Saturn

by Ben Bova

  As soon as she recognized Eberly's face her expression lit up with hope, expectation.

  "Holly, if you have a moment, could you come to my office, please?" he asked pleasantly.

  She said, "I'll be there f-t-l!"

  Eff-tee-ell? Eberly wondered as her image winked out. What could—Ah! Faster than light. One of her little bits of slang.

  He heard her tap on his door, light and timid.

  Let her wait, he said to himself. Just long enough to make her worry a bit. He sensed her fidgeting uncertainly outside his door.

  When at last she tapped again he called, "Enter."

  Holly wasn't pouting as she stepped into Eberly's office. Instead, she looked apprehensive, almost afraid.

  Eberly got to his feet and gestured to the chair in front of his desk. "Sit down, Holly. Please."

  She perched on the chair like a little bird ready to take flight at the slightest danger. Eberly sat down and said nothing for a few moments, studying her. Holly was wearing a forest green tunic over form-fitting tights of a slightly lighter green. No rings or other jewelry except for the studs in her earlobes. Diamonds, he saw. Since the Asteroid Belt had been opened to mining, gemstones were becoming commonplace. At least she's taken off that silly decal on her forehead, Eberly noted. She's rather attractive, really, he thought. Some men find dark skin exotic. Not much of a figure, but she's got good long legs. Should I find someone to get her involved romantically? No, he concluded, I want her attention focused on me, for now.

  He made a slow smile for her. "I hurt you, didn't I?"

  Holly's eyes went wide with surprise.

  "I didn't mean to. Sometimes I become so wrapped up in my work that I forget the people around me have feelings." With a sigh, he continued, "I'm truly sorry. It was thoughtless of me."

  Her expression bloomed like a flower in the sunshine. "I shouldn't be such a pup, Malcolm. I just couldn't help it. I wanted to be beside you at the ceremony and—"

  "And I let you down."

  "No!" she said immediately. "It was my own dimdumb fault. I should've known better. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to cause you any trouble."

  Eberly leaned back in his comfortable chair and gave her his patient fatherly smile. How easily she's maneuvered, he thought. She's apologizing to me.

  "I mean," Holy was prattling on, "I know you've got lots to do and all the responsibilities for the whole habitat's human resources and all that and I shouldn't have expected you to take time out and stand around watching the ridic' ceremonies with me like some schoolkid at commencement or something...."

  Her voice wound down like a toy running out of battery power.

  Eberly replaced his smile with a concerned expression. "Very well, Holly. It's over and done with. Forgotten."

  She nodded happily.

  "I have an assignment for you, if you can find the time to work on it."

  "I'll make the time!"

  "Wonderful." He smiled again, the pleased, grateful smile.

  "What's the assignment?"

  He called up the habitat's ground plan and projected it against the bare wall. Holly saw the villages, the parks and farmlands and orchards, the offices and workshops and factory complexes, all neatly laid out and connected by paths for pedestrians and electric motorbikes.

  "This is our home now," Eberly said. "We're going to be living here for at least five years. Some of us—many of us—will spend the rest of our lives here."

  Holly agreed with a nod.

  "Yet we have no names for anything. Nothing but the engineers' designations. We can't go on calling our home towns 'Village A' and 'Village B' and so forth."

  "I click," Holly murmured.

  "The orchards should have names of their own. The hills and the woods—everything. Who wants to go shopping in 'Retail Complex Three'?"

  "Yeah, but how will we pick names for everything?"

  "I won't," Eberly said. "And you won't, either. This is a task that must be done by the residents of the habitat. The people themselves must choose the names they want."

  "But how—"

  "A contest," he answered before she could complete her question. "Or rather, a series of contests. The residents of each village will have a contest to name that village. The workers in a factory will have a contest to name their factory. It will engage everyone's attention and keep them busy for months."

  "Cosmic," Holly breathed.

  "I need someone to work out the rules and organize each individual contest. Will you do this for me?"

  "Absotively!"

  Eberly allowed himself to chuckle at her enthusiasm. He went on, "Later, you'll have to form committees to judge the names entered and count the votes."

  "Wow!" Holly was almost trembling with anticipation, he could see.

  "Good. I want you to make this your top priority. But tell no one about this until we're ready to announce it to the general populace. I don't want knowledge of this leaking out prematurely."

  "I'll keep it to myself," Holly promised.

  "Fine." Eberly leaned back in his chair, satisfied. Then he cocked an eye at her and said, "I notice that you called me several times. What is it you wanted to talk to me about?"

  Holly blinked as if suddenly shaken awake from a dream. "See you? Oh, yeah. It's prob'ly nothing much. Just some details, not a big deal, really, I guess."

  Leaning slightly forward, Eberly thought that her persistent calls were merely a thinly-disguised attempt to get to see him. He rested his arms on his desk. "What is it, then?"

  With a concerned knitting of her brows, Holly said, "Well... I was running routine checks on the dossiers of the last batch of personnel to come aboard and I found some discrepancies in a few of them."

  "Discrepancies?"

  She nodded vigorously. "References that don't check out. Or in-completed forms."

  "Anything serious?" he asked.

  "Ruth Morgenthau, for example. She's only got one position filled in on the prior-experience section of her application."

  "Really?"

  "It's a wiz of a good one," Holly admitted. "Chief of administrative services for the Amsterdam office of the Holy Disciples."

  Eberly smiled faintly. "That is rather impressive, don't you think?"

  "Uh-huh, but it's only one and the form calls for at least three."

  "I wouldn't worry about it."

  She nodded. "Kay, no prob. But there's one guy, he claims references from several universities but I can't find any mention of him in any of their records."

  "False references?" Eberly felt a pang of alarm. "Who is this person?"

  Holly pulled a palmcomp from her tunic pocket and pointed it at the wall opposite the one showing the habitat's layout. She glanced at Eberly, silently asking permission. He nodded curtly.

  A human resources dossier appeared on the wall. Eberly felt himself frowning as he saw the name and photo at its top: Sammi Vyborg.

  Scrolling down to the references section of the dossier, Holly highlighted the names of five university professors.

  "Far's I can dig, he never attended any of those schools," she said.

  Eberly leaned back in his chair and steepled his fingers, hiding his intense displeasure, thinking furiously. "Have you contacted any of those professors?"

  "Not yet. I wanted you to see this before I go any deeper."

  "Good. Thank you for bringing this to my attention."

  "I can query each of the profs. But what do we do with Vyborg if they don't back him?"

  Eberly spread his hands. "Obviously we can't let the man remain in the post he's been assigned to. If he has falsified his references."

  "We can ship him back Earthside when we refuel at Jupiter, I guess," Holly mused. "But what do we do with him till then? Put him to work in the farms or something?"

  "Or something," Eberly temporized.

  "Kay. I'll query the—"

  "No," he said sharply. "I will contact these professors. Each one of them. Myself."

 
"But you've got so much to do."

  "It's my responsibility, Holly. Besides, they're much more likely to respond quickly to a query from the chief of human resources than from one of the chief's assistants."

  Her face fell briefly, but she quickly brightened. "Yeah, guess so."

  "Besides, you're going to be very busy arranging the contests."

  She grinned at that.

  "I'll take care of it myself," Eberly repeated.

  "Doesn't seem fair," she murmured. "I'm sorry I brought it to you. I should have done it without bothering you."

  "No, Holly. This is something that should have been brought to my attention. You did the right thing."

  "Kay," she said, getting slowly to her feet. "If you say so. Still..."

  "Thank you for bringing this to me," Eberly said. "You've done a fine job."

  She beamed. "Thanks!"

  "I'm sure it's just a mistake or a misunderstanding somewhere along the line. I know Vyborg personally. He's a good man."

  "Oh! I didn't know—"

  "All the more reason to check this out thoroughly," Eberly said sternly. "There can be no personal favoritism here."

  "No, of course not."

  "Thank you, Holly," he said again.

  She went to the door, slowly, as if reluctant to leave his presence. He smiled at her and she finally left his office, sliding the door shut quietly.

  Eberly stared at the dossier still on his wallscreen, the false references still highlighted.

  Idiot! he fumed. There was no need for Vyborg to pad his dossier. He's let his ego override his judgment.

  Still, Eberly said to himself, a mistake like this gives me a little leverage over him. Something to make him more dependent on me. All to the good.

  Now to correct his folder. And he began dictating to his computer the glowing references from each of the university professors that would be placed in Vyborg's dossier.

  DEPARTURE Plus 28 Days

  "Come on," groused Manuel Gaeta, "there's gotta be a way. There's always a way, Fritz."

  Friederich Johann von Helmholtz got up from his knees and drew himself to his full height. Despite his imposing name, he was a short, slim, almost delicately-built man—and the best technician in the solar system, as far as Gaeta was concerned. At the moment, however, there was precious little good will flowing between them.

  Fritz's burr-cut head barely rose to Gaeta's shoulders. Standing beside the muscular stuntman, the technician looked almost like a skinny child. Both of them were dwarfed by the massive cermet-clad suit standing empty in the middle of the equipment bay.

  "Of course there is a way," Fritz said, in precisely clipped English. "You get into the suit. We seal it up. Then we go through the sterilization procedure that Professor Wilmot and Dr. Urbain insist upon, including the gamma-ray bath. And then you die."

  Gaeta huffed mightily.

  Fritz stood beside the empty suit, his arms folded implacably across his slim chest.

  "Jesoo, Fritz," Gaeta muttered, "those Astro Corp suits paid half a bill for me to be the first man to set foot on Titan. You know what they'll do to me if I don't do it? If I don't even try 'cause some tightass scientists are worried about the bugs down there?"

  "I would imagine they will want their half billion returned," Fritz said calmly.

  "And we've already spent a big chunk of it." Fritz shrugged.

  "They'll take it outta my hide," Gaeta said, frowning with worry. "Plus, nobody'll ever back me for another stunt. I'll be finished."

  "Or perhaps dead." Fritz said it without the faintest flicker of a smile.

  "You're a big help, amigo."

  "I am a technician. I am not your financial advisor or your bodyguard."

  "You're un fregado, a cold-blooded machine, that's what you are."

  "Insulting me will not solve your problem."

  "So what? You're not solving my problem. Nobody's solving my problem!"

  Fritz pursed his lips momentarily, a sign that he was thinking. "Perhaps ... no, that probably would not work."

  "Perhaps what?" Gaeta demanded.

  Reaching up to pat the bulky suit on its armored upper arm, Fritz mused, "The problem is to insert you into the suit after it has been sterilized without contaminating it."

  "Yeah. Right."

  "Perhaps we could wrap you in a sterile envelope of some sort. A plastic shroud that has been decontaminated."

  "You think?"

  Cocking his head to one side, Fritz added, "The problem then becomes to get you sealed into the shroud without contaminating it."

  "Same problem as getting into the maldito suit in the first place." Gaeta broke into a string of Spanish expletives.

  "But if we did it outside the habitat, in space," Fritz said slowly, as if piecing his ideas together as he spoke, "then perhaps between the ambient ultraviolet flux out there and the hard vacuum the contamination requirements could be satisfied."

  Gaeta's dark brows shot up. "You think?"

  Fritz shrugged again. "Let me run some numbers through the computer. Then I will talk with Urbain's planetary protection team."

  Gaeta broke into a grin and thumped Fritz on the shoulder hard enough to make the smaller man totter. "I knew you could do it, amigo! I knew it all along."

  DEPARTURE Plus 142 Days

  Eberly had sat for more than two hours, utterly bored, as each of the habitat's sixteen department heads gave their long, dull weekly reports. Wilmot insisted on these weekly meetings; Eberly thought them pointless and foolish. Nothing more than Wilmot's way of making himself feel important, he told himself.

  There was no need to spend two or three hours in this stuffy conference room. Each department chairman could send in his or her report to Wilmot electronically. But no, the old man has to sit up at the head of the table and pretend that he's actually doing something.

  For a community of ten thousand alleged troublemakers, the habitat was sailing on its way to Saturn smoothly enough. Most of the population were relatively young and energetic. Eberly, with Holly's unstinting help, had weeded out the real troublemakers among those who applied for a berth. Those whom he accepted had run afoul of the strictures of the highly-organized societies back on Earth one way or another: unhappy with their employment placement, displeased when the local government refused to allow them to move from one city to another, unwilling to accept a genetic screening board's verdict on a childbearing application. A few had even tried political action to change their governments, to no avail. So here they were, in habitat Goddard, in a man-made world that had plenty of room for growth. They turned their backs on Earth, willing to trek out to Saturn in their ridiculous quest for personal freedom.

  The trick is, Eberly thought as the chief of maintenance droned on about trivial problems, to give them the illusion of personal freedom without allowing them to be free. To make them look to me for their freedom and their hopes for the future. To get them to accept me as their indispensable leader.

  It's time to begin that process, he decided as the maintenance chief finally sat down. Now.

  Yet he had to wait for the security director's report. Leo Kananga was an imposing figure: a tall, deeply black Rwandan who insisted on being addressed as "Colonel," his rank in the Rwandan police force before he volunteered for the Saturn mission. His head shaved bald, he dressed all in black, which accented his height. Despite his impressive appearance, he had nothing new to report, no great problems. A few scrapes here and there in the cafeteria, usually young men making testosterone displays for young women. An out-and-out brawl at a pickup football game in one of the parks.

  "Sports hooligans," Kananga grumbled. "We get fights after vids of major sporting events from Earth, too."

  "Maybe we should stop showing them," suggested one of the women.

  The security chief gave her a pitying smile. "Try that and you'll have a major disturbance on your hands."

  Great God, Eberly thought, they're going to argue the point for the next h
alf hour. Sure enough, others around the table joined the discussion. Wilmot sat in silence at the head of the table, watching, listening, occasionally fingering his moustache.

  Which of these dolts will be loyal to me? Eberly asked himself as they wrangled on. Which will I have to replace? His eyes immediately focused on Berkowitz, the overweight chairman of the communications department. I've promised his job to Vyborg, Eberly thought. Besides, Berkowitz would never be loyal to me; I couldn't trust a Jew who's spent all his life in the news media.

  At last the teapot-tempest over sports hooligans ended. Without a resolution, of course. That type of discussion never produces results, Eberly believed, only hot air. Still, I should remember sports hooligans. They might become useful, at the proper moment.

  Wilmot stroked his moustache again, then said, "That completes the departmental reports. Have we any old business to take up?"

  No one stirred, except that several people seemed to eye the door that led out of the conference room.

  "Any new business? If not—"

  "I have a piece of new business, sir," said Eberly, raising his hand.

  All eyes turned toward him.

  "Go ahead," Wilmot said, looking slightly surprised.

  "I think we should consider the matter of standardizing our clothing."

  "Standardizing?"

  "You mean you want everyone to wear uniforms?"

  Eberly smiled patiently for them. "No, not uniforms. Of course not. But I've noticed that great differences in clothing styles cause a certain amount of... well, friction. We're all supposed to be equals here, yet some of the people flaunt very expensive clothing. And jewelry."

  "That's a personal decision," said Andrea Maronella. She was wearing an auburn blouse and dark green skirt, Eberly noticed, touched off with several bracelets, earrings, and a pearl necklace.

  "It does cause some friction," Eberly repeated. "Those sports enthusiasts, for example. They wear the colors of the teams they favor, don't they?"

  Colonel Kananga nodded.

  Berkowitz, of all people, piped up. "Y'know, some people show up at the office dressed like they were going to work on Wall Street or Saville Row, while the technicians come in looking like they've been dragged on a rope from lower Bulgaria or someplace."