Saturn gt-12

by Ben Bova

  Saturn

  ( Grand Tour - 12 )

  Ben Bova

  Second in size only to Jupiter, bigger than a thousand Earths but light enough to float in water, home of cushing gravity and delicate, seemingly impossible rings, it dazzles and attracts us: Saturn.

  Earth groans under the rule of fundamentalist political regimes. Crisis after crisis has given authoritarians the upper hand. Freedom and opportunity exist in space, for those with the nerve and skill to run the risks.

  Now the governments of Earth are encouraging many of their most incorrigible dissidents to join a great ark on a one-way expedition, twice Jupiter’s distance from the Sun, to Saturn, the ringed planet that baffled Galileo and has fascinated astronomers ever since.

  But humans will be human, on Earth or in the heavens — so amid the idealism permeating Space Habitat Goddard are many individuals with long-term schemes, each awaiting the right moment. And hidden from them is the greatest secret of all, the real purpose of this expedition, known to only a few…

  Ben Bova

  Saturn

  There are some questions in Astronomy to which we are attracted … on account of their peculiarity … [rather] than from any direct advantage which their solution would afford to mankind… I am not aware that any practical use has been made of Saturn’s Rings… But when we contemplate the Rings from a purely scientific point of view, they become the most remarkable bodies in the heavens… When we have actually seen that great arch swing over the equator of the planet without any visible connection, we cannot bring our minds to rest.

  —James Clerk Maxwell

  As the new century begins … we may be ready to settle down before we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate what it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for everyone into the indefinite future… For every person in the world to reach present U.S. levels of consumption would require [the resources of] four more planet Earths.

  —Edward O. Wilson

  Once more to dearest Barbara, and to Dr. Jerry Pournelle, a colleague and friend who originated the term “shepherd satellites” but never received the credit for it that he deserves.

  BOOK I

  For the same reason I have resolved not to put anything around Saturn except what I have already observed and revealed — that is, two small stars which touch it, one to the east and one to the west, in which no alteration has ever yet been seen to take place and in which none is to be expected in the future, barring some very strange event remote from every other motion known to or even imagined by us. But as to the supposition … that Saturn is sometimes oblong and sometimes accompanied by two stars on its flanks, Your Excellency may rest assured that this results either from the imperfection of the telescope or the eye of the observer… I, who have observed it a thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it. And reason, based upon our experiences of all other stellar motions, renders us certain that none will ever be seen, for if these stars had any motions similar to those of other stars, they would long since have been separated from or conjoined with the body of Saturn, even if that movement were a thousand times slower than that of any other star which goes wandering through the heavens.

  Galileo Galilei, Letters on Sunspots, 4 May 1612

  SELENE: ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

  Pancho Lane frowned at her sister. “His name isn’t even Malcolm Eberly. He changed it.”

  Susan smiled knowingly.

  “Oh, what diff’s that make?”

  “He was born Max Erlenmeyer, in Omaha, Nebraska,” Pancho said sternly. “He was arrested in Linz, Austria, for fraud in ’eighty-four, tried to flee the country and—”

  “I don’t care about that! It’s ancient! He’s changed. He’s not the same man he was then.”

  “You’re not going.”

  “Yes I am,” Susan insisted, the beginnings of a frown of her own creasing her brow. “I’m going and you can’t stop me!”

  “I’m your legal guardian, Susie.”

  “Poosh! What’s that got to do with spit? I’m almost fifty years old, f’real.”

  Susan Lane did not look much more than twenty. She had died when she’d been a teenager, killed by a lethal injection that Pancho herself had shot into her emaciated arm. Once clinically dead she had been frozen in liquid nitrogen to await the day when medical science could cure the carcinoma that was raging through her young body. Pancho had brought her cryonic sarcophagus to the Moon when she began working as an astronaut for Astro Manufacturing Corporation. Eventually Pancho became a member of Astro’s board of directors, and finally its chairman. Still Susan waited, entombed in her bath of liquid nitrogen, waiting until Pancho was certain that she could be reborn to a new life.

  It took more than twenty years. And once Susan was revived and cured of the cancer that had been killing her, her mind was almost a total blank. Pancho had expected that; cryonics reborns usually lost most of the neural connections in the cerebral cortex. Even Saito Yamagata, the powerful founder of Yamagata Corporation, had come out of his cryonic sleep with a mind as blank as a newborn baby’s.

  So Pancho fed and bathed and toilet trained her sister, an infant in a teenager’s body. Taught her to walk, to speak again. And brought the best neurophysiologists to Selene to treat her sister’s brain with injections of memory enzymes and RNA. She even considered nanotherapy but decided against it; nanotechnology was allowed in Selene, but only under stringent controls, and the experts admitted that they didn’t think nanomachines could help Susan to recover her lost memories.

  Those years were difficult, but gradually a young adult emerged, a woman who looked like the Susie that Pancho remembered, but whose personality, whose attitudes, whose mind were disturbingly different. Susan remembered nothing of her earlier life, but thanks to the neuroboosters she had received her memory now was almost eidetic: if she saw or heard something once, she never forgot it. She could recall details with a precision that made Pancho’s head swim.

  Now the sisters sat glaring at each other: Pancho on the plush burgundy pseudoleather couch in the corner of her sumptuous office, Susan sitting tensely on the edge of the low slingchair on the other side of the curving lunar glass coffee table, her elbows on her knees.

  They looked enough alike to be immediately recognized as sisters. Both were tall and rangy, long lean legs and arms, slim athletic bodies. Pancho’s skin was little darker than a well-tanned Caucasian’s; Susan’s a shade richer. Pancho kept her hair trimmed down to a skullcap of tightly-curled fuzz that was flecked with spots of fashionable gray. Susan had taken treatments to make her dark-brown hair long and luxurious; she wore it in the latest pageboy fashion, spilling down to her shoulders. Her clothing was latest mod, too: a floor-length faux silk gown with weights in its hem to keep the skirt hanging right in the low lunar gravity. Pancho was in a no-nonsense business suit of powder gray: a tailored cardigan jacket and flared slacks over her comfortable lunar softboots. She wore sensible accents of jewelry at her earlobes and wrists. Susan was unadorned, except for the decal across her forehead: a miniature of Saturn, the ringed planet.

  Susan broke the lengthening silence. “Panch, you can’t stop me. I’m going.”

  “But… all the way out to Saturn? With a flock of political exiles?”

  “They’re not exiles!”

  “C’m on, Soose, half the governments back Earthside are cleaning out their detention camps.”

  Susan’s back stiffened. “Those fundamentalist regimes you’re always complaining about are encouraging their nonbelievers and dissidents to sign on for the Saturn expedition. Encouraging, not deporting.”

  “They’re getting rid of their troublemakers,” Pan
cho said.

  “Not troublemakers! Free thinkers. Idealists. Men and women who’re ticked with the way things are on Earth and willing to warp off, zip out, and start new lives.”

  “Misfits and malcontents,” Pancho muttered. “Square pegs in round holes.”

  “The habitat will be populated by the best and brightest people of Earth,” Susan retorted.

  “Yeah, you wish.”

  “I know. And I’m going to be one of them.”

  “Cripes almighty, Soose, Saturn’s ten times farther from the Sun than we are.”

  “What of it?” Susan said, with that irritating smile again. “You were the first to go as far as the Belt, weren’t you?”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “You went out to the Jupiter station, di’n’t you?”

  Pancho could do nothing but nod.

  “So I’m going out to Saturn. I won’t be alone. There’ll be ten thousand of us, f’real! That is, if Malcolm can weed out the real troublemakers and sign up good workers. I’m helping him do the interviews.”

  “Make sure that’s all you’re helping him with,” Pancho groused.

  Susan’s smile turned slightly wicked. “He’s been a perfect gentleman, dammit.”

  “Blister my butt on a goddam’ Harley,” Pancho grumbled. And she thought, Damned near thirty years I’ve been working my way up the corporation but ten minutes with Susie and she’s got me talkin’ West Texas again.

  “It’s a great thing, Panch,” said Susan, earnest now. “It’s a mission, really. We’re going out on a five-year mission to study the Saturn system. Scientists, engineers, farmers, a whole self-sustaining community!”

  Pancho saw that her sister was genuinely excited, like a kid on her way to a thrill park. Damn! she said to herself. Susie’s got the body of an adult but the mind of a teenager. There’ll be nothing but grief for her out there, without me to protect her.

  “Say it clicks, Panch,” Susan asked softly, through lowered lashes. “Tell me you’re not ticked at me.”

  “I’m not sore,” Pancho said truthfully. “I’m worried, though. You’ll be all alone out there.”

  “With ten thousand others!”

  “Without your big sister.”

  Susan said nothing for a heartbeat, then she reached across the coffee table and grasped Pancho’s hand. “But Panch, don’t you see? That’s why I’m doing it! That’s why I’ve got to do it! I’ve got to go out on my own. I can’t live like some little kid with you doing everything for me! I’ve got to be free!”

  Sagging back into the softly yielding sofa, Pancho murmured, “Yeah, I suppose you do. I guess I knew it all along. It’s just that… I worry about you, Susie.”

  “I’ll be fine, Panch. You’ll see!”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Elated, Susan hopped to her feet and headed for the door. “You’ll see,” she repeated. “It’s gonna be great! Cosmic!”

  Pancho sighed and got to her feet.

  “Oh, by the way,” Susan called over her shoulder as she opened the office door, “I’m changing my name. I’m not gonna be called Susan anymore. From now on, my name is Holly.”

  And she ducked through the door before Pancho could say a word more.

  “Holly,” Pancho muttered to the closed door. Where in the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed world did she get that from? she wondered. Why’s she want to change her name?

  Shaking her head, Pancho told the phone to connect with her security chief. When his handsome, square-jawed face took shape in the air above her desk, she said:

  “Wendell, I need somebody to ride that goddamned habitat out to Saturn and keep tabs on my sister, without her knowin’ it.”

  “Right away,” the security chief answered. He looked away for a moment, then said, “Um, about tonight, I—”

  “Never mind about tonight,” Pancho snapped. “You just get somebody onto that habitat. Somebody good! Get on it right now.”

  “Yes, ma’am!” said Pancho’s security chief.

  LUNAR ORBIT: HABITAT GODDARD

  Malcolm Eberly tried to hide the panic that was still frothing like a storm-tossed sea inside him. Along with the fifteen other department leaders, he stood perfectly still at the main entrance to the habitat.

  The ride up from Earth had been an agony for him. From the instant the Clippership had gone into Earth orbit and the feeling of gravity had dwindled to zero, Eberly had fought a death struggle against the terror of weightlessness. Strapped into his well-cushioned seat, he had exerted every effort of his willpower to fight back the horrible urge to vomit. I will not give in to this, he told himself through gritted teeth. Pale and soaked with cold sweat, he resolved that he would not make a fool of himself in front of the others.

  Getting out of his seat once the Clippership had made rendezvous with the transfer rocket was sheer torture. Eberly kept his head rigidly unmoving, his fists clenched, his eyes squeezed down to slits. To the cheerful commands of the flight attendants, he followed the bobbing gray coveralls of the woman ahead of him and made his way along the aisle hand over hand from one seat back to the next until he glided through the hatch into the transfer vehicle, still in zero gravity, gagging as his insides floated up into his throat.

  No one else seemed to be as ill as he. The rest of them — fifteen other men and women, all department leaders as he was — were chatting and laughing, even experimenting with allowing themselves to float up off the Velcro carpeting of the passenger compartment. The sight of it made Eberly’s stomach turn inside out.

  Still he held back the bile that was burning his throat. I will not give in to this, he told himself over and over. I will prevail. A man can accomplish anything he sets his mind to if he has the strength and the will.

  Strapped down again in a seat inside the transfer rocket, he stared rigidly ahead as the ship lit off its engines to start its flight to lunar orbit. The thrust was gentle, but at least it provided some feeling of weight. Only for a few seconds, though. The rocket engines cut off and he felt again as if he were falling, endlessly falling. Everyone else was chattering away, several of them boasting about how many times they had been in space.

  Of course! Eberly realized. They’ve all done this before. They’ve experienced this wretchedness before and now it doesn’t bother them. They’re all from wealthy families, rich, spoiled children who’ve never had a care in their lives. I’m the only one here who’s never been off the Earth before, the only one who’s had to fight and claw for a living, the only one who’s known hunger and sickness and fear.

  I’ve got to make good here. I’ve got to! Otherwise they’ll send me back. I’ll die in a filthy prison cell.

  Through sheer mental exertion Eberly endured the hours of weightlessness. When the woman in the seat next to him tried to engage him in conversation he replied tersely to her inane remarks, desperately fighting to keep her from seeing how sick he was. He forced a smile, hoping that she would not notice the cold sweat beading his upper lip. He could feel it soaking the cheap, thin shirt he wore. After a while she stopped her chattering and turned her attention to the display screen built into the seat backs.

  Eberly concentrated on the images, too. The screen showed the habitat, an ungainly cylinder hanging in the emptiness of space like a length of sewer pipe left behind by a vanished construction crew. As they approached it, though, the habitat grew bigger and bigger. Eberly could see that it was rotating slowly; he knew that the spin created a feeling of gravity inside the cylinder. Numbers ran through his mind: The habitat was twenty kilometers in length, four kilometers across. It rotated every forty-five seconds, which produced a centrifugal force equivalent to normal Earth gravity.

  In his growing excitement he almost forgot the unease of his stomach. Now he could see the long windows running the length of the gigantic cylinder. And the Moon came into view, shining brightly. But seen this close, the Moon was ugly, scarred and pitted with countless craters. One of the biggest of them, Eberly knew, housed the cit
y-state of Selene.

  Swiftly the habitat grew to blot out everything else. For a moment Eberly feared they would crash into it, even though his rational mind told him that the ship’s pilots had their flight under precise control. He could see the solar mirrors hugging the cylinder’s curving sides. And bulbs and knobs dotting the habitat’s skin, like bumps on a cucumber. Some of them were observation blisters, he knew. Others were docking ports, thruster pods, airlocks.

  “This is your captain speaking,” said a woman’s voice from the speakers set above each display screen. “We have gone into a rendezvous orbit around the habitat. In three minutes we will be docking. You’ll feel a bump or two: nothing to be alarmed about.”

  The thump jarred all the passengers. Eberly gripped his seat arms tightly and waited for more. But nothing else happened. Except -

  His innards had settled down! He no longer felt sick. Gravity had returned and he felt normal again. No, better than normal. He turned to the woman sitting beside him and studied her face briefly. It was a round, almost chubby face with large dark almond eyes and curly black hair. Her skin was smooth, young, but swarthy. Eberly judged she was of Mediterranean descent, Greek or Spanish or perhaps Italian. He smiled broadly at her.

  “Here we’ve been sitting next to each other for more than six hours and I haven’t even told you my name. I’m Malcolm Eberly.”

  She smiled back. “Yes, I can see.” Tapping the name badge pinned to her blouse, she said, “I’m Andrea Maronella. I’m with the agrotech team.”

  A farmer, Eberly thought. A stupid, grubbing farmer. But he smiled still wider and replied, “I’m in charge of the human resources department.”

  “How nice.”

  Before he could say more, the flight attendant asked them all to get up and head for the hatch. Eberly unstrapped and got to his feet, happy to feel solid weight again, eager to get his first glimpse of the habitat. The inner terror he had fought against dwindled almost to nothing. I won! he exulted to himself. I faced the terror and I beat it.