Titan

16 February 2096: Evening

To his credit, Eberly spent several hours wrestling with his conscience. But, as usual, he won.

Sitting alone in his sparsely furnished apartment as the solar windows darkened into evening, he finally decided there was no other option: I’ve got to get rid of Holly. I can’t have her working for me as a department head while she’s running against me in the election.

But it’s got to be done carefully, he told himself. I can’t just fire her. Everybody will see it as an out-and-out political move. A vendetta. I’ve got to be more delicate than that.

He felt almost bad about his decision. He liked Holly on a personal level. She had always worked faithfully for him. But now she had turned on him, plunged a dagger into his back. It was her sister’s doing, of course. Holly had been fine until Pancho had showed up. Pancho Lane was his real enemy; she was using Holly as a front, a dupe, a mask to hide her own ambition. And she’s up to something more, he told himself. Pancho and Cardenas and that scientist, Wunderly. They’re scheming, cooking up some plot behind my back. I’ve got to find out what they’re doing.

Eberly straightened up in his recliner and called his computer to take a memo. One of the smart walls brightened, and as he spoke his words appeared in print on the wall screen. Eberly dictated, corrected, rewrote his memorandum until he was completely satisfied with it:

Eberly reviewed his wording one final time, then nodded, satisfied. I’ll send it to Berkowitz at midnight so he can use it on the morning news broadcast. I’m going to be making a major speech tomorrow evening; this will be the icing on that cake.

Pleased with his work, he rose and headed for the cafeteria. More people ate there than in the habitat’s two restaurants. More hands to shake, more voters to smile at. Let them see me as one of them, eating where they eat, sharing their lifestyle.

As he headed down the corridor, smiling and nodding to the people he met along the way, he made a mental note to send a copy of the memorandum to Holly. Tomorrow, he thought, after the morning broadcast breaks the news. I’ll send a copy to her home and another to her office. Together with an order to vacate the office at once.

Urbain sat tensely at the central console in the mission control center. Eleven engineers bent over eleven other consoles, each of them showing the false-color imagery from one satellite’s infrared camera view of Titan.

Only a few more days of storage remain in Alpha’s core memory, Urbain told himself for the thousandth time. We must find her before she goes into hibernation mode.

But even with eleven satellites crisscrossing Titan’s smog-shrouded terrain in low polar orbits, finding Alpha was proving harder than he had imagined. In theory, the satellites’ infrared cameras were capable of a five-meter resolution, which should have been more than good enough to find the errant vehicle. But so far, no sight of Alpha.

The special team he had assigned to building up a three-dimensional view of Titan’s surface was due to make its presentation to Urbain in the morning. Bah! he said to himself, pushing up from the console’s wheeled chair. I cannot wait. Time is flying by.

He strode to his office and called the surveillance team. The phone computer tracked them down in a small workshop halfway across the habitat from Urbain’s office.

“Dr. Urbain,” said Da’ud Habib, obviously surprised. In the phone screen his lean, dark-eyed face looked thinner than Urbain remembered it, almost gaunt. The slim beard that traced his jawline had grown thicker, as if he had not trimmed it in weeks.

“Dr. Habib,” Urbain replied, equally surprised. “What are you doing with the surveillance team?”

“I’m assisting them with their computer interfaces, sir. They need help with—”

“Never mind,” Urbain interrupted, impatient. “I need the team’s report at once.”

“Now?” Habib asked. Other faces appeared behind him, crowding into the screen, men and women, all of them looking tired, baggy-eyed, disheveled.

“We’re going balls-out to make our presentation tomorrow morning,” said one of the men.

“We’re pulling an all-nighter here,” said a woman, looking irritated as she pushed her hair away from her face.

“I understand and I appreciate how hard you are working,” Urbain said, trying to keep his own annoyance from showing on his face. “Still—”

“Why don’t you come down here?” the woman suggested.

Habib looked startled momentarily, then he nodded. “Yes. That might be the best thing, sir. If you could come over to our lab.”

Urbain thought it over for all of five seconds. Then, “Very well. I shall.” Then he asked, “Um … just where is your lab?

Pancho unhooked the safety harness and got up stiffly from the simulator chair. The three-dimensional displays on the walls of the tight little compartment flickered and went dark. She ducked through the hatch and stepped into the simulator control chamber, where Wanamaker was shutting down the computer system that ran the simulation.

Stretching to her full height and raising her long arms above her head, Pancho felt her vertebrae pop. “Whooie,” she groaned. “Been a long time since I sat in one place for so long.”

“Eight hours,” Wanamaker said, kneading her shoulders. “Full mission sim.”

“How’d I do?”

He nodded toward the silent bank of consoles. “The computer says you did pretty well.”

“Pretty well?”

“Reflexes were a little slow on the recapture sequence.”

“But I picked her up okay, di’n’t I?”

He nodded. “Could be smoother, Panch. When you’re actually out there in the rings you’ll be working with a neophyte. You can’t expect her to be much help.”

“It’s her life she’s layin’ on the line.”

“And it’s your responsibility to fish her out of the rings and bring her home safely,” said Wanamaker.

Pancho made a mock scowl. “You’re a lousy boss.”

Grinning, Wanamaker replied, “You don’t make admiral by being a sweetheart.”

Stretching again, Pancho changed her tone and said, “Okay, sailor. Wanna buy me a drink?”

“You’ve earned one. And dinner.”

Pancho took his arm and let him lead her toward the door of the simulations chamber.

But she stopped halfway there and turned back toward the consoles. “Better schedule another full-up for tomorrow morning,” she said. “This time with Nadia in the loop.”

Urbain felt slightly ridiculous pedaling an electrobike halfway across the habitat to the village of Delhi, but either the electric motor was defective or he didn’t know how to engage it properly. Every time he tried, the motor refused to turn on. So Urbain pedaled the entire distance along the winding path between Athens and Delhi. The village was sparsely occupied, most of its buildings dark and empty. As he was wondering if he’d be able to find the building Habib had directed him to, he saw a young woman up ahead waving a hand lamp.

He braked to a stop in front of her and, in the light of the lamp, recognized her as the one who had suggested he come to Habib’s lab. She was taller than he had expected, with long straight ash-blonde hair that fell well past her shoulders.

“Good evening,” Urbain said, puffing slightly from the unaccustomed exercise, “Ms … . eh …”

“Negroponte,” she said. “Yolanda Negroponte. I’ve been on your geosciences team since we left Earth.”

It was meant as a rebuke and Urbain knew it. “Yes, of course,” he muttered, trying to recover. “Of course.”

“I’m a biologist,” she added over her shoulder, as she opened the door to the building.

Urbain followed her inside, wondering why a biologist was working on the surveillance team. Then he realized that there was precious little biological work for her to do while Alpha was lost and silent.

As soon as Negroponte pushed open the door of the makeshift laboratory, Habib rushed to Urbain’s side. He was slightly shorter than Negroponte, his skin several shades darker than her golden tan. Nearly a dozen other men and women clustered around them. Urbain could smell odors of stale food and old coffee. Containers of take-out dinners littered the folding tables along the back wall. He realized that he himself had not eaten since lunch, many hours ago.

“I’m so glad you could join us here,” Habib said, half apologetically. “I know it’s a long haul …”

Urbain, feeling sweaty from his pedaling, replied, “Time is vital. We must find Alpha before she goes into hibernation mode.”

“Or dumps the data it’s accumulated,” one of the other scientists said.

Urbain tried not to glower at him. “What have you accomplished?”

“Not as much as we had hoped,” Habib said.

“But something of significance, nevertheless,” Negroponte added. She stood beside Habib, almost protectively. She was a big-boned woman with lank, light blonde hair. Urbain wondered what their personal relationship might be.

“We’ve set up a three-dimensional display of what the satellites have actually observed,” Habib said. “We had intended to spend the night running through it and making certain there aren’t any glitches in it.”

Urbain said, “I will view it, glitches and all.”

Nodding uncertainly, Habib said, “Yes, sir. If you’ll please take a seat …” He indicated a flimsy-looking plastic chair set before a blank wall screen.

Urbain sat and the entire team seemed to flutter away to work stations that were set against the wall behind him. All except Habib, who stood beside the seated Urbain.

The wall screen glowed and then displayed a view of gray, rough, uneven ground. Before Urbain could comment, the view suddenly acquired depth, clarity; it became a fully three-dimensional image. Urbain strained his eyes, but he could see no marks of treads, no tracks or depressions in the surface.

“That’s Alpha’s original landing site,” Habib said.

“You are certain?” Urbain demanded.

“Sir, that’s just about the only thing we are certain about.”

For the next two hours Urbain watched in growing aggravation as Habib and his team patched views from the satellites. Hardly any trace of Alpha’s tracks could be seen other than a short stretch of tread prints here and there, seemingly almost at random. One view showed a small frozen lake with a small mountain of piled-up ice in its middle.

“That’s water ice,” Negroponte’s voice called out.

“And you can see a slight indication of tracks leading to the edge of the lake,” said Habib.

“Did Alpha sink into the lake?” Urbain asked, alarmed.

“We don’t think so,” Habib replied. “We have some tracks on the other side—ah! There they are.”

“But there must be more tracks,” Urbain demanded. “We know Alpha’s mass and the tensile strength of the ground. We have calculated the depth to which the tracks would sink.”

Habib nodded again, but his face showed apprehension. “Sir, we know that the treads were designed to spread Alpha’s weight so that she wouldn’t sink too deeply into the ice.”

“Still, she must have left tracks. It’s impossible for her not to have done so.”

“I agree, sir. But if you notice the timeline of the images we’ve shown, tracks show up only in the most recent images.”

“Or in places where the vehicle must have dug itself more deeply into the ground,” said one of the others, “such as the lakeside.”

“There’s no sign of tracks at the original landing site,” Negroponte added, walking across the dimly lit room to stand beside Habib.

Twisting in his chair, Urbain looked up at the two of them. “What are you suggesting? That the tracks are eroded by weathering?”

“No, sir,” said Habib, with a shake of his head. “Natural erosion rates would be too slow to erase the tracks.”

“Then what?”

“Something is actively erasing them.”

“Something?” Urbain felt alarmed. “What do you mean? What something?”

“We don’t know, sir. But some force or agency is actively erasing Alpha’s tracks almost as soon as they’re laid down.”

“Something alive, perhaps,” added Negroponte, the biologist.