Urbain broke his silence almost explosively. “No! It is impossible! No one is allowed to the surface of Titan. It would be a violation of every principle we are guided by.”
“There must have been a misunderstanding,” Wilmot said more smoothly. “No one has been to Titan’s surface, and—”
“Pardon me,” said Gaeta, “but that’s just the point. If somebody else had already been to Titan there’d be no reason for me to do the stunt.”
“Stunt,” Wilmot echoed disapprovingly.
“I have the equipment,” Gaeta went on. “It’s all been tested. My crew comes aboard tomorrow. All I need from you is some workshop space where they can set up my gear and check out the equipment. We’re all set with everything else.”
Urbain shook his head vehemently. “Teleoperated probes only will be sent to the surface of Titan. No humans!”
“With all respect, sir,” Gaeta said, his voice still soft and friendly, “you’re thinking like a scientist.”
“Yes, of course. How else?”
“See, I’m in show biz, not science. I get paid to do risky stunts, like surfing the clouds of Jupiter and skiing down Mt. Olympus on Mars.”
“Stunts,” Wilmot muttered again.
“Yeah, stunts. People pay a lotta money to participate in my stunts. That’s what the VR gear is for.”
“Virtual reality thrills. Vicarious experiences.”
“Cheap thrills, right. It brings in the big bucks. My investors’ll make their half-bill back the first ten seconds I’m on the VR nets.”
“You risk your life so that other people can get their adventure plugged into a virtual reality set,” Urbain said, almost accusingly.
If anything, Gaeta’s smile widened. “The trick is to handle the risks. Do the research, buy or build the equipment you need. They call me a daredevil, but I’m not a fool.”
“And you want to be the first man to reach the surface of Titan,” Wilmot said.
“Shouldn’t be that tough. You’re going out there anyway, so we hitch a ride with you. Titan’s got an atmosphere and a decent gravity. Radiation levels are nowhere near as bad as Jupiter.”
“And contamination?” demanded Urbain.
Gaeta’s brows hiked up. “Contamination?”
“There is life on Titan. It is only microscopic, I grant you: single-celled bacterial types. But it is living and we must protect it from contamination. That is our first duty.”
The stuntman relaxed again. “Oh, sure. I’ll be in an armored space-suit. You can scrub it down and bathe me in ultraviolet light when I get back. Kill any bugs that might be on the suit’s exterior.”
Urbain shook his head even more violently. “No, no, no. You don’t understand. We are not worried about the microbes contaminating you. Our worry is that you might contaminate them.”
“Huh?”
“It is a unique ecology, there on Titan,” Urbain said, his blue eyes burning with intensity, his beard bristling. “We cannot take any chances on your contaminating them.”
“But they’re just bugs!”
Urbain’s jaw sagged open. He looked like a Believer who had just heard blasphemy uttered.
“Unique organisms,” corrected Wilmot sternly. “They must not be disturbed.”
“But they’ve landed probes on Titan,” Gaeta protested, “lots of ’em!”
“Each one was as thoroughly disinfected as science can achieve,” Urbain said. “They were subjected to levels of gamma radiation that almost destroyed their electronic circuits. Some of them were actually disabled during the decontamination procedures.”
Gaeta shrugged. “Okay, you can decontaminate my suit the same way.”
“With you inside it?” Wilmot asked quietly.
“Inside? Why?”
Urbain replied, “Because when you get into your suit you will be leaving a veritable jungle of microbial flora and fauna on every part of its exterior that you touch: human sweat, body oils, who knows what else? One fingerprint, one breath could leave enough terrestrial microbes to utterly devastate Titan’s entire ecology.”
“I’d have to stay in the suit while you fry it with gamma rays?”
Wilmot nodded.
Urbain said flatly, “That is the only way we will allow you to go to Titan’s surface.”
DEPARTURE MINUS 38 DAYS
He’s really handsome when he smiles, Holly noted silently. But he’s always so serious!
Malcolm Eberly was peering intently at the three-dimensional display floating in midair above his desktop. To Susan he looked like a clean-cut California surfer type, but only from the neck up. His blond hair was chopped short, in the latest style. He had good cheekbones and a strong, firm jaw. Chiseled nose and startling blue eyes, the color of an Alpine sky. A killer smile, too, but he smiled all too rarely.
She had bent over backwards to please him: dressed in the plain tunics and slacks that he preferred, let her hair go natural and cut those stubborn curls short, took off the decal she had worn on her forehead and wore no adornments at all except for the tiny asteroidal diamond studs in her ears. He hadn’t noticed any of it.
“We’ve got to be more selective in our screening processes,” he said, without looking up from the display. His voice was low, richly vibrant; he spoke American English, but with an overlay of a glass-smooth cultured British accent.
“Look.” Eberly thumbed his remote controller and the display rotated above the desktop so that Susan could see the three-dimensional chart. The office was small and austere: nothing in it but Eberly’s gray metal desk and the stiff little plastic chair Susan was sitting in. No decorations on the walls. Eberly’s desktop was antiseptically bare.
She leaned forward in the uncomfortable squeaking chair to inspect the series of jagged colored lines climbing steadily across the chart floating before her eyes. Just as she had remembered it from last night, before she’d gone home for the evening.
“In the two weeks since you’ve started working in the human resources office,” Eberly said, “successful recruitments have climbed almost thirty percent. You’ve accomplished more work than the rest of the staff combined, it seems.”
That’s because I want to please you, she said to herself. She didn’t have the nerve to say it aloud; didn’t have the nerve to do anything more but smile at him.
Unsmilingly, he continued, “But too many of the new recruits are convicted political dissidents, troublemakers. If they caused unrest on Earth, they’ll probably cause unrest here.”
Her smile crumpled. She asked, “But isn’t that the purpose of this mission? The reason we’re going to Saturn? To give people a new chance? A new life?”
“Within reason, Holly. Within reason. We don’t want chronic protesters here, out-and-out rebels. The next thing you know, we’ll be inviting terrorists to the habitat.”
“Have I done that bad a job?”
She waited for him to reassure her, to tell her she was doing her job properly. Instead, Eberly got to his feet and came around the desk.
“Come on, let’s go outside for a bit of a stroll.”
She shot to her feet. She was just a tad taller than he. From the shoulders down Eberly was slight, skinny really. Thin arms, narrow chest, even the beginnings of a pot belly, she thought. He needs exercise, she told herself. He works too hard in the office. I’ve got to get him outside more, get him to the fitness center, build him up.
Yet she followed him in silence down the hallway that led past the habitat’s other administrative offices and out the door at its end.
Bright sunshine was streaming through the long windows. Colorful butterflies flitted among the hyacinths, multihued tulips, and bloodred poppies that bloomed along the path. They walked in silence along the path that ran past the cluster of low white buildings and down the shoulder of the hillside on which the village was built. The tan-bricked path wound around the lake at the bottom of the ridge and out into a pleasant meadow. A bicyclist passed them, coasting down the gentle slope. Leafy young trees spread dappled shade along the path. Susan heard insects humming in the bushes and birds chirping. A complete ecology, painstakingly established and maintained. Looking at the grassy field and the clumps of taller trees standing farther along the gently curving path, she found it hard to believe that they were inside a huge, man-made cylinder that was hanging in empty space a few hundred kilometers above the surface of the Moon. Until she glanced up and saw that the land curved completely around, overhead.