Fascinating. Eberly puts out this silly damned dress code, and no one complains. They either ignore it, or they decorate their clothes with scarves and sashes. These people aren’t going to be led around by their noses, that’s clear enough.
But Eberly wants to control them, apparently. I wonder what ticked him off? Most likely it was that little dressing down I gave him about the Cardenas woman. Instead of submitting to authority or sulking, he takes political action. Fascinating. Now the question is, what will the general population do? He only got a handful of people to listen to him, but by the start of the workday tomorrow the entire habitat will know of his speech. How will they react?
More importantly, he thought, how should I react? Move to thwart him? Cooperate with him?
Wilmot shook his head. Neither, he decided. I must not insert my own prejudices into this experiment. It won’t be easy to stay out of it, though. I can’t simply disappear; I have a role to play. But I mustn’t let it interfere with their behaviors.
Of course, he thought, none of them knows the real purpose of this mission. No one even guesses that it exists. And I must keep it that way. If anyone got the slightest hint of it, that would skew the experiment terribly. I’ll have to be very careful in phrasing my report back to Atlanta. It wouldn’t do to have some snoop in the communications department find out what’s really going on here.
He got up from his chair, surprised at how stiff he felt, and headed for his bedroom. I’ll play it strictly by the book, he decided. The agreed-upon protocols will be followed at all times. That should offer enough resistance to Eberly to force his next move. I wonder what it will be?
Eberly finally got rid of his admirers and made his way to his own quarters, flanked only by Morgenthau, Vyborg, and Kananga.
Once inside his spartan apartment, he said excitedly, “They loved me! Did you see the way they reacted to me? I had them in the palm of my hand!”
“It was brilliant,” said Vyborg quickly.
Morgenthau was less enthusiastic. “It was a good beginning, but only a beginning.”
“What do you mean?” Eberly asked, disappointment showing clearly on his face.
Morgenthau sat heavily on the room’s only couch. “It wasn’t much of a crowd. Fewer than three hundred.”
Vyborg immediately agreed. “Less than three percent of the total population.”
“But they were with me,” Eberly said. “I could feel it.”
Looking up at him, Morgenthau said, “Three percent might not be all that bad.”
“What about the other ninety-seven percent?” Kananga asked.
She shrugged. “It’s as Malcolm said in his speech. They’re too lazy, too indifferent to care. If we can capture and hold an active minority, we can lead the majority around by its collective nose.”
“What will Wilmot’s reaction be?” Vyborg asked.
“We’ll know soon enough,” said Eberly.
A crafty expression came over Morgenthau’s fleshy face. “Suppose he simply ignores us?”
“That’s impossible,” Vyborg snapped. “We’ve made a direct challenge to his authority.”
“But suppose he feels so secure in his authority that he simply ignores us?” Morgenthau insisted.
Eberly said, “Then we will raise the stakes until it’s impossible for him to ignore me.” He smacked his fist into the open palm of his other hand.
Kananga said nothing, but a wisp of a smile curled his lips slightly.
Holly, Cardenas, and Manuel Gaeta were the last customers in the Bistro. The human hostess had gone home, leaving only the simple-minded robots to stand impassively by the kitchen door, waiting for the people to leave so they could clean the last remaining table and the floor around it.
“…your basic problem is contamination?” Cardenas was asking the stuntman.
Gaeta glanced at the dessert tray the hostess had left on their table: nothing but crumbs. They had finished the coffee long ago.
“Contamination, right,” Gaeta said, suppressing a yawn. “Wilmot and the geek boys are scared I’ll hurt the bugs down there on the surface.”
“That’s an important consideration,” Holly said.
“Yeah, right.”
Cardenas said, “I can solve your problem, I’m pretty sure.”
Gaeta’s eyes widened. “How?”
“I could program nanomachines to break down any residues of perspiration or whatever organic materials you leave on the outside of your suit. They’ll clean it up for you, break down the organics into carbon dioxide and water vapor. No sweat.”
“Literally!” Holly accented the pun.
Gaeta did not smile. “These nanomachines… they the type that’re called gobblers?”
“Some people call them that, yes,” Cardenas replied, stiffly.
“They can kill you, can’t they?”
Holly swiveled her attention from Gaeta’s swarthy, wary face to Cardenas, who was suddenly tight-lipped.
For a long moment Cardenas did not reply. At last she said, “Gobblers can be programmed to attack proteins, yes. Or any carbon-chain organics.”
“That’s pretty risky, then, isn’t it?” he asked.
Holly saw that Cardenas was struggling to keep her voice calm. “Once you’re sealed inside the suit, the nanobugs can be sprayed over its outer surface. We can calculate how long it would take them to destroy any organics on the suit. Double or triple that time, then we douse the whole assembly in soft UV. That will deactivate the nanobugs.”
“Deactivate?” Gaeta asked. “You mean, like, kill them?”
“They’re machines, Manny,” she said. “They’re not alive. You can’t kill them.”
“But would they come back later and start chewing on organics again?”
“No, we’ll wash them all off. And once they’re deactivated, they don’t revive. It’s like breaking a motor or a child’s toy. The pieces don’t come back together again spontaneously.”
Gaeta nodded. But Holly thought he didn’t look convinced.
THE MORNING AFTER
“What did you think of his speech last night?”
Ilya Timoshenko looked up from his console in Goddard’s navigation and control pod. There was very little actual work for them to do; the habitat was sailing through the solar system on a course that Isaac Newton could have calculated to a fine accuracy. The fusion engines were purring along smoothly, miniature man-made suns converting hydrogen ions into helium and driving the habitat along on the energy released. Bored as usual with the utterly routine nature of his duty shift, Timoshenko had been daydreaming about the possibilities of designing a fusion engine that converted helium into carbon and oxygen. After all, that’s what the stars do when they run low on hydrogen; they burn the helium they’ve accumulated. The carbon and oxygen from helium fusion would be valuable resources in themselves, he realized.
But Farabi, the pipsqueak navigator, wants to get me involved in politics, Timoshenko thought sourly.
“What speech?” he muttered. The two men were alone on the bridge. Captain Nicholson had decided that there should be two of them in the control center at all times, despite the fact that the computer actually ran everything. We humans are redundant here, Timoshenko often told himself. Yet the captain insisted, and her three underlings obeyed.
“Eberly’s speech,” Farabi said. “Last night in the cafeteria. I thought I saw you there.”
“Not me,” said Timoshenko. “You must have seen somebody else and thought it was me.”
“It was you. I saw you.”
Timoshenko glared at the man. Farabi claimed that he was an Arab from one of those desert lands that had once supplied the world with oil. He was small and wiry, his skin nut brown, his nose decidedly hooked. Timoshenko thought he was more likely a Jew from the ruins of Israel hiding from the real Arabs. Timoshenko himself was as Russian as can be, only slightly taller than Farabi, but thick-bodied, muscular, with a heavy thatch of unruly auburn hair.