This mission to Saturn has changed him, she realized. Now he cares. He’s tasted glory; now he understands that one must have power in order to succeed. Now he wants to be admired, respected.
And now this failure. His robot sat dead, inert, useless on the surface of Titan. It was enough to make a man weep.
But Eduoard did not weep. He seethed. He fumed like a volcano about to erupt. He paced their sitting room radiating anger and frustration. All the passion he had kept bottled up inside him when he was among his scientists came boiling out now that he was alone with her.
“Dolts,” he muttered. “Idiots. All of them. From Wexler on down.”
“Eduoard,” Jeanmarie said as soothingly as she could, “perhaps it is only temporary. Perhaps tomorrow the probe will respond.”
He glowered at her. “You should have heard them. The high and mighty geniuses. Throwing off theories like little children tossing handfuls of leaves into the air.”
She saw the fury in his face.
“It must be a programming error,” he whined in falsetto, mimicking Wexler’s penetrating nasality. Then, in a deeper voice, “No, it has to be an antenna malfunction. No, there must be damage from the entry into the atmosphere. No, it must be … must be …”
His face was so red she feared a blood vessel would burst. Balling his hands into fists he shook them above his head. “Fools! Stupid, smug, self-important idiots! And all of them staring at me. I could see it in their eyes. Failure! That’s what they think of me. I’m a failure.”
Only then did Eduoard Urbain actually break into tears, deep racking sobs that tore at Jeanmarie’s heart. She folded her arms about him and gently led him toward their bedroom, wondering to herself, What can I do to ease his pain? How can I help him? How?
At the Bistro restaurant, Pancho had tipped her chair back to a precarious angle and lifted her softbooted feet off the grass, balancing herself teeteringly on the chair’s back legs.
“You could get hurt if the chair goes over,” Gaeta warned.
She grinned at him, slightly drunk from the wine and cognac they had absorbed. “Wanna bet I can keep it on two legs longer’n you can?”
Gaeta shook his head. “No thanks.”
“You’re a stuntman, ain’tcha?” Pancho teased. “You laugh at danger, right?”
“I do stunts for money, Pancho. I don’t risk my spinal cord on an after-dinner dare.”
“Betcha a hundred. How’s that?”
Kris Cardenas grasped Gaeta’s hand before he could reply. “Manny has better things to do than play games with you, Pancho.”
Pancho let the chair drop forward. “Like play games with you, Kris?”
Cardenas smiled sphinxlike.
Turning to Holly and her guy, Pancho asked, “How ’bout you, Raoul? I’ll give you odds: five to one.”
Holly got up from her chair. “We’ve got to be going, Panch. Thanks for the dinner.”
“Welcome,” Pancho slurred.
Her sister smiled. “This was the best Christmas I’ve had in a long time, Panch. The best I can remember, f’real.”
Slouching back in her chair, Pancho drank in the warmth of Holly’s smile. “Me too, kid. Me too.”
Wanamaker said, “It’s time we got to bed, too, Pancho.”
“Oh? Whatcha got in mind?”
He laughed, but Pancho caught a hint of embarrassment in it.
As they got up from the table, Holly asked, “Are you going to watch them try to make contact with Titan Alpha tomorrow?”
With a shake of her head, Pancho replied, “I been disinvited. Nobody allowed into the control center tomorrow except the workin’ crew.”
“I’ll bet Wexler will be there,” said Cardenas. “Urbain can’t lock her out.”
Turning curious, Pancho asked, “I heard you were gonna lace the probe with nanomachines.”
“We had talked about it, Urbain and I,” Cardenas said, as they started up the path that led back to the village’s apartment buildings. “But he sent the beast down to Titan before I could work up the nanos for him. Impatient.”
“Bet he wishes he had ’em on board now.”
“Maybe,” Cardenas said guardedly. “Frankly, Pancho, I’m just as glad they’re not. He’d be blaming me for whatever glitch has shut down his beast.”
Timoshenko’s message
I know you can’t send an answer back, they won’t let you do that. It’s okay. Well, no, it’s not really okay but I understand. I’m an exile, a nonperson, and it would be dangerous for you to reply to me or even admit you’ve received a message from me. Still, I wish there was some way for you to let me know you at least get my messages. I don’t care even if you don’t listen to them; it’s just so damned lonely out here not knowing if you even received them.
Big doings among the high-and-mighty scientists. The big lump of a probe they sent down to Titan’s surface isn’t talking to them. Just sitting there on the ice like the big pile of junk that it is. Makes me laugh. I worked for more than a year on that machine, on my own time, even. Put a lot of sweat into it. And for what? Like everything else in my life, it’s all been for nothing.
Urbain is tearing his hair out, what’s left of it. The other scientists are running around like chickens trying to figure out what went wrong. Me? I sit all alone here in the navigation center with nothing to do. That’s where I am now, talking to you. Oh, I check the instruments, but we’re in orbit around Saturn now. We’re just going around in circles. No more navigation. No more propulsion. The only problem we could possibly have is if some chunk of ice hit the outer shell and broke one of the superconducting wires of the radiation shield. Then we’d have to go outside and fix it. It would be a relief from the boredom.
I miss you. I know we fought when I had to leave and it was all my fault. I can see that now. I’ve made a mess of everything. The only thing I hope for is that I haven’t made a mess of your life too, Katrina. You deserve a good life with a man who loves you and can give you good, healthy kids.
Me, I’m here in this fancy Siberia forever. It’s not bad, really I’m a free man, as free as you can be in this glorified tin can. I even ran for political office. Can you imagine? Me! I lost, of course, but it was a different experience, let me tell you.
I miss you. I know it’s too late, but I want you to know that I love you, dear Katrina. I’m sorry I ruined our lives.
26 December 2095: Morning
Malcolm Eberly had worked hard to reach his lofty position as Goddard’s chief administrator. Plucked from an Austrian prison cell on the promise that he would set up a fundamentalist government to rule the habitat’s ten thousand souls, he had outmaneuvered the murdering zealots who’d been sent to keep watch over him and now he stood at the head of the habitat’s administration, admired and respected.
Truth to tell, most of the habitat’s population didn’t give a damn about their own government so long as no one bothered them with rules and regulations. They had been picked from the dissatisfied, disaffected free thinkers, men and women who had run afoul of the authoritarian fundamentalist regimes of Earth. They were dissidents, idealists, troublemakers. Now they were more than a billion kilometers away from Earth, and for the most part both they and the Earthside politicians felt better for it.