Titan

16 April 2096: Evening

Feeling guilty about the ice cream she’d had for dessert, Wunderly followed Negroponte back to the bio lab. It was dark, except for the one strip of ceiling lights over the bench where they’d been working.

Negroponte slid into the chair before the display screen. Standing behind her, Wunderly saw that it looked exactly the same as when they’d left, three hours earlier. All this work for nothing, she thought. I made Manny risk his life; Pancho and Wanamaker, too. For nothing. The damned things are just dust specks. The activity I saw in the rings is just natural abrasion, nothing more than ordinary particle dynamics.

“I think that should do it,” said Negroponte as her long fingers tapped on the keyboard. “Yes. I’m rerunning the past three hours and speeding up the display. Now we’ll see …” She held out a manicured forefinger for a dramatic moment, then pressed it on a keypad.

The image on the screen seemed to twitch.

“Did you see that?” Negroponte asked, suddenly excited.

“Something …,” Wunderly said. “I might have blinked.”

“We didn’t both blink,” Negroponte muttered, fingers pecking again. “I’m reversing the vid and running it forward again. There! See it?”

“It might be a hitch in the video,” Wunderly said, trying to keep calm despite the thrill twitching at her nerves.

“Reversing again. This time I’ll slow it down …”

Wunderly felt the buzz building up inside her. Don’t get your hopes up, she told herself. Stay cool, don’t let yourself get wound up.

She leaned over Negroponte’s shoulder, her eyes widening as the dark blob on the screen pulsated slowly: once, twice, three times. Then it went still.

“Reversing again,” Negroponte said, her voice slightly shaky.

The ice creature went through its pulsations again.

“It really is alive,” Wunderly whispered.

“You were right all along,” Negroponte said, turning in her chair.

Wunderly wrapped her arms around the biologist’s shoulders and hugged her. Negroponte struggled to her feet and embraced Nadia. The two women danced down the length of the lab bench.

“You’ll get a Nobel for this!” Negroponte exulted.

“We’ll get the prize. The two of us. We did this together.”

“Life at cryogenic temperatures,” Negroponte said, moving back to their apparatus.

“We’ve got to tell Urbain and then the ICU. They’ll want to see our data. We should get more video footage, examine more specimens.”

Negroponte was nodding hard enough to make her hair fly. “Do you realize what this means? These organisms have such a slow metabolism that we can study their cellular reactions molecule by molecule. More detail than we’ve ever been able to see in normal cells!”

Wunderly was already digging in her handbag for her handheld. “Maybe we’ll get two Nobels!”

Even this late in the evening Urbain was in his office, staring at the smart wall that displayed a real-time view of Alpha on the surface of Titan.

Ask that stuntman to go there and repair her? He fingered his moustache, thinking, struggling to find a way out of the morass his creation had blundered into. How can he repair Alpha when we don’t know what’s wrong with her? The engineers swear that it must be a failure of the uplink antennas, but the computer team believes it’s a programming error of some kind. The blind men and the elephant, Urbain said to himself. Each specialist sees only as far as his own biases.

Could the computer engineers be correct? Could it be a software error? Then the hardware would be perfectly fine. Reprogram the master computer and Alpha will be under control once more. Urbain shook his head. But they’ve been over the programming a dozen times. More. They haven’t found any software problems.

This is Habib’s responsibility, Urbain said to himself. The memory of the man’s insolence boiled up afresh. He should be here, trying to discover what’s gone wrong, not off with the maintenance people chasing down their stupid power outages. He should be—

His desk phone said, “Dr. Wunderly calling, sir. Urgent.”

“What now?” Urbain muttered.

Mistaking his words, the phone opened the link to Wunderly. Her heart-shaped face popped into focus on the smart wall to Urbain’s left, life-size, eyes wide, an excited breathless grin splitting her features.

“They’re alive!” she fairly shouted. “We’ve got proof! The ring organisms are alive!”

“Alive?” Urbain blinked at the news. “You mean the rings actually harbor living creatures?”

“Microbes,” Wunderly said, gulping for air. “At cryogenic temperature. Psychrophiles.”

“I must report this to the ICU. Immediately.”

Wunderly nodded her agreement. “Dr. Negroponte worked with me. We did it together. She deserves as much credit as I do.”

“Of course,” Urbain said absently. “Of course.”

And he thought, I will get a share of the credit, as well. After all, these two women are part of my staff. They work under my direction. He smiled at Wunderly’s happy image. While she chattered away jubilantly, Urbain said to himself, This will take away some of the harm of Alpha’s failure. He didn’t realize it was the first time he’d used the word failure without pain or anger.

Malcolm Eberly was sitting in a meeting of Madame Urbain’s ZPG committee. He was the only man in the small conference room. All the others around the circular table were women, an even dozen of them, most of them well beyond the usual child-bearing age.

As he listened to them discuss their committee’s work, he thought about how child-bearing age could be extended by rejuvenation therapies, implanted ova, frozen embryos, even nanotechnology treatments of a woman’s reproductive system. Still, most women had their children before they were fifty; Eberly had gotten his staff to check out the demographics from Earth.

The committee’s avowed purpose was to defeat Holly Lane’s petition drive to repeal the Zero Population Growth protocol. Its secondary purpose, as far as Eberly was concerned, was to give him an excuse to meet with these woman and bask in the warmth of their admiration. They’ll vote for me, Eberly told himself. They want me to be their chief administrator, not that upstart Holly.

The head of the subcommittee on statistics was a youngish-looking computer technician with large green eyes and a smile that dimpled her cheeks nicely. But she wasn’t smiling now.

“Although we have slowed the anti-ZPG petition drive,” she was reporting, “we have not stopped it. People are still signing the petition, albeit at a slower rate than earlier.”

Madame Urbain, tres chic in a pastel lilac frock and tasteful hints of jewelry, asked, “What are your projections?”

Green Eyes shrugged. “At this rate, they’ll have enough signatures by May first to force repeal of the protocol.”

“Then we have failed?” Madame Urbain asked, looking distressed.

“Not failed,” Eberly said. All eyes turned to him. “This is not a failure by any means.

“Even if the protocol must be repealed,” he said, looking around the table at each of them in turn, “the repeal could be only temporary. The winner of the election could present a new zero-growth statute once he’s been reinstalled in office.”

They considered that. They discussed it. Eberly pointed out to them that if he were reelected by a sizable majority he could use his popularity to slow or divert the people who wanted to allow unrestricted growth.

“If Holly Lane is soundly defeated, much of the power behind her petition drive will be dissipated.” Eberly did not altogether believe that, but he had to keep up the spirits of these women so they would continue to work for him for the remainder of the election campaign.

They talked and debated and rehashed the matter for more than an hour. At last Madame Urbain moved that they adjourn and partake of the pastries and coffee that awaited them at the cafeteria.

Eberly walked beside her, with most of the other committee women clustered around them, down the sloping street toward the cafeteria building, chatting amiably with his admirers.

His phone buzzed. Frowning, he said, “Please excuse me,” and fished the phone from his tunic pocket.

Eberly recognized the face on the tiny screen of his handheld as a technician in the communications department.

“I left specific orders that I was not to be disturbed unless there is an emergency,” he said sharply into the phone.

“I thought you’d want to know, sir. Urbain just sent a report to the ICU. They have proof that there are creatures living in the rings.”

Eberly glanced at Madame Urbain and the other women walking with him. He hoped they had not heard the message.