The blaring music finally ended and an expectant hush fell over the crowd. Eberly saw that fully three thousand of the habitat’s population was standing on the grass, facing him. It was the biggest crowd of the campaign, yet Eberly felt disappointed, dejected. Seventy percent of the population doesn’t care enough about this election to attend the rally. Seventy percent! They sit home and do nothing, then complain when the government does things they don’t like. The fools deserve whatever they get.
The crowd sat on the chairs that had been arranged for them. Eberly saw that there were plenty of empties. Before they could begin to get restless, he rose slowly and stepped to the podium.
“I’m a little embarrassed,” he said as he clipped the pinhead microphone to his tunic. “Professor Wilmot isn’t able to be with us this evening, and he asked me to serve as moderator in his place.”
“Don’t be embarrassed!” came a woman’s voice from somewhere in the throng.
Eberly beamed a smile in her general direction and went on, “As you probably know already, we are not going to bore you with long-winded speeches this evening. Each candidate will make a brief, five-minute statement that summarizes his position on the major issues. After these statements you will be able to ask questions of the candidates.”
He hesitated a heartbeat, then went on, “The order of speakers this evening was chosen by lot, and I won the first position. However, I think it’s a little too much for me to be both the moderator and the first speaker, so I’m going to change the order of the candidates’ statements and go last.”
Dead silence from the audience. Eberly turned slightly toward Urbain, then back to the crowd. “Our first speaker, therefore, will be Dr. Edouard Urbain, our chief scientist. Dr. Urbain has had a distinguished career…”
Holly watched the newscast of the rally from the tunnel. Professor Wilmot’s not there, she thought. I wonder why.
Then she realized that this was the perfect opportunity to get to Wilmot without Kananga or anyone else interfering. Holly got to her feet. Just about everybody’s at the rally, she saw, eyes still on the screen. I’ll bet Wilmot’s in his quarters. I could sneak in there and tell him what’s going down.
She turned off the wallscreen and started striding purposively along the tunnel, heading for Athens and Wilmot’s quarters.
After a few minutes, though, she turned off into a side tunnel that provided access for maintenance robots to trundle from one main utility tunnel to another. No sense marching straight to the village, she told herself. Go the roundabout way and look out for any guards that might be snooping around.
So she missed Raoul Tavalera, who came down the utility tunnel from the direction of Athens, looking for her.
Urbain and then Timoshenko spent their five minutes reviewing the positions they had stressed all through the campaign. Urbain insisted that scientific research was the habitat’s purpose, it’s very raison d’etre, and with him as director the habitat’s exploration of Saturn and Titan would be a great success. Timoshenko had taken up part of Eberly’s original position, that the scientists should not become an exalted elite with everyone else in the habitat destined to serve them. Eberly thought that Timoshenko received a larger and longer round of applause than Urbain did.
As Timoshenko sat down, Eberly rose and walked slowly to the podium. Is Morgenthau right? he asked himself. Are Timoshenko’s voters switching to Urbain? Are the engineers lining up with the scientists?
It makes no difference, Eberly told himself as he gripped the edges of the podium. Now is the time to split them. Now is the time to swing the overwhelming majority of votes to me.
“Now is the time,” he said to the audience, “for me to introduce the final speaker. I find myself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of introducing myself.”
A few titters of laughter rippled through the crowd.
“So let me say, without fear of being contradicted, that here is a man who needs no introduction: me!”
They laughed. Vyborg and several of his people began to applaud, and most of the crowd joined in. Eberly stood at the podium soaking up their adulation, real or enforced, it didn’t matter to him as long as the people down there performed as he wanted them to.
Once they quieted down, Eberly said, “This habitat is more than a playground for scientists. It is more than a scientific expedition. This is our home, yours and mine. Yet they want to tell us how we should live, how we should serve them.
“Theytake it for granted that we will maintain strict population controls, even though this habitat could easily house and feed ten times our current population.
“But how will we be able to afford an expanding population? Our ecology and our economy are fixed, locked in place. There is no room for population growth, for babies, in their plans for our future.
“I have a different plan. I know how we can live and grow and be happy. I know how each and every one of you can get rich!”
Eberly could feel the crowd’s surge of interest. Raising an arm to point outward, he said:
“Circling around Saturn is the greatest treasure in the solar system: thousands of billions of tons of water. Water! What would Selene and the other lunar cities pay for an unending supply of water? What would the miners and prospectors in the Asteroid Belt pay? More than gold, more than diamonds and pearls, water is the most precious resource in the solar system! And we have control of enough water to make us all richer than Croesus.”
“No!” Nadia Wunderly screamed, leaping to her feet from the middle of the audience. “You can’t! You mustn’t!”
SATURN ARRIVAL MINUS 3 DAYS, 3 HOURS, 11 MINUTES
Eberly saw a stumpy, slightly plump woman with spiky red hair pushing her way to the front of the crowd.
“You can’t siphon off the ring particles!” she shouted as the people moved away to clear a path for her. “You’ll ruin the rings! You’ll destroy them!”
Holding up a hand for silence, Eberly said dryly, “It seems we’ve reached the question-and-answer part of this evening’s rally.”
Once she got to the front of the crowd, at the edge of the platform, Wunderly hesitated. Suddenly she looked embarrassed, unsure of herself. She glanced around, her cheeks reddening.
Eberly smiled down at her. “If the other candidates don’t mind, I’d like to invite this young woman up here to the podium to state her views.”
The audience applauded: lukewarm, but applause nonetheless. Eberly glanced at Urbain and Timoshenko, sitting behind him. Urbain looked uncertain, almost confused. Timoshenko sat with his arms crossed over his chest, an expression somewhere between boredom and disgust on his dark face.
“Come on up,” Eberly beckoned. “Come up here and state your views so that everyone can hear you.”
Wunderly hung back for a couple of heartbeats, then — her lips set in a determined grim line — she climbed the platform stairs and strode to the podium.
As Eberly clipped a spare microphone to the lapel of her tunic, she said earnestly, “You can’t mine the rings—”
Eberly stopped her with a single upraised finger. “Just a moment. Tell us your name first, if you please. And your affiliation.”
She swallowed once, then looked out at the audience and said, “Dr. Nadia Wunderly. I’m with the Planetary Sciences group.”
“A scientist.” I thought so, Eberly said to himself. Here’s my chance to show the voters how self-centered the scientists are, how righteous they are, not caring an iota about the rest of us.
“That’s right, I’m a planetary scientist. And you can’t start mining the rings. You’ll destroy them. I know they look big, but if you put all of the ring particles together they’d only form a body of ice that’s no more than a hundred kilometers across.”