by Ben Bova
Instead of snatching at the bait she offered, Urbain stiffened even more at the mention of the university teams that would supercede him.
Visibly trembling, his face ashen, he said in a low, hard voice, “Every resource I have at my disposal will be used to study Titan. All my other staff personnel are working overtime, working nights as well as days, to complete the rover vehicle that we will send to Titan’s surface. That moon bears life! Unique forms of life. You are the only member of my staff who is not working on Titan, you and your precious rings! I leave you undisturbed to study them. Be grateful for that and don’t bother me again with demands that I cannot meet.”
The threat was hardly veiled, Wunderly realized. Leave him alone or he’ll put me to work on Titan, along with everybody else.
She pushed herself to her feet, feeling defeated, empty, helpless. And angry. The man’s fixated on almighty Titan, she grumbled to herself as she left Urbain’s office. He’s so doggone narrow-minded he could look through a keyhole with both eyes.
Precisely at 17:00 hours, Gaeta rapped once on the frame of Holly’s open door and stepped into her office.
“Quitting time,” he announced. “Come on, I’ve got something to show you.”
Despite her inner turmoil, Holly laughed and told her computer she was leaving for the day. The holographic image blinked once and winked off.
“What’s this all about?” Holly asked as she let him lead her out of the building.
“I thought you’d enjoy a good long look at where we’re going,” Gaeta said.
“Saturn?”
“Yeah. You can see it pretty easy now with the naked eye.”
“Really?”
He chuckled. “Just like I thought. You haven’t taken a peek at it, have you?”
“Not for a while,” Holly admitted.
He had a pair of electrobikes waiting outside the office building. Holly followed him, pedaling along the winding bike path across the park, through the orchard and farmlands, out toward the endcap. They left the bikes in racks that stood at the path’s terminus and headed up a narrow footpath, through flowering shrubbery and a few young trees.
“I’ll never get used to this,” Gaeta muttered.
“What?”
“The way gravity works in here. We’re walking uphill but it feels like we’re going downhill.”
Holly put on a superior air. “ ‘The habitat’s spin-induced gravity,’ ” she quoted from the orientation manual, “ ‘decreases as one approaches the habitat’s centerline.’ Which is what we’re doing now.”
“Yeah,” he said, sounding unconvinced.
At last they came to a small building with a single door marked TOENDCAP OBSERVATION UNIT. Inside, a flight of dimly lit metal stairs led downward. As their softboots padded quietly on the steel treads, Holly realized that it felt as if they were climbing up, not down.
“We’re not in Oz anymore,” Gaeta muttered as they made their way along the shadowy stairwell. His voice echoed slightly off the metal walls.
“Oz?” Holly asked.
“It’s an old story. I’ll get the vid beamed up from Earthside for you.”
Holly really didn’t understand what he was talking about. The stairs ended and they walked along a narrow passageway, a tunnel lined with pipes and conduits overhead and along both walls. Although the tunnel looked straight and level, it felt as if they were trudging up an incline. At last they reached a hatch markedendcap observation unit: use caution in entering. Gaeta tapped on the entry pad and the hatch sighed open.
An automated voice said, “Caution, please. You are about to enter a rotating enclosure. Please proceed with care.”
An open cubicle stood on the other side of the hatch. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were softly cushioned.
Gaeta laughed as they stepped in. “Great. They finally got me into a padded cell.”
“Rotation beginning,” announced the computerized voice.
Holly suddenly felt light-headed, almost woozy.
“It’s like an amusement park ride,” Gaeta said, grasping Holly around the waist.
The computer voice announced, “Ten seconds to hatch opening. Use caution, please.”
The padded wall they were facing slid open and Gaeta, still holding Holly by the waist, pulled her through. Holly gasped and forgot the slightly wobbly feeling in her legs. A million stars were spread across her view, hard unblinking pinpoints of light, the eyes of heaven staring back at her.
“Cosmic,” she breathed.
“That’s a good word for it,” Gaeta said in a hushed voice.
Then Holly realized that someone was already there in the dimly lit blister, her back to them, staring out at the stars. She looked short and stocky; in the muted light the color of her spiky hair was difficult to determine; Holly thought it might have been red.
The woman stirred as if coming out of a trance, turned slightly and whispered, “Hi.”
“Hello,” Holly whispered back. It was like being in a cathedral; nobody raised her voice.
Gaeta said softly, “This whole compartment counter-rotates against the habitat’s spin, so you can see everything without having it revolve all around you.”
Holly knew that from the orientation vids, but it didn’t matter. The sight of the universe spread out before her blotted everything else from her awareness. So many stars! she thought. Millions and zillions of them. Red stars, blue stars, big bright ones, smaller dimmer ones.
Gaeta leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That blue one, there. That’s Earth.”
“And that bright yellow one?”
“Jupiter.”
“So where’s Saturn?” she asked.
The other woman pointed down toward the lower edge of the big curving window. “There.”
Holly stared at a bright pinkish star. No, not a star; she could see that it was a disk, flattened at the poles.
Then it hit her. “Where’s the rings? There’s no rings!”
RING WORLD
The woman smiled at Holly. “Galileo felt just the way you do. The doggone rings disappeared on him.”
“What do you mean?” Holly asked, looking back and forth from the pink disk of the planet to the round, owl-eyed face of the woman, half hidden in the shadows of the dimly lit observation blister.
The woman smiled, a little sadly, Holly thought. She said, “Galileo was the first to see that Saturn had something strange about it, back in 1609, 1610, somewhere in there. His dinky little telescope couldn’t resolve the rings; all he saw was what looked like a pair of stars hovering on either side of Saturn’s disk.”
“And they disappeared?” Holly asked.
“Ah-yup. He laid off observing Saturn for a while, and when he looked again — around 1612 or so, this was — the rings were gone.”
“What happened to them?”
“They didn’t go anyplace. They were still there. But every fifteen years or so Saturn’s tilt comes around to a position where the rings are edge-on to an observer on Earth. They’re so doggone thin they seem to disappear. You can’t see them in low-power telescopes. Not even in some pretty darn big ’scopes, really.”
“So we’re looking at them edge-on right now?” Gaeta asked. “That’s right. Poor Galileo. He didn’t know what was going down. Must have driven him half-crazy.”
Holly stared at the disk of Saturn, as if she could make the rings reappear if she just tried hard enough.
“You can see ’em in the ’scopes over at the astronomy blister,” the woman said. She seemed on the verge of saying more, but stopped herself.
“Are you an astronomer?” Holly asked.
“Sort of. Nadia Wunderly’s my name.” She put out her hand, fingers splayed and thumb sticking straight up. Holly took it and introduced herself and Gaeta. Wunderly shook hands with him, too, her expression serious, as if meeting people was a chore that had to be done correctly.
“What do you mean, you’re sort of an astronomer?” Gaeta asked.
“You’re not?”
“Naw. I’m interested in Saturn’s rings. I’m really a physicist by training; a fluid dynamicist.”
Within an hour they were all in Holly’s apartment, munching leftovers from her refrigerator while Wunderly explained that Saturn’s rings could be thought of as a fluid, with each individual chunk of ice in the rings acting as a particle in that dynamic, ever-changing fluid.
“So the ice flakes are speeding around Saturn like they’re on a race track,” Wunderly was saying, making a wobbly circle with the spear of celery she held in one hand, “and banging into one another like people jostling in the New Tokyo subway trains.”
“All the time?” Gaeta asked.
“All the time,” Wunderly replied, then crunched off a bite of celery.
Holly was on the other side of the counter that partitioned off the kitchen, waiting for the microwave to defrost a packaged dinner. “And they have these little moons going around, too?”
“Ay-yup. Sheepdogs. The moons keep the rings from spreading out and mixing into one another.”
Gaeta, sprawled over the living room sofa with a bowl of chips resting on his flat stomach, seemed deep in thought.
“Then there’s the spokes, too,” Wunderly went on. “Magnetic field levitates the smaller ice flakes.” She waved her free hand up and down like a snake’s sinuous undulations.
“Everything’s bumping into everything else,” Holly said, just as the microwave finally pinged.
“And not all of the particles are little flakes, either. Some of ’em are big as houses. The moons, of course, are a few kilometers across.”
“Sounds confusing,” Holly said, carrying the steaming-hot dinner tray into the living room. She put it down on the coffee table in front of Wunderly.
“Sounds dangerous,” said Gaeta, hauling himself up to a sitting position.
“It’s only dangerous if you stick your nose in,” Wunderly said. “I just want to study the rings from a safe distance.”
“Nobody’s been there, huh?” he asked.
“To the rings? We’ve sent automated probes to Saturn, starting with the old Cassini spacecraft darn near a century ago.”
Gaeta was sitting up straight now, his eyes kindled with growing excitement. “Any of them go through the rings? I mean, from one side to the other, top to bottom?”
Wunderly was poking at the dinner tray with the stub of her celery stalk. “Through the ring plane, you mean?”
“Yeah, right.”
Holly sat down beside Gaeta on the sofa.
“They’ve sent probes through the gaps between the rings, of course. But not through a ring itself. That’d be too danged dangerous. The probe would be beaten up, abraded. It’d be like going through a meat grinder.”
Holly said, “Manny, you’re not thinking of doing that, are you?”
He turned to her, grinning. “It’d make a helluva stunt, chiquita.”
“Stunt?” Wunderly looked puzzled.
“That’s what I do for a living,” Gaeta explained. “I go where no one has gone before. The more dangerous, the better.”
“Within reason,” Holly said.
He laughed.
Recognition dawned on Wunderly’s face. “You’re the guy who scaled Mt. Olympus! On Mars. I saw the vid.”
“That was me. And I skiboarded halfway down the slope, too,” Gaeta said, with pride in his voice.
“Yes, but you can’t go skydiving through Saturn’s rings.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll get killed.”
“There’s always an element of risk in a stunt. That’s what makes people watch.”
Holly said, “They pay money to see if you get killed.”
He laughed. “Like the Roman gladiators. Only I don’t hafta kill anybody. I just risk my own neck.”
Wunderly said, “Not in the rings. It’s suicide.”
“Is it?” Gaeta mused. “Maybe not.”
Holly wanted to stop him before he got to like the idea too much. “Manny—”
“I mean, Wilmot and the science guys don’t want me going down to Titan. Maybe the rings would be a better stunt. Nothing else like them in the whole solar system.”
“All the big planets have rings, don’t they?” Holly said. “Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune.”
“Yeah, but they’re just puny little ones. Pobrecitos.”
“The real question is,” said Wunderly, her eyes beginning to sparkle, “how come Saturn has such a terrific set of rings while the other giant planets just have those dinky little ones?”
Gaeta looked at Holly, then back to Wunderly. He shrugged.
Wunderly resumed, “I mean, you’d think that the bigger a planet is, the bigger its ring system would be. Right? Then how come Saturn’s is bigger than Jupiter’s? And those rings are dynamic, they don’t just sit there. Particles are falling into the planet all the time, new particles abraded off the moons. Why is Saturn’s system so big? Are we just lucky enough to see Saturn at precisely the right time when its ring system is big and active? I don’t believe in luck. Something’s different about Saturn. Something important.”
“So what is it?” Holly asked. “What makes Saturn so special?”
“GOK,” said Wunderly.
“What?” Holly and Gaeta asked in unison.
“God Only Knows,” Wunderly replied, with a grin. “But I intend to find out.”
Wunderly talked about the rings for more than an hour, growing more excited with each word. When Gaeta asked about flying through the rings, Wunderly stressed the danger. “It’s impossible, I tell you,” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed.” Which only made Gaeta more excited about the stunt.
Finally she left, but not before Gaeta got her to promise that she would let him see all the vids and other data she had amassed. He told her he would bring his chief technician to take a look, too.
Holly saw Wunderly to the door, and when she closed and turned back to Gaeta, she realized they were alone and he was grinning from ear to ear. Don’t get involved with him, she warned herself. He’s going to get himself killed, sooner or later. Prob’ly sooner.
Yet she went to the sofa and sat beside him and leaned her head on his strong, muscular shoulder and within minutes they were kissing, their clothes vanishing, and he carried her into the bedroom like a conquering hero and she didn’t think of Malcolm Eberly at all. Hardly.
SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 317 DAYS
Wilmot felt like a harried schoolmaster confronted by a gaggle of unruly students.
“A punch-up?” he bellowed, furious. “The two of you actually struck one another?”
The two young men standing before his desk looked sheepish. One of them had a blue-black little mouse swelling beneath his left eye. He was red-haired and pink-cheeked; Irish, Wilmot guessed. The other was taller, his skin the color of milk chocolate; a crust of blood stained his upper lip. Neither of them spoke a word.
“And what was the reason for this brawl?”
They both remained mute.
“Well?” Wilmot demanded. “Out with it! What caused the fight?”
The one with the black eye muttered, “We disagreed over the name for Village B.”
“Disagreed?”
The other guy said, “He wanted to call the village Killarney.”
His antagonist said, “It’s a proper name. He said it was stupid.”
“And this led to fisticuffs? A disagreement over naming the village? What on Earth were you drinking?”
Alcoholic beverages were not sold in the cafeteria, where the scuffle had occurred, although the habitat’s two restaurants did have liquor as well as wine and a home-brewed beer supplied by one of the farms.
“It’s my fault,” said the one whose nose had been bloodied. “I had a drink
in Nemo’s before going to the cafeteria.”
Wilmot glared at them. “Must I suspend all alcohol? Is that what you want?”
They both shook their heads. Wilmot studied their hangdog expressions. At least they look properly repentant, he thought. A logistics analyst and a communications technician, brawling like schoolboys.
With the sternest scowl he could produce, Wilmot said, “One more incident like this and I will suspend your personal drinking privileges altogether. And put you to work in the recycling facility. If you want to act like garbage, I’ll set you to handling garbage six hours a day.”
The one with the black eye turned slightly toward the other and extended his hand. “I’m sorry, bud.”
His erstwhile opponent clasped the hand in his own. “Yeah. Me too.”
“Get out of here, the two of you,” Wilmot growled. “And don’t ever behave so idiotically again.”
The communications tech hurried from Wilmot’s office to his own quarters, where he dabbed a wet cloth to clean off the scabbed blood on his lip and then put in a call to Colonel Kananga.
“I started a fight in the cafeteria,” he said to Kananga’s image in his phone screen.
The Rwandan said, “I’ve already heard about it, through channels. What did Wilmot have to say to you?”
“Nothing much. He seemed more puzzled than angry.”
Kananga nodded.
“What do you want me to do next?”
“Nothing at present. Just go about your duties and behave yourself. I’ll call you when the time comes.”
“Yessir.”
With a population that included people of many faiths, there was no Sabbath aboard the habitat that everyone adhered to, so election day for Phase One of the naming contests was declared a holiday for everyone.
Malcolm Eberly sat in his living room, looking gloomy, almost sullen, as he watched the newscast on the hologram projector. The image showed the polling center in Village A. People filed in and voted, then left. It was about as rousing as watching grass grow.