Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Libet’s bone calcium continued to wash out in her urine, at a half percent a month. Rosenberg thought there was a danger of her inner spongy bone, the trabeculae, vanishing altogether, without hope of regeneration. He didn’t have any way of monitoring the build-up of some of that calcium in Libet’s kidneys, which could lead ultimately to kidney stones. And on top of all of that, Libet was working her way through the classic symptoms of acute radiation sickness.

  In the first few days after the solar storm incident Libet had suffered from nausea, pain, a loss of appetite, extreme fatigue, vomiting. After a couple of weeks she had started to suffer diarrhea, hemorrhaging from the mucous membranes in her nose, mouth and other parts of her body, and hair loss, from patches all over her scalp.

  Libet had taken a dose of around five hundred rem. The textbooks said her chances of survival in the short term were less than fifty percent; and in the long term — when effects like cancer had time to work through — even more marginal…

  He suspected she’d done well to survive so long, even to stay conscious.

  He looked at Libet’s face. He could see tears leaking steadily, and when he raised a lid, her eye was bloodshot. That was partly due to the changed fluid balance, and partly to the dustiness of the air: in microgravity, dust didn’t settle out. The eyes produced tears, and blink reflexes cut in, intended to wash foreign bodies off the eye, into the lacrimal duct and into the nose. The nose was supposed to run, then, to wash the particles out of the system. But in microgravity there was no gravity feed to the lacrimal duct. The blinking could only redistribute particles over the eye; Libet’s cornea was, as a result, red and scratched. And the particles which were forced into Libet’s lacrimal duct did not run out of her nose, because her nose was almost stopped up by excessive mucous secretions.

  If she ever pulled through this he didn’t want Libet to emerge with eye damage. So he had set Mott the task of bathing Libet’s eyes, and treating them with various drops…

  Complex, messy, unanticipated problems.

  As he worked, Rosenberg thought about death.

  If — when — Siobhan Libet died, it would be Rosenberg who would have to sign her death certificate.

  He would have to perform the autopsy.

  He would have to provide standard and X-ray documentation, and subject tissue samples to toxicologic, bacteriologic and biochemical analysis; he’d have to take samples from the liver, a kidney, the brain, a lung, cerebrospinal fluid, vitreous humor, hair, skin, spleen and the skeletal muscles…

  The legal position wasn’t very clear.

  NASA spaceflight crews were judged to be federal agency radiation workers, and so were covered by Occupational Safety and Health Administration radiation protection measures. But those measures had not been drawn up for spaceflight, and NASA had prepared its own standards for crew dosage. As far as he could make out, because of get-out clauses, there were actually no radiation exposure standards for human exploration missions.

  For sure, though, they hadn’t adhered to the ALARA principle that the standards laid down: exposure As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

  If the law suits started flying, Rosenberg might even be asked to preserve the body. That would mean, as far as he could see, mummification.

  Jesus. What a situation.

  In the course of his med training, Rosenberg had had some preliminary introduction to psychology. It wasn’t exactly a subject he was interested in, but what he had learned had pretty much confirmed his preconceptions about NASA: that the psychological preparation of NASA crews, including this one, was pitiful.

  Nobody had figured out how they should respond to a situation like this. What would they do if someone died? Hold a service? If so, what denomination? And if they had to store the evidence, what were they supposed to do with the mummified body?

  Maybe the worst problem was that the five of them had, prior to Libet’s accident, come to some kind of accommodation with each other, and with their situation. But the injury to Libet during the solar storm, and now her likely death — the loss of her skills, her muscles, her dedication to the farm, her contribution to the collective personality of the crew — was likely to destabilize them all, he feared.

  Or worse. It might destroy them altogether.

  …In sleep, her skin was smoothed out, almost glowing in the soft light of her cabin’s reading lamp. She looked young, trouble-free, save for the occasional grimace, pain echoes which crossed her face.

  It was an odd thing, but he’d never really gotten to know Libet, in the years they’d spent together training for this mission, even the months they’d been cooped up together in this hacked-up Space Shuttle. To him she was a kind of sketch, a collection of barely understood traits: her readiness to laugh, her obvious sense of wonder, her youthful impatience to fly in space, her relationship with Mott.

  But then, he hadn’t really gotten to know any of the rest of the crew, except in so far as their interests crossed his own. It was only now, when he had been forced more or less to suspend his own work on the Titan data and had been reduced to a kind of low-level nurse for Libet, that he had started to see her as some kind of human being.

  There was a person in there, he realized now: an interior presence as deep and complex as his own, inside this shell of damaged flesh. And she was suffering.

  He hadn’t quite understood his own reaction when he saw how Mott, in her distress, held Libet, and how Libet responded to her. He had been baffled, angry, as if Mott was intruding.

  It was a funny thing, but it was as if, out here, so isolated from all but this ill-assorted handful of people, Rosenberg was starting to gain some kind of psychic connection with his fellow humans, for the first time in his adult life. And it wasn’t all that hard for him to figure out why he had gotten so angry at Nicola Mott, Libet’s grieving lover.

  It was because — in a stupid, unworthy way, now that she was utterly dependent on him — he was falling in love with Libet himself.

  Rosenberg was jealous.

  When he got back to the common area, he found Angel and Benacerraf screaming at each other.

  Paula had algal growth smeared over her cheek. “Were you aware of this?”

  “Aware of what?”

  “What he’s been taking.” She stabbed a finger at Angel, who loomed in the air beyond her, his beard floating, his body hunched over in the shape of a huge, brown-jacketed claw.

  “Are you talking about drugs?”

  Paula seemed to be trembling, so extreme was her anger. “God damn it, am I supposed to watch over every damn thing on this fucking ship? Rosenberg, you’re the surgeon up here. You got a responsibility for this stuff.”

  “Woah.” Rosenberg held his hands up. “Back off, Paula. As far as I’m concerned all I have is a field assignment. I’m no doctor, and I sure as hell will not accept sole responsibility for our medical supplies.” Now it was his turn to point at Angel, who laughed at him. “If that asshole wants to shoot himself up, that’s his responsibility. There’s no lock on the cupboard, and I’m not prepared to hold any key—”

  “Fuck this,” Angel snapped now. “Look, Benacerraf, I’m not taking any orders from you over this.”

  “Then you can take them from NASA.”

  “NASA are ten million miles away,” Angel yelled. “We’re on our own out here. Don’t you get it?”

  Benacerraf tried to face him, but they were both bobbing in the air as they gestured, their centers of mass adjusting as they threw their arms back and forth. It added an air of absurdity to the whole situation, and was maybe even extending the row.

  “Steroids,” Rosenberg said.

  They turned to look at him.

  “Anabolic steroids. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s taking steroids, against microgravity wasting of his bones.”

  “Steroids,” Benacerraf said, “and fluoride to promote calcium growth. That’s what I’ve been able to trace anyhow.”

  Angel shrugged. “Sue me,�
�� he said. “It’s a hell of a sight easier than those dumb hours in the arm.”

  “It doesn’t work,” Rosenberg said. “What is it you’re using, the nandrolone? Look, steroids work by increasing muscle strength, not by acting directly on the bones. The stronger the muscles, the more stress they impose on the skeleton; and your skeleton adjusts itself until it’s just strong enough to withstand muscle stress. But — here’s the catch, Bill — you still have to do your exercise to get the benefit. Don’t you get it? And as for the fluoride, that really is dumb. You’ll start getting calcification where you don’t want it. And—”

  “Up your ass, double-dome,” Angel said savagely. “You’re no doctor. What do you know?”

  Rosenberg shrugged. “Fine. Your choice. Don’t come to me when your tendons ossify.”

  “Fuck you,” Angel said. He pulled himself into his quarters, and slammed the door closed behind him.

  Now that the shouting had stopped, the routine noises of the hab module became more apparent: the whir of the high-speed fans, the hiss of the vents, sixty decibels of white noise.

  For a moment Benacerraf hung there in the air, her legs drawn up towards her chest. Her breathing was rapid, her face flushed, her eyes, over puffed cheeks, red-rimmed and irritated. Rosenberg wondered vaguely about the state of her heart. “Rosenberg,” she said now, “I want you to take responsibility for this. I want you to find a way of locking those damn drugs away from Bill.”

  He didn’t respond.

  He had no intention of locking away anything. He sure wasn’t going to intervene in some argument between Benacerraf and Angel, for the benefit of a control freak like Benacerraf.

  Anyhow, he figured, he had enough responsibility already.

  He got away from Benacerraf. He made his way past the debris of the laundry, and in the galley he tried to find something easy to fix for lunch.

  * * *

  Hadamard was in Washington during the inauguration of Xavier Maclachlan, after his wafer-thin win in the 2008 election.

  Maclachlan called it a “liberation of the capital.”

  Armed militia bands came in from Idaho and Arizona and Oklahoma and Montana, to fire off black-powder salutes to the nationalist-populist who promised to repeal all gun control laws. In the crowd, Hadamard saw a couple of Ku Klux Klan costumes, a sight he thought had gone into an unholy past. Come to that, there was a rumor that a former Klan leader was being made ready to become a future White House chief of staff. And in his speech Maclachlan appealed to the people to end what he called the “Israeli occupation of Congress…”

  And so on.

  As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama.

  Army engineers — set in place during the handover from the last Administration — started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

  There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country’s membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started — arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs — ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese — and world trade collapsed.

  The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan.

  Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blueprints for Reagan’s old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his “da Vinci brains trust.” The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft.

  And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form.

  Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises.

  Jake Hadamard was still in his job at NASA, trying to maintain support for the Titan mission, still coping with the fall-out from the Endeavour launch. Not that anybody seemed to care much about that any more. The scuttlebutt, in fact, was that Maclachlan was lining up Al Hartle as Hadamard’s replacement. Maclachlan couldn’t have sent a clearer signal as to what he thought of the X-15 incident.

  Hadamard had thought he could work with Maclachlan. All his life, Hadamard had put himself, his career, first; he’d thought he could work with anybody.

  Maybe he’d been wrong.

  He thought Maclachlan was causing a lot of people a lot of misery, needlessly. He was stirring up hate that might rebound on him. And he was taking one hell of a risk by enraging China like this.

  Hadamard felt afraid of the future. But his greatest fear was that Maclachlan might actually be right. What if his protectionism and military bristling actually gained back the advantage for the U.S., as they all entered the second decade of what the commentators were calling “China’s century”? What if his own, Hadamard’s, vestigial moral doubts were exposed as the confusion of a weakling? What then…?

  The future, his personal future and the nation’s, was more cloudy than ever before.

  Marcus White asked to meet him at the KSC Visitors’ Center. He parked his car and walked through the Kennedy rocket park. Hadamard remembered how you used to be able to see the rockets as you approached the Visitors’ Center, sprouting from the far side of the freeway, white and silver, like the ash-coated stumps of burned-out trees, tied to the ground by their stay-wires.

  Now, though, those silver treestumps were almost all fallen; those that hadn’t been dragged away to be dismantled lay against the hot ground like discarded matches.

  He was early.

  The old Visitors’ Center was deserted — the ticket booths closed up, the once-sparkling VR displays of the Moon and Mars just empty stages — but the main work of dismantling the place hadn’t yet begun, and as Hadamard walked the click of his patent leather shoes on the floor echoed.

  He walked around the old-fashioned displays of real hardware: Gemini, Mercury, Apollo. The Mercury capsule — America’s first manned spaceship — was just a cone of corrugated metal, packed with equipment, enclosed in a glass sheath; the controls were glass and Bakelite and metal toggles, clunky and crude. It looked as if it dated from the 1930s, not the 1960s. It was hard to see how a man in a pressure suit could get inside there, let alone fly the thing into space.

  Even the Apollo Command Module seemed small, dingy and primitive: impossibly cramped, with the metal frames of those three couches jammed in together. The interior finish had faded to a muddy yellow. There was big chunky machinery on the hatch, and tiny, thick windows, and Velcro patches everywhere.

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  The gravelly voice in his ear made him jump. He turned. In the dimmed lights he made out the tough leather face of Marcus White.

  “I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did they go to the bathroom in there? Well, I’ll tell you. You had to strip naked, see, and then take this plastic bag and clamp it to your ass. And when the turds came out you had to hook them down into the bag with your finger, through the plastic. No gravity; nothing to make stuff fall by itself, right? And then—”

  Hadamard forced a smile. “Marcus,” he said, “I know how Apollo astronauts went to the bat
hroom.”

  “So you came to see these old birds before they are taken out for scrap?”

  “They’re not being scrapped, Marcus,” Hadamard said patiently. “As you know. They’ll be put in storage, here at the Cape or at Langley or Vandenburg. It’s just—”

  “I know. Nobody wants to see this old junk any more. Right? So, you believe that too, Jake?”

  Hadamard shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know any more, Marcus. Most of the population is too young to remember Apollo anyhow. And the opinion polls say most of them don’t believe it ever happened, that it was all faked, a Cold War stunt. Attendances here have dropped right off. What do you want to see me about?”

  White let his mouth drop open. “You don’t know what’s going on here — you, the big cheese?”

  “I don’t get to hear everything.”

  “Sure. Not since Maclachlan took the oath, right?”

  Hadamard stiffened. “So tell me.”

  White made an odd, growling sound at the back of his throat. “I’ll show you. I was called in to do a VR recording. For the new arcade. They called us all in, those who are left alive. Pete, Neil… Quite a reunion.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Not really.” They walked on, past more mummified, dust-covered 1960s hardware. “You know, I see these guys once every five or ten years. And all I can think is, once you could bounce around on the Moon as light as a feather, and now, my God, look what all this gravity has done to you…

  “Anyhow, come on. You won’t believe your fucking eyes.”

  The new arcade was a lot smaller and more compact than the old, sprawling Visitors’ Center — it had an atmosphere more like a chapel, in fact, as opposed to the old center’s VR whizz-bang. There were no Geminis suspended from the ceiling, no wax dummies of spacewalking astronauts, no Jim Lovell spacesuits or Lunar Rovers on faked-up moonscapes. There were a few simple decorations — abstract paintings of the Earth, Moon and stars — and a discrete row of VR booths, almost like confessionals.