Saturn gt-12

by Ben Bova

  “Holly? She attacked somebody?”

  Gaeta said, “Holly’s never been violent before. What the hell’s going on?”

  Morgenthau’s face took on a sad expression. “Apparently Miss Lane has stopped taking her medication, for some reason. She is decidedly unbalanced. I can send you her dossier, if you want proof of her condition.”

  “Do that,” Cardenas snapped.

  “I will.”

  “But I don’t see what this has to do with my lab,” Cardenas said.

  Morgenthau sighed like a teacher trying to enlighten a backward child. “We know that she’s been friendly with you, Dr. Cardenas. We can’t take the chance that she might get into your lab and release dangerous nanobugs. That would be—”

  “There aren’t any dangerous nanobugs in my lab!” Cardenas exploded. “And even if there were, all you have to do is expose them to ultraviolet light and they’d be deactivated.”

  “I know that’s how it seems to you,” said Morgenthau patiently. “But to the rest of us nanomaehines are a dangerous threat that could wipe out everyone in this habitat. Naturally, we must be extremely careful in dealing with them.”

  Seething, Cardenas started to say, “But don’t you understand that—”

  “I’m sorry,” Morgenthau said sternly. “The issue is decided. Your laboratory will remain closed until Holly Lane is taken into custody.”

  SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 3 DAYS, 6 HOURS, 17 MINUTES

  Gaeta could see that Cardenas was livid, furious. Even Tavalera, who usually seemed passively glum, was glaring at the empty space where Morgenthau’s image had been.

  “Holly’s not a nutcase,” Tavalera muttered.

  “I don’t think so either,” said Cardenas.

  “But Morgenthau does,” Gaeta pointed out. “And so does Eberly and the rest of the top brass, I guess.”

  Cardenas shook her head angrily. “And Wilmot won’t do a damned thing about it.”

  Gaeta said, “This is serious, Kris. They’re saying Holly might’ve killed somebody.”

  “Who?” asked Tavalera.

  Striding toward the kitchen, Cardenas said, “The only person who’s died recently was Diego Romero. Drowned.”

  “And they’re sayin’ Holly did it?” Tavalera said.

  Cardenas didn’t answer. She went behind the kitchen counter and started yanking packages from the freezer.

  Gaeta noticed the message light blinking on her desktop unit. “You got incoming, Kris.”

  “Take it for me, will you?”

  It was Holly’s dossier. The three of them studied it, displayed against the sitting room wall.

  “She’s bipolar; manic-depressive,” Gaeta said.

  “But that doesn’t mean she’d become violent,” said Cardenas.

  Tavalera made a sour face. “I don’t believe it. She’s not like that.”

  Cardenas looked at him for a long moment, then said, “Neither do I.”

  “Could somebody have faked her dossier?” Gaeta asked. “Framed her?”

  “There’s one way to find out,” said Cardenas. She commanded the phone to locate Holly’s dossier in the files of the New Morality headquarters in Atlanta.

  “This is gonna take an hour or more,” said Gaeta.

  “Let’s grab a bite to eat while we wait,” Cardenas suggested.

  “Are we going to the rally?” Gaeta asked.

  “After we have Holly’s Earthside dossier in our hands,” Cardenas replied.

  Holly was waiting for the evening news report while eating a dinner composed of fresh fruits taken from the orchard and a package of cookies from the underground warehouse that cached the specialty foods brought from Earth.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor of the utility tunnel that ran beneath the orchard. She planned to go later out to the endcap and sleep in the open, beneath the trees, safely hidden by the flowering bushes that grew in profusion there. Don Diego would’ve loved the area, she thought, its unorganized roughness, a little bit of wilderness in all this planned-out ecology.

  The phone screen on the wall opposite her showed an educational vid beamed from Earth: something about dinosaurs and the comet-borne microbes that wiped them out. Holly thought that it was safe enough to watch the program; no one could trace a passive use of the phone. It was only if she made an outgoing call that they could track her location.

  The ed program ended as she munched on the cookies. A three-note chime announced the evening news.

  Holly’s eyes went wide when the newscaster announced that she was not only a hunted fugitive, but a dangerously unbalanced mental case, wanted in connection with the drowning of Don Diego, who might try to unleash a nanoplague on the habitat.

  “You bastards!” Holly shouted, jumping to her feet.

  Then the newscast showed a prerecorded interview with Malcolm Eberly, who was identified as the deputy director of the habitat. With convincing sorrow, Eberly said:

  “Yes, Miss Lane worked in the Human Resources Department when I served as its chief. She seemed perfectly normal then, but apparently once she goes off her medication she becomes… well, violent.”

  “You’re flaming right I’m violent!” Holly screeched. “Wait till I get my hands on your lying face!”

  Dressed in a sky-blue blouse and slacks, Cardenas came back into the sitting room where Gaeta and Tavalera were talking together.

  “Has her dossier come in from Atlanta yet?” Cardenas asked.

  Gaeta shook his head. “Your message is probably just reaching them Earthside by now. We’re a long way from home, Kris.”

  Tavalera got to his feet. “The rally’s due to start in half an hour.”

  “Sit down, Raoul,” said Cardenas. “I want to see Holly’s dossier before we go.”

  “We’ll miss—”

  “The candidates won’t be making their final statements for another hour, at least,” Gaeta said. “All we’ll miss is a lot of noise: the marching bands and all that crap.”

  Sitting back on the sofa, Tavalera said, “I’m worried about Holly. Those goons from Security can be rough.”

  “Where could she be?” Cardenas wondered aloud, going to the sofa and sitting beside Tavalera.

  Gaeta, in the armchair across the coffee table from the sofa, suddenly lit up. “I bet I know.”

  “Where?”

  “The tunnels. She liked to explore the tunnels that run under the ground.”

  “Tunnels?”

  “There must be a hundred kilometers of ’em. More. They’d never be able to find her down there. And she knows every centimeter of them; has it all memorized.”

  “Then how could we find her?” Cardenas asked.

  “I’ll look for her,” said Tavalera, getting up again.

  Gaeta reached out and grasped his wrist. “Raoul, there’s just too much of the tunnels to search. You’ll never find her. Especially if she doesn’t want to get found.”

  Tavalera pulled free of his grip. “It beats sitting around here doin’ nothing,” he said.

  “If you do find her,” Cardenas said, “bring her here. We’ll keep her safe until this all gets sorted out.”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  With nothing else to do after Tavalera left, Cardenas and Gaeta watched the news broadcast that showed the crowd building up at the rally site beside the lake. The speaker’s platform was empty, but several small bands paraded through the gathering throng, blasting out marching tunes and working up the crowd. They noted that there were plenty of empty chairs spread out on the grass.

  “We won’t have any trouble getting seats,” Cardenas murmured.

  Gaeta got up from the armchair to sit beside Cardenas, on the sofa. They watched the video, close enough to touch. Despite everything else, Cardenas thought that within a week, two at most, Gaeta would be packing up and preparing to leave the habitat. His torch ship might be already on the way here, she said to herself. Should I go with him? Would he want me to?

  The phone chimed. Cardena
s displayed the message. It was the dossier of Susan Lane, from the files of the New Morality headquarters in Atlanta.

  “They got the wrong Lane,” Gaeta said.

  But then the file photo of Holly came up, unmistakable.

  “She must’ve changed her name,” murmured Cardenas.

  “Is that a sign of instability?”

  They read the dossier, every word and statistic.

  “No mention of mental or emotional problems,” Gaeta said.

  “Or of medications.”

  “The sonsofbitches have faked her dossier. They’re framing her.”

  Cardenas recorded the entire file into her handheld. Then she popped to her feet.

  “Let’s go to the rally and confront Eberly with this,” she said.

  “Right,” said Gaeta.

  But when he slid the front door open, four burly men and women in the dead black tunics of the security force were standing in the hallway, slim black batons hooked into their belts.

  “Colonel Kananga wants to talk to you,” said one of the women, who seemed to be their leader. “After the rally. He asks that you stay here until he can get to you.”

  Wordlessly, Cardenas slid the door shut and went back to the sofa.

  “They must know what we’ve done,” Gaeta said.

  “They’ve bugged this apartment,” said Cardenas, dropping back onto the sofa. “They can hear every word we say. And they know about Holly’s dossier from Atlanta.”

  Feeling dazed, helpless, Gaeta said, “Then they know that Tavalera’s gone to the tunnels to find her.”

  THE FINAL RALLY

  It was hard to talk with so many people pressing around them. Eberly and Morgenthau were walking side by side along the path that led down to the lakeside rally site. Vyborg was slightly behind them, Kananga and a pair of his biggest men up ahead, clearing a path through the thick crowd of people who lined the path, shouting and smiling and reaching for Eberly to shake his hand, touch him, get a smile from him.

  He wanted to shake their hands, smile at them, bask in the glow of their adulation. But instead he virtually ignored them as he talked with Morgenthau.

  “She’s in the tunnels?” he shouted over the crowd’s meaningless hubbub.

  Morgenthau nodded, puffing hard despite the fact that the press of the crowd slowed their pace to little more than a snail’s pace.

  “Cardenas’s assistant has entered the tunnels to search for her,” she yelled into Eberly’s ear.

  “I hope he has better success than Kananga’s oafs.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” he said louder. “Never mind.”

  “We’ve detained Cardenas and the stunt man. They have Holly’s original dossier.”

  A shock of alarm hit Eberly. “How did they get it?”

  “From Atlanta. The New Morality has dossiers on everyone aboard the habitat, apparently.”

  Wringing his hands in frustration, Eberly said, “I should have doctored those files, too.”

  “Too late for that.”

  “This is getting out of hand. We can’t keep Gaeta and Cardenas locked up. I’ve been pushing Gaeta’s stunt as a campaign issue.”

  “Vyborg thought it best to keep them quiet until after the election tomorrow.”

  Eberly glanced over his shoulder. Vyborg. That sour little troll has been the cause of all this trouble, he told himself. Once I’m firmly in power, I’ll get rid of him. But then he thought, The little snake knows too much about me. The only way to be rid of him is to silence him permanently.

  A brass band came blaring up to him, surrounded his little group and escorted them to the speaker’s platform. They were amateur musicians, making up in enthusiasm what they lacked in talent. They blew so loudly that Eberly couldn’t think.

  Urbain and Timoshenko were already seated on the platform, he saw as they approached. The crowd was cheering wildly, already worked up to a near frenzy. Wilmot was nowhere in sight. Good. Let him remain in his quarters, as I instructed. I want these people to see me as their leader, no one else.

  He climbed the stairs and took his chair between Timoshenko and Urbain. The several little bands clumped together into one large conglomeration in front of the platform and played a faltering rendition of “Now Let Us Praise Famous Men.” Eberly wondered how the women of the habitat felt about the sexist sentiment. The band was so poor that it didn’t matter, he decided.

  The blaring music finally ended and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Eberly saw that fully three thousand of the habitat’s population was standing on the grass, facing him. It was the biggest crowd of the campaign, yet Eberly felt disappointed, dejected. Seventy percent of the population doesn’t care enough about this election to attend the rally. Seventy percent! They sit home and do nothing, then complain when the government does things they don’t like. The fools deserve whatever they get.

  The crowd sat on the chairs that had been arranged for them. Eberly saw that there were plenty of empties. Before they could begin to get restless, he rose slowly and stepped to the podium.

  “I’m a little embarrassed,” he said as he clipped the pinhead microphone to his tunic. “Professor Wilmot isn’t able to be with us this evening, and he asked me to serve as moderator in his place.”

  “Don’t be embarrassed!” came a woman’s voice from somewhere in the throng.

  Eberly beamed a smile in her general direction and went on, “As you probably know already, we are not going to bore you with long-winded speeches this evening. Each candidate will make a brief, five-minute statement that summarizes his position on the major issues. After these statements you will be able to ask questions of the candidates.”

  He hesitated a heartbeat, then went on, “The order of speakers this evening was chosen by lot, and I won the first position. However, I think it’s a little too much for me to be both the moderator and the first speaker, so I’m going to change the order of the candidates’ statements and go last.”

  Dead silence from the audience. Eberly turned slightly toward Urbain, then back to the crowd. “Our first speaker, therefore, will be Dr. Edouard Urbain, our chief scientist. Dr. Urbain has had a distinguished career…”

  Holly watched the newscast of the rally from the tunnel. Professor Wilmot’s not there, she thought. I wonder why.

  Then she realized that this was the perfect opportunity to get to Wilmot without Kananga or anyone else interfering. Holly got to her feet. Just about everybody’s at the rally, she saw, eyes still on the screen. I’ll bet Wilmot’s in his quarters. I could sneak in there and tell him what’s going down.

  She turned off the wallscreen and started striding purposively along the tunnel, heading for Athens and Wilmot’s quarters.

  After a few minutes, though, she turned off into a side tunnel that provided access for maintenance robots to trundle from one main utility tunnel to another. No sense marching straight to the village, she told herself. Go the roundabout way and look out for any guards that might be snooping around.

  So she missed Raoul Tavalera, who came down the utility tunnel from the direction of Athens, looking for her.

  Urbain and then Timoshenko spent their five minutes reviewing the positions they had stressed all through the campaign. Urbain insisted that scientific research was the habitat’s purpose, it’s very raison d’etre, and with him as director the habitat’s exploration of Saturn and Titan would be a great success. Timoshenko had taken up part of Eberly’s original position, that the scientists should not become an exalted elite with everyone else in the habitat destined to serve them. Eberly thought that Timoshenko received a larger and longer round of applause than Urbain did.

  As Timoshenko sat down, Eberly rose and walked slowly to the podium. Is Morgenthau right? he asked himself. Are Timoshenko’s voters switching to Urbain? Are the engineers lining up with the scientists?

  It makes no difference, Eberly told himself as he gripped the edges of the podium. Now is the time to split them. Now is
the time to swing the overwhelming majority of votes to me.

  “Now is the time,” he said to the audience, “for me to introduce the final speaker. I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of introducing myself.”

  A few titters of laughter rippled through the crowd.

  “So let me say, without fear of being contradicted, that here is a man who needs no introduction: me!”

  They laughed. Vyborg and several of his people began to applaud, and most of the crowd joined in. Eberly stood at the podium soaking up their adulation, real or enforced, it didn’t matter to him as long as the people down there performed as he wanted them to.

  Once they quieted down, Eberly said, “This habitat is more than a playground for scientists. It is more than a scientific expedition. This is our home, yours and mine. Yet they want to tell us how we should live, how we should serve them.

  “Theytake it for granted that we will maintain strict population controls, even though this habitat could easily house and feed ten times our current population.

  “But how will we be able to afford an expanding population? Our ecology and our economy are fixed, locked in place. There is no room for population growth, for babies, in their plans for our future.

  “I have a different plan. I know how we can live and grow and be happy. I know how each and every one of you can get rich!”

  Eberly could feel the crowd’s surge of interest. Raising an arm to point outward, he said:

  “Circling around Saturn is the greatest treasure in the solar system: thousands of billions of tons of water. Water! What would Selene and the other lunar cities pay for an unending supply of water? What would the miners and prospectors in the Asteroid Belt pay? More than gold, more than diamonds and pearls, water is the most precious resource in the solar system! And we have control of enough water to make us all richer than Croesus.”

  “No!” Nadia Wunderly screamed, leaping to her feet from the middle of the audience. “You can’t! You mustn’t!”

  SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 3 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 11 MINUTES