Titan

4 May 2096: Evening

The cocktail reception was ostensibly to welcome the shipload of biologists and planetary scientists who had arrived from Earth in the wake of Wunderly’s confirmation that Saturn’s rings harbored living organisms. Urbain’s entire scientific staff, as well as the habitat’s most prominent citizens were there to greet the newcomers.

Ordinarily, Urbain would not have invited Manuel Gaeta. After all, the man was not a scientist: nothing more than an entertainer, a stunt performer, little more than a trained ape. But Gaeta was living with Dr. Cardenas, who was a Nobel laureate. Urbain could not invite her without having him come along.

Besides, Urbain needed this trained ape.

The party was at the lovely lakeside bandshell, at the foot of the gentle hill on which the village of Athens was built. Champagne flute in hand, Urbain saw Pancho Lane and her sister with a pair of men he couldn’t quite place. He leaned toward his wife and asked her who they were. Jeanmarie told him that the older, taller of the two men was Pancho’s companion, a former admiral. The other was the engineer that the habitat had taken in when it passed Jupiter.

“Ah yes,” Urbain murmured, recognizing the somber-faced younger man. “Tavalera is his name, I believe.”

And there was Eberly, of course, with his claque following wherever he went. Urbain suppressed a frown. The chief administrator was totally in his element, surrounded by admirers, smiling and chatting and laughing with them.

Gaeta, Urbain said to himself. I must get to Gaeta.

He saw that the stuntman and Dr. Cardenas were standing by the lake’s edge, deep in earnest conversation with Wunderly. Strange, he thought. Wunderly should be the center of attention at this reception, yet she is off to one edge of the crowd with her little circle of friends. Urbain shook his head. She has much to learn about the politics of science, he told himself.

Taking his wife’s free hand, Urbain said to the women she was chatting with, “Excuse us, if you please. I must speak with Dr. Wunderly for a few moments.”

And he led Jeanmarie toward the little group at the water’s edge.

Wunderly was babbling away nonstop to Kris Cardenas. Gaeta stood with the two women, barely understanding a word of what Wunderly was saying.

“ … So when Da’ud showed me the graphs he’d worked up I ran through the vids of the ring spokes and sure enough they correlated to five nines,” Wunderly gushed.

“The spokes correlate with Titan’s position?” Cardenas asked.

Gesticulating so forcefully that she sloshed champagne onto the grass, making Gaeta jump nimbly out of the way, Wunderly said, “Yes! We’d wondered what caused the spokes and now we’ve got an explanation! Just in time for me to go back to Earth.”

“The spokes?” Gaeta asked, frowning slightly. “You mean those lanes of dust in the rings?”

Wunderly nodded vigorously. “The dust lanes that rise above the plane of the ring particles and then drift down again.”

“Like they’re doing the wave at a ball game,” Gaeta said.

“The wave?” Wunderly looked puzzled.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the gathering of partygoers, Yolanda Negroponte was deep in conversation with four of the biologists who had just arrived from Earth.

She had come to the reception alone, dressed in a simple off-white miniskirted frock that showed her long legs to advantage. She had phoned Habib several times during the course of the day to ask him to escort her to the party, but he had not answered her calls. Now she stood at the center of the little group of newcomers, trying to keep up the conversation with them while looking out over their heads, scanning the crowd for Habib.

He’s afraid of me, she said to herself. I came on too strong. Yet she knew that if she did not pursue Habib he would drift away from her. Why must he be so difficult? she asked herself.

And why must you insist on going after him? asked a voice in her mind. There are lots of other men here. You could have your pick of them. But it was handsome, gentle, shy Habib who interested her. He was such a tiger when he got angry.

“Have you done a DNA analysis yet?”

Negroponte barely heard the question. It took an effort for her to focus on the quartet of biologists around her: two men, two women.

“Preliminary,” she responded. “The cellular structure has a nucleus and what appears to be nucleic acids, although their chemical composition is completely different from terrestrial DNA.”

“And their structure? Is it a double helix, like ours, or triple, like the Martian biota?”

Negroponte shook her head slightly. “There’s no evidence of helical structure at all.”

“Not helical?”

“We’ve done gamma-ray diffraction and MRF microscopy. The nucleic acids appear to be a crystalline lattice.”

“That’s impossible!”

Negroponte smiled knowingly at the flustered little man, who didn’t quite came up to her shoulder. “Come to my lab tomorrow and I’ll show you.”

Then her smile widened into genuine warmth. She saw Habib among the partygoers, looking very handsome in a forest green suit. And he was pushing his way through the crowd, heading toward her with a champagne flute in each hand.

“Look at how beautifully the lake reflects the lights of the shell and the land above,” said Jeanmarie to her husband. He ignored her, his attention bent on Wunderly, Gaeta and Cardenas standing down by the water’s edge.

“Good evening,” Urbain said as he and his wife got to within earshot. “Are you enjoying the reception?”

Wunderly grinned at her boss. “The food’s good,” she answered, eying the nearest table. It was laden with finger foods and surrounded by guests. Robot waiters from the Bistro, squat little flat-topped machines that rolled silently on tiny trunions, were busily bringing up replenishment trays, marching like a line of ants from the restaurant in the village to the tables scattered across the grass.

“You have made a great contribution to science,” Urbain said graciously to Wunderly. “I will be sorry to see you leave the habitat.”

Both he and Wunderly knew that Urbain had opposed her single-minded concentration on the rings. Urbain had wanted everyone on his staff to focus on Titan; Wunderly had held out stubbornly—and won.

“I couldn’t have made the contribution without you, Dr. Urbain,” she said, equally congenial. “I owe all my success to you.”

“Not at all,” he said. But he beamed at her.

“I think we made another major breakthrough today,” Wunderly said.

“Oh?”

“The spokes in the rings correlate with the positions of Titan and the outer moons!”

Urbain stared at her for a moment. “Are you certain of this?”

“Da’ud Habib’s done the correlation and I checked it with the vids we have of the spoke actions.”

“But what could be the cause of this?” Urbain was suddenly engrossed. “Could it be gravitational?”

“I think it’s electromagnetic,” Wunderly said. “Electromagnetic force is orders of magnitude stronger than gravitational.”

“Yes, true. And Saturn’s electromagnetic field is very powerful.”

“And it extends way out beyond the orbits of the major moons.”

“True. We must calculate the energies involved.”

Kris Cardenas butted in, “From what Nadia tells me, this also explains the electromagnetic surges from Saturn that’ve been causing power outages here.”

“A useful byproduct,” Urbain granted. But his attention was entirely focused on Wunderly’s news. He forgot that he was hosting this reception; he forgot about the party altogether. He even forgot that he needed to ask Gaeta to go down to his stranded Alpha on the surface of Titan.