“Malcolm Eberly!” someone shouted.
A chorus of hisses rose from the audience. It startled Holly; it sounded like an angry warning from a den of snakes.
“Reason Eberly stuck us with this midafternoon time is that he figured nobody’d show up.”
“But he was wrong!” a woman yelled. Laughter and cheers rose from the audience.
Holding up her hands for silence, Holly went on, “The reason I accepted this dimdumb time was that we’ve got an important job to do, and we can’t waste any time getting it done.
“What is it?” Pancho asked, at the top of her voice.
Suppressing a grin at her sister’s stooging, Holly said, “We want the Zero Population Growth repealed, or at least reexamined.”
“Repealed!” several women shouted.
“Well, okay, but Eberly’s going to say that the ZPG protocol can’t be repealed or even altered unless there’s a formal petition signed by sixty-seven percent of the habitat’s population.”
“No!”
“Boo!”
“That’s a crock!”
Again gesturing for silence, Holly said, “I’m afraid it’s true. I’ve looked it up. Our constitution states that any clause or protocol that’s in force now can only be changed or repealed outright if two-thirds of the habitat’s citizens sign a petition to that effect.”
A babble of angry voices rose from the audience.
“Now wait,” Holly urged. “Wait up! Women make up forty-seven percent of the habitat’s population. If we get all the women to sign the petition, we only need two thousand men to sign up.”
That silenced them. Holly could practically hear them thinking; Two thousand men. How are we going to get two thousand men to agree with us?
Fishing her handheld from her tunic pocket, Holly flashed the petition she had drafted on the rear wall of the stage.
“I’ve written up the petition, all nice and legal,” she said. “Now what we’ve got to do is get sixty-seven hundred signatures in less than six weeks. Petitions have to be officially registered and counted by May first, one month before the election. That gives us only forty-one days to get the job done. We’ve got to get busy!”
They jumped to their feet and cheered. All but Wilmot and Ramanujan, who sat there in stony silence. Holly felt thrilled at their response until she realized that there were hardly more than two hundred here. We need sixty-seven hundred signatures, she thought. Even if we get every woman in that habitat to sign the petition, which we won’t, we’ll still need two thousand men.
20 March 2096: Evening
Where were you this afternoon?” Yañez asked his wife over their dinner table. ”I called from the hospital and you weren’t home.”
Estela replied, “I went to a political rally.”
His brows rose. “A political rally? You?”
“Why not?”
“I didn’t know that Eberly held a rally this afternoon.”
“It wasn’t for Eberly,” Estela replied.
Yañez put his soupspoon down on his place mat. “Whose rally was it, then?”
“Holly Lane’s,” she replied calmly. “It was about this ZPG business.”
Frowning, he picked up his spoon and ladled some soup to his lips.
“She’s written a petition against the ZPG protocol. I signed it.”
“Estela, no!”
“So did plenty of other women.”
“Sheer nonsense,” he muttered into his soup.
If she heard him, she gave no sign. They finished their light dinner cheerily enough, then Yañez went to the living room to watch the news while Estela cleared the table and put the dirty dishes in the washer. She heard Holly Lane’s voice and looked up: Oswaldo was watching the evening news. But he quickly turned it to an entertainment channel.
Once the kitchen was tidied, Estela went to her desk, next to the pantry, and took a copy of the ZPG petition from the top drawer. She walked into the living room and deposited the petition in her husband’s lap.
He looked up at her. “What’s this?”
“The petition.”
He scanned it, then handed it back to her. “Very competently drafted.”
“Sign it,” she said.
“What?”
“Sign it. We need six thousand and seven hundred signatures. Sign it, please.”
“Estela!”
She dropped the petition back on his lap.
“No!” he said.
Estela did not argue. She said nothing; she simply left the flimsy sheet on her husband’s lap and sat beside him to spend the rest of the evening watching entertainment vids beamed from Earth and Selene.
They retired to bed. Once the lights were out, Yañez laid a hand on his wife’s bare thigh and began stroking her skin.
“No,” she said.
“No?”
“Sign the petition.”
“Estela! I’m shocked! This is … it’s not right!”
“Sign the petition.”
“I have my rights as your husband!”
“Once you sign the petition we can discuss your rights as my husband. Not until then.”
He glared at her in the darkness. She turned her back to him. Furious, he turned his back to her. They both fell asleep that way.
Urbain spent the evening shuttling between his office and the mission control center. While his engineers and technicians were trying to trace out the ghostly trail of the tracks Alpha had left on Titan’s frozen ground, Urbain had presided at a meeting of the biologists on his staff. They had crowded into his office, bubbling with excitement at their observations of Alpha’s ghost tracks.
“I’ve set up a timeline,” said Negroponte. She clearly had assumed leadership of the group. “The tracks are smoothed down in a matter of hours.”
“How many hours?”
“Hard to say, exactly,” she replied, pushing back that stubborn lock of hair that swept across her face. “It’s between four and ten hours, that’s the best we can come up with, so far.”
“It’s got to be biological,” one of the other biologists said. “It can’t be anything else.”
“May I point out,” Urbain said, trying to regain control of the meeting, “that we do not know enough about erosion mechanisms on Titan to make such a definite statement.”
“Yeah, maybe,” the biologist replied, “but what else could it be?” He was young, earnest, agog with the idea that they were actually watching a biological process at work on the surface of Titan.
“I agree,” said Negroponte. “I can’t imagine any weathering process acting so fast.”
“We do not know enough to say that,” Urbain repeated firmly. “We should call in the geologists to look at this.”
They all stared at him, sitting behind his desk like the lord of a castle while they huddled on the other side like a knot of beseeching peasants.
“However,” Urbain added, “I see no reason why we cannot proceed on the hypothesis that we are witnessing a biological process. Until further data is produced.”
There, he thought. That ought to keep them satisfied. He got up from his chair and headed for the mission control center, to see if they had made any progress. The biologists continued discussing their data, throwing off ideas and theories like a St. Jean Baptiste fireworks display, while Negroponte sat back and encouraged them.
Holly was dead tired, emotionally drained from her afternoon speech, but still she spent the evening in a long and repetitious panel discussion with six other residents—including Professor Wilmot—in front of Berkowitz’s cameras in the communications center’s studio. The panel wrangled over the ZPG issue and Holly’s announcement that she had started a petition drive to repeal the zero-growth protocol.