“Quickly!” Urbain hissed, breathless. “Vite, vite!”
Other engineers were gathering around behind him. Urbain felt their body heat, smelled the scents of their colognes and aftershaves and perspiration. But he kept his eyes riveted to the blank display screen.
It lit up and Urbain could hear a gush of excitement behind him. The view was much wider than it had been a moment ago.
“Tightening the focus,” the engineer murmured. “This is all real-time, you realize.”
“Yes, yes,” Urbain snapped impatiently. “Focus on the tracks.”
“That’s what I’m doing,” the engineer replied testily.
“Use the autofocus,” a voice behind Urbain suggested.
“What the hell d’you think I’m doing?” the engineer growled.
The double row of tracks took form on the screen. Urbain heard the others sigh.
“Follow them!” he urged.
The landscape shifted; the tracks blurred and then came into sharp focus again. Urbain could feel his heart thundering against his ribs. His mouth was dry.
“And there she is,” the engineer said.
Urbain stared. Titan Alpha sat on the ice, unmoving but apparently intact. Then the view on the screen blurred.
Urbain realized that he had tears in his eyes.
When Ramanujan had reported to Eberly about Holly’s afternoon rally, Eberly’s first reaction was, “A petition drive? Do you know how many signatures she will need?”
“Sixty-seven hundred, she said,” Ramanujan had replied.
“Six thousand, six hundred and sixty-seven, actually,” Eberly said.
Ramanujan dipped his chin in acknowledgement of his boss’s superior knowledge. He was taller than most of the Hindus that Eberly had known, but painfully thin; Ramanujan’s face looked like a skull with emaciated dark skin stretched tightly across it.
“She’ll never get that many signatures,” Eberly had said, dismissing the problem—and his assistant—with a wave of his hand.
But as the afternoon wore into evening Eberly found himself worrying more and more about it. He ate dinner alone in his apartment, brooding over the possibilities. After dinner he watched Holly’s panel discussion on the news channel.
She can’t possibly get sixty-seven hundred signatures, Eberly told himself. Even if she got every woman in the habitat to sign the stupid petition she’d still need two thousand men to sign it, too.
Impossible.
And yet …
Eberly sank back in his favorite recliner and thought about the problem for long hours. Well past midnight he was still wide awake, pondering the possibilities.
I need a woman to rise up in opposition to her, he realized. I need a woman who’ll not only refuse to sign the silly petition but who’ll campaign actively against it. She doesn’t have to openly support my candidacy. In fact, it’d be better if she didn’t; she shouldn’t have any visible ties to me. She should just oppose the petition because the idea behind it is wrong.
A woman who’d oppose breaking the ZPG protocol. Who? Who would stand up against most of the other women in the habitat?
The answer came to him with the clarity of a church bell on a calm summer evening: Jeanmarie Urbain. Her and her clumsy attempt to seduce me into releasing those satellites for her husband. If she believed that allowing population growth would endanger the scientific work her husband’s doing, she’d oppose Holly’s petition. She’d not only refuse to sign it, she’d campaign against it.
Good, he told himself. I’ll have to see her and explain the situation to her. Put it in terms that she’ll understand: population growth will eat up the habitat’s resources and we’ll no longer be able to support the scientific research that her husband’s leading. She’ll go for that. If she doesn’t, I’ll remind her of our little tryst a couple of months ago. I’ll scare her into working for me, if I have to.
But it won’t come to that. She’ll do it for her husband.
“Good,” he repeated aloud.
Suddenly a new conception flashed into his mind like a starburst. An entire plan for the campaign, a strategy that could not possibly fail. No matter what Holly does, no matter what she stands for, this will beat her. Like those ancient oriental martial arts, I’ll use her own strengths to defeat her. It’s perfect! I’ll lead her into the trap and when we have one of our big debates I’ll spring it on her.
There’s no way she can outmaneuver me, Eberly said to himself. I’ll sweep her and anyone who’s supporting her entirely out of my way!
Perfect.
21 March 2096: Early morning
None of them had slept. Rumpled, baggy-eyed, sweaty, yet not one of Urbain’s scientists or engineers felt tired or irritable in the slightest. They had spent the whole night trying every downlink frequency, every message, every command they could think of, but Titan Alpha still sat silent and inert on the edge of the carbonaceous expanse that spread over more than a third of Titan’s surface.
“She’s a stubborn little beast,” Habib said, scratching at his scruffy little beard.
He had pulled up a wheeled chair next to Urbain; the two of them were staring at the satellite image of Alpha. Urbain could feel the press of dozens of others crowding around them, leaning over his shoulders. He remembered that he himself had not showered for god knew how many hours. What of it? he asked himself. First things first.
“She’s not responding at all,” Habib whispered, restating the obvious.
But Urbain was too excited to feel annoyed. “She has made her way halfway around Titan and stopped at the edge of the carbon field. Has she gone into hibernation mode? Or is she making observations before proceeding further?”
“We haven’t seen any flashes from the laser,” Habib said.
“Perhaps she is restricting herself to passive observations,” Urbain murmured.
“Or the core memory’s reached saturation and she’s gone into hibernation,” said Negroponte from behind Habib’s shoulder.
Urbain shook his head. “She goes into hibernation exactly when she reaches the edge of the carbon field? No, it is too much of a coincidence.”
“Coincidences happen,” Negroponte rebutted.
For the first time since he had seen the image of Alpha sitting safe and intact on the surface of Titan, Urbain felt nettled. This woman is too domineering, too self-assured.
Yet Habib said, “For all the communicating the beast has done with us, she might as well be in hibernation mode.”
Urbain felt irritation rising inside him. He realized that he had reached the end of his endurance. And probably the others have as well, he thought. We’ve all been here more than twelve hours now, some of us more than twenty.
“We must find some way to communicate with Alpha,” he said, trying to alter the direction of their discussion.
“Yes, but how?” Habib asked.
Pushing himself up from the console’s chair, Urbain said loudly, “Enough for now. We all need sleep. I want three volunteers to stand watch over Alpha while the rest of us go to our homes and sleep.”
Negroponte immediately said, “I’ll stand watch.”
“Me too,” Habib said.
Strange, Urbain thought. Moslem men are raised to be chauvinists; yet this one follows her like an obedient puppy.
He found that his legs were tingling from sitting for so many hours. Slightly shaky, Urbain made his way to the door of the control center. All but three of his scientists and engineers followed him.
At the door he turned and forced a weak smile. “While you sleep,” he told them all, “dream up a way to communicate with Alpha.”