, you will shape the government of those ten thousand souls properly.”

  “Will you do it?” the yachtsman asked, earnestly. “Will you accept this responsibility?”

  It took all of Eberly’s self control to keep from laughing in their faces. Go to Saturn or remain in jail, he thought. Be the leader and form a government or live another nine years in that stinking cell.

  “Yes,” he said, with quiet determination. “With God’s help, I accept the responsibility.”

  The two men smiled at one another, while Eberly thought that by the time the habitat reached Saturn he and everyone in it would be far away from the strictures of these religious fanatics.

  Then the pig said, “Of course, if you fail to accomplish our goals, we’ll see to it that you return here and serve out the remainder of your sentence.”

  “We might even add a few more charges,” said the yachtsman, almost genially. “There’s a lot in your dossier to choose from, you know.”

  DEPARTURE MINUS 45 DAYS

  James Colerane Wilmot was a peer of the realm, a baronet who had left his native Ulster in the wake of the Irish Reunification despite his family’s five hundred — odd years of residence there.

  To his credit, he felt no bitterness about leaving his ancestral home. The family had never been wealthy; for more than a dozen generations they had struggled to maintain a shabbily dignified lifestyle by raising sheep. Wilmot had no interest whatsoever in animal husbandry. His passion was the study of the human animal. James Colerane Wilmot was an anthropologist.

  He was also a very able administrator, and as adroit as they come in the quietly fierce internecine warfare of academia. He felt that being named to head this strange collection of people in their mission out to distant Saturn would be the acme of his career, a real, carefully controlled research program, an actual experiment in a field that had never been able to conduct experiments before.