Saturn (43 page)

Holly smiled at him. "Good. That's what I wanted to hear."

He grinned back at her.

Holly called out. "Phone! Connect me with Pancho Lane, at Astro Corporation Headquarters in Selene."

Tavalera let go of her hand and started to back his wheelchair away from the bed.

"Don't go away, Raoul," Holly said. "I want my sister to meet you."

Professor Wilmot sat in his favorite chair, gently swirling the whisky in the glass he held in his right hand. Although his eyes were focused on the report he was dictating, he was actually staring far beyond the words hovering in mid-air before him, looking with his mind's eye into the events of the past few days and trying to foresee the shape of the events to come.

For a long while he sat there, alone, slowly swishing the whisky, wondering what he should say to his superiors back on Earth, how he should explain what had gone wrong with the grand experiment.

"Actually," he said at last, "nothing has really gone
wrong.
This experiment was intended to test the ability of a self-contained community to survive and develop a viable social system of its own. Unfortunately, the social system they began to develop was definitely not the type that we expected or desired. It was based on violence and deception, and it would have led to a rather harsh, restrictive authoritarian regime. On the other hand, such systems are inherently unstable, as the events of the past few days have proven."

He sat in silent thought for long moments. Then, taking a sip of his whisky, he continued, "We are now entering a new phase of the experiment, an attempt to develop a working democratic government. The question is, are the people of this community too lazy, too selfish to work at governing themselves? Are they nothing more than spoiled children who
need
an authoritarian government to run things for them? Only time will tell."

He thought of Cardenas's suggestion of a universal draft: require each citizen to serve a certain portion of time in public service. It's worked elsewhere, Wilmot said to himself. Perhaps it could work here. But he had his doubts.

He took a longer pull on the whisky, then spoke the final section of his report to the leaders of the New Morality organization in Atlanta.

"You have provided the major funding for this expedition to ascertain if a similar selection of individuals could serve as the population of a mission to another star, a mission that would take many generations to complete. Based on the results of merely the first two years of this experiment, I must conclude that we simply do not know enough about how human societies behave under such stresses to make a meaningful judgment.

"In my personal opinion, we are not ready to begin planning an interstellar mission. In fact, we are nowhere near the understanding we will require to send a genetically viable human population out on a star flight that will take many generations to complete.

"That is disappointing news, I'm sure, but it should hardly be surprising. This is the first time an artificially generated human society has been sent on its own so far from Earth. We have much to learn."

He drained the whisky, then continued on a brighter note, "On the other hand, this group of cantankerous, squabbling, very bright men and women has accomplished some significant successes. We have made it to Saturn. We have avoided falling into the trap of an authoritarian government. We have found a new life-form in the rings of Saturn, possibly. We are preparing to study the moon Titan with surface probes and, eventually, with a human presence on the surface of that world.

"You of the New Morality may not like everything that we have accomplished, and you may not agree with everything we plan to do
—
including using nanotechnology wherever it is appropriate. But you can take comfort in the fact that your generous funding has helped to establish a new human outpost twice as far from Earth as the Jupiter station; an outpost that is prepared to explore Saturn, its rings, and its moons."

Wilmot smiled at the irony of it. "In a very real sense, you have shown the rest of the human race how to escape the limits of the Earth. For that, no matter what you think or what you believe, you will gain the eternal thanks of generations to come."

My thanks to all the friends and colleagues who provided information and ideas for this novel, especially Jeff Mitchell, Ernest Hogan, and, from Columbia University's Biosphere 2, Gilbert LaRoque and John S. Engen.