Yet she went to the sofa and sat beside him and leaned her head on his strong, muscular shoulder and within minutes they were kissing, their clothes vanishing, and he carried her into the bedroom like a conquering hero and she didn’t think of Malcolm Eberly at all. Hardly.

SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 317 DAYS

Wilmot felt like a harried schoolmaster confronted by a gaggle of unruly students.

“A punch-up?” he bellowed, furious. “The two of you actually struck one another?”

The two young men standing before his desk looked sheepish. One of them had a blue-black little mouse swelling beneath his left eye. He was red-haired and pink-cheeked; Irish, Wilmot guessed. The other was taller, his skin the color of milk chocolate; a crust of blood stained his upper lip. Neither of them spoke a word.

“And what was the reason for this brawl?”

They both remained mute.

“Well?” Wilmot demanded. “Out with it! What caused the fight?”

The one with the black eye muttered, “We disagreed over the name for Village B.”

“Disagreed?”

The other guy said, “He wanted to call the village Killarney.”

His antagonist said, “It’s a proper name. He said it was stupid.”

“And this led to fisticuffs? A disagreement over naming the village? What on Earth were you drinking?”

Alcoholic beverages were not sold in the cafeteria, where the scuffle had occurred, although the habitat’s two restaurants did have liquor as well as wine and a home-brewed beer supplied by one of the farms.

“It’s my fault,” said the one whose nose had been bloodied. “I had a drink in Nemo’s before going to the cafeteria.”

Wilmot glared at them. “Must I suspend all alcohol? Is that what you want?”

They both shook their heads. Wilmot studied their hangdog expressions. At least they look properly repentant, he thought. A logistics analyst and a communications technician, brawling like schoolboys.

With the sternest scowl he could produce, Wilmot said, “One more incident like this and I will suspend your personal drinking privileges altogether. And put you to work in the recycling facility. If you want to act like garbage, I’ll set you to handling garbage six hours a day.”

The one with the black eye turned slightly toward the other and extended his hand. “I’m sorry, bud.”

His erstwhile opponent clasped the hand in his own. “Yeah. Me too.”

“Get out of here, the two of you,” Wilmot growled. “And don’t ever behave so idiotically again.”

The communications tech hurried from Wilmot’s office to his own quarters, where he dabbed a wet cloth to clean off the scabbed blood on his lip and then put in a call to Colonel Kananga.

“I started a fight in the cafeteria,” he said to Kananga’s image in his phone screen.

The Rwandan said, “I’ve already heard about it, through channels. What did Wilmot have to say to you?”

“Nothing much. He seemed more puzzled than angry.”

Kananga nodded.

“What do you want me to do next?”

“Nothing at present. Just go about your duties and behave yourself. I’ll call you when the time comes.”

“Yessir.”

With a population that included people of many faiths, there was no Sabbath aboard the habitat that everyone adhered to, so election day for Phase One of the naming contests was declared a holiday for everyone.

Malcolm Eberly sat in his living room, looking gloomy, almost sullen, as he watched the newscast on the hologram projector. The image showed the polling center in Village A. People filed in and voted, then left. It was about as rousing as watching grass grow.

Ruth Morgenthau tried to cheer him. “The turnout isn’t as bad as my staff predicted. It looks as if at least forty percent of the population will vote.”

“There’s no excitement,” Eberly grumbled.

Sammi Vyborg, sitting on the other side of the coffee table, shrugged his bony shoulders. “We didn’t expect excitement at this phase. After all, they’re only choosing categories for naming, not the names themselves.”

Eberly gave him a sharp glance. “I want the people worked up. I want them challenging Wilmot’s authority.”

“That will come,” said Kananga. He was leaning back on the sofa, his long arms spread across its back. “We’ve been testing different approaches.”

The hint of a frown clouded Eberly’s face. “I heard about the fist-fight in the cafeteria.”

“Before the next election day we can create a riot, if you like.”

Eberly said, “That’s not the kind of excitement that we need.”

“A riot would be good,” said Vyborg. “Then we could step in and quell the fighting.”

“And you could stand as the man who brought peace and order to the habitat,” Morgenthau said, smiling at Eberly.

“Maybe,” he said, almost wistfully. “I just wish—”

Morgenthau interrupted, “You wish everyone would listen to you and fall down in adoration.”

“If I’m going to be their leader, it’s important that they trust me, and like me.”

“They’ll love you,” said Vyborg, his voice dripping sarcasm, “once you have the power to determine life or death for them.”

At the end of election day, Holly sat at her desk tabulating the results of the voting. Villages would be named after cities on Earth, the voters had decided. Individual buildings would be named for famous people. The farms and orchards and other open areas would get names from natural features on Earth or from mythology: that particular vote was too close to call a clear winner.

Her phone announced that Ruth Morgenthau was calling. Holly told the computer to accept the call, and Morgenthau’s face appeared, hovering alongside the statistics.

“Do you have the results?”

Nodding, Holly said, “All tabbed.”

“Forward them to me.”

With a glance at the phone’s data bar beneath her caller’s image, Holly saw that Morgenthau was calling from Eberly’s apartment. She felt nettled that Morgenthau was with Malcolm and she hadn’t been invited. Maybe I can fix that, she thought.

“I’ve got to send them to Professor Wilmot first,” she said. “Official procedure.”

“Send them here as well,” said Morgenthau.

Holly replied, “If I do, there’ll be an electronic record that I violated procedure.” Before Morgenthau could frown, Holly went on, “But I could bring you a copy in person; there’d be no record of that.”

Morgenthau’s fleshy face went crafty for a moment, then she dimpled into a smile. “Very good, Holly. Good thinking. Bring the results to me. I’m at Dr. Eberly’s quarters.”

“I’ll be there f-t-l,” Holly said.

The instant Holly stepped into Eberly’s apartment she felt tension in the air; the room was charged with coiled-tight emotions. Morgenthau, Vyborg, and Kananga were there: Holly thought of them as the hippo, the snake, and the panther, but there was no humor in the characterizations. Kananga, in particular, made her edgy the way he watched her, like a hunting cat tracking its prey.

Eberly was nowhere in sight, but before Holly could ask about him, he entered the living room and smiled at her. The tension that she felt dissolved like morning mist melting under warm sunlight.

“Holly,” he said, extending both arms toward her. “It’s been too long since we’ve seen you.”

“Mal—” she began, then corrected herself. “Dr. Eberly. It’s wonderful to see you again.”

Morgenthau said, “Holly’s brought us the election results.”

“Fine,” said Eberly. “That’s very good of you, Holly.”

Pulling her handheld from her tunic pocket, Holly projected the tabulations on one of the living room’s bare walls. Malcolm doesn’t have any decorations in his apartment, she saw. Just like his office used to be: empty, naked.

For hours the five of them studied the voting results, dissecting them like pathologists taking apart a corpse to see what killed the living person. Kananga disappeared into the kitchen for a while and, much to Holly’s surprise, eventually placed a tray of sandwiches and drinks on the bar that divided the kitchen from the living room. Eberly kept digging deeper into the statistics, trying to break down the voting by age, by employment, by educational background. He wanted to know who voted for what, down to the individual voter, and why.