Titan

18 February 2096: Afternoon

Eberly was furious. He paced back and forth behind his desk as Timoshenko and Aaronson sat in guilty silence and tracked his movement with their eyes.

“Am I being sabotaged?” Eberly demanded. “Did someone deliberately cause the power outage just to make me look ridiculous? Impotent?”

“Power supply isn’t my responsibility,” Timoshenko said curtly. “Exterior maintenance doesn’t include the power inverters.”

Aaronson frowned as he ran a hand through his dirty-blond hair. “Our primary source of electrical power is photovoltaics, which depend on the solar mirrors. Those mirrors have been performing erratically—”

“Minor fluctuations,” Timoshenko snapped. “Nothing that could have caused a major outage. The problem is internal, not external.”

“We don’t know what the problem is,” Aaronson said, his round, jowly face reddening.

“You don’t know?” Eberly snarled. “It’s been more than five hours since it happened and you still don’t know what caused this breakdown?”

“It only lasted less than a minute. And the backups came on when they were needed,” Aaronson replied. “We’re tracking down the fault,” he added, almost sullenly.

“Well you’d better track it down pretty damned fast!” Eberly fairly shouted. “And fix it! I can’t have this happening while I’m running for reelection. I can’t have the people thinking this habitat is breaking down around their heads.”

Timoshenko said nothing, but he couldn’t help thinking, Maybe it is. Maybe this whole huge contraption is breaking down. Maybe it’s going to kill us all.

Holly knew she should have been working on her speech for this evening’s presentation. In a way, Eberly’s firing her had been a godsend: she had no other responsibilities except to work on her election campaign. Her salary had been automatically cut down to minimal level, since she was officially unemployed now, but Pancho had electronically transferred a big wad of credits from her bank account in Selene. Holly had no money worries.

She knew what she wanted to say, but she needed facts to back up her intuition. That was why she had asked Professor Wilmot to see her. To her delight, the professor had agreed to meet her at the Bistro restaurant.

He was already there when Holly arrived, seated at a table out on the grass with a cup in front of him, watching the people strolling along the pathways that cut through the flowering shrubbery.

He got to his feet once he saw her approaching, a tall, thickset, iron-gray man wearing an old-fashioned tweed jacket, a floppy little bow tie, and dark slacks that badly needed pressing. He greeted Holly with a charming little bow.

“It’s good of you to take the time to see me, Professor,” Holly said, as he helped her into her chair.

“I have nothing but time,” he replied, seating himself next to her.

The robot waiter wheeled up to their table and Holly selected a cup of tea from the touchscreen on its flat top.

“Would you like pastries with your tea?” the robot asked in its synthesized slightly British accent. The flat screen showed a selection of goodies.

Holly looked at the professor, who shook his head, then told the robot, “No, thank you.”

With a perfunctory, “Very well, Miss,” the machine rolled off toward the restaurant’s interior.

“I presume,” said Wilmot, with an almost fatherly smile, “that you want to talk about population control.”

“Yes, I do,” Holly answered eagerly. “What I need to know is, is it possible for us to allow our population to increase in a controlled way, or would we just have a baby explosion if we lifted the ZPG protocol?”

Wilmot touched a fingertip to his moustache before answering. “Population control,” he murmured. “Touchy subject, that. It impinges on peoples’ religious beliefs, you see.”

“Most of the people in this habitat aren’t terribly religious,” Holly said. “We got rid of the zealots.”

“Perhaps so, but when it comes to family planning, most people have usually been imprinted since childhood with firm ideas on the subject.”

“I guess,” Holly said, as the robot trundled back to their table with a tray bearing a tea service.

While she put the tray on their table and began to pour herself a cup of tea, Wilmot went on. “Different cultures have approached the matter in different ways. The Chinese, with their hierarchical heritage, imposed population limits by government fiat. It worked, after a fashion. India, of course, was a different matter entirely. Before the biowar depopulated the subcontinent, that is.”

“Our ZPG protocol has been sort of voluntary, really.”

Wilmot nodded. “Yes. A law with no enforcement behind it. Seems to be working, so far.”

“So far.”

“You’re concerned that it won’t work much longer.”

“Professor, it can’t work much longer. Most of our population is young; the women are of child-bearing age.”

Wilmot’s lips twitched in what might have been either a smile or a grimace. “Child-bearing age seems to have stretched a great deal. Once it was definitely ended by the time a woman reached forty. Now it’s decades longer.”

“And getting even longer,” Holly added.

“I suppose they’ll all want to have children. Most of them, at least.”

“At least.”

He took a sip of his tea. “Western cultures—Europe, North America, Australia—they’ve pretended that they handle family planning through the concept of individual liberty.”

“You mean they don’t?”

“Hardly. There has always been a religious backbone to the illusion of individual liberty. Western governments never had to make laws about population control because their churches did it for them. Especially once the fundamentalists gained power and civil law became intermixed with religious dogma.”

“But the New Morality and the other fundamentalist groups are against family planning,” Holly pointed out.

“Officially, yes. They realize that overpopulation leads to poverty, and poor people are easier to control than wealthy ones. Still …” Wilmot tilted his head slightly. “There are ways to get the churches to look the other way. Particularly if you are a generous donor to said churches.”

“So the rich stay rich and the poor have babies.”

“And remain poor.”

Holly could feel her brows knitting. “So how do we handle population growth here in Goddard?” she asked. “We can’t keep this ZPG protocol much longer.”

Wilmot drained his cup, then set it down with a delicate clink on its saucer. “My dear young lady, I’m afraid that problem is one that you are going to have to deal with. I have no wisdom from on high to impart to you.”

She almost smiled at his words. “I was hoping you did.”

With a shake of his head, Wilmot said, “You are dealing with the most fundamental of human drives, my dear. There are no pat solutions to the problem. You—and the rest of our population—will have to work out your own salvation for yourselves.”

Glumly, Holly said, “I guess.”

“Indeed,” said Wilmot, thinking, This will be the most fascinating anthropological study since Margaret Mead’s early work in Samoa. Will these people be able to produce a workable solution, or will they tear themselves and this habitat to pieces?