Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  But, out here, it hardly seemed to matter, like so much else.

  Discovery’s path — whirling around the inner planets, and then out past Jupiter to Saturn — was actually similar to that of Cassini, which had come this way more than a decade before. But since then Jupiter and Saturn had wheeled through their grand orbits, of twelve and twenty-nine years, and they weren’t in such a favorable position for Discovery’s slingshot as they had been for Cassini. Discovery needed to come in a lot closer than Cassini, to extract still more energy from Jupiter, the most massive planet in the Solar System.

  But that meant the orbiter had to penetrate deep into Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

  Mott knew she, and the rest of the crew, were paying a price. Jupiter’s magnetic field was ten times as powerful as Earth’s, and its magnetosphere — the doughnut-shaped belt of magnetically trapped solar wind particles — stretched fifty Jupiter diameters, far beyond Discovery’s current position. Right now heavy solar wind particles, electrons and hydrogen and helium nuclei, which circled, trapped, in Jupiter’s magnetosphere — ten thousand times as energetic as those in the Van Alien belts of Earth — coursed through the fabric of the ship, and her body.

  Arguably this place, the magnetosphere of the most massive planet, was the most hostile section of deep space in the Solar System. And here she was, staring out the window at it.

  Mott stayed on the flight deck as long as she could, exercising in Jupiter light.

  She slowed her pace on the treadmill. She hung onto the pilot’s seat for a moment and let her aching legs drift, deliciously, in the balm of microgravity, bearing no weight at all. Then she swivelled and pulled herself to the instrument panel at the back of the flight deck, and looked out over the orbiter’s instrument bay.

  Discovery was passing Jupiter with its payload bay turned up to the giant planet and its system, instruments straining, the big high-gain antenna pointing at remote Earth, lost now in the glare of the sun. The point-source sun and pink Jupiter, at right angles to each other, cast complex multiple shadows over the blocky, blanketed equipment in the payload bay, and over Discovery’s curving wings.

  It was impossible to reconcile the awesome spectacle up here with the squalor and crap of their lives inside the spacecraft — the shitty, failing systems, the endless slog of their daily lives.

  But there had been no other way to get here, to see this.

  She towelled off her sweat, wrapped up her softscreen, and went back to the hab module.

  Rosenberg clambered into Apollo Command Module CM-115, through the tight little docking tunnel in its nose, past the compartments containing the drogue and recovery parachutes and their mortars and the forward reaction control system.

  He came down into the big pressurized crew compartment in the mid-section, descending on it from above. There were three couches in there, side by side on their backs. They were just metal frames slung with grey Armalon fiberglass cloth, so close together he was sure it wouldn’t be possible for three adult humans to pack in there without rubbing shoulders, elbows and knees against each other.

  Rosenberg wriggled into the center couch, the Command Module Pilot’s. He spread out his manuals on his knee.

  He was here as part of his in-flight training program. He was never going to be a pilot, but he had to learn how to fly an Apollo — in case of contingency — all the way to the surface of Titan.

  The Command Module was like a small aircraft, upended, its interior coated with switches, dials and cathode ray displays. The lights were subdued, the glow in the cabin greenish from the CRTs. Directly in front of him there was a big, gun-metal grey, one-hundred-and-eighty-degree instrument panel, glistening with five hundred switches. There were control handles on the commander’s couch armrests: the attitude controller assembly on the right, which was used to control the reaction thruster assemblies, and the big thrust-translator controller on the left, which could be used to accelerate the craft forward or back. For this unique mission, the attitude control would also be used to direct a paraglider, a shaped parachute which would guide Apollo down to a safe landing on Titan’s slushy surface.

  There was a smell of plastic and metal; all around him the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred.

  The windows seemed small and far away; he was pretty much surrounded by metal walls, here, and even though the side hatch was still open, he felt closed in.

  The Command Module showed Apollo’s priorities: it had been built to keep people alive, not to let them sightsee, or do any of that fancy science crap en route to the Moon.

  He turned his attention to the instrument panel.

  There were toggle switches, thumb wheels, push buttons, rotary switches with click stops. The readouts were mainly meters, lights and little rectangular windows. There were tiny joysticks and pushbuttons: translational controllers, to work the Command Module’s clusters of attitude rockets. He experimented with the switches. They were protected by little metal gates on either side, to save them being kicked by a free-fall boot. He worked his way across the panel, practising flipping the dead switches, getting used to the feel of them.

  There were little diagrams etched into the panel, he saw, circuit and flow charts. He consulted his manuals. All the switches were contained by one diagram or another. Once he started to see the system behind the diagrams, he began to figure the logic in the panel, how the switches clustered and related to each other.

  He surveyed the cabin, checking he understood the contents of the lockers.

  The equipment bay beyond the left-hand couch contained components of the environment control system, including the control unit. The bay in front of this held more life support equipment such as a water delivery system, and doubled as a clothing store. The right-hand bay contained more food, and the extremely clunky Apollo-era waste management systems: plastic condoms, and bags within which you had to catch and treat your turds. In a bay ahead of this Rosenberg found medical kits, survival gear and modern-looking camera equipment. In the aft bay, beneath the couches, were components of pressure suits.

  If you docked with a Lunar Module, Rosenberg learned, you stowed your docking probe in that aft bay, and the circular tunnel cover in the left-hand bay…

  In the lower bay at the foot of the center couch he found guidance and navigation electronics. Communications equipment was also crammed in there, along with batteries, food and other equipment.

  There was also a tiny, beautiful sextant and telescope, for navigating between Earth and Moon.

  GM-H5 had been built four decades earlier, to fly to the Moon. But now it had been rebuilt, to some extent. CM-115 had been upgraded to stand a space soak of six years. Its attitude control system was to be based on nitrogen, which would not degrade in space. Hydraulic systems, which might freeze, were replaced by systems of wires and electric motors. The cooling system had been replaced by a water-based design, because chemicals in the old system like glycol were corrosive and couldn’t be stored over long periods. A thermal blanket cocoon had been fitted over the Command Module’s heatshield, to protect it from micrometeorite damage. The life support systems — some of which dated back to the Mercury era — had been upgraded to Shuttle technology. And so on.

  The main challenge, in learning to handle this thing, was going to be the computer system.

  Rosenberg spread a softscreen over his knee, opened up a manual, and began to poke at the Command Module’s DSKY — pronounced “disky,” the little computer touch-control pad. The technicians had torn the heart out of Apollo’s computers, but had to leave the same interface. Anything else would have meant pulling the ship apart, and nobody had got the confidence to do that.

  The DSKY was not a softscreen — not even much like the keyboard, mouse and monitor technology he had grown up with. There was just a block of status and warning lights labelled PROG and OPR ERR and UPLINK ACTY and COMP ACTY… He began to study their meanings.

  Tentatively, he started to punch the keypad
. The pad wasn’t even qwerty; it contained a blocky numeric pad, with addition and subtraction signs, and eight function keys with tiny lettering: VERB, NOUN, ENTER, RSET, PRO, others. The keypad was used to construct little command sentences, to communicate with the computer. There were about a hundred verbs and nouns he would have to know.

  He practiced loading a rendezvous program. He touched the surface of his softscreen, and a little prompt panel opened up. He told the computer he wanted to change the program: he pressed the VERB function key, and then 3, 7, ENTER. He gave it the new program: P31, a rendezvous mode. 3, 1, ENTER. He asked for data. VERB 0, 6; NOUN 8, 4. Five-digit numbers flashed up on the display area. That was the velocity change he’d need for the next maneuver.

  The display could show decimal numbers, angles, octal numbers, time… He could only tell which was which by context, following his checklist.

  The flight load had dozens of programs. Rosenberg would have to learn which was which, learn to select them without thinking. There wouldn’t be much help for him, if he had to run this stuff in anger. But then, nobody said it would be easy.

  And besides, he was kind of enjoying this. It was like solving a series of little logical puzzles.

  They nearly didn’t have computers in the old Apollos at all, he’d learned. Not everyone had agreed they needed them for navigation and rendezvous; ground control could cover all of that. Two arguments got computers in here. The first was the Russians. What if those Soviets tried to disrupt communications with Houston? The astronauts needed some way to get around the jamming by doing their own calculations. And the second was that NASA wanted to prepare for longer-duration missions, such as the flights to Mars that had never been funded: far enough away, you can’t afford to wait out the minutes, or hours, it might take for some number to come up from the ground; you needed a local processing ability.

  Fear and dreams, he thought, that’s what had driven the computer technology, and everything else about Apollo, and maybe now the Titan mission as well. Fear and dreams.

  The DSKY system was so counter-intuitive it was going to be tough to learn. But he had six years to study it, en route to Titan; if he ever needed to fly this ship he’d be able to play the crummy little gadget like a piano.

  And anyhow he enjoyed the work. He enjoyed being tucked away, alone, in this humming little cabin with all its gadgets, occupying his mind with creaky old computer codes. It was a break from the complexities of life support, and his ambiguous and increasingly unwelcome role as ship’s doctor, and the sour relationships that prevailed in the hab module.

  And besides, Rosenberg found himself being slowly seduced by the Apollo.

  He loved the endless lockers, the compact equipment, the careful design and storage, the way everything was tucked away.

  When he was a kid, he’d built himself a den cum spaceship something like this. It was just a plastic tent hung up inside a climbing frame. He had little food boxes in there, and stocks of soda, and a rolled-up Army-surplus sleeping bag in one corner, and a couple of boxes of cold lights. He’d landed on a hundred planets in that little ship, all of them contiguous with his mother’s back yard; He would peer through muddy plastic portholes, then creep out of his ship with his torch and his walkie-talkie and explore; but the main joy was to huddle back in the safety of his den, cocooned by his materiel and equipment, the stuff of his portable world, and write up his log.

  Sad little bastard, he thought bleakly.

  Anyhow, what was Apollo but the apotheosis of all dens?

  And what did that say about Isaac Rosenberg? By launching himself off on this endless spaceflight, was he braving a new frontier, or retreating to some cozy fantasy of his lonely childhood?

  It was best, he had learned much earlier in this mission, to avoid self-analysis.

  Sitting alone inside the quiet Apollo, he worked his way through his manuals, learning how the old spaceship was flown.

  Benacerraf had instituted a weekly crew meeting.

  They were facing so many problems now, she figured they couldn’t afford to indulge in their habitual acrimonious isolation from each other. They had to discuss their problems, come up with solutions, parcel out pieces of work.

  Much as she hated the idea herself.

  And so, now, the four of them hooked legs or arms around stanchions and struts, their postures taking on the stooping crouch of the neutral-G position.

  They looked, Benacerraf thought, like four birds of prey, perched on some metal branch.

  “…We traced the root cause of the heart arrhythmia problems,” Rosenberg was saying, reading from a softscreen which was suspended in the air before him. The computer folded softly like a bird’s wing, the letters and numbers shimmering across its surface. “It was a trace element deficiency.”

  Benacerraf said, “What trace element?”

  “Potassium. You find it in sea water and in various salts, like carnallite and sytvine. Potassium is essential in the biocycles. Its salts are used as fertilizers in the farm’s nutrient solution, which—”

  “Cut to the chase, asshole,” Angel said mildly, his eyes closed.

  Rosenberg said, “In the potable water we have a limit of three hundred forty milligrams per liter. We’ve actually been recording a level of a tenth that.” He scratched his face. The problem is partly the excess peeing we all do. Potassium, along with other stuff, gets flushed out of the system. So it has to be replaced. Now I’m spiking the potable water with electrolytes, specifically potassium, to restore the balance.”

  “So will we have long-term heart problems because of this?” Mott asked.

  “Probably.” Rosenberg shrugged. “But this is not a regime in which we’re aiming for a long and healthy old age anyhow. I wouldn’t worry; it’s just another bogeyman to bite us, in a long line with all the others.”

  Benacerraf found Rosenberg’s thin voice fantastically irritating, as he droned through his lists of facts. “So tell me what caused the deficiency in the biocycles.”

  “It has to be the SCWO,” Rosenberg said, his eyes studiously on Benacerraf’s face.

  Angel showed no reaction, his face hidden by his beard.

  Rosenberg doesn’t want to take him on. So, Benacerraf thought wearily, it’s up to me to confront this asshole again, to take on the burden of responsibility for us all.

  “Bill, the SCWO is your baby. We’ve been having problems with it for years. And now this potassium crap.”

  Angel shrugged, his body moving minutely in the air as his center of mass shifted. “What do you want me to tell you? Look, we knew when we launched that the SCWO was immature technology, a risky piece of equipment to haul along. Basically the damn thing works. Hell,” he said, leering casually at Mott, who looked away, “you know that, or we’d all be knee-deep in Rosenberg’s pale shit, right? But we still get a lot of corrosion of the surfaces in there — it’s a hostile environment, and there are a shit-load of toxic gases which—”

  “Bill, I’ve been relying on you to fix it. And now I hear this.”

  “I’ve nursemaided the damn thing half way to Saturn already,” Angel snapped. “I’m a pilot, not a plumber.”

  “You have to get it right, Bill. Right to the last decimal place, of the last trace element. That’s what it takes.” She felt herself slipping into peevish anger. “Don’t you see that? Why should I have to tell you what to do, how to do it? Why can’t I trust you to do your job…?”

  She noticed Mott folding her arms over herself, and rolling her eyes, escaping inward.

  Damn it, she thought. We set ourselves the trap again. And I fell into it.

  Angel was still blustering, justifying his negligent work on the SCWO. And Rosenberg, unfortunately, was going into lecture mode. He put his hands to his temples, his own long hair and wispy beard drifting around his face, and he started telling Angel stuff he already knew: about the instability of their miniature biosphere, the lack of buffering reservoirs of essential elements like potassium, the way
the balance had to be monitored and adjusted constantly by the crew…

  Angel started yelling back at Rosenberg, who just closed his eyes and droned on. Their voices seemed amplified in the dingy metal tube of the hab module.

  Benacerraf knew she needed to find some way of defusing the situation. But, she thought wearily, why me? Why is it always me who has to be the peacemaker, to eat shit, to make Bill calm down and force Rosenberg to look up from his softscreen and dry Nicola’s eyes over her girlfriend — why me?

  The meeting broke up, acrimoniously, with no real outcome. Mott went to her sleep compartment, Rosenberg to the farm.

  And Angel…

  Benacerraf watched, discreetly, as Angel took up position near the water spigots of the galley. And, with his skinny, spindled legs folded under him, he started to play with water. Angel took a syringe now, for example, and filled it with water from a spigot. When he pressed the plunger, slowly and carefully, injecting water into the air, a small bubble grew from the needle’s tip. He jerked the needle away and the water took the form of a tiny planet, floating in the air. Angel worked his needle and produced a whole set of the little water globes, drifting in the air around his head.

  Then he took smaller syringes from a set he’d improvised from medical waste, and injected the bubbles with iodine, grape juice, diluted orange juice, to stain them blue, green, yellow, red. Soon he had a whole Solar System, Benacerraf thought, with a miniature Mars and Earth and Jupiter, floating around his bearded head as if around a sun. Angel’s eyes followed the little spheres, entranced.

  Now Angel tried to herd his little water planets together, with his open palms. The water spheres were clammy to the touch; if Angel was gentle they bounced away from his palm as if coated with some fine elastic membrane, but if he wasn’t so careful the balls of water would cling like some jellyfish, spreading over the surface of his palm. With one such glob dangling from his palm, he shook his hand gently, up and down; the spherical cap rippled symmetrically, clinging to his skin.