Uranus

by Ben Bova

She was still struggling with that question when Tómas came back into the cluttered living room, glowingly clean, beaming from ear to ear.

  DECISIONS

  Evan Waxman sat at his desk, also thinking about his relationship with Raven.

  She’s only one woman, he told himself. Why worry about her? There are plenty of others. But he kept thinking of how exciting, how wonderfully abandoned she was under the influence of Rust. She’d do anything, and ask for more.

  So what? he asked. So was Alicia, back when we started. And a dozen others. Don’t get your life snarled around one woman. There are plenty of others, and more coming in on every shipload that arrives here.

  Almost, he convinced himself. Almost.

  But then he thought, If I let Raven walk away from me, what message does that send to Alicia and all the others? I’m in charge here, goddammit! They do what I want them to do, or else. If I let Raven walk away, then others will try to follow.

  I can’t allow that, Waxman told himself. I’ve got to bring her back under my control. Totally. She doesn’t leave me until I’m finished with her. And it’s got to be done so that all the other little slashes see it and know it and understand that I tell them what to do and they do it.

  I’m not going to allow Raven or any other of these available twats to get away from me. There’s only one way out for them. Like that big oaf O’Donnell. The only freedom they’ll ever find is death.

  Nodding to himself, he called to his intercom, “Alicia.”

  She slid his office door open immediately.

  Waxman smiled at her. That’s the kind of response I want, he told himself. I call and she comes.

  “Yes, Mr. Waxman?” Alicia asked from the doorway.

  Gesturing to the chairs in front of his desk, he said, “Come in. Sit down.”

  Alicia did as she was told.

  Waxman studied her gaunt face for a silent moment.

  Then, “How friendly are you with Raven Marchesi?”

  Alicia’s eyes flashed wide for a moment. Alarm? Waxman asked himself. The question had startled her.

  Swiftly composing herself, Alicia answered, “I had dinner with her once, in her quarters.”

  “You two get along well?”

  “Well enough.”

  Waxman went silent for several heartbeats. Then he slid open one of his desk drawers and pulled out the half-empty plastic vial of Rust.

  “You know what this is, of course,” he said.

  Alicia stiffened slightly. “Rust.”

  Dangling the tiny vial between two fingers, Waxman asked, “Do you think you could get into Raven’s quarters and sprinkle this inside her refrigerator? Without her knowing it, of course.”

  Alicia Polanyi stared at the vial hanging from Waxman’s fingers, her lips pressed together into a thin bloodless line. He smiled at her. How long has it been since our last session with this stuff? Waxman asked her silently. Months. And it still has its pull. She’s staring at it like a starving man gazing at a full-course dinner.

  “It took several weeks for the medical team to clean that junk out of my system,” Alicia said.

  “I know,” Waxman responded. “But I’m told you’ve requisitioned nose filters for yourself, so there’s no danger of your inhaling any of it.”

  Alicia couldn’t take her eyes off the tiny plastic tube half filled with the reddish narcotic. But something was going on behind those ice-blue eyes, Waxman saw. Something was churning in her mind.

  “Well?” he prodded.

  “I … I’d rather not have anything to do with it, if you don’t mind.”

  “But I do mind, Alicia. I mind very much. I want you to do me this favor. You’ll be perfectly safe, I promise you.”

  She finally shifted her gaze to Waxman’s slyly smiling face.

  “And what do I get in return?”

  Waxman leaned back in his sculpted chair. “Ah. The old quid pro quo.”

  Alicia said nothing.

  Almost laughing, Waxman said, “Well. I won’t offer you another Rust trip. That would be too cruel, after all your hard work to get over your addiction.”

  She nodded silently.

  “What would you like? What can I offer you?”

  “I … I’ll have to think about that.”

  Spreading his arms wide, Waxman said, “Name your price. Anything in this habitat that you want.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Alicia repeated. “This is a surprise.”

  His smile disappearing, Waxman said, “Well, think quickly. I want your answer before the end of the day.”

  “Yes, sir,” Alicia said. And she got up from the chair and hurried to the outer office, leaving Waxman staring at the door sliding shut between them.

  * * *

  Alicia sat at her desk, her thoughts spinning. Anything in this habitat that you want, he said. Anything. She knew what she really wanted. She wanted to be away from Evan Waxman and his cruelly smiling face, his lustful hands, his filthy pleasures. She wanted to be back on Earth, free, rich enough to live as she wished, where she wished.

  But Evan would never allow that. She might have rid herself of the need for Rust, but he would never allow her to leave the habitat and get entirely away from him.

  What to do? Who could she run to? She dared not contact Raven. Evan would find out and punish her. Maybe kill her, just as he’d had Quincy O’Donnell murdered.

  She did not want to serve Evan Waxman anymore, not for another day, not for another hour, another minute. But how to get away from him? How?

  It was late in the afternoon before she made up her mind.

  Checking her desktop video, she saw that Waxman was deep in conversation with one of the habitat’s councilmen. They were talking about the construction of Haven II. Quincy O’Donnell’s death had put a crimp in the construction schedule, from what they were saying, but that would be smoothed out soon enough.

  Alicia tapped out the number for Tómas Gomez’s quarters, and there was Raven, seated beside the astronomer, scrolling through a long, incomprehensible list of alphanumeric symbols.

  I can’t call her, Alicia said to herself. Evan might find out. But maybe …

  She thought over the idea that had cropped up in her mind nearly an hour earlier. At last she decided that it could work. There was some risk involved, of course, but sitting here doing nothing was riskier.

  Checking back on Evan, she saw that his conversation with the councilman was finished. Time to act, she told herself.

  Alicia Polanyi got to her feet, stepped to the door to Waxman’s private office, and rapped on it firmly.

  ACTIONS

  Without preamble, Alicia said to Waxman, “I want to set up a boutique.”

  Waxman’s brows climbed toward his scalp. “A boutique?”

  “A shop for women. A place where they could buy stylish clothes, jewelry, shoes … that sort of thing.”

  His eyes narrowing slightly, Waxman said, “We already have shops for women.”

  Stepping farther into his office, Alicia said, “Yes, I know. But they’re more like military depots than shops where a woman can choose from the latest fashions.”

  “That’s Umber’s doing. He wants our people to dress pretty much alike. And besides, that keeps the price of clothing low. Nobody can out-do her neighbors. No competition between the women. Or the men, for that matter.”

  “But women like to dress up,” Alicia countered. “Why should we all go around wearing the same uniforms?”

  “From what I’ve seen,” Waxman answered, “lots of women make their own alterations on their clothes.”

  Alicia nodded vigorously. “Yes. Of course they do. No woman really wants to go around in the same uniform as everybody else.”

  “A women’s clothing shop,” Waxman mused.

  “It could make a profit for the habitat,” Alicia coaxed. “Only a small one, at first, but…”

  For a long, silent moment Waxman stared at her as he thought, She wants to get away from me.
She wants to set herself up as someone to pay attention to.

  With a shake of his head, he told Alicia, “This is something that’s beyond my authority. You’ll have to get Reverend Umber’s permission.”

  Clamping down on the thrill of excitement she felt, Alicia asked, “May I speak to him about it?”

  Waxman clearly was not pleased with the idea, but he reluctantly agreed, “I suppose so.”

  “Oh, thank you, Evan! I’m so grateful!”

  Waxman nodded, thinking, We’ll see just how grateful you are the next time I invite you to my quarters.

  * * *

  Now comes the hard part, Alicia told herself.

  It was late in the afternoon. She carried the plastic tube half-filled with Rust in the pocket of her slacks as she headed for Raven’s quarters.

  Evan can track me through the cameras set up along all the passageways, she knew. But once I’m inside Raven’s place there won’t be any surveillance devices watching me. She knew this from the long months she had spent as Waxman’s assistant. Private quarters were kept private, at Reverend Umber’s insistence.

  “We’ll have no Peeping Toms in Haven,” the reverend had commanded.

  Other men and women strode along the passageway as Alicia approached Raven’s quarters. Aside from a nod or a smile, they paid scant attention to her. She had memorized the combination to Raven’s front door. No pulling out a slip of paper when she was ready to tap out the entry code. It’s got to look as if I’m going into my own place—which was several dozen meters farther down the corridor.

  No one seemed to pay any attention to her as she quickly fingered the lock’s combination. The door slid open smoothly and Alicia hurriedly slipped inside, then slid the door shut again.

  She went into the kitchen and glanced at the little refrigerator sitting beside one of the storage shelves. She pulled the tube of Rust from her pocket and, after scanning the kitchen’s ceiling for a sign of a surveillance camera, threw the vial and its contents into the disposal chute.

  The chute’s door snapped shut, but not before Alicia saw the flash of light that meant the vial and its contents had been vaporized, utterly destroyed, broken into their constituent atoms by the disposal’s laser system.

  Then she pulled a small pad from her other pocket and scrawled on it: Meet me in the main cafeteria as soon as you can.

  She signed the note with a single sweeping A, then pressed it onto the kitchen table. Again she looked up and scanned the ceiling. No sign of surveillance cameras. Still, she felt nervous.

  Alicia wanted to phone Raven, but feared their conversation would be tapped by Waxman. Instead, she made her way to the main cafeteria, found a table for two off in a corner far from the serving counters, and waited for Raven to show up.

  BOOK THREE

  THE ASTRONOMER

  LIVING ROOM LABORATORY

  Tómas Gomez sat in the makeshift laboratory that had once been his living room. The room was jammed with instrumentation—sensors, computers, diagnostic monitors—humming and beeping and flashing flickering images on their viewscreens.

  He sat at the room’s tiny desk, staring glumly at the symbols scrolling down his desktop screen.

  Nothing, he moaned inwardly. The submarine had scooped up more than a hundred samples of the seabed’s rocks and sands, which were now carefully laid out across the floor of the docking area where the submersible itself was resting, halfway across the habitat’s circular structure from Gomez’s apartment. Automated cameras and diagnostic analyzers slid slowly along an elevated trackway, carefully examining each specimen and automatically televising the imagery to Gomez’s desktop computer screen.

  Nothing but rocks and sand.

  Gomez looked up from his screen, across the narrow desk at the chair where Raven had been sitting. After a ten-hour-long day with him, she had left for dinner. She had asked Gomez if he wanted to come with her to the main cafeteria, but he had declined, glued to his self-imposed vigil.

  Chemical analyses of the ocean bottom’s sands showed nothing but sand. Ordinary sand that had been sitting on the floor of the sea for billions of years. The same for the samples of rocks that the submarine had dredged up. Natural, commonplace rocks, nothing unusual about them, nothing that suggested anything surprising.

  Nothing, Gomez told himself. Nothing but natural materials, no hint of anything that hadn’t been there since the planets were formed, nearly four billion years earlier.

  He felt a surge of anger welling up inside him, a dark tide of violence.

  To come all this way, to battle past the committees, the officials sitting behind their desks with their nods and smiles while they decided the course of my life, to fight my way out here to fucking Uranus and send the submarine to the bottom of the fucking ocean and find—nothing! Not a goddamned mother-humping shred of evidence, not a shit-faced pissing hint of anything beyond the natural crap that’s down there—it was more than he could bear.

  His whole life hung in the balance. Finding nothing meant that he had spent the past three years of his life in vain, and the university committee had spent more than three billion international dollars—for what? A few scoops of rocks and sand.

  I’m ruined, he knew. I’ll be known everywhere I go as the idiot who spent a fortune proving that there’s nothing on Uranus worth studying. Nothing that a gaggle of grad students can’t categorize and write a paper about that nobody will bother to read.

  Slowly, Gomez pushed himself to his feet. Deep in his guts he felt a burning, raging urge to smash the machines that surrounded him, to destroy the technology that had failed him, to destroy himself and his pointless, worthless life.

  How can I face them? he seethed inwardly. How can I go back to Earth with nothing to show them? Better to die here and get it over with.

  He took a deep, shuddering breath. And sat down again. Staring at his desktop screen, he let his stubby fingers tap out the command to keep reviewing the results of the submarine’s excursion, to continue searching for something, anything, that might give a hope of discovering a new revelation.

  He lost track of time. The images on his screen blurred into a slowly scrolling list of failure, of defeat, of the end of all his hopes and dreams.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw himself returning to Earth, reporting his failure, being assigned to some backwater study that would drown him in meaningless details. Add another decimal point to somebody else’s analysis, clean up the work that this group of researchers has published, teach classes to bright and eager newcomers who’ve never heard of your work, sink deeper and deeper into obscurity.

  Then a voice from deep within him said, Well, you had your chance and you took it. You tried, but the thing you were searching for just wasn’t there. It’s not your fault. It just isn’t there.

  It’s not my fault, Tómas agreed. But I’ll carry this albatross around my neck for the rest of my life.

  He realized that his desktop’s screen was blinking.

  ANOMALY.

  The letters flashed across the list of alphanumerics that filled the screen.

  ANOMALY.

  A glitch somewhere, Gomez told himself. He spoke to the voice-activated computer program. “Examine anomaly.”

  The screen immediately showed a small piece of twisted metal, one of the hundreds of samples the submarine had returned from Uranus’s seabed.

  Gomez blinked at the image. Nothing unusual about it, he thought. The data bar at the bottom of the screen showed that the sample was slightly less than eight centimeters long.

  A scrap of metal, Gomez thought. We’ve brought up hundreds of similar bits. Natural enough: metal chunks scattered among the sand and rocks.

  “Chemical analysis?” he asked the computer.

  Letters took shape over the image. Gomez read aloud:

  “Iron, ninety-five percent.

  “Carbon, two point five percent.

  “Manganese …

  “Nickel…”

  His jaw d
ropped open.

  “Steel,” he whispered, as if afraid that if he spoke the word any louder the analysis would disappear from his screen.

  He swallowed nervously, then asked the computer in a trembling voice, “Conclusion of analysis?”

  The computer’s synthesized voice answered, “The imaged sample is composed of steel.”

  Steel.

  Gomez felt his heart thumping beneath his ribs. Steel! STEEL!

  Steel does not exist in nature. It is created in ovens, in blast furnaces. Created by intelligent beings!

  Gomez stared at the letters of the analysis, and the image of the twisted piece of metal in the screen’s background.

  He leaped up from his chair and shouted, “Steel! It’s steel!”

  STEEL

  Standing there at his desk, slightly bent over, staring at the computer screen, his whole body shaking, his heart racing, Gomez repeated to himself in a heartfelt whisper, “Steel! Steel created by intelligent inhabitants of the planet Uranus.”

  He sank back into his desk chair and commanded the computer, “Send this analysis to the chairman of the research division at the University of Valparaiso.”

  The computer replied dispassionately, “Sent.”

  Then he got to his feet again, slightly surprised that his legs supported him.

  “Administrator Waxman,” he said to the computer. “Connect me to him. Urgent!”

  “Connecting,” said the computer.

  Gomez stood there impatiently, realizing that the difference between intelligent humans and intelligent computers is that computers didn’t care. A sneeze was just as important to the machines as the end of the world.

  Waxman’s handsome, dark-bearded face appeared on the screen, smiling, unruffled, at ease. “I’m not available at the moment. I’ll call you back—”

  Gomez interrupted, “Mr. Waxman, this is Tómas Gomez. I’ve found steel! At the bottom of the ocean! Steel!”

  Waxman’s image on the screen flickered and disappeared, replaced by the man’s actual face.