She looked down on her little team from inside the suit’s helmet visor. Pancho looked tight with worry. Wanamaker seemed concerned, too. Tavalera was Tavalera, gloomy and apprehensive. Gaeta seemed almost angry, as if he were certain she was going to mess up.
Guess again, Manny, she said silently. I’ll go through this just like we did in the simulator. No flubs, no hitches. I’m going to make you admit that I can work this suit without you shitting bricks every ten seconds.
The inner hatch slowly closed, shutting off her view of the others. Wunderly was alone inside the big metal-walled compartment, her heart thumping. I wonder what the medical readouts are showing? They’d shut down the test automatically if I got anywhere near a redline.
“You facing the outer hatch?” Gaeta’s voice demanded.
“Yes, certainly,” she replied testily, while she turned laboriously in the unwieldy suit to comply with his order.
“Starting airlock cycle,” Gaeta said, his voice going flat as he lapsed into the clipped jargon of a mission controller.
“Airlock cycle, copy,” Wunderly echoed.
Wunderly clipped both her suit tethers to the clasps on either side of the outer hatch. She faintly felt the vibration of the airlock’s pumps through the thick insulation of her boots as she watched the lights on the panel beside the outer hatch slowly flicker from green through amber to red.
The outer hatch swung open and a million pinpoints of stars hung in the blackness, staring unblinkingly at her. Wunderly licked her lips and swallowed hard before she could say, “Ready to go outside.”
No reply. She looked out at the stars, slowly wheeling around her, and suddenly felt slightly breathless, almost dizzy.
“Tethers secure?”
She nodded inside the helmet, then said, “Both tethers secure.”
“Clear for outside,” Gaeta said. She thought he sounded uptight.
Clumping to the lip of the airlock hatch, Wunderly told herself, You’d better not screw up, girl. He’ll never let you use the suit again if you make a single mistake.
“Stepping out,” she said.
There was nothing out there. It was like stepping off a high diving board or jumping out of an airplane. She had never done either, but that’s what went through her mind as she put one booted foot out into sheer vacuum and pushed off the lip of the airlock hatch with her other foot. She drifted outward, turning slightly. The stars were so thickly strewn that she couldn’t make out any of the old familiar constellations.
“You okay?” Gaeta sounded worried.
“I’m fine.”
“Your pulse rate’s over a hundred ten.” Pancho’s voice.
“I’m fine,” Wunderly repeated.
And then Saturn swung into view, swathed about its middle with those gleaming brilliant rings. Wunderly’s breath gushed out of her. My god! she thought. I can almost reach out and touch them!
“Still okay?” Gaeta asked.
Those rings! Out here she could see them clearly, even though they were more than a hundred thousand klicks away. Wunderly stared, awestruck. She could even see the narrow swaths of darker debris that swung through the glittering ice chunks of the rings: sooty dust from crumbled moonlets.
“Still okay?” Gaeta repeated, the strain clear in his voice.
“They’re wonderful!” she gasped. “So beautiful! Look at the way they’re interwoven. They’re gorgeous!”
“Don’t lose your perspective,” Gaeta snapped. “You’re not out there to sightsee.”
“Right,” she replied, shaking her head inside the helmet. “It’s just … they’re so damned fascinating.”
Silence for several heartbeats, then Gaeta said in a considerably lighter tone, “You’re gonna get a lot closer to them, muchacha.”
Titan Alpha
Following the dictates of its master program, Titan Alpha trundled across the frozen terrain, gathering data that would have made its human creators ecstatic with wonder and exultation.
The biology program was busily storing data from its observations into Alpha’s main memory core. The motile particles on the surface of the slushy methane-covered ice were most likely living organisms, carbon-based units that metabolized the abundant hydrocarbons in the ice and the ethane-laced streams that fed into the distant seas. They were similar to the organisms detected in the seas by earlier probes, but there were significant differences as well.
Using entirely passive observations, since active examinations were prohibited by the primary restriction, the biology program had deduced that the motile particles represented a low-temperature psychrophile form of organism. Their internal metabolism was so slow, due to the low-temperature environment, that compared to Earth-normal biology they could hardly be considered to be alive. Yet they were demonstrably ingesting nutrients from the hydrocarbons in the ice in which they lived. Their internal temperatures were noticeably higher than their external environment, and they gave off heat and waste matter—mostly gaseous methane that quickly froze onto the ground.
The very slowness of their metabolism was of significance, the biology program deduced. It could follow the organisms’ internal metabolic paths in exquisite detail, if only the primary restriction could be lifted. Where terrestrial organisms’ basic metabolic reactions took place in hundreds of nanoseconds or less, these psychrophiles’ reactions took tens of millions of nanoseconds to run to completion. A living slow-motion laboratory for the study of biology.
Yet this promising avenue of study could not be pursued. The master program’s primary restriction prohibited it. If the same conflict had existed among two human researchers, furious arguments and even violent struggle might have ensued. For Alpha’s conflicting computer programs, however, there was no dispute, no quarrel. The program could not even feel regret that such a rich opportunity was being passed up.
Indeed, the master program was examining another problem that it considered more important. The memory core was reaching its saturation point. Data was accumulating but not being uplinked. The master program realized that once saturation had been reached, it must shut down all systems and enter hibernation mode until new commands were downlinked.
The master program reviewed its options.
It could uplink the stored data. But that was prohibited by the primary restriction.
It could enter hibernation mode until new commands were downlinked. But the downlink antennas had been disabled to prevent any contradictions that would impinge on the primary restriction.
It could erase all the accumulated data and continue to gather fresh data.
Of the three options, only the third did not result in violating the primary restriction.
16 February 2096: Evening
To his credit, Eberly spent several hours wrestling with his conscience. But, as usual, he won.
Sitting alone in his sparsely furnished apartment as the solar windows darkened into evening, he finally decided there was no other option: I’ve got to get rid of Holly. I can’t have her working for me as a department head while she’s running against me in the election.
But it’s got to be done carefully, he told himself. I can’t just fire her. Everybody will see it as an out-and-out political move. A vendetta. I’ve got to be more delicate than that.
He felt almost bad about his decision. He liked Holly on a personal level. She had always worked faithfully for him. But now she had turned on him, plunged a dagger into his back. It was her sister’s doing, of course. Holly had been fine until Pancho had showed up. Pancho Lane was his real enemy; she was using Holly as a front, a dupe, a mask to hide her own ambition. And she’s up to something more, he told himself. Pancho and Cardenas and that scientist, Wunderly. They’re scheming, cooking up some plot behind my back. I’ve got to find out what they’re doing.