Titan

20 June 2096: Morning

Holly and Tavalera had to push against an incoming tide of three dozen scientists surging into the reception area from the fusion torch ship docked to the habitat’s main airlock. The arriving men and women looked eager, thrilled to be at Goddard after a six-week trip from Earth. Carrying a single travel bag, Tavalera looked gloomier than usual, downright depressed. Holly, due to be installed as the habitat’s new chief administrator later in the afternoon, seemed almost as sad.

The scientists rushed on past them, chattering excitedly with one another. Holly and Tavalera made their way to the airlock hatch, where a lone officer from the arriving torch ship stood in royal blue coveralls, a palmcomp in hand.

“So you’re really going?” Holly asked, her voice barely above a whisper.

Tavalera smiled wistfully. “You’re really staying?”

“I’ve got to,” she said, blinking at the tears forming in her eyes.

“Me too,” he replied. “I’ve got to go back home, Holly. I’d hate myself if I didn’t. I’d end up hating you for keeping me here.”

“I guess.”

His eyes were glistening, too. “I love you, Holly.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and rested her head against his chest. “I love you too, Raoul.”

“I’ll come back,” he said, folding his free arm around her. “I just hafta see Earth again, my family, my old friends. Then I’ll come back to you.”

“Just let me know when and I’ll hire a ship to bring you.” She looked up at him, tried to smile. “I’m a twirling VIP now … or I will be in a few hours.”

The ship’s officer coughed politely. “Our turnaround time is very tight, I’m afraid. You’ll have to board if we’re going to make rendezvous with the tanker they’ve laid on for us at Jupiter.”

Tavalera nodded. “I know something about tankers,” he said mildly.

Holly clutched at him, kissed him longingly. He held her just as tightly, but then broke the embrace.

“I … I’ll be back,” he promised, hefting his travel bag.

“I’ll be here,” she said.

He turned abruptly and walked swiftly past the officer to duck through the airlock hatch and disappear from her view.

Trying to fight down the feeling that she’d never see him again, Holly went slowly back through the now-empty reception area, her head low, her spirits even lower.

“Uh … Ms. Chief Administrator?”

She looked up and saw Ilya Timoshenko standing at the end of the short passageway that opened into the habitat proper. He was dressed in slacks and collarless jacket, his shirt buttoned to the neck.

“Mr. Timoshenko,” she said, surprised to see him.

“Ilya, please to call me Ilya.”

“Ilya. And you should call me Holly. Besides, I’m not chief administrator yet. Not for another—” she glanced at her wrist “—five hours.”

Timoshenko’s gray eyes sparkled. “Even so, we’re going to be working together for the next year. Maybe more, no?”

“Maybe,” Holly said, thinking, Or maybe I’ll go to Earth when my term in office is finished.

Timoshenko looked slightly flustered, almost embarrassed. “I know you’ll be surrounded with friends and well-wishers at the ceremony, so I came out here to see you before all that.”

“Is there something in particular … ?”

“No, nothing special. I just want to offer you my congratulations and assure you that the maintenance department will keep this bucket in tip-top shape for you.”

“For all the people,” Holly said.

“Yes, for everybody. Now that Eberly’s out of office, I can promise that with my whole heart.”

Despite herself, Holly grinned at him. “You don’t like Malcolm?”

Grinning back at her, Timoshenko answered, “I don’t like most people, but him I like least of all.”

Holly actually laughed. “Well, I hope you grow to like me, at least a little bit.” She started toward the hatch at the end of the passageway.

“I think I already do,” said Timoshenko. And he stepped quickly in front of her to tap out the code on the hatch’s keypad. The heavy hatch sighed open a crack.

“Um … would it be all right if I asked you for a favor?” he said, his back to her.

“A favor?”

Turning to face her, his face looking strangely flustered, embarrassed, Timoshenko explained, “Once you are chief administrator you will have the authority to put through calls to people on Earth, no?”

“Anybody has the right—”

“Not exiles,” Timoshenko interrupted. “The authorities won’t allow my ex-wife to receive calls from me.”

Understanding dawned on Holly. “So you want me to call her for you.”

“If you could.”

“I’d be glad to, Ilya. Maybe we can get her to come out here and be with you again.”

Timoshenko’s face turned flame-red. But his smile was anything but sheepish. Turning quickly, he pulled the hatch all the way open.

Holly saw the green and vibrant habitat spread out before her. Timoshenko made a little bow to usher her through the hatch and into her own domain.

Eberly sat alone in his apartment, his uneaten lunch on the kitchen table before him.

They voted against me, he said to himself for the thousandth time. She beat me by a landslide. They rejected me. I’m all alone now. I don’t even have a job.

He thought of the Bible story of the unjust steward who also found himself thrown out of his job. What can I do? Eberly asked himself. To dig I am unable, to beg I am too proud.

At that exact moment his phone chimed.

“Phone answer,” he called out glumly.

The kitchen cabinets to his left glowed and formed an image of Zeke Berkowitz, smiling his usual affable, avuncular smile.

“Good morning, Malcolm,” said Berkowitz brightly.

“It’s past noon,” Eberly replied. “And I’m in no mood for an interview about our change in administrations.”

Berkowitz looked almost startled. “Interview? No, no. That’s not why I called you.”

“Then what?” Crossly.

“I figured you’ll be looking for a new job and I wanted to get my offer in ahead of all the others.”

Eberly knew there were no others, and he suspected that Berkowitz did, too. “A new job?”

“I’ve got an idea,” Berkowitz said, his smile widening. “How would you like to be a commentator on our news broadcasts? You know, give the people your opinions on what’s happening, your slant on the stories of the day.”

“A video commentator?”

“Sure. You’d be a natural. And it would keep you in front of the public every day. People would look up to you, they’d value your opinions.”

“They’d admire me?”

“Of course they would! You’ve served this community well. You’ve worked hard. Now you can be the voice of habitat Goddard, sharing your insights on each day’s events with your fellow citizens.”

“Every day. I’d be seen every day.”

Berkowitz nodded cheerfully. His broad smile was soon matched by Eberly’s own.

Pancho sat in the front row for the swearing-in ceremony, with Jake beside her. She beamed as Holly took the oath of office from Professor Wilmot.

Holly looked slightly nervous as she began her inauguration speech, Pancho thought, but her sister launched into it smoothly enough.

“You ready for the big adventure?” Pancho whispered to Wanamaker.

“Chasing comets?” he whispered back.

“That’s only part of it.”

“What’s the rest?”

“Havin’ a baby.”

Wanamaker’s jaw dropped.

On Titan’s cold and murky surface Titan Alpha trundled across the spongy mats of dark carbonaceous soil. Its sensors were uplinking a steady stream of data to the intensely eager scientists of habitat Goddard while computer engineers labored to alter the master program’s prohibition against contamination.

The scientists had discovered that the single-celled creatures living in those widespread mats were beginning to form colonies, taking the first step toward developing true multicellular species. In a few hundred million years, the biologists thought joyfully, Titan would begin to undergo a Cambrian Explosion and evolve true plants and animals.

Meanwhile, a spherical shell of powerful electromagnetic pulses was expanding at the speed of light across the interstellar vastness, informing any species clever enough to decipher them that intelligent life exists on the planets circling a smallish yellow main-sequence star in the Perseus arm of the Milky Way galaxy.