Titan (35 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Titan
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Tomorrow is the first of May. No spring fertility rites in this habitat, of course. These people have their fertility rites all year ’round, actually.
However, tomorrow evening there will be the second of three debates between our two candidates for chief administrator.
Although a lot has happened since the first debate, not much has changed. The scientists have proven that Saturn’s rings actually do harbor living microorganisms in their particles of ice. The ICU has already dispatched a shipload of science people to come and see for themselves. Urbain is in his glory, taking as much credit for the discovery as he can grab despite the fact that he initially opposed investigating the rings at all. Ah well, the rings have taken the spotlight away from Urbain’s failed lander on Titan. The useless hulk is still incommunicado: silent as a stone.
Politically, Eberly is insisting that the rings can still be mined for their water without disrupting the ice creatures. The scientists disagree, naturally, but Urbain has been strangely muted on the subject. The woman who made the discovery, Dr. Wunderly, is up in arms against Eberly but I doubt that it will do her any good. Clever politician that he is, Eberly has offered to put her in charge of environmental protection of the rings—while he moves ahead with plans to mine them!
It appears that Holly Lane’s petition to overthrow the ZPG protocol will succeed. She claims to have more than
seven thousand signatures, more than enough to repeal the protocol The signatures need to be verified, of course, but that’s merely a matter of form. Unless Eberly pulls some new trick.
At the end of the day, however, the petition might not matter one way or the other. From all that I can see and hear, these people want to mine the rings. They want to get rich. And Eberly has told them once they begin bringing in money from the mining, then they can repeal the zero-growth protocol and start enlarging the habitat’s population.
It would seem that Eberly has everything his own way. He’s even hinted that he would defy an IAA injunction against mining the rings. He’s taken the pose that he would rather fight than give in to what he calls “Earthbound bureaucrats.”
We shall see what we shall see.
Z
eke Berkowitz smiled professionally into the middle of the three cameras facing him and the two candidates, who sat at the table flanking him. Each camera was mounted on a self-balancing monopod. Two communications technicians were working behind the cameras; there were no other people in the studio. Berkowitz’s smile was pleasant, unforced, but it had a sly edge to it: the professional newsman’s subtle declaration that he knew more than his audience did.
As the digital clock on the studio’s far wall clicked to 16:00, Berkowitz said, “Good evening, and welcome to the second of three debates between the two candidates running for the office of chief administrator.”
Berkowitz noted with pleasure the real-time readout of his audience’s size displayed on a monitor beside the clock. Virtually every household in the habitat was watching the debate. Good, he thought. Very good. But then he reminded himself that all entertainment broadcasts had been suspended for the length of this debate. People could watch vids from their personal libraries, if they chose; otherwise, the debate was the only show on the air throughout the habitat.
He introduced the two candidates and explained that each of them would have five minutes to make an opening statement, then the floor would be thrown open to questions phoned in by the viewers.
“Holly Lane, formerly chief of human resources, will give her opening statement first.”
Holly inadvertently licked her lips as all three cameras swiveled slightly to focus on her.
She tried to smile as she began: “Hi. You all know me, I guess, and what I’m trying to accomplish in this election. Thanks to your help, we’ve signed more than seven thousand people up for our petition to repeal the Zero Population Growth protocol. Seven thousand three hundred and fourteen, to be exact.”
Holly had not written out a prepared speech. The display screen built into the tabletop before her showed only rough notes of the points she planned to make.
“The human resources department is going to verify the signatures over the next few days, so if you get a call from one of my former workers, be nice to her. Or him.
“Once the signatures are confirmed, it’ll be up to the chief administrator to declare the ZPG rule no longer valid. I expect he’ll drag his feet on this, ’cause he’s never been in favor of allowing women to decide their own lives.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Eberly shift unhappily in his chair. Zinged him, she thought.
“The real question, though,” Holly went on, “is how we handle population growth once the ZPG rule is abolished. We all know that uncontrolled population growth could ruin this habitat. On the other hand, that sort of scenario seems kinda remote,
far off in the future. After all, we could double our population tomorrow and still have room for plenty more people.
“But the problem is real. We mustn’t grow beyond our means. We don’t want to expand our population so fast that our standard of living goes down. We don’t want to become overpopulated and poor, like so many countries back Earthside did.
“Can we regulate our growth without government rules? Without laws and protocols? I believe we can. I believe we’ve got to, because the alternative is pretty messy.”
Holly glanced at Eberly, then focused back on the cameras. “Now look at the problem from the other side. How can the government stop us from having babies? Is my opponent willing to force women to abort when they get pregnant? Is he going to create a police force that’ll snoop into every bedroom in this habitat?”
With a shake of her head, Holly concluded, “It’s either the one or the other. Either we take the responsibility into our own hands and control population growth through individual responsibility, or we face a police state that’ll put women under surveillance twenty-four seven.”
She looked at Berkowitz, then back at the cameras. “That’s all I’ve got to say. Thank you.”
Berkowitz smiled noncommittally. “Thank you, Ms. Lane. And now,” he turned toward Eberly, “our incumbent chief administrator, Malcolm Eberly.”
Eberly gave his brightest smile to the cameras, plucked a sheet of flimsy from the breast pocket of his tunic and ostentatiously crumpled it in his fist.
“I had prepared an opening statement,” he began, “but in the light of my opponent’s scare tactics, I feel it’s necessary—vital, really—to set the record straight.”
Holly craned her neck slightly to peek at the screen displaying Eberly’s speech. It showed exactly what he was saying, almost word for word. He knew what I was going to say! she realized. He had me figured out before I even opened my mouth. She felt crushed. What chance do I have? He’s way ahead of me all the time.
“I was against the petition to repeal the ZPG protocol, yes,
that’s true,” Eberly said smoothly. “I was against it because I didn’t feel it was necessary. I knew, as all of you did, that sooner or later we would lift the ZPG restriction. It was only a matter of time.”
He turned to Holly and gave her a pitying look. “My opponent paints a dire picture of either explosive population growth that swamps our economic capabilities or a police state in which women are held in a sort of reproductive bondage. Nothing could be further from the truth.
“I have pointed out the path to a balanced, fair and free society, a society in which women can choose to have babies because we have the economic growth to match our population growth.”
He paused for a dramatic moment. Then, “That economic growth will come from mining Saturn’s rings. You—the men and women of this community—will become wealthy from selling water to the human establishments on the Moon and the asteroids, on Mars and the other planets.
“I know there have been objections to my plan. I know that the scientists have found microscopic creatures living within the ice particles. But I am certain that we can mine the rings without unduly harming these microbes. The rings are huge, vast, and our mining operations would hardly scratch them.”
Spreading his arms as if in supplication, Eberly said, “We can grow wealthy, and the wealth we generate will support population growth. When the time comes we can build new habitats, new centers of human society that can grow and spread across the solar system or even out toward the stars themselves. The future is in our hands! We don’t have to fear runaway growth or a static, brutal police state. We can be the progenitor of new worlds, worlds that we build with our own hands, our own minds, our own hearts.”
Holly thought she could hear the applause from every household in habitat
Goddard
.
Estela Yañez watched Eberly on the wall screen of her living room with narrowed eyes. Turning to her husband, sitting on the sofa beside her, she asked, “Is he right? Can they mine the rings without destroying the creatures living there?”
Yañez shrugged elaborately. “Estela, my dear, he is the chief administrator. He has access to much more information on the subject than we do.”
The screen now showed Berkowitz, who was explaining that the candidates would now take questions phoned in from the viewing audience.
“But do you believe him?”
“Why should I not believe him? Do you think he would lie about something so important?”
Estela pursed her lips. “I have seen politicians lie before.”
“Wait.” Yañez held up a hand. “Listen. Someone is asking the same question.”
The screen showed Eberly again, sitting behind the table and smiling benignly.
“Yes,” he was saying, “I know that the scientists want to declare the rings off-limits for mining. But don’t you think that’s an overreaction on their part? After all, the rings contain more than five hundred thousand million
million
tons of water ice. And how much will we be taking away from that staggering amount? A pittance. A millionth of a percent, at most.”
The caller’s voice insisted, “Yes, but won’t even a small amount kill off the creatures living in the ice?”
Eberly’s smile grew tolerant. “My friend, people have been mining the metals and minerals on Earth for thousands of years. Have they killed off the microscopic bugs that live in those rocks? No, not at all.”
Yañez turned to his wife. “There. You see?”
As the two-hour-long debate wound to its conclusion Holly felt drained, defeated. Eberly had deflected the ZPG issue and turned it into a reinforcement for his scheme to mine the rings. When she’d asked him what he’d do when the IAA forbade mining, he’d smiled and said that he was certain he could negotiate the matter.
“This doesn’t have to be an either/or confrontation,” Eberly said. “I’m certain that, with patience and good will on both sides, we can work out a compromise that will allow us to mine the rings and still allow the scientists to study their bugs.”
Before Holly could rebut, Eberly added, “There’s no need for hysteria or scare tactics.”
Holly had no response for that.
A caller brought up the power outages that still afflicted the habitat sporadically. Eberly smoothly replied:
“Our engineers and computer people have determined that the problem is coming from surges in Saturn’s electromagnetic field. They’ve figured out how to predict the surges, and we’re now setting up protective systems that will eliminate the outages within a few weeks.”
Eberly then winked outrageously for the cameras. “The problem will be solved by election day, I promise you.”
All the calls seemed to be for Eberly. Of course, Holly realized. He’s planted these callers. His people are swamping the phone lines.
“How do we know,” a man asked, “that there’s really a market for water from the rings?”
Beaming as if he’d been waiting for this one all evening, Eberly answered, “You know, I asked myself that very question, a few weeks ago. Are we fooling ourselves by assuming that the settlements on the Moon and the Asteroid Belt and elsewhere will buy water ice from us?”
He hesitated a dramatic moment, then proceeded, “So I called the leaders of Selene and Ceres. They’ve assured me that they’ll buy water from us, and at a price that will give us a twenty percent profit margin!”
Holly knew there was no way she could beat this man. No way at all.
Y
es,” Kris Cardenas said to Urbain’s image on her wall screen, “given these specs we can generate nanomachines that will build a new antenna system on
Alpha.”
Urbain appeared to be seated at the desk in his office. There were dark rings under his eyes, and his face seemed thinner, more lined than Cardenas remembered it from earlier meetings. She was no physician, but it looked to her as if the chief scientist was under tremendous stress.
He nodded somberly. “Good. Can you proceed to build the devices at once?”
Cardenas nodded back at him. “I’ll give it my highest priority.”
“How soon will they be done?”
Calculating mentally and adding a generous safety factor, Cardenas said, “In ten days. A week, if everything goes smoothly.”
Urbain sighed as if he were about to sign a pact in blood. “Very well, then. Please proceed as quickly as you can.”
“Fine,” Cardenas said. “But once we’ve produced the nanos for you, how are you going to get them to your machine down on Titan’s surface?”
Urbain didn’t answer. He had already broken the phone connection before Cardenas finished her question. The wall went back to displaying one of her favorite paintings, an Impressionist street scene from nineteenth-century Paris.
Swiveling her chair, she looked out across the nanotechnology lab from the alcove that she used as her office. Tavalera was just coming in through the airlock door.
“Sorry I’m late,” he called, as he walked past the work benches toward her. “I had breakfast with Timoshenko and we got to talking about beefing up the protection on the superconductor shielding.”
Cardenas got up from her chair, thinking, We’re getting popular.
It’s taken a year for people to get over their fear of nanos and come to us for help. Now Timoshenko wants us, and Urbain has finally decided to let us help him.
The question popped into her mind again. How will Urbain get our nanos to his machine on Titan’s surface?
“Uh, I need some advice,” Tavalera said. He looked distressed, embarrassed.
Cardenas smiled at him. “It’s easy to get advice, Raoul.” She gestured to the wheeled chair beside her desk and they both sat down. “What’s the problem?”
“There’s a ship coming from Earth.”
“With a contingent of scientists to look at Wunderly’s bugs,” Cardenas said. “Nadia’s planning to go back to Earth with them.”
Tavalera nodded somberly. “I could hitch a ride home with them.”
Cardenas understood. “Is that what you want to do?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
She studied his long, gloomy face. “You’d like Holly to come with you, wouldn’t you?”
“Yeah.” It came out as a long, sorrowful groan. “But I know she won’t.”
“Raoul, she can’t. She’s running for election.”
“I know.”
“She can’t leave the habitat. Even if she wanted to.”
“Which she doesn’t.”
Cardenas thought for a moment. “What do
you
want to do, Raoul?”
He looked away from her, studied his shoes. “I want to go back home,” he muttered, without lifting his face.
Cardenas waited, and sure enough he added, “And I want Holly to come with me.”
“You can’t have both.”
“I know. But you asked me what I want. That’s what I want.”
She hesitated, then decided to plunge ahead. “Have you asked Holly what she wants?”
Still looking down, Tavalera replied, “She wants to be chief administrator of this place. She’ll never go back to Earth.”
“Has she told you that?”
“I know she won’t.”
“Have you asked her?”
Tavalera shook his head. “What good would it do?”
“I don’t know, Raoul. But at the very least you should talk this over with her.”
The sour expression on his face showed what he thought of the idea. “Yeah,” he said. “Right.”
Timoshenko was coasting along the outer hull of habitat
Goddard
, unencumbered by a space suit. The virtual reality program allowed him to see what the maintenance robot saw, feel whatever it touched with its pair of steel grippers. While the robot trundled along the guideway built into the hull, Timoshenko felt that he was walking—no, not walking, gliding on ice, skating the way he used to do in Gorky Park with Katrina.
She wasn’t coming to him. Timoshenko had checked the passenger manifest for the ship bringing a load of scientists to
Goddard,
and her name was not on the list. He had tried putting through a call to her, but of course the operators in Moscow refused to allow it: he was a nonperson, an exile, not permitted to speak to law-abiding citizens. With a sinking heart, he realized that if somehow he did manage to get a message to Katrina then
she
would be breaking the law;
she
would get into trouble with the authorities.
In desperation, he had asked Eberly to contact her as he had before. He practically begged the chief administrator to do this favor for him. Eberly, wise in the ways of collecting gratitude, had told him that he had specifically asked the authorities in Moscow and even the main office of the Holy Disciples for permission to speak to the woman. She had refused to reply to his call.
Refused, Timoshenko repeated to himself. Refused. She doesn’t want to come out here. She doesn’t want to be with me. She said she would, when there didn’t appear to be a chance in hell of doing it. Easy enough for her to say it then. But now, now when there’s a ship she can get onto and really come to me, she refuses.
Timoshenko looked out at the curving hull of the habitat,
and the black infinity of space beyond it. The robot was built to inspect the hull, not gaze at the stars. It could not lift its eyes to search for the blue gleam in that emptiness that was Earth.
I don’t blame her, he told himself. This is exile, far from everything and everyone she knows. Everyone except me. Why should she give up her whole life to come here and be with me? I don’t blame her. I don’t. No matter how fancy they’ve made this flying stovepipe, it’s still a place of exile, a high-tech Siberia. She’s right not to come here. I don’t want her to give up her life on Earth just for me. I had my chance to make her happy and I ruined it. She’s right to stay away from me.
As he glided along the curving shape of the hull, it occurred to him that Eberly had lied. Eberly had told him that Katrina wanted to join him here, to share his exile, share his life. That had been a lie, Timoshenko realized now. Eberly had twisted him into taking this job as chief of maintenance by dangling the prospect of Katrina’s joining him here. Had the man lied to him?
Timoshenko blanked the VR program, lifted the goggles off his head and pulled off the sensor gloves. He knew some of the people in the communications department; one fellow in particular had become a drinking buddy. He called that man and, after a little wheedling, got him to check on the chief administrator’s calls to Russia.
“Nothing in the log,” the beefy-faced comm clerk told him.
“Nothing?” Timoshenko asked.
“Eberly hasn’t put in any calls to Russia. Not one.”
Numb with grief and rising anger, Timoshenko nodded, thanked his pal and broke the phone connection. Eberly lied to me. The devious bastard twisted me around his little finger. He used the possibility that Katrina might come here to me to get me to do what he wanted me to. The lying, smug-faced son of a bitch.
How to get back at him? Timoshenko wondered, feeling the heat of his rage burning inside him. The answer was astoundingly simple. Kill him. Kill the bastard and all those around
him. Kill him and kill yourself. Destroy this habitat and end this exile once and for all. Put an end to everything and everybody. It wouldn’t be difficult. In fact, it could be done with ease.

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