Free Titan by Ben Bova Page B

nothing to do there now that Goddard was plying its orbit around Saturn. Nothing to do except think, and remember the life he had left behind on Earth. The woman he had left behind. His wife, the golden-haired Katrina. Katrina of the sweet smile and delicate hands. When she spoke it was like silver bells chiming in his heart.
    No, that way lay remorse. And anger. A rage so towering that its black storm could engulf him utterly. Timoshenko fought against the rage, because he knew that he himself was its focus, its center. At the thundering heart of his bloodred fury was the knowledge that he had brought this exile on himself. He drank too much, he talked too much, he cared too much. So they had exiled him to this green and luxurious prison more than a billion kilometers from Katrina.
    Timoshenko was working with the Titan Alpha mission control team when the call from Eberly reached him. Now that the probe was on Titan, the control center was on twenty-four-hour status: all consoles manned at all times. Timoshenko had volunteered to help fill mission control’s manpower needs. The job wasn’t really work; just babysitting the consoles. Boring routine, nothing more. The telemetry was coming through fine and
showed that the stupid machine down there was functioning as it should. Except that it refused to send any sensor data to Urbain and his twitching scientists. Timoshenko almost laughed. Urbain’s pride and joy was sitting on a cliff of dirty ice like a sullen teenager, refusing to talk to its daddy.
    So what? he asked himself. Why shouldn’t Urbain have his dreams shattered? Welcome to the club.
    The phone’s synthesized voice spoke in its flat, dull tones in his earplug: “The chief administrator wishes to see you in his office immediately. Please acknowledge.”
    Suppressing an urge to tell the chief administrator to pound sand up his ass, Timoshenko took in a breath, then replied into his lip mike, “I am on duty at the mission control center and cannot leave my post. My shift will end at seventeen hundred hours. I will report to the chief administrator’s office at seventeen-twenty, unless I hear otherwise from our respected and unparalleled chief administrator.”
    There, Timoshenko thought. That ought to keep that fathead Eberly happy for a couple of hours.
    Cardenas met Nadia Wunderly at the cafeteria precisely at noon. They carried their trays through the cold food line together, and Cardenas noted with an inner smile that Nadia took nothing more than a fresh green salad and a bottle of mineral water. Not wanting to tempt her friend to anything more, Cardenas limited her own selection to a Caesar salad augmented with bits of grilled faux chicken and a tall glass of tomato juice.
    As they put their trays on an empty table and sat down, Cardenas remarked, “You’re looking well, Nadia.”
    “I feel great,” said the physicist.
    Cardenas nodded and dug into her salad.
    “I mean,” Wunderly continued, “I can almost feel the nanos melting away the fat inside me. I’ve lost six kilos already!”
    “That’s wonderful.” Cardenas smiled to herself.
    A month earlier Wunderly had come to her, almost in tears, to beg her help. “It’s almost Christmas,” she pleaded, “and look at me! I’m fat as a pig!”
    Cardenas had tried to calm her friend, but she knew what was coming and dreaded it.

    At last Wunderly had begged, “Can’t you give me some nanos, just a little bit, just enough to burn this fat off me? Nobody’s going to ask me out for New Year’s Eve when I look like this!”
    Wunderly was chubby. Her basic body type was chunky, big-boned. She would never look sylphlike or slinky unless she had a complete body makeover, which could take months.
    “What you’re asking for is gobblers,” Cardenas had told her friend as gently as she could. “They’re illegal, totally banned everywhere. They could kill you; they’ve killed others, god knows.”
    “I don’t care!” Wunderly had yelped.