S
ome party,” Tavalera said, as he strolled slowly with Holly up the gently rising walkway toward Athens.
“Enjoy yourself?” she asked.
“Yeah. Sure.”
Holly gazed up at the lights over their heads: unwinking pinpoints, the stars of this inside-out habitat of theirs.
They ambled along the lane, passing through pools of light from the street lamps, then into stretches of shadow, walking slowly, as if reluctant to get home.
“The ship that brought the scientists will be leaving in a week,” Tavalera said at last.
“Nadia’s going back to Earth with them,” said Holly.
“She’ll be back.”
“I guess.”
Tavalera stopped and reached for Holly’s shoulders, turning her to face him. They were in the shadows between streetlamps, their features barely discernable.
“I could go back on that ship,” he said. “I checked with Eberly. He said the New Morality’ll pay half my fare and the habitat will kick in the other half.”
Sudden anger flared in Holly’s gut. “Eberly! He’ll pay to get rid of you just to hurt me,” she said.
“Would it hurt you? If I left?”
“Of course it would.”
“Really?” His voice brimmed with joyous disbelief.
She grabbed him by the ears and kissed him. “Raoul, you can be a real dimdumb. I love you!”
“I love you, too, Holly,” he said.
Even in the nighttime darkness she could see the toothy grin splitting his face. He looks so super when he smiles. Then she thought, I ought to make him smile more.
“Holly,” he said, his smile withering, replaced by dead seriousness. “Holly … will you come with me? Back to Earth? For real?”
She didn’t hesitate a moment. “Back to Earth or anywhere else, Raoul. Anywhere.”
“You will?” His voice jumped an octave.
“F’real,” she said, totally certain. “I’ve never seen Earth. I was born there and lived my first life there, but I don’t remember any of that.”
“I’ll take you to the Grand Canyon,” Tavalera said, suddenly bursting with enthusiasm. “The Taj Mahal. The pyramids!”
“I want to see West Texas. Pancho and I were born there.”
“Most of it’s under the Sea of Mexico.”
“Then we can go scuba diving.”
“We could scuba through Manhattan, too. And Miami.”
“Cosmic!”
“Then you’ll come on the ship with me?”
Holly took a breath. “I can’t go until the elections, Raoul.”
“Oh.” His voice fell. “That.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Holly said happily. “Malcolm’s gonna beat me by a landslide and then I’ll be free to go wherever you want.”
“But if you win?”
“No chance of that,” she assured him. And herself. “Soon’s the election returns are counted we can snag a ship and zip back to Earth together.”
“Together,” he breathed.
“First ship out after the elections.”
He murmured, “We can get married back home. My parents’ d like that.”
“So would I.”
They started walking up the sloping path again. Tavalera blurted, “But what if you win?”
“I won’t.”
“You could. You got more than seven thousand signatures on your petition. What if they all vote for you?”
“They won’t. Berkowitz has been running polls. This morning’s shows me behind, sixty-two to thirty-two with six percent undecided.”
“You could quit,” Tavalera suggested. “Resign. Come with me now, right away.”
Holly shook her head. “I wouldn’t give Malcolm the satisfaction. Let him sweat out the vote count. He’s gonna win, but I won’t let him win by default.”
Tavalera said nothing.
“I mean, I wouldn’t mind losing by a decent percentage, but this is cosmic.”
With a small shrug Tavalera replied, “People wanna mine the rings. They wanna get rich.”
“I guess.”
If she wins I’ll never see her again, Tavalera thought. Even if she loses, she could change her mind and stay here.
As if she could read his mind, Holly said, “Don’t stress out on it, Raoul. I’m gonna get my butt whupped so bad on election day that I won’t ever want to show my face in this habitat again.”
He wished he believed her. “You think Eberly really talked with people at Selene?” he mused aloud. “And the rock rats?”
“He said he did.”
“But did he really? Maybe he was just saying that to impress the voters.”
Holly brightened a little. “I could check.”
He felt happy to see her smile, at least a little. Still, as they walked back through the pools of light and shadow toward their apartments, Tavalera wished he’d kept his big mouth shut.
Eduoard Urbain grew more nervous and fretful as the reception dwindled down. People were leaving, in couples or larger groups. The laughter was dying away; the last drinks were finished. As the host of the party, Urbain had torn himself away from Wunderly at last and, at Jeanmarie’s prompting, posted himself by the path that led back to Athens so he could bid a
formal good night to the departing guests. Human waiters from the Bistro were piling emptied glassware onto the little flat-topped robots that scooted back to the restaurant in Athens.
Gaeta had not yet left the party. He was strolling slowly with Cardenas along the edge of the lake. Urbain saw him bend down, pick up a pebble and hurl it into the water. Ripples spread on the still surface, circles within circles. How like a little boy, Urbain thought. There must be much of the adventurous little boy in him still.
“Are you going to ask him?” His wife’s voice was soft, almost a whisper, but yet it made Urbain’s insides jump.
He nodded nervously. “Yes. I must.”
“Then now is the moment,” Jeanmarie said.
“Yes,” he repeated. “I know.”
He took his wife’s outstretched hand and together they walked down the grassy slope to the water’s edge.
Cardenas noticed them approaching. Smiling, she said, “A lovely party, Eduoard. Jeanmarie, you must be proud of your husband.”
“I am,” said Jeanmarie. “He is a man of many accomplishments.”
Gaeta grinned lazily at them. “This was better than that New Year’s Eve bash.”
Urbain felt his cheeks grow warm. “Thank you. Thank you.”
Cardenas glanced at her wristwatch. “Well, we’d better get some sleep. Tomorrow’s a working day.”
“Yes,” Urbain murmured while his mind raced, trying to find some opening, some way to get around to what he wanted to ask.
Jeanmarie understood. She asked Cardenas, “How is your work on the new antenna system going?”
“Very smoothly,” Cardenas replied. “I’ll be able to deliver the nanos to you by the end of the week, at most. Only a couple of final tests left to do.”
“They will be safe?” Jeanmarie asked.
“That’s what we’ll be testing for. The nanos are all programmed and capable of building a new antenna on the lander. Now we’re making certain they’ll switch themselves off and go inert once the task is finished.”
“Excellent,” Urbain said.
“I’m curious, though,” Cardenas went on. “How do you intend to get the package down to your lander?”
Urbain coughed slightly. “We know
Alpha
’s position. We have her under constant surveillance.”
Gaeta said, “So?”
Taking a deep breath, like a man about to plunge over a precipice, Urbain replied, “I need you to take the nanomachines to
Alpha.”
For an instant neither Gaeta nor Cardenas replied. Urbain blinked once and felt his wife’s hand tensing in his.
Gaeta laughed. “Now you
want
me to go down to the surface? No shit.”
“No!” Cardenas snapped. “Manny’s not going anywhere. He’s retired.”
“But this is important,” Urbain said.
“Wait a minute,” Gaeta said, a lopsided smile stretching across his beat-up features. “When I first came here it was to go down there, to be the first man to set foot on Titan’s surface. And you refused. I thought you’d pop your cork!”
“That was for a stunt, a publicity adventure. What I ask you now is for science.”
“You said you didn’t want to take the chance of contaminating the life-forms.”
“And you, Dr. Cardenas,” Urbain countered, turning toward the nanotechnology expert, “told me that you could decontaminate his suit with nanomachines.”
“I don’t care what I said,” Cardenas said hotly. “Manny’s not going to Titan. Period!”
“Now wait a minute, Kris,” Gaeta said, still grinning. “This is big. I could get Fritz and a top crew here for this stunt.”
“It’s not a stunt!” Urbain insisted.
“You’re not going!” Cardenas repeated, just as adamantly.
Jeanmarie said, “Don’t you see, Dr. Cardenas? Mr. Gaeta is my husband’s last hope. His career, the entire investigation of Titan’s surface, depends on him.”
“Your husband’s career,” Cardenas replied. “Manny’s life.”
“But—”
“He could get killed down there.”
“Hold on, Kris,” Gaeta said. “If I could get Fritz and his people to run the mission I could be the first human being on Titan. That’s worth a lot.”
“Is it worth your life?”
“It won’t be that dangerous,” Gaeta said. “I go down, put your package of nanos on the lander and come back up. Piece of cake.”
“Manny, no. I can’t go through this again.”
“Last time, Kris.”
“That’s what you said about going to the rings for Wunderly.”
“And I got through that okay, didn’t I?”
Urbain could see the fire in Cardenas’s eyes. And the desire in Gaeta’s.
“Look,” Gaeta said to her. “Lemme call Fritz, see what he thinks. He wouldn’t let me stick my head in a noose.”
“Not much.”
“And if Fritz thinks this stunt is worthwhile, he’ll zoom out here on a torch ship and run the whole operation. Just like old times.”
Cardenas started to reply but no words came from her mouth, only a half-strangled sound that might have been a sigh or a growl or a muffled wail of despair. She stamped off toward the path that led to the village. Gaeta hurried to catch up with her.
“He will do it,” Urbain said, his voice shaky, breathless.
“Yes,” said Jeanmarie. “I only hope that it will not destroy his relationship with Dr. Cardenas.”
Urbain almost said, What of it? But one look at his wife’s distraught face made him hold his tongue.
F
ritz von Helmholtz fought back the smile that wanted to form on his normally stem face. This morning his team of technicians had towed the massive excursion suit into the sim lab and stood it up on its feet. Gaeta had climbed into the armored suit with all the grinning enthusiasm of a little boy.
“Ready for the sim run.” Gaeta’s voice, clearly excited, came from the communications computer’s speaker.
Von Helmholtz turned to the technician at the main console. “Initiate the landing procedure,” he said calmly.
Friedrich Johann von Helmholtz was a short, slim, almost delicately built man. He could be cold, even arrogant; he was always meticulous, demanding. In Gaeta’s eyes, Fritz was the best damned technician in the solar system. As always, he wore his customary immaculate white, crisply pressed coveralls over an old-fashioned slate-gray three-piece business suit. He stood beside the looming excursion suit, his burr-cut head barely reaching its waist, and looked it over with a practiced eye. It appeared no worse for wear than the last time he’d seen it, more than eight months earlier. A few new dents from Gaeta’s little frolic through Saturn’s B ring, but nothing substantial.
Today’s simulation run was to practice Gaeta’s landing on Titan. That officious little scientist, Urbain, had insisted that Manny land directly on top of the landing vehicle itself, not on the surface of the moon. He didn’t want to take any chances on contaminating the life-forms living on Titan. But he doesn’t mind taking chances with the life-form from Earth that’s going to repair his ailing vehicle, Fritz grumbled silently.
It’s probably just as well Manny goes for the lander, he reasoned. The ground around it could be muddy, viscous, difficult to walk on, downright dangerous. But a lot of people were counting on that. This excursion to Titan’s surface—this mission to rescue a defunct robot—was already contracted to the
biggest media combine in the Earth/Moon system. The more dangerous the stunt, the more viewers they could attract. With virtual-reality circuitry, the audience would even get the illusion that they were performing the stunt themselves. And the bigger the audience, the more money. We’ll all make millions out of this, von Helmholtz told himself. Tens of millions, perhaps a hundred million or more.
My task, he told himself, is to make the mission as safe as possible. The audience should experience a perception of danger, of risk. I am here to maximize that perception while minimizing the actual danger to my stuntman. He recalled all the other stunts that he and Gaeta had worked on together. The danger was always there; without it, there would be no audience interest, no money flowing in. He realized that although he and Gaeta lived with danger, Gaeta was the only one who could get killed if anything went wrong.
Von Helmholtz pursed his lips, then walked out of the simulation chamber and back to the consoles strung along the laboratory’s rear wall.
“We’re ready to initiate the landing sequence,” said the technician seated at the main console.
Von Helmholtz said curtly, “Begin.”
The walls of the simulation chamber seemed to evaporate, replaced by three-dimensional views of Titan’s surface.
“Looks like a cloudy day,” Gaeta quipped.
Von Helmholtz frowned at the comm console’s technician as if she had said it. “No jokes, please,” he said in his precise, clipped accent.
“Si, generalisimo,”
Gaeta replied. “Strictly business.”
“Yes,” replied von Helmholtz. “Strictly business, if you please.”
Cardenas was going through the presentation for the third time, and getting more than a little irritated about it.
“Here are the final results,” she said, pointing to the graph displayed on Urbain’s office wall. “As you can see, all traces of biologically active materials have been broken down by the nanos, leaving nothing but inorganics such as carbon dioxide and hydrogen compounds that quickly dissipate.”
Urbain sat at the circular conference table in the corner of his office, frowning at the graph as if he didn’t trust it. Flanking him were Yolanda Negroponte and another biologist.
“And the nanomachines themselves?” Urbain asked. “What of them?”
“They self-destruct,” Cardenas replied, the same answer she’d given twice earlier when Urbain had asked the same question.
Urbain glanced uneasily at his two biologists. They said nothing.
“I can show you photomicrographic evidence of the nanos going inert,” Cardenas said.
“Inert is not destroyed,” said Urbain.
Cardenas forced a smile. “Once they go inert, they’re nothing more than nanometer-sized bits of dust. They’re not vampires; they don’t rise from the dead.”
“They’re not living creatures at all,” said Negroponte, almost condescendingly. “They’re just nanometer-sized machines.”
Urbain scowled at her.
“That’s right,” Cardenas agreed. “They’re just very small machines.”
“They successfully clean all the contaminants from the exterior of the stuntman’s suit,” Urbain said. It was halfway between a question and a statement of fact.
Cardenas suppressed a flare of annoyance at the word
stuntman
, but replied as pleasantly as she could. “Yes, they completely break down all the biologicals.”
“And you can apply the nanos to the suit after the man gets inside it and seals it up?” asked the other biologist, a pert, freckle-faced redhead.
“Yes, that’s the plan.”
“So there will be no contaminants on the suit’s exterior when he goes to Titan’s surface,” said Negroponte.
“That’s right,” Cardenas said tightly.
Urbain hiked his brows, lowered them, brushed his moustache with a fingertip, shrugged his shoulders. Finally he said, “Then we can proceed to decontaminate the suit just before he leaves on the mission.”
“The plan,” Cardenas said, “is to do the decontamination
procedure in the transfer ship’s airlock, just before he goes down to Titan’s surface.”
Urbain nodded and said, “Very well. Thank you, Dr. Cardenas.”
Cardenas picked up her palmcomp and left Urbain’s office with nothing more than a terse farewell. As she walked out of the building and headed back through the morning sunlight toward her own lab, she thought, Manny’s going through with this. No matter what I’ve said, no matter how I’ve pleaded with him, he’s going through with it. Like a kid with a new toy. Like a man hooked on a narcotic drug. He’s obsessed with the idea of doing this mission. I’m playing second fiddle to this … this stunt he wants to do.
No, she told herself. It’s not just that he wants to do it. He
needs
to do it. There’s no way in heaven or hell that I can stop him. He’s going to go through with this even if it kills him.
I’ve got a rival, she realized. Until he gets past this mission, I’m not the most important thing in his life. What will he be like once he’s finished the stunt? Will he come back to me?
What if the stunt kills him? What will I do then?
“You heard the man,” Timoshenko said sourly, “we’re supposed to have this problem solved before election day.”
Habib looked up from his computer display. “Eberly? He said that?”
“At the last debate. He promised.”
Habib muttered, “A politician’s promise.”
Timoshenko had come to the computer center to witness the crucial test of Habib’s prediction scheme. If the man’s work was right, there should be a surge from Saturn’s magnetic field some time this morning. For his part, Timoshenko had increased the shielding on the superconducting wires that spanned the habitat’s outer shell and put in place a set of electronic backups that automatically shunted power when a surge caused dangerous voltage hikes in the habitat’s electrical circuitry.
“Well,” said Habib softly, “there’s nothing to do now except wait.”
Timoshenko did not enjoy waiting. He paced impatiently
among the dozen men and women at their workstations, all of them bent over the work on their own screens and trying to ignore the Russian’s impatient footsteps clicking along the tiled floor. Hands clasped behind his back, face squinched into a dark scowl, Timoshenko paced and fidgeted, glanced at the wall clock, paced and fidgeted some more.
“Try to relax,” Habib said, looking up as Timoshenko reached his workstation. “You can’t force it to happen.”
“I know. I know.”
The minutes dragged by. Timoshenko thought of Eberly as he marched to and fro across the computer center. Eberly. The man had never spoken with Katrina. Never. Eberly’s whole story about Katrina joining him here had been nothing but a lie, a damned lie, a trick to get him to accept the job as chief of maintenance. Katrina would never come out here. Never. Why should she? Why would anyone leave Earth to come to join me in exile? She doesn’t want to be with me.
I’ll kill him, Timoshenko told himself. Sooner or later, I’ll kill Eberly and myself and everyone in this tin can of a Siberia. I’ll put an end to this misery once and for all.
“Try to relax,” Habib repeated.
You
try, Timoshenko answered silently. But he stopped pacing and pulled up a little wheeled chair to sit next to Habib. Half a minute later he sprang to his feet and began pacing again.
“Shouldn’t you be in touch with your staff people?” Habib suggested mildly.
“No,” the Russian snapped. “Either the shielding works or it doesn’t. Either the automatic relays do their job properly or they don’t. My people have done their jobs. Now we wait for the real test.”
“You’re going to give yourself a heart attack,” Habib warned.
“My heart wouldn’t dare attack me.”
“But if you don’t—” The curve on Habib’s screen that displayed the intensity of Saturn’s magnetosphere began to kink visibly. “Wait. I think it’s coming.”
Timosheko raced back to the chair and plopped on it.
“Yes,” said Habib, pointing with a trembling finger. “It’s spiking rapidly.”
Timoshenko stared at the ragged curve. It rose, writhing like a thing alive, jagged peaks and small dips between them climbing, climbing.
“It’s a big one,” Habib murmured.
The intensity continued to climb for several minutes while the two men stared at the screen, hardly breathing. Then it began to go down again.
Habib blinked, then looked around. All the others were still bent over the screens as if nothing had happened.
“Nothing happened,” Timoshenko said.
Breaking into a huge grin, Habib said, “Yes! Exactly! We’ve just experienced a monster spike and nothing happened. No power outages. The lights didn’t even blink!”
Timoshenko yanked his palmcomp out of his pocket. “I’ll check with my staff. I need a full report—every circuit.”
As he pecked out the numbers on his handheld he realized that if there had been an outage anywhere his phone would be ringing. It worked, he told himself. We’ve learned how to prevent the outages.
And he knew that the same knowledge could be used to totally shut down all the electrical systems in the habitat, when he wanted to end it all.
Holly was surprised that Douglas Stavenger himself answered her call to Selene. She had heard earlier from George Ambrose, the chief administrator of the asteroidal miners’ headquarters at Ceres, who had confirmed that he’d communicated with Eberly.
“We’ll buy water ice from you blokes soon’s you can ship it to us,” Ambrose had said in response to Holly’s call. Since there was nearly an hour’s lag time in communications between Saturn and the Asteroid Belt, even at the speed of light, conversations were impossible. Holly called in the morning, Ambrose replied several hours later.
“You asked about the price your chief administrator quoted,” Ambrose had said, his shaggy, red-maned face filling Holly’s phone screen. “He was kinda vague about it, but I got the impression it’d be less’n half what it costs us now for squeezin’ water outta the carbonaceous rocks here in the Belt.”
Ambrose had rattled on for more than a quarter hour, then
bid Holly farewell with a cheery, “You got any more questions, just zip ’em to me. I’ll be happy to deal with you blokes.”
Douglas Stavenger was completely different. Holly had sent her message to the chairman of Selene’s governing council. All day she had waited for a reply. She was getting ready for sleep when his return call came in.
Now she sat cross-legged on her bed while Stavenger spoke He looked much younger than Holly had expected, and his face seemed to be about the same skin tone as her own. He’s been the power-behind-the-throne at Selene for ages, Holly though How can he look so young? And handsome.
“I’m answering your query because the council doesn’t want to make a formal declaration as yet. Your Mr. Eberly made it clear that his inquiry was … well, not secret, exactly, but sensitive.”
Just like Malcolm, Holly said to herself. He does everything in whispers.
“Selene manufactures its own water from oxygen in the lunar regolith,” Stavenger explained, “and hydrogen blowing in on the solar wind. We also extract water from the frozen caches at the poles.”