Imperial Earth

There had never been any expectation of finding life on the other moons, where conditions were far more hostile. Only. Iapetus and Rhea, less than half the size of Titan, had even a trace of atmosphere. The remaining satellites were barren aggregates of rock, overgrown snowballs, or mixtures of both. By the mid-2200’s, more than forty had been discovered, the majority of them less than a hundred kilometers in diameter. The outer ones-twenty million kilometers from Saturn-all. moved in retrograde orbits and were clearly temporary visitors from the asteriod belt; there was much argument as to whether they should be counted as genuine satellites at all.

Though some had been explored by geologists, many had never been examined, except by robot space probes, but there was no reason to suppose that they held any great surprises.

Perhaps one day, when Titan was prosperous and getting a little dull, future generations would take up the challenge of these tiny worlds. Some optimists had talked of turning the carbon-rich snowballs into

orbital zoos, basking beneath the warmth of their own fusion suns and teeming with strange life forms. Others had dreamed of private pleasure domes and low-gravity resorts, and islands in space for experiments in super-technology life styles. But these were fantasies of a Utopian future;

Titan needed all its energies now to solve its coming crisis, in this demi mille

THE POLITICS OF TIME AND SPACE

Then only two Makenzies were talking together, their conversation was even more terse and telegraphic than when all three were present.

Intuition, parallel thought processes, and shared experience filled in gaps that would have made much of their discourse wholly unintelligible to outsiders.

“Handle?” asked Malcolra.

“We?!” retorted Colin.

“Thirty-one? Boy!”

Which might be translated into plain English as:

“Do you think he can handle the job?”

“Have you any doubts that we could?”

“At thirty-one? I’m not so sure. He’s only a boy.” “Anyway, we’ve no choice.

This is a Godsent or Washington-sent—opportunity that we can’t afford to miss. He’ll have to get a crash briefing on Terran affairs, learn all that’s necessary about the United States…”

“That reminds me-what is the United States these days? I’ve lost count.”

“Now there are forty-five states-Texas, New Mexico, Alaska, and Hawaii have rejoined the Union, at least for the Cente

“Just what does that mean, legally?”

“Not very much. They pretend to be autonomous, but pay their regional and global taxes like everyone else. It’s a typical

Terran compromise.”

Malcolm, remembering his origins, sometimes found it necessary to defend his native world against such cynical remarks.

“I often wish we had a little more Terran compromise here. It would be nice to inject some into Cousin Armand.”

Armand Helmer, Controller of Resources, was not in fact a cousin of

Malcolm’s, but a nephew of his ex-wife, Ellen. However, in the closed little world of Titan everyone except recent immigrants was related to everybody else, and the designations “uncle,” 6daunt ….. nephew,” “cousin” were tossed around with cheerful inaccuracy.

“Cousin Armand,” said Colin with some satisfaction, “is going to be very upset when he learns that Duncan is on his way to Earth.”

“And what will he do about it?” Malcolm asked softly.

It was a good question, and for a moment both Makenzies brooded over the deepening rivalry between their family and the Helmers. In some ways, it was commonplace enough; both Armand and his son, Karl, were Terran-born, and had brought with them across a billion kilometers that maddening aura of superiority that was so often the hallmark of the mother world. Some immigrants eventually managed to eradicate it, though the process was difficult. Malcolm Makenzie had succeeded only after three planets and a hundred years, but the Helmers had never even tried. And although Karl had been only five years old when he left Earth, he seemed to have spent the subsequent thirty trying to become more Terran than the Terrans. Nor could it have been a coincidence that all his wives had been from Earth.

Yet this had been a matter of amusement, rather than a

bother to conceal his belief that three generations of Makenzies were enough.

Whether or not he had actually coined the famous “What’s good for the Makenzies…” phrase, he certainly quoted it with relish.

To do Armand justice, his ambitions seemed more concentrated on his only son than on himself. That alone would have been sufficient to put some str i s on the friendship between Karl and Duncan, but it would probably have survived paternal pressures from either direction. What had caused the final rift was still something of a mystery, and was associated with a psychological breakdown that Karl had experienced fifteen years ago.

He had emerged from it with all his abilities intact, but with a marked change of personality. After graduating with honors at the University of

Titan, he had become involved in a whole range of research activities, from measurements of galactic radio waves to studies of the magnetic fields around Saturn. All this work had some practical relevance, and Karl had also played a valuable role in the establishment and maintenance of the communications network upon which Titanian life depended. It would be true to say, however, that his interests were theoretical rather than practical, and he sometimes tried to exploit this whenever the old “Two Cultures” debate raised its hoary head.

Despite a couple of centuries of invective from both sides, no one really believed that Scientists, with a capital S, were more cultured (whatever that meant) than Engineers. The purity of theoretical knowledge was a philosophical aberration which would have been laughed out of court by those Greek thinkers who had had it foisted on them more than a thousand years earlier. The fact that the greatest sculptor on Earth had begun his career as a bridge designer, and the best violinist on Mars was still doing original work in the theory of numbers, proved exactly nothing one way or the other. But the Helmers liked to argue that it was time for a change; the engineers had run Titan for long enough, and they had the perfect replacement, who would

bring intellectual distinction to his world. At thirty-six, Karl still possessed the charm that had captivated all his peers, but it seemed to many-and certainly to Duncan-that this was now underlined by something hard, calculating, and faintly repellent. He could still be loved, but he had lost the ability to love; and it was strange that none of his spectacular marriages had produced any offspring.

If Armand hoped to challenge the Makenzie regime, Karl’s lack of an heir was not his only problem. Whatever the Seven Worlds might say about their independence, the center of power was still on Earth. As, two thousand years ago, men had once gone to Rome in search of justice, or prestige, or knowledge, so in this age the Imperial planet called to its scattered children. No man could be taken seriously in the arena of Solar politics unless he was personally acquainted with the key figures of Terran affairs, and had traced his way at least once through the labyrinth of the terrestrial bureaucracy.

And to do this, one had to go to Earth; as in the days of the Caesars, there was no alternative. Those who believed otherwise-or pretended to-risked being tagged with the dreaded word “colonial.”