Titan (7 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Titan
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“
S
o how serious are you about this bodyguard of yours?” Holly asked her sister.
The two women were sitting in Holly’s kitchen. She had invited Pancho for breakfast and a one-on-one talk. There were no eggs in the habitat, no chickens. Most of the protein came from aquaculture fish, frogs or shellfish, or from the genetically engineered protein the inhabitants of
Goddard
fondly called “McGlop.” Holly had microwaved a plate of the processed protein for them and added sliced fruits from the habitat’s orchards.
Pancho shrugged her slim shoulders. “We been livin’ together for a few months now. We get along real well.”
“In bed?”
“That’s none of your business, girl,” Pancho said. But she grinned widely as she said it.
Holly grew more serious. “You know I’m in charge of human resources here.”
“Very responsible position.”
“If you and Jake are going to apply for permanent residency, I’ve got to know as soon as possible.”
“Permanent residency?” Pancho’s face clearly showed surprise. “I hadn’t even thought about that.”
“You mean you just came out here to visit me?” Holly realized that she was surprised, too.
“Yep. I told you that, didn’t I?”
“You did. But I thought—”
“You thought I was bullshitting you?”
“Well …” Holly felt her cheeks burning. “Yeah, I guess I did. A little.”
Pancho glanced down at the protein slices on her plate. “I dunno, maybe I was. A little. Truth is, I don’t know what I want to do.”
“Malcolm’s afraid you’ll become a citizen and then run for his job.”
“Me? Hell no! I’ve had enough sittin’ behind a desk. I’ve made all the executive decisions I’m ever gonna make. Never again!”
She said it with such fervor that Holly wondered what was behind her sister’s outburst.
“Anyway,” Pancho went on, “I want you to get to know Jake. And I want to see more of this guy of yours.”
“Raoul?”
“Yeah, Raoul. Sounds like a flamenco dancer.”
Holly smiled. “He’s an engineer. From New Jersey.”
“Raoul,” Pancho repeated. “He looks like a real downer, you ask me.”
“I didn’t ask,” Holly said pointedly. “And he’s not a downer. He’s just—well, Raoul wasn’t one of our original people. He was an engineer at the Jupiter station. He came aboard when he had an accident while we were refueling at Jupiter on the way out here. Applied for citizenship after … after the trouble we had with those religious fanatics. They beat him up, too.”
“And he decided to stay here?”
“I think it’s because of me,” Holly said.
“Well, well.”
Growing somber, Holly confessed, “Thing is, Panch, he’s given up his chance to go back home because of me. That’s a load.”
“You like him?”
Holly nodded, a little uncertainly.
“You get along well?”
“Oh, yeah, sure.”
“In bed?”
Her chin went up. “Like you said, that’s none of your business.”
“But you’ve got no complaints.”
A hint of a smile sneaked across Holly’s face. “No complaints.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“I think that sooner or later he’s going to want to go home.”
“To New Jersey?”
“It’s his home. His family, his friends, they’re all there. He misses them. He was at Jupiter station doing his two years of mandatory public service.”
“So you’re scared of him dumping you.”
“And that makes it tough to make a real commitment.”
“Which increases the chances of him dumping you.”
“Catch twenty-two,” said Holly unhappily.
“You could go back Earthside with him, you know.”
Holly’s eyes went wide. “And leave
Goddard?
I couldn’t do that, Panch. I’m
somebody
here. All my friends are here.”
“And all your family, too,” Pancho said gently. “Even though I’m not sure how long I’ll stay.”
“This is a good place, Panch,” Holly said earnestly. “It’s got everything a person could want.”
“Maybe,” Pancho said, a slight hint of wistfulness in her voice. “It’s a big solar system, though. Lots of places. They’ve rebuilt the
Ceres
habitat. Enlarging it, even. And they’re finding more on Mars every day, just about.”
Holly took a good long look at her sister as Pancho rambled on about the solar power stations being built on Mercury and the new cities being dug into the Moon’s battered regolith. She realized that Pancho had a wanderlust, a longing to see new places, to travel across the breadth of the solar system. That’s what’s brought her here to Saturn, Holly realized. She thinks it’s to visit me but it’s really that wanderlust of hers.
Holly found that she felt almost relieved about it.
Oswaldo Yañez felt almost delighted that the poor man had mashed his thumb so badly. His hours of duty at the habitat’s hospital were almost always so boringly quiet that he welcomed an opportunity to actually practice medicine. The habitat’s population was mostly young; even most of those whose calendar age was climbing up there took rejuvenation therapies that kept their bodies youthful.
Yañez was considering rejuve therapy for himself, although he had told no one about it yet, not even his wife of thirty-two years. He was still vigorous, his dark hair still thick and luxuriant,
but he had added nearly ten kilos to his weight since joining this habitat and he worried about that. Too much easy living, he knew, but his determination to exercise and go on a diet always melted away in the presence of his wife’s cooking.
As he cleaned away the blood, he saw the technician’s thumb wasn’t all that badly mangled.
“I was working on the main water pump,” the younger man explained, “down in the underground. My power wrench went dead, poof! just like that. When I tried to figure out what was wrong with it, the damned thing snapped on again. Whacked my thumb real hard.”
“It’s not serious,” Yañez assured him. “I’m going to extract some stem cells from your bone marrow, culture them and then inject them back into you to rebuild the damaged tissue. You’ll be fine in a week or less.”
The technician nodded, but kept on muttering about his power wrench. “Shouldn’ta crapped out on me like that,” he insisted. “It was like it was
tryin
’ to mangle me, you know?”
Vernon Donkman frowned at his desktop screen. This shouldn’t be happening, he told himself.
Donkman was the chief financial officer of
Goddard,
a position that sounded impressive to the uninformed until they learned that he was the
only
financial officer in the habitat. Still, his was a very responsible position, despite the fact that virtually every financial transaction among the habitat’s citizens was done electronically. The bank’s computer handled all financial links with Earth and the other human settlements throughout the solar system, as well.
The frown that etched Donkman’s lean, almost gaunt face was engendered by the fact that the bank’s central accounting system showed an anomaly. The master account didn’t balance! It was off by only a few hundred credits, but it should not be off at all. Not by a single penny, Donkman told himself sternly.
The problem was easy enough to fix, he knew. Simply liquidate the unbalanced amount from the habitat’s internal account. That would balance the books. But the thought irked Donkman
mightily. Accounts should balance without jiggering. It was his insistence on such purity that got him exiled from Amsterdam in the first place. Someone high up in the hierarchy of the Holy Disciples had been bleeding off cash from the church’s banking system. Donkman had tried to track down the embezzler and found himself accused of the crime and exiled to habitat
Goddard.
The memory of that injustice rankled him, but this tiny misbalance in the habitat’s account aggravated him even more. The amount involved was too small for anyone to deliberately have stolen it. It was a mistake, somewhere in the accounting system, a simple mistake.
But try as he might, Donkman could not find where the mistake originated. At last his wristwatch alarm buzzed. With a reluctant sigh, Donkman pushed himself up from his desk and headed for the cosmetics clinic. Everyone was getting enzyme injections to turn their skin golden tan. He didn’t want to be the only one among his acquaintances to look like a palefaced mouth breather.
M
alcolm Eberly felt distinctly uneasy inside the nanotech laboratory. Not that he had any religious scruples against nanotechnology; he simply shared the same fear that most people had about an outbreak of uncontrollable nanomachines, mindless microscopic monsters chewing up everything in their path like an unstoppable swarm of soldier ants. The thought made him shudder inside.
He knew his fears were grounded in solid fact. Nanomachines had killed people in the past. Back when Dr. Cardenas had first joined the habitat, while Professor Wilmot was still in
charge of the interim government, the old man had insisted on all kinds of safeguards before he’d allow Cardenas to set up this laboratory. Why, just getting into this lab was a major struggle: You had to pass through a double set of heavy doors, just like an airlock. Cardenas had to keep the air pressure inside her lab lower than the pressure in the rest of the habitat, just to make certain none of the virus-sized machines could waft out on a stray current of air.
Urbain seemed uneasy, too. He must be really desperate, Eberly thought, if he’s considering using nanomachines to fix his probe down there on Titan.
If Kris Cardenas sensed their apprehensions, she gave no sign of it. Perched casually on a tall stool, one elbow leaning on the top of the lab bench, Cardenas was wearing a comfortable light, short-sleeved sweater of baby blue and denim jeans. Urbain, as usual, was in a jacket and carefully creased slacks. No tie, but he had knotted an ascot inside the collar of his shirt. Eberly himself wore a loose tunic over his slacks, as the dress code he had promulgated called for. Hardly anyone outside the habitat’s administrative staff paid much attention to his dress code.
“We’ve been working on nanos for self-repair and maintenance,” Cardenas was saying to Urbain. “That was what you asked for.”
“Yes, I realize that,” Urbain replied, running a nervous finger along his trim moustache. “But we are confronted by a new problem now.”
Eberly hadn’t actually been invited to this meeting, but once he heard that Urbain was going to Cardenas for help he decided he had to listen in. And Urbain was too ridiculously polite to tell the habitat’s chief administrator to keep his nose out of scientific matters. So Eberly sat in one of the folding chairs that Cardenas had provided for them while Urbain and the nanotech expert thrashed out their problems. Off at the far side of the lab, Cardenas’s lone assistant hovered among the gleaming metal equipment, intently listening. What’s his name? Eberly asked himself. Tavalera, came the answer. The engineer we picked up after the refueling accident at Jupiter.
“As I understand the problem,” Cardenas was saying, “the probe isn’t sending any data to you.”
Urbain touched his moustache again before answering. “
Titan Alpha
is not uplinking data from its sensors, that is true. We have reason to believe the sensors are working and gathering data.
Alpha
simply is not relaying the information to us.”
“Curious,” muttered Cardenas.
“Frustrating,” snapped Urbain. “We are receiving telemetry from
Alpha
’s maintenance program. All systems appear to be functioning properly—except for the sensor data uplink.”
Cardenas straightened up on her stool, crossed her legs, glanced over at her assistant, then made a little shrug. “I don’t see what we can do to help you, Dr. Urbain. It’s—”
“Please. Call me Eduoard. We have known each other long enough to use our first names.”
“Eduoard,” Cardenas said, with a slight dip of her chin. “I’m afraid I don’t see how nanos can help you, unless you can pinpoint the cause of the malfunction.”
Urbain sighed mightily. “That is the real problem. We don’t know what is causing the silence. No one knows. My people have been racking their brains for three days now. And three nights, I might add. They are going over all the computer programming, line by line. It is maddening.”
“So how can nanos help?”
With a shake of his head, Urbain said, “I was hoping that perhaps there might be some way to deliver nanomachines to
Alpha
that could construct a new uplink antenna.”
“A backup to the existing antenna?”
“Or a replacement,” said Urbain.
He’s desperate, Eberly said to himself. Grasping at straws.
Cardenas got down from the stool. “Let me think about it, Eduoard. That might be possible, but it won’t be easy …” Her voice trailed off.
Urbain got to his feet. “I would appreciate anything you can do.”
Cardenas walked him to the door of the laboratory, Eberly following a pace or so behind them. “Please keep me informed of your analysis of the situation,” she told Urbain. “You never
know, something that seems trivial to you might open a window for us.”
“I will,” said Urbain. His gloomy tone showed how hopeless he felt. “Thank you.”
As soon as the lab door closed behind them, Eberly made a hasty farewell to Urbain and hurried outside the laboratory building, into the sunshine, along the gently rising street up to the administrative center and into his own office. Sliding into his desk chair he told the phone to locate Ilya Timoshenko and ask him to come to the chief administrator’s office immediately.
Timoshenko ran against me in the general election, Eberly told himself. So did Urbain. If they’re smart enough to combine their votes they could defeat me in June. I’ve got to get them working against one another. Divide and conquer, that’s the rule.
Timoshenko was not in the navigation center, which was his nominal work station, for the simple reason that he had nothing to do there now that
Goddard
was plying its orbit around Saturn. Nothing to do except think, and remember the life he had left behind on Earth. The woman he had left behind. His wife, the golden-haired Katrina. Katrina of the sweet smile and delicate hands. When she spoke it was like silver bells chiming in his heart.
No, that way lay remorse. And anger. A rage so towering that its black storm could engulf him utterly. Timoshenko fought against the rage, because he knew that he himself was its focus, its center. At the thundering heart of his bloodred fury was the knowledge that he had brought this exile on himself. He drank too much, he talked too much, he cared too much. So they had exiled him to this green and luxurious prison more than a billion kilometers from Katrina.
Timoshenko was working with the
Titan Alpha
mission control team when the call from Eberly reached him. Now that the probe was on Titan, the control center was on twenty-four-hour status: all consoles manned at all times. Timoshenko had volunteered to help fill mission control’s manpower needs. The job wasn’t really work; just babysitting the consoles. Boring routine, nothing more. The telemetry was coming through fine and
showed that the stupid machine down there was functioning as it should. Except that it refused to send any sensor data to Urbain and his twitching scientists. Timoshenko almost laughed. Urbain’s pride and joy was sitting on a cliff of dirty ice like a sullen teenager, refusing to talk to its daddy.
So what? he asked himself. Why shouldn’t Urbain have his dreams shattered? Welcome to the club.
The phone’s synthesized voice spoke in its flat, dull tones in his earplug: “The chief administrator wishes to see you in his office immediately. Please acknowledge.”
Suppressing an urge to tell the chief administrator to pound sand up his ass, Timoshenko took in a breath, then replied into his lip mike, “I am on duty at the mission control center and cannot leave my post. My shift will end at seventeen hundred hours. I will report to the chief administrator’s office at seventeen-twenty, unless I hear otherwise from our respected and unparalleled chief administrator.”
There, Timoshenko thought. That ought to keep that fathead Eberly happy for a couple of hours.
Cardenas met Nadia Wunderly at the cafeteria precisely at noon. They carried their trays through the cold food line together, and Cardenas noted with an inner smile that Nadia took nothing more than a fresh green salad and a bottle of mineral water. Not wanting to tempt her friend to anything more, Cardenas limited her own selection to a Caesar salad augmented with bits of grilled faux chicken and a tall glass of tomato juice.
As they put their trays on an empty table and sat down, Cardenas remarked, “You’re looking well, Nadia.”
“I feel great,” said the physicist.
Cardenas nodded and dug into her salad.
“I mean,” Wunderly continued, “I can almost
feel
the nanos melting away the fat inside me. I’ve lost six kilos already!”
“That’s wonderful.” Cardenas smiled to herself.
A month earlier Wunderly had come to her, almost in tears, to beg her help. “It’s almost Christmas,” she pleaded, “and look at me! I’m fat as a pig!”
Cardenas had tried to calm her friend, but she knew what was coming and dreaded it.
At last Wunderly had begged, “Can’t you give me some nanos, just a little bit, just enough to burn this fat off me? Nobody’s going to ask me out for New Year’s Eve when I look like this!”
Wunderly was chubby. Her basic body type was chunky, big-boned. She would never look sylphlike or slinky unless she had a complete body makeover, which could take months.
“What you’re asking for is gobblers,” Cardenas had told her friend as gently as she could. “They’re illegal, totally banned everywhere. They could kill you; they’ve killed others, god knows.”
“I don’t care!” Wunderly had yelped. “I’ll take the risk!”
But Cardenas would not. Still, she could not leave her friend to despair. Grimly, she had told Wunderly, “Come to my lab tomorrow night, around eight.”
Wunderly had come to the lab as eager as a puppy. Cardenas gave her a fruit cocktail that contained not nanomachines, but a powerful appetite suppressant and a diuretic. A placebo, in effect. She gave Wunderly detailed instructions about dieting and exercise.
“If you don’t follow this regimen the nanos won’t attack the fat cells,” Cardenas had warned, mentally crossing her fingers. “And you’ll be endangering your health.”
Every two days Wunderly had returned to Cardenas’s lab for a booster. She thought she was getting nanomachines that would burn away her fat as if by magic. To her delight, she lost weight. Not magically: it was by dint of diet and exercise that she would never have undertaken without the lure of nanomachines doing their work inside her body.
And it was working. Nadia already looks better, Cardenas thought, and she’s smiling instead of blubbering about her weight.
Manny Gaeta came to their table, carrying a tray laden with soup, a McGlop sandwich, and a slice of peach pie. Cardenas had told him about her little deception, of course. She had to step on his foot, under the table, only three times before he caught her meaning.
“Hey, Nadia, you’re looking terrific,” he said, grinning at Wunderly. “You been working out or something?”
“Something,” Wunderly answered, beaming at Cardenas.

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