Titan (18 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Titan
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I
t’s like an unending nightmare, Eduoard Urbain said to himself. He sat at his desk, head sunk between his hands, handsome silk ascot hanging loose and sweaty from his shirt collar, his pearl gray jacket tossed over the back of a chair.
Endless. Night and day I try to make something work and it is useless. It’s like one of those dreams where you are struggling to get away from something horrible but you can’t move. Your feet are mired in mud or sinking into wet concrete.
He banged a fist on his desktop so hard it hurt. “Why?” he demanded of the empty office. “Why won’t she speak to me?”
With red-rimmed eyes he reviewed the latest reports from his staff.
Alpha
was still incommunicado, somewhere on the surface of Titan. She could not be located unless low-altitude satellites were put in place around Titan to search for her with infrared and radar scanners. And Eberly will not allow the satellites to be launched unless I agree to his scheme to mine Saturn’s rings.
Endless. A never-ending cycle of frustration. My career is in tatters; my life is ruined. I am already a laughingstock back on Earth. The news media are doing stories about my failure.
What can I do? Urbain asked himself. What choice do I have? Eberly holds all the power. If I don’t give in to him, I’ll never find
Alpha
, never have a prayer of regaining contact with her.
Urbain straightened up in his chair. Let’s look at this calmly, he told himself. Rationally. Either you agree to mine the rings or you lose
Alpha
forever. Or at least until some other group is sent out here with the personnel and equipment to locate
Alpha
and get her to begin sending data. By then you will have been replaced, sent home to Quebec in disgrace, a miserable failure, a has-been, a never-was.
No! Urbain told himself sternly. That cannot be allowed. If I agree to allow that miserable extortionist Eberly to mine the rings, I can locate
Alpha
and bring her back to life. Me, myself.
Wunderly will go berserk, but that is her problem, not mine. Besides, she will immediately appeal to the ICU and IAA. They will never allow mining the rings if Wunderly can show that Saturn’s rings are indeed biologically active.
Urbain glanced at the digital time display on his desktop screen. Exactly midnight.
Very well, he told himself, his mind made up at last. I will agree to Eberly’s ridiculous demand. Let him mine the rings, or try to. My first priority, my
only
priority, is to save
Alpha.
With a grim smile he ordered the phone to call Malcolm Eberly, regardless of the hour.
Holly hadn’t wanted to ask Pancho for advice but there was no one else she could think of. After her disastrous breakup with Raoul, she rushed to her apartment and spent hours pacing, thinking, rerunning their meeting in her head, calling herself a fool, a blind idiot, to put Raoul in a bind like that. No wonder he walked out. He thinks all I’m interested in is to get him to fly Nadia to the rings. Stupid! Stupid!
She realized that she loved Raoul Tavalera, but he would never believe her now. Love is based on trust, she knew, and he’ll never be able to trust me again. Never.
She held back the tears that threatened to engulf her, but Holly knew she wouldn’t be able to sleep. She didn’t even change into her nightclothes. She simply paced her apartment, eying the phone console, wanting to call Raoul but knowing it would be useless, pointless. I’ve been a cosmic idiot, she told herself. An intergalactic dimdumb.
It was just past midnight when she found herself ordering the phone to call her sister. As soon as she realized it she wanted to cancel the call. But before she could, Pancho’s face appeared on the small screen of the phone console.
“What’s up, sis?” Pancho looked wide-awake, grinning happily.
“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” Holly asked.
“Hell no. Jake and I were just raiding the fridge. Those meals at Nemo’s can be pretty skimpy.”
“I guess.”
Pancho’s eyes narrowed. “What’s the matter? What’s wrong?”
Swallowing once before replying, Holly asked, “Panch, could you come over here? To my place? I need to talk to you. Just the two of us.”
“Faster than light, kid,” said Pancho.
“It was so good of you to come here to meet me,” Jeanmarie Urbain said, wondering if Eberly could hear the nervous thundering of her pulse.
Eberly smiled graciously in the darkness of the little woods. “I must confess that your call surprised me, Madame Urbain.”
“Jeanmarie,” she murmured, as she walked alongside Eberly along the shadowy, twining path. “My friends call me Jeanmarie.”
“You count me as a friend?”
She hesitated a heartbeat. Then, “I hope so.”
Eberly chuckled softly. “Your husband doesn’t think of me as a friend.”
She thought carefully before replying, “Eduoard is completely immersed in his work. He has no time for friendships, no room for personal relations.”
“Not even for his wife?”
Jeanmarie pictured herself walking a tightrope over an abyss. One false step and I am doomed, she told herself.
Eberly took her silence as agreement. “It’s a shame that such a lovely woman is neglected.”
She sighed. “It is his work. His reason for existence. He takes others—his aides, his associates—for granted.”
“And you, as well.”
“I am afraid so.”
“That’s very sad.”
It took all her courage to reply, “Sad, yes. And lonely.”
Eberly walked in silence for several paces along the path. She could not make out the expression on his face. He was slightly taller than she, but she got no impression of brute masculine
strength. Rather, Jeanmarie felt as if she were walking with a stealthy cat padding along beside her, eying her with calculating eyes.
At last he said, “I know what it is to be lonely.”
“You do?”
“Scientists aren’t the only ones to become ensnared in their work. I have the responsibility for this entire habitat on my shoulders. Ten thousand men and women. They all depend on me.”
“Yes, of course. I should have realized that.”
“Like you, I have no one to turn to,” Eberly went on, his voice a soft, poignant murmur.
“You need a friend,” she said.
“That’s perfectly true. You’re a very understanding woman.”
“You are very kind.”
“I’m happy that you believe so.”
She decided she had to play her penultimate card. “You know, I have admired you for several weeks now. You are so … so commanding. So superb.”
He stopped walking and turned to face her. Jeanmarie’s heart thumped in her chest.
“You really admire me?” he asked, his voice high with wonder.
“Truly,” she lied.
“Perhaps …,” he began, then paused dramatically.
“Perhaps?”
Taking both her hands in his, Eberly said, “Perhaps we could be friends.”
She allowed him to hold her hands as she gazed into his eyes, trying to fathom what was going on behind them.
“But you’re a married woman,” Eberly said gloomily. “In a closed habitat like this, it could never work.”
“If Eduoard were busy working on his probe, searching for it, trying to regain control of it …”
“He’d have no time for you at all, would he?”
“None at all,” she agreed.
“But we couldn’t be seen together in public,” Eberly said gravely. “That wouldn’t do.”
She replied, “We could meet here and take walks, talk to each other, share our thoughts.”
“I suppose I could arrange for an electric cart and we could ride to one of the endcaps, or one of the unoccupied villages.”
Jeanmarie recognized the danger in that.
“I could not be away from home for so very long,” she temporized.
“But if your husband had the satellites he wants he’d be spending all his time searching for his probe, wouldn’t he?”
Nodding, she added, “And once he found the machine he would be with it every hour of the night and day.”
Eberly smiled. “You have a rival.”
“Yes, I do.”
He stepped closer and put his hands on her shoulders. And his palmcomp chimed.
Jeanmarie shuddered as if rudely awakened from a bad dream. Eberly grumbled something and flicked his handheld open.
“Yes?” he snapped.
“Chief Administrator Eberly?” he heard from the handheld’s tiny speaker. Urbain’s voice! Does he know … ?
“Yes,” he said, more guardedly.
“This is Eduoard Urbain. I have decided to withdraw my opposition to mining the rings of Saturn.” Urbain’s voice was brittle, sharp-edged. “Providing, of course, that you permit my people to launch the satellites into orbit around Titan. And to build replacement satellites.”
Glancing at Jeanmarie, who was staring at him with eyes so wide with guilt that he could see their whites even in the nighttime darkness, Eberly answered, “Very well. We can discuss this in my office first thing tomorrow morning.”
He snapped the handheld shut and said to Jeanmarie, “It’s quite late. You’d better get home.”
“Was that Eduoard?” she asked, in an agonized tone.
Nodding, Eberly said, “He’ll be at your apartment shortly, wondering where you’ve been.”
With that he turned abruptly and began striding back toward Athens, leaving Jeanmarie standing in the shadows alone. Both of them felt relieved.
Pancho did not break the light-speed barrier, but she was knocking at Holly’s door before Holly could finish washing the tears from her face.
“What’s the matter?” she said as she strode into the apartment, her head swiveling as if she were looking for cutthroats and assassins.
Within minutes the two sisters were sitting together on the sofa as Holly poured out her troubles.
“Oh, Panch, I’ve made such a mess of things!”
Pancho nodded tightly.
“He’ll never want to talk to me again. Never.”
“Does that matter so much to you?”
“It does! It truly does. I didn’t realize how much I really love Raoul until now. I’ve flamed out, Panch. I’ve wrecked it all.”
Leaning back on the sofa, Pancho scratched idly at her chin. “Cool down, sis. Let’s take this one step at a time.”
“He thinks all I want is to get him to fly Nadia to the rings. He doesn’t know that I really love him.”
“Well, to begin with, you’ve gotta find somebody else to pilot the spacecraft. That’ll show him that he’s not on the spot for that assignment.”
“I wish. But even if I could find somebody he’d still be sore at me. He’ll go back to Earth soon’s he can, I bet.”
“Which won’t be real soon,” Pancho said, as soothingly as she could. “There aren’t any ships heading all the way out here that I know of.”
“There will be, in a few months.”
“That’s a long time from now.”
“Yeah, maybe, but—”
“What you need, first shot out of the box, is somebody to fly your scientist pal to the rings.”
“Timoshenko won’t do it,” Holly said. “And we don’t really have anybody else except Raoul who can do the job. We need an experienced astronaut.”
Grinning widely, Pancho said, “You’re lookin’ at one.”
“You? But Jake said—”
“Never mind what Jake said. I spent more time drivin’ spacecraft than you’ve spent brushing your teeth, just about.”
“But … but that was years ago, Panch. You’re too old—”
Pancho’s face hardened. “Don’t say it, kid. My reflexes are still quick enough to give you a spanking. A little time in a simulator and I’ll be sharp as a samurai sword’s edge.”
Holly sat there, mouth open, clearly disbelieving.
“Jake can help your mission control team. He gets along pretty good with Manny Gaeta.”
“I s’pose …”
“And you can get your boyfriend to join the techie team, too. He can stay nice and safe here while I fly out to the rings. This is gonna be fun!”
“Pancho,” said Holly, shaking her head, “you can’t—”
“The hell I can’t.”
“But Raoul won’t join the mission control team. He won’t even talk to me.”
“Sure he will,” Pancho said cheerfully. “Ask him while you’re in bed.”
“I couldn’t!”
“Best time to ask a man anything,” Pancho said with a knowing wink.
E
berly awoke with a smile. Registration day. The moment that my reelection campaign actually begins. Sitting up in his bed, he mentally scanned his political horizon. No obstacles in sight. Urbain has caved in to me, so there’ll be no real opposition to my plan to mine the rings.
As he got up and padded to the lavatory he thought, Of course that Wunderly woman will object and try to get the IAA to intervene, but that will just make me look more heroic to the voters, resisting the demands of Earthbound bureaucrats who don’t care about our real needs. Maybe I’ll get elected unanimously!
Best of all, he told himself, as he thoroughly brushed his teeth, I won’t have to play games with Urbain’s wife. What a pathetic little game she tried to play with me! Would she really have gone to bed with me? He shook his head as he rinsed his mouth and spat into the sink.
I can have my pick of just about any woman in this habitat, he said to himself. But why bother? Power is better than sex. Being admired by everyone—
everyone!
—that’s the really great thing in life. I don’t need women. I don’t need anything or anyone, not as long as I’m chief administrator. No one can hurt me. No one can touch me. I’m king of the hill and I’m not going to let anyone pull me down.
Zeke Berkowitz was smiling amiably as he inspected the camera placements he had personally set up around the stage of Athens’s only theater. As chief of
Goddard’s
communications department, Berkowitz still thought of himself as a newsman, and this day of registering for the coming election was one of those rare newsworthy events in the habitat.
Despite his slightly portly shape, Berkowitz cut a rather dapper figure in his pale yellow slacks and raw silk sports coat of toast brown. He had none of his minuscule staff with him; he figured he could handle this event alone with the help of the three remotely controlled cameras he had set in place. Unlike most of the younger people in the habitat, Berkowitz had disdained the enzyme treatments that would turn his skin golden. That’s for the kids, he thought. I’ll stay a pasty-faced old fart.
His years aboard
Goddard
had taught him not to expect a throng of curious onlookers. The inhabitants of this community were a strange lot, largely aloof to politics. No, Berkowitz reminded himself, they’re not aloof; they’re wary, suspicious of politics and politicians and everything that goes with them. Most of them had been exiled by their home countries, one way or another. They were aboard
Goddard
because their fundamentalist regimes at home had no use for them.
Berkowitz himself had come out to Saturn willingly, at the request of Professor Wilmot when the professor was organizing this permanent expedition. Retired after a lifetime in the news
media business, bereft by the death of his wife, he had gladly accepted the chance to get as far away from his memories as he could.
Sure enough, the theater was practically empty. A few onlookers with nothing better to do were scattered among the otherwise empty seats. They merely made the place look emptier. Up on the stage, the official registrar sat behind a long table, bare except for the laptop computer opened in front of him. Berkowitz had expected the chief of human resources, Holly Lane, to serve as the registrar but apparently she had sent an underling. Holly’s a lot more photogenic than this young nonentity, he thought.
Ten A.M. was the official opening time for citizens who wished to register as candidates for election to the habitat’s post of chief administrator. It was now nearly eleven and no candidates had shown up. No matter, Berkowitz thought. Eberly will be here sooner or later, and he’ll unquestionably bring an entourage with him. With tight camera angles, good interview questions and some judicious editing I’ll make this the media event of the young year on this evening’s news broadcast.
He was mildly surprised when Holly Lane appeared at the back of the theater and strode boldly down the center aisle. Has she come to replace the guy behind the desk? It’s her job, as head of human resources, to serve as registrar. Maybe she was busy on something else and couldn’t get to it until now, Berkowitz thought.
“Good morning,” he called to Holly, as she climbed the stairs at one end of the stage.
“Hello, Zeke,” said Holly with a wave of her hand. She was wearing not her usual dull tunic and slacks but a brightly flowered short-skirted dress. Pretty young woman, Berkowitz thought. Nice legs.
Holly marched straight to the registrar and said, “I want to register as a candidate.”
The man behind the table—thirtyish, round-faced—had looked pretty bored up until that moment. His brows shot up and he squeaked, “You?”
“Yep, me.”
Berkowitz raced from his post at one end of the stage to the table. “Hey, no, wait a minute! We’ve got to do this over. I wasn’t expecting—”
Holly laughed at his suddenly flustered expression. “You weren’t expecting me to throw my name in the mix?”
Grinning back at her, Berkowitz said, “The expression is ‘throw my hat in the ring.’ And, no, I wasn’t expecting it. This is news! We’ve got to stage it right.”
Holly allowed him to direct her. Berkowitz had her go back halfway down the aisle and, after adjusting the camera angles, cued her to walk up onto the stage once more.
She strode to the table purposively and announced in a clear, firm voice, “I want to register as a candidate for chief administrator.”
It was now precisely eleven A.M., and at that moment the double doors at the rear of the theater swung open again and Malcolm Eberly marched in, followed by exactly a dozen men and women. He was smiling confidently as he started up the aisle.
“No! Wait!” Berkowitz yelled from the stage. “We’re not finished here yet.”
Eberly slowed and stopped, his smile dwindling as he recognized who was at the registrar’s table.
“Holly?” he yelped.
“Be with you in a minute,” Holly answered.
“Let me finish with her,” Berkowitz called to him. “Then we’ll get you entering through the doors.”
Eberly’s face darkened as he stood with folded arms in the middle of the theater amid his entourage while Berkowitz videoed Holly giving her name to the registrar and his pulling up her dossier on his computer.
“You are now officially registered as a candidate for the office of chief administrator,” said the registrar in an overly loud voice, obviously aware of the cameras. “Good luck to you.”
“Thanks,” said Holly, smiling sweetly. “I’m gonna need it.”
“Okay,” Berkowitz called down to Eberly while he pecked at his handheld remote to reposition the cameras. “Go back to the doors and come in again.”
This is going to be great, Berkowitz exulted silently, as Eberly reentered the theater, his most dazzling smile firmly in place. We’re actually going to have a race for the election. Holly Lane’s running against her own boss.
Four minutes later, with Eberly’s registration safely recorded, Berkowitz beckoned the two candidates toward him.
“I need to ask you a few questions,” he told them. “Why you’re running, what you hope to accomplish, that sort of thing. Mr. Eberly, you first.”
“I’m running for reelection because I believe the people of this habitat need and deserve a man with experience. I think I’ve shown over the past year that I can run the office efficiently, fairly, and to the betterment of all our people.” Somehow Eberly managed to smile and look serious at the same time.
“And what will be your number one priority, if you are reelected?” Berkowitz asked.
Eberly’s smile brightened. “I believe that the path to wealth and a successful future for the people of this habitat lies in mining the rings of Saturn for their abundant supply of water ice. Water is the most precious commodity in the solar system, and we can become the prime supplier of water for the human settlements on the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt and the research stations elsewhere in the solar system.”
“Despite the reservations voiced by our own scientists and others?” Berkowitz prodded.
“Our people should and must decide their own fate,” Eberly said, his voice firm and strong. “We should not allow Earthbound bureaucrats or unrealistic scientists to restrict our freedoms.”
Berkowitz turned to Holly, standing beside Eberly. He noted that she was slightly taller than Eberly, which would show clearly in a video two-shot.
“And Ms. Lane, why have you decided to oppose Mr. Eberly?”
Holly stumbled, “Well, it’s not … I mean, there’s nothing personal involved. I just think that Malcolm’s ignoring a problem that’s incredibly important.”
“What problem?”
“Population growth,” she replied immediately. “Our people are living under the zero-growth protocol. That’s got to change, sooner or later. Prob’ly sooner.”
“But with out limited resources—,” Berkowitz began.
Holly cut him short. “This habitat can support five times our current population easily. What we’ve got to do is work out a way to allow population growth within the limits of our resources. I think we’re smart enough to figure out how to do that.”
“Do you have a plan for allowing population growth?”
“Nossir, I surely don’t. But we need to get our best minds together to work on this problem. Even ask for advice from Earth if we need to; there’s lots of people on Earth who’ve dealt with population-growth issues.”
“Without much success,” Eberly interjected.
“We can’t ask the people of this habitat to keep on the way we’ve been. It’s inhuman! People want to have babies!”
“Women want to have babies,” Eberly countered.
“So do men,” Holly jabbed back. “Normal men.”
Before Eberly could reply Berkowitz physically pushed in between them. “I can see that this is going to be an exciting race. Can you both agree to having one or more formal debates on these issues?”
“Certainly,” Eberly snapped.
Holly nodded less assuredly. “I guess.”
“Good. I’ll meet with you individually to arrange the details. For now, would you kindly shake hands for the camera?”
Holly stuck her hand out and Eberly took it in a lukewarm grip.
“May the best man win,” Eberly said, looking straight into the nearest camera.
“May the better person win,” Holly corrected.
Eduoard Urbain ignored registration day; he did not watch the news broadcast that evening that showed the interviews with the two candidates. He didn’t even know that Holly Lane had registered in opposition to Malcolm Eberly.
The last one of his satellites had been successfully inserted
into a low polar orbit around Titan, and Urbain had no time for anything except to search for his wandering
Alpha.
One of the satellites had malfunctioned at launch from the habitat; its guidance system had evidently been misprogrammed. Instead of heading for an orbit around Titan its trajectory aimed it into the moon’s thick atmosphere. Urbain had gone into a frenzy, terrified that the satellite would crash on Titan’s surface and contaminate the biosphere. His mission controllers, though, fired the satellite’s maneuvering thrusters and sent it into a long, looping trajectory that passed Titan safely and swung it into a course that would ultimately impact high in Saturn’s northern hemisphere, safely away from any possible contamination of Titan.
Eleven satellites in low orbit to scour the moon’s surface in search of the lost rover. Urbain spent night and day in the mission control center, peering at the displays on the smart walls, reviewing thousands of still images of Titan’s landscape.
The planetary physicists on his staff were ecstatic with the satellites’ imagery. They were generating a detailed photographic map of Titan’s surface, with a five-meter resolution.
“If we could overlap imagery from two or more satellites,” one of them suggested to Urbain, “we could build up a three-dimensional map with a resolution of better than one meter. We’d be able to see individual boulders!”
“Not until we find
Alpha,”
Urbain insisted doggedly.
“But that’ll help us find the beast.”
“Ah, yes,” Urbain backtracked. “Of course.”
He took his meals at the mission control center, even had a cot brought in so he could nap there when he could no longer keep his eyes open. Jeanmarie visited now and then, often to bring him a meal she had cooked for him. He had no time for her. A mumbled thanks and a brief peck on her cheek was all he could manage for his wife.
Still no trace of
Alpha.
“Perhaps,” suggested one of the engineers, “it blundered into one of the seas and sank.”
“Blundered?” Urbain roared. “Blundered?
Alpha
is not
blind. Not stupid. She has more computing power in her central processor than you have in your head!”
The man scurried away from Urbain’s red-hot wrath.
It was the youngest of the planetary physicists, a sweet-faced woman with more nerve than her colleagues, who approached him next.

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