Titan

4 May 2096: Midmorning

Da’ud Habib tried to get in a workout at the health center first thing every morning, before anyone else got there, but then he realized that Negroponte just happened to be exercising in a form-fitting sweat suit at the same time each day. Just as she just happened to be in the cafeteria when he came in for lunch. Invariably, she sat at his table. When he would show up later than usual she would move from the table she’d been sitting at to be with him.

The woman is pursuing me, he told himself. At first it was flattering, but it soon became an embarrassment. Negroponte thinks I’m some lover out of the Arabian Nights, he thought. A hawk-eyed emir who’s going to carry her off on his steed to his tent in the desert. Nothing could be farther from reality.

Habib had been born in Vancouver of an immigrant Palestinian family and raised in the faith of Islam. Bookish and deeply interested in computers, he was actually rather shy around women. Throughout his university years, with his exotic good looks he had never had trouble finding women; they found him. His difficulty had always been in getting rid of them. While he enjoyed sex, he had no desire to marry or even to live with a woman. There was too much else to do; tying himself down to a woman would get in the way of his studies, his career. There would be time for marriage and children later, he thought.

He had chosen to join Dr. Urbain’s scientific staff when his former faculty advisor had phoned him and suggested he do so.

“It’s an opportunity, Da’ud,” the graying professor had told him.

“Five years?” Habib questioned.

“When you return to Earth you’ll have your pick of universities eager to take you on. Even the New Morality will look favorably on you.”

“Why should they?”

“They want this habitat to succeed, to become an example of how people can live off-Earth.”

“Most of the habitat’s people will be exiles, won’t they?”

The professor had grinned knowingly. “Yes, but there are lots of other bright young men and women whom the New Morality would like to see move off this world.”

“I don’t see how my going out there with them—”

“Trust me, Dau’ud. It’s a better opportunity for you than anything you can hope for here on Earth.”

Habib thought he heard a veiled message: spend the five years on this Saturn mission or find the New Morality blocking your applications to the better schools. He was no fighter. He did what his advisor suggested.

It was like living in a university town, to a great extent. And the work was fascinating—at first. Habib directed the programming of the bulky probe Urbain was building, his cherished Titan Alpha. It was a fascinating challenge to program the complex machine so that it could operate independently in the alien environment of Titan’s surface, flexible enough to cope with unknowns and to learn from the surroundings in which it found itself.

Then Alpha had landed and gone silent, and Urbain had gone slightly insane. Habib felt certain that there was a hitch in the programming somewhere, but though he spent night and day trying to find an error, so far he could discern nothing wrong with the programming.

There were lots of women available in the habitat, and although he tried to remain free of entanglements, his normal male hormones made their demands on him. He was surprised, though, when Dr. Wunderly asked him to go to the New Year’s Eve party with her. He agreed, even though he would not have thought to ask her. Nadia Wunderly was not the most attractive woman he knew, yet she seemed to genuinely like him; more important, she was just as wrapped up in her work as he was in his. She would not try to force a commitment upon him.

He felt certain Negroponte would. Yet, with her tall, ample figure and almond-eyed face she was powerfully attractive.

Habib got through his abbreviated workout, showered and changed back into his workaday tunic and slacks, then headed for his eleven o’clock meeting with Timoshenko. At last he had something solid to show the maintenance chief. Mathematics is so much simpler than women, he thought. A mathematical relationship remains fixed unless some discernable value produces a change. A relationship with a woman is always changing, often for no recognizable reason.

Habib got to Timoshenko’s office and slid open the door to the anteroom. Three engineers were sitting with their heads bent over display screens. The chief of maintenance did not have a personal assistant. He believed that computers could do the routine office work; each of his employees was actively engaged in maintaining the habitat’s myriad mechanical, hydraulic, electrical and electronic systems.

Habib went straight to the door of Timoshenko’s private office.

“He’s not in,” said one of the engineers, barely looking up from her desktop screen. “Hasn’t been in yet this morning.”

“But we have a meeting scheduled for eleven.”

“You’re three minutes early,” came Timoshenko’s voice from behind him.

Turning, Habib saw the Russian walking toward him. Timoshenko looked terrible: his eyes red and puffy, as if he had not slept all night.

“I have good news for you,” Habib said, by way of greeting.

“Good,” said Timoshenko, almost in a growl. “I could use some news that’s good, for a change.”

Five minutes later, Habib was sitting beside Timoshenko at the little round table in a corner of the maintenance chief’s office. One wall screen was filled with a set of graphs displaying complex curves.

“So you’re telling me that Titan is causing the power surges?” Timoshenko asked, eying the graphs suspiciously.

“I don’t know if Titan is the cause of the surges,” Habib replied, “but they correlate very closely with the position of Titan and the other major moons in their orbits around Saturn.”

Timoshenko grunted.

Pointing to the graphs, Habib explained, “We get the power surges whenever Titan and the other major moons line up on the same side of Saturn.”

In a heavy low voice Timoshenko muttered, “That’s why the surges are grouped approximately every two weeks. Titan’s orbit is sixteen days.”

“Yes. And it explains why you can go for months without any surges at all: that’s when the outer moons are not on the same side of the planet as Titan.”

“You’re certain of this?”

“The mathematics are definitive,” Habib said with some pungency in his tone. He didn’t like having his calculations questioned.

“But what’s causing it? What we have here looks like astrology, not physics.”

Habib shrugged. “You’ll have to ask Wunderly or one of the astrophysicists. I am a mathematician.” Pointing to the wall screen display, he added, “You asked me to tell you how to predict when the surges will come and that’s what I’ve done.”

Timoshenko nodded. “Yes. So you have.” Turning slightly in his chair he called out, “Phone! Get Dr. Wunderly. Top priority.”