Saturn

by Ben Bova

  Urbain and Timoshenko were already seated on the platform, he saw as they approached. The crowd was cheering wildly, already worked up to a near frenzy. Wilmot was nowhere in sight. Good. Let him remain in his quarters, as I instructed. I want these people to see me as their leader, no one else.

  He climbed the stairs and took his chair between Timoshenko and Urbain. The several little bands clumped together into one large conglomeration in front of the platform and played a faltering rendition of "Now Let Us Praise Famous Men." Eberly wondered how the women of the habitat felt about the sexist sentiment. The band was so poor that it didn't matter, he decided.

  The blaring music finally ended and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Eberly saw that fully three thousand of the habitat's population was standing on the grass, facing him. It was the biggest crowd of the campaign, yet Eberly felt disappointed, dejected. Seventy percent of the population doesn't care enough about this election to attend the rally. Seventy percent! They sit home and do nothing, then complain when the government does things they don't like. The fools deserve whatever they get.

  The crowd sat on the chairs that had been arranged for them. Eberly saw that there were plenty of empties. Before they could begin to get restless, he rose slowly and stepped to the podium.

  "I'm a little embarrassed," he said as he clipped the pinhead microphone to his tunic. "Professor Wilmot isn't able to be with us this evening, and he asked me to serve as moderator in his place."

  "Don't be embarrassed!" came a woman's voice from somewhere in the throng.

  Eberly beamed a smile in her general direction and went on, "As you probably know already, we are not going to bore you with long-winded speeches this evening. Each candidate will make a brief, five-minute statement that summarizes his position on the major issues. After these statements you will be able to ask questions of the candidates."

  He hesitated a heartbeat, then went on, "The order of speakers this evening was chosen by lot, and I won the first position. However, I think it's a little too much for me to be both the moderator and the first speaker, so I'm going to change the order of the candidates' statements and go last."

  Dead silence from the audience. Eberly turned slightly toward Urbain, then back to the crowd. "Our first speaker, therefore, will be Dr. Edouard Urbain, our chief scientist. Dr. Urbain has had a distinguished career..."

  Holly watched the newscast of the rally from the tunnel. Professor Wilmot's not there, she thought. I wonder why.

  Then she realized that this was the perfect opportunity to get to Wilmot without Kananga or anyone else interfering. Holly got to her feet. Just about everybody's at the rally, she saw, eyes still on the screen. I'll bet Wilmot's in his quarters. I could sneak in there and tell him what's going down.

  She turned off the wallscreen and started striding purposively along the tunnel, heading for Athens and Wilmot's quarters.

  After a few minutes, though, she turned off into a side tunnel that provided access for maintenance robots to trundle from one main utility tunnel to another. No sense marching straight to the village, she told herself. Go the roundabout way and look out for any guards that might be snooping around.

  So she missed Raoul Tavalera, who came down the utility tunnel from the direction of Athens, looking for her.

  Urbain and then Timoshenko spent their five minutes reviewing the positions they had stressed all through the campaign. Urbain insisted that scientific research was the habitat's purpose, it's very raison d'etre, and with him as director the habitat's exploration of Saturn and Titan would be a great success. Timoshenko had taken up part of Eberly's original position, that the scientists should not become an exalted elite with everyone else in the habitat destined to serve them. Eberly thought that Timoshenko received a larger and longer round of applause than Urbain did.

  As Timoshenko sat down, Eberly rose and walked slowly to the podium. Is Morgenthau right? he asked himself. Are Timoshenko's voters switching to Urbain? Are the engineers lining up with the scientists?

  It makes no difference, Eberly told himself as he gripped the edges of the podium. Now is the time to split them. Now is the time to swing the overwhelming majority of votes to me.

  "Now is the time," he said to the audience, "for me to introduce the final speaker. I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of introducing myself."

  A few titters of laughter rippled through the crowd.

  "So let me say, without fear of being contradicted, that here is a man who needs no introduction: me!"

  They laughed. Vyborg and several of his people began to applaud, and most of the crowd joined in. Eberly stood at the podium soaking up their adulation, real or enforced, it didn't matter to him as long as the people down there performed as he wanted them to.

  Once they quieted down, Eberly said, "This habitat is more than a playground for scientists. It is more than a scientific expedition. This is our home, yours and mine. Yet they want to tell us how we should live, how we should serve them.

  "They take it for granted that we will maintain strict population controls, even though this habitat could easily house and feed ten times our current population.

  "But how will we be able to afford an expanding population? Our ecology and our economy are fixed, locked in place. There is no room for population growth, for babies, in their plans for our future.

  "I have a different plan. I know how we can live and grow and be happy. I know how each and every one of you can get rich!"

  Eberly could feel the crowd's surge of interest. Raising an arm to point outward, he said:

  "Circling around Saturn is the greatest treasure in the solar system: thousands of billions of tons of water. Water! What would Selene and the other lunar cities pay for an unending supply of water? What would the miners and prospectors in the Asteroid Belt pay? More than gold, more than diamonds and pearls, water is the most precious resource in the solar system! And we have control of enough water to make us all richer than Croesus."

  "No!" Nadia Wunderly screamed, leaping to her feet from the middle of the audience. "You can't! You mustn't!"

  SATURN ARRIVAL Minus 3 Days, 3 Hours, 11 Minutes

  Eberly saw a stumpy, slightly plump woman with spiky red hair pushing her way to the front of the crowd.

  "You can't siphon off the ring particles!" she shouted as the people moved away to clear a path for her. "You'll ruin the rings! You'll destroy them!"

  Holding up a hand for silence, Eberly said dryly, "It seems we've reached the question-and-answer part of this evening's rally."

  Once she got to the front of the crowd, at the edge of the platform, Wunderly hesitated. Suddenly she looked embarrassed, unsure of herself. She glanced around, her cheeks reddening.

  Eberly smiled down at her. "If the other candidates don't mind, I'd like to invite this young woman up here to the podium to state her views."

  The audience applauded: lukewarm, but applause nonetheless. Eberly glanced at Urbain and Timoshenko, sitting behind him. Urbain looked uncertain, almost confused. Timoshenko sat with his arms crossed over his chest, an expression somewhere between boredom and disgust on his dark face.

  "Come on up," Eberly beckoned. "Come up here and state your views so that everyone can hear you."

  Wunderly hung back for a couple of heartbeats, then—her lips set in a determined grim line—she climbed the platform stairs and strode to the podium.

  As Eberly clipped a spare microphone to the lapel of her tunic, she said earnestly, "You can't mine the rings—"

  Eberly stopped her with a single upraised finger. "Just a moment. Tell us your name first, if you please. And your affiliation."

  She swallowed once, then looked out at the audience and said, "Dr. Nadia Wunderly. I'm with the Planetary Sciences group."

  "A scientist." I thought so, Eberly said to himself. Here's my chance to show the voters how self-centered the scientists are, how righteous they are, not caring an iota about the rest of us.

 
"That's right, I'm a planetary scientist. And you can't start mining the rings. You'll destroy them. I know they look big, but if you put all of the ring particles together they'd only form a body of ice that's no more than a hundred kilometers across."

  Turning to Urbain, Eberly said, "Would you care to join this discussion, Dr. Urbain?"

  The Quebecois got up from his chair and approached the platform, while Timoshenko sat unmoving, his arms still folded across his chest, his face still scowling.

  "The rings are fragile," Wunderly said earnestly. "If you start stealing tons of particles from them you might break them up."

  Eberly asked, "Dr. Urbain, is that true?"

  Urbain's face clouded momentarily. Then, with a little tug at his beard, he replied, "Yes, of course, if you continue to remove particles from the rings, at some point you will destabilize them. That is obvious."

  "How many tons of ice particles can we remove without destabilizing the rings?"

  Urbain looked at Wunderly, then gave a Gallic shrug. "That is unknown."

  "I could calculate it," Wunderly said.

  "How many tons of ice are there in the rings?" Eberly probed.

  Before Urbain could answer, Wunderly said, "A little over five times ten to the seventeenth metric tons."

  "Five times..." Eberly made a puzzled face. "That sounds like a lot, to me."

  Urbain said, "It is five with seventeen zeroes after it."

  "Five hundred thousand million million tons," said Wunderly.

  Eberly pretended to be amazed. "And you're worried about our snitching a few hundred tons per year?"

  A few snickering laughs rose from the crowd.

  "But we don't know what effect that would have on the ring dynamics," Wunderly said, almost pleading.

  Urbain added more forcefully, "You say a few hundred tons per year, but that number will grow."

  "Yes, but there's five hundred thousand million million tons available," said Eberly.

  Nostrils flaring, Urbain said, "And once all of Canada was covered with trees. Where are they now? Once the oceans of Earth were filled with fish. Now even the plankton are dying. Once the jungles of Africa were home to the great apes. Today the only chimpanzees or gorillas in existence live in zoos."

  Turning to the audience, Eberly said in his strongest, most authoritative voice, "You can see why scientists must not be allowed to run this habitat. They care more for apes than they do for people. They want to keep five hundred thousand million million tons of water ice out of our hands, when just a tiny amount of that water could make all of us wealthy."

  Wunderly burst, "But we don't know enough about the rings! At some point you could upset the ring dynamics so badly that they'll all go crashing down into the planet!"

  "And what would happen to any organisms living beneath the clouds?" Urbain added. "It would be an environmental catastrophe beyond imagining. Planetary genocide!"

  Eberly shook his head. "By taking a hundred tons or so, out of five hundred thousand million million?"

  "Yes," Urbain snapped. "I will not allow it. The International Astronautical Authority will not allow it."

  "And how will they stop us?" Eberly snapped back. "We're an independent entity. We don't have to follow the dictates of the IAA or any other Earthbound authority."

  Turning again to the audience, he said, "I will establish our government as independent of all Earthbound restrictions. Just like Selene. Just like the mining communities in the Asteroid Belt. We will be our own masters! I promise you!"

  The audience roared its approval. Urbain shook his head in bafflement. Tears sprang to Wunderly's eyes.

  PROFESSOR WILMOT'S QUARTERS

  Instead of his usual evening's entertainment, Wilmot watched the final rally. Eberly's a rabble-rouser, nothing less, he thought. Mining the rings and making everyone rich. What an extraordinary idea. Ecologically unwise, perhaps, but the short-term gains will wipe out any fears of long-term problems.

  The scientists are unhappy, of course. But what can they do? Eberly's got this election sewed up. Timoshenko's people will vote their pocketbooks and go for Eberly. So will a good many of the scientists, I wager.

  He leaned back in his comfortable upholstered chair and watched the crowd boil up onto the platform and carry Eberly off on their shoulders, leaving Urbain, Timoshenko, and that pathetic little red-haired woman standing there like forlorn children.

  Holly knew there was no exit from the utilities tunnel that opened directly into the apartment building where Professor Wilmot lived. Since she'd gone into hiding she'd been able to sneak into office buildings in the dead of night and use their lavatory facilities. She had even gone clothes shopping in the main warehouse without being detected. But now she would have to risk coming up into the village and scurrying along the streets of Athens in full view of the surveillance cameras atop the light poles.

  How can I do that without being seen? she asked herself as she made her way along the tunnel. I need a disguise.

  Or a diversion, she realized. She stopped and sat on the floor, thinking hard.

  Tavalera walked for kilometers along the main utility tunnel running from Athens out under the orchards and farms and all the way to the endcap. No sign of Holly.

  He passed a sturdy little maintenance robot swiveling back and forth across a small patch of the metal flooring, its vacuum cleaner buzzing angrily.

  Tavalera stopped and watched the squat, square-shaped robot. From his weeks spent with the Maintenance Department, Tavalera knew that the robots patrolled these tunnels, programmed to clean any dust or leaks they found, or to call for human help if they came across something beyond their limited means of handling. There was some kind of crud at this one spot, Tavalera reasoned. He couldn't see any dirt or an oil smear. Could it have been crumbs? Could Holly have been eating here?

  He looked up and down the tunnel. The robot, satisfied that the area was now clean, trundled off toward the endcap, deftly maneuvering around Tavalera, its sensors alert for anything amiss.

  "Holly!" Tavalera yelled, hoping she was close enough to hear him. No answer except the echo of his own voice bouncing down the tunnel.

  Sitting side by side, Cardenas and Gaeta watched the rally, too, from the enforced confinement of her apartment.

  "Mine the rings?" Cardenas gasped at the idea. "Nadia's going to have a stroke over that."

  Gaeta made a grudging grunt. "I dunno. Maybe he's onto something. Ten to the seventeenth is a big number."

  "But still..." Cardenas murmured.

  "You know what the going price is for a ton of water?"

  "I know it's more precious than gold," said Cardenas, "but that's because the price of gold has collapsed since the rock rats started mining the asteroids."

  "Mining the rings." Gaeta scratched at his jaw. "Might be a workable idea."

  "What are we going to do about Holly?" Cardenas asked, her voice suddenly sharp.

  Gaeta said, "There's not much we can do, is there? We're stuck here."

  "For the time being."

  "So?"

  "There's the phone," Cardenas said.

  "Who do you want to call?"

  "Who can help us? And help Holly?"

  "Quien sabe?"

  "What about Professor Wilmot?"

  "He wasn't at the rally," said Gaeta.

  "So he's probably at home."

  Cardenas told the phone to call the professor. No image formed, but Wilmot's cultured voice said, "I cannot speak with you at the moment. Please leave a message."

  Before Gaeta could say anything, Cardenas said, "Professor, this is Kris Cardenas. I'm concerned about Holly Lane. I've taken the liberty of accessing her dossier from the Earthside files, and it doesn't match the dossier that Eberly claims is hers. There's no record of mental illness or emotional instability. Something is definitely wrong here, and I'd like to discuss it with you as soon as possible."

  Once the phone light winked out, Gaeta said, "That's assuming Eberly lets
us out of here."

  Cardenas replied tightly, "He can't keep us under lock and key forever."

  "Well, he's got us under lock and key right now."

  "What can we do about it?" she wondered aloud.

  Gaeta reached for her. "Well, you know what they say."

  She let him pull her into his arms. "No, what do they say?"

  Grinning, "When they hand you a lemon, make lemonade."

  She thought about the bugs that Eberly's people must have planted in the apartment. "They've probably got cameras watching us."

  He grinned wickedly. "So let's give 'em something to see."

  Cardenas shook her head. "Oh no. But we could stay under the blanket. I doubt that they've got infrared sensors planted."

  Holly came up in the administration building and slipped along its empty corridors to her own office. There was no window in her cubicle so she went to Morgenthau's office and looked out at the street. Empty. Everybody's either at the rally or at home watching the rally, she thought. She hoped.

  But there are security goons watching the surveillance cameras. Worse, there are computers programmed to report any anomalies that the cameras pick up, she knew. I bet my description is on their list of anomalies. People can be distracted or lazy or even bribed; the warping computers never blink.

  What I need is a distraction. It won't fool the computers but it'll keep the security people busy.

  A distraction.

  Holly closed her eyes, picturing the schematics of the habitat's safety systems that she had memorized. For several minutes she sat at Morgenthau's desk, her face twisted into a grimace of concentration. Then at last she smiled. She activated Morgenthau's desk computer and, recalling the access code for the fire safety system, began instructing the computer to create a diversion for her.