Three thousand and some refugees, he thought. Hardly an imposing number. There are millions more back on Earth desperately seeking a way out of poverty and despair. But I won’t be able to help them, not unless I can wrest control of this habitat back out of Evan’s hands.
How? he cried silently. How can one man stand against Waxman and his minions? He has the Council under his control. He’s reduced me to a figurehead. How can I fight against him? How can I win?
Glancing about, Umber realized he had walked completely around the habitat’s passageway again; he was back where he had started earlier in the day.
How symbolic, he told himself. Back where you began. You’ve accomplished nothing. All you’re doing is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
But there was something tickling the back of his mind. A hazy thought, a vague idea was prodding him. Yet he could not form a clear picture of it.
Lord, he prayed silently, show me the way.
As he started on his next circumnavigation of the passageway, he listened for God’s wisdom.
In vain.
Vincente Zworkyn looked up from his cluttered desk and saw Tómas Gomez standing at his door, grinning uncertainly as he leaned on a silvery cane.
Bouncing up from his chair, Zworkyn beamed a smile at the younger man. “Tómas! They let you out!”
Gomez stepped stiffly into the office/workshop, his free arm outstretched, a wide grin on his tan face. “I am officially released from the hospital.”
“Wonderful!” said Zworkyn, ushering Tómas to his desk. “How do you feel?”
“Like I’m a hundred and fifty years old. My leg’s not accustomed to walking long distances yet.”
“You walked all the way here from the hospital?”
“Yes,” said Tómas, as he eased himself into the chair in front of Zworkyn’s desk. “Ahh. It feels good to sit.”
Zworkyn went back around the desk and sat himself down. “Abbott was as good as his word. I got a call from the Farside Observatory this morning. They’re sending the Schmidt data to us. Should be here by lunchtime.”
“Good. Then we’ll have some work to do.”
Zworkyn nodded happily.
Kyle Umber was halfway through his fourth trip around Haven’s central passageway when it hit him.
Gandhi! he thought. Mohandas K. Gandhi. The liberator of India, back in the twentieth century.
Umber stopped in his tracks and stood stock-still in the middle of the crowd of men and women walking through the passageway.
“Gandhi,” he said aloud. “Nonviolence.”
Gandhi was so revered that the Indian people dubbed him “Mahatma”: holy one. His campaign of nonviolent protest against the British forces that had occupied India for several hundred years eventually forced the Brits to leave India and allow the Indian people independence and the right to form their own government.
Could it work here? Umber turned around and hurried toward his office, back in the habitat’s administrative tower. Gandhi, he kept repeating to himself. Nonviolence.
Once he reached his office he slid into his desk chair and asked his computer to pull up everything it had on Gandhi.
Well past the dinner hour, he was still at his desk, watching ancient newsreel films of the frail, wizened little man who freed his people from British domination.
He saw snippets of Gandhi’s description of the nonviolent approach to political freedom.
The term Satyagraha was coined by me… the computer spelled out over a scene of police beating unresisting Indian men and women in old, grainy, black-and-white newsreel footage. Its root meaning is “holding on to truth,” hence “force of righteousness.” I have also called it love force or soul force…. I discovered in the earliest stages that pursuit of truth did not permit violence being inflicted on one’s opponent… for what appears truth to the one may appear to be error to the other. And patience means self-suffering. So the doctrine came to mean vindication of truth, not by the infliction of suffering on the opponent, but on one’s self.
Umber sank back in his desk chair and stared at the words of Gandhi. Eyes wide with discovery, he told himself, That’s a form of Christianity! Not by inflicting suffering on one’s opponent, but on one’s self.
That is the way to deal with Waxman and the people around him. Satyagraha. The force of righteousness.
He raised his eyes to the ceiling of his office and his vision seemed to penetrate through it and out into the limitless depths of space.
“Lord, help me in this quest for righteousness.”
He heard no reply, but he neither expected to nor needed to. He had found his way and was fully committed to it, mind and heart and soul.
Yet a thin, hard voice in his mind asked, All right, then. What’s your first step?
THE FIRST STEP
“Please come in, Reverend,” said Raven, gesturing her visitor into her living room.
Reverend Umber stepped somewhat hesitantly into Raven’s apartment. Alicia Polyani was already there, sitting on the sofa beneath the view of Uranus turning serenely on its axis.
“Thank you,” said Umber. “It’s good of you to see me.” He went to the sling chair in front of the sofa and lowered himself carefully into it.
Before either of the women could say anything, Umber began, “I’ve come to ask the two of you to help me organize a cabal, a protest against what Evan Waxman is doing to our habitat.”
Raven glanced at Alicia, then turned back to Umber. “A protest?”
“A nonviolent protest that could break Waxman’s control of Haven.”
“That sounds… interesting,” said Raven.
“It sounds dangerous,” Alicia murmured.
“This is like looking for a needle in a haystack,” complained Zworkyn.
“It’s there,” said Tómas, sitting on the edge of the sofa in Zworkyn’s living room. The wall screen across the room showed views of the stars from one of Farside Observatory’s wide-field Schmidt telescopes.
“It’s there,” Tómas repeated, without taking his eyes off the star-littered screen. “We just have to find it.”
“A tiny needle in a huge haystack. A minuscule needle in an enormous haystack.”
Tómas shook his head stubbornly. “We’ve estimated what its magnitude should be. We just have to search until we find it.”
Zworkyn stared at the younger man. “Look, Tómas. We’ve set the parameters. We’ve estimated the range of magnitudes that the moon would show, we’ve calculated how far from our solar system it would be. And we’ve found nothing. Nothing even remotely similar to what we’re looking for.”
Tómas nodded absently, still staring at the screen. “All right, so it’s not in this view. We still have six other Schmidt images to look at.”
“It’s dinner time,” Zworkyn grumbled. “Past dinner time.”
“Go ahead and eat. I want to look at the next display.”
Zworkyn shook his head unhappily, but didn’t move from the sofa.
“Passive resistance?” Alicia asked.
“Yes,” said Umber. “It’s the way to break Waxman’s control. It’s a hard way, a difficult way. It requires enormous self-control, enormous sacrifice—”
“But you expect the people of this habitat to set themselves down in front of the manufacturing tower and let the security police beat them?”
Umber nodded silently.
Raven murmured, “That’s asking a lot from them. Maybe more than they can give you.”