by Bova, Ben
“That’s what Habib said,” Urbain muttered.
“So? You see?”
He pushed the dish away. “I must find a way to regain contact with Alpha. I must.”
“Perhaps … ,” Jeanmarie began, then hesitated.
“Perhaps?”
“I was merely thinking, this Gaeta fellow. He flew to the rings again. Perhaps he could go down to Titan and see what’s wrong with Alpha?”
He snorted with disdain. “Nonsense! The man is a stuntman, not a scientist. A performer.”
“Still, you could direct him, tell him what to do. And he could tell you what he sees once he’s there.”
Urbain shook his head. “It would never work. He wanted to go down to Titan when he first came to the habitat. He wanted to be the first man to set foot on the surface.”
“And you refused him.”
“Of course! I cannot allow contamination there. Titan bears a living ecology. I can’t have some video stuntman tramping around down there.”
“Yet you sent your machine to the surface.”
“It was thoroughly sterilized. Much more thoroughly than a human could be, even inside that monstrosity of a suit he has. The levels of radiation we used to sterilize Alpha would have killed him.”
Jeanmarie nodded as if she understood. Then she said, “Still, if all else has failed, perhaps this stuntman is your only recourse.”
“Never! I refused him once. Now you want me to go to him with my hat in my hand and beg his assistance? Never!”
“I understand,” Jeanmarie said. And she thought that she truly did understand, much better than her husband.
16 APRIL 2096: LATE AFTERNOON
If they’re alive,” said Yolanda Negroponte, looking up from the microscope’s display screen, ”they’re unlike any kind of organism anyone’s ever seen before.”
Wunderly, sitting beside her at the lab bench, said quietly, “Well, isn’t that what you would expect?”
The biology laboratory was empty except for the two women; the other lab benches were bare, silent. Dust motes drifted through the sunlight slanting in through the tall windows. The small, white anodized freezer containing the ice particles sat between them, flanked by a pair of remote manipulators and the gray tubing of a miniaturized electron microscope.
A puzzled frown creased Negroponte’s face. “They’re not dust flecks. They have an internal structure, I can see that, but nothing seems to be going on inside them. Living cells are dynamic: the organelles pulsate, the whole cell quivers and vibrates. These things just lie there like raisins in a pudding.”
“Maybe they’re dead?” Wunderly asked. “Maybe they were alive once and now they’re dead. We might have killed them by taking them out of their natural habitat.”
Negroponte shook her head, making a long strand of blonde hair fall across her face. Pushing it back, she said, “You’ve kept the temperature and pressure the same as in the ring. There’s no sign of contamination. If they’re alive in the ring they should be alive here.”
Wunderly got up from the little wheeled chair she’d been sitting in and headed for the coffee urn at the end of the bench.
“Maybe I’ve been wrong all along. Eberly will be glad to hear it.”
“Coffee’s a good idea,” said Negroponte, also rising from her chair. “Too bad they can’t make a decent espresso. It stimulates the brain.”
“Caffeine,” Wunderly murmured, as she filled a mug with the hot steaming brew, then handed it to Negroponte.
The two women sipped in silence for a few moments. Then Wunderly asked, “So Da‘ud really yelled at Urbain?”
“You should have seen him. Like a knight in armor facing down a dragon.”
“I didn’t think he had it in him.”
“He did it for me,” Negroponte said, still marveling at yesterday’s showdown. “I think my crying triggered something in him, something brave and strong.”
Wunderly brought her mug to her lips. “Maybe I should cry for him,” she muttered into the coffee.
“You’re still interested in him?” Negroponte arched a brow at her.
“Aren’t you?”
“More than before, Nadia.”
“Then he’s all yours,” Wunderly said, thinking, I’m not going to let Da’ud or any man get in the way of my work. I need her more than him.
Negroponte changed the subject back to biology. “What’s the temperature inside the cryo unit?”
“Minus two hundred, almost.”
Tapping a fingernail against her coffee mug, Negroponte said, “Biology depends on chemistry, and chemical reactions go slower as you drop the temperature.”
“Do you think … ?”
“They look like cells. They have an internal structure and they maintain their interiors within well-defined membranes. But they’re inert, seemingly.”
Wunderly’s eyes lit up with hope. “Maybe they’re not inert! Maybe they’re just slow!”
“Can you fit a minicam to the microscope?” Negroponte asked.
“Sure!”
Within half an hour they had a miniature video camera attached between the eyepiece of the microscope and the cable linking it to the display screen.
“Good,” said Negroponte once they had finished the rig and tested it.
Wunderly looked from the screen, which still showed the dark cellular object imbedded in the ice chip, to the biologist’s satisfied expression. “Now we wait for something to happen?”
“Now we go to dinner, linger over dessert, and then come back to see what’s been recorded.”
Wunderly nodded agreement. Dessert, she thought. I deserve a decent dessert.
Pancho had spent the day with Holly in her apartment. The two of them were desperately trying to find some way of trumping Eberly’s position on mining the rings. Pancho sat on the living room sofa, her long legs stretched out across its cushions.
“The IAA won’t allow it,” she said stubbornly, repeating it for at least the twentieth time.
Sitting at her desk, across the room from her sister, Holly shook her head. “Urbain’s given his okay. Even if the IAA does decide against mining, Malcolm could get our people to go ahead anyway.”
“And risk having Peacekeeper troops sent out here?”
“Panch, do you really think the IAA’s going to send troops all the way out here? Do you think Earth’s willing to go to war over mining the rings of Saturn?”
“It wouldn’t be a war, exactly,” Pancho said uncertainly. “Would it?”
“It would mean blood and killing,” Holly replied. “Jake’s right: spacecraft are really fragile. I don’t think the IAA would take the risk if our people put up a determined front.”
“They will if Nadia can prove the rings harbor life.”
“Not even then,” Holly said. “Malcolm’ll work out some weaselly deal that the IAA’ll agree to. Just wait and see.”
“A deal? Better’n war, I guess.”
The lights flickered once, twice, then steadied again. Both women looked ceilingward.
“Speakin’ of fragile spacecraft,” said Pancho. “This habitat isn’t the safest place in the solar system.”
“Timoshenko says he may have a bead on what’s causing the power failures.”
Swinging her legs down from the sofa, Pancho said, “Well, there’s an issue you can hammer on.”
“Panch, it’s not Malcolm’s fault that we have these outages.”
“It’s happening while he’s in charge. That makes it his responsibility. From what I hear, people are damned unhappy about losing power all the time. And it could get worse, couldn’t it?”
“I s’pose,” Holly said. “But I don’t think it’s enough of a problem to swing people to voting for me.”
“Elections aren’t won by the votes for a candidate,” Pancho said, stabbing her finger in Holly’s direction for emphasis. “They’re decided by the votes against.”
“So?”
“So you hang these power
failures on Eberly. They’re his failures, and he’s not doing anything to fix the problem.”
“He’s trying.”
“You want to get elected or not?”
Holly stared at her sister for a long, silent moment. Then she shook her head stubbornly. “I just wish we had something to top him on the mining issue. That’s what’s gonna decide this election, Panch. Everything else is secondary.”
Pancho had to admit that she was right.
16 APRIL 2096: EVENING
Feeling guilty about the ice cream she’d had for dessert, Wunderly followed Negroponte back to the bio lab. It was dark, except for the one strip of ceiling lights over the bench where they’d been working.
Negroponte slid into the chair before the display screen. Standing behind her, Wunderly saw that it looked exactly the same as when they’d left, three hours earlier. All this work for nothing, she thought. I made Manny risk his life; Pancho and Wanamaker, too. For nothing. The damned things are just dust specks. The activity I saw in the rings is just natural abrasion, nothing more than ordinary particle dynamics.
“I think that should do it,” said Negroponte as her long fingers tapped on the keyboard. “Yes. I’m rerunning the past three hours and speeding up the display. Now we’ll see …” She held out a manicured forefinger for a dramatic moment, then pressed it on a keypad.
The image on the screen seemed to twitch.
“Did you see that?” Negroponte asked, suddenly excited.
“Something …,” Wunderly said. “I might have blinked.”
“We didn’t both blink,” Negroponte muttered, fingers pecking again. “I’m reversing the vid and running it forward again. There! See it?”
“It might be a hitch in the video,” Wunderly said, trying to keep calm despite the thrill twitching at her nerves.
“Reversing again. This time I’ll slow it down …”
Wunderly felt the buzz building up inside her. Don’t get your hopes up, she told herself. Stay cool, don’t let yourself get wound up.
She leaned over Negroponte’s shoulder, her eyes widening as the dark blob on the screen pulsated slowly: once, twice, three times. Then it went still.
“Reversing again,” Negroponte said, her voice slightly shaky.
The ice creature went through its pulsations again.
“It really is alive,” Wunderly whispered.
“You were right all along,” Negroponte said, turning in her chair.
Wunderly wrapped her arms around the biologist’s shoulders and hugged her. Negroponte struggled to her feet and embraced Nadia. The two women danced down the length of the lab bench.
“You’ll get a Nobel for this!” Negroponte exulted.
“We’ll get the prize. The two of us. We did this together.”
“Life at cryogenic temperatures,” Negroponte said, moving back to their apparatus.
“We’ve got to tell Urbain and then the ICU. They’ll want to see our data. We should get more video footage, examine more specimens.”
Negroponte was nodding hard enough to make her hair fly. “Do you realize what this means? These organisms have such a slow metabolism that we can study their cellular reactions molecule by molecule. More detail than we’ve ever been able to see in normal cells!”
Wunderly was already digging in her handbag for her handheld. “Maybe we’ll get two Nobels!”
Even this late in the evening Urbain was in his office, staring at the smart wall that displayed a real-time view of Alpha on the surface of Titan.
Ask that stuntman to go there and repair her? He fingered his moustache, thinking, struggling to find a way out of the morass his creation had blundered into. How can he repair Alpha when we don’t know what’s wrong with her? The engineers swear that it must be a failure of the uplink antennas, but the computer team believes it’s a programming error of some kind. The blind men and the elephant, Urbain said to himself. Each specialist sees only as far as his own biases.
Could the computer engineers be correct? Could it be a software error? Then the hardware would be perfectly fine. Reprogram the master computer and Alpha will be under control once more. Urbain shook his head. But they’ve been over the programming a dozen times. More. They haven’t found any software problems.
This is Habib’s responsibility, Urbain said to himself. The memory of the man’s insolence boiled up afresh. He should be here, trying to discover what’s gone wrong, not off with the maintenance people chasing down their stupid power outages. He should be—
His desk phone said, “Dr. Wunderly calling, sir. Urgent.”
“What now?” Urbain muttered.
Mistaking his words, the phone opened the link to Wunderly. Her heart-shaped face popped into focus on the smart wall to Urbain’s left, life-size, eyes wide, an excited breathless grin splitting her features.
“They’re alive!” she fairly shouted. “We’ve got proof! The ring organisms are alive!”
“Alive?” Urbain blinked at the news. “You mean the rings actually harbor living creatures?”
“Microbes,” Wunderly said, gulping for air. “At cryogenic temperature. Psychrophiles.”
“I must report this to the ICU. Immediately.”
Wunderly nodded her agreement. “Dr. Negroponte worked with me. We did it together. She deserves as much credit as I do.”
“Of course,” Urbain said absently. “Of course.”
And he thought, I will get a share of the credit, as well. After all, these two women are part of my staff. They work under my direction. He smiled at Wunderly’s happy image. While she chattered away jubilantly, Urbain said to himself, This will take away some of the harm of Alpha’s failure. He didn’t realize it was the first time he’d used the word failure without pain or anger.
Malcolm Eberly was sitting in a meeting of Madame Urbain’s ZPG committee. He was the only man in the small conference room. All the others around the circular table were women, an even dozen of them, most of them well beyond the usual child-bearing age.
As he listened to them discuss their committee’s work, he thought about how child-bearing age could be extended by rejuvenation therapies, implanted ova, frozen embryos, even nanotechnology treatments of a woman’s reproductive system. Still, most women had their children before they were fifty; Eberly had gotten his staff to check out the demographics from Earth.
The committee’s avowed purpose was to defeat Holly Lane’s petition drive to repeal the Zero Population Growth protocol. Its secondary purpose, as far as Eberly was concerned, was to give him an excuse to meet with these woman and bask in the warmth of their admiration. They’ll vote for me, Eberly told himself. They want me to be their chief administrator, not that upstart Holly.
The head of the subcommittee on statistics was a youngish-looking computer technician with large green eyes and a smile that dimpled her cheeks nicely. But she wasn’t smiling now.
“Although we have slowed the anti-ZPG petition drive,” she was reporting, “we have not stopped it. People are still signing the petition, albeit at a slower rate than earlier.”
Madame Urbain, tres chic in a pastel lilac frock and tasteful hints of jewelry, asked, “What are your projections?”
Green Eyes shrugged. “At this rate, they’ll have enough signatures by May first to force repeal of the protocol.”
“Then we have failed?” Madame Urbain asked, looking distressed.
“Not failed,” Eberly said. All eyes turned to him. “This is not a failure by any means.
“Even if the protocol must be repealed,” he said, looking around the table at each of them in turn, “the repeal could be only temporary. The winner of the election could present a new zero-growth statute once he’s been reinstalled in office.”
They considered that. They discussed it. Eberly pointed out to them that if he were reelected by a sizable majority he could use his popularity to slow or divert the people who wanted to allow unrestricted growth.
“If Holly Lane is soundly de
feated, much of the power behind her petition drive will be dissipated.” Eberly did not altogether believe that, but he had to keep up the spirits of these women so they would continue to work for him for the remainder of the election campaign.
They talked and debated and rehashed the matter for more than an hour. At last Madame Urbain moved that they adjourn and partake of the pastries and coffee that awaited them at the cafeteria.
Eberly walked beside her, with most of the other committee women clustered around them, down the sloping street toward the cafeteria building, chatting amiably with his admirers.
His phone buzzed. Frowning, he said, “Please excuse me,” and fished the phone from his tunic pocket.
Eberly recognized the face on the tiny screen of his handheld as a technician in the communications department.
“I left specific orders that I was not to be disturbed unless there is an emergency,” he said sharply into the phone.
“I thought you’d want to know, sir. Urbain just sent a report to the ICU. They have proof that there are creatures living in the rings.”
Eberly glanced at Madame Urbain and the other women walking with him. He hoped they had not heard the message.
17 APRIL 2096: MORNING
This changes nothing,” Eberly said, sitting tensely in his desk chair.
Eduoard Urbain, seated before the desk, smiled thinly. “Au contraire. I believe it changes everything.”
“They can’t stop us from mining the rings. And remember, you gave your approval. I have your signature.”
“That was blackmail and you know it,” said Urbain. “I can renounce my endorsement now that Wunderly has proved the rings bear indigenous life.”
“What of it?” Eberly snapped. “We can still mine the rings if we choose to.”
“Not unless the IAA allows it. And with the universities recommending a total ban on mining, the IAA will forbid it.”
