Titan (25 page)

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Authors: Ben Bova

BOOK: Titan
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U
rbain had lost track of how many times he’d walked between his own office and the mission control center that night. The biologists had settled themselves around the little oval conference table in his office, still throwing out theories about what smoothed
Alpha
’s tracks and what observations they needed to decide which theory was correct. If any. The engineers in the control center were doggedly tracing those ghost tracks and looking for fresh ones.
As Urbain returned to the dimly lit control center once again, half a dozen of the engineers were gathered around the coffee urn, arguing intently:
“We’ve covered the whole damned surface and no trace of her. The frigging junk heap must’ve sunk into one of the seas.”
“Or maybe that smaller lake. Tracks went right up to it.”
“And out again.”
“How can you tell if some of the tracks were outbound from the lake?”
“Too many tracks to be all one way. Besides—”
“Besides, bullshit! We’ve got five-meter resolution imagery. And stereoscopics. We’ve covered the whole fucking surface of Titan. Nothing! Nothing but tracks and ghosts of tracks.”
Urbain realized for the first time that his team of engineers were feeling just as frustrated and angry as he himself. They’re close to cracking, he told himself. I must do something to lift their spirits. But what?
One of the women said, “It’s a big world down there. Even with three-dimensional imagery we could miss the beast. We need to keep hunting.”
“Til we trip over our long, gray beards, huh?”
“What else can we do?”
“Go back home. Admit the damned thing’s lost and go back
to Earth. We’re not exiles, we’re volunteers. We can go back whenever we want to.”
“Whenever there’s a ship to take us back.”
“You mean whenever somebody’s willing to foot the bill to carry us back.”
“The ICU has to take us back! We didn’t sign on for a permanent appointment all the way the hell out here!”
Urbain cleared his throat noisily and they all looked up.
“Any progress?” he asked pointedly.
No one bothered to answer him. They drifted back to their consoles, sullenly, Urbain thought. Like unhappy schoolchildren who would rather be somewhere else, anywhere except here.
“I know this is frustrating,” he said, loudly enough for everyone in the control center to hear him. Before anyone could reply he added, “But the search for
Alpha
must continue. Already the biologists have made an important discovery.”
“Already,” someone muttered acidly.
“
Alpha
is down there, and she needs our help. We must—”
One of the men at the consoles sang out, “Got something here! Looks like fresh tracks.”
Urbain rushed to his console and peered over the engineer’s shoulder at his central display screen. Across the spongy landscape he could see the sharp, deep imprint of a double row of cleat tracks.
“Follow them!” he shouted. “Follow them!”
The landscape shifted. The tracks continued, clear and straight. Suddenly the display went blank.
“What happened? Urbain demanded.
Without looking up from his screens the engineer replied, “Reached the limit of that satellite’s range of vision. Switching to another …”
“Quickly!” Urbain hissed, breathless.
“Vite, vite!”
Other engineers were gathering around behind him. Urbain felt their body heat, smelled the scents of their colognes and aftershaves and perspiration. But he kept his eyes riveted to the blank display screen.
It lit up and Urbain could hear a gush of excitement behind him. The view was much wider than it had been a moment ago.
“Tightening the focus,” the engineer murmured. “This is all real-time, you realize.”
“Yes, yes,” Urbain snapped impatiently. “Focus on the tracks.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” the engineer replied testily.
“Use the autofocus,” a voice behind Urbain suggested.
“What the hell d’you think I’m doing?” the engineer growled.
The double row of tracks took form on the screen. Urbain heard the others sigh.
“Follow them!” he urged.
The landscape shifted; the tracks blurred and then came into sharp focus again. Urbain could feel his heart thundering against his ribs. His mouth was dry.
“And there she is,” the engineer said.
Urbain stared.
Titan Alpha
sat on the ice, unmoving but apparently intact. Then the view on the screen blurred.
Urbain realized that he had tears in his eyes.
When Ramanujan had reported to Eberly about Holly’s afternoon rally, Eberly’s first reaction was, “A petition drive? Do you know how many signatures she will need?”
“Sixty-seven hundred, she said,” Ramanujan had replied.
“Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven, actually,” Eberly said.
Ramanujan dipped his chin in acknowledgement of his boss’s superior knowledge. He was taller than most of the Hindus that Eberly had known, but painfully thin; Ramanujan’s face looked like a skull with emaciated dark skin stretched tightly across it.
“She’ll never get that many signatures,” Eberly had said, dismissing the problem—and his assistant—with a wave of his hand.
But as the afternoon wore into evening Eberly found himself worrying more and more about it. He ate dinner alone in his apartment, brooding over the possibilities. After dinner he watched Holly’s panel discussion on the news channel.
She can’t possibly get sixty-seven hundred signatures, Eberly told himself. Even if she got every woman in the habitat
to sign the stupid petition she’d still need two thousand men to sign it, too.
Impossible.
And yet …
Eberly sank back in his favorite recliner and thought about the problem for long hours. Well past midnight he was still wide awake, pondering the possibilities.
I need a woman to rise up in opposition to her, he realized. I need a woman who’ll not only refuse to sign the silly petition but who’ll campaign actively against it. She doesn’t have to openly support my candidacy. In fact, it’d be better if she didn’t; she shouldn’t have any visible ties to me. She should just oppose the petition because the idea behind it is wrong.
A woman who’d oppose breaking the ZPG protocol. Who? Who would stand up against most of the other women in the habitat?
The answer came to him with the clarity of a church bell on a calm summer evening: Jeanmarie Urbain. Her and her clumsy attempt to seduce me into releasing those satellites for her husband. If she believed that allowing population growth would endanger the scientific work her husband’s doing, she’d oppose Holly’s petition. She’d not only refuse to sign it, she’d campaign against it.
Good, he told himself. I’ll have to see her and explain the situation to her. Put it in terms that she’ll understand: population growth will eat up the habitat’s resources and we’ll no longer be able to support the scientific research that her husband’s leading. She’ll go for that. If she doesn’t, I’ll remind her of our little tryst a couple of months ago. I’ll scare her into working for me, if I have to.
But it won’t come to that. She’ll do it for her husband.
“Good,” he repeated aloud.
Suddenly a new conception flashed into his mind like a starburst. An entire plan for the campaign, a strategy that could not possibly fail. No matter what Holly does, no matter what she stands for, this will beat her. Like those ancient oriental martial arts, I’ll use her own strengths to defeat her. It’s perfect! I’ll lead her into the trap and when we have one of our big debates I’ll spring it on her.
There’s no way she can outmaneuver me, Eberly said to himself. I’ll sweep her and anyone who’s supporting her entirely out of my way!
Perfect.
N
one of them had slept. Rumpled, baggy-eyed, sweaty, yet not one of Urbain’s scientists or engineers felt tired or irritable in the slightest. They had spent the whole night trying every downlink frequency, every message, every command they could think of, but
Titan Alpha
still sat silent and inert on the edge of the carbonaceous expanse that spread over more than a third of Titan’s surface.
“She’s a stubborn little beast,” Habib said, scratching at his scruffy little beard.
He had pulled up a wheeled chair next to Urbain; the two of them were staring at the satellite image of
Alpha
. Urbain could feel the press of dozens of others crowding around them, leaning over his shoulders. He remembered that he himself had not showered for god knew how many hours. What of it? he asked himself. First things first.
“She’s not responding at all,” Habib whispered, restating the obvious.
But Urbain was too excited to feel annoyed. “She has made her way halfway around Titan and stopped at the edge of the carbon field. Has she gone into hibernation mode? Or is she making observations before proceeding further?”
“We haven’t seen any flashes from the laser,” Habib said.
“Perhaps she is restricting herself to passive observations,” Urbain murmured.
“Or the core memory’s reached saturation and she’s gone into hibernation,” said Negroponte from behind Habib’s shoulder.
Urbain shook his head. “She goes into hibernation exactly when she reaches the edge of the carbon field? No, it is too much of a coincidence.”
“Coincidences happen,” Negroponte rebutted.
For the first time since he had seen the image of
Alpha
sitting safe and intact on the surface of Titan, Urbain felt nettled. This woman is too domineering, too self-assured.
Yet Habib said, “For all the communicating the beast has done with us, she might as well be in hibernation mode.”
Urbain felt irritation rising inside him. He realized that he had reached the end of his endurance. And probably the others have as well, he thought. We’ve all been here more than twelve hours now, some of us more than twenty.
“We must find some way to communicate with
Alpha,”
he said, trying to alter the direction of their discussion.
“Yes, but how?” Habib asked.
Pushing himself up from the console’s chair, Urbain said loudly, “Enough for now. We all need sleep. I want three volunteers to stand watch over
Alpha
while the rest of us go to our homes and sleep.”
Negroponte immediately said, “I’ll stand watch.”
“Me too,” Habib said.
Strange, Urbain thought. Moslem men are raised to be chauvinists; yet this one follows her like an obedient puppy.
He found that his legs were tingling from sitting for so many hours. Slightly shaky, Urbain made his way to the door of the control center. All but three of his scientists and engineers followed him.
At the door he turned and forced a weak smile. “While you sleep,” he told them all, “dream up a way to communicate with
Alpha.”
Gaeta’s eyes popped open shortly before seven A.M. He tried to slip out of bed without awakening Cardenas, but she stretched out a bare arm toward him.
“It’s too early to get up,” she murmured drowsily.
He leaned over and kissed her lightly on the lips. “You go back to sleep. I’ve got a lot to do in the sim lab.”
“The honeymoon’s over,” she sighed, turning slightly so that the sheet slid down to reveal a bare shoulder.
Gaeta stared at her for a moment, then muttered, “Business before pleasure.”
She pulled the sheet up demurely, then asked, “So how’s it going?” Her cornflower blue eyes were wide open now.
“Okay.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“Only okay?”
Turning back toward her, Gaeta waggled a hand. “Pancho’s fine. She’s a natural. Reflexes like a cat. Jake, though … It’s been a long time since that
viejo
’s actually flown a spacecraft.”
“He’s not cutting it?”
“He can fly the bird out to the ring okay. It’s picking up Pancho on the other side that worries me. Not much room for error there. No slack.”
Still lying back on her pillow, Cardenas mused, almost to herself “Raoul could fly the transfer ship.”
“He doesn’t want to.”
“But he could. He’s had more recent experience than Jake.”
“He doesn’t want to,” Gaeta repeated.
“I could talk to him.”
“Wouldn’t do much good.”
“I can be very persuasive,” Cardenas insisted.
“Really?”
She sat up in the bed, and the sheet fell to her waist. Reaching both arms out to him, she said, “Don’t you think so?”
He let her twine her fingers in his thick, curly hair. “I really ought to get to the lab. Pancho and Jake’ll be there at nine and—”
“It’s not even eight yet.” Cardenas wound her arms around his neck and pulled her toward him.
Gaeta slid back into bed. “I guess you can be pretty persuasive when you want to be.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Just don’t try this kind of persuasion on Raoul.”
“Would that upset you?”
He grinned fiercely down at her. “Holly would slit your throat.”
“Oh.”
“Now what’s this crap about the honeymoon being over?”
Delicacy and tact, Eberly said to himself, as he walked out toward the lake. Use pressure only when you have to.
Morning was his favorite time of day. Sunshine streamed through the solar windows. The habitat looked fresh and clean. Hardly anyone else was up and around; the other residents were either at their breakfasts or already at their jobs, leaving the lakeside paths almost exclusively to Eberly and his morning constitutional.
Off to his right he saw the little copse of trees where he had that silly tryst with Jeanmarie Urbain. A romantic spot, he thought, even in broad daylight. I wonder how she felt about our clumsy little rendezvous? Was she nervous? Frightened? Excited? Eberly himself had felt none of those emotions. Women were not important to him. Sex was not important. Sometimes he wondered if the prison doctors had done something to his sex drive back in Austria. He shook his head. Power is what’s important, he told himself. Power keeps you safe. Power is what makes people admire you.
Yet, as he strolled down to the lakeside, he felt that Madame Urbain must have at least respected him. She had said she admired him. She really was lonely. I could have had her, Eberly told himself. She was ready for an affair with me.
Still, he was glad that it hadn’t happened. Too many complications, too many dangers. No emotional commitments, he told himself. A man in my position has to be above all that. Power is more important than sex, he repeated to himself. I don’t need a woman hanging onto me, not when I have the admiration of everyone in the habitat. They
all
love me. They respect and appreciate me, even the dolts who voted against me in the last election. But this time around it’ll be different. This time I might even win unanimously. Once I’ve sprung my little trap on the snippy Ms. Lane, she won’t have a leg left to stand on.
Eberly was grinning happily as he sat on the bench where he was to meet Jeanmarie Urbain. She wasn’t there yet, of course. He had decided to come a good quarter hour earlier than the time they had agreed upon for this meeting. Madame Urbain had been surprised that Eberly had called her well past midnight,
but she’d been alone in her apartment, as Eberly had guessed she would be. Her husband was spending long nights with the other scientists; everyone in the habitat knew that Urbain even slept in his office most nights.
And there she was! Walking slowly, almost uncertainly, along the path from the village. She looked fresh and lovely in a sleeveless little flowered frock. She truly is an attractive woman, Eberly realized. I could have her if I wanted to.
He got up from the bench and, once she was close enough, made a slight bow.
“Madame Urbain, how pleasant to see you again,” he said, smiling his best smile.
She seemed nervous. “You said it was important that we talk together.”
“Yes, it is.” Gesturing to the bench, “Please sit down.”
She looked around as if afraid she’d been followed.
“There’s nothing wrong with the wife of the habitat’s chief scientist sitting on a park bench with the chief administrator in broad daylight,” Eberly said, gesturing to the bench again. “Please make yourself comfortable.”
She perched like a frightened little bird, ready to flutter away at the slightest provocation.
Sitting almost an arm’s length from her, Eberly said, “What I wanted to talk to you about is politics.”
Jeanmarie visibly relaxed.
“And science,” Eberly added.
“Yes?”
“Let me get straight to the point,” he said. “This petition to overthrow our zero-growth protocol is a direct danger to your husband’s work.”
“A danger?” Her eyes widened. “How so?”
Eberly spent the next half hour explaining how unlimited population growth would eat up the habitat’s resources, forcing the government to devote more and constantly more of its precious allocations of food, funds and personnel to provide for a relentlessly growing population.
“We won’t be able to support the scientific staff,” he told her. “We might even have to put them to work in the hospital or the food processing plants.”
“But the ICU would provide funding for the research,” Jeanmarie objected.
“Only up to a point,” said Eberly. “The ICU only provides a small share of the scientific staff’s needs. The citizens of this habitat are expected to shoulder most of the burden.” It was almost true: an exaggeration, but not much of one.
Jeanmarie sat on the bench, head bowed, pondering what Eberly was telling her. At last she said slowly, “You are saying that if the petition succeeds in overthrowing the ZPG protocol, it will endanger the work my husband and the other scientists are engaged in?”
“Most definitely. It could put an end to all the scientific research being conducted here.”
“But what can we do about it?”
Eberly smiled inwardly at her use of
we.
I’ve got her, he told himself. She’ll do what I tell her to.
“Someone must take a stand against this petition,” he told her, radiating sincerity. “Someone must show the women of this habitat that the petition could put an end to our very reason for existence.”
Jeanmarie nodded, but she still looked slightly uncertain.
Eberly grasped her hands and looked straight into her light brown eyes. “Jeanmarie—may I call you Jeanmarie?”
“Yes,” she murmured. “Of course.”
“Jeanmarie, we face a choice. This habitat can be the center for the most important scientific research being conducted in the entire solar system …” He hesitated dramatically. “Or it can sink into a starving, stinking, overpopulated cesspool, like so many poor nations on Earth.”
“I see. I understand.”
“You can be a central figure in saving us from collapse. The choice is yours.”
Jeanmarie Urbain got to her feet, every line of her petite figure showing determination. “Tell me what I must do,” she said to Eberly.
He rose beside her. “Yes,” he said. “I will.”
They each felt relieved that the other didn’t mention their brief tryst of two months before.

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