Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  “All right,” he said, breathless. “Now we got oxygenated air in his lungs,” He looked exhausted, his glasses sweat-streaked, as if he might pass out himself. “Now, the heart.” He felt for Angel’s carotid pulse. “Nothing. Niki, you’re stronger than me. Come around here.”

  Mott pulled herself behind Angel. She placed her left hand fist in Angel’s sternum and grabbed the fist with her other hand. She pulled Angel’s back against her chest, then compressed his sternum, hauling him hard towards her, counting. “One. Two. Three…—” The idea was to squeeze the heart between the sternum and the thoracic vertebrae, and so push oxygenated blood through Angel’s body.

  At a count of twelve, Angel shuddered. He coughed, his throat dry and ragged.

  Later, Benacerraf was at a squawk box, listening to the insectile voice of a capcom, the words eighty minutes old. The capcom was enthusing about the images they had received during the Saturn closest approach. Already NASA was receiving requests for the commercial rights, and there were believed to be hundreds of illegal hacked-up VR copies running through their cycles even now, out in the net.

  She stared into a monitor.

  Discovery was receding from Saturn now, skimming back, briefly, towards the sun, and the planet was once more turning its full face to the spacecraft. The cloud bands were sharply distinguished, though more subtle and yellowish than Jupiter’s. Along the fringe of one band at the equator Benacerraf could see turbulence, oval clouds like cells. The rings themselves cast a shadow, a thin, complex line, over the milky equator of Saturn’s daylit hemisphere. The shadow was curved, an exercise in projective geometry. And the rings had a lacy, tenuous appearance, so that she could see the curve of the bright limb of the planet through their structure.

  There was nothing to compare to this experience.

  This was not, she thought, even like travelling from Earth to Moon, from one closed-up sphere to another. They had journeyed for years, into the huge outer wastes of the Solar System, and entered orbit around this metahuman artifact, this structure of rings and spheres that could fill up the Earth-Moon system.

  It is the dream of a million years, she thought, to be here and see this.

  Rosenberg drifted in, and took her through Angel’s injuries.

  “…Paula, you have to understand the human body is not designed to withstand vacuum. Basically the internal pressure turns it into a kind of low-tech bomb. All Bill’s internal material tried to escape, through his skin, the orifices of his head and body. Bleeding everywhere. His lungs are torn. His blood vessels have been leaking. A few more seconds and he would have drowned in his own blood. His blood must have been close to boiling in his, veins.”

  “Will he live?”

  Rosenberg shrugged. “Sure. For a while. We all will, for a while. But if he was at home he’d be hospitalized.”

  “We aren’t at home.”

  “And, Paula—”

  “What?”

  “His brain was starved of oxygen. I don’t even know how long for.”

  That helps, she thought bleakly.

  “What was that fluid, on the inside of his visor?”

  “The clear stuff?” His face was neutral. “Oh, that. I did tell him to keep his eyes shut. His left eye ruptured, and—”

  Benacerraf felt bile pool at the back of her throat. She made it into the waste management area in time to throw up, violently, into the commode.

  She wiped her mouth on a wet-wipe, the antiseptic stinging her tongue.

  In his quarters, Angel was waking up. He was starting to scream.

  BOOK FOUR

  Ground Truth

  A.D. 2014 — A.D. 2015

  Voyager One flew high above the plane of the ecliptic, that invisible sheet in space which contains the orbits of the major planets of the Solar System.

  Voyager was a spindly dragonfly construction, of booms and struts and instrument platforms, and a huge antenna which pointed back at Earth. Built around a compact ten-sided box, it weighed about a ton, and was big enough to fill a small house.

  During its long mission, it had visited both the Solar System’s largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn. The gravitational fields of those worlds had flung Voyager onwards at such a high speed that it had broken the bonds which once tied it to the sun.

  Now, Voyager One was racing across space at a million miles per day, heading for the stars.

  But in the year 2014, an expected command from Earth did not arrive.

  Voyager had been designed to operate during an extended lifetime and at a great distance from Earth, with an hours-long downlink-uplink communications round-trip time. Since contact with the ground would not be continuous, the spacecraft could know if it had lost contact with Earth only if it missed an expected command. So the software embedded in its engineering flight computer contained a command loss subroutine.

  When the command did not arrive on schedule, an internal alarm went off.

  The computer went into an algorithm designed to protect the spacecraft and its mission.

  First Voyager was placed in a stable, passive state. Then, for two weeks, Voyager waited for the ground control to solve whatever problem had arisen on Earth, and to send the spacecraft a new command sequence. The basic design assumption was that the control centers would be sending a stream of commands, frantically trying to get the spacecraft’s attention.

  When no command sequence was received Voyager assumed the fault was with itself. It went through an emergency routine, in a bid to reestablish contact with the Deep Space Network stations.

  The procedure worked in a loop. First the computer tried to figure out whether the craft’s radio antenna was still pointing at Earth. Voyager had sensors to detect the sun, and fixed, bright stars like Canopus; it knew where it was in three-dimensional space. The craft was smart enough to know where Earth should be, relative to the fixed stars, at any moment during the extended mission.

  So the software checked the angles, and the antenna was pointed at Earth.

  Still no commands were detected.

  Voyager’s next assumption was that its radio receiver was dead. So it shutdown its primary radio and turned on its backup receiver. It broadcast telemetry to Earth, indicating what it thought might have happened.

  There was no response from Earth.

  Voyager went back to the beginning of the loop, and began the reacquisition process once more…

  It could not know there was nobody on Earth who was listening, any more, to voices from the sky.

  * * *

  The Space Shuttle orbiter Discovery sailed over the equator of Titan, five hundred miles above rust-brown cloud tops. It was flying with its payload bay facing the clouds, and its instruments, battered by their billion-mile flight, peered down at the hidden surface. The blunt heatshields of two Apollo capsules, facing Titan, glowed in the light of the world they had come so far to challenge.

  Nicola Mott sat in the flight deck commander’s seat, loosely strapped in.

  Titan hung above the flight deck windows, above her head.

  From pole to pole, she could see no differences, no details in the drab burnt-brown clouds, no breaks, no structure. There was perhaps a subtle shading, the south hemisphere a little lighter than the north. But the light was so uncertain that Mott couldn’t be sure. And Titan was dark, darker than the enhanced Voyager and Cassini images had led her to expect, a deep dull brown rather than orange.

  It was almost like the flybys of Venus again, Mott thought. Here was the same perfect sphere, the billiard-ball-smooth sheen of haze and cloud, hiding any glimpse of the ground. But the light of the sun was less than a hundredth its strength at Venus; the clouds of Venus had been dazzling white, almost blinding, like sheets of sunlight. Titan looked almost spectral, sombre, the ochre hue of its clouds drawn from the palette of some obsessive, gloomy painter.

  And Titan was a small world. Its curve was evident, much more so than Earth from low orbit, and its orange-brown belly protruded at Mott, s
haded, obviously three-dimensional. Discovery rolled into another two-hour sunrise. Mott watched the sun lift through the cloud layers. The thin light, occluded by the air, gave her glimpses of structure: onion-skin layers deep in the clouds, perhaps the glimmerings of faint outer shells, beyond the bulk of the atmosphere. And Saturn rise was… remarkable.

  The planet was like a sculpture of glass, two or three feet across, held at arm’s length. Saturn itself was a fat ball of milky yellow crystal, at the heart of a plate of shining rings. The rings — contained well within the orbit of Titan — were tipped up, from Mott’s perspective; they emerged from darkness on the face of the planet, and formed a thin, banded ellipse. Looking along the rings, Mott could see other moons, a string of glowing crescent-beads.

  Under the clouds of Titan the sky would be hidden. It was going to be hell to know that Saturn itself was suspended above the clouds, as motionless as Earth in the black sky of the Moon, and yet forever invisible.

  The hatch opened. Benacerraf and Rosenberg came bustling onto the flight deck, up the tunnel from the orbiter’s mid deck. Through the open access-way to the mid deck — through the airlock and the connecting tunnel to the hab module — Mott could hear the aimless crooning of Bill Angel, blind and alone. His gull-like cries were diminished by distance; sound didn’t carry well in the reduced pressure of the hab module. Mott said, “What do you want?”

  “We have to talk,” Rosenberg said. Benacerraf looked at Mott and shrugged.

  Mott, reluctantly, released her restraints and pulled herself across the cabin.

  Rosenberg said, “We have to discuss Bill. How in hell are we going to get him to the surface?”

  Benacerraf sighed. “Damn your logical mind, Rosenberg.”

  But it’s a non-question, Mott thought. She avoided the eyes of the others; she stared at the dull ochre Titan highlights on the instrument panels. She said, “Logical, maybe, but he’s starting from an assumption.”

  “What assumption?”

  “That we take Bill down at all.”

  There was a long silence.

  The three of them drew closer together — like conspirators, Mott thought, their hair drifting in the sluggish currents of the air. They were gaunt, withered by years of microgravity and a lousy diet and canned air; they must look like three witches, gathered around some spell-book, plotting the fate of another human being.

  Benacerraf said at last, “There is nowhere to leave him. We’re taking Discovery down too, remember.”

  “I know,” Mott said. “That doesn’t alter the suggestion.”

  Rosenberg raised greying eyebrows. “Right. And you’ll be the one who will shove him out the airlock.”

  Mott opened her mouth to reply.

  Benacerraf said, “This isn’t doing us any good. Niki, Bill Angel didn’t ask to finish up as he has. He’s just turned out to be the weakest of us, is all. It could have been any of us. And now, he’s a billion miles from the nearest person who can help him. Save for us. So we take him down.”

  “Anyhow,” Rosenberg said, “you know what Houston says. Maybe being returned to a stable gravity environment will help bring Bill out of this. He’s always going to be disabled, of course. But he was a competent astronaut. Maybe he can still be useful.”

  “And you believe that?” Mott said mildly.

  “Enough,” Benacerraf snapped.

  Mott thought about pushing it.

  After six years, she was sick of Benacerraf’s peevish bossiness. One day, perhaps, she was going to have to challenge the authority that Benacerraf assumed so easily. But now wasn’t the time.

  “Which returns me to my original question,” Rosenberg said. “How do we get him to the surface?”

  Benacerraf frowned. “Each Apollo can hold one, two, three — even all four of us if it has to. Logically, we ought to split evenly between the capsules: two and two.”

  Rosenberg shook his head. “I got to advise against that. We know little enough about this Titan entry as it is, and we’re not sure how the Apollos will behave, after a couple of decades in store and six years of space soak. Anything could happen. Who would want to be alone in a failing Command Module with Bill Angel?”

  “Even if he was sedated?”

  “Even so. Paula, the entry is going to take hours, remember.”

  Mott said, “We could all four of us ride down in the one capsule. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but with a couch installed in the lower equipment bay—”

  “Again, bad idea,” Rosenberg said. “We ought to go down separately. If one Apollo has a bad landing, we only hurt half the crew; the rest are on hand to help.”

  “But,” Benacerraf said, evidently irritated, “that logic leaves us with only one combination. One and three: one person alone, and two of us sandwiching Angel. Hardly an ideal.”

  “Well,” Mott said angrily, “it might not be what we planned. But it’s what we’re left with. We never planned for Siobhan to get herself killed—”

  “Nicola. The one alone. It has to be you.”

  “That hadn’t occurred to Mott. Tell me why,” she said.

  “You’re the nearest thing to a pilot we have left. I could trust you to fly that Apollo down alone, but not myself or Rosenberg.”

  To fly down to the surface of Titan, a new world, alone… She felt an odd mixture of exhilaration and sheer, unadulterated fear.

  It would be the first time the crew had been separated, since the launch day.

  The three of them gathered a little closer, watching each other, as if in awe of how far they had travelled together, of what they were planning now.

  “All right,” Mott said. “I’ll do it.”

  Both Rosenberg and Benacerraf, simultaneously and apparently on impulse, reached out towards her. Physical contact had become a major taboo for them all; but now they held onto each other’s arms, feebly hugging.

  Benacerraf said, “We don’t have anything to fear. We can do this. We’ll be there for you when you land.”

  “Sure,” said Mott. “See you in the mud.”

  Rosenberg tugged at his wispy beard. “We need another name. A call-sign for the base camp, the landing site of the orbiter… You know, in Greek mythology the Titans were a family of giants, the children of Uranus and Gaia, the sky and the Earth. Before the gods, they sought to rule the heavens. You’ll know some of their names: Rhea, Tethys, Iapetus, Hyperion, Phoebe. And others — Cronos, the leader, Rhea, Oceanus, Coeus, Crius, Mnemosyne. Their stronghold was Mount Othrys, a counterpart of Mount Olympus.”

  “Oh,” Benacerraf said. “Hence the Geological Survey name for our friendly ice mountain down there. So what happened to the Titans?”

  “Cronos overthrew Uranus, his father. But then there was a ten-year battle, between the Titans and the gods. Zeus beat out Cronos by bringing in Hundred-armed Giants — the Hecatoncheires — as his allies. Then the Titans were imprisoned, for eternity, in Tartarus. They were locked behind huge bronze doors, and the Hundred-armed Giants were appointed jailers—”

  “Tartarus? Where’s that?”

  Rosenberg pulled a face. “You don’t want to know. A place as far below Hades as Hades is below Heaven.”

  Mott stabbed a finger at Titan. “Then that’s the name for our colony. Where we’re going to have to live out the rest of our lives. Underneath all that orange shit. Tartarus.”

  Nobody disagreed.

  The rusty light of Titan, washing from the hab module’s multiple monitors, made their skin look old, pallid.

  * * *

  Mott lay on her back in the center couch of Apollo Command Module CM-115, now known as Jitterbug.

  She was alone in here. She was wearing her orange pressure suit. Cool air washed over her face, inside her helmet, bringing with it a smell of plastic and metal; all around her the fans and pumps of the Command Module clicked and whirred. It was a mundane, comforting noise, louder than a Shuttle orbiter or the hab module, somehow more obviously mechanical; it was like being inside s
ome huge, elaborate clock.

  She looked ahead, through the small docking windows set in Jitterbug’s nose.

  She was sailing backwards over the orange-brown cloud-sea of Titan. She was in Titan’s shadow, but some light was diffused forward by the thick atmosphere, so that the clouds before Jitterbug were a blanket of rusty oranges and browns, fading into curved darkness far ahead of her.

  And now, in her side windows, the sun rose, a spot of light like a helicopter searchlight, rising up from the blurred haze, the multiple layers of atmosphere she would, today, traverse.

  It was probably the last dawn she would ever witness.

  “Hey there, Jitterbug.”

  It was Benacerraf. Mott flicked the switch on her microphone wire. “I hear you, Bifrost.”

  “I can see you, fat as a goose.”

  She twisted in her couch. And there, framed by the small window to her right, was Bifrost. The familiar cone profile of the second Apollo, illuminated by Titan light, was unmistakable.

  In space, the various upgrades were obvious. No attempt had been made to refurbish the Apollos’ old ablative heatshields. The base of Bifrost, which would take the brunt of the entry heating, was coated by black silica-based tiles, the same material used on the undersurface of the Shuttle orbiters, bonded to an aluminum honeycomb beneath. And the upper conical surface, which would reach much lower temperatures, was coated with white Nomex felt tiles. The black and white finish, punctured by windows and the gaping mouths of reaction control nozzles, gave Bifrost an oddly modern look, Mott thought, compared to the baroque silver hulls of the old Moon-mission designs.

  Strapped to Bifrost’s base there was another novelty. The classic fat silver cylinder of the Apollo Service Module was replaced by a squat tube six feet long — about half the length of the Command Module — with a fat, flaring nozzle. This was a PAM-D-II, a payload assist module. It was a Thiokol solid rocket booster which had been used as an upper stage for launching satellites from Shuttle and Earth-orbit flights. It was strapped to the center of Bifrost’s heat-shield by metal straps, which would be severed by pyrotechnic bolts.