Fighting the fears bubbling inside her, Cardenas went to the folding chair beside Timoshenko and sat down. I shouldn’t be drinking coffee, she told herself, sipping the steaming brew gingerly. I’m keyed up enough already.
As if he could read her thoughts, Timoshenko grinned slyly at her. “What we need is vodka, no?”
Tavalera said, “When they get back we’ll break out some champagne.”
Wanamaker’s voice said from the flimsy’s tiny speaker, “Separation complete. All systems in the green.”
“I’m outside.” Gaeta’s voice. “Heading into the B ring.”
He’s outside. Cardenas’s breath caught in her throat. He’s on his own now.
Nadia Wunderly was not a religious person, but she had painted a replica of an old Pennsylvania Dutch hex sign that she had remembered from her childhood, a set of colored circles nested within one another, barely twelve centimeters across. It was perched atop the desktop screen in her cramped office, to keep evil spirits away. It’s nonsense, Nadia told herself. But somehow she felt better with it there.
The mission was going smoothly so far. Manny was outside now and Pancho was maneuvering the transfer craft to the underside of the B ring, through the Cassini gap between the A and B rings, to the spot where she would pick up Manny.
After he’s gone through the ring and collected my samples, Wunderly said silently. She suppressed an urge to reach up and touch the hex sign.
As she’d expected, Eberly’s opening statement was devoted almost entirely to the idea of mining the rings.
“There is wealth out there,” he told the audience in the rich measured tones he used for swaying crowds. “The most valuable commodity in the solar system is water, and we have within our grasp many billions of tons of frozen water. It will be the highest priority of my second term of office to begin mining the rings of Saturn and make every single person in the habitat as wealthy as an Earthly millionaire.”
They applauded lustily. Holly sat there on the stage and watched the audience roar its approval, clapping and even whistling, more than half of them rising to their feet for a standing ovation.
Wilmot waited several moments, then calmly walked to the lectern and made a shushing motion with both hands. Slowly the crowd stopped and sat down again.
I should’ve brought a claque with me, Holly thought. She mentally kicked herself for not organizing a band of loyal supporters to give her the kind of ovation that Eberly had arranged for himself.
“And now the challenger,” said Professor Wilmot, turning slightly toward Holly, “Ms. Holly Lane, formerly head of the human resources department.”
A scattering of polite applause rippled through the auditorium. Better’n nothing, Holly thought, as she stepped up to the lectern. Her prepared speech appeared on the built-in screen.
“There are other kinds of riches besides money,” she began, looking out over the sea of faces. “For good and proper reasons, we all agreed to the Zero Population Growth protocol when we started this voyage to Saturn. But that was then, and this is now.”
She saw a few heads nodding here and there. All women’s.
“This habitat is our home. Most of us will spend the rest of our lives here, some by choice, many because they wouldn’t be allowed to return to Earth.” She took a breath. “Well, if this is our home, then we should make it as much of a home as we can. I don’t mean just the physical environment. I mean that sooner or later we should begin to bring children into our world. Otherwise we’re living in a barren, empty shell. We need the warmth, the love, the humanness of raising families.”
“Do we need the aggravation?” someone in the back yelled. A man’s voice.
Heads turned to find the heckler. One of Eberly’s flacks, Holly knew. Several people laughed.
She put on a smile. “We need a future,” she replied. “Children represent the future, and without them this community will just grow older and eventually die out.”
As Holly continued speaking, Eduoard Urbain turned to his wife and whispered, “This is nonsense. Population growth would destroy this habitat.”
She nodded, knowing that what her husband meant was that population growth would threaten his work.
12 April 2096: Into the ring
Manny Gaeta squinted against the glare. Even though the suit’s visor was heavily tinted, Saturn’s B ring was so bright it almost made his eyes tear. Glittering brilliant jewels of ice stretched as far as he could see in every direction.
Despite himself, he grinned. Yes, the fear was there, deep inside him. But so was the excitement, the exultation. What was that old line: To boldly go where no one has gone before. That’s me. Boldly. Here alone, in the suit, heading into the blindingly dazzling rings, Gaeta knew that if he had to die he wanted to die this way, doing what no one else had ever dared to try.
“Closing in,” he muttered into his helmet microphone.
He glanced at the lidar display on the left side of the helmet. It was breaking up into hash. Shouldn’t do that, he said to himself, shaking his head.
“Your altimeter reading is breaking up.” Wanamaker’s voice sounded slightly edgy, through the helmet’s earphones.
“The laser beam is getting scattered too much by the ice particles,” he replied.
“It’s gonna be tough for you to judge distances, then,” Pancho said.
“I can eyeball it.”
“Anything hitting you?” Wanamaker asked.
“Not yet. I’m still more than two hundred klicks from the main body of the ring.”
“Movin’ fast, though. We got a good fix on your beacon; you’re doin’ twelve hundred an hour.”
“I’d better slow down.”
“Retro burn programmed for six minutes from now,” said Wanamaker. “Do you want to override it and go manual?”
Staring out at the overwhelming field of gleaming white, Gaeta said, “No, let the program ride.”
“Tell me when you start getting pinged,” said Pancho.
“Right,” Gaeta replied. But he thought, What can they do about it? They’ll be pushing over to the other side of the ring in another ten minutes.
Unless something goes wrong, answered a voice in his head. They’ll hang here as long as they can, just in case some malfunction pops up. They’ll fish you out.
Yeah, Gaeta said to himself. If they can.
A tiny red light winked at him from the rim of the helmet’s displays. Impact, Gaeta realized. The display went dark immediately. One little ice flake hit me. A scout?
Holly was surprised at the questions from the audience. Almost all of them were from women, and they all wanted to know how soon the ZPG protocol could be lifted.
“The first step is to get six thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven signatures on our petition,” she answered, more than once. “We can’t do a thing until we have enough signers.”
Eberly’s people asked questions, too: mostly about how much money could be brought in from mining Saturn’s rings. But Professor Wilmot picked the questioners from a sea of waving hands and he picked mostly women.
Through it all, Eberly was strangely quiet. Not that he didn’t speak well or answer questions, but he ignored the population growth question almost entirely. Holly had expected him to paint dreadful word pictures of how the habitat would be overrun with babies and sink into a squalling, poverty-stricken disaster. But he didn’t. He spoke positively about how wealthy the habitat could become by mining the rings. To Holly, he seemed to be avoiding the ZPG issue altogether.
Until Professor Wilmot called on Jeanmarie Urbain.
She stood up, impeccably clad in a dark short-sleeved sheath adorned tastefully with hints of jewelry: clearly the best-dressed woman in the auditorium. Holly though she looked a bit nervous, almost timid, while the automatic microphones along the auditorium’s side walls focused on her. Her husband, seated beside her, looked more annoyed than pleased that his wife was asking a question.