Saturn

VISION OF SATURN

Manny Gaeta’s rugged face appeared on Holly’s desktop screen.

“Hi,” he said, grinning. “When do you close up shop?” He called her once a week, as punctually as if he had ticked it off on his calendar. Holly kept putting him off. She had no desire to complicate her life. Since Don Diego’s death Holly had buried herself in work, running the naming contests, keeping the office functioning despite Morgenthau’s utter indifference to departmental duties. Her nights she spent thinking about Don Diego, going over the medical record time and again, picturing in her mind every detail of the scene down at the culvert when she first came across the old man’s dead body. It wasn’t an accident, Holly convinced herself. It couldn’t be an accident. There’s no evidence of any physical trauma: His heart was sound, he didn’t have a stroke, he didn’t even have a bump on his head or a bruise anywhere on his body. But he drowned. How? Why?

She hardly saw anyone except Kris Cardenas now and then. They had lunch together every few days. Holly asked Kris to help her go over Don Diego’s medical records. Cardenas looked them over and then told Holly she could find nothing amiss.

“You’ve got to accept the fact that people die, Holly,” Cardenas told her over lunch in the bustling cafeteria. “It doesn’t happen often, but it happens. People die.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Holly insisted.

“Give it up, Holly,” Cardenas said gently. “He was a sweet old man, but he’s dead and you can’t bring him back.”

“Someone killed him.”

Cardenas’s eyes went wide. “Murder?”

Holly nodded, knowing she was being cosmically stupid about this but unable to back away from it.

“I think you need to get your mind off this, kid,” said Cardenas. “You’re getting … well, you’re getting almost paranoid about it.”

“But he couldn’t have just walked down the embankment and stuck his head in the water and drowned. That’s impossible!”

“Get off it, Holly. This is consuming too much of your time and energy. Go out tonight and have a good time. Take your mind off it. Have some fun for yourself.”

Holly saw that Cardenas was in earnest. “Momma Kris,” she murmured. And smiled.

“There must be plenty of young men who’d be happy to take you out for the evening,” said Cardenas.

Trying to push Don Diego out of her mind, Holly replied, “Manny Gaeta’s been calling me.”

“There you go. He’s a chunk of Grade-A beef.”

Holly nodded.

“Do you like him?”

“I went to bed with him once,” Holly blurted.

“Really?”

“That night he rescued the injured astronaut.”

“Oh yeah,” Cardenas said, remembering. “He must’ve been on an emotional high. Pumped up with adrenaline.”

“I guess.”

“And testosterone.”

Despite herself, Holly laughed. “Plenty of that.”

“And he’s been calling you?”

“Uh-huh. But I don’t want to get involved with him. I don’t think I do, but if I go out with him I guess he’ll expect me to do it again.”

Cardenas glanced down at her salad, then said, “You don’t have to do what he expects. You can have dinner and nothing more. Just don’t give him the wrong signals.”

“Signals?”

“Be pleasant, but no touchy-feely.”

“I don’t know if that would work,” Holly said uncertainly.

“Meet him at the restaurant. Stay in public places. Walk yourself home.”

“I guess.”

“Unless you want to go to bed with him again.”

“I don’t! Well, not really. It’s like, I want him to like me, but not too much.”

With a shake of her head, Cardenas dug her fork into the salad. “Men aren’t subtle, Holly. You have to set the rules clearly. Otherwise there’ll be a problem.”

“See,” Holly confessed, feeling confused, “I really want Malcolm to notice me. I mean, he’s the reason I signed up for this habitat in the first place but I’ve hardly even seen him in the past few months and Manny’s flaming nice and all but I don’t want to get myself involved and…” She didn’t know what more to say.

“Malcolm?” Cardenas asked. “You mean Dr. Eberly?”

“The chief of human resources, yes.”

Cardenas looked impressed. “You’re interested in him.”

“But he’s not interested in me.” Holly suddenly felt close to tears.

“Isn’t that always the way?”

“I don’t know what I should do.”

Cardenas glanced around the busy cafeteria, then said firmly, “Have as much fun as you can with the stunt stud. Why not?”

“You think it’ll make Malcolm jealous?”

With a huff that was almost a grunt, Cardenas replied, “No, I don’t think he’ll pay any attention to it. But why shouldn’t you have some fun? He seems to be a nice guy.”

“F’sure.”

“Then have some fun with him while you can. He’ll be leaving for Earth after he’s done his stunt, so you won’t have to worry about a long-term commitment.”

“But I want a long-term commitment,” Holly blurted, surprising herself. She immediately added, “I mean, maybe not right now, and not with Manny, I guess, but sometime.”

“With Eberly?”

“Yes!”

Cardenas shook her head. “Good luck, kid.”

Nadia Wunderly had dieted stringently, exercised regularly, and lost four kilos. Her tireless work on her research proposal had paid off, too: Dr. Urbain had approved her study of Saturn’s rings. His approval was reluctant, she knew; Wunderly was the only scientist on the staff interested in the rings. All the others were focused on Titan, as was Urbain himself.

She was in Urbain’s office, pleading for an assistant and some time on the habitat’s major telescope.

“I can’t do it all by myself,” she said, trying to walk the fine line between requesting help and admitting defeat. “My proposal called for two assistants, if you remember.”

“I remember perfectly well,” Urbain said stiffly. “We simply do not have the manpower to spare.”

The chief of the Planetary Sciences Department sat tensely behind his desk as if it were a barricade to protect him against the onslaughts of revolutionaries. Yet all Wunderly wanted was a little help.

“The main telescope is completely engaged in observing Titan,” Urbain went on, as if pronouncing a death sentence. “This is an opportunity that we must not fail to use to our advantage.”

“But the rings are—”

“Of secondary importance,” said Urbain.

“I was going to say, unique,” Wunderly finished.

“So are the life-forms on Titan.”

Wondering how to convince him, she said, “I wouldn’t need much time on the ’scope. An hour or so each day to compare—”

“An hour?” Urbain looked shocked. His trim little dark beard bristled. “Impossible.”

“But we should use this time as we approach the planet to do long-term studies of the ring dynamics. It’d be criminal not to.”

Nervously running a hand over his slicked-back hair, Urbain said, “Dr. Wunderly, this habitat will be in orbit around Saturn for many, many years. Indefinitely, in fact. You will have ample opportunity to study the dynamics of your rings.”

He almost sneered at those last words. Wunderly knew that behind her back the other scientists called her “the Lord of the Rings,” despite the gender inaccuracy.

She pulled out her trump card. “I thought that if we could study the rings during the months of our approach, do a synoptic study, a thorough one, then we could publish our findings before we established orbit around Saturn, before the university teams fly out to take over our research work. With your name as the lead investigator, of course.”

Instead of snatching at the bait she offered, Urbain stiffened even more at the mention of the university teams that would supercede him.

Visibly trembling, his face ashen, he said in a low, hard voice, “Every resource I have at my disposal will be used to study Titan. All my other staff personnel are working overtime, working nights as well as days, to complete the rover vehicle that we will send to Titan’s surface. That moon bears life! Unique forms of life. You are the only member of my staff who is not working on Titan, you and your precious rings! I leave you undisturbed to study them. Be grateful for that and don’t bother me again with demands that I cannot meet.”

The threat was hardly veiled, Wunderly realized. Leave him alone or he’ll put me to work on Titan, along with everybody else.

She pushed herself to her feet, feeling defeated, empty, helpless. And angry. The man’s fixated on almighty Titan, she grumbled to herself as she left Urbain’s office. He’s so doggone narrow-minded he could look through a keyhole with both eyes.

Precisely at 17:00 hours, Gaeta rapped once on the frame of Holly’s open door and stepped into her office.

“Quitting time,” he announced. “Come on, I’ve got something to show you.”

Despite her inner turmoil, Holly laughed and told her computer she was leaving for the day. The holographic image blinked once and winked off.

“What’s this all about?” Holly asked as she let him lead her out of the building.

“I thought you’d enjoy a good long look at where we’re going,” Gaeta said.

“Saturn?”

“Yeah. You can see it pretty easy now with the naked eye.”

“Really?”

He chuckled. “Just like I thought. You haven’t taken a peek at it, have you?”

“Not for a while,” Holly admitted.

He had a pair of electrobikes waiting outside the office building. Holly followed him, pedaling along the winding bike path across the park, through the orchard and farmlands, out toward the endcap. They left the bikes in racks that stood at the path’s terminus and headed up a narrow footpath, through flowering shrubbery and a few young trees.

“I’ll never get used to this,” Gaeta muttered.

“What?”

“The way gravity works in here. We’re walking uphill but it feels like we’re going downhill.”

Holly put on a superior air. “ ‘The habitat’s spin-induced gravity,’ ” she quoted from the orientation manual, “ ‘decreases as one approaches the habitat’s centerline.’ Which is what we’re doing now.”

“Yeah,” he said, sounding unconvinced.

At last they came to a small building with a single door marked TOENDCAP OBSERVATION UNIT. Inside, a flight of dimly lit metal stairs led downward. As their softboots padded quietly on the steel treads, Holly realized that it felt as if they were climbing up, not down.

“We’re not in Oz anymore,” Gaeta muttered as they made their way along the shadowy stairwell. His voice echoed slightly off the metal walls.

“Oz?” Holly asked.

“It’s an old story. I’ll get the vid beamed up from Earthside for you.”

Holly really didn’t understand what he was talking about. The stairs ended and they walked along a narrow passageway, a tunnel lined with pipes and conduits overhead and along both walls. Although the tunnel looked straight and level, it felt as if they were trudging up an incline. At last they reached a hatch markedendcap observation unit: use caution in entering. Gaeta tapped on the entry pad and the hatch sighed open.

An automated voice said, “Caution, please. You are about to enter a rotating enclosure. Please proceed with care.”

An open cubicle stood on the other side of the hatch. Its walls, floor, and ceiling were softly cushioned.

Gaeta laughed as they stepped in. “Great. They finally got me into a padded cell.”

“Rotation beginning,” announced the computerized voice.

Holly suddenly felt light-headed, almost woozy.

“It’s like an amusement park ride,” Gaeta said, grasping Holly around the waist.

The computer voice announced, “Ten seconds to hatch opening. Use caution, please.”

The padded wall they were facing slid open and Gaeta, still holding Holly by the waist, pulled her through. Holly gasped and forgot the slightly wobbly feeling in her legs. A million stars were spread across her view, hard unblinking pinpoints of light, the eyes of heaven staring back at her.

“Cosmic,” she breathed.

“That’s a good word for it,” Gaeta said in a hushed voice.

Then Holly realized that someone was already there in the dimly lit blister, her back to them, staring out at the stars. She looked short and stocky; in the muted light the color of her spiky hair was difficult to determine; Holly thought it might have been red.

The woman stirred as if coming out of a trance, turned slightly and whispered, “Hi.”

“Hello,” Holly whispered back. It was like being in a cathedral; nobody raised her voice.

Gaeta said softly, “This whole compartment counter-rotates against the habitat’s spin, so you can see everything without having it revolve all around you.”

Holly knew that from the orientation vids, but it didn’t matter. The sight of the universe spread out before her blotted everything else from her awareness. So many stars! she thought. Millions and zillions of them. Red stars, blue stars, big bright ones, smaller dimmer ones.

Gaeta leaned over her shoulder and pointed. “That blue one, there. That’s Earth.”

“And that bright yellow one?”

“Jupiter.”

“So where’s Saturn?” she asked.

The other woman pointed down toward the lower edge of the big curving window. “There.”

Holly stared at a bright pinkish star. No, not a star; she could see that it was a disk, flattened at the poles.

Then it hit her. “Where’s the rings? There’s no rings!”

RING WORLD

The woman smiled at Holly. “Galileo felt just the way you do. The doggone rings disappeared on him.”

“What do you mean?” Holly asked, looking back and forth from the pink disk of the planet to the round, owl-eyed face of the woman, half hidden in the shadows of the dimly lit observation blister.

The woman smiled, a little sadly, Holly thought. She said, “Galileo was the first to see that Saturn had something strange about it, back in 1609, 1610, somewhere in there. His dinky little telescope couldn’t resolve the rings; all he saw was what looked like a pair of stars hovering on either side of Saturn’s disk.”

“And they disappeared?” Holly asked.

“Ah-yup. He laid off observing Saturn for a while, and when he looked again — around 1612 or so, this was — the rings were gone.”

“What happened to them?”

“They didn’t go anyplace. They were still there. But every fifteen years or so Saturn’s tilt comes around to a position where the rings are edge-on to an observer on Earth. They’re so doggone thin they seem to disappear. You can’t see them in low-power telescopes. Not even in some pretty darn big ’scopes, really.”

“So we’re looking at them edge-on right now?” Gaeta asked. “That’s right. Poor Galileo. He didn’t know what was going down. Must have driven him half-crazy.”

Holly stared at the disk of Saturn, as if she could make the rings reappear if she just tried hard enough.

“You can see ’em in the ’scopes over at the astronomy blister,” the woman said. She seemed on the verge of saying more, but stopped herself.

“Are you an astronomer?” Holly asked.

“Sort of. Nadia Wunderly’s my name.” She put out her hand, fingers splayed and thumb sticking straight up. Holly took it and introduced herself and Gaeta. Wunderly shook hands with him, too, her expression serious, as if meeting people was a chore that had to be done correctly.

“What do you mean, you’re sort of an astronomer?” Gaeta asked.

Wunderly’s face became even more somber. “I’m with the Planetary Sciences team,” she explained, “but they’re mostly astrobiologists. They’re all hotted up about Titan.”

“You’re not?”

“Naw. I’m interested in Saturn’s rings. I’m really a physicist by training; a fluid dynamicist.”

Within an hour they were all in Holly’s apartment, munching leftovers from her refrigerator while Wunderly explained that Saturn’s rings could be thought of as a fluid, with each individual chunk of ice in the rings acting as a particle in that dynamic, ever-changing fluid.

“So the ice flakes are speeding around Saturn like they’re on a race track,” Wunderly was saying, making a wobbly circle with the spear of celery she held in one hand, “and banging into one another like people jostling in the New Tokyo subway trains.”

“All the time?” Gaeta asked.

“All the time,” Wunderly replied, then crunched off a bite of celery.

Holly was on the other side of the counter that partitioned off the kitchen, waiting for the microwave to defrost a packaged dinner. “And they have these little moons going around, too?”

“Ay-yup. Sheepdogs. The moons keep the rings from spreading out and mixing into one another.”

Gaeta, sprawled over the living room sofa with a bowl of chips resting on his flat stomach, seemed deep in thought.

“Then there’s the spokes, too,” Wunderly went on. “Magnetic field levitates the smaller ice flakes.” She waved her free hand up and down like a snake’s sinuous undulations.

“Everything’s bumping into everything else,” Holly said, just as the microwave finally pinged.

“And not all of the particles are little flakes, either. Some of ’em are big as houses. The moons, of course, are a few kilometers across.”

“Sounds confusing,” Holly said, carrying the steaming-hot dinner tray into the living room. She put it down on the coffee table in front of Wunderly.

“Sounds dangerous,” said Gaeta, hauling himself up to a sitting position.

“It’s only dangerous if you stick your nose in,” Wunderly said. “I just want to study the rings from a safe distance.”

“Nobody’s been there, huh?” he asked.

“To the rings? We’ve sent automated probes to Saturn, starting with the old Cassini spacecraft darn near a century ago.”

Gaeta was sitting up straight now, his eyes kindled with growing excitement. “Any of them go through the rings? I mean, from one side to the other, top to bottom?”

Wunderly was poking at the dinner tray with the stub of her celery stalk. “Through the ring plane, you mean?”

“Yeah, right.”

Holly sat down beside Gaeta on the sofa.

“They’ve sent probes through the gaps between the rings, of course. But not through a ring itself. That’d be too danged dangerous. The probe would be beaten up, abraded. It’d be like going through a meat grinder.”

Holly said, “Manny, you’re not thinking of doing that, are you?”

He turned to her, grinning. “It’d make a helluva stunt, chiquita.”

“Stunt?” Wunderly looked puzzled.

“That’s what I do for a living,” Gaeta explained. “I go where no one has gone before. The more dangerous, the better.”

“Within reason,” Holly said.

He laughed.

Recognition dawned on Wunderly’s face. “You’re the guy who scaled Mt. Olympus! On Mars. I saw the vid.”

“That was me. And I skiboarded halfway down the slope, too,” Gaeta said, with pride in his voice.

“Yes, but you can’t go skydiving through Saturn’s rings.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll get killed.”

“There’s always an element of risk in a stunt. That’s what makes people watch.”

Holly said, “They pay money to see if you get killed.”

He laughed. “Like the Roman gladiators. Only I don’t hafta kill anybody. I just risk my own neck.”

Wunderly said, “Not in the rings. It’s suicide.”

“Is it?” Gaeta mused. “Maybe not.”

Holly wanted to stop him before he got to like the idea too much. “Manny—”

“I mean, Wilmot and the science guys don’t want me going down to Titan. Maybe the rings would be a better stunt. Nothing else like them in the whole solar system.”

“All the big planets have rings, don’t they?” Holly said. “Jupiter and Uranus and Neptune.”

“Yeah, but they’re just puny little ones. Pobrecitos.”

“The real question is,” said Wunderly, her eyes beginning to sparkle, “how come Saturn has such a terrific set of rings while the other giant planets just have those dinky little ones?”

Gaeta looked at Holly, then back to Wunderly. He shrugged.

Wunderly resumed, “I mean, you’d think that the bigger a planet is, the bigger its ring system would be. Right? Then how come Saturn’s is bigger than Jupiter’s? And those rings are dynamic, they don’t just sit there. Particles are falling into the planet all the time, new particles abraded off the moons. Why is Saturn’s system so big? Are we just lucky enough to see Saturn at precisely the right time when its ring system is big and active? I don’t believe in luck. Something’s different about Saturn. Something important.”

“So what is it?” Holly asked. “What makes Saturn so special?”

“GOK,” said Wunderly.

“What?” Holly and Gaeta asked in unison.

“God Only Knows,” Wunderly replied, with a grin. “But I intend to find out.”

Wunderly talked about the rings for more than an hour, growing more excited with each word. When Gaeta asked about flying through the rings, Wunderly stressed the danger. “It’s impossible, I tell you,” she said. “You’ll get yourself killed.” Which only made Gaeta more excited about the stunt.

Finally she left, but not before Gaeta got her to promise that she would let him see all the vids and other data she had amassed. He told her he would bring his chief technician to take a look, too.

Holly saw Wunderly to the door, and when she closed and turned back to Gaeta, she realized they were alone and he was grinning from ear to ear. Don’t get involved with him, she warned herself. He’s going to get himself killed, sooner or later. Prob’ly sooner.

Yet she went to the sofa and sat beside him and leaned her head on his strong, muscular shoulder and within minutes they were kissing, their clothes vanishing, and he carried her into the bedroom like a conquering hero and she didn’t think of Malcolm Eberly at all. Hardly.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 317 DAYS

Wilmot felt like a harried schoolmaster confronted by a gaggle of unruly students.

“A punch-up?” he bellowed, furious. “The two of you actually struck one another?”

The two young men standing before his desk looked sheepish. One of them had a blue-black little mouse swelling beneath his left eye. He was red-haired and pink-cheeked; Irish, Wilmot guessed. The other was taller, his skin the color of milk chocolate; a crust of blood stained his upper lip. Neither of them spoke a word.

“And what was the reason for this brawl?”

They both remained mute.

“Well?” Wilmot demanded. “Out with it! What caused the fight?”

The one with the black eye muttered, “We disagreed over the name for Village B.”

“Disagreed?”

The other guy said, “He wanted to call the village Killarney.”

His antagonist said, “It’s a proper name. He said it was stupid.”

“And this led to fisticuffs? A disagreement over naming the village? What on Earth were you drinking?”

Alcoholic beverages were not sold in the cafeteria, where the scuffle had occurred, although the habitat’s two restaurants did have liquor as well as wine and a home-brewed beer supplied by one of the farms.

“It’s my fault,” said the one whose nose had been bloodied. “I had a drink in Nemo’s before going to the cafeteria.”

Wilmot glared at them. “Must I suspend all alcohol? Is that what you want?”

They both shook their heads. Wilmot studied their hangdog expressions. At least they look properly repentant, he thought. A logistics analyst and a communications technician, brawling like schoolboys.

With the sternest scowl he could produce, Wilmot said, “One more incident like this and I will suspend your personal drinking privileges altogether. And put you to work in the recycling facility. If you want to act like garbage, I’ll set you to handling garbage six hours a day.”

The one with the black eye turned slightly toward the other and extended his hand. “I’m sorry, bud.”

His erstwhile opponent clasped the hand in his own. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Get out of here, the two of you,” Wilmot growled. “And don’t ever behave so idiotically again.”

The communications tech hurried from Wilmot’s office to his own quarters, where he dabbed a wet cloth to clean off the scabbed blood on his lip and then put in a call to Colonel Kananga.

“I started a fight in the cafeteria,” he said to Kananga’s image in his phone screen.

The Rwandan said, “I’ve already heard about it, through channels. What did Wilmot have to say to you?”

“Nothing much. He seemed more puzzled than angry.”

Kananga nodded.

“What do you want me to do next?”

“Nothing at present. Just go about your duties and behave yourself. I’ll call you when the time comes.”

“Yessir.”

With a population that included people of many faiths, there was no Sabbath aboard the habitat that everyone adhered to, so election day for Phase One of the naming contests was declared a holiday for everyone.

Malcolm Eberly sat in his living room, looking gloomy, almost sullen, as he watched the newscast on the hologram projector. The image showed the polling center in Village A. People filed in and voted, then left. It was about as rousing as watching grass grow.

Ruth Morgenthau tried to cheer him. “The turnout isn’t as bad as my staff predicted. It looks as if at least forty percent of the population will vote.”

“There’s no excitement,” Eberly grumbled.

Sammi Vyborg, sitting on the other side of the coffee table, shrugged his bony shoulders. “We didn’t expect excitement at this phase. After all, they’re only choosing categories for naming, not the names themselves.”

Eberly gave him a sharp glance. “I want the people worked up. I want them challenging Wilmot’s authority.”

“That will come,” said Kananga. He was leaning back on the sofa, his long arms spread across its back. “We’ve been testing different approaches.”

The hint of a frown clouded Eberly’s face. “I heard about the fist-fight in the cafeteria.”

“Before the next election day we can create a riot, if you like.”

Eberly said, “That’s not the kind of excitement that we need.”

“A riot would be good,” said Vyborg. “Then we could step in and quell the fighting.”

“And you could stand as the man who brought peace and order to the habitat,” Morgenthau said, smiling at Eberly.

“Maybe,” he said, almost wistfully. “I just wish—”

Morgenthau interrupted, “You wish everyone would listen to you and fall down in adoration.”

“If I’m going to be their leader, it’s important that they trust me, and like me.”

“They’ll love you,” said Vyborg, his voice dripping sarcasm, “once you have the power to determine life or death for them.”

At the end of election day, Holly sat at her desk tabulating the results of the voting. Villages would be named after cities on Earth, the voters had decided. Individual buildings would be named for famous people. The farms and orchards and other open areas would get names from natural features on Earth or from mythology: that particular vote was too close to call a clear winner.

Her phone announced that Ruth Morgenthau was calling. Holly told the computer to accept the call, and Morgenthau’s face appeared, hovering alongside the statistics.

“Do you have the results?”

Nodding, Holly said, “All tabbed.”

“Forward them to me.”

With a glance at the phone’s data bar beneath her caller’s image, Holly saw that Morgenthau was calling from Eberly’s apartment. She felt nettled that Morgenthau was with Malcolm and she hadn’t been invited. Maybe I can fix that, she thought.

“I’ve got to send them to Professor Wilmot first,” she said. “Official procedure.”

“Send them here as well,” said Morgenthau.

Holly replied, “If I do, there’ll be an electronic record that I violated procedure.” Before Morgenthau could frown, Holly went on, “But I could bring you a copy in person; there’d be no record of that.”

Morgenthau’s fleshy face went crafty for a moment, then she dimpled into a smile. “Very good, Holly. Good thinking. Bring the results to me. I’m at Dr. Eberly’s quarters.”

“I’ll be there f-t-l,” Holly said.

The instant Holly stepped into Eberly’s apartment she felt tension in the air; the room was charged with coiled-tight emotions. Morgenthau, Vyborg, and Kananga were there: Holly thought of them as the hippo, the snake, and the panther, but there was no humor in the characterizations. Kananga, in particular, made her edgy the way he watched her, like a hunting cat tracking its prey.

Eberly was nowhere in sight, but before Holly could ask about him, he entered the living room and smiled at her. The tension that she felt dissolved like morning mist melting under warm sunlight.

“Holly,” he said, extending both arms toward her. “It’s been too long since we’ve seen you.”

“Mal—” she began, then corrected herself. “Dr. Eberly. It’s wonderful to see you again.”

Morgenthau said, “Holly’s brought us the election results.”

“Fine,” said Eberly. “That’s very good of you, Holly.”

Pulling her handheld from her tunic pocket, Holly projected the tabulations on one of the living room’s bare walls. Malcolm doesn’t have any decorations in his apartment, she saw. Just like his office used to be: empty, naked.

For hours the five of them studied the voting results, dissecting them like pathologists taking apart a corpse to see what killed the living person. Kananga disappeared into the kitchen for a while and, much to Holly’s surprise, eventually placed a tray of sandwiches and drinks on the bar that divided the kitchen from the living room. Eberly kept digging deeper into the statistics, trying to break down the voting by age, by employment, by educational background. He wanted to know who voted for what, down to the individual voter, and why.

Vyborg, his tunic unbuttoned and hanging loosely from his spindly shoulders, rubbed his eyes, then took a sandwich from the tray.

“The scientists voted pretty much as a bloc,” he said, gesturing with the sandwich in his hand. “That’s surprising.”

“Why are you surprised?” Morgenthau asked. She had nibbled at a sandwich and left most of it uneaten on the coffee table. Holly wondered how she kept her size if she ate so delicately.

“Scientists are contentious,” Vyborg said. “They’re always arguing about something or other.”

“About scientific matters,” said Eberly. “But their interests are something else. They voted as a bloc because they all have the same interests and the same point of view.”

“That could be a problem,” Kananga said.

Eberly smiled knowingly. “Not really. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Holly followed their ruminations, fascinated, looking from one to another as they surgically dismembered the voting results. She realized that Morgenthau had designed the ballot to include information on the department the voter worked in and the voter’s specific occupation. Secret ballots, Holly thought, were secret only as far as the individual voter’s name was concerned. Each ballot carried enough information for detailed statistical analyses.

“We’re going to need a counterweight for them,” Vyborg said, between bites of his sandwich.

“For the scientists?” asked Kananga.

“Yes,” Eberly snapped. “It’s already taken care of.”

Morgenthau gave Holly her crafty look again. “What about this stuntman that you’ve been seeing?”

Holly blinked with surprise. “Manny Gaeta?”

“Yes,” said Morgenthau. “He’s had his arguments with the scientists, hasn’t he?”

“He wants to go down to the surface of Titan and they won’t allow that until they—”

“The surface of Titan?” Eberly interrupted. “Why?”

Holly explained, “He does spectacular stunts and sells the VR rights to the nets.”

“He’s extremely popular on Earth,” Morgenthau pointed out. “A vid star of the first magnitude.”

“A stuntman,” Vyborg sneered.

Eberly asked, “And he’s in conflict with the scientists?”

“They’re afraid he’ll contaminate the life-forms on Titan,” said Holly. “Dr. Cardenas is trying to help him—”

“Cardenas?” Vyborg snapped. “The nanotech expert?”

“Right.”

“How well do you know this stuntman?” Eberly asked her.

Holly felt a pang surge through her. “We’re pretty good friends,” she said quickly.

“I want to meet him,” said Eberly. “Make it a social occasion, Holly. I want to have dinner with the two of you. Invite Cardenas also. We’ll make it a foursome.”

Holly tried to mask the rush of emotions she felt. Jeeps, she thought, I finally get to go out to dinner with Malcolm but I’ve got to bring along the guy I’ve been sleeping with!

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 312 DAYS

Of the two restaurants in the habitat, Nemo’s was by far the more spectacular. Where the Bistro was small and quiet, with most of its tables out on the lawn, Nemo’s was plush and ambitious. The restaurant was designed to resemble the interior of a submarine, with curved bare metal walls and large round portholes that looked out on holograms of teeming undersea life. The proprietor, a former Singapore restaurateur whose outspoken atheism had gotten him into trouble, had sunk a fair share of his personal assets into the restaurant. “If I’m going to fly all the way out to Saturn,” he told his assembled children, grandchildren, and more distant relatives, “I might as well spend my time doing something I know about.” They were not happy to see the head of the family leave Earth — and take so much of their inheritance with him.

Holly felt distinctly nervous as she followed the robot headwaiter to the table for four that she had reserved. Gaeta had offered to pick her up at her apartment, but she thought it better that they meet at the restaurant. She was the first to arrive, precisely on time at 20:00 hours. The squat little robot stopped and announced, “Your table, Miss.” Holly wondered how it decided she was a Miss and not a Ma’am. Did it pick up the data from her ID badge?

She sat at the chair that allowed her to look across the room at the entryway. The restaurant was not even half filled.

“Would you care for a drink?” the robot asked. Its synthesized voice was warm and deep. “We have an excellent bar and an extensive wine list.”

Holly knew that that was an exaggeration, at best. “No thanks,” she said. The robot trundled away.

Eberly appeared at the entryway, and Kris Cardenas came in right behind him. She wore an actual dress, a knee-length frock of flowered material, light and summery. Holly suddenly felt shabby in her tunic and tights, despite the sea-green shawl she had knotted around her waist.

She stood up as the two of them approached. Neither of them realized they were both heading to the same table, at first, but Eberly caught on quickly and gallantly held Cardenas’s chair for her as she sat down. As Holly introduced them to one another she found herself hoping that Manny wouldn’t come. Maybe he got tied up on something, some test or whatever. She barely paid attention to the conversation between Eberly and Cardenas.

Then Gaeta appeared, wearing a formfitting mesh shirt and denims. No badge. No decorations of any kind, except for the stud in his earlobe. He didn’t need finery. Heads turned as he strode to their table well ahead of the robot headwaiter.

Except for the fluttering in her stomach, the meal seemed to go easily enough. Gaeta knew Cardenas, of course, and Eberly acted as their host, gracious and charming. Conversation was light, at first: They talked about the recent voting and Gaeta’s previous feats of daring.

“Soaring through the clouds of Venus,” Eberly said admiringly, over their appetizers. “That must have taken a great deal of courage.”

Gaeta grinned at him, almost shyly. “You know what they say about stunt people: more guts than brains.”

Eberly laughed. “Still, it must take a good deal of both guts and brains.”

Gaeta dipped his chin in acknowledgment and turned his attention to his shrimp cocktail.

By the time the entrees were served, the topic had turned to Gaeta’s intention to get to the surface of Titan.

“If Kris here can convince Urbain and his contamination nuts that I won’t wipe out their chingado bugs,” Gaeta complained.

Cardenas glanced at him sharply.

“Pardon my French,” he mumbled.

“I thought it was Spanish,” said Holly.

Eberly skillfully brought the conversation back to Urbain and his scientists. Gaeta grumbled about their worries over contaminating Titan, while Cardenas shook her head as she talked about their fears of runaway nanobugs.

“I can understand where they’re coming from, of course,” she said, “but you’d think I’m trying to create Frankenstein’s monster, the way they’re hemming me in with all kinds of safety regulations.”

“They’re overly cautious?” Eberly asked.

“A bunch of little old ladies,” Gaeta said.

Holly asked, “Manny, have you thought any more about going through the rings?”

With a shake of his head he replied, “I haven’t heard anything from that Nadia. She said she’d look into it.”

“I’ll call her,” Holly said. “Maybe she forgot.”

By the time dessert was being served, Eberly was suggesting, “Perhaps I can help you with Dr. Urbain. I have direct access to Professor Wilmot; I can make your case for visiting Titan’s surface.”

Then he added, turning to Cardenas, “And for easing some of the restrictions on your nanotechnology lab.”

“It’s not the restrictions, so much,” Cardenas said earnestly. “I can live with them. I understand why they’re scared, and I even agree with them, up to a point.”

“Then what is your problem?” Eberly asked.

“Manpower, pure and simple,” said Cardenas. “I’m all alone in the lab. I’ve tried to recruit assistants, but none of the younger scientific staff will come anywhere near nanotech.”

Glancing at Holly, Eberly asked, “Hasn’t the Human Resources Department been able to help?”

Cardenas looked surprised at the thought. “I’ve asked Urbain,” she said. “What I need is a couple of lab assistants. Youngsters who have basic scientific training. But the scientists run in the opposite direction when I ask them for help.”

“I see,” Eberly murmured.

Smiling, Cardenas said, “Back when I was on Earth, in the Stone Age, the professors ran their labs with grad students. Slave labor, cheap and plentiful.”

Eberly steepled his fingers. “We don’t have many grad students among us, or even undergraduates, I’m afraid. And everyone has a job slot; that was a requirement for being accepted aboard the habitat.”

“We don’t have any unemployed students,” Holly said.

“I figured that out right away,” said Cardenas. “But I thought I’d be able to talk a couple of the younger people on Urbain’s staff to come over and help me.”

“He won’t allow them to,” Eberly guessed.

Cardenas’s expression hardened. “He won’t let me talk to them anymore. And he’s got them frightened of even meeting me socially. I’m being frozen out.”

Eberly turned to Holly and placed a hand on her wrist. “Holly, we’ve got to do something to correct this.”

She glanced at Gaeta before replying, “If that’s what you want, Malcolm.”

He looked back at Cardenas as he answered, “That’s what I want.”

Dinner ended and the four of them went outside into the twilight atmosphere. Holly’s heart was thumping. What happens now?

Eberly said, “Holly, why don’t we go up to your office and see what we can do to help Dr. Cardenas?”

She nodded. “If I knew what skills you need, Kris, I could pull up a list of possible candidates for you.”

Cardenas said, “I’ll shoot the requirements to you as soon as I get home.”

Gaeta said, “I’ll walk you home, Kris. It’s on my way.”

Holly stood frozen to the spot as Gaeta and Cardenas said goodbye and started along the path that led to her quarters. Eberly had to touch her shoulder to break the spell.

“We have work to do, Holly,” he told her.

But she kept staring at Cardenas and Gaeta, walking side by side down the dimly lit path. Cardenas turned and looked over her shoulder at Holly, as if to say, Don’t worry, nothing’s going to happen. At least, Holly hoped that’s what she was signifying.

She’s my friend, Holly told herself. She knows Manny and I have made out together. She wouldn’t do anything with him. It was his idea to walk her home. She won’t let him do anything.

Still, Eberly had to tell her again, “Holly, come on. We have work to do.”

THE SECOND RALLY

Eberly prided himself on never making the same mistake twice. The first public speech he’d given, to announce the naming contests, had been good enough, as far as it went, but a miserable failure in the eyes of Morgenthau and Vyborg. The crowd at the cafeteria had been sparse, and despite their rousing response to his oratory they made it clear that they considered the whole affair as nothing better than a learning experience, at best.

He intended to profit from that.

With Phase One of the naming campaign finished, and categories for each type of feature in the habitat settled by the first round of voting, Eberly carefully prepared for his second public appearance.

It’s impossible to please everyone, he realized, but it is possible to split people up into small, distinct groups and then find out what each group desires and promise it to them. Divide and conquer: a concept as old as civilization, probably older. Eberly learned how to use it. He was pleased, almost surprised, at how easy it was to use the natural antipathy between the stuntman and Urbain’s scientific staff.

For weeks he had Vyborg build up the stuntman’s presence in the habitat with vids and news releases that showed how heroic, how exciting Gaeta was: the conqueror of Mt. Olympus on Mars, the man who trekked across Mare Imbrium on the Moon. Vyborg cleverly played up the scientific information that Gaeta had harvested during each of his feats. Now he wanted to be the first human being to set foot on the murky, forbidding surface of Titan. Will the scientists allow him to do it? Humans will land on Titan someday, sooner or later. Why not allow this intrepid hero to take the risks he is so willing to endure? At Eberly’s insistence, no mention was made of Dr. Cardenas and her effort to create nanobugs to attack the contamination problem. “There will be no publicity about nanotechnology,” he decided.

Kananga’s people helped to divide the general populace. It was pathetically simple to set individuals against one another. Eberly himself hit on the idea of using vids from Earthside sporting events to create organized fan clubs, clannish factions who placed bets on “their” teams and watched each game in boozy uproarious exuberance. When Wilmot and his administrators tried to control the distribution of alcoholic drinks, even beer, the fans spontaneously began meeting in private apartments. A lively commerce in home brew began, and it wasn’t unusual for fights to break out when one fan club clashed with another.

Morgenthau saw to it that Eberly was apprised of each group’s special interests. The machinists complained that their salary level was kept artificially lower than that of the lab technicians. One group of farmers wanted to expand their acreage and plant tropical fruits that Wilmot’s administrators had disallowed because they would require more water and an extensive hothouse to create a warmer, wetter environment than the rest of the habitat. A bitter rivalry was simmering between the fans of two soccer teams that were heading for the World Cup back on Earth. The brawls between them were getting so serious that even Kananga suggested they be toned down.

Through all this, Holly’s work was an invaluable asset to Eberly. She ran the Human Resources Department and faithfully brought to Eberly the statistics he needed to determine all the inner group dynamics. She was earnest, honest, and had no idea that the fractures within the habitat’s social structure were being eagerly fomented by Eberly’s clique.

“We need to do something to bring people together again,” she told Eberly, time and again. “We need some way of unifying everybody.”

Meanwhile, Wilmot watched the growing disharmony with a mixture of fascination and dread. The carefully knit society that had been created for this habitat was unraveling, coming apart at the seams. People were splitting up into tribes, no less. Clans, even. As an anthropologist he was enthralled by their behavior. As the leader of the expedition, however, he feared that the growing chaos would lead to mayhem, perhaps even murder. Yet he resisted the urge to interfere or clamp down with new regulations and enforcements. Let the experiment continue, he told himself. Let them play out their little games. The end result will be more important than any individual’s life; in the final analysis it could be more important than the success or failure of this mission.

Ultimately, Holly urged Eberly, “You’ve got to do something, Malcolm! You’re the only one who has the vision to bring everybody together again.”

He allowed Morgenthau to back Holly’s increasingly insistent pleading with similar suggestions of her own. At last he told them to organize a rally.

“I’ll speak to them,” he said. “I’ll do my best.”

Holly worked sixteen and eighteen hours a day to organize a rally that would bring out everyone in the habitat. She set it up in the open park along the lake outside Village A. She saw to it that the cafeterias and restaurants closed down at 18:00 hours that afternoon; no one was going to have dinner out until after Eberly’s speech was finished.

At Morgenthau’s suggestion, Holly organized parades. The sports fans’ clubs easily agreed to march to the park, each of them carrying makeshift banners of their club’s colors. The musicians among the populace formed impromptu bands and even agreed to play one at a time, rather than competing in cacophony. The farmers put together a march of sorts, not that they walked in any discernable order. So did the other workers, each organized by their specialty.

Still, when the music played and the people marched, only a few thousand showed up. Most of the population stayed home. Holly consoled herself with the thought that they all would watch the rally on video. At least, she hoped so.

Even so, some three thousand people formed a considerable crowd. Eberly looked delighted as they assembled raggedly in front of the band shell where he sat on the stage, watching and smiling at them.

Morgenthau looked pleased, too. Holly heard her say into Eberly’s ear, “This is a big-enough minority to give us the power we need, Malcolm. The ones who’ve stayed home will be swept up in the tide, when the time comes.”

The atmosphere was like an old-fashioned summertime picnic. Music played. People marched, then stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the little band shell and stage that stood at one end of the park.

Manuel Gaeta was the first speaker. Morgenthau introduced him and the crowd roared and whistled as he slowly, shyly, climbed the steps of the stage.

He motioned for quiet, grinning out at a sea of expectant faces. “I’m no public speaker,” he began. “I’ve done a lot of scary things in my life, but I think this is scarier than any of them.”

People laughed.

“I don’t have all that much to say. I hope to be able to get down to the surface of Titan, and when I do, I’d like to dedicate the mission to you folks, the people of this habitat.”

They roared their delight. Holly, sitting beside Eberly at one side of the stage, looked around the crowd, searching for the faces of scientists that she knew. She spotted only a few of them. Neither Dr. Urbain nor Professor Wilmot was in the crowd.

“My real job today,” Gaeta went on, “is to introduce the main speaker. I think you all know him. Malcolm Eberly is director of the Human Resources Department, and the one man among the habitat’s top staff who’s tried to help me. I think he can help all of us.”

With that, Gaeta turned and gestured toward Eberly, who slowly, deliberately got up from his chair and walked to the podium. The crowd’s applause was perfunctory.

“Thank you, Manny,” Eberly said, gripping the sides of the podium with both hands. Looking out into the crowd, he went on, “And thank you, each and every one of you, for coming to this rally this evening.”

He took a breath, then lowered his head, almost as if in prayer. The crowd went silent, waiting, watching.

“We have before us a task of awesome magnitude,” Eberly said. “We must face new and unknown dangers as we sail farther into unexplored space than any human beings have gone before.”

Holly was struck by the pitch of his voice. He was a different man on the platform, she saw: His eyes blazed, his voice was deeper, stronger, more certain than she had ever heard before.

“Soon now we will be reaching Saturn. Soon our real work must begin. But before we can start, we have the responsibility of creating a new order, a new society, a new government that will represent us fairly and justly and accomplish all that we want to achieve.

“The first step in creating this new order is the naming of names. We have the opportunity, the responsibility, of choosing the names by which our community will be known. It may seem like a trivial task, but it is not. It is of primary importance.

“Yet what do we see all around us? Instead of unity, there is strife. Instead of clear purpose, there is confusion and struggle. We are divided and weak, where we must be united and strong.”

Holly listened in growing fascination, feeling herself drawn into his web of words. It’s enthralling, she realized. Malcolm is mesmerizing all these thousands of people.

“We are the chosen ones,” he was telling them. “We few, we chosen few, we who will establish human purpose and human dignity at the farthest outpost of civilization. We who will bring the banner of humanity to the cold and hostile forces of nature, we who will show all the universe that we can build a strong and safe haven for ourselves, a paradise of our own creation.

“The naming of names is merely the first step in this quest. We then must create a new government and elect the leaders who will serve us as we begin to create the new society that we desire.

“Instead of rivalry, we must have cooperation. Instead of struggle, we must have unity. Instead of weakness, we must have strength. Let each man and woman here firmly resolve that this society shall be strong and united. Ask not what gain you as an individual will obtain. Ask rather what strength you can contribute to help create a free and flourishing new order. We can build a paradise with our own hands! Will you help to do it?”

They bellowed, “YES!” They clapped and cheered and whistled. Eberly stood at the podium, head bowed, soaking up their adulation the way a flower drinks in sunlight.

The crowd quieted, watched his silent form up on the podium. Slowly Eberly raised his head, looked out on them with an almost beatific smile on his lips.

“Each of you — each man and woman here — must pledge yourselves to the unity and cooperation we need to create the new order. I want each of you to reach out and clasp hands with the person next to you. Friend or stranger, man or woman, take your neighbor’s hand in your own and swear that we will work together to build our new world.”

The crowd murmured, heads turned, feet shuffled. Then, slowly at first, people turned to each other and clasped hands. Holly watched as more and more people embraced, their differences forgotten for the moment, many of them openly sobbing. Holly realized that Malcolm was the only person in the entire habitat who could bring the people together like this.

She was proud to have helped this great man achieve this moment of unity, this powerful emotion of loving friendship.

URGENT COMMUNICATION

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 288 DAYS

Ruth Morgenthau hated these nature walks that Eberly insisted upon. He’s absolutely paranoid, she thought as she trudged reluctantly along the path that led through the park from Village A toward the orchards. He worries that someone might be bugging his apartment the way we’re bugging everyone else’s.

It’s no longer Village A, she reminded herself. It’s Athens now. And the orchard is officially the St. Francis of Assisi Preserve. Morgenthau almost giggled aloud. What a name! What arguments they had had, real shouting battles between herself, Vyborg, and Kananga. Even the normally moderate and reserved Jaansen had raised his voice when it came to naming the habitat’s various laboratory buildings.

The months-long campaign to produce actual names for the habitat’s villages, buildings, and natural features had been little more than a farce. Every vote had a scatter factor larger almost than the number of votes. Everyone in the habitat had an opinion about what the names should be, and hardly two votes agreed with each other. It was a grand mess, but Eberly came through with a magnificent solution.

“Since there is no unanimity among the voters,” he told his inner cadre of confidants, “we will have to make the decisions ourselves.”

That set the four of them wrangling, with Kananga insisting that African names be just as numerous as European or Asian, Vyborg holding out for names that had powerful psychological connotations among the populace, and Jaansen firmly — sometimes stubbornly — proffering his own list of famous scientists’ names. Eberly had stayed above the fray, listening to their squabbles with cold disdain. Morgenthau found the whole affair disgusting; she hadn’t cared what names were chosen, as long as they were not blatantly secular. She had flatly refused to allow the biology facility to be named after Charles Darwin, of course.

In the end, Eberly resolved most of their disputes. When they could not agree, he made the decision. When they wrangled too long, he stepped in and told them to stop acting like children. Morgenthau watched over him carefully, though, and he knew it.

Village A got a European name: Athens. Village B went to the Asians: Bangkok. Village C became Cairo; D became Delhi and E was named Entebbe. The Americans — North and South — complained bitterly, but Eberly stared them down by solemnly proclaiming those were the names that the habitat’s residents had voted for. After all, he pointed out, Americans actually were a minority in the habitat’s population.

Since the votes were secret ballots, Eberly refused to allow anyone to recount them. In a great show of seeming impartiality, he erased all the votes — “So that no one can tamper with them, or use them to cause unrest in the future,” he announced.

There were some grumbles, but the people by and large accepted the names that the voters allegedly chose. Eberly saw to it that there were plenty of American and Latino names sprinkled among the buildings and natural features, to keep everyone reasonably satisfied.

It was a strong, masterful performance, Morgenthau felt. Yet a tendril of worry troubled her. Perhaps Eberly was too strong, too determined to have his own way, too hungry for power. We are agents of God, she reminded herself. We seek power not for ourselves, but for the salvation of these ten thousand lost souls. She wondered if Eberly felt the same way. In fact, she was almost certain that he did not. Yet authorities higher than her own had chosen Eberly to lead this mission; her job was to support him — and keep him from straying too far from the path the New Morality and Holy Disciples had chosen for him.

So Morgenthau walked beside him along the Washington Carver Pathway, which led from Athens to the St. Francis Orchard and beyond, over the little rolling knolls that bore the incongruous name of the Andes Hills toward the farmlands of the Ohio region. She desperately hoped that Eberly would not decide to walk all the way to California, the open region up by the endcap. Her feet hurt enough already.

“You’re very quiet this afternoon,” Eberly said as they walked along the meandering brick path. Those were the first words he himself had spoken in many minutes.

Morgenthau could feel sweat beading on her brow. “I’m just happy that the names have been settled on,” she said. “You did a masterful job, a brilliant job.”

He allowed a wintry smile to curve his lips. “Just as long as the actual votes have been totally erased.”

“Totally,” she swore.

“And no one outside our inner circle knows about how the names were chosen.”

“No one.”

“Not even Holly? She’s very bright, you know.”

Morgenthau agreed with an nod. “She asked why the votes should be erased. Once I told her that it was your decision, though, she put up no resistance.”

Eberly nodded. “I’ll probably have to take her to bed, sooner or later. That will ensure her loyalty.”

Morgenthau gaped at him, shocked. “She’s quite loyal enough now. There’s no need—”

He cut her short. “The next steps we take will be more and more distasteful to her. I’ll have to keep her bound to me personally. Otherwise she might balk, or even rebel against us.”

“But bedding her — that’s sinful!”

“It’s in a good cause. We must all be prepared to make sacrifices.”

She caught his sarcastic tone. “Well, at least she’s rather attractive.”

“A bit dark for my liking,” Eberly said, almost as casually as if he were discussing his preferences in clothing or food. “I favor blondes, with fuller figures.”

Morgenthau felt her cheeks reddening. And yet… Is he toying with me? she wondered. Testing me? She had no desire to pursue this line of discussion. She had no fantasies about her own attractions, or her own preferences.

“You didn’t ask me out on this walk to discuss your plans for romance, did you?”

“No,” he answered, quite seriously. “Hardly that.”

“Then what?”

Without changing his leisurely pace, Eberly looked up at the light poles and the miniature cameras atop them, then out to the green and flowering parkland spread about them.

“Offices can be bugged too easily. There are always prying eyes and ears to worry about.”

She understood. “Out here, it simply looks as if we’re taking in some exercise together.”

“Precisely.” He nodded.

Morgenthau considered that the fact the two of them were walking together might start some tongues wagging, although hardly anyone would suspect her of having a romantic interest in Eberly, or of being of any physical attraction to him. Or any man, for that matter. They all see me as a short, dumpy, overweight loser, Morgenthau knew. I’m no threat to any of them. How little they know!

“Sooner or later we’re going to have to confront Wilmot,” Eberly said, his eyes still scanning for eavesdroppers. “Vyborg is constantly nagging me about removing Berkowitz and installing himself as the chief of communications. I’ve decided that the way to get to Berkowitz is through Wilmot.”

“Through Wilmot?”

“Berkowitz is an innocuous former network executive. He doesn’t appear to have any obvious vices. He runs the Communications Department so loosely that Vyborg is actually in charge of virtually the entire operation.”

“But Sammi wants the title as well as the responsibility,” Morgenthau said. “I know him. He wants the respect and the power.”

“Yes. And he’s impatient. If what he did to that old man Romero is ever discovered…”

“It won’t reflect on you,” she assured him. “It can’t.”

“Perhaps. But still, Berkowitz should be removed.”

“And to do that, you want to go through Wilmot?” Morgenthau asked.

“That’s not the only reason, of course,” Eberly went on. “Wilmot believes he is in charge of the habitat. The day will come when I’ll have to disabuse him of that notion.”

“We can’t have a godless secularist ruling these people!” Morgenthau said fervently.

“I’ll need some ammunition, something to hold over Wilmot.”

“A carrot or a stick?” Morgenthau asked.

“Either. Both, if possible.”

“We’ll need someone to review all his personal files and phone conversations.”

Eberly nodded. “This must be kept totally secret. I don’t want even Vyborg to know that we’re going through Wilmot’s files.”

“Then who should do the work?”

“You,” said Eberly, so clearly and precisely that there was no room to argue. Morgenthau’s heart sank; she saw long dreary nights of snooping into the professor’s phone conversations and entertainment vids.

She lapsed into silence, thinking hard as they walked slowly along the path.

“Well?” Eberly prodded.

“It might be very boring. He’s nothing more than an elderly academic. I doubt that there’s much there to use.”

Eberly did not hesitate a microsecond. “Then we’ll have to manufacture something. I prefer to find a weakness that he actually has, though. Drumming up false accusations can be tricky.”

“Let me talk to Vyborg about it.”

“No,” Eberly snapped. “Keep this between the two of us. No one else. Not yet, at least.”

“Yes,” she agreed reluctantly. “I understand.”

All the time during the long walk back to their offices in Athens, Morgenthau thought about Eberly’s commitment to their cause. He’s seeking nothing more than his own personal aggrandizement, she thought. But he has the charisma to be the leader of these ten thousand people. I’ll have to put up with him. Wilmot, she told herself, is an out-and-out secularist: an atheist or an agnostic, at best. Find something that will hang him. I’ve got to find something that will hang him.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 28? DAYS

“I haven’t slept with him, if that’s what’s worrying you,” said Kris Cardenas.

Holly looked into her cornflower-blue eyes and decided that Kris was telling the truth. She was spending an awful lot of time with Manny Gaeta, but it was strictly business, she insisted. On the other hand, Manny hadn’t asked Holly out or dropped into her office or even phoned her since the night he had walked Kris home.

And Malcolm was as cool and distant as ever. All business, nothing but business. Some love life, Holly thought. It’s all in tatters.

“I’m telling you the truth, Holly,” Cardenas insisted, misinterpreting Holly’s silence.

“I know, Kris,” she said, feeling more confused than unhappy. “Point of fact, I wouldn’t blame you if you did. He’s a dynamo.”

The two women were having a late lunch in the nearly empty cafeteria, well after almost everyone had cleared out of the place.

Cardenas leaned closer to Holly and confided, “He hasn’t come on to me at all. If you weren’t interested in him, I’d be kind of disappointed. I mean, I’m a lot older than he is in calendar years but I’m not repulsive, am I?”

Holly giggled. “Kris, if you’re interested, go right ahead. I’ve got no claims on him.”

“Yes you do.”

“No, not really. In fact, I think I’m better off with him off my scanner screen.”

Cardenas raised a disbelieving eyebrow.

“Really,” Holly said, wondering inwardly if she were doing the right thing, “his only interest in me was purely physical.”

“A lot of relationships have started that way.”

“Well this one’s over. It isn’t really a relationship, anyway. It never was.” Holly was surprised that it didn’t hurt to admit it. Not much, anyway.

Cardenas shrugged. “It’s a moot point. He’s nothing but business with me.”

“Prob’ly in awe of you.”

Cardenas laughed. “I’ll bet.”

“Sure.”

“Never mind,” she said, waving one hand as if brushing away an annoying insect. “You said you’ve got a possible lab assistant for me?”

“Maybe,” Holly said. “I haven’t raised the idea with him, yet. But he’s got some of the qualifications you’re looking for. An engineering degree—”

“What kind of engineering?”

“Electromechanical.”

“How recent?”

Holly pulled her handheld out of her tunic pocket. Raoul Tavalera’s three-dimensional image appeared in the air above their table, together with the facts and figures of his dossier.

Cardenas scanned through the data. “Whose department is he working in?”

“Maintenance,” Holly replied. “But he’s just putting in time there; he doesn’t officially belong to any department. He’s the astronaut that Manny fished out.”

“Oh.” She went through the dossier again, more slowly this time. “Then he’ll only be with us until Manny packs up and leaves.”

“I guess. But he’s available now and you said you needed help right away.”

“Beggars can’t be choosy,” Cardenas agreed. “I’ll have to talk to him. Has he agreed to work with me?”

“He doesn’t know anything about it yet. I can set up a meeting for you, though.”

“Good enough.”

“In my office, kay?”

Cardenas thought a moment. “That’s probably better than inviting him to my lab. He might be scared of having nanobugs infect him.”

Tavalera looked suspicious as he sat down in front of Holly’s desk. He arrived promptly on time, though; that was a good sign, she thought.

She had asked him to come to her office fifteen minutes before Cardenas.

“What’s this all about?” he asked, almost sullenly.

“Job op,” said Holly brightly.

“I’ve got a job, with the maintenance crew.”

“Like it?”

He scowled. “Are you kiddin’?”

Holly made a smile for him. “I’d be worried if you said you did.”

“So what’ve you got for me?”

“It’s in a science lab. You’ll be able to use your engineering education, f’sure.”

“I thought all the science slots were filled. That’s what you told me when I first came aboard here.”

“They are. This is with Dr. Cardenas, in her nanotech lab.”

His eyes widened momentarily. Holly could sense the wheels churning inside his skull.

“Nanotech,” he muttered.

Holly nodded. “Some people are clanked up about nanotechnology, I know.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you?”

Tavalera hesitated a moment, then replied, “Yeah, kinda. Guess I am.”

“You’d be foolish not to be,” Holly agreed. “But working with Dr. Cardenas, you’ll be working with the best there is. It’ll look cosmically good on your resume, y’know.”

“The hell it will. I wouldn’t want anybody back on Earth to know I’d been within a zillion light-years of any nanobugs.”

“Well,” Holly said, “you don’t have to take the job if you don’t want to. We’re not going to force you. You can always stay with Maintenance.”

“Thanks a bunch,” he groused.

He was still wary about the idea when Cardenas arrived. She seemed uncertain about him, as well.

“Mr. Tavalera, I can’t work with somebody who’s frightened to be around nanomachines.”

“I’m not scared of ’em. I’m just scared they won’t let me go back home if anybody finds out I’ve been workin’ with you.”

“You can demand a complete physical,” Cardenas said. “Then they’ll see you’re not harboring any nanobugs in your body.”

“Yeah,” he reluctantly admitted. “Maybe.”

Holly suggested, “We can keep your employment with Dr. Cardenas completely off the record. As far as the authorities Earthside will know, you worked in Maintenance all the time you were aboard this habitat.”

“You can do that?” Even Cardenas looked incredulous.

“I can do it for special cases,” Holly said, thinking about how she would have to keep Morgenthau from poking her fat face into Tavalera’s official dossier.

“You’d do it for me?” Tavalera asked.

“Sure I would,” said Holly.

He looked unconvinced, but he abruptly turned to Cardenas and said, “Well, I guess if you screw up and let killer bugs loose, everybody in this tin can is gonna get wiped out anyway. I might as well work with you. Beats overhauling farm tractors.”

Cardenas glanced at Holly, then started laughing. “You certainly are enthusiastic, Mr. Tavalera!”

His long, horsy face broke into an awkward grin. “That’s me, all right: Mr. Enthusiasm.”

“Seriously,” Holly said to him, “do you want to work with Dr. Cardenas or not?”

“I’ll do it. Why not? What have I got to lose?”

Turning to Cardenas, Holly asked, “Are you satisfied with him?”

Still smiling at her new assistant, Cardenas said, “Not yet, but I think we can work it out.”

She got to her feet and Tavalera stood up beside her, smiling shyly. Holly thought, He looks so much better when he smiles.

Cardenas put out her right hand. “Welcome to the nanolab, Mr. Tavalera.”

His long-fingered hand engulfed hers. “Raoul,” he said. “My name’s Raoul.”

“I’ll see you at the nanolab at eighta.m. sharp,” Cardenas said.

“Eight hundred. Right. I’ll be there.”

Cardenas left. Tavalera stood uncertainly before Holly’s desk for a moment, then said, “Thanks.”

“De nada,”said Holly.

“You meant it, about keeping this out of my dossier?”

“Certainly.”

He fidgeted for a few heartbeats more, then said, “Uh … would you like to have dinner with me tonight? I mean, I ’predate what you did for me—”

Holly cut him off before he spoiled it. “I’d be happy to have dinner with you, Raoul.”

Two weeks later, Cardenas invited Edouard Urbain to her laboratory, to show him what progress she had achieved in decontaminating Gaeta’s suit. Tavalera sat at the master console, set against the wall opposite the door to the corridor.

“Remember, Raoul,” Cardenas said, “we want to be completely honest with Dr. Urbain. We have nothing to hide.”

He nodded, and a small grin played across his face. “I got nothing to hide because I don’t know anything.”

Cardenas smiled back at him. “You’re learning fast, Raoul. I’m very impressed with you.” To herself, Cardenas thought, He’s been a lot brighter than I thought he’d be. Maybe having a couple of dates with Holly has helped him to cheer up about being stuck here.

When the chief scientist stepped through the door, more than ten minutes late, he looked as tense and guarded as a man walking into a minefield. Cardenas tried to put him at his ease by showing him through her small, immaculately neat laboratory.

“This is the assembly area,” she said, pointing to a pair of stainless steel boxlike structures resting atop a lab bench. Gauges and control knobs ran across the face of each. “The nanomachine prototypes are assembled in this one,” she patted one of the breadbox-sized enclosures, “and then the prototype reproduces itself in here.”

Urbain kept a conspicuous arm’s length from the apparatus. When Cardenas lifted the lid on one of the devices, he actually flinched.

Cardenas tried not to frown at the man. “Dr. Urbain, there is nothing here that can harm you or anyone else.”

Urbain was clearly not reassured. “I understand, in my head. Still… I am nervous. I’m sorry, but I can’t help it.”

She smiled patiently. “I understand. Here, come over to the main console.”

For more than an hour Cardenas showed Urbain how the nanomachines were designed and built. How they reproduced strictly according to preset instructions.

“They’re machines,” she stressed, over and over. “They do not mutate. They do not grow wildly. And they are deactivated by a dose of soft ultraviolet light. They’re really quite fragile.”

With Tavalera running the scanning microscope from the main console, Cardenas showed how the nanomachines she had designed broke up the contaminating molecules on the exterior of Gaeta’s suit into harmless carbon dioxide, water vapor, and nitrogen oxides.

“The suit is perfectly clean within five minutes,” she said, pointing to the image from the console. “The residues outgas and waft away.”

Urbain appeared to be intrigued as he leaned over Tavalera’s shoulder and peered intently at the data and imagery. “All the organics are removed?”

Nodding, Cardenas said, “Down to the molecular level there’s not a trace of them remaining.”

“And the nanobugs themselves?”

“We deactivate them with a shot of UV.”

“But they are still on the surface of the suit? Can they reactivate themselves?”

“No,” said Cardenas. “Once they’re deactivated they’re finished. They physically break down.”

Urbain straightened up slowly.

“As you can see, we can decontaminate the suit,” Cardenas said.

“Not merely the suit,” Urbain said, his eyes looking past her. “This process could be used to decontaminate every piece of equipment we send to Titan’s surface.”

“Yes it could,” Cardenas agreed.

For the first time since entering the nanotechnology laboratory, Urbain smiled.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 273 DAYS

“This man Berkowitz has got to go!” Eberly insisted.

Wilmot sank back in his comfortable desk chair, surprised at the vehemence of his human resources director’s demand.

Softly, he asked, “And what gives you the right to interfere with the working of the Communications Department?”

Eberly had stoked himself up to a fever pitch. For weeks Vyborg had been pressuring him, threatening to act on his own if Eberly could not or would not get rid of Berkowitz. Vyborg wanted to be head of communications, and his scant patience had reached its end. “Either you get him removed or I will remove him myself,” the grim little man said. “In a few months we’ll be entering Saturn orbit. I want Berkowitz out of the way before then. Long before then!”

Eberly knew this was a test of his power. Vyborg would never challenge him so unless he felt that Eberly was deliberately procrastinating. Now, Eberly knew, if I don’t deliver Berkowitz’s head, Vyborg will stop believing in me, stop obeying me. So, like it or not, he had to confront Wilmot.

Morgenthau hadn’t come up with a thing that he could use against Wilmot. Although she swore that she spent every night faithfully plowing through his phone conversations and his computer files, she had found nothing useful, so far.

I can do it without her help, Eberly told himself as he arranged to meet the chief administrator. A man can do anything, if he has the unbreakable will to succeed.

Yet now, as he sat before Wilmot’s desk and saw the professor’s steel-gray eyes assessing him coolly, Eberly wondered which of them had the stronger will.

“After all,” Wilmot said, “your position as head of Human Resources doesn’t give you the right to meddle in other departments, does it.”

“This is not meddling,” Eberly snapped. “It’s a matter of some urgency.”

Wilmot thought, He had a big success with the naming contest and the voting connected with it. That rally he held out in the park was a rather rousing event. It’s gone to his head. He thinks he’s already in charge of every department. He thinks he’s going to replace me as chief of the entire habitat. Well, my lad, you have another think coming.

“Urgency?” he asked, deliberately calm and methodical. “How so?”

“Berkowitz is incompetent. We both know that.”

“Do we? I thought the Communications Department was running rather smoothly.”

“Because Dr. Vyborg is doing all the work,” Eberly said.

“Vyborg. That little reptilian fellow.”

Eberly stifled an angry reply. He’s deliberately trying to goad me, he realized. This old man is trying to make me angry enough to make a mistake.

He took in a breath, then said more calmly, “Vyborg is a very capable man. He is actually running the Communications Department while Berkowitz sits on his laurels and does nothing.”

“Much as Ms. Morgenthau is running your office, I should imagine,” said Wilmot, with the trace of a smile.

Eberly smiled back at the older man. You’re not going to make me lose my temper, he said silently. I’m not going to fall into your trap.

“Vyborg is ambitious,” he said aloud. “He’s come to me to ask my help. He feels frustrated, unappreciated.”

“Why doesn’t he come to me? You can’t help him.”

“I agreed to speak to you about the situation,” Eberly said. “Vyborg feels he shouldn’t go over Berkowitz’s head and speak directly to you. He’s afraid that Berkowitz will hold it against him.”

“Really?”

“Berkowitz is a drone, and we both know it. Vyborg does all the work for him.”

“As long as the Communications Department runs well, I have no reason for removing Berkowitz from his position. This discussion is actually over the man’s management method. To his underlings he may seem like a drone, but as long as the department hums along, he’s doing his job effectively, as far as I’m concerned.”

Eberly sat back, thinking furiously. This is a test, he realized. Wilmot is testing me. Toying with me. How should I answer him? How can I get him to do what I want?

Wilmot, meanwhile, studied Eberly’s face carefully. Why is he so worked up about the Communications Department? Does he have some personal grudge against Berkowitz? Or some personal relationship with Vyborg? I wish old Diego Romero were still with us; he kept the department’s different factions working together smoothly enough, before he died.

Eberly finally hit upon a new ploy. “If you find it impossible to remove Berkowitz, perhaps you could promote him.”

Wilmot felt his brows rise. “Promote him?”

Hunching forward on his chair, Eberly said, “Apparently this man Gaeta is going to be allowed to go to the surface of Titan after all.”

“That stuntman?”

“Yes. Dr. Cardenas has convinced Urbain that she can decontaminate Gaeta’s suit so well that the man can go to Titan’s surface without harming the life-forms there.”

“Urbain hasn’t told me of this,” Wilmot said sharply.

Eberly held back a snicker of triumph. You sit in your office and expect everyone to come to you, he sneered inwardly at Wilmot. The real life of this habitat swirls around you and you know almost nothing of it.

“You’re certain that Urbain has approved of this… this stunt?” Wilmot asked.

“The approval isn’t official yet, but Cardenas has worked out an understanding with him.”

Wilmot nodded. “Urbain will notify me when he makes his approval official.”

“Why not ask Berkowitz to join Gaeta’s team, as their full-time publicity manager?”

“Ahh. I see.”

Eberly went on, “Berkowitz would enjoy that, I think.”

“And while he’s enjoying his special assignment, your friend Vyborg can run the Communications Department.”

“He can be given the title of acting director,” said Eberly.

“Very neat. And what happens when Gaeta has performed his stunt and it’s all finished?”

Eberly shrugged, “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” To himself, though, he said, By the time Gaeta’s done his stunt we’ll have the new constitution in effect and I’ll be the elected leader of this habitat. Berkowitz, Vyborg — even you, old man — will have to bow to my wishes.

But as he left Wilmot’s office, his satisfaction melted away. He was playing with me, Eberly realized, like a cat plays with a mouse. Like a puppeteer pulling my strings. He let me have my way with Berkowitz because he intended to do it all along; he was just waiting to see how I jumped. Berkowitz doesn’t mean a thing to him. It’s all a game he’s playing.

I’ve got to get control over him, Eberly told himself. I’ve got to find some way to bend the high and mighty Professor Wilmot to my will. Make him jump through my hoops.

When is Morgenthau going to find something I can use? There must be something in Wilmot’s life that I can use for leverage. Some weakness. I’ve got to get Morgenthau to work harder, concentrate on his files, his phone conversations, everything he says or does, every breath he draws. I want him in my grasp. That’s vital. If I’m to be the master here, Wilmot’s got to bow down to me, one way or the other.

Holly saw Raoul Tavalera sitting alone in the cafeteria, bent over a sizable lunch. She carried her tray to his table.

“Want some company?” she asked.

He looked up at her and smiled.

“Sure,” he said. “Sit right down.”

Tavalera had invited her to dinner at least once a week since starting work at the nanotechnology lab. Holly enjoyed his company, although he could get moody, morose. She tried to keep their dates as bright and easy as possible. So far, he’d worked up the nerve to kiss her goodnight. She wondered when he would try to go farther. And what she would do when he did.

“How’s it going in the nanolab?” Holly asked as she removed her salad and iced tea from her tray.

“Okay, I guess.”

“Dr. Cardenas treating you well?”

He nodded enthusiastically. “She’s easy to work with. I’m learnin’ a lot.”

“That’s good.”

“None of it’ll be any use when I go back to Earth, though.”

For a moment, Holly didn’t know why he would say that. Then she remembered, “Ohh, nanotech’s banned on Earth, isn’t it?”

Tavalera nodded. “They’ll probably quarantine me until they’re certain I don’t have any nanobugs in my body.”

“There’s a nanotech lab in Selene.”

“I’m not gonna live underground on the Moon. I’m goin’ back home.”

They talked about home: Holly about Selene and Tavalera about the New Jersey hills where he had grown up.

“A lotta the state got flooded out when the greenhouse cliff hit. All the beachfront resorts … people go scuba diving through the condo towers.”

“That’s something you don’t have to worry about in Selene,” Holly pointed out.

Tavalera grinned at her. “Yeah. The nearest pond is four hundred thousand kilometers away.”

“We have a swimming pool in the Grand Plaza!”

“Big fr — uh, big deal.”

Ignoring his near lapse, Holly went on, “It’s Olympic-sized. And the diving platforms go up to thirty meters.”

With a shake of his head, Tavalera said, “You wouldn’t get me up there, low gravity or no low gravity.”

He just wants to go home, Holly saw. He wants to get back home. It made her sad to realize that she had no home to go back to. This is my home, she told herself. This habitat. Forever.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 266 DAYS

If it must be done, Wilmot said to himself, ’twere best done quickly.

It was a dictum that had served him well all during his long career in academia. He often coupled it with Churchill’s old aphorism: If you’re going to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite about it.

So he invited Gaeta and Zeke Berkowitz to dine with him, in the privacy of his own apartment. Berkowitz was an old friend, of course, and Wilmot was delighted when he showed up precisely on time, before the stuntman.

As Wilmot poured a stiff whisky for the news director, Berkowitz grinned amiably and said, “Must be pretty bad news, to make the first drink so tall.”

Wilmot smiled, a little sheepishly, and handed the glass to Berkowitz. “You still have your nose in the wind, don’t you, Zeke?”

Berkowitz shrugged. “I’d be a lousy newsman if I didn’t know what was going on.”

Wilmot poured an even stiffer belt for himself.

“Rumor is,” Berkowitz said, still standing by the apartment’s compact little bar, “that you’re going to kick me upstairs.”

With a slight nod, Wilmot admitted, “I’m afraid so.”

Before Berkowitz could ask another question, they heard a rap at the door. “That will be Gaeta,” said Wilmot, heading for the door.

Gaeta wore a denim work shirt and jeans, about as formal an outfit as he possessed. He looked serious, almost somber as Wilmot introduced him to Berkowitz and asked the stuntman what he wanted to drink.

“Beer, if you have it,” said Gaeta, still unsmiling.

“Would Bass ale do?” Wilmot asked.

Gaeta broke into a grin. “It’ll do very well, thanks.”

Wilmot steered his two guests to the sitting room chairs. Once they were comfortably settled, he said to Gaeta, “I’ve asked you here because I want to assign Zeke to be your full-time publicity man.”

Berkowitz nodded knowingly. The stuntman looked surprised.

By the time Wilmot carried the dinner tray to the table, though, the two men seemed to be getting along well enough.

“So if Urbain or the IAA or whoever prevents me from going down to Titan, I’ll take a spin through the rings,” Gaeta was saying.

Berkowitz twirled his fork in the air. “Through the rings? Wow. That’d be spectacular.”

“You think you could get me some coverage, huh?”

“A brain-dead librarian could get you coverage for that. I mean, everybody’s seen footage from the automated probes they’ve sent to Titan’s surface. Fascinating stuff, yeah, but it’s been done. Nobody’s been to the rings.”

“No human has set foot on Titan,” Wilmot pointed out.

“I know. But the rings! They’ll salivate over that. I could run an auction right now and gin up enough cash to pay for your whole crew and then some.”

Gaeta leaned back in his chair, looking contented. Wilmot saw that Berkowitz was as happy as a child with a new toy. The professor felt relieved. I can give Eberly and that Vyborg creature what they want without hurting anyone’s feelings. A win — win situation. All to the good.

Pancho Lane could feel her face tightening into a frown as she watched Manuel Gaeta’s message to her.

“So even if I can’t get to Titan, this stunt with the rings oughtta pay you back for the trip with interest.”

Yeah, but what about my sister? Pancho demanded silently.

Gaeta rambled on about his possible stunts while Pancho sat fuming behind her desk. What about Susie? she wondered. Holly, I mean.

At last Gaeta said, “Tour sister’s fine, Ms. Lane. She’s a very bright young woman. Very intelligent. And very attractive, too. She has lots of friends and she seems very happy here. Not to worry about her.”

But Pancho focused on his “And very attractive, too.” Gaeta had something of a reputation. Handsome chunk of beef, Pancho had to admit. I wouldn’t throw him out of my bed. Is he making it with my sister?

Pancho sighed. If he is, there’s not much I can do about it. I just hope Susie enjoys it. I hope he doesn’t hurt her. If he does, this’ll be his last stunt. Ever.

Professor Wilmot rocked slightly in his desk chair as he dictated his status report to Atlanta.

“It’s interesting to observe the different motivations of these people. Eberly isn’t after power so much as adulation, it seems to me. The man wants to be adored by the people. I’m not certain what Vyborg wants; I haven’t been able to work up the stamina to get close to the man. Berkowitz is happy to be rid of the responsibilities of heading the Communications Department. He’s back to being an active newsman. I understand there’s some friction between him and Gaeta’s technical crew, but that’s perfectly understandable. Quite normal.

“Gaeta himself is fascinating, in his own way. He actually wants to risk his hide on these stunts he does. He enjoys them. Of course, they bring him money and fame, but I believe he’d do them anyway, merely for the sheer adrenaline rush they give him. In a strange way, he’s rather like a scientist, except that scientists enjoy the intellectual thrill of being the first to discover new phenomena, while this stuntman enjoys the visceral excitement of being the first man on the scene.”

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 205 DAYS

Night after night Holly spent in her apartment, alone, calling up programs from Earth on forensic medicine. She recalled with perfect clarity the way Don Diego’s crumpled body had looked when she discovered it lying headfirst in the water of the irrigation culvert. She remembered every detail of the medical examination report: no heart attack, no major stroke, nothing unusual except that the heels of his hands seemed slightly abraded, and his lungs were full of water.

What would roughen the heels of his hands? Holly wondered. The concrete surface of the culvert, she decided. Then she began to search for a reason why his hands were bruised. Eventually she came to the conclusion that he was trying to push his head out of the water, trying hard enough to scrape the skin off the heels of both hands.

And why, if he was trying so hard to get up, why couldn’t he lift his head out of the water? Because something — or someone — was holding his head down. Drowning him. Murdering him.

Not trusting her memory, good as it was, Holly called up the medical report and studied it for several nights in a row.No sign of violence. Only the abrasions on his hands.

It wasn’t much to go on. But Holly doggedly pursued that one clue. She thought of it as a clue. She was convinced Don Diego had been murdered.

Why? By whom?

Closing her eyes, she envisioned once again the scene when she found the old man’s body. No signs of a struggle. Nothing disturbing the slope that led down to the concrete except some footprints in the dirt. Boot prints, actually.

Professor Wilmot also spent his evenings watching video displays, as usual. The business of the habitat faded into oblivion as he sat in his favorite chair, swirling his glass of whisky in his right hand, watching his collection of vids about naked women undergoing torture. Sometimes, when a scene was particularly revolting, he felt a twinge of guilt. But that passed quickly enough. It’s all make-believe, he told himself. They wouldn’t produce such vids unless there was a market for them. I’m not the only one who enjoys this sort of thing.

He had run through the collection he’d brought aboard the habitat, seen each of them twice and his favorites more than that. For weeks he fretted about ordering more from Earth. They made new ones all the time, he knew. Fresh faces. New young bodies.

There was a certain danger in calling a supplier on Earth and ordering more vids. Even if he routed his order through a middleman at Selene, sooner or later it would be traced to the habitat. But there are ten thousand people here, he told himself. How would they know it’s me, and not some clerk or farm worker? Besides, I’d wager there are others aboard who have similar tastes and make similar orders.

After weeks of arguing with himself, and watching the same old vids, he sent an order to Earth by the habitat’s tight-beam laser communications link. It was all in code, of course. No one will know, Wilmot reassured himself. After all, who would be tapping the comm links? It’s not as if I’m using my personal phone line. Someone would have to tap every outgoing and incoming message to find my one brief little order. Who would be fanatic enough to do that?

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 87 DAYS

“It’s remarkable, really,” Wilmot was saying to his computer. “They have drafted a constitution and are preparing for elections. By the time we establish ourselves in orbit about Saturn, they’ll be ready to transfer power to their new government.”

The computer was automatically encrypting his words for transmission to Earth, to the headquarters of the New Morality in Atlanta, the covert financial backers of the Saturn mission. Wilmot was the only person in the habitat who knew where the funding for this experiment had come from, and he intended to keep the secret entirely to himself. His reports back to Atlanta were private, coded, and sent toward Earth by the automated laser system, not by the habitat’s regular communications links.

“The man Eberly has formed something of a clique around himself,” Wilmot continued, “which is more or less what I had expected. The scientists have formed a countervailing political force, led by Dr. Urbain. Frankly, Urbain seems more interested in personal flattery than politics, but he seems to be the acknowledged leader among the technical types.

“Even the engineers have organized a political bloc, of sorts. Their leader seems to be a Russian exile named Timoshenko, although he insists that he has no interest in politics. Yet he’s allowed the engineers to bruit his name about as a candidate for the chief administrator’s position. Frankly I doubt that he has one chance in a million.

“There have been a few scuffles here and there, but by and large the political campaigning has been remarkably free of the usual hooliganism, which is little short of extraordinary when one considers that the bulk of our population is made up of dissidents and free-thinkers who got themselves into trouble on Earth. I believe the reason is that most of the population doesn’t care a fig about this political campaigning. Most of the people here have absolutely no interest in their own government. In fact, they try rather hard to avoid any commitments of any sort.”

Wilmot leaned back in his comfortable swivel chair and re-read his words from the image displayed above his desk. Satisfied with his report so far, he continued:

“In three weeks we will have the general elections that will bring our new constitution into power and elect the individuals who will form the new government. Eberly is the odds-on favorite. I shall have to install him as the new chief administrator and gracefully retire to the ceremonial role of president. I suspect that Eberly will name Urbain to some important-sounding but innocuous position: probably deputy administrator or some such. I have no idea of how he’ll handle the engineer, Timoshenko.

“Some of the people around Eberly frankly give me the willies. He’s surrounded himself with nonentities who believe themselves to be quite important, such as this Vyborg person who’s now running the Communications office. I know that the Morgenthau woman is a high official in the Holy Disciples. Why she volunteered for this mission is beyond me. And this Kananga fellow! He’s positively frightening.”

Wilmot talked on, bluntly giving his opinions on each of the major players in the habitat’s coming elections. He would have been much less free with his judgments if he had known that every word he spoke was being picked up by molecular-film microphones and recorded for Eberly’s perusal.

Late in the afternoon the cafeteria was quiet, nearly empty; most of the lunchtime crowd had left, and the dinner rush hadn’t started yet. Manuel Gaeta sat with three others at a table near the holowindow that showed a view of a pristine lake in the Rockies, a picture from distant Earth taken long before the greenhouse warming had driven millions from their flooded cities to makeshift refugee camps in such regions.

Of the four people talking intently together over the remains of their lunches, Gaeta was the only one who looked anywhere near happy.

“We can do it,” Gaeta said firmly.

“It would be awfully dangerous, Manny,” said Kris Cardenas.

Nadia Wunderly nodded her agreement. “It’d be like trying to walk past a firing squad that uses machine guns.”

Gaeta shrugged carelessly. “All I gotta do is go in-between the bullets.” He turned to von Helmholtz. “What do you think, Fritz?”

Von Helmholtz cast a cold eye at him. “Isn’t it enough to do what we came here to do?”

Gaeta said, “We’ll do the Titan gig if we can get the scientists to allow it. But while we’re out here, why not do a spin through the rings?”

“Because you could get killed,” von Helmholtz snapped.

Spreading his hands as if he’d proven his point, Gaeta countered, “That’s why people watch, Fritz. They’re waiting to see if I get killed.”

“What is worse, you’ll ruin the suit.”

Gaeta laughed.

“There’s a really strong chance that you would be killed,” Wunderly said.

“Not if you can pick out the right spot in the rings for me to traverse. A spot without so many big chunks.”

With a sigh, Wunderly explained, “I’d have to study the rings close-up for months, Manny. Years, maybe.”

“We’ve still got a few weeks before we go into orbit around Saturn. Won’t that be enough?”

“I’d need all the computer time we’ve got on board to make any reasonable computations,” she said. “Plus I’d need time on the big ’scopes and Urbain won’t let me near them.”

Von Helmholtz looked surprised. “He won’t allow you to use the telescopes in the astronomy pod?”

Wunderly shook her head. “Urbain won’t let me have any time on the big ’scopes. They’re all being used full-time on Titan.”

“All of them?”

“All of them,” said Wunderly.

“Maybe we can talk him into letting you use one,” Gaeta suggested.

“He won’t. I’ve asked, more than once. Besides, I’d need a ton of computer time.”

“Maybe somebody else should ask him,” said Gaeta.

“Who?” Cardenas asked.

“Wilmot. Or if not him, maybe Eberly can swing it.”

Again she shook her head. “Urbain won’t listen to Eberly. He won’t even talk to him. They’re running against each other in the elections, remember?”

Eberly, meanwhile, was sitting tensely in the living room of his apartment, which had become the command center for his election campaign. A bank of computers lined the wall where the sofa had once been, each machine humming with continuous recording of the conversations in every public space in the habitat and quite a few private apartments and offices, including Wilmot’s and Urbain’s.

“I don’t like this constitution,” Morgenthau was saying. “I never did, and the closer we get to putting it into action, the less I like it.”

Eberly studied her fleshy face as she sat in the upholstered chair on the opposite side of the oval coffee table. Her usual smile was gone; she was deadly serious.

“Why didn’t you voice your objections when we were drafting it?” he asked sharply.

“I thought Vyborg and Jaansen were thrashing everything out satisfactorily, and then you made it clear that you wanted an end to their arguing.”

With growing impatience, Eberly said, “I’ve explained it to all of you time and again. As long as the emergency-powers clause is in the constitution all the rest of it doesn’t matter.”

“I still don’t like it,” Morgenthau insisted.

Eberly thought he knew what the problem was. Morgenthau was no fighter; she was an agent planted on the habitat ostensibly to help him, but actually to keep watch on him and report back to the Holy Disciples. Someone high up in the hierarchy must have finally reviewed the new constitution and told her that it didn’t suit the stern moral standards of the Disciples. She would never oppose me like this, Eberly said to himself. Not unless she’s under pressure from her superiors back on Earth.

“It’s too late to change it now,” he said, trying to keep his voice calm, even. “The people vote on it in three weeks.”

Morgenthau said, “You could withdraw it. Say it needs further work.”

“Withdraw it?” Despite his self-discipline, Eberly nearly shouted the words. “That would mean we’d have to postpone the election.”

Morgenthau said nothing.

How can I get her back on my side? Eberly asked himself. How can I make her see that she’d be better off following my orders than the stupid commands from Earth?

“Listen to me,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, bending his head closer to hers. “In three weeks the people will vote. They’ll accept this constitution for the very same reasons that you distrust it: Because it promises individual freedom and a liberal, relaxed government.”

“Without any rules for population control. Without any moral standards.”

“Those will come later, after the constitution is adopted and we are in power.”

Morgenthau looked totally unconvinced.

“As I’ve explained more than once,” Eberly said, straining to hold on to his swooping temper, “once I’m in power I’ll declare a state of emergency and suspend all those liberal laws that bother you.”

“How can you declare a state of emergency if everyone is satisfied with the constitution?”

“We’ll need a crisis of some sort. I’ll think of something.”

Morgenthau’s face looked as hard as steel. “You were taken out of prison and placed in this habitat to form a proper, god-fearing government. You are not living up to your end of the agreement.”

“That’s not true!” he protested. Inwardly, a panicky voice whined, They can’t send me back to prison. They can’t!

“All we need to do is generate a crisis,” he said aloud. “Then Kananga and his security teams can clamp down.”

“It won’t be that simple,” Morgenthau said. “The more power you give Kananga the more he will seize control of everything. I don’t trust him.”

“Neither do I,” Eberly admitted, silently adding, I don’t trust anyone.

“And then there’s this Cardenas woman, working with nanomachines. They’re the devil’s spawn and yet you allow her to go right ahead and do her evil in our midst.”

“Only until I’m in power,” Eberly said.

“She’s got to go. Get rid of her.”

As Eberly nodded somberly, the solution to his problems suddenly struck him with the blinding force of a revelation. Yes! he said to himself. That will solve everything!

He made a warm smile for the still-scowling Morgenthau and, leaning forward, patted her chubby knee. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of everything.”

Her frown faded somewhat, replaced by curiosity.

“Trust me,” Eberly said, smiling still more broadly.

LABORATORY LAVOISIER

Kris Cardenas wondered why Urbain had asked her to meet with him. Not in his office, not even in the astronomy pod, where the big telescopes were housed. Here in the science building, in his main laboratory, which had been named for the eighteenth-century French founder of modern chemistry, Antoine Laurent Lavoisier.

Cardenas’s own lab (named after the American physicist Richard P. Feynman) was in a separate building, up at the top of the ridge on which Athens was built, as far away from the other labs as possible. As she made her way down the bricked path that curved past the low, white-walled apartment buildings and shops of the village, Cardenas felt the old resentment against unreasoning fear of nanotechnology still simmering deep within her.

Keep it under control, she warned herself. Keep everything in perspective. Remember that Lavoisier was beheaded during the French Revolution. Idiots and bastards have always been in our midst.

So she put on a sunny smile as she entered the lab complex and saw Edouard Urbain standing in the doorway to his laboratory, waiting for her. He looked nervous. No, Cardenas decided, not nervous. Excited. Expectant. Almost like a little boy standing in front of the Christmas tree, eager to tear into the brightly wrapped packages.

“Dr. Cardenas!” Urbain greeted her. “How good of you to come.”

“It was good of you to invite me,” she replied.

He ushered her into the lab. Cardenas was slightly taller than Urbain, her sandy blond hair and bright blue eyes a sharp contrast to his dark, slicked-back hair and eyes of mahogany brown.

The lab was two stories tall, its bare metal ceiling the underside of the building’s roof. A tall screen stood just inside the doorway, cutting off the main area of the lab from view. The place felt to Cardenas like an airplane hangar or an empty warehouse. With a slight gesture, Urbain led Cardenas along the screen toward its end.

“I wanted you to see this,” he said, his voice brimming with anticipation. She thought his moustache would start quivering any moment. “I am very proud of what we have accomplished.”

They reached the end of the screen. With a flourish, Urbain turned the corner and pointed to the massive object standing in the middle of the laboratory floor.

The first thing that Cardenas noticed was that the lab had been cleaned, the floor swept. Not a scrap of paper or equipment in sight. No wires snaking across the floor or dangling from overhead mounts. He’s spiffed up his lab, Cardenas thought. He’s got it looking like an old automobile showroom.

“There it is,” Urbain said, aglow with pride. “Titan Alpha.”

A spacecraft, Cardenas realized. More than two meters tall; nearly three, she estimated. Standing on a pair of caterpillar treads, like an old-fashioned tank. Massive. Silvery-gray. Titanium, she guessed. Its oblong body was studded with projections.

“It has been built here, completely,” Urbain said, almost in a whisper. “It did not exist when we left Earth. None of it. My staff and I constructed it.”

Cardenas became aware that half a dozen men and women were standing off along the far wall of the lab, like students who had been lined up and told to remain quiet and respectful.

“You’ll go to the surface of Titan in this,” Cardenas said.

“Not in person, of course,” said Urbain. “Alpha is designed to be teleoperated from here in the habitat. It is a mobile laboratory that will explore the surface of Titan for us.”

“I see.”

Urbain snapped his fingers; one of the technicians across the lab whirled and began tapping out instructions on a desk-sized console. The spacecraft seemed to stir. A loud electrical hum filled the lab and a pair of long, skeletal arms unfolded from one side of its body. Pincerlike claws opened and shut. Cardenas instinctively moved back a couple of steps.

Urbain laughed. “Don’t be afraid. She won’t harm you. Those grippers can handle the most delicate biological samples without damaging them.”

“It’s… very impressive.”

“Yes, isn’t she? Alpha is equipped with a complete array of sensors. She can take samples, store them in insulated capsules and send them back to us, here in the habitat, for analysis.”

“Won’t it return after it’s finished its mission?”

“No. Never. She remains on Titan. We will send replenishments of fuel and supplies for its sensors.”

“Isn’t it nuclear powered?” Cardenas asked.

“Of course! The fuel is necessary for the sample-return rockets.”

“I see.”

Urbain sighed contentedly. “I haven’t had as much time to spend on this project as I would have liked. My hours are consumed with this political campaign, you know.”

Cardenas nodded. “Yet you’ve completed the job. It’s a great accomplishment.”

“I am blessed with a fine staff.”

Afraid that Urbain would order the bulky spacecraft to start trundling across the laboratory floor, Cardenas said, “I’m very grateful that you asked me to see it.”

She started toward the door, slowly. Urbain caught up with her in two strides.

“My motivation was not entirely from pride,” he said, looking a little less animated now. “I have a favor to request of you.”

Still walking along the screen, feeling somehow oppressed by the massive spacecraft, almost threatened by it, Cardenas replied with, “A favor?”

Urbain hesitated, as if he didn’t know how to choose the right words. “It concerns Alpha’s self-repair capabilities.”

Cardenas glanced sharply at him.

“I was wondering,” Urbain said as they turned around the end of the screen, “if nanomachines might be able to repair Alpha while she is on the surface of Titan.”

Cardenas nodded, thinking, So that’s it. They’re all terrified of nanobugs until they come up against something where nanomachines can help them.

“I mean,” Urbain went on, “you yourself have nanomachines in your body, don’t you? They’re constantly repairing your tissues, aren’t they?”

With a slight laugh of relief, Cardenas answered, “And you’d like to have a nanotech immune system built into your spacecraft.”

“Nanomachines that could continuously repair any equipment failures or damage.”

“Or wear and tear,” Cardenas added.

“Yes! Precisely.”

She stopped at the open doorway, thinking swiftly. “It would take time, Dr. Urbain. When do you plan to send the spacecraft to Titan?”

“As soon as we establish orbit around Saturn. Within a few days of that, at the most.”

“I certainly can’t come up with a set of therapeutic nanos that soon.”

“But perhaps they could be sent to Alpha after she is on Titan, once you produce them.”

“Perhaps,” Cardenas conceded.

“Will you look into the possibilities?” he asked eagerly.

Cardenas saw in his eyes that he regarded this machine of his almost like a human being, a woman he loved and cherished and wanted to protect, keep from harm. A kind-hearted Dr. Frankenstein, she thought, worried about the creature he’s created. Then a sharp pang of memory hit her. How many times have you been called Frankenstein? she asked herself.

“Can you do it?” Urbain pressured.

“I can try.”

“Good! Excellent!”

“Under one condition,” she added.

His brows rose toward his receding hairline. “Condition? If you mean you want me to allow that… that stuntman to go down to the surface—”

Cardenas said, “But we’ve tested the decontamination procedure several times now. I’ve sent you the reports.”

“Tests in the airlock. Yes, I’ve scanned your reports.”

“So you know that we can clean his suit to your satisfaction.” Suddenly Cardenas got a new inspiration. “We can decon your spacecraft the same way.”

“Alphacan be decontaminated the normal way.”

“Yes, but if you use nanomachines you won’t have to subject the spacecraft to such high levels of radiation. Won’t that be better for its electronics systems?”

Urbain started to reply, stopped himself, then admitted, “Yes. Definitely.”

“I can set that up for you in a couple of days. By the time we’re in Saturn orbit I’ll be able to decon your craft as clean as new-fallen snow.”

“But that doesn’t mean that I can allow the stuntman to go down to the surface. The IAA forbids it. My hands are tied.”

Don’t push it any farther, Cardenas told herself. You’ve got a toe in the door. Let it rest there, for now.

Yet she heard herself say, “There is one other thing.”

Urbain’s brows went up again.

“It’s rather minor…”

“What is it?”

“One of your staff people, Dr. Wunderly—”

“Wunderly?”

“She needs some telescope time to study the rings.”

“Impossible. I’ve told her—”

“Surely you can spare some time at one of the telescopes for her,” Cardenas said, more as a declaration than a request. “After all, you’re going to have your spacecraft operating on Titan’s surface in a few weeks, won’t you?”

Urbain hesitated. “Yes, that’s true enough.”

“And you want to be able to use nanomachines to keep it in good shape.”

His face showed clearly that he understood Cardenas’s threat. “I see. Yes. Very well, I will attempt to get some time for Wunderly on one of the telescopes so she can study her wretched rings.”

“Fine,” said Cardenas. “And I’ll attempt to develop a set of nanomachines that can auto-repair your spacecraft while it’s on Titan.”

“And to decontaminate Alpha,” Urbain reminded her.

Cardenas nodded her agreement and started for the door. Then she turned back. “By the way, how is the political campaign going?”

Urbain took in a sharp breath, as if surprised by her sudden change of subject. Then he shrugged. “It takes too much of my time. I must give speeches, prepare position papers on everything from medical care to garbage recycling. Every person in the habitat feels free to ask me pointless questions and to give me their own vapid opinions.”

“That’s politics, I guess,” Cardenas said, chuckling.

“I fear it will be even worse after I am elected.”

“You expect to win?”

“Of course. This is a scientific mission, isn’t it? The whole purpose of our flight to Saturn is scientific.”

“But the scientists are only a small part of the population,” Cardenas pointed out.

“Yes, of course. But the others will vote for me. It is the only logical choice they can make. Eberly is the only other major candidate, and he has no scientific background at all.”

“What about the engineer, Timoshenko?”

Urbain made an unpleasant face. “He is nothing. A posturer. The engineers and technicians will vote for me, overwhelmingly.”

Cardenas held back the comment she wanted to make. Better not to disillusion the man, she thought. He’ll find out soon enough on election day. It’ll bruise his ego, but in the long run he’ll probably be relieved to get out of politics and give all his attention to his clunky Alpha.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 45 DAYS

The three women met for breakfast in the cafeteria, so early that the place was hardly half filled. Holly thought the cafeteria seemed different this early in the morning: quieter, subdued, as if the people shuffling through the lines weren’t fully awake yet. She found Kris and Nadia Wunderly already at a table, heads leaning together, pleased grins on their faces.

Holly unloaded her tray of melon slices, bran cereal, soy milk, and faux coffee and sat down.

Wunderly looked happy, her big gray eyes sparkling. “I still can’t thank you enough for getting me some telescope time. You should see the dynamics of those rings! It’s … it’s…”

Cardenas laughed lightly. “Words fail you?”

A little embarrassed, Wunderly said, “I’d like you to see the imagery I’ve been getting.” Turning to Holly, Wunderly said, “You too, Holly.” Holly smiled at her. “Sure. I’d love to.”

Wunderly asked Cardenas, “I still can’t understand how you got Urbain to let me use the ’scope.”

Still grinning, Cardenas said, “Trickery and deceit. And a little blackmail.”

“Whatever works, I guess,” Holly said.

Wunderly dipped into her bowl of soy yogurt. “Thanks to you, Kris, I can feed Manny the data he needs.”

Holly’s innards twitched. “Manny?”

“He wants to dive through the rings,” Wunderly explained. “But he can’t do it without my help.”

Looking across the table to Cardenas, Holly said, “I haven’t seen Manny in weeks. How is he?”

Wunderly answered, “Terrific.”

Cardenas looked surprised. “Come to think of it, the last time I saw him was our final test of the decon nanos.”

Wunderly glanced from Holly to Cardenas and then back again. “I see him almost every day,” she said. A little smugly, Holly thought.

“Do you see him nights?” asked Cardenas, raising her teacup to her lips.

Wunderly said, “Sure. Sometimes.” Very smugly, as far as Holly was concerned.

“He’s pretty good, isn’t he?” said Cardenas.

Wunderly nodded with pleasure.

Suddenly aware, Holly blurted, “Kris, have you maxed out with Manny?”

Cardenas actually blushed. Nodding behind her teacup, she said in a small voice, “A couple of times. You said you didn’t mind, remember?”

“I don’t mind,” Holly insisted, knowing from the turmoil inside her that it wasn’t really true.

Wunderly’s owl eyes went even wider than usual. “You mean he’s slept with both of you?”

Cardenas put down her teacup. “Actually, we didn’t do all that much sleeping.”

Holly burst into laughter. The pain inside her dissolved. “He’s a flamer, all right.”

Wunderly looked hurt, though. “Both of you,” she whispered. It was no longer a question.

Cardenas reached across the table to touch Wunderly’s hand. “He’s just a man, Nadia. It doesn’t mean anything to him. Just fun and games. Recreational.”

“But I thought—”

“Don’t think. Just enjoy. He’ll be heading back to Earth soon. Have fun while you can.”

“ ‘Gather ye rosebuds’,” Holly quoted, wondering where she remembered the line from.

Forcing a halfhearted smile, Wunderly said, “I suppose you’re right. But still…”

“Just don’t get pregnant.”

“Oh, I’d never!”

Holly was thinking, though. “He slept with me when he needed help from the administration. And he slept with you, Kris, when he found out you could help him with nanobugs.”

“And now he’s sleeping with me,” Wunderly chimed in, “because I can help him with the rings.”

“That sonofabitch,” Cardenas said. But she was grinning widely.

“You know what they’d call a woman who did that,” Wunderly said.

Holly didn’t know if she should be angry, amused, or disgusted.

“It’s a good thing he’ll be leaving soon,” Cardenas said. “Otherwise he might get murdered.”

“He’s getting away with murder right now,” said Wunderly, with a tinge of anger.

“Well,” Cardenas said, “he’s good at it.”

Holly asked, “Nadia, are you going to keep on with him?”

“I couldn’t! Not now.”

“Why not?” Cardenas asked. “If you enjoy being with him, why not?”

“But he’s … it’s… it’s not right.”

With a shake of her head, Cardenas said, “Don’t let the New Morality spoil your fun. There’s nothing wrong with recreational sex, as long as you understand that it’s recreational and nothing more. And you protect yourself.”

Holly wondered, How do you protect your heart? How do you let a man make love to you and then just walk away and let him go do it with someone else? With your friends, for god’s sake.

Wunderly nodded slightly, but she looked just as unconvinced as Holly felt.

“It’s not like the old days,” Cardenas went on, “when you had to worry about AIDS and VD.”

“I read about AIDS in history class,” Wunderly said. “It must have been terrible.”

“Just don’t get yourself pregnant.”

“I won’t. I can’t. The habitat’s regulations won’t allow it.”

Cardenas was no longer grinning. “I can remember a time, back before either one of you were born, when religious fundamentalists were against abortion. Against any kind of family planning.”

“Really?” Holly was surprised.

“Yes. It wasn’t until they dropped their ‘right to life’ position that the New Morality began to gain real political power. Once the Catholics got an American Pope, even the Vatican caved in.”

For several moments all three of the women were silent. The cafeteria seemed to be waking up. There were more people coming in, more chatter and clatter as they lined up for their breakfasts before heading off to their jobs.

Wunderly pushed her chair back from the table and stood up. “I’ve got to make a progress report to Dr. Urbain.”

“And Manny?” Cardenas asked.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. He can be … well, attractive, you know.”

“Seductive,” said Cardenas.

“Charming,” Holly added. “Like a snake.”

Wunderly just shook her head and walked off, leaving her half-finished breakfast on the table.

“What do you think she’ll do?” Holly asked.

Cardenas chuckled. “She’ll go to bed with him but feel bad about it.”

“That’s brutal.”

“Yep.”

“Would you go to bed with him again?”

Cardenas gave her a guarded look. “Would you?”

Holly felt her lips curling upward into a rueful smile. “Only if he asks me.”

They both laughed.

“The sonofabitch is getting away with murder, all right,” Cardenas said.

Suddenly serious, Holly said softly, “I wonder if somebody else has gotten away with murder.”

“Huh? Who?”

“I don’t know. I just wonder about Don Diego.”

“You’re still gnawing on that?”

“They didn’t find anything wrong with him.”

“Except that he drowned.”

“But how could he drown?” Holly wondered. “How could a man fall into a few centimeters of water and drown himself?”

“He was pretty old,” Cardenas said.

“But his health was fine. They didn’t find any heart failure or any sign of a stroke.”

“You think someone pushed him into the water and deliberately drowned him?”

The scene appeared in Holly’s mind, every detail, just as she had seen it that day. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Who? Why?”

Holly shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish I did.”

CAMPAIGN SPEECHES

The political debate was held in the habitat’s outdoor theater, a big concrete shell that curved gracefully to focus the sound waves produced on its stage out into the rows of seats set up on the grass.

It’s a fairly good crowd, Eberly thought as he looked out over the audience. Must be more than a thousand out there, and a lot more watching by vid. Seated on the stage three meters to his left was Edouard Urbain, looking stiffly elegant in an old-fashioned dove-gray suit over a sky-blue turtleneck. Next to him sat Timoshenko, sour and gruff; he wore gray coveralls as a symbol of pride in his profession. Eberly thought he looked like a janitor. Eberly himself wore a dark charcoal tunic and comfortable slacks of lighter gray, true to the dress code he had promulgated.

Wilmot stood at the podium in his usual tweed jacket and shapeless trousers, explaining the rules of the debate.

“…each candidate will begin with a five-minute summary of his position, to be followed by another five minutes apiece for rebuttal. Then the meeting will be opened to questions from the audience.”

Eberly kept himself from smiling. Vyborg and Kananga had “seeded” the audience with dozens of supporters, each of them armed with questions that would allow Eberly to dominate the Q A period. He had no intention of allowing Urbain or Timoshenko to say a single word more than absolutely necessary.

“So without further ado, allow me to introduce Dr. Edouard Urbain, head of our scientific section,” said Wilmot. He began reading Urbain’s curriculum vitae from the display on the podium.

What a bore, thought Eberly. Who cares what scientific honors he won in Quebec?

At last Urbain got up and went to the podium to the accompaniment of scattered applause. There are only a few scientists in the audience, Eberly realized. So much the better. He saw that Urbain limped, ever so slightly. Strange I’d never noticed that before, he said to himself. Is that something new, or has he always walked with a little limp? Looking out over the audience, Eberly recognized several of his own people, including Holly and the stuntman, Gaeta, sitting in the front row. Good. Just as I ordered.

Urbain cleared his throat and said, “As you know, I am not a politician. But I am a capable administrator. Managing more than one hundred highly individualistic scientists and their assistants has been compared to attempting to make a group of cats march in step.”

He stopped, waiting for laughter. A few titters rose from the audience.

Looking slightly nettled, Urbain went on: “Allow me to show you how I have managed the scientific programs of this habitat. In this first image we see …”

AVs! Eberly could hardly keep himself from whooping with glee. He’s showing audiovisuals, as if this was a scientific meeting. The audience will go to sleep on him!

Holly felt distinctly uncomfortable sitting next to Gaeta, but Eberly had told her to bring the stuntman to the meeting and she had followed his orders.

Gaeta had smiled his best when Holly called him. “Go to the rally with you? I’m not much for listening to speeches.”

“Dr. Eberly has asked specially that you come,” Holly had said to his image, from the safety of her office. “It would be a favor to him.”

“Eberly, huh?” Gaeta mulled it over for a moment. “Okay, why not? Then we can have dinner together afterward. Okay?”

Despite everything she knew about Gaeta, Holly wanted to say yes. Instead, “I’m sure Dr. Eberly would like to have dinner with you.”

“No, I meant you, Holly.”

“I don’t think I’ll be able to.”

“Why not?”

She wanted to say, Because you’ve bedded every woman who’s been able to help you. Because you just think of me as a convenience, because you’re an insensitive macho bastard. Because I want you to care for me and all you care about is getting laid.

But she heard herself say, “Well, maybe. We’ll see.”

From his seat on the stage, Eberly saw Urbain’s audiovisuals in a weird foreshortening as they hovered in the air behind the speaker’s podium. Urbain was explaining them in a flat, unemotional monotone.

An organization chart. Then some quick telescope images of Titan that showed a blurry orange sphere. Urbain used a laser pointer to emphasize details that had no interest for Eberly. Or the rest of the audience, Eberly thought.

“And the final holo,” said Urbain. Eberly wanted to break into applause.

What appeared in three dimensions above the stage looked like a silver-gray tank.

“This is Alpha,” said Urbain, his voice taking on a glow of pride. “She will descend to the surface of Titan and begin the detailed exploration of that world, directed in real time by my staff of scientists and technicians.”

The tank lurched into motion, trundling back and forth on caterpillar treads, extending mechanical arms that ended in pincers or shovel-like scoops. Urbain stood to one side of the podium watching the machine, looking like a proud father gazing fondly at his child as it takes its first steps.

Wilmot, who had been sitting in the first row, climbed the steps onto the stage and advanced to the podium.

“A very impressive demonstration, Dr. Urbain, but I’m afraid your five minutes are up,” he said, his voice amplified for everyone to hear by the pin mike clipped to the lapel of his jacket.

A grimace of disappointment flashed across Urbain’s face, but he immediately turned off his palm-sized projector and made a smile for the audience.

“Thank you for your patience,” he said, then turned and took his seat on Eberly’s left. Not one person clapped his hands.

Wilmot, at the podium, said, “And now we have Mr. Ilya Timoshenko, from the Engineering Department. Mr. Timoshenko was born in Orel, Russia, and took his degree in electrical engineering…”

Eberly tuned out Wilmot’s drone and watched the crowd. There were lots of men and women out there who had also dressed in gray coveralls. My God, he realized: It’s like a team uniform. And almost half the crowd is wearing gray coveralls!

Timoshenko ambled up to the podium, nodding his thanks to Wilmot and then looking out at the audience. He tried to smile, but on his dour face it looked more like a grimace.

“I won’t need five minutes,” he said, his voice rough, gravelly. “What I have to say is very simple. Dr. Urbain says you should vote for him because he’s a scientist. Dr. Eberly is going to tell you to vote for him because he’s not a scientist.”

A few people laughed.

“I ask you to vote for me because I’m a working stiff, just as most of you are. I’m not a department head. I’m not a boss. But I know how to get people to work together and I’m one of you. I’ll look out for your interests because I’m one of you. Remember that when you vote. Thank you.”

And he turned and went back to his seat. No applause. The audience was too surprised at the abruptness of his presentation.

Wilmot looked startled for a moment, but then he rose and went purposefully to the podium.

“Thank you, Mr. Timoshenko,” Wilmot said, looking over his shoulder at the engineer. Turning back to the audience he said, “I think we should give Mr. Timoshenko a hearty round of applause, for being so brief, if for no other reason.”

Wilmot started clapping his meaty hands together and the crowd quickly joined in. The applause was perfunctory, Eberly thought, and it quickly faded away.

“Our final candidate,” said Wilmot, “is Dr. Malcolm Eberly, head of the Human Resources section and chief architect of the proposed constitution that we will vote on, come election day.”

Without a further word of introduction, he turned halfway toward Eberly and said simply, “Dr. Eberly.”

Several dozen people scattered through the audience got to their feet, applauding loudly, as Eberly rose and stepped to the podium. Others looked around and slowly, almost reluctantly, got up from their seats, too, and began to clap. By the time Eberly gripped the edges of the podium half the audience was on their feet applauding. Sheep, thought Eberly. Most people are nothing better than stupid sheep. Even Wilmot was standing and clapping halfheartedly, too polite to do otherwise.

Eberly gestured for silence and everyone sat down.

“I suppose I should say that I’m not a politician, either,” he began. “Or at least, I wasn’t one until I came into this habitat.

“But if there is one thing that I’ve learned during our long months of travel together, it is this: Our society here must not be divided into classes. We must be united. Otherwise we will fragment into chaos.”

He turned slightly to glance at Urbain. Then, looking squarely at his audience again, Eberly said, “Do you want to be divided into scientists and non-scientists? Do you want a small, self-important elite to run your government? What makes these scientists believe that they should be in charge? Why should you have to take orders from an elite group that puts its own goals and its own needs ahead of yours?”

The audience stirred.

Raising his voice slightly, Eberly said, “Did the scientists help to draft the constitution that you will vote on? No. There was not a single scientist on the drafting committee. They were all too busy with their experiments and observations to bother about the way we’re going to live.”

Urbain began to protest, “But we were not asked—”

Wilmot turned off Urbain’s lapel mike. “Rebuttals will come after the first position statements,” he said firmly.

Urbain’s face went red.

Suppressing a satisfied grin, Eberly said, “Our new government must be managed by people from every section of our population. Not only scientists. Not only engineers or technicians. We need the factory laborers and farmers, the office workers and maintenance technicians, butchers and bakers and candlestick makers. Everyone should have a chance to serve in the new government. Everyone should share in the authority and responsibility of power. Not just one tiny group of specialists. Everyone.”

They got to their feet with a roar of approval and applauded like thunder. Eberly smiled at them glowingly.

Wilmot stood up and motioned for them to stop. “Your applause is eating into Dr. Eberly’s allotted time,” he shouted over their clapping.

The applause petered out and everyone sat down.

Eberly lowered his head for a moment, waiting for them to focus their complete attention on him. Then he resumed:

“I’ll tell you one other thing we need in our new government. A person at its head who understands that we must be united, that we must never allow one elite group to gain power over the rest of us. We need a leader who understands the people, a leader who will work tirelessly for everyone, and not merely the scientists.”

“Damn right!” came a voice from the audience.

Eberly asked, “Do you want an elite group of specialists to impose their will on you?”

“No!” several voices answered.

“Do you want a government that will work for everyone?”

“Yes!”

“Do you want a leader who can control the scientists and work for your benefit?”

“Yes! Yes!” they shouted. And Eberly saw that his own people were only a small part of those who rose and responded to him.

He let them cheer and whistle until Wilmot came to the podium to announce that his initial five minutes were up.

Eberly went placidly back to his seat, noting with pleasure that Urbain looked upset, almost angry, and Timoshenko’s scowl was even darker than usual.

Q A SESSION

Urbain sputtered through the rebuttal period, defending the importance of the habitat’s science mission, denying that he would put the scientists’ needs above those of all the others. The more he denied, Eberly thought, the more firmly he fixed in the audience’s mind the fact that he considered the scientists to be separate and apart from — above, really — everyone else.

Timoshenko hammered on his theme of being a simple, ordinary working man who understands the needs of the common people. Eberly noted with pleasure that neither candidate attacked him.

When it came to his time for a rebuttal statement, Eberly walked slowly to the podium and said:

“We have a choice that reminds me of the three bears in the tale of Goldilocks. One of our candidates has too little experience at management. He tells you that he is an ordinary guy. This is quite true, but for the leader of this great society we are struggling to create we need someone who is not ordinary; we need someone with experience, and courage, and skill.”

He hesitated a heartbeat, then said, “The other candidate has too much experience at management. He’s been managing scientists for so long that he’s completely out of touch with what the rest of us need. Charts and equations and fancy mechanical toys that will explore the surface of Titan have nothing to do with our needs and our future here in this habitat.”

That brought a round of applause. Eberly stood at the podium, his head bowed slightly, soaking up the adulation.

At last Wilmot got up and said, “Now we will open the meeting to questions from the floor, and from those who are watching these proceedings in their homes.”

Eberly snapped his attention to the professor. Wilmot hadn’t told him that people would be able to call in questions from their homes, and Vyborg hadn’t even warned him of the possibility. We don’t have anyone ready with prepared questions from home, he thought. The crowd is seeded, but not the home audience.

“He makes some sense,” Gaeta said to Holly as they sat down again. “I mean, Urbain is dead-set against letting me go to Titan, even though Kris has shown him she can clean my suit with nanobugs.”

Holly nodded and said, “Why don’t you ask about that?”

Gaeta nodded back at her. “Good idea!”

The questions were all for Eberly. The people Vyborg had planted in the crowd dominated the Q A period, and even those who weren’t plants addressed their questions to Eberly, not to Urbain or Timoshenko. Eberly stood at the podium, ignoring his opponents sitting a few meters away. Wilmot stood beside him, choosing the questioners from the hands raised in the audience and the incoming calls lighting up his handheld.

The questions were all so predictable, Eberly realized with some relief. Even those calling in from their homes asked the kind of routine, boring questions that he could have answered in his sleep.

Yes, I will review all applications for babies. I believe we can allow a modest growth in our population.

No, I will not permit any religious group to attain control of the government. He saw Morgenthau’s cheek twitch at that answer, but it was the answer they had agreed to give. “We have to get voted into power first,” he had told her, time and again, “before we can even hint at our true affiliations.”

Of course I will pay personal attention to the needs of the farmers, he said to a caller who refused to identify himself. Without the farms we will quickly starve.

He recognized Manuel Gaeta when the stuntman rose to his feet to ask, “Will you permit me to go to the surface of Titan?”

Everyone knew Gaeta and his beat-up handsome face. All attention in the outdoor theater turned to him.

Eberly couldn’t help smiling. “If you can satisfy the scientists that you won’t contaminate the life-forms on Titan, I don’t see any reason to prevent you from going.”

Wilmot turned and motioned Urbain to come up to the podium. “Dr. Urbain, what is your position on this?”

Slicking his hair back with one hand, Urbain said without hesitation, “The threat of contamination to the microbial organisms of Titan is much too serious to allow any human exploration of that world for the foreseeable future. Besides, we have no choice in the matter. The IAA forbids any human intervention on Titan’s surface.”

Gaeta called from the first row, “But Dr. Cardenas has shown you that she can clean my suit.”

Wilmot said to the audience, “Mr. Gaeta is referring to the work of Dr. Kristin Cardenas, who has developed nanomachines that may be capable of decontaminating Mr. Gaeta’s spacesuit.”

“The decontamination appears to be acceptable,” Urbain conceded, looking a little flustered, “but appearances can be deceiving. Besides, we should not take the risk of having nanomachines infect Titan’s ecology.”

Eberly nudged Urbain away from the podium and looked out at the sea of faces watching them. “This is a good example of why we can’t allow the scientists to have control of the government. Why shouldn’t this man be allowed to carry out his adventure, if it’s been proven that he won’t hurt the bugs down there?”

“It has not been proven!”

“Dr. Cardenas says that it has been,” Eberly countered.

“Not to my satisfaction,” snapped Urbain.

“Yoursatisfaction!” Eberly shouted. “In other words, you make the decision and everyone else has to obey you — even a Nobel Prize winner like Dr. Cardenas.”

“It is my decision to make,” Urbain insisted.

“I thought you said the International Astronautical Association made the decision.”

“Yes, of course, that’s true,” Urbain stammered, “but if necessary I could override their decision. After all, I am the director of all scientific efforts here.”

“You want to be a dictator!” Eberly exclaimed, pretending shock.

Wilmot jumped between them. “Wait a moment. There is another issue here. What about the dangers of nanotechnology?”

“Nanotechnology is a tool,” Urbain said. “A tool that must be used carefully — but nothing more than a tool, nonetheless.”

Eberly was surprised at that. All he could add was, “Yes, I agree.”

Timoshenko rose from his chair. “Wait. There are dangers with nanotechnology. The bugs can get out of control—”

“Bullshit!” came a screaming voice from the audience. Kris Cardenas shot to her feet, her face white with anger. “Show me one instance where nanomachines have gotten out of control. They’ve been using nanobugs at Selene and the other lunar communities for decades now, and there’s been no trouble at all. Not one incident.”

Timoshenko scowled at her. “Nanobugs killed several people, back when it was still called Moonbase.”

“That was deliberate murder. You might as well outlaw hammers because they’ve been used to smash people’s skulls.”

Wilmot spread his hands to calm things down. “No one is thinking of outlawing nanotechnology,” he said flatly. “We recognize Dr. Cardenas as the solar system’s acknowledged expert on the subject, and we have agreed to use nanomachines — but under the strictest safety procedures.”

Before either of the other candidates could say anything, Eberly stepped in. “Nanotechnology can be very helpful to us, and I have every confidence in Dr. Cardenas’s ability to develop nanomachines safely.”

“I too,” said Urbain.

They all turned to Timoshenko. He grimaced, then said, “With all respect to the admired Dr. Cardenas, I believe nanomachines can be very dangerous in a closed environment such as ours. They should be banned.”

Eberly seized the moment. “Most of us are here in this habitat,” he said, “because of laws and regulations that stifled our lives. Most of us are educated, knowledgeable, unafraid of new ideas and new capabilities. We have all suffered under governments that restricted our freedoms.”

He saw several heads nodding agreement.

“All right then,” he asked the audience, “how many of you are in favor of banning nanotechnology altogether?”

The people hesitated, glanced at each other. A few hands went up. Very few. Down on the floor, Kris Cardenas looked around, smiled, and sat down.

Eberly nodded, satisfied. Turning to Timoshenko, he said, “There you are. Vox populi, vox dei.”

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 20 DAYS

Holly saw that it would be senseless to try to talk with Malcolm after the debate ended. He was immediately surrounded by admirers, including Morgenthau and that dark little man, Vyborg. Kris Cardenas pushed her way through the departing throng, a bright grin on her face. “I think we might get you down to Titan after all,” she said to Gaeta.

He grinned back at her. “Maybe. If Eberly wins the election.”

Holly suddenly felt like a third wheel on a bicycle, standing between Kris and Manny. The crowd was thinning out, little knots of three or four people heading for home or one of the restaurants. Eberly came down from the stage, enveloped in well-wishers and sycophants. As he walked past Holly he nodded to her and smiled, but he did not invite her to join his group.

Before she could feel any reaction, Gaeta said, “Come on, Holly, we’ll walk you home.”

Surprised, Holly glanced at Cardenas. She arched one brow, as if to remind Holly of what they had learned about the stuntman’s activities.

Holly nodded back and the three of them started across the grass and up the lakeside path toward the village of Athens.

“I didn’t see Nadia here,” Cardenas said as they climbed toward the apartment buildings.

“She’s probably working,” Gaeta said. “Urbain’s given her some time on a telescope; she’s always up in the observatory now.”

“I thought she’d come with you,” said Holly.

He actually looked surprised. “With me?”

Holly let it pass. They reached Cardenas’s building and said goodnight, then Gaeta walked with Holly to the next building, where her apartment was.

“You’ve been seeing Nadia a lot, haven’t you?” she asked.

Gaeta nodded. “If this Titan gig falls through, I’ve got to do something to keep my investors happy. She’s helping me plan a jaunt through the rings.”

“Sure.”

The dawn of understanding finally shed its light on Gaeta’s face. “Ohh,” he said. “She told you, didn’t she?”

“It came up in conversation, yes,” said Holly.

They were at the door to her apartment building. As Gaeta stopped there, the habitat’s lighting flicked from its evening mode to the nighttime system. His face fell into shadow, but Holly could see him well enough.

“Okay,” he admitted, “it happened.”

“More than once.”

He grinned sheepishly. “Christ, you sound like a priest at confession: ‘How many times?’ ”

“It’s not funny, Manny.”

“You didn’t take our times together seriously, did you?”

She thought a moment, then half-lied, “No, not all that seriously, I guess.”

“I mean, I know I was supposed to look out for you, but, well… it just sort of happened.”

“It happens a lot with you.”

“You seemed to enjoy it at the time,” he said softly.

Holly suddenly realized what he had just said. “What do you mean, you were supposed to look out for me?”

He took a deep breath. “That’s why I’m here, Holly. Your sister wanted me to keep an eye on you.”

She felt her jaw drop open. “Pancho? Panch hired you?”

Shuffling from one foot to another like a little boy caught in a place where he shouldn’t have been, Gaeta said, “It’s not that simple, Holly. She didn’t exactly hire me.”

“She thought I needed a bodyguard,” Holly groused. “My big sister didn’t trust me out here on my own.”

“I was trying to raise the funding for the Titan gig,” he tried to explain, “and this guy from Astro Corporation came up with an offer.”

Suddenly the absurdity of it hit Holly like a bucketful of ice-cold water. She broke into laughter.

Perplexed, Gaeta asked, “What’s so funny?”

“You are. And my big sister. She hired you to protect me, and you pop me into bed. My faithful watchdog. When she finds out she’ll want to castrate you.”

“She wanted me to keep you away from Eberly and that’s what I did.”

Holly’s laughter choked off like a light switch being thrown. “Panch hired you to keep me away from Malcolm?”

He nodded sheepishly.

“And that’s why you took me to bed?”

“No! I didn’t plan that. You … I… it just—”

“Just sort of happened. I know.”

“I didn’t hurt you.”

“The hell you didn’t,” Holly snapped. “And then you go off and screw Kris, and then Nadia. You’ll be lucky if you live long enough to get to Titan.”

“Oh Christ. Does Kris know about all this?”

“Kris? Sure she knows. So does Nadia.”

“So my name’s mud with her, eh?”

“With Nadia?”

“With Kris.”

“Why don’t you ask her?”

In the shadowy lighting it was hard to make out the expression on Gaeta’s face, but the tone of his voice came through clearly enough. “Because I’d … mierda! I really like Kris.”

“More than Nadia?”

“More than anybody. I guess I hurt her feelings, didn’t I? I guess she’s pissed off at me.”

Holly couldn’t resist the opportunity. “I don’t think she’s really mad at you. Of course, she’s working up some nanobugs that eat testicles, but other than that I don’t think she’s sore at you at all.”

Gaeta mumbled, “Guess I can’t blame her.” Then he turned away and started walking down toward his own quarters, head hung low. Holly almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

They’re all trying to keep me away from Malcolm, Holly thought as she undressed for bed. Pancho, Manny, Morgenthau, they’re all trying to keep Malcolm and me apart.

As she slipped into bed and commanded the lights to turn off, she wondered if she still wanted Malcolm the way she did when she first came aboard the habitat. He’s been so bugging distant; he doesn’t care about me. He hardly even knows I’m alive. But he’s been so busy. This political stuff takes all his time. It was different when we first met, different when we started out in this habitat. I could see him all the time then, and he liked me, I know he did.

How can he like me, how can he even think about me, when he never sees me? He’s always surrounded by Morgenthau and that Vyborg snake. And Kananga, he scares me.

How can I get past them? How can I get to be alone with Malcolm, even for a few minutes?

Her thoughts drifted to her sister. She hired Manny. She’s paying him big bucks to keep me away from Malcolm. He made love to me for money, the dirty … Holly tried to think of the masculine equivalent of the word “whore.”

Lying in bed, staring into the darkness, she thought, So Pancho wants to keep me away from Malcolm, does she. I’ll show her. I’ll get to Malcolm. I’ll get past the Hippo and the Snake and even Kananga, the Panther.

And suddenly, like a bright light clicking on, she knew how to accomplish that.

MIDNIGHT I

Holly got out of bed and dressed swiftly. She didn’t have to check a directory to know where Eberly’s quarters were; she had the complete map of the habitat in her head, every square centimeter, every assigned apartment, laboratory, workshop, airlock, even the maze of underground tunnels and conduits.

Yet she hesitated before leaving her own apartment. The clock said three minutes before midnight, but she thought that Eberly would probably still have a throng of admirers and well-wishers crowding his quarters. Better to wait. Wait until they all leave.

So she went instead to her office and pulled up a display from the outdoor surveillance camera that looked at Eberly’s building. Sure enough, people were still milling around out on the grounds. His apartment must be jammed with them, Holly thought.

Drowsily she watched as the crowd slowly thinned away. She fell asleep, then woke with a start. The digital clock said 02:34. The apartment building looked dark and silent. He’s prob’ly asleep by now, Holly thought. For several moments she debated inwardly about awakening him. He works so hard, she thought; he needs his rest.

But you’ll never get to see him alone otherwise, Holly told herself. She commanded the phone to call Eberly.

“You have reached the residence of Dr. Malcolm Eberly,” his phone answered. “Please leave your name and Dr. Eberly will return your call.”

Screw that! Holly said to herself. She got up from her desk chair and headed for his apartment.

There was a perfunctory security lock on the building’s main door. Holly had memorized all the combinations long ago, and tapped on the keypad. The door popped open. As she went up the stairs, a sudden thought shook her. Maybe he’s not alone! Maybe he’s got somebody with him.

With a shake of her head, Holly told herself, Better to find out now. She marched down the shadowy hallway, lit only by the glow of fluorescent nameplates on each door. Eberly’s apartment was at the end of the hall.

She took a breath and rapped on the door. No response. Holly banged on it with the flat of her hand, worrying that the noise would wake the neighbors but determined to get Eberly to answer her.

She heard someone cough on the other side of the door. Then Eberly’s muffled voice demanded, “Who is it?”

“Holly,” she said, standing squarely in front of the peephole.

Eberly slid the door back. He had a dark-colored robe pulled around him, his hair looked slightly tousled.

“There is a doorbell,” he said crankily.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” she said. “It’s urgent.”

As if he were slowly remembering his manners, Eberly gestured her into his sitting room. A snap of his fingers and the glareless overhead lights came on. Now Holly could see that his robe was deep maroon. And his feet were bare.

“What is it, Holly? What’s wrong?”

“I’m sorry to bother you at this hour, Malcolm, but I can’t get past Morgenthau and all your other assistants and I’ve got to have your help and the only way I could see you alone was like this.”

He smiled a little and slicked back his hair with one hand. “All right. You’re seeing me. What’s the problem?”

“Diego Romero. He was murdered.”

“Murdered?” The strength seemed to leak out of Eberly’s legs. He sank down onto the sofa.

Taking the closest chair to him, Holly said, “I’m positive. It wasn’t an accident. He was trying to push himself out of the water and somebody held him down.”

Eberly swallowed visibly, then asked, “You have proof of this?”

“I have evidence. The abrasions on his hands. They couldn’t have happened any other way.” Picturing the scene in her mind once again, she added, “And there were boot prints in the dirt, too many prints for one person to make.”

“But who would want to kill that gentle old man? Why would someone want to murder him?”

“I don’t know,” Holly said. “That’s why I need your help. There ought to be an investigation.”

He sat in silence for a moment, obviously thinking furiously. “Holly, this is a matter for the Security Department. You should tell them about your evidence.”

“Security? That means Kananga, doesn’t it?”

“He’s in charge of security, yes.”

Holly wrung her hands. “I don’t think he’d take me seriously. He’s… he wouldn’t think my evidence is enough to start a real investigation.”

Eberly leaned back in the sofa. “Colonel Kananga is an experienced police officer. He’ll know what to do.”

“Malcolm, he scares me,” she confessed.

He said nothing for several heartbeats, looking at Holly with those startling blue eyes of his. Then he smiled gently. “Holly, would you like me to go with you to Kananga?”

Her heart clutched within her. “Would you?”

“For you, Holly, of course.”

“Oh, great. Cosmic!”

Eberly’s smile grew warmer. “I’ll call Kananga first thing in the morning.” His eyes shifted to the digital clock across the room. “Which is only a few hours from now.”

She shot to her feet. “Oh, jeeps, I’m so sorry to bother you at this time of night, Malcolm. It’s just that I can’t get to see you anytime else, you’ve always got so many people around and—”

Eberly rose and grasped her shoulder lightly. “I know. I’ve been so terribly busy. Too busy. But I’ll always make time for you, Holly. Simply call me here at my quarters. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you so we can meet together, in private.”

She didn’t know what to say, except utter an awed, “Cosmic.”

Eberly guided her to the door. “I don’t want you to worry about a thing, Holly. We’ll meet with Kananga tomorrow. And from now on, whenever you want to see me, simply leave a message on my private line, here.”

“I will, Malcolm. I surely will.”

As she walked homeward, feeling almost light-headed, Holly realized how wrong, how stupid, Pancho had been. Malcolm could’ve taken me to his bed and I’d have hopped in like a rabbit on aphrodisiacs, she thought. But Malcolm was too much of a gentleman to even think about that. And the guy Panch hired to protect me screws me whenever he feels like it. Some bodyguard.

MIDNIGHT II

Manuel Gaeta did not go to sleep, either. By the time he reached his own quarters he had decided he should call Kris Cardenas and tell her everything.

“Can I see you, Kris?” he asked to her image floating in the middle of his one-room apartment. She was still wearing the slacks and blouse from earlier in the evening. Then Gaeta realized she wasn’t in her apartment; the phone had tracked her to her laboratory.

Cardenas looked slightly bemused. “Sure, Manny. When?”

“Tonight. Now.”

“Now?” She seemed to think it over for a few moments. “Okay. Come on over to my lab. I’ll wait for you.”

“Great!”

Halfway there, Gaeta remembered Holly’s crack about Kris developing nanobugs that ate testicles. He laughed to himself. Hey man, he said to himself, you live with danger. That’s the life you’ve chosen.

Cardenas wasn’t laughing, though, when she opened the locked door to her lab. She looked bright and perky, despite the late hour, but utterly serious.

“What’s on your mind, Manny?” she asked as she led him past a row of lab benches and spotless, gleaming plastic and metal equipment. “You are,” he said.

Cardenas perched herself on a high swiveling stool and pointed to a hard straight-backed chair for Gaeta. He remained standing.

“So you’re thinking about me at—” she glanced at the clock on the far wall, “ — twenty-eight minutes before one o’clock in the morning.”

Gaeta folded his arms across his chest. “Come on, Kris, cut the crap. Holly told me that you know about her and about Nadia.”

“I imagine you’re bragging to all your buddies about your hit parade.”

“I haven’t said a word to anybody. You grow up where I did, you learn to keep your mouth shut.”

She eyed him, disbelief clear in her expression. And something else, he thought. Curiosity? Maybe even regret?

“I just want you to know,” he said, “that you’re the only one who means anything to me. You’re the one I don’t want to lose.”

That shocked her. “You’re joking!”

“No joke, Kris,” he said. “I’ve never said this to anybody else in my life. I think I love you.”

Cardenas started to reply, then closed her mouth, pressed her lips together tightly.

“I mean it,” Gaeta said. “I never said that to anybody before.”

At last she replied, so softly he could barely hear her, “I never thought I’d hear anyone say that to me again.”

Ruth Morgenthau wanted to sleep, but she had hours and hours of vids to watch and phone taps to listen to. Eberly was pressing her for results, and she was determined to go through all of the material that Vyborg had amassed on Professor Wilmot’s communications. So she sat in her padded recliner, resisting the urge to crank it all the way back and drift off to sleep. I’ve let this material pile up so much, she realized. I’ve got to wade through it; otherwise it will just get worse.

Why not let Vyborg do this? she asked herself wearily as the hours ground on. He’s put the taps in place, his people have set up the cameras in Wilmot’s quarters and office. Why not let him drudge through all this drivel? She knew the answer: it was because if Vyborg found something, Vyborg would get the credit in Eberly’s eyes. Morgenthau shook her head ponderously. No, that will never do. If anyone is going to bring Wilmot low, it must be me. Eberly must see that I did it. No one else but me.

She worried about Eberly’s devotion to their cause. He seems more interested in being admired than in furthering the reach of the Holy Disciples. He’s an American, of course, and they’re all infatuated with their own individuality, but still he’s subject to the judgments of their New Morality.

Another reason to see this job through, she thought. If I can bring him something to use against Wilmot, it will make Eberly see that he needs me. Vyborg and that murderous Kananga can help him in some ways, but I must make him realize that he is dependent on me. One word from me can put him back in prison, yet he treats me as just another of his underlings. He’s smart enough to call my bluff on that. If I send him packing, our whole mission here will be destroyed. Urbain or that growling Russian will be elected leader of this habitat and I’ll have failed miserably.

Eberly has no respect for my abilities. He thinks I’m lazy, incompetent. Well, let me bring him the goods on Wilmot and his opinion of me will have to change.

Silently Morgenthau prayed for help, for success. Let me find something that we can use against Wilmot, she prayed. For the greater glory of God, let me find a way to bring the professor to his knees.

The only answer she received was hour after hour of watching Wilmot at his desk, listening to his phone conversations, reading the reports he wrote before he encoded them to send back to Earth. Each evening the professor sat watching vids for hours. Morgenthau fast-forwarded and skipped past them. She could not see them clearly from the vantage point of the camera set in Wilmot’s sitting room ceiling, and she couldn’t hear the sound tracks because he listened to the vids through a miniature plug he wormed into his ear. Hour after hour, he watched the indecipherable vids.

And hour after hour, Morgenthau skimmed past them, looking for something tangible, something sinful or illegal or merely embarrassing, something that could hurt Professor Wilmot.

Utterly bored and weary, Morgenthau yawned and rubbed her heavy-lidded eyes. I can barely stay awake, she said to herself. Enough is enough.

She turned off the display, still showing Wilmot staring at his entertainment vid in rapt concentration, and started to push herself up from her recliner when she remembered to check if Wilmot had sent any messages out of the habitat, to Earth. Each week he sent a coded report to somewhere in Atlanta, she knew. Very cryptic, even once the computer decoded them. A strange coincidence that whoever Wilmot was reporting to resided in the same city as the headquarters of the New Morality. Morgenthau shrugged it off as merely a coincidence.

Already half asleep, she pulled up the file of his outgoing messages.

Aside from the usual brief report to Atlanta, there was an even shorter message to some address in Copenhagen. And he had sent it not through the usual radio channel, but by a tight-beam laser link.

Suddenly Morgenthau was wide awake, calling the same number in Copenhagen, tracing Wilmot’s message.

“She knows?” Vyborg asked, startled.

Eberly, walking along the curving path between Vyborg and Kananga, replied, “She suspects.”

To a casual observer the three men seemed to be ambling slowly along the flower-bordered pathway out beyond the edges of Athens. Late morning sunlight streamed through the habitat’s solar windows. Bees hummed among the hyacinths and hollyhocks. Butterflies fluttered. Vyborg, short and spare, hunching over slightly as he walked, was scowling like a man who had just swallowed something vile. Even tall, regal Kananga, on Eberly’s other side, looked displeased, perhaps even worried.

“And she came to you for help,” Kananga said.

Eberly nodded slowly. “I have volunteered to bring her to your office.”

“Not my office,” said Kananga. “Too many eyes watching there. We’ll have to meet somewhere more secluded.”

“Where?” Eberly asked.

Vyborg suggested, “How about the scene of the crime?”

Kananga smiled gleamingly. “Perfect.”

Eberly glanced from one man to the other. They’re drawing me into their crime, he realized. They’re going to make me a party to another murder. What alternative do I have? How can I keep clear of this?

Aloud, he said, “I’ll tell her to meet me at the scene of the old man’s death, but I won’t be there when she arrives.”

“I will,” said Kananga.

“She’s got to disappear entirely,” Eberly said. “We can’t have another dead body to explain.”

Vyborg said, “In a habitat as large as this, there must be thousands of places where she could run off to.”

“I don’t want her body found,” Eberly repeated.

“It won’t be,” said Kananga. “That’s what airlocks are for.” Looking past Eberly to Vyborg, he said, “You’ll be able to erase the airlock security camera record, won’t you?”

Vyborg nodded. “And replace it with perfectly normal footage that will show absolutely nothing.”

“Good,” Kananga said.

Eberly drew in a deep breath. “Very well. When shall we do it?”

“The sooner the better.”

“This afternoon, then.”

“Fourteen hundred hours,” Kananga suggested.

“Make it earlier,” said Vyborg, “while most of the people are at lunch.”

“Yes,” Kananga agreed. “Say, twelve-thirty hours.”

“Good.” Vyborg smiled, relieved.

“I don’t like any of this,” Eberly said.

“But it’s got to be done.”

“I know. That’s why I’m helping you.”

“Helping us?” Vyborg challenged. “What will you be doing to help us? The colonel here is doing what needs to be done. You’ll be in your office, establishing an alibi.”

Eberly looked down at the smaller man coldly. “I’ll be in my office amending Holly Lane’s dossier to show that she is emotionally unstable, and has attempted suicide in the past.”

Kananga laughed aloud. “Good thinking. Then her disappearance won’t look so suspicious.”

“Just be certain that her body isn’t found,” Eberly snapped.

“It won’t be,” said Kananga, “unless someone wants to get into a spacesuit and search a few million kilometers of vacuum.”

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 19 DAYS

Holly and Eberly walked past the orchard’s neat rows of trees, heading for the spot along the irrigation canal where Don Diego had drowned. Holly didn’t need a map or a marker; she remembered the exact location perfectly.

“But what did Kananga find?” she asked.

Eberly shrugged his rounded shoulders. “I don’t know. He said he didn’t want to talk about it on the phone.”

“Must be something important,” she said, quickening her pace. “Must be.” Eberly touched his comm, in the breast pocket of his tunic. Vyborg was supposed to call him, give him an excuse to leave Holly and head back to his office. Why hasn’t he called? Is he trying to make certain I’m involved personally in this? Trying to make me a witness to Holly’s murder? An accomplice?

Holly was oblivious to his nervous behavior. “Wonder what it could be?”

“What what could be?” Eberly asked, with growing impatience. “Whatever it is that Kananga found.”

Your death, he replied silently. He’s going to kill you, and make me a party to it.

“Wait,” said Eberly, reaching out to grasp Holly’s arm. “What is it, Malcolm?”

He stood there, feeling cold sweat beading his upper lip, his forehead, trickling down his ribs. I can’t do it, he realized. I can’t let them draw me in this deep.

“Holly, I…” What to say? How can I get out of this without telling her everything?

His comm buzzed. Almost giddy with relief, Eberly fished it out of his tunic pocket and fumbled it open.

Instead of Vyborg’s dark, sour face, Morgenthau appeared on the miniature screen. She was smiling broadly. “I’ve found it,” she said, without preamble. “His entertainment vids. They’re—”

“I’m out here in the orchard with Holly,” he interrupted, his voice as strong and imperative as he could make it without shouting. “What is it that you’ve found?”

Morgenthau looked flustered for a moment, then she seemed to understand what he was trying to tell her. “It’s an important break through,” she temporized. “Too complicated to discuss over the phone. I must show you all the details, so that you can then discuss them with Professor Wilmot.”

“Is it urgent?” he prompted.

“Oh, yes, quite urgent.” Morgenthau took her cue. “I suggest you come to my office immediately. This can’t wait.”

“Very well,” he said sharply. “I’ll meet you at your office.”

He clicked the handheld shut and looked up at Holly. “I’m afraid I’ll have to go back. You go on to your meeting with Kananga. I’ll join you as soon as I can.”

Holly was clearly disappointed, but she nodded her understanding. Without another word, Eberly turned around and started walking quickly back toward the village, practically loping through the trees. Puzzled, Holly turned back and headed for the irrigation culvert. Then she realized she would have to see Kananga by herself. The prospect didn’t please her, but she was determined to find out what the security chief had learned about Don Diego’s death.

No, not death, Holly reminded herself. Murder.

For one of the rare times in his life, Manuel Gaeta felt awkward. As he walked down the corridor toward Nadia Wunderly’s cubbyhole office, he actually felt nervous, like a teenager going out on his first date. Like a guilty little kid going to confession.

The door markedplanetary sciences staff was wide open. The area inside looked like a maze constructed of shoulder-high partitions, filled with quietly intense scientists and their assistants. Gaeta had been there often enough to know the way, but this particular morning he got confused, lost, and had to ask directions. Everybody seemed to know who he was and they smilingly pointed him in the right direction. The women seemed to smile especially warmly, he noticed.

None of that now, he told himself sternly.

Feeling a little like a mouse in a psychologist’s maze, Gaeta finally made it to Wunderly’s cubbyhole, which was about as far from the front door as it could be.

“Good morning, Manny,” she said, barely looking up as he hesitated by the entryway.

“Hi,” he said as brightly as he could manage. “You got the results for me?”

She nodded without smiling. Unasked, Gaeta took the squeaky little plastic chair at the side of her desk. Suma friadad, he thought. A man could freeze to death in here.

Wunderly projected a set of tables on the blank partition that formed the back wall of her cubicle. “These are the frequencies of particles bigger than ten centimeters in the brightest belt, the B ring,” she said, her voice flat, as unemotional as a machine. “And here are the deviations that they—”

“I don’t blame you for being sore at me,” he interrupted.

She blinked her big gray eyes slowly, solemnly.

“I know you and Kris talked.”

“Holly, too.”

He conceded with a shrug and a weak attempt at a boyish smile. “Yeah, and Holly too.”

“And God knows who else.”

“Now wait,” he said, raising a hand defensively. “It’s bad enough, don’t go making it worse than it is.”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Wunderly said.

“I owe you an apology.”

She glared at him for a moment. Then, “I don’t want to talk about it. Ever again.”

“But I—”

“Never again, Manny!” Her eyes flashed. She meant it, he realized.

Wunderly took a breath, then said, “Our relationship from now on is strictly business. You want to go skydiving through the rings and I want to draw public attention to the rings. We’ll work together on this strictly as professionals. No personal involvement. Understood?”

“Understood,” he said weakly.

“With any luck, I’ll get a big fat grant to study the rings and you’ll break your ass.”

Despite himself, Gaeta grinned at her. “With any luck,” he agreed.

Holly walked along the culvert to the spot where Don Diego’s murder had taken place. As she made her way down the dirt embankment she looked for Kananga. He was nowhere in sight.

He’s not here? she wondered. What’s going on?

Then she saw his tall, lanky form, maybe a hundred meters up the embankment, standing there, waiting for her. As usual, he was dressed completely in black: tunic, slacks, boots, all dead black.

“Hello,” she called.

Kananga started toward her.

“This is the spot, right here,” Holly shouted. “By the peach trees up there.”

Kananga called back, “Are you certain?”

“I remember every detail.”

He stopped once he was within arm’s reach. “You have an excellent memory.”

“Photographic,” Holly said. She tried to hide her nervousness, with Kananga towering over her. She noticed that his boots left prints in the dirt just like the ones at the murder scene.

“And I suppose that spot, there,” he stretched out a long arm, pointing, “is where you found the old man’s body.”

Holly pointed slightly more leftward. “Over there. That’s where it was.”

“I see.” And he grabbed Holly, one big hand clamped over her face, covering her nose and mouth, the other arm wrapped around her waist, pinning her arms to her sides and lifting her completely off her feet.

FIGHT OR FLEE

Can’t breathe! Kananga’s big hand was clamped over Holly’s face, smothering her. She flailed her feet, trying to kick him, but her softbooted feet merely bounced off his long, muscular legs.

Holly’s arms were pinned to her sides as Kananga carried her down along the culvert. She was desperately gasping for air but his hand was gripping her painfully, tighter and tighter.

Holly’s right hand brushed against Kananga’s slacks. Without conscious thought she felt for his crotch, grabbed and squeezed as hard as she could. He yowled and dropped her. Holly landed on the balls of her feet and whirled to face him. Kananga was doubled over, his face contorted with pain. She kicked him in the side of his head with every gram of strength she could muster.

Kananga went sprawling. Holy jeeps! Holly said to herself. I must have had martial arts training back on Earth. Kananga was staggering to his knees, groaning. Holly kicked him again and then took off, racing as fast as she could along the sloping concrete wall of the culvert, splashing along the edge of the stream, getting as far away from Kananga as fast as she could.

By the time Eberly got back to the administration building, most of his nervousness had abated. Kananga’s killed her. It’s on his head, not mine. Nobody knows that I led Holly to him. Not even Morgenthau knows. If Kananga gets caught, I can distance myself from him.

He entered the Human Resources section of the building and walked past the four clerical types working at their desks. The door to Morgenthau’s office was closed; he slid it open without knocking.

She looked up sharply from her desk, recognized who had invaded her privacy, and put on a smile for Eberly.

He glanced around before sliding the door shut again and taking the chair in front of the desk. This used to be my office, he thought, noting how Morgenthau had tricked up the walls with holoviews of Monet’s paintings of cathedrals.

“You found something of Wilmot’s?” he asked, without preamble. It was important to make Morgenthau understand who was the chief here and who the underling. Otherwise she’d flaunt her connections to the Holy Disciples and try to control him.

“Something that can destroy him,” Morgenthau said, smiling devilishly.

Eberly hiked his brows dubiously. “Really?”

“Really.” Morgenthau projected a list of titles against a bare spot on the wall. Each title had a still picture image alongside it.

Eberly gaped at the pictures.

“Pure filth,” Morgenthau said. “He watches these disgusting vids every night before he goes to bed.”

“You’re sure?”

She nodded, grim-faced. “Every night. I have it all on camera.”

Eberly broke into laughter. “We have him!” he crowed. “We have Wilmot in our grasp.” And he clenched both his hands into tight, painful fists.

“I may have a concussion.” Kananga lay stretched out on the sofa in Vyborg’s apartment, long legs dangling over the sofa’s edge, his head thundering with pain. The side of his face was swollen.

Vyborg carried a cold towel to the colonel, biting his lips to keep from screaming curses at the blundering idiot. Allowing a little slip of a girl to beat him up! To get away! Now she knows for certain that Romero was murdered. He kept silent, though. In the foul mood he’s in, Kananga might decide to throttle me if I tell him what I actually think of him.

“Where did she go? Where is she now?” Vyborg said, his voice low, sibilant. “That’s the important question.”

“You’ve got to tell Eberly.”

“I’vegot to? Why not you? You’re the one who allowed her to get away.”

“You tell him,” Kananga said, his face hard, determined.

Vyborg didn’t try to suppress the angry disdain he felt. Puffing a disgusted breath from his nostrils he called, “Phone! Connect me with Dr. Eberly, wherever he is. Emergency priority.”

Within ten seconds Eberly’s face appeared hovering in the air above the coffee table. He was smiling happily. Vyborg immediately saw that he was in Morgenthau’s office.

“I’m glad you called,” Eberly said. “I have important news for you both.”

“I’m afraid I have news, also,” said Vyborg. “Bad news.”

Eberly’s smile faded. Behind him, Morgenthau looked suddenly concerned.

No sense prolonging the agony, Vyborg decided. Come right out with it. “Holly Lane escaped.”

“Escaped? What do you mean?”

“Apparently she is a martial arts champion. She got away from our good colonel here,” Vyborg gestured toward Kananga, still supine on the sofa, “and we have no idea where she is.”

Eberly stared at the three-dimensional image that filled half of Morgenthau’s office: Vyborg standing tense and obviously angry while Kananga lay on the sofa pressing a cold towel to his head.

He glanced at Morgenthau, whose expression was gradually changing from puzzlement to understanding. She’s piecing it together, Eberly realized. Now she knows that I’m involved in the attempt on Holly’s life.

Shaking inside with a mixture of fury and fear, Eberly managed to say, “I want you both at my apartment in five minutes.”

Holly ran blindly along the culvert until her lungs burned with exertion. She stopped, bent over, puffing hard. A glance backward showed nothing. He’s not following me, she decided with some relief. Prob’ly unconscious, the way I kicked him. Jeeps, maybe he’s dead. She straightened up and headed up the embankment, into the dappled shadows of the orchard. Serve him right, she thought. He tried to kill me. He must’ve killed Don Diego.

Kay, she told herself. Kananga killed Don Diego. Why? She had no idea. Who do I tell about it? Malcolm?

Then she realized that Malcolm had led her to this meeting with Kananga. Had suggested it in the first place. Malcolm knew what was going down. He’s part of it, whatever “it” is, she realized.

She wanted to cry. Malcolm’s involved in Don Diego’s murder. He wanted Kananga to murder me!

Who could she trust? Who could she turn to? I can’t go back to my apartment, they might be waiting for me there. Kris! I’ll call Kris. Or maybe Manny. She thought about it as she hurried through the apple trees at the far end of the orchard. Ahead lay rows of berry bushes and, beyond that, the endcap.

Not Manny, she decided. I won’t go running to him like some helpless little girl asking the big, strong hero to protect her. He prob’ly wouldn’t believe me, anyway. Kris would. Kris’ll believe me. But should I get her involved in this?

She kept on walking toward the endcap, trying to sort out her options and finding there weren’t all that many options open to her. If Eberly is part of this, whatever it is, that means Morgenthau and that slimy Vyborg snake are part of it too.

Under the stand of elms at the endcap, Holly sat tiredly on the grass and tried to think. Looking down the length of the green landscape, the habitat seemed exactly the same as it had been the day she and Kris Cardenas had stopped here. But nothing was the same, Holly thought, her insides suddenly hollow. Her whole world had crashed and burned. I wish Pancho was here, she admitted to herself. Panch would know what to do.

Holly pulled out her comm unit and stared at it in her hand. No sense calling Pancho; it’d take the better part of an hour for a message to get to her. And what could I say to her? Help, somebody’s just tried to murder me? What good would that do?

Kris. I’ll call Kris. She said to the comm unit, “Kris Cardenas.”

Nothing happened. Holly saw that the screen was flat and dark. The unit wasn’t working.

They’ve deactivated my phone! Why? she asked herself. And answered, Because they want me to use a wall phone, so then they’ll know where I am. They’re after me! They want to locate me and grab me.

For the first time, Holly felt truly afraid.

NANOTECH LABORATORY

“We’ll go on the day after we establish orbit around Saturn,” Gaeta said.

Sitting at her desk in her office cubicle, Kris Cardenas looked far from pleased. “Why so soon? Why not wait and get more data first?”

Gaeta smiled at her. “This isn’t science, Kris, it’s show biz. We go right away, we get a lot more attention, much bigger audience. We wait until the chingado scientists have all the data they want, we’ll be old and gray and nobody’ll give a damn anymore.”

Her cornflower-blue eyes snapped. “I’m one of those chingado scientists, Manny.”

Pursing his lips, Gaeta answered, “You’d be a chingada, feminine. But you’re not. It’s not a nice word and you’re a nice person.”

Cardenas was not amused. “Isn’t it dangerous enough without plunging in there as soon as we arrive at Saturn?”

“Kris, I love you, but I don’t think you’re ever gonna understand my business. The more danger the better.”

“Until you kill yourself.”

“I’m not gonna kill myself. Fritz won’t let me. It’d ruin the damned suit. He’d kill me if I did that.”

Despite herself, Cardenas laughed.

Raoul Tavalera popped his head over the edge of the cubicle’s partition. “I’m goin’ home now. Okay?”

“That’s fine, Raoul,” said Cardenas.

An uncertain expression clouded Tavalera’s long face. “You heard from Holly this afternoon?”

“No.”

“She said she’d call me. We were goin’ to go out for dinner. But I haven’t heard from her all day. And she’s not answering her phone.”

Before Cardenas could reply, Gaeta said, “I thought we’d go out to Nemo’s tonight, Kris.”

“All right by me.” Turning back to Tavalera, “I haven’t heard a thing from Holly, Raoul.”

“Funny,” he said. “That’s not like her, not calling when she said she would.”

“It is a little strange,” Cardenas agreed.

“Whatever,” Tavalera said. “I’m goin’. The main processor is still working on the assemblers for Dr. Urbain.”

She nodded. “I know. Switch on the UVs before you leave, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, where is she?” Eberly demanded.

Kananga was sitting up on Vyborg’s sofa now. He had put the cold towel away, but his left cheek was slightly puffy. “I have my whole staff searching for her. We’ll find her within an hour or two.”

Eberly paced past Vyborg, who was sitting in the armchair on the other side of the coffee table. “She’s got to be found. And silenced.”

“She will be,” Kananga said.

“She can’t go far,” Vyborg offered. “This habitat is big, but it’s not that big.”

Eberly frowned at him. His mind was racing. They’ve dragged me into this. Now I’m a party to their crime, whether I want to be or not. Two blundering oafs; they couldn’t even take care of one woman, a girl, a child really. He glared at Kananga as he paced across the room. Or maybe they’re smarter than I think. Maybe they planned it all this way precisely to pull me into their orbit. How can I hold the old man’s murder over their heads now?

Abruptly he stopped and jabbed a finger at Kananga. “As soon as she’s found I want her brought to me. Do you understand that? No more violence. I’ll take care of her.”

Kananga’s brows knit. “What do you have in mind?”

“That’s my business. I’ll handle it.”

“She can accuse me of murder,” Kananga said.

“And assault, perhaps attempted murder,” said Vyborg. “Certainly attempted rape.”

“You,” Eberly pointed at Vyborg, “get every phone in the habitat checked out. I want to know where she is when she calls, who she’s calling, and what she’s telling them.”

Vyborg nodded and got up from his chair.

Eberly headed for the door.

“Where are you going?” asked Kananga.

“To see Wilmot. If we’re going to hunt down this woman we must prevent him from getting in our way.”

Holly ducked through the hatch and clambered down a steel ladder to the utilities tunnel that ran the length of the habitat. Maybe they won’t think of looking for me down here, she thought. And even if they do, I can hide out in this maze for days and days. Long as I have to. Like Jean Valjean in the sewers. As she headed down the silent, dimly lit tunnel, she tried to remember when she’d read Les Misérables. Pancho had made her read a lot of old stuff after she had been reborn from the cryonics tank. Panch called it literature. Most of it was pretty boring. But Holly remembered vividly the scene in the sewers that ran beneath the Paris streets. Did I see a vid of it? she wondered. Maybe before I died?

With a puzzled shake of her head she felt thankful that the habitat’s tunnels were dry and there were no rats. No sewer smell, either. Holly sniffed and smelled nothing. Maybe some dust, and the faint trace of machine oil or something. Water gurgling through some of the pipes. The ever-present hum of electrical machinery.

The tunnel’s automatic lights turned on as she walked and off as she left a section. She saw a wall phone.

I could call Kris, she thought. Or Manny. He’d help me. He’d beat the crap out of Kananga.

But she hesitated in front of the phone. Kananga’s in charge of security. He’s got the whole warping security force under his command. And Malcolm’s in with him. They could say whatever they want about me, say I’m under arrest or something. Jeeps! They could even say that I murdered Don Diego!

And if I call Kris or anybody else I’d be getting them into trouble. Holly felt panic surging in her gut. What should I do? What can I do?

She sagged against the tunnel’s metal wall and slumped to the floor. Don’t do anything, she told herself. You’re pretty safe here, at least for the time being. Nobody knows where you are. You can stay down here until you figure things out.

Or starve to death. She looked up and down the tunnel, darkness in both directions. Good. If anybody was coming after her, the lights would be flicking on and off.

Food. I was supposed to go to dinner with Raoul tonight. He’ll think I stood him up.

She pushed herself up to her feet. Sorry Raoul, she apologized silently. Then she grinned. Food. Holly closed her eyes briefly, picturing the layout of the tunnels. The food processing plants were further down this tunnel. But if I take the cutoff and head back under Athens I can get under the storage lockers for the cafeteria. Plenty of food there.

She started off in that direction.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 18 DAYS, SIX HOURS

“What’s so important that you have to interrupt my dinner?” Wilmot asked testily.

Eberly smiled at the older man. He had spent the past two hours watching Morgenthau’s recordings of Wilmot’s evening activities. Morgenthau had been disgusted by the professor’s choice of entertainment, but Eberly had watched snatches of the vids, fascinated by their mixture of eroticism and savagery. Now he stood in Wilmot’s living room, facing the professor’s sternly disapproving frown.

“We have a serious situation on our hands, Professor,” said Eberly. “Well, what is it?”

“One of the Human Resources staff members has disappeared. I have reason to believe she’s suffered a mental breakdown.”

“What?” Wilmot looked startled. “Who is this person?”

“Holly Lane. You’ve met her.”

“Have I?”

Eberly was keenly aware that Wilmot had still not offered him a chair. The two men were still standing, facing each other, barely a meter inside Wilmot’s front door. Inwardly, Eberly was amused. He knew he was keeping the professor from his evening’s entertainment.

“I suppose I’m partially to blame,” Eberly said, trying to sound contrite. “I’ve been protecting her all these months. But she’s finally snapped.”

Wilmot looked puzzled, and more than a little annoyed.

Eberly fished his handheld from his tunic and projected Holly’s dossier on the wall above Wilmot’s sofa.

The professor recognized Holly’s face. “She’s the one you brought with you a while back.”

“Yes.” Eberly shook his head sadly. “As you can see, she has a history of emotional dysfunction.” He had spent hours carefully rewriting Holly’s dossier. “As long as she takes her medication she’s perfectly normal. But once she stops…”

Wilmot studied the dossier briefly, then asked, “Why’d she go off her meds?”

“It’s this Diego Romero business. Holly became obsessed by the old man’s death. She convinced herself that he was murdered.”

“Murdered?”

“It’s nonsense, of course. But this afternoon she attacked Colonel Kananga. She tried to kill him, at exactly the same site as the old man’s death.”

“Good lord! And where is she now?”

“Disappeared, as I told you. Kananga has organized a search for her.”

Wilmot nodded, as if satisfied. “Very well. It seems that Kananga is doing what he should. But why have you bothered me about this?”

“Because I want you to appoint me deputy administrator.”

“Deputy? I don’t need a deputy.”

“I think you do. You will appoint me deputy administrator so that you can retire from running the habitat.”

“Retire? And put you in charge? Hah!”

“It’s not such a ridiculous idea,” Eberly said softly. “You will retire and I will take over your duties.”

“Nonsense!”

“Once retired,” Eberly went on, “you can spend all your time watching your filthy vids, instead of merely the evenings.”

Wilmot staggered back a step. The color drained from his beefy face.

“This habitat needs strong leadership,” said Eberly. “Especially with the elections coming up and our impending arrival at Saturn. You’ve done your job quite well, Professor. Now it’s time for you to step aside.”

“And turn everything over to you? Never!”

Eberly shrugged. “In that case, we’ll have to make your choice of entertainment known to the entire population of the habitat.”

“We? Who do you mean?”

“We don’t want to embarrass you, Professor. Simply step aside and allow me to take control and no one will ever know about your perverse little entertainments.”

Wilmot sank down into the nearest chair, speechless.

Kris Cardenas lay in her bed, trying to decide if she was making another mess of her life. What will I be this time? she asked herself: a hardhearted bitch or a romantic idiot?

Her relationship with Gaeta had started out as a passionate fling, all glands and heat. Once Holly had stepped out of the way she allowed Manny to bed her; she hadn’t had so much fun in decades. But then Kris found out about Nadia. It wasn’t that Gaeta had been unfaithful to her; neither one of them had promised anything except fun and games. But the thought that Manny used women that way, slept with a woman who could help him and then moved on to the next, that angered her. Then came his sudden declaration of love. True love! Cardenas almost laughed aloud at the thought. But whatever it was, she was overjoyed by it. At my age, she thought, stifling a giggle. Score a real triumph for nanotechnology!

As she turned to face her love, though, her thoughts sobered. He’s going to get himself killed, she feared. That’s the business he’s in, taking constantly bigger risks. Cardenas hated the public, the audience of vicarious thrill-seekers who pushed Manny to riskier and riskier stunts until he tried the one stunt that would kill him.

He lay on his back, blissfully asleep, his rugged, expressive face relaxed, almost boyish. Cardenas studied the slight scars on his brow and along his jawline, the slightly pushed-in aspect of his nose.

Stop it! she commanded herself. You’re getting soft as a grape. Even if he lives through this rings stunt he’ll be leaving afterward. Then what will you do? Go traipsing after him like some overaged groupie?

Gaeta opened his eyes, turned toward her, and smiled. Cardenas felt her heart melt for him.

“What time is it?” he mumbled, raising his head enough to see the digital clock.

“Early,” Cardenas whispered. “Go back to sleep.”

“Big test today,” he said. “The snowball fight.”

“Not yet. Go back to sleep.”

“Nah. I’m up.”

Cardenas reached for him. “Why, so you are,” she said, with an impish grin.

The phone buzzed.

“Aw, mierda,” he groaned.

“Audio only,” Cardenas told the phone.

Holly’s face took shape at the foot of the bed. “Can’t talk long. Just gotta tell you Kananga tried to kill me and I’m on the run. I’ll buzz later when I can.”

And her image winked out, leaving the two of them staring at emptiness.

SNOWBALL FIGHT

“Pay attention!” Fritz snapped.

Inside the massive suit, Manny blinked. Fritz was right, his thoughts had wandered. That’s the dangerous part of this love thing, it makes it hard to concentrate on the business at hand. We’ll be at Saturn in a few days and I’ll do the rings. If it clears enough profit, then fuck Titan and Urbain and all those uptight cositas. I’ll just take the money and run home.

With Kris? Will she come with me? Do I have the guts to ask her to? He almost laughed: the most fearless stuntman in the whole solar system and I’m scared to death she’d turn me down. Where’s your cojones, tough guy?

The banging on his suit startled him. Fritz was whacking at the suit’s armored chest with the flat of his hand, as high up as he could reach.

“Wake up in there!” Fritz hollered.

“I’m awake,” said Gaeta.

“These days you spend too much time in bed and not enough time sleeping.”

“I’m awake,” Gaeta repeated peevishly.

From inside the suit, Fritz looked like a cranky little guy standing out there scowling at him, not even as tall as Gaeta’s shoulder. Together with the four other technicians, they were standing in a sealed-off section of corridor that led to one of the habitat’s major airlocks, big enough to handle bulky equipment. Gaeta had marched in and, at Fritz’s order, turned his back to the airlock hatch. Now he could see, down where they had sealed the corridor from the rest of the habitat, half a dozen fans that the techs had set up. Three of the techs were lugging heavy plastic jugs of water and placing them in precisely marked spots on the corridor’s floor of metallic squares. Beside each of the fans stood a dark metal tube encased in a copper-colored magnetic coil, looking to Gaeta like a cross between a laboratory contraption and a shotgun. The fourth tech was loading the tubes with ball bearings.

“This simulation will last only a few seconds,” Fritz said, “but it is designed to give you a feeling for what you will encounter in the ring.”

“I know all that, Fritz,” Gaeta said impatiently. “Let’s get on with it.”

As unperturbed as if he had heard not a syllable, Fritz went on, “The water will vaporize into ice crystals and the fans will blow them at you. The electromagnetic guns will fire the pellets that simulate larger pieces of ice at approximately Mach one point three.”

“And I stand here and take it all in the face,” said Gaeta.

“I trust the suit will not be penetrated,” said Fritz.

“The self-sealing gunk will stop any leaks.”

“Temporarily.”

“Long enough for this test.”

“But not long enough to save you once you are out in the ring.”

“Which is why we’re running this sim, to see if the suit holds up. So let’s get on with it.”

Fritz gazed up at him, his expression somewhere between discontent and anxiety.

“Come on, Fritz,” Gaeta urged. “Let’s get it over with.”

With a shake of his head, Fritz led the other techs past the airtight door that sealed off the end of the corridor section. Gaeta saw it close.

“Pumping down the chamber,” Fritz’s voice said in his helmet earphones.

“Pump away,” said Gaeta.

The only aspect of his flight through Saturn’s B ring that this test couldn’t simulate was the lack of gravity. Gaeta didn’t think that was important; he had experienced micro-g many times, it wasn’t a problem for him. But standing in the middle of a superblizzard and allowing himself to be pelted by supersonic stainless steel ball bearings, that was something else. Like facing a firing squad. Yeah, he said to himself, but I’m inside an armored suit. Like Superman. Those bullets’ll just bounce off my chest.

He hoped.

James Colerane Wilmot sat alone in his living room, staring into infinity. Ruined. Tripped up by my own stupidity.

He sighed heavily. I could fight him. Most of the population here is in this habitat because they couldn’t stand the rules and regulations that were strangling them. So I have rather bizarre taste in entertainment. I could offer to take counseling, even psychotherapy. I don’t have to knuckle under to this snotty Eberly and his clique. Not unless I want to.

He thought about that. Not unless I want to. Why should I go through the embarrassment and stress of public revelation, public ridicule? Accusations and defenses, excuses, pleading for understanding? No, I won’t subject myself to all that. I can’t.

In a way, actually, this is better than ever. Now I’m totally removed from any semblance of control, any hint of responsibility. The experiment is completely free now from any possible interference. I’ll have to inform Atlanta about that.

He hesitated, frowning. Eberly’s been watching every move I make. Every communication. Even what I do here in the supposed privacy of my own quarters. He’s watching me now.

What to do? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Atlanta will find out about this power play of Eberly’s soon enough. They must have plenty of spies scattered through the population.

Holly had debated for hours about calling Kris. At last she decided she would do it from a phone up topside. She didn’t want Kananga or anyone else to know that she was using the underground tunnels as her hiding place. So just before the habitat’s solar windows opened for “sunrise,” she climbed up the ladder that opened into the cafeteria’s storeroom. She could hear people stirring in the kitchen, just beyond: pots clanging and voices calling back and forth. A robot trundled in from the kitchen, rolled right past her and went to a shelf where it grasped a carton of preserved fruit in its gripper-tipped arms, then turned a precise one hundred and eighty degrees, rolled past her again, and pushed through the double doors to the kitchen.

Holly tiptoed to the wall phone near the kitchen door and made her hurried call to Kris. Somebody’s got to know that I’m alive and being hunted by Kananga, she told herself.

After her swiftly spoken message to Kris, she went back to the trapdoor, down the ladder, and ran nearly a kilometer along the main tunnel before slumping down to the floor, panting.

You flaming dimdumb, she said to herself. You were in the warping storeroom and you never thought to get something to eat. Stupid!

Her stomach agreed with a growl.

“She made a call?” Kananga asked eagerly. “When? From where?”

His aide, wearing the black tunic and slacks that Kananga demanded for his security staff, replied, “From the cafeteria storeroom, sir. About an hour ago.”

“An hour ago?” Kananga snarled, rising from his desk chair.

The woman glanced at her handheld. “Actually fifty-two minutes ago, sir.”

“And you’re just telling me now?”

“We only had a skeleton staff on at the time, sir. They can’t monitor every phone in the habitat in real time. It’s—”

“I want an automated program set up immediately. Use her voice-print as the key to trigger an automatic alarm. Immediately!”

“Yessir.”

“This woman is a dangerous psychopath. She’s got to be apprehended before she kills someone else!”

The aide scampered from Kananga’s office and his baleful glare.

He slowly settled himself back in his chair. The cafeteria. Of course. She’s got to eat. We’ll simply stake out teams at the cafeteria and the restaurants. She’ll be drawn to the food, sooner or later. And once she is, we’ll have her.

Gaeta had never been in a blizzard, never tried to trudge through drifts of snow while a cold wind battered at him and drove flakes of ice stinging against his face.

For nearly half a minute, though, he faced the fiercest maelstrom that Fritz’s ingenuity could devise. Ice crystals flew all around him, enveloping him in a blinding whirl of gleaming, glinting white. Steel pellets peppered him, rattling against his armored suit so loudly that Gaeta knew it was going to crack. He worried especially about the faceplate. It was bulletproof, he knew, but how bulletproof could it be?

He was being machine-gunned, strafed by supersonic pellets of stainless steel.

Yet he stood it. He remained on his feet and even took a few plodding steps upstream, into the blinding whiteout blowing at him. The rattling of the pellets was so loud, though, that he had trouble hearing Fritz’s voice counting down the time in his helmet earphones.

All he could do was stand and take it. And look at the lighted displays splashed across the inside of his visor. Every damned light was green, every monitor was showing that the suit was functioning normally. Whoops! One went yellow. Nothing important, he saw; one of the knee joints had suddenly lost lubrication. The backup came on and the light switched back to green.

The noise was damned near deafening. Like a thousand crazy woodpeckers attacking the suit. Why the hell do I put up with this crap? Gaeta wondered. Why am I spending my life getting the shit kicked out of me? Why don’t I take whatever money I make out of this and retire while I’ve still got all my arms and legs?

The classic answer rang in his head: What, and quit show business? He laughed aloud.

And then it was over. As suddenly as it had started, it all disappeared, leaving Gaeta standing there inside the cumbersome suit, his ears ringing from the pounding bombardment.

“What are you laughing about?” Fritz demanded.

Gaeta replied, still grinning, “I laugh at danger, Fritz. Don’t you read my media releases? I think you wrote that line yourself.”

It took the better part of half an hour for them to refill the corridor section with air and for Gaeta to crawl out of the suit.

Fritz inspected it minutely, going over every square centimeter of the hulking suit with a magnifying glass.

“Dimpled, but not penetrated,” was Fritz’s estimation.

“Then we can go as planned.”

“Yes, I believe we can.”

Gaeta’s handheld buzzed. He flicked it open and saw Nadia Wunderly’s face on the minuscule screen.

“If you’re worried about the test—”

“No, no, no!” she said, brimming with excitement. “I just had to tell you right away. You’re the luckiest guy in the solar system!”

“Whattaya mean?”

“There’s going to be a capture event!” Wunderly was almost shouting. “Three days after we arrive in orbit Saturn’s going to capture an asteroid from the Kuiper Belt.”

“What? What do you mean? Slow it down a little.”

“Manny, a small chunk of ice-covered rock is approaching Saturn from deep in the Kuiper Belt, out beyond Pluto. It’s already fallen into Saturn’s gravity well. I’ve done the calculations. It’s going to fall into orbit around Saturn smack in the middle of the A ring! Three days after we arrive in orbit outside the rings!”

“Three days?” Fritz asked, looking over Gaeta’s shoulder at Wunderly’s ecstatic face.

“Yes! If you delay your excursion for three days, you can be there when the capture takes place!”