Titan

by Bova, Ben

  Only a trifle now, Timoshenko thought. But what happens if these fluctuations grow bigger? We could all die in here if the solar mirrors fail in a major way.

  He shook his head. There’s nothing wrong with the motors or the actuators, he told himself. We’ve tested them sixteen times now and they perform within design specs each time. But they don’t work within the specs when they’re outside, attached to the mirrors!

  Is the computer program at fault? he wondered. He ran a hand through his bristly mop of hair. I’ll have to get somebody from the computer group to go over the mirror program. Line by line, byte by byte. They won’t be happy about it. Nothing but dogwork, thankless drudgery. But it’s got to be done.

  Or else we could all end up in the dark. And the temperature outside is near absolute zero. A super Siberia.

  17 FEBRUARY 2096: CAMPAIGN SPEECH

  Zeke Berkowitz couldn’t help but admire the thoroughness of Eberly’s preparations for this speech. He’s a terrific stage manager, Berkowitz thought. He knows how to make a maximum impact.

  Eberly had cajoled only a few dozen of his own staff people to serve as the live audience for his speech, but the conference room he had chosen was small enough to make the place look crowded. Since most of the habitat’s citizens would watch the speech from their homes, Eberly’s flunkies were enough to make it seem like a sizeable and enthusiastic audience.

  Berkowitz had his staff remove the conference table from the room and set up rows of chairs for the audience. A small lectern stood at the front of the room; Berkowitz’s minicams were positioned in the rear.

  At precisely 2100 hours, Sonya Vickers—the newly appointed acting director of the human resources department—stepped daintily to the lectern and looked out over the audience that filled the room to capacity. She was elfin slim, blonde, youthful, smiling.

  “I’m glad to see so many of you here in person,” she began, “to witness this important policy statement by our chief administrator.” Lifting her eyes to look directly into Berkowitz’s central camera, she continued, “And to those of you at home, welcome.”

  She hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “Now, without further ado, I would like to introduce your chief administrator, a man who has served all of us selflessly and very capably, Malcolm Eberly.”

  The audience rose to their feet on cue and cheered enthusiastically.

  In the living room of her apartment, Holly sat on her sofa, flanked by her sister and Jake Wanamaker. The screen on the opposite wall showed Eberly smiling brilliantly as he walked the six steps to the lectern, where he shook Vickers’s hand and thanked her for her introduction. Impulsively, it seemed, she gave him a peck on the cheek.

  “That was scripted, betcha,” Holly muttered.

  Eberly beamed at his audience as they applauded lustily. After a few moments he gestured for silence. He had to repeat the gesture several times before they stopped clapping and sat back in their seats.

  “That was scripted, too,” Holly grumbled.

  “Take notes,” said Pancho. “You can learn a few things from this guy.”

  Eberly gripped the sides of the lectern and bowed his head for a moment. The audience fell absolutely silent.

  “Thank you all for that magnificent welcome,” he said, his voice low, as if choked with emotion.

  “This is a momentous occasion,” Eberly went on, sweeping the room with his startling blue eyes, then looking directly into the camera. His voice rose, strengthened. “You—all of you, every citizen of this habitat—has the chance to make history. Tonight we are embarking on a contest that will decide who will direct this habitat for the coming year. You citizens have the right, the power, the responsibility of electing the person you want to be your chief administrator. You will make this decision. You will vote in a free and fair election on the first day of June.” He hesitated, then added, with a modest smile, “As a politician back in my native Austria once said: ‘Don’t let anybody tell you how to vote. You go to the polls and vote for me!’”

  The audience laughed. But Holly growled, “He was born in Omaha, Nebraska.”

  Pancho nodded.

  On the wall screen, Eberly was continuing, “Our first year under the constitution that we ourselves have written has been a very good year. We are in a stable orbit around Saturn, the farthest outpost of human civilization in the entire solar system. We have achieved self-sufficiency as far as food and our other life-support requirements are concerned. The machinery of our habitat is performing admirably, thanks to the hard work and great care of our technicians and engineers. Our scientists have landed a probe on Titan, and although they have had some difficulties with it, I’m sure that in the coming year they will successfully regain contact with it and explore that mysterious world thoroughly.”

  Alone in her own apartment, Nadia Wunderly watched with growing apprehension. He’s going to tell them about the rings, she said to herself. He’s going to ruin everything.

  “But in this coming year,” Eberly went on, “we must begin to take larger steps, steps that will assure our financial stability and economic well-being. Within easy reach of us, close enough almost to touch from here, in fact, lie the rings of Saturn—a treasure trove of the most precious commodity in the solar system: water. The time has come for us to begin to mine the rings, to sell their water ice to other human settlements throughout the solar system, to make ourselves wealthy by becoming the human race’s primary supplier of water and life everywhere!”

  The audience leaped to its feet and roared its approval. Wunderly jumped to her feet, too, and screamed, “Never!” to her empty apartment.

  In her apartment, Holly sunk her chin into her chest and glowered at the wall screen. “The only way to stop him is to get Nadia to the rings before election day.”

  Pancho shook her head. “She’ll never be ready in time. We’d just be killing her.”

  Holly turned to face her. “Then you’ll have to do it, Panch.”

  “Me?”

  Wanamaker started to say, “Now wait a minute—”

  “You,” Holly said to her sister. “You’ve got to go into the rings, Pancho.”

  18 FEBRUARY 2096: MORNING

  Tavalera walked toward the simulations laboratory like a little boy reluctantly trudging his way to school. This is all crazy, he said to himself, as he passed the administration building. People were hustling in and out, the place looked like a beehive of activity. That puzzled Tavalera; normally the admin center was as laid-back and quiet as a collection of snails. Then he realized that Eberly had kicked off his reelection campaign last night and now he wanted everybody to think he and his people were hard at work. Yeah, sure, Tavalera said to himself. Until he gets himself reelected.

  He had watched Eberly’s speech on TV, just like everybody else. Holly hadn’t called him about it. She hadn’t called him about anything, not since he’d walked out on her. And the one time he’d called her he’d let his temper get the better of him and messed it up. That was a stupid thing to do, Tavalera told himself bitterly. The one good thing in your life and you screw it up.

  Yeah, he argued silently, but all she wanted out of me was to use me for Wunderly’s flight to the rings. She never cared about me. Not really. Not for myself.

  Then what about the times you spent together before Wunderly decided she’s going to the rings? he asked himself. What about the nights in bed with her, way before all this crap about going to the rings started?

  Shaking his head, Tavalera made his way up the four steps of the sim lab’s building and headed down the central corridor toward the laboratory itself.

  Holly’d never go back to Earth with me, he told himself. Hell, now she’s running for chief administrator; if she wins she’ll never leave this habitat. If I wanted to go back home she wouldn’t go with me. He grunted as if struck in the heart. The way things are now, she wouldn’t even cross a street to be with me. I’ve screwed things up pretty damned well.

  He felt a jolt of ele
ctricity streak through him, though, when he opened the door to the simulations laboratory. Holly was standing there by the row of consoles, with Wunderly and her sister, Pancho. The three women seemed to be deep in heated conversation.

  “It’s my problem, Pancho,” Wunderly was saying. “I can’t let you take the risks for me.”

  “Try and stop me,” Pancho replied, grinning. “I’m lookin’ forward to this. Haven’t had any real fun since I was runnin’ from a bunch of Jap security people at the Yamagata base on the Moon.”

  Wunderly turned to Holly. “Tell her she can’t do this, Holly. Make her understand—”

  “Nadia,” Holly interrupted, “it was my idea for Panch to fly the mission.”

  Holly looked … Tavalera couldn’t fathom the expression on Holly’s face. Was it fear or guilt or just plain stubbornness? He decided it must be some of all three.

  A big, hard hand grabbed his shoulder. Tavalera spun around and saw Jake Wanamaker towering over him, the expression on his face perfectly clear: grim determination.

  “Stay out of that argument, Raoul,” Wanamaker said in a husky whisper. “It’d be like stepping into a trio of laser beams if you try to get between ’em. They’ll slice you to ribbons.”

  “What’s goin’ on?”

  “Pancho’s going to make the run into the rings,” said Wanamaker, looking totally unhappy about it. “Wunderly’s relieved but she doesn’t want to admit it yet.”

  “And Holly?”

  “It was Holly’s bright idea.”

  Glancing at the three women intently arguing across the room, Tavalera asked Wanamaker, “Should I power up the equipment or not?”

  A hint of a smile snuck across Wanamaker’s craggy face. “Power it up, I guess. They can’t stand there bickering all day. But don’t get within ten meters of them if you can avoid it.”

  Tavalera almost tiptoed to the master console and began to activate the simulator’s various systems. The excursion suit, standing empty in the corner where two hologram screens met, seemed to twitch slightly as Tavalera powered it up. He could see a glow of light inside the suit through the open hatch in its back. The wall screens came up with a seamless three-dimensional view of Saturn’s rings: a bright gleaming expanse of glittering ice particles—flakes, pebbles, chunks as big as boulders—shining as brightly as a snow field that went on as far as the eye could see, slim twisting rings twining around one another like living vines made of ice. To Tavalera it looked like an infinite swirl of sparkling diamonds, except for the streaks of darker material here and there, dust or soot, that broke the stunning display. Somehow the dark streaks made the ice particles seem brighter, even more dazzling to the eye.

  And the particles were dynamic. They shifted and moved, weaved in and out around one another, twirled and fluttered in an endless dance of dazzling complexity. Tavalera knew he was watching a real-time view of the rings, what the cameras outside the habitat were observing at this very moment. In the distance he saw a darker area, like a spoke radiating from the inner rim of the rings toward its outermost edge.

  Wanamaker nudged him, then silently pointed at Wunderly. The scientist had stopped arguing with Holly and her sister and was staring at the holoview, raptly watching the rings in their intricate, fascinatingly beautiful ballet as they swirled around the mammoth planet Saturn.

  “It’s settled,” Holly said, suddenly as hard as steel. “Pancho’s doing the excursion. Jake will fly her to the rings and pick her up afterward.”

  Wunderly shook her head, but she was still staring at the holoview and there wasn’t much force in her refusal.

  “It’s settled,” Holly repeated.

  “Right,” said Pancho. “Now lemme get inside that suit and see what it feels like.”

  At that moment the overhead lights went out and all the consoles went dark. Tavalera heard the sickening whine of electrical motors powering down. The sim lab was plunged into darkness.

  Urbain was straining his eyes staring at the satellite cameras’ three-dimensional image of Titan’s surface. There is something there, he told himself. The ground is slightly smoother along a straight line across the ice, as if the tracks made by Alpha have been smoothed down, paved over. Ghost tracks, he thought. Or perhaps I am merely seeing what I want to see, things that don’t actually exist. He thought of Percival Lowell, spending his life squinting through telescopes at Mars, drawing maps of Martian canals that were in truth nothing more than eyestrain and wish fulfillment.

  The control center was fully manned. Da’ud Habib was sitting at the console where views from several satellites were overlapped to produce the three-dimensional images.

  “Dr. Habib,” Urbain called. “Come here for a moment, please. I want you to see if—”

  Suddenly all the wall screens went out: every console screen turned blank, and the control center was plunged into darkness so complete that Urbain could not see the console in front of him. Before he could do anything more than drop his mouth open in shock, the backup emergency lights turned on. But the wall screens and consoles remained dark.

  “What’s happened?” Urbain shouted. He heard other voices muttering, grousing.

  The overhead lights flickered and then steadied. Urbain heaved a sigh of relief. The consoles came back up.

  “A power outage,” someone said.

  “Have we overloaded the system?” a woman asked.

  “Did we lose any data?” Urbain called out.

  Habib pecked at his console keyboard. “I don’t think so …”

  “How could there be a power failure?” Urbain demanded. “Half the villages in the habitat are unpopulated. We have more electrical power than we need.”

  “Something went wrong,” Habib said.

  “That’s pretty damned obvious,” a woman’s voice replied sarcastically.

  Urbain shut out their bantering and returned his attention to his console screen. Ghost tracks? he asked himself. Could it be? And if it is so, can we use them to find Alpha?

  18 FEBRUARY 2096: AFTERNOON

  Eberly was furious. He paced back and forth behind his desk as Timoshenko and Aaronson sat in guilty silence and tracked his movement with their eyes.

  “Am I being sabotaged?” Eberly demanded. “Did someone deliberately cause the power outage just to make me look ridiculous? Impotent?”

  “Power supply isn’t my responsibility,” Timoshenko said curtly. “Exterior maintenance doesn’t include the power inverters.”

  Aaronson frowned as he ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair. “Our primary source of electrical power is photovoltaics, which depend on the solar mirrors. Those mirrors have been performing erratically—”

  “Minor fluctuations,” Timoshenko snapped. “Nothing that could have caused a major outage. The problem is internal, not external.”

  “We don’t know what the problem is,” Aaronson said, his round, jowly face reddening.

  “You don’t know?” Eberly snarled. “It’s been more than five hours since it happened and you still don’t know what caused this breakdown?”

  “It only lasted less than a minute. And the backups came on when they were needed,” Aaronson replied. “We’re tracking down the fault,” he added, almost sullenly.

  “Well you’d better track it down pretty damned fast!” Eberly fairly shouted. “And fix it! I can’t have this happening while I’m running for reelection. I can’t have the people thinking this habitat is breaking down around their heads.”

  Timoshenko said nothing, but he couldn’t help thinking, Maybe it is. Maybe this whole huge contraption is breaking down. Maybe it’s going to kill us all.

  Holly knew she should have been working on her speech for this evening’s presentation. In a way, Eberly’s firing her had been a godsend: she had no other responsibilities except to work on her election campaign. Her salary had been automatically cut down to minimal level, since she was officially unemployed now, but Pancho had electronically transferred a big wad of credits from her
bank account in Selene. Holly had no money worries.

  She knew what she wanted to say, but she needed facts to back up her intuition. That was why she had asked Professor Wilmot to see her. To her delight, the professor had agreed to meet her at the Bistro restaurant.

  He was already there when Holly arrived, seated at a table out on the grass with a cup in front of him, watching the people strolling along the pathways that cut through the flowering shrubbery.

  He got to his feet once he saw her approaching, a tall, thickset, iron-gray man wearing an old-fashioned tweed jacket, a floppy little bow tie, and dark slacks that badly needed pressing. He greeted Holly with a charming little bow.

  “It’s good of you to take the time to see me, Professor,” Holly said, as he helped her into her chair.

  “I have nothing but time,” he replied, seating himself next to her.

  The robot waiter wheeled up to their table and Holly selected a cup of tea from the touchscreen on its flat top.

  “Would you like pastries with your tea?” the robot asked in its synthesized slightly British accent. The flat screen showed a selection of goodies.

  Holly looked at the professor, who shook his head, then told the robot, “No, thank you.”

  With a perfunctory, “Very well, Miss,” the machine rolled off toward the restaurant’s interior.

  “I presume,” said Wilmot, with an almost fatherly smile, “that you want to talk about population control.”

  “Yes, I do,” Holly answered eagerly. “What I need to know is, is it possible for us to allow our population to increase in a controlled way, or would we just have a baby explosion if we lifted the ZPG protocol?”

  Wilmot touched a fingertip to his moustache before answering. “Population control,” he murmured. “Touchy subject, that. It impinges on peoples’ religious beliefs, you see.”