Titan

12 April 2096: Into the ring

Manny Gaeta squinted against the glare. Even though the suit’s visor was heavily tinted, Saturn’s B ring was so bright it almost made his eyes tear. Glittering brilliant jewels of ice stretched as far as he could see in every direction.

Despite himself, he grinned. Yes, the fear was there, deep inside him. But so was the excitement, the exultation. What was that old line: To boldly go where no one has gone before. That’s me. Boldly. Here alone, in the suit, heading into the blindingly dazzling rings, Gaeta knew that if he had to die he wanted to die this way, doing what no one else had ever dared to try.

“Closing in,” he muttered into his helmet microphone.

He glanced at the lidar display on the left side of the helmet. It was breaking up into hash. Shouldn’t do that, he said to himself, shaking his head.

“Your altimeter reading is breaking up.” Wanamaker’s voice sounded slightly edgy, through the helmet’s earphones.

“The laser beam is getting scattered too much by the ice particles,” he replied.

“It’s gonna be tough for you to judge distances, then,” Pancho said.

“I can eyeball it.”

“Anything hitting you?” Wanamaker asked.

“Not yet. I’m still more than two hundred klicks from the main body of the ring.”

“Movin’ fast, though. We got a good fix on your beacon; you’re doin’ twelve hundred an hour.”

“I’d better slow down.”

“Retro burn programmed for six minutes from now,” said Wanamaker. “Do you want to override it and go manual?”

Staring out at the overwhelming field of gleaming white, Gaeta said, “No, let the program ride.”

“Tell me when you start getting pinged,” said Pancho.

“Right,” Gaeta replied. But he thought, What can they do about it? They’ll be pushing over to the other side of the ring in another ten minutes.

Unless something goes wrong, answered a voice in his head. They’ll hang here as long as they can, just in case some malfunction pops up. They’ll fish you out.

Yeah, Gaeta said to himself. If they can.

A tiny red light winked at him from the rim of the helmet’s displays. Impact, Gaeta realized. The display went dark immediately. One little ice flake hit me. A scout?

Holly was surprised at the questions from the audience. Almost all of them were from women, and they all wanted to know how soon the ZPG protocol could be lifted.

“The first step is to get six thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven signatures on our petition,” she answered, more than once. “We can’t do a thing until we have enough signers.”

Eberly’s people asked questions, too: mostly about how much money could be brought in from mining Saturn’s rings. But Professor Wilmot picked the questioners from a sea of waving hands and he picked mostly women.

Through it all, Eberly was strangely quiet. Not that he didn’t speak well or answer questions, but he ignored the population growth question almost entirely. Holly had expected him to paint dreadful word pictures of how the habitat would be overrun with babies and sink into a squalling, poverty-stricken disaster. But he didn’t. He spoke positively about how wealthy the habitat could become by mining the rings. To Holly, he seemed to be avoiding the ZPG issue altogether.

Until Professor Wilmot called on Jeanmarie Urbain.

She stood up, impeccably clad in a dark short-sleeved sheath adorned tastefully with hints of jewelry: clearly the best-dressed woman in the auditorium. Holly though she looked a bit nervous, almost timid, while the automatic microphones along the auditorium’s side walls focused on her. Her husband, seated beside her, looked more annoyed than pleased that his wife was asking a question.

“Go ahead, Madame Urbain,” said Wilmot gently.

“My question is for Mr. Eberly,” she said, her voice trembling slightly. “Sir, what will happen to the research programs that the scientists are conducting if our habitat’s resources must be devoted more and more to a growing population?”

Eberly came out of his chair as if propelled by a spring, smiling widely. It’s a setup, Holly realized. He coached her to ask that question.

By the time Eberly had crossed the three steps between his chair and the lectern, he had changed his expression. The smile was gone; he looked somber, almost grim.

“As we all understand,” he began, his voice low, controlled, “the main purpose of this habitat was to carry out scientific studies of the planet Saturn, its rings and its moons. But if we must divert more and more of our resources to accommodating a constantly growing population, we will have less and less to devote to the science work.”

Holly wanted to object, but Eberly wasn’t finished.

“Scientific information is our major export product, as of now,” he went on. “Essentially, the International Consortium of Universities back on Earth pays us to provide data about the Saturn system. It’s not enough to keep our entire population going, of course. The major part of our economy is internal: we grow our own food, we provide goods and services for one another, we have built a strong internal economy for ourselves.”

He bowed his head and hesitated a heartbeat. Then, looking up again, he said, “But if our population begins to grow unchecked, and we have no other external sources of income, then our economy will be forced to provide food and shelter and education and, eventually, jobs for our growing population. The scientists will have to depend exclusively on whatever funding the ICU provides, which won’t be enough to sustain them at their current level of activity. We will have to cut back on our science programs, which means the ICU will cut back on its funding. A vicious circle.”

Dozens of hands went up in the audience. But Eberly still wasn’t finished. “However,” he said, his voice stronger, “I can see a way out of this dilemma.” He allowed a small smile to creep across his face. “To allow population growth we need a new source of income. Hanging out there before our very eyes is that source: the rings of Saturn. Once we begin selling water to Selene and Ceres and the other human establishments off-Earth, we will have a source of income that will allow us to end the zero-growth protocol once and for all!”

Eberly’s flacks along the side walls immediately began applauding, and quickly most of the rest of the audience joined in. Holly sat on the stage, stunned at the simplicity of his scheme. She watched, crestfallen, as the audience got to its feet, applauding. She wanted to rush to the lectern and tell them that no one would be allowed to mine the rings until it was absolutely established that there were no organisms living there that might be hurt.

But she knew it would be useless. Eberly had taken her own campaign issue and turned it against her. You want population growth? Mine the rings to pay for it.

Nadia’s going to die when she hears about this, Holly said to herself. And Malcolm’s going to win reelection by a landslide.

Nadia Wunderly was in her cluttered office, totally engrossed at the view from Gaeta’s helmet camera that was displayed on her desktop screen. It was like falling from a cliff down into a gleaming glacier. The screen was filled with glittering bits of ice, interwoven strands curled and entwined so intricately that her fastest computer program could not model them in real time. Manny’s falling into the ring, she knew; he’ll plough right through it like a meteor crashing into the ice particles.

“Retro burn complete.” Gaeta’s voice came through the computer’s speakers.

“Copy retro complete.” Wanamaker’s voice. “Your velocity vector is on the money.”

At Wunderly’s insistence they had slowed Gaeta’s approach to the ring. Even though it was by far the densest of Saturn’s rings, she had argued, the B ring was scarcely two kilometers thick. If Gaeta didn’t slow down he would zip through the ring too fast to collect any samples. Gaeta had reluctantly agreed. The first time he’d gone to the rings his trajectory had been arranged so he would glide along inside the B ring for more than ten minutes, and that had nearly killed him. Now he was diving through, in and out, but slowly enough to have a good chance to pick up samples of the ice particles and the creatures that lived in them.

If they’re really there, Wunderly found herself thinking. If they really exist and they’re not just a wish-dream of mine.

“Sample boxes open,” she heard Wanamaker’s voice.

“Boxes open, check,” Gaeta confirmed.

“We’re reading the temperature inside the boxes as within three degrees of ambient,” said Wanamaker.

“Good,” replied Gaeta. “Don’t wanna toast these babies once we get ’em in the samplers.”

Wunderly recalled that the first time Gaeta had gone through the rings the ice creatures had coated his suit so thickly it had become impossible for him to move his limbs or even communicate with the controllers. This time they had put miniature heating coils on his comm antennas. It didn’t take much energy to keep the antennas above the rings’ ambient temperature of -178 degrees Celsius. But they had to keep the rest of the suit cold, especially the sample boxes.

He was getting close enough now that she could see individual chunks of ice on her display screen. No way to judge sizes, although some of the pieces were obviously much larger than others.

“Getting dinged pretty good now,” Gaeta reported. “Lots of impacts.”

“Sizes?” Wanamaker asked.

“Nothing big enough to shake me,” said Gaeta, “but the impact counter is lighting up like a video game display now.”

Don’t let him get struck by a big one, Wunderly pleaded silently. She knew there were chunks of ice as big as trailer trucks in the rings. Don’t let him get hurt, she prayed to a god she didn’t really believe in.