Saturn

by Ben Bova

  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 city-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.

  He politely allowed Maronella to slide out into the aisle ahead of him and then followed her to the hatch. The sixteen men and women filed through the hatch, into an austere metal-walled chamber. An older man stood by the inner hatch, tall and heavyset; his thick head of hair was iron gray and he had a bushy gray moustache. His face looked rugged, weather-beaten, the corners of his eyes creased by long years of squinting in the open sun. He wore a comfortable suede pullover and rumpled tan jeans. Two younger men stood slightly behind him, clad in coveralls; obviously underlings of some sort.

  "Welcome to habitat Goddard," he said, with a warm smile. "I'm Professor James Wilmot. Most of you have already met me, and for those of you who haven't, I look forward to meeting you and discussing our future. But for now, let's take a look at the world we'll be inhabiting for at least the next five years."

  With that, one of the young men behind him tapped the keyboard on the wall beside the hatch, and the massive steel door swung slowly inward. Eberly felt a puff of warm air touch his face, like the light touch of his mother's faintly remembered caress.

  The group of sixteen department leaders started through the hatch. This is it, Eberly thought, feeling a new dread rising inside his guts. There's no turning back now. This is the new world they want me to live in. This huge cylinder, this machine. I'm being exiled. All the way out to Saturn, that's where they're sending me. As far away as they can. I'll never see Earth again.

  He was almost the last one in line; he heard the others oohing and aahing by the time he got to the open hatch and stepped through. Then he saw why.

  Stretching out in all directions around him was a green landscape, shining in warm sunlight. Gently rolling grassy hills, clumps of trees, little meandering streams spread out into the hazy distance. The group was standing on an elevated knoll, with a clear view of the habitat's broad interior. Bushes thick with vivid red hibiscus and pale lavender oleanders lined both sides of a curving path that led down to a group of low buildings, white and gleaming in the sunlight that streamed in through the long windows. A Mediterranean village, Eberly thought, set on the gentle slope of a grassy hill, overlooking a shimmering blue lake.

  This is some travel brochure vision of what a perfect Mediterranean countryside would look like. Far in the distance he made out what looked like farmlands, square little fields that appeared to be recently plowed, and more clusters of whitewashed buildings. There was no horizon. Instead, the land simply curved up and up, hills and grass and trees and more little villages with their paved roads and sparkling streams, up and up on both sides until he was craning his neck looking straight overhead at still more of the carefully, lovingly landscaped greenery.

  "It's breathtaking," Maronella whispered.

  "Awesome," said one of the others.

  Eberly thought, A virgin world, untouched by war or famine or hatred. Untouched by human emotions of any kind. Waiting to be shaped, controlled. Maybe it won't be so bad here after all.

  "This must have cost a bloody fortune," a young man said, in a strong, matter-of-fact voice. "How could the consortium afford it?"

  Professor Wilmot smiled and touched his moustache with a fingertip. "We got it in a bankruptcy sale, actually. The previous owners went broke trying to turn this into a ret
irement center."

  "Who retires nowadays?"

  "That's why they went bankrupt," Wilmot replied.

  "Still... the cost..."

  "The International Consortium of Universities is not without resources," said Wilmot. "And we have many alumni who can be very generous when properly approached."

  "You mean when you twist their arms hard enough," a woman joked. The others laughed; even Wilmot smiled good-naturedly.

  "Well," the professor said. "This is it. This will be your home for the next five years, and even longer, for many of you."

  "When do the others start coming up?"

  "As the personnel board approves applicants and they pass their final physical and psychological tests they will come aboard. We have about two-thirds of the available positions already filled, and more people are signing up at quite a brisk pace."

  The others asked more questions and Wilmot patiently answered them. Eberly filtered their nattering out of his conscious attention. He peered intently at the vast expanse of the habitat, savoring this moment of discovery, his arrival into a new world. Ten thousand people, that's all they're going to permit to join us. But this habitat could hold a hundred thousand easily. A million, even!

  He thought of the squalor of his childhood days: eight, ten, twelve people to a room. And then the merciless discipline of the monastery schools. And prison.

  Ten thousand people, he mused. They will live in luxury here. They will live like kings!

  He smiled. No, he told himself. There will be only one king here. One master. This will be my kingdom, and everyone in it will bend to my will.

  VIENNA: SCHÖNBRUNN PRISON

  More than a full year before he had ever heard of habitat Goddard, Malcolm Eberly was abruptly released from prison after serving less than half his term for fraud and embezzlement.

  The rambling old Schönbrunn Palace had been turned into a prison in the aftermath of the Refugee Riots that had shattered much of Vienna and its surroundings. When Eberly first learned that he would serve his sentence in the Schönbrunn he had been hopeful: at least it wasn't one of the grim state prisons where habitual criminals were held. He quickly learned that he was wrong: a prison is a prison is a prison, filled with thugs and perverts. Pain and humiliation were constant dangers; fear his constant companion.

  The morning had started like any other: Eberly was roused from sleep by the blast of the dawn whistle. He swung down from his top bunk and waited quietly while his three cell mates used the sink and toilet. He had become accustomed to the stench of the cell and quite early in his incarceration had learned that complaints led only to beatings, either by the guards or by his cell mates.

  There was a hierarchy among the convicts. Those connected with organized crime were at the top of the prestige chain. Murderers, even those poor wretches who killed in passion, were accorded more respect than thieves or kidnappers. Mere swindlers, which was Eberly's rap, were far down the chain, doomed to perform services for their superiors whether they wanted to or not.

  Fortunately, Eberly maneuvered himself into a cell where the top con was a former garage mechanic from the Italian province of Calabria who had been declared guilty of banditry, terrorism, bank robbings, and murders. Although barely literate, the Calabrian was a born organizer: he ran his section of the prison like a medieval fiefdom, settling disputes and enforcing a rough kind of justice so thoroughly that the guards allowed him to keep the peace among the prisoners in his own rough manner. When Eberly discovered that he needed a man who could operate a computer to keep him in touch with his family in their mountaintop village and the remnants of his band, still hiding in the hills, Eberly became his secretary. After that, no one was allowed to molest him.

  It was the mind-numbing routine of each long, dull day that made Eberly sick to his soul. Once he came under the Calabrian's protection, he got along well enough physically, but the drab sameness of the cell, the food, the stink, the stupid talk of the other convicts day after day, week after week, threatened to drive him mad. He tried to keep his mind engaged by daily visits to the prison library, where he could use the tightly-monitored computer to make at least a virtual connection to the world outside. Most of the entertainment sites were censored or cut off altogether, but the prison authorities allowed—even encouraged—using the educational sites. Desperately, Eberly enrolled in one course after another, usually finishing them far sooner than expected and rushing into the next.

  At first he took whatever courses came to hand: Renaissance painting, transactional psychology, municipal water recycling systematics, the poetry of Goethe. It didn't matter what the subject matter was; he needed to keep his mind occupied, needed to be out of this prison for a few hours each day, even if it was merely through the computer.

  Gradually, though, he found himself drawn to studies of history and politics. In time, he applied for a degree program at the Virtual University of Edinburgh.

  It was a great surprise when, one ordinary morning, the guard captain pulled him out of line as he and his cell mates shuffled to the cafeteria for their lukewarm breakfasts.

  The captain, stubble-jawed and humorless, tapped Eberly on the shoulder with his wand and said, "Follow me."

  Eberly was so astonished that he blurted, "Why me? What's wrong?"

  The captain held his wand under Eberly's nose and fingered the voltage control. "No talking in line! Now follow me."

  The other convicts marched by in silence, their heads facing straight ahead but their eyes shifting toward Eberly and the captain before looking away again. Eberly remembered what the wand felt like at full charge and let his chin sink to his chest as he dutifully followed the captain away from the cafeteria.

  The captain led him to a small, stuffy room up in the executive area where the warden and other prison administrators had their offices. The room had one window, tightly closed and so grimy that the morning sunlight hardly brightened it. An oblong table nearly filled the room, its veneer chipped and dull. Two men in expensive-looking business suits were seated at it, their chairs almost scraping the bare gray walls.

  "Sit," said the captain, pointing with his wand to the chair at the foot of the table. Wondering what this was all about, and whether he would miss his breakfast, Eberly slowly sat down. The captain stepped out into the hallway and softly closed the door.

  "You are Malcolm Eberly?" said the man at the head of the table. He was rotund, fleshy-faced, his cheeks pink and his eyes set deep in his face. Eberly thought of a pig.

  "Yes, I am," Eberly replied. Then he added, "Sir."

  "Born Max Erlenmeyer, if our information is correct," said the man at the pig's right. He was prosperous-looking in an elegant dark blue suit and smooth, silver-gray hair. He had the look of a yachtsman to him: Eberly could picture him in a double-breasted blazer and a jaunty nautical cap.

  "I had my name legally changed when—"

  "That's a lie," said the yachtsman, as lightly as he might ask for a glass of water. An Englishman, from his accent, Eberly decided tentatively. That could be useful, perhaps.

  "But, sir—"

  "It doesn't matter," said the pig. "If you wish to be called Eberly, that is what we will call you. Fair enough?"

  Eberly nodded, completely baffled by them.

  "How would you like to be released from prison?" the pig asked.

  Eberly could feel his eyes go wide. But he quickly controlled his reactions and asked, "What would I have to do to be released?"

  "Nothing much," said the yachtsman. "Merely fly out to the planet Saturn."

  Gradually they revealed themselves. The fat one was from the Atlanta headquarters of the New Morality, the multinational fundament alist organization that had raised Eberly to manhood back in America.

  "We were very disappointed when you ran away from our monastery in Nebraska and took up a life of crime," he said, genuine sadness on his puffy face.

  "Not a life of crime," Eberly protested. "I made one mistake only, and now I'm
suffering the consequences."

  The yachtsman smiled knowingly. "Your mistake was getting caught. We are here to offer you another chance."

  He was a Catholic, he claimed, working with the European Holy Disciples on various social programs. "Of which, you are one."

  "Me?" Eberly asked, still puzzled. "I don't understand."

  "It's really very simple," said the pig, clasping his fat hands prayerfully on the tabletop. "The International Consortium of Universities is organizing an expedition to the planet Saturn."

  "Ten thousand people in a self-contained habitat," added the yachtsman.

  "Ten thousand so-called intellectuals," the pig said, clear distaste in his expression. "Serving a cadre of scientists who wish to study the planet Saturn."

  The yachtsman glanced sharply at his associate, then went on, "Many governments are allowing certain individuals to leave Earth. Glad to be rid of them, actually."

  "The scientists are fairly prestigious men and women. They actually want to go to Saturn."

  "And they are all secularists, of course," the yachtsman added.

  "Of course," said Eberly.

  "We know that many people want to escape from the lives they are leading," the pig resumed. "They are unwilling to submit to the very necessary discipline that we of the New Morality impose."

  "The same thing applies in Britain and Europe," said the yachtsman. "The Holy Disciples cleaned up the cities, brought morality and order to the people, helped feed the starving and find jobs for the people who were wiped out by the greenhouse floods."

  The pig was nodding.

  "But still, there are plenty of people who claim we're stifling their individual freedoms. Their individual freedoms! It was all that liberty and license that led to the near-collapse of civilization."