The frown that etched Donkman’s lean, almost gaunt face was engendered by the fact that the bank’s central accounting system showed an anomaly. The master account didn’t balance! It was off by only a few hundred credits, but it should not be off at all. Not by a single penny, Donkman told himself sternly.
The problem was easy enough to fix, he knew. Simply liquidate the unbalanced amount from the habitat’s internal account. That would balance the books. But the thought irked Donkman mightily. Accounts should balance without jiggering. It was his insistence on such purity that got him exiled from Amsterdam in the first place. Someone high up in the hierarchy of the Holy Disciples had been bleeding off cash from the church’s banking system. Donkman had tried to track down the embezzler and found himself accused of the crime and exiled to habitat Goddard.
The memory of that injustice rankled him, but this tiny misbalance in the habitat’s account aggravated him even more. The amount involved was too small for anyone to deliberately have stolen it. It was a mistake, somewhere in the accounting system, a simple mistake.
But try as he might, Donkman could not find where the mistake originated. At last his wristwatch alarm buzzed. With a reluctant sigh, Donkman pushed himself up from his desk and headed for the cosmetics clinic. Everyone was getting enzyme injections to turn their skin golden tan. He didn’t want to be the only one among his acquaintances to look like a palefaced mouth breather.
28 December 2095: Nanolab
Malcolm Eberly felt distinctly uneasy inside the nanotech laboratory. Not that he had any religious scruples against nanotechnology; he simply shared the same fear that most people had about an outbreak of uncontrollable nanomachines, mindless microscopic monsters chewing up everything in their path like an unstoppable swarm of soldier ants. The thought made him shudder inside.
He knew his fears were grounded in solid fact. Nanomachines had killed people in the past. Back when Dr. Cardenas had first joined the habitat, while Professor Wilmot was still in charge of the interim government, the old man had insisted on all kinds of safeguards before he’d allow Cardenas to set up this laboratory. Why, just getting into this lab was a major struggle: You had to pass through a double set of heavy doors, just like an airlock. Cardenas had to keep the air pressure inside her lab lower than the pressure in the rest of the habitat, just to make certain none of the virus-sized machines could waft out on a stray current of air.
Urbain seemed uneasy, too. He must be really desperate, Eberly thought, if he’s considering using nanomachines to fix his probe down there on Titan.
If Kris Cardenas sensed their apprehensions, she gave no sign of it. Perched casually on a tall stool, one elbow leaning on the top of the lab bench, Cardenas was wearing a comfortable light, short-sleeved sweater of baby blue and denim jeans. Urbain, as usual, was in a jacket and carefully creased slacks. No tie, but he had knotted an ascot inside the collar of his shirt. Eberly himself wore a loose tunic over his slacks, as the dress code he had promulgated called for. Hardly anyone outside the habitat’s administrative staff paid much attention to his dress code.
“We’ve been working on nanos for self-repair and maintenance,” Cardenas was saying to Urbain. “That was what you asked for.”
“Yes, I realize that,” Urbain replied, running a nervous finger along his trim moustache. “But we are confronted by a new problem now.”
Eberly hadn’t actually been invited to this meeting, but once he heard that Urbain was going to Cardenas for help he decided he had to listen in. And Urbain was too ridiculously polite to tell the habitat’s chief administrator to keep his nose out of scientific matters. So Eberly sat in one of the folding chairs that Cardenas had provided for them while Urbain and the nanotech expert thrashed out their problems. Off at the far side of the lab, Cardenas’s lone assistant hovered among the gleaming metal equipment, intently listening. What’s his name? Eberly asked himself. Tavalera, came the answer. The engineer we picked up after the refueling accident at Jupiter.
“As I understand the problem,” Cardenas was saying, “the probe isn’t sending any data to you.”
Urbain touched his moustache again before answering. “Titan Alpha is not uplinking data from its sensors, that is true. We have reason to believe the sensors are working and gathering data. Alpha simply is not relaying the information to us.”
“Curious,” muttered Cardenas.
“Frustrating,” snapped Urbain. “We are receiving telemetry from Alpha’s maintenance program. All systems appear to be functioning properly—except for the sensor data uplink.”
Cardenas straightened up on her stool, crossed her legs, glanced over at her assistant, then made a little shrug. “I don’t see what we can do to help you, Dr. Urbain. It’s—”
“Please. Call me Eduoard. We have known each other long enough to use our first names.”
“Eduoard,” Cardenas said, with a slight dip of her chin. “I’m afraid I don’t see how nanos can help you, unless you can pinpoint the cause of the malfunction.”
Urbain sighed mightily. “That is the real problem. We don’t know what is causing the silence. No one knows. My people have been racking their brains for three days now. And three nights, I might add. They are going over all the computer programming, line by line. It is maddening.”
“So how can nanos help?”
With a shake of his head, Urbain said, “I was hoping that perhaps there might be some way to deliver nanomachines to Alpha that could construct a new uplink antenna.”
“A backup to the existing antenna?”
“Or a replacement,” said Urbain.
He’s desperate, Eberly said to himself. Grasping at straws.
Cardenas got down from the stool. “Let me think about it, Eduoard. That might be possible, but it won’t be easy …” Her voice trailed off.
Urbain got to his feet. “I would appreciate anything you can do.”
Cardenas walked him to the door of the laboratory, Eberly following a pace or so behind them. “Please keep me informed of your analysis of the situation,” she told Urbain. “You never know, something that seems trivial to you might open a window for us.”
“I will,” said Urbain. His gloomy tone showed how hopeless he felt. “Thank you.”
As soon as the lab door closed behind them, Eberly made a hasty farewell to Urbain and hurried outside the laboratory building, into the sunshine, along the gently rising street up to the administrative center and into his own office. Sliding into his desk chair he told the phone to locate Ilya Timoshenko and ask him to come to the chief administrator’s office immediately.
Timoshenko ran against me in the general election, Eberly told himself. So did Urbain. If they’re smart enough to combine their votes they could defeat me in June. I’ve got to get them working against one another. Divide and conquer, that’s the rule.
Timoshenko was not in the navigation center, which was his nominal work station, for the simple reason that he had nothing to do there now that Goddard was plying its orbit around Saturn. Nothing to do except think, and remember the life he had left behind on Earth. The woman he had left behind. His wife, the golden-haired Katrina. Katrina of the sweet smile and delicate hands. When she spoke it was like silver bells chiming in his heart.
No, that way lay remorse. And anger. A rage so towering that its black storm could engulf him utterly. Timoshenko fought against the rage, because he knew that he himself was its focus, its center. At the thundering heart of his bloodred fury was the knowledge that he had brought this exile on himself. He drank too much, he talked too much, he cared too much. So they had exiled him to this green and luxurious prison more than a billion kilometers from Katrina.