Free Titan by Ben Bova

muttering about his power wrench. “Shouldn’ta crapped out on me like that,” he insisted. “It was like it was tryin ’ to mangle me, you know?”
    Vernon Donkman frowned at his desktop screen. This shouldn’t be happening, he told himself.
    Donkman was the chief financial officer of Goddard, a position that sounded impressive to the uninformed until they learned that he was the only financial officer in the habitat. Still, his was a very responsible position, despite the fact that virtually every financial transaction among the habitat’s citizens was done electronically. The bank’s computer handled all financial links with Earth and the other human settlements throughout the solar system, as well.
    The frown that etched Donkman’s lean, almost gaunt face was engendered by the fact that the bank’s central accounting system showed an anomaly. The master account didn’t balance! It was off by only a few hundred credits, but it should not be off at all. Not by a single penny, Donkman told himself sternly.
    The problem was easy enough to fix, he knew. Simply liquidate the unbalanced amount from the habitat’s internal account. That would balance the books. But the thought irked Donkman
mightily. Accounts should balance without jiggering. It was his insistence on such purity that got him exiled from Amsterdam in the first place. Someone high up in the hierarchy of the Holy Disciples had been bleeding off cash from the church’s banking system. Donkman had tried to track down the embezzler and found himself accused of the crime and exiled to habitat Goddard.
    The memory of that injustice rankled him, but this tiny misbalance in the habitat’s account aggravated him even more. The amount involved was too small for anyone to deliberately have stolen it. It was a mistake, somewhere in the accounting system, a simple mistake.
    But try as he might, Donkman could not find where the mistake originated. At last his wristwatch alarm buzzed. With a reluctant sigh, Donkman pushed himself up from his desk and headed for the cosmetics clinic. Everyone was getting enzyme injections to turn their skin golden tan. He didn’t want to be the only one among his acquaintances to look like a palefaced mouth breather.

28 DECEMBER 2095: NANOLAB

    M alcolm Eberly felt distinctly uneasy inside the nanotech laboratory. Not that he had any religious scruples against nanotechnology; he simply shared the same fear that most people had about an outbreak of uncontrollable nanomachines, mindless microscopic monsters chewing up everything in their path like an unstoppable swarm of soldier ants. The thought made him shudder inside.
    He knew his fears were grounded in solid fact. Nanomachines had killed people in the past. Back when Dr. Cardenas had first joined the habitat, while Professor Wilmot was still in
charge of the interim government, the old man had insisted on all kinds of safeguards before he’d allow Cardenas to set up this laboratory. Why, just getting into this lab was a major struggle: You had to pass through a double set of heavy doors, just like an airlock. Cardenas had to keep the air pressure inside her lab lower than the pressure in the rest of the habitat, just to make certain none of the virus-sized machines could waft out on a stray current of air.
    Urbain seemed uneasy, too. He must be really desperate, Eberly thought, if he’s considering using nanomachines to fix his probe down there on Titan.
    If Kris Cardenas sensed their apprehensions, she gave no sign of it. Perched casually on a tall stool, one elbow leaning on the top of the lab bench, Cardenas was wearing a comfortable light, short-sleeved sweater of baby blue and denim jeans. Urbain, as usual, was in a jacket and carefully creased slacks. No tie, but he had knotted an ascot inside the collar of his shirt. Eberly himself wore a loose tunic over his slacks, as the dress code he had promulgated called for. Hardly anyone outside the habitat’s administrative