Saturn

“Holly?”

She snapped her attention back to Eberly. “I-I’m sorry,” she stuttered, embarrassed. “I guess I wasn’t listening.”

He nodded, as if accepting her apology. “Yes, I forget how beautiful this is. You’re absolutely right, none of us should take all this for granted.”

“What were you saying?” she asked.

“It wasn’t important.” He raised his arm and swept it around dramatically. “This is the important thing, Holly. This world that you will create for yourselves.”

My name is Holly now, she reminded herself. You can remember everything that happens to you, remember your new name, for jeep’s sake.

Still, she asked, “Why’d you want me to change my name?”

Eberly tilted his head to one side, thinking before he answered. “I’ve suggested to every new recruit that they change their names. You are entering a new world, starting new lives. A new name is appropriate, don’t you agree?”

“Oh, right! F’sure.”

“Yet,” he sighed, “very few actually follow my suggestion. They cling to the past.”

“It’s like baptism, isn’t it?” Holly said.

He looked at her and she saw something like respect in his piercing blue eyes. “Baptism, yes. Born again. Begi

“This’ll be my third life,” she told him.

Eberly nodded.

“I don’t remember my first life,” Holly said. “Ear’s I can remember, my life started seven years ago.”

“No,” Eberly said firmly. “Your life began two weeks ago, when you arrived here.”

“F’sure. Right.”

“That’s why you changed your name, isn’t it?”

“Right,” she repeated, thinking, He’s so bugging serious about everything! I wish I could make him smile.

Eberly stopped walking and slowly turned a full circle, taking in the world that stretched all around them and climbed up over their heads to completely encircle them.

“I was born in deep poverty,” he said, his voice low, almost a whisper. “I was born prematurely, very sick; they didn’t think I would live. My father ran away when I was still a baby and my mother took up with a migrant laborer, a Mexican. He wanted me to die. If it weren’t for the New Morality I would have died before I was six months old. They took me into their hospital, they put me through their schools. They saved me, body and soul.”

“I’m glad,” Holly said.

“The New Morality saved America,” Eberly explained. “When the greenhouse warming flooded all the coastal areas and the food riots started, it was the New Morality that brought order and decency back into our lives.”

“I don’t remember the States at all,” she said. “Just Selene. Nothing before that.”

He chuckled. “You certainly seem to have no trouble remembering anything that’s happened to you since. I’ve never seen anyone with such a steel trap of a mind.”

With a careless shrug, Holly replied, “That’s just the RNA treatments they gave me.”

“Oh, yes, of course.” He started walking again, slowly. “Well, Holly, here we are. Both of us. And ten thousand others.”

“Nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-eight,” she corrected, with an impish grin.

He dipped his chin slightly in acknowledgment of her arithmetic, totally serious, oblivious to her attempt at humor.

“You have the opportunity to create a new world here,” Eberly said. “Clean and whole and new. You are the most fortunate people of the ages.”

“You too,” she said.

He made a little gesture with one hand. “I’m only one man. There are ten thousand of you — minus one, I admit. You are the ones who will create this new world. It’s yours to fashion as you see fit. I’m completely satisfied merely to be here, among you, and to help you in any way that I can.”

Holly stared at him, feeling enormous admiration welling up within her.

“But Malcolm, you’ve got to help us to build this new world. We’re going to need your vision, your…” she fumbled for a word, then … “your dedication.”

“Of course, I’ll do what I can,” he said. And for the first time, he smiled.

Holly felt thrilled.

“But you must do your best, too,” he added. “I expect the same dedication and hard work from you that I myself am exerting. Nothing less, Holly.”

She nodded silently.

“You must devote yourself totally to the work we are doing,” Eberly said. “Totally.”

“I will,” Holly answered. “I already have, f’real.”

“Every aspect of your life must be dedicated to our work,” he insisted. “There will be no time for frivolities. Nor for romantic entanglements.”

“I don’t have any romantic entanglements, Malcolm,” she said, in a small voice. Silently she added, Wish I did. With you.

“Neither do I,” he said. “The task before us is too important to allow personal considerations to get in the way.”

Holly said, “I understand, Malcolm. I truly do.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

And Eberly thought, Carrot and stick, that’s the way to control her. Carrot and stick.

DEPARTURE MINUS TWO HOURS

Eberly chose to stand with his back to the oblong window of the observation blister. Beyond its thick quartz the stars were swinging by slowly as the mammoth habitat revolved lazily along its axis. The Moon would slide into view, so close that one could see the smoothed launching pads of Armstrong Spaceport, blackened by decades of rocket blasts, and the twin humps of Selene’s two buried public plazas, as well as the vast pit where workers were constructing a third. Some claimed they could even see individual tractors and the cable cars speeding along their overhead lines to outlying settlements such as Hell Crater and the Farside Observatory.

Eberly never looked out if he could help it. The sight of the Moon, the stars, the universe constantly swinging past his eyes made him sick to his stomach. He kept his back to it. Besides, his work, his future, his destiny was inside the habitat, not out there.

Standing before him, facing the window with apparently no ill effect, stood a short heavyset woman wearing a gaudy finger-length tunic of many shades of red and orange over shapeless beige slacks. Sparkling rings adorned most of her fingers and more jewelry decorated her wrists, earlobes, and double-chi

Beside her was a lean, short, sour-faced man wearing a shabby pseudoleather jacket of jet black.

“Malcolm,” said Morgenthau, gesturing with a chubby hand, “may I introduce Dr. Sammi Vyborg.” She turned slightly. “Dr. Vyborg, Malcolm Eberly.”

“I am very pleased to meet you, sir,” said Vyborg, in a reedy, nasal voice. His face was little more than a skull with skin stretched over it. Prominent teeth. Narrow slits of eyes.

Eberly accepted his extended hand briefly. “Doctor of what?” he asked.

“Education. From the University of Wittenberg.”

The ghost of a smile touched Eberly’s lips. “Hamlet’s university.”

Vyborg gri

Morgenthau asked, “The records go back that far?”

“They are very sketchy, of course.”

“I’m not interested in the past,” Eberly said. “It’s the future that I am working for.”

Vyborg nodded. “So I understand.”

Eberly glanced sharply at Morgenthau, who said hastily, “I have explained to Dr. Vyborg that our task is to take charge of the habitat’s management, once we get underway.”

“Which will be in two hours,” Vyborg added.

Eberly focused his gaze on the little man, asking, “I have seen to it that you are highly placed in the Communications Department. Can you run the entire department, if and when I ask you to?”

“There are two very prominent persons above me in the department,” Vyborg replied. “Neither of whom are Believers.”