Grand Tour 12 Titan by Ben Bova

Author:Ben Bova [Bova, Ben]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780340823
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 2006-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Holly stood alone on the stage of Athens’s indoor theater and watched the rows fill up almost entirely with women. Pancho sat in the front row, grinning up at her. And she even had Nadia Wunderly sitting beside her. She saw Professor Wilmot and a couple of other men, including that Ramanujan guy that worked for Eberly. A flaming spy for Malcolm, she told herself. It almost amused her to see Wilmot and Ramanujan sitting together, as if for protection, amid a growing sea of women. Berkowitz was in back, a remote controller in one hand to direct the cameras he had stationed in the far corners of the theater.

Otherwise the theater was occupied by women. Dozens of conversations hummed through the place, but so far they didn’t sound impatient. Quite the opposite, Holly thought. The women seemed positive, even buoyant.

More were still coming into the theater at two o’clock, the time set for the rally to start. Holly fidgeted nervously on the stage, torn between a compulsion to start promptly and a desire to get as large an audience as possible. The theater sat four hundred, and the seats were more than half filled. Malcolm’s first rally back in his first election campaign hadn’t drawn this many.

She killed a minute or so adjusting the microphone pinned to the lapel of her tunic.

At last, three minutes past the hour, Holly cleared her throat and said, “I want to thank you for coming here this afternoon.”

All the buzzing conversations stopped. All eyes turned to Holly. She noted a few women were still trickling into the theater and hurrying to seats toward the rear.

“I know a lot of you have had to take time off from your jobs or other occupations to come here. I want to apologize for having this rally at such a weird hour. Thing is, the administration claimed that all the theaters and other public spaces are completely booked for every evening between now and election day. And you know who runs the administration!”

“Malcolm Eberly!” someone shouted.

A chorus of hisses rose from the audience. It startled Holly; it sounded like an angry warning from a den of snakes.

“Reason Eberly stuck us with this midafternoon time is that he figured nobody’d show up.”

“But he was wrong!” a woman yelled. Laughter and cheers rose from the audience.

Holding up her hands for silence, Holly went on, “The reason I accepted this dimdumb time was that we’ve got an important job to do, and we can’t waste any time getting it done.

“What is it?” Pancho asked, at the top of her voice.

Suppressing a grin at her sister’s stooging, Holly said, “We want the Zero Population Growth repealed, or at least reexamined.”

“Repealed!” several women shouted.

“Well, okay, but Eberly’s going to say that the ZPG protocol can’t be repealed or even altered unless there’s a formal petition signed by sixty-seven percent of the habitat’s population.”

“No!”

“Boo!”

“That’s a crock!”

Again gesturing for silence, Holly said, “I’m afraid it’s true. I’ve looked it up. Our constitution states that

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