Ben Bova - Saturn.pdf - Ben Bova - margozap

Second in size only to Jupiter, bigger than a thousand Earths but

light enough to float in water, home of cushing gravity and delicate,

seemingly impossible rings, it dazzles and attracts us: Saturn

Earth groans under the rule of fundamentalist political regimes.

Crisis after crisis has given authoritarians the upper hand. Freedom

and opportunity exist in space, for those with the nerve and skill to

run the risks.

Now the governments of Earth are encouraging many of their most

incorrigible dissidents to join a great ark on a one-way expedition,

twice Jupiter's distance from the Sun, to Saturn, the ringed planet

that baffled Galileo and has fascinated astronomers ever since.

But humans will be human, on Earth or in the heavens--so amid the

idealism permeating Space Habitat Goddard are many individuals with

long-term schemes, each awaiting the right moment. And hidden from

them is the greatest secret of all, the real purpose of this

expedition, known to only a few....

BEN BOVA

A six-time winner of the Hugo Award, a former editor of Analog and

former fiction editor of Omni, and a past president of the National

Space Society and the Science Fiction Writers of America, Ben Bova is

the author of more than a hundred works of science fact and fiction.

He lives in Florida. Visit his Web site: www.benbova.net.

SATURN

BEN BOVA

TOR

A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed

in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

SATURN

right to reproduce this book or portions thereof, in any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden A Tor Book Published by Tom

Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10010

www.tor.com Tor is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty

Associates, LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bova, Ben, 1932-

Saturn / Ben Bova.--1st ed. p. cm.

"A Tom Doherty Associates book." ISBN 0-312-87218-6 1. Saturn

(Planet)--Fiction. I. Title PS3552.O84S28 2003 813'.54-dc21

2003040216

First Edition: June 2003

Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

Once more to dearest Barbara, and to Dr. Jerry Poumelle, a

colleague and friend who originated the term "shepherd satellites"

but never received the credit for it that he deserves.

There are some questions in Astronomy to which we are attracted ...

on account of their peculiarity ... [rather] than from any direct

advantage which their solution would afford to mankind.... I am not

aware that any practical use has been made of Saturn's Rings.... But

when we contemplate the Rings from a purely scientific point of view,

they become the most remarkable bodies in the heavens.... When we

have actually seen that great arch swing over the equator of the

planet without any visible connection, we cannot bring our minds to

rest.

--James Clerk Maxwell.

As the new century begins ... we may be ready to settle down before

we wreck the planet. It is time to sort out Earth and calculate what

it will take to provide a satisfying and sustainable life for

everyone into the indefinite future.... For every person in the world

to reach present U.S. levels of consumption would require [the

resources of] four more planet Earths.

--Edward O. Wilson.

BOOK I

For the same reason I have resolved not to put anything around

Saturn except what I have already observed and revealed--that is, two

small stars which touch it, one to the east and one to the west, in

which no alteration has ever yet been seen to take place and in which

none is to be expected in the future, barring some very strange event

remote from every other motion known to or even imagined by us. But

as to the supposition ... that Saturn is sometimes oblong and

sometimes accompanied by two stars on its flanks, Your Excellency may

rest assured that this results either from the imperfection of the

telescope or the eye of the observer.... I, who have observed it a

thousand times at different periods with an excellent instrument, can

assure you that no change whatever is to be seen in it. And reason,

based upon our experiences of all other stellar motions, renders us

certain that none will ever be seen, for if these stars had any

motions similar to those of other stars, they would long since have

been separated from or conjoined with the body of Saturn, even if

that movement were a thousand times slower than that of any other

star which goes wandering through the heavens.

Galileo Galilei.

Letters on Sunspots.

4 May 1612

SELENE: ASTRO CORPORATION HEADQUARTERS

Pancho Lane frowned at her sister. "His name isn't even Malcolm

Eberly. He changed it."

Susan smiled knowingly.

"Oh, what diff's that make?"

"He was born Max Erlenmeyer, in Omaha, Nebraska," Pancho said

sternly. "He was arrested in Linz, Austria, for fraud in 'eighty-

four, tried to flee the country and--"

"I don't care about that! It's ancient! He's changed. He's not the

same man he was then."

"You're not going."

"Yes I am," Susan insisted, the beginnings of a frown of her own

creasing her brow. "I'm going and you can't stop me!"

"I'm your legal guardian, Susie."

"Poosh! What's that got to do with spit? I'm almost fifty years

old, f'real."

Susan Lane did not look much more than twenty. She had died when

she'd been a teenager, killed by a lethal injection that Pancho

herself had shot into her emaciated arm. Once clinically dead she had

been frozen in liquid nitrogen to await the day when medical science

could cure the carcinoma that was raging through her young body.

Pancho had brought her cryonic sarcophagus to the Moon when she began

working as an astronaut for Astro Manufacturing Corporation.

Eventually Pancho became a member of Astro's board of directors, and

finally its chairman. Still Susan waited, entombed in her bath of

liquid nitrogen, waiting until Pancho was certain that she could be

reborn to a new life.

It took more than twenty years. And once Susan was revived and

cured of the cancer that had been killing her, her mind was almost a

total blank. Pancho had expected that; cryonics reborns usually lost

most of the neural connections in the cerebral cortex. Even Saito

Yamagata, the powerful founder of Yamagata Corporation, had come out

of his cryonic sleep with a mind as blank as a newborn baby's.

So Pancho fed and bathed and toilet trained her sister, an infant

in a teenager's body. Taught her to walk, to speak again. And brought

the best neurophysiologists to Selene to treat her sister's brain

with injections of memory enzymes and RNA. She even considered

nanotherapy but decided against it; nanotechnology was allowed in

Selene, but only under stringent controls, and the experts admitted

that they didn't think nanomachines could help Susan to recover her

lost memories.

Those years were difficult, but gradually a young adult emerged, a

woman who looked like the Susie that Pancho remembered, but whose

personality, whose attitudes, whose mind were disturbingly different.

Susan remembered nothing of her earlier life, but thanks to the

neuroboosters she had received her memory now was almost eidetic: if

she saw or heard something once, she never forgot it. She could

recall details with a precision that made Pancho's head swim.

Now the sisters sat glaring at each other: Pancho on the plush

burgundy pseudoleather couch in the corner of her sumptuous office,

Susan sitting tensely on the edge of the low slingchair on the other

side of the curving lunar glass coffee table, her elbows on her

knees.

They looked enough alike to be immediately recognized as sisters.

Both were tall and rangy, long lean legs and arms, slim athletic

bodies. Pancho's skin was little darker than a well-tanned

Caucasian's; Susan's a shade richer. Pancho kept her hair trimmed

down to a skullcap of tightly-curled fuzz that was flecked with spots

of fashionable gray. Susan had taken treatments to make her dark-

brown hair long and luxurious; she wore it in the latest pageboy

fashion, spilling down to her shoulders. Her clothing was latest mod,

too: a floor-length faux silk gown with weights in its hem to keep

the skirt hanging right in the low lunar gravity. Pancho was in a no-

nonsense business suit of powder gray: a tailored cardigan jacket and

flared slacks over her comfortable lunar softboots. She wore sensible

accents of jewelry at her earlobes and wrists. Susan was unadorned,

except for the decal across her forehead: a miniature of Saturn, the

ringed planet.

Susan broke the lengthening silence. "Panch, you can't stop me. I'm

going."

"But... all the way out to Saturn? With a flock of political

exiles?"

"They're not exiles!"

"C'm on, Soose, half the governments back Earthside are cleaning

out their detention camps."

Susan's back stiffened. "Those fundamentalist regimes you're always

complaining about are encouraging their nonbelievers and dissidents

to sign on for the Saturn expedition. Encouraging, not deporting."

"They're getting rid of their troublemakers," Pancho said.

"Not troublemakers! Free thinkers. Idealists. Men and women who're

ticked with the way things are on Earth and willing to warp off, zip

out, and start new lives."

"Misfits and malcontents," Pancho muttered. "Square pegs in round

holes."

"The habitat will be populated by the best and brightest people of

Earth," Susan retorted.

"Yeah, you wish."

"I know. And I'm going to be one of them."

"Cripes almighty, Soose, Saturn's ten times farther from the Sun

than we are."

"What of it?" Susan said, with that irritating smile again. "You

were the first to go as far as the Belt, weren't you?"

"Yeah, but-"

"You went out to the Jupiter station, di'n't you?"

Pancho could do nothing but nod.

"So I'm going out to Saturn. I won't be alone. There'll be ten

thousand of us, f'real! That is, if Malcolm can weed out the real

troublemakers and sign up good workers. I'm helping him do the

interviews."

"Make sure that's all you're helping him with," Pancho groused.

Susan's smile turned slightly wicked. "He's been a perfect

gentleman, dammit."

"Blister my butt on a goddam' Harley," Pancho grumbled. And she

thought, Damned near thirty years I've been working my way up the

corporation but ten minutes with Susie and she's got me talkin' West

Texas again.

"It's a great thing, Panch," said Susan, earnest now. "It's a

mission, really. We're going out on a five-year mission to study the

Saturn system. Scientists, engineers, farmers, a whole self-

sustaining community!"

Pancho saw that her sister was genuinely excited, like a kid on her

way to a thrill park. Damn! she said to herself. Susie's got the body

of an adult but the mind of a teenager. There'll be nothing but grief

for her out there, without me to protect her.

"Say it clicks, Panch," Susan asked softly, through lowered lashes.

"Tell me you're not ticked at me."

"I'm not sore," Pancho said truthfully. "I'm worried, though.

You'll be all alone out there."

"With ten thousand others!"

"Without your big sister."

Susan said nothing for a heartbeat, then she reached across the

coffee table and grasped Pancho's hand. "But Panch, don't you see?

That's why I'm doing it! That's why I've got to do it! I've got to go

out on my own. I can't live like some little kid with you doing

everything for me! I've got to be free!"

Sagging back into the softly yielding sofa, Pancho murmured, "Yeah,

I suppose you do. I guess I knew it all along. It's just that... I

worry about you, Susie."

"I'll be fine, Panch. You'll see!"

"I sure hope so."

Elated, Susan hopped to her feet and headed for the door. "You'll

see," she repeated. "It's gonna be great! Cosmic!"

Pancho sighed and got to her feet.

"Oh, by the way," Susan called over her shoulder as she opened the

office door, "I'm changing my name. I'm not gonna be called Susan

anymore. From now on, my name is Holly."

And she ducked through the door before Pancho could say a word

more.

"Holly," Pancho muttered to the closed door. Where in the ever-

lovin' blue-eyed world did she get that from? she wondered. Why's she

want to change her name?

Shaking her head, Pancho told the phone to connect with her

security chief. When his handsome, square-jawed face took shape in

the air above her desk, she said:

"Wendell, I need somebody to ride that goddamned habitat out to

Saturn and keep tabs on my sister, without her knowin' it."

"Right away," the security chief answered. He looked away for a

moment, then said, "Um, about tonight, I--"

"Never mind about tonight," Pancho snapped. "You just get somebody

onto that habitat. Somebody good! Get on it right now."

"Yes, ma'am!" said Pancho's security chief.

LUNAR ORBIT: HABITAT GODDARD

Malcolm Eberly tried to hide the panic that was still frothing like

a storm-tossed sea inside him. Along with the fifteen other

department leaders, he stood perfectly still at the main entrance to

the habitat.

The ride up from Earth had been an agony for him. From the instant

the Clippership had gone into Earth orbit and the feeling of gravity

had dwindled to zero, Eberly had fought a death struggle against the

terror of weightlessness. Strapped into his well-cushioned seat, he

had exerted every effort of his willpower to fight back the horrible

urge to vomit. I will not give in to this, he told himself through

gritted teeth. Pale and soaked with cold sweat, he resolved that he

would not make a fool of himself in front of the others.

Getting out of his seat once the Clippership had made rendezvous

with the transfer rocket was sheer torture. Eberly kept his head

rigidly unmoving, his fists clenched, his eyes squeezed down to

slits. To the cheerful commands of the flight attendants, he followed

the bobbing gray coveralls of the woman ahead of him and made his way

along the aisle hand over hand from one seat back to the next until

he glided through the hatch into the transfer vehicle, still in zero

gravity, gagging as his insides floated up into his throat.

No one else seemed to be as ill as he. The rest of them--fifteen

other men and women, all department leaders as he was--were chatting

and laughing, even experimenting with allowing themselves to float up

off the Velcro carpeting of the passenger compartment. The sight of

it made Eberly's stomach turn inside out.

Still he held back the bile that was burning his throat. I will not

give in to this, he told himself over and over. I will prevail. A man

can accomplish anything he sets his mind to if he has the strength

and the will.

Strapped down again in a seat inside the transfer rocket, he stared

rigidly ahead as the ship lit off its engines to start its flight to

lunar orbit. The thrust was gentle, but at least it provided some

feeling of weight. Only for a few seconds, though. The rocket engines

cut off and he felt again as if he were falling, endlessly falling.

Everyone else was chattering away, several of them boasting about how

many times they had been in space.

Of course! Eberly realized. They've all done this before. They've

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