Saturn

“What of it?” Susan said, with that irritating smile again. “You were the first to go as far as the Belt, weren’t you?”

“Yeah, but—”

“You went out to the Jupiter station, di’n’t you?”

Pancho could do nothing but nod.

“So I’m going out to Saturn. I won’t be alone. There’ll be ten thousand of us, f’real! That is, if Malcolm can weed out the real troublemakers and sign up good workers. I’m helping him do the interviews.”

“Make sure that’s all you’re helping him with,” Pancho groused.

Susan’s smile turned slightly wicked. “He’s been a perfect gentleman, dammit.”

“Blister my butt on a goddam’ Harley,” Pancho grumbled. And she thought, Damned near thirty years I’ve been working my way up the corporation but ten minutes with Susie and she’s got me talkin’ West Texas again.

“It’s a great thing, Panch,” said Susan, earnest now. “It’s a mission, really. We’re going out on a five-year mission to study the Saturn system. Scientists, engineers, farmers, a whole self-sustaining community!”

Pancho saw that her sister was genuinely excited, like a kid on her way to a thrill park. Damn! she said to herself. Susie’s got the body of an adult but the mind of a teenager. There’ll be nothing but grief for her out there, without me to protect her.

“Say it clicks, Panch,” Susan asked softly, through lowered lashes. “Tell me you’re not ticked at me.”

“I’m not sore,” Pancho said truthfully. “I’m worried, though. You’ll be all alone out there.”

“With ten thousand others!”

“Without your big sister.”

Susan said nothing for a heartbeat, then she reached across the coffee table and grasped Pancho’s hand. “But Panch, don’t you see? That’s why I’m doing it! That’s why I’ve got to do it! I’ve got to go out on my own. I can’t live like some little kid with you doing everything for me! I’ve got to be free!”

Sagging back into the softly yielding sofa, Pancho murmured, “Yeah, I suppose you do. I guess I knew it all along. It’s just that… I worry about you, Susie.”

“I’ll be fine, Panch. You’ll see!”

“I sure hope so.”

Elated, Susan hopped to her feet and headed for the door. “You’ll see,” she repeated. “It’s go

Pancho sighed and got to her feet.

“Oh, by the way,” Susan called over her shoulder as she opened the office door, “I’m changing my name. I’m not go

And she ducked through the door before Pancho could say a word more.

“Holly,” Pancho muttered to the closed door. Where in the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed world did she get that from? she wondered. Why’s she want to change her name?

Shaking her head, Pancho told the phone to co

“Wendell, I need somebody to ride that goddamned habitat out to Saturn and keep tabs on my sister, without her knowin’ it.”

“Right away,” the security chief answered. He looked away for a moment, then said, “Um, about tonight, I—”

“Never mind about tonight,” Pancho snapped. “You just get somebody onto that habitat. Somebody good! Get on it right now.”

“Yes, ma’am!” said Pancho’s security chief.

LUNAR ORBIT: HABITAT GODDARD

Malcolm Eberly tried to hide the panic that was still frothing like a storm-tossed sea inside him. Along with the fifteen other department leaders, he stood perfectly still at the main entrance to the habitat.

The ride up from Earth had been an agony for him. From the instant the Clippership had gone into Earth orbit and the feeling of gravity had dwindled to zero, Eberly had fought a death struggle against the terror of weightlessness. Strapped into his well-cushioned seat, he had exerted every effort of his willpower to fight back the horrible urge to vomit. I will not give in to this, he told himself through gritted teeth. Pale and soaked with cold sweat, he resolved that he would not make a fool of himself in front of the others.

Getting out of his seat once the Clippership had made rendezvous with the transfer rocket was sheer torture. Eberly kept his head rigidly unmoving, his fists clenched, his eyes squeezed down to slits. To the cheerful commands of the flight attendants, he followed the bobbing gray coveralls of the woman ahead of him and made his way along the aisle hand over hand from one seat back to the next until he glided through the hatch into the transfer vehicle, still in zero gravity, gagging as his insides floated up into his throat.

No one else seemed to be as ill as he. The rest of them — fifteen other men and women, all department leaders as he was — were chatting and laughing, even experimenting with allowing themselves to float up off the Velcro carpeting of the passenger compartment. The sight of it made Eberly’s stomach turn inside out.

Still he held back the bile that was burning his throat. I will not give in to this, he told himself over and over. I will prevail. A man can accomplish anything he sets his mind to if he has the strength and the will.

Strapped down again in a seat inside the transfer rocket, he stared rigidly ahead as the ship lit off its engines to start its flight to lunar orbit. The thrust was gentle, but at least it provided some feeling of weight. Only for a few seconds, though. The rocket engines cut off and he felt again as if he were falling, endlessly falling. Everyone else was chattering away, several of them boasting about how many times they had been in space.

Of course! Eberly realized. They’ve all done this before. They’ve experienced this wretchedness before and now it doesn’t bother them. They’re all from wealthy families, rich, spoiled children who’ve never had a care in their lives. I’m the only one here who’s never been off the Earth before, the only one who’s had to fight and claw for a living, the only one who’s known hunger and sickness and fear.

I’ve got to make good here. I’ve got to! Otherwise they’ll send me back. I’ll die in a filthy prison cell.

Through sheer mental exertion Eberly endured the hours of weightlessness. When the woman in the seat next to him tried to engage him in conversation he replied tersely to her inane remarks, desperately fighting to keep her from seeing how sick he was. He forced a smile, hoping that she would not notice the cold sweat beading his upper lip. He could feel it soaking the cheap, thin shirt he wore. After a while she stopped her chattering and turned her attention to the display screen built into the seat backs.

Eberly concentrated on the images, too. The screen showed the habitat, an ungainly cylinder hanging in the emptiness of space like a length of sewer pipe left behind by a vanished construction crew. As they approached it, though, the habitat grew bigger and bigger. Eberly could see that it was rotating slowly; he knew that the spin created a feeling of gravity inside the cylinder. Numbers ran through his mind: The habitat was twenty kilometers in length, four kilometers across. It rotated every forty-five seconds, which produced a centrifugal force equivalent to normal Earth gravity.

In his growing excitement he almost forgot the unease of his stomach. Now he could see the long windows ru

Swiftly the habitat grew to blot out everything else. For a moment Eberly feared they would crash into it, even though his rational mind told him that the ship’s pilots had their flight under precise control. He could see the solar mirrors hugging the cylinder’s curving sides. And bulbs and knobs dotting the habitat’s skin, like bumps on a cucumber. Some of them were observation blisters, he knew. Others were docking ports, thruster pods, airlocks.