W
e’re going to miss the big debate,” Tavalera said, as he watched Gaeta climb into the hulking excursion suit.
“Not to worry,” Timoshenko called from behind the suit, where he was helping Gaeta worm through the hatch in the back. “They’ll replay it on the news broadcasts six hundred times, at least.”
They had trundled Gaeta’s excursion suit on its dolly, like the sarcophagus of a giant, down to the outer chamber of the airlock at the habitat’s endcap, the only airlock big enough to accommodate the ponderous armored suit. Then, with Gaeta himself helping, they’d used the overhead winch to stand the suit up on its thick-soled boots. Gaeta opened the hatch in the suit’s back and clambered inside. The transfer craft that would carry him to the rings was docked outside the airlock. Pancho and Wanamaker were going through the prelaunch countdown. Tavalera had brought a quartet of roll-up computers to monitor the suit’s sensors and run communications, and he stuck them on the scuffed metal bulkhead because there were no smart walls in the airlock area. Once Gaeta’s head appeared in the helmet visor, Tavalera turned on the intercom.
“Can you hear me, Manny?”
“Loud and clear. You can turn down the volume a smidge.”
Timoshenko checked the suit’s hatch to make certain it was sealed, then walked back to the row of roll-ups with Tavalera.
It took several minutes for the two men to run through the checklist. Finally Tavalera said, “You’re okay to enter the airlock.”
Gaeta turned slowly, like a monster out some old horror flick, while Timoshenko trotted to the airlock’s inner hatch and pecked out the combination on the wall plate that opened it. The hatch swung smoothly inward and Gaeta clumped carefully over its sill. Once the hatch closed again, with Gaeta inside
the airlock, Timoshenko hurried back to the pasted-up computers where Tavalera waited.
“Pumping down the airlock,” Tavalera called out.
They heard Gaeta’s voice from the fabric computer that was handling communications, “Copy pumping down.”
Glancing up from the screens to Timoshenko, Tavalera said, “I really appreciate your helping us out here.”
Timoshenko shrugged. “I’m a big boss now, I’ve got lots of time. Not much for me to do except sit at a desk and listen to excuses.”
And hope for the future, he added silently.
Timoshenko had known, when Eberly summoned him to his office, that the chief administrator was going to twist his arm again. The habitat had suffered an hour-long power outage earlier in the day, the third in the past six weeks. Now it was night, well past the dinner hour, and the desks in the outer office were empty. The overhead lights were off; only a small desktop lamp here and there broke the darkness.
He knocked once on Eberly’s door and then opened it. Eberly was at his desk. As usual it was immaculately clear, its surface glistening in the full light of the overheads.
“Precisely on time,” Eberly said, smiling brightly, as he gestured Timoshenko to one of the chairs before his desk.
Timoshenko sat without speaking a word.
“I fired Aaronson this afternoon,” Eberly said without preamble. “We can’t keep having these blackouts. I’m appointing you director of the entire maintenance department.”
“I decline the honor.”
Still smiling, Eberly opened his desk drawer and pulled out a single sheet of plastic. “Your wife is quite beautiful,” he said, sliding the sheet across his desk.
Timoshenko did not dare to pick it up. Merely a glance at Katrina’s lovely face was enough to make his heart thunder.
“My ex-wife has nothing to do with this,” he said through gritted teeth.
“I’ve asked the authorities in Moscow about her. She hasn’t remarried. She’s apparently willing to come out here,” said
Eberly. “It seems she’s even anxious to be reunited with you.”
Timoshenko’s first reaction was to leap across the desk and throttle the smug bastard. But he fought it down, barely.
“You two can be reunited,” Eberly went on, “once you’ve accepted the post of head of the maintenance department. You’ll be an important member of this habitat’s community, and she—”
“I don’t want her here! I don’t want her exiled from Earth!”
Eberly shook his head like a schoolteacher disappointed with his student’s response. “You’re a victim of disorganized thinking, Ilya. You see this habitat as a place of exile, a prison, a gulag.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Not in the slightest. This is the most comfortable, even luxurious, habitation you’ve ever known in your entire life. Admit it. Aren’t the living conditions better here than they were in Russia? Aren’t you more free than you ever were there? Don’t you have a better position; aren’t you a respected man?”
Timoshenko couldn’t reply. He wanted to stuff Eberly’s words down his throat, but he knew that what the man was saying was quite true. With the exception that Timoshenko could never leave this man-made world. Never return to Russia. Never see his home. Never see Katrina or hear her voice again. Luxurious or not, this is still a prison, he told himself.
Leaning across his desk and pointing a finger at the engineer, Eberly said, “You’re living much better than your wife is, you know. I’ve looked into her situation, on your behalf. She’s nowhere near the level of comfort and respect that you’re living at.”
“Is … is she all right?”
“She’s living in a one-room apartment and working as an assistant in the central public library in Kaliningrad. That’s a suburb of Moscow, I believe.”
“An assistant? But she has a doctorate in communications.”
“She can be here in six months or less,” Eberly tempted. “If you take the job as head of maintenance.”
Timoshenko started to shake his head, but he heard his own voice saying, “You promise you can bring her here?”
“On the next ship that’s coming from Earth.”
“And … and she can leave … if she doesn’t like it?” If she doesn’t want to stay with me, he added silently.
“She’ll be coming here voluntarily,” Eberly said smoothly. “Of course she can leave whenever she wishes.”
Timoshenko felt paralyzed, unable to decide, unable even to think. His guts were churning, but his mind was a blank.
“She wants to come here,” Eberly purred. “She wants to be with you. I know she does.”
No matter what he knew he should say, Timoshenko blurted, “All right! All right! I’ll take your damned job. I’ll be a big boss, just like you want.” And inside his head he told himself, Katrina is coming here! She’s coming here to join me! She
wants
to be with me!
He lumbered up from the chair without saying another word and lurched to the door while Eberly watched, smiling. Only after he was safely out of Eberly’s office, in the shadowy darkness of the unoccupied desks, did Timoshenko let tears of joy flow down his cheeks.
Standing beside Tavalera in the airlock area, Timoshenko tried to keep his mind on the business at hand. He forced the image of Katrina out of his head and concentrated on the data displayed on the flimsy computer screens.
“Should I open the link with Dr. Wunderly?” he asked.
Tavalera nodded absently as he pressed a pressure pad on the communications computer’s fabric keyboard. “Pancho, you ready to take Manny aboard?”
Pancho was standing in the transfer craft’s compact little cockpit. Barely big enough for two people, it had no chairs, nothing but display panels with their winking gauges and readouts and a single circular port of glassteel directly in front of her.
“Ready for boarding,” she said into the pin mike clipped onto the collar of her coveralls. Turning to Wanamaker, she said, “You’re the welcoming committee, Jake.”
Wanamaker threw her a mock salute and ducked through the hatch. It was only three strides to the cargo bay, where Gaeta would ride inside his suit.
“I’m ready to come aboard,” Gaeta’s voice said from the speaker set above the airlock hatch.
“Hang five,” Wanamaker replied. “I’ve got to make certain we’re sealed tight here.”
“Panel’s in the green,” Pancho called.
“Right. Just doing a manual check.” It was part of the procedures they had rehearsed in the simulator. Wanamaker checked to see that there were no leaks between the craft’s airlock and the habitat’s.
“Okay,” he said after a two-minute inspection. “I’m opening our outer airlock hatch.”
Pumps rumbled and Wanamaker thought he could hear the outer hatch creak open. It’s all in my imagination, he told himself. Those bearings don’t squeak.
At last the inner hatch swung open and Gaeta thumped awkwardly into the cargo bay. The oversized suit loomed above Wanamaker; he felt as if a monstrous alien robot had stepped in.
“Welcome aboard,” he said, peering up to see Gaeta’s face in the suit’s visor.
“Is this the bus to Tijuana?” Gaeta wisecracked.
Pancho’s voice said, “Cut the clowning and seal the airlock. We gotta keep on schedule.”
Nadia Wunderly had hoped to get samples from the rings before Eberly’s debate against Holly, but delays in refurbishing the transfer rocket and switches in crew assignments from herself to Pancho and finally to Gaeta—who should have taken the responsibility from the beginning, she thought—held up the mission until the very day of the debate.
Eberly had played coy about granting permission to use a transfer craft, but one visit from Wanamaker and Gaeta had put an end to Eberly’s foot-dragging. Still, the man had managed to push their launch date to the day of the first debate between himself and Holly.
The debate wouldn’t start until eight P.M., Wunderly knew. Manny could be through the rings and on his way home by then. But I won’t know what he’s got in the sample boxes. The debate will start before I get the samples into my own lab.
Now she sat in her cramped little office, her one smart wall display split between the cameras on Gaeta’s excursion suit and a view of Saturn. The giant planet’s rings glittered like wide swaths of beckoning diamonds, alluring, endlessly fascinating.
It took an effort of will for Wunderly to drag her attention away from the rings. Nervously, she began rearranging the papers scattered across her littered desk, waiting for the spacecraft to detach from the habitat and start its flight to the rings.
Come on, she urged silently. Get on with it!
F
ive-second countdown on my mark,” Pancho called out. “Mark! Four …”
She felt the craft shudder as the connectors holding it against the habitat unlocked.
“ … two … one …”
The automatic sequencer fired the cold gas jets, just a brief moment of thrust, hardly jarring Pancho as she stood in the cockpit. Her thumb was on the manual firing button, a needless backup.
“We’re off!” she sang out.
“Good luck,” Tavalera’s voice came through the speaker.
The sense of weight that had been imparted by the habitat’s spin dwindled away to nothing. Pancho felt her insides gurgle. Come on, girl, she said to herself, as she wiggled her soft-booted feet into the floor loops, you’ve been in zero g half your life, just about. Don’t get queasy on me now.
Wanamaker stuck his head through the hatch. “Manny’s having his breakfast.”
“Inside the suit?” Pancho asked, over her shoulder. She saw
that he was holding onto the hatch’s rim with both hands, his feet floating up off the deck.
“Yup. You hungry? I can pull something from the galley.”
Pancho knew that this tiny craft’s galley was nothing more than a refrigerated bin stocked with premade sandwiches and fruit juices. Her stomach was still complaining, although moving her head hadn’t made her whoozy at all.
“Yeah, let’s grab a bite,” she said. “Nothin’ to do here for the next few hours except watch the board.” Besides, she said to herself, I don’t want to let zero g get the better of me.
Holly bit her lip as she studied the numbers displayed on the smart wall. Fifty-two hundred and sixteen signatures, she thought. Not enough yet. But we’re getting there.
She had hoped to be able to announce that the petition drive had succeeded at the debate against Eberly this evening. Not going to make it, she told herself. But we’re getting close. And more than a third of the signatures are from guys.
Her phone chirped. The data bar on the screen’s bottom told her it was Zeke Berkowitz. “Answer,” she called.
Berkowitz’s normally amiable features looked troubled. “Holly, we’re going to be running a news feature right before the debate. I thought you ought to see a preview of it, so you won’t be caught by surprise.”
“Okay,” Holly replied absently, still thinking about the petition drive.
“I’m shooting the interview to you now,” said Berkowitz.
“Thanks.”
For nearly half an hour Holly continued working on the petition drive figures, trying to determine if there were pockets of the population that they had not yet signed up. At last, more as a break from the work than anything else, she switched to the message Berkowitz had sent.
She was surprised to see Jeanmarie Urbain on screen. The chief scientist’s wife was sitting in the same studio that Berkowitz used to interview Holly and Eberly.
“Madame Urbain,” Berkowitz said from off camera, “why have you organized your committee?”
Jeanmarie Urbain looked tense, but she forced a smile and looked straight into the camera. Zeke prob’ly told her to do that, Holly thought.
“It is necessary for the future of this community to stop this ridiculous petition that is being circulated,” she said.
Holly jerked with surprise.
“You mean the petition to repeal the Zero Population Growth protocol?”
“Yes. Exactly. We must not repeal the protocol.”
“And why are you against the petition?” Berkowitz’s voice asked calmly.
Looking very earnest, very convinced, Mme. Urbain answered as if reciting a memorized reply, “This habitat of ours is quite limited in its resources. If we permit unregulated growth, our habitat will quickly be filled beyond our capacity to support the increased population. People will starve. Children—babies—will starve!”
“Don’t you think that’s an extreme view?”
“Not at all. Unregulated population growth will turn this beautiful habitat of ours into an overcrowded slum, a teeming cesspool of poverty, disease and crime. We must maintain the Zero Population Growth protocol! We must!”
“Forever?”
Jeanmarie Urbain hesitated. Holly thought she might be searching her memory for the answer she had been coached to give.
“No, not forever,” she said at last. “But not until we have achieved some means of bringing more wealth to our community should we think about increasing our population.”
“Some means of increasing our wealth,” Berkowitz repeated.
“Yes. Our habitat was designed to support ten thousand people. Unless our economic situation improves, we have not the resources to support a larger population.”
Silence for a moment. Then Berkowitz asked, “Madame Urbain, if the ZPG protocol were to be repealed, would
you
want to have a baby?”
Jeanmarie looked surprised by his question, shocked. “I? Would I want to have a baby?”
“You and Dr. Urbain are childless, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” she admitted. Reluctantly, Holly thought.
“So, if it became permissible …? I mean, you’re still young enough to have a baby, obviously.”
“I … might,” she said slowly. Then she quickly added, “But not until the community can support a larger population.”
The camera pulled back to show Berkowitz sitting facing Mme. Urbain. He turned slightly in his chair and another camera showed him full-face.
“So Mme. Jeanmarie Urbain, wife of the habitat’s chief scientist, has formed a committee to oppose repeal of the ZPG protocol. How do
you
feel about this issue? Send in your thoughts. We’ll keep a running score, with reports every hour.”
Holly’s wall screen suddenly went blank. The interview was finished. She sat there, her mind spinning. Turncoat! Holly thought. Traitor! Then she calmed down a bit and she realized that this had to be Eberly’s doing. Just like the snake he is, Holly thought, getting a woman to fight against this women’s issue.
“How’re you doin’ in there?” Pancho asked, letting her feet float free of the floor loops so she could bob up to the level of Gaeta’s transparent visor. She could see his rugged face through the reflections of the cargo bay’s overhead light strips.
“Checking everything twice,” Gaeta replied, his amplified voice echoing slightly off the bay’s bare metal bulkheads.
“Just like Santy Claus.”
“Watch this,” said Gaeta.
Pancho saw the hulking suit’s two arms rise from their sides, their servomotors whining. The pincer claws opened and snapped shut.
“Like a crab, huh?” she commented.
“Wanna dance?” Gaeta asked, wrapping both arms around her waist. He began lumbering awkwardly across the floor, his heavy magnetized boots lifting and then thumping down again on the metal deck.
Pancho hung on to his broad shoulders, grinning. “Hey, don’t let Jake see this. He’s the jealous type.”
Laughing, Gaeta lowered her gently to the floor and released his double grip on her. Pancho hooked one foot into a floor loop, then made a wobbly curtsy. “Thanks for the dance.”
“Pilot to the bridge,” Wanamaker’s voice came over the intercom. “Ejection point in one hour.”
“Gotta go,” she said. “You okay in there? Need anything?”
“I’m fine, Pancho. I’ll start the final checkout now.”
“Right. I’ll tell Jake; he’ll be monitoring you.”
She pushed off for the hatch and swam weightlessly back to the bridge. Her eye caught the control board’s master clock as she settled into the floor loops at the pilot’s station.
“Just about time for Holly’s big shootout with Eberly,” she muttered.
Wanamaker didn’t reply. He had a headset clamped over his thick steel-gray hair, already working with Gaeta, going through the suit’s final checkout.