Titan

Professor Wilmot’s oral diary

Tomorrow is the first of May. No spring fertility rites in this habitat, of course. These people have their fertility rites all year ’round, actually.

However, tomorrow evening there will be the second of three debates between our two candidates for chief administrator.

Although a lot has happened since the first debate, not much has changed. The scientists have proven that Saturn’s rings actually do harbor living microorganisms in their particles of ice. The ICU has already dispatched a shipload of science people to come and see for themselves. Urbain is in his glory, taking as much credit for the discovery as he can grab despite the fact that he initially opposed investigating the rings at all. Ah well, the rings have taken the spotlight away from Urbain’s failed lander on Titan. The useless hulk is still incommunicado: silent as a stone.

Politically, Eberly is insisting that the rings can still be mined for their water without disrupting the ice creatures. The scientists disagree, naturally, but Urbain has been strangely muted on the subject. The woman who made the discovery, Dr. Wunderly, is up in arms against Eberly but I doubt that it will do her any good. Clever politician that he is, Eberly has offered to put her in charge of environmental protection of the rings—while he moves ahead with plans to mine them!

It appears that Holly Lane’s petition to overthrow the ZPG protocol will succeed. She claims to have more than seven thousand signatures, more than enough to repeal the protocol The signatures need to be verified, of course, but that’s merely a matter of form. Unless Eberly pulls some new trick.

At the end of the day, however, the petition might not matter one way or the other. From all that I can see and hear, these people want to mine the rings. They want to get rich. And Eberly has told them once they begin bringing in money from the mining, then they can repeal the zero-growth protocol and start enlarging the habitat’s population.

It would seem that Eberly has everything his own way. He’s even hinted that he would defy an IAA injunction against mining the rings. He’s taken the pose that he would rather fight than give in to what he calls “Earthbound bureaucrats.”

We shall see what we shall see.