Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  There was a snap, somewhere in the wall high above her.

  Murky air billowed into the cabin, above her face. There was a stink, of swamps and marshes and…

  And methane. Titan air. And, mixed in with it, the sharp tang of nitrogen tetroxide, oxidizer from the RCS.

  She couldn’t believe it; she sat staring as the orange mush billowed down towards her. Following some antique command, the cabin pressure relief valve had opened. The valve was a two-inch nozzle designed to let in warm Pacific air, for returning Moon voyagers. It was not supposed to open on the way down to Titan.

  It was the failure she had been waiting for. This had to be some consequence of her failing to follow the correct automation sequence earlier. Another untested logic path. But why the hell hadn’t that damn valve simply been welded shut?

  It was a multiple failure. Multiple failures always got you, in the end.

  And while she lay here and thought about it, she had sucked in a lungful of freezing, toxic Titan air…

  She closed her mouth and eyes and pulled her faceplate down. It snapped into place, and she felt a cool blue blast of oxygen on her face. She breathed out, trying to empty her lungs. But that, she realized, was only going to start the methane and nitrogen tet circulating in her life support.

  The stink of swamp gas was overwhelming. And the nitrogen tet seemed to be burning at her lungs and eyes; she could barely see.

  She considered trying to find some way to close that relief valve. But now she could barely see the instrument panel.

  Anyhow, maybe it was better for the oxygen in the cabin to be overwhelmed by Titan air. If that methane caught a spark, Jitterbug would explode.

  She was coughing, her throat and lungs aching.

  The descent was nearly over, anyhow.

  The cold air of Titan wrapped over her limbs. She found herself shivering already. When she got to the ground, she’d have to move quickly to get to the heated EVA suit. She rehearsed the moves she would make. Stand up, as best she could, and reach under the couch for the big net bag there; haul out the suit…

  Jitterbug crashed into the tholin slush.

  The fall was no more severe than if Jitterbug had been dropped on Earth from five or six feet. But to Mott it felt like a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout her bruised body.

  …And now the Command Module tipped to the right. She could feel the roll, see the orange-black landscape wheel past the windows. Perhaps the paraglider hadn’t come loose, and was dragging Jitterbug over. Or perhaps she had landed on some kind of slope, a crater wall maybe, and was rolling.

  Orange-brown mud splashed across the glass of the windows to her right, and turned them dark. Mott found herself hanging there in her straps, with cabin trash raining down around her: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. The Stable 2 position, she thought. Upside down. One whole side of Jitterbug must be buried in the icy slush of Titan.

  For a moment there was stillness, a cramped creaking as the hull cooled.

  Then a window to her right cracked in two. Orange-black slush forced its way into the cabin, flowing, viscous.

  Mott, suspended, began coughing again.

  She was stuck in her seat. She couldn’t move. She was going to freeze. Help was two hours away, or a billion miles, depending on how you looked at it.

  When the Titan slush lapped against her legs, she could feel the cold of it seep into her bones.

  No footprints and flags for me, after all. But I got here. I got to touch Titan.

  The slush was rising. It would reach her head in a few seconds. She tried not to struggle.

  So quickly, it was over.

  Heat and cold, she thought; fire and ice. That’s what separates Siobhan and me: fire and ice, at the extremities of the Solar System.

  The slush forced its way through her faceplate, driving shards of plexiglass before it.

  * * *

  After its muddy splashdown, Command Module CM-115 settled deeper into the icy slush of Titan, its aluminum hull creaking as it cooled.

  A wall-mounted camera peered at Benacerraf, as she lay in her couch, making history. She felt flat, deflated, battered by the events of the entry, the loss of contact with Nicola.

  But she had her role to play.

  She said, “Houston, Bifrost. Tartarus Base here. We have landed.”

  “Amen to that.” said Rosenberg.

  Without enthusiasm, she imagined how their words would be collected by Cassini and hurled across eighty light minutes, dispersing and growing fainter, to whoever on Earth was left to listen…

  She turned her head. Every neck muscle ached; her head felt like a sack of water, ungainly and heavy, strapped to the top of her spine.

  Rosenberg was sitting in the left-hand couch, Benacerraf the right. Angel was sandwiched between them in the center couch, his bony body swathed in its bubble of orange pressure suit, pressed up against Benacerraf. He was apparently at peace, Benacerraf thought, his sedated madness contained for now within the orange high-technology bubble of his suit.

  The window to her right was already frosted, the condensation from their breath and sweat frozen against the glass. She could see little of the landscape, in the murky twilight beyond. Even after just a few minutes on the surface, the tholin drizzle had coated the windows of Bifrost with a thin, purple-brown, organic scum; it streaked down the window like leaking oil.

  The contrast with the warm, brightly-lit, mundane interior of the Apollo was marked; to leave here, she thought, would be like stepping out of your mom’s kitchen into a stormy night.

  But Rosenberg seemed to feel differently. Elated.

  “We’re here,” Rosenberg said. “My God.”

  “Yes. We’re here. But do you really think anybody gives a damn any more?”

  “I do,” he said, his tone defiant. “I do. We achieved what we set out to achieve. This is Apollo 11, all over again.” He turned to face her; there was a smile on his face, framed by his open visor. “This is history, Paula. There’s a new world out there. You’ll be the first: the first since Armstrong—”

  “No,” she snapped. “Nicola was the first, whatever has happened to Jitterbug. Don’t you ever forget that.”

  Rosenberg turned away, and for a moment there was silence, broken only by the hum of the Command Module’s systems.

  She released her restraints.

  The Apollo Command Module wasn’t designed to land anywhere but Earth. So, it didn’t have an airlock. When Benacerraf opened the hatch, all the Earth-like air inside the cabin was going to be lost, to be replaced by Titan’s methane-laced nitrogen. So all three of them, Angel included, would have to be in their EMUs — their extravehicular mobility units, their surface suits.

  Therefore, by remorseless logic, Benacerraf and Rosenberg were going to have to strip and dress Angel.

  Benacerraf got hold of the frame of her couch and pushed herself upright. The Command Module was so small her head was almost brushing the instrument panel above her.

  There was a dull ringing in her ears. The colors leached from the instrument panel, and everything turned a dull golden-brown.

  “Oh,” she said. “Oh, wow.”

  Rosenberg was sitting up too, his face grey. “Just take it easy, Paula. Sit for a while. Let your body figure out which way is up.”

  “This one-seventh gravity is a killer, huh.”

  She could feel her heart laboring to pump blood up this unaccustomed gravity gradient. And this, she thought dismally, was with the assistance of the G-suit that was still compressing the slack blood vessels of her legs.

  Slowly — after maybe ten minutes — the ringing subsided, and the colors returned. Her heart was still hammering, though.

  Benacerraf knelt on her couch. With Rosenberg’s help she reached over Angel, and hauled him off his couch and onto her own. His space-attenuated body weighed an effective thirty or forty pounds, she estimated. But even so it took real effort, by both of them, to wres
tle him around the cluttered little cabin.

  When Angel was transferred, she released latches and folded up his center couch, and stowed it away in the lower equipment bay, the roomier space beneath the couches. Now she was able to stand. With Rosenberg beside her, she began to work on the inert Angel.

  She twisted off Angel’s helmet and gloves. She detached the umbilical tubes which connected his suit to the cabin’s life support supplies, and pulled off his boots. Then, with Rosenberg, she hauled the heavy, elasticated pressure garment off Angel’s limp, unresponsive limbs.

  Underneath, Angel was already wearing his basic thermal underwear, with his Heating Garment over the top and a G-suit — inflatable rubber trousers — over that. Benacerraf began to strip off the G-suit.

  Next she had to fit Angel’s urine collector, a huge, unlikely condom.

  She took a deep breath. She reached down and pushed her hand inside Angel’s underwear. His groin was warm and faintly damp, she found, disgusted. She pulled Angel’s penis out of his underwear.

  Rosenberg laughed. “Where no man has gone before.”

  “Shut up, Rosenberg.”

  As she tried to push the condom over Angel’s penis, he started to move. He was grinding his hips. She looked into his face. His ruined eyes were closed, of course, but there was a grin stretching his lips; a thin sheen of saliva glistened on his lower lip.

  He was getting an erection; his grinding was pushing the penis against the palm of her hand.

  She snatched her hands away. “Shit,” she said.

  Rosenberg laughed again. “Hot mike, commander.”

  “Fuck you, Rosenberg. Bill? Bill, can you hear me?”

  Angel crooned wordlessly, rocking his head to left and right.

  Rosenberg pressed an infuser to Angel’s neck. Angel subsided, almost immediately. “Old bastard,” Rosenberg said without malice. “The only bit of him that still works is his libido.”

  “And how,” Benacerraf said, “are we going to get rid of that?”

  At Angel’s groin, the erection sprouted like a miniature flagpole, the veins thick.

  Rosenberg grinned. “I always thought Bill was all hat and no horse.”

  “It’s not funny, Rosenberg.”

  “Don’t worry.” He reached down to a storage compartment and pulled out a stainless steel spoon. He pressed its bowl against the frosty glass of the window behind him, and tapped the tip of Angel’s glans with the chilled bowl.

  Angel grunted and stirred.

  The penis sagged immediately, like a deflated balloon.

  “A nurse’s trick I picked up during my med training,” Rosenberg said. “Never thought I’d have to use it. And now I’m going to mark this damn spoon, to make sure I never eat with it.”

  Grimacing, Benacerraf reached down once more and tucked Angel’s penis briskly into the condom.

  With Rosenberg’s help, she lifted Angel into his Beta-cloth outer garment. The sleeves and neck were terminated with steel rings that would snap onto Angel’s EVA gloves and helmet. Now she fitted a tube over his condom attachment; there was a bag sewn into the outer garment to store a couple of pints of urine. Angel was already wearing a kind of diaper — an absorbent undergarment — that would soak up any bowel movement he couldn’t defer.

  Benacerraf hoped like hell he would defer. Wiping Angel’s ass for him was one chore she hadn’t yet had to endure, one aspect of Angel’s descent into hell where he’d managed, so far, to hang onto a little dignity.

  Benacerraf hauled Angel’s PLSS — his Personal Life Support System, his backpack — up from storage lockers under the couches. The pack was a big, massive box coated in Beta-cloth. Here it weighed just twenty pounds, but she could feel the mass of the pack, its Newton’s-laws inertia undiminished; she had to handle it carefully to avoid battering the control panels. Rosenberg leaned Angel forward, and Benacerraf lifted the backpack over him and strapped it in place round him. The packs were adapted Shuttle technology, with lightweight batteries for power, air and water circulation pumps and fans, and lithium hydroxide canisters for scrubbing out carbon dioxide. Not much more advanced than the packs which had sustained men on the Moon. The suits would support EVAs of seven or eight hours, if they were lucky.

  Next came the fitting of Angel’s umbilicals, hoses for air and water for the heating system. Rosenberg and Benacerraf worked across Angel’s chest, locking each hose into place, double-checking each other’s progress. “Locks checked, blue locks. Locks checked, red locks. Purge locks, double-locked…”

  The surface of Titan represented a new challenge for EVA suit designers.

  All previous EVAs — in Earth orbit, or on the Moon — had been in a vacuum. And the main challenge had been to surround the astronaut with an atmospheric pressure which, if not equivalent to Earth’s, was at least sufficient to sustain life. So the astronauts wore pressure garments, bubbles inflated with oxygen.

  On Titan, it was different. On Titan, the air was thick — thicker, in fact, than on Earth. The air wasn’t breathable, and the astronauts still needed an Earth-equivalent air supply. But there was no need for pressurization against vacuum; the suits in that respect were a little more like deep-diving suits.

  There was another novelty.

  In the vacuum of space, the problem was keeping the astronaut’s body cool. Solar heat could be reflected by white overgarments, and sufficient heat of the astronaut’s own body could be retained by insulating layers; the trick was to wrap the body in a cooling garment — tubes of water to carry body heat away, and then radiate it into the vacuum.

  Here on Titan, there was no vacuum. In the thick air conduction I and convection would work rapidly to carry away heat. The main problem on Titan, in fact, was the deadly cold. If that frigid slush or the thick, sluggish air above it came into anything close to direct contact with an astronaut’s flesh, life heat would be sucked away with frightening speed.

  To combat the cold, the Titan suit was built on a Heating Garment — a sexless, skintight piece of clothing laced with wires and water pipes. The wires would heat the flesh, and the air which ran over it. It was like wearing an electric blanket. And the water in the tubes had high heat capacity; it would form a heat-retaining shell around the body. And over the heating suit the astronauts would wear layers of soft, insulating clothing.

  The final outer garment was crude — much more primitive than the pressure suit — just layers of white Beta-cloth, fiberglass filaments coated with Teflon, with heat-retentive insulating material between, the chest unit studded with umbilical connectors and controls.

  She fixed on Angel’s Snoopy hat, his flight helmet with its radio earphones and microphone, and over the top of that Rosenberg lifted Angel’s hard helmet with its visor, and twisted it into place against the seal at the neck. The last pieces of the suit were the gloves; these were close-fitting, and snapped onto rings at Angel’s wrist.

  Now Rosenberg flicked a switch on Angel’s chest panel. Benacerraf could hear the soft, familiar hum of the pumps and fans in Angel’s backpack, the whoosh of the oxygen-nitrogen mix inside his helmet.

  Rosenberg and Benacerraf worked through suit checks. There was a panel on the front of Angel’s chest which gave a digital readout of oxygen and carbon dioxide and pressure levels, and various malfunction warning lights. She could see Angel’s oxygen pressure level stabilizing.

  Rosenberg nodded, satisfied.

  Benacerraf sat back on the cabin’s right hand couch and peered into Angel’s helmet. Once again, they had got Bill sealed away, locked into his own self-contained world, as if within a private spacecraft, his degeneration concealed by the gleaming white Beta-cloth layers.

  Benacerraf and Rosenberg got into their own suits.

  A half-hour later, when they were done, they studied each other. Their names were stitched on the chests of the shining white suits, and the NASA logo and the Stars-and-Stripes were proudly emblazoned on their sleeves; they wore bright blue overboots, blue gloves. In the b
ulky suits, hardly able to move in the cramped cabin, they looked faintly ludicrous, like three snowmen, Benacerraf thought.

  Rosenberg checked his suit display, and the status of the Command Module from a control panel.

  “For the record,” he said, “We have a go for vent.”

  “Affirmative,” Benacerraf said. “We’re all sealed up. Go for vent.”

  “All right.” Rosenberg closed a switch on the wall.

  Vents in the base and apex of the Command Module opened up. There was a harsh hiss.

  There was a muddy brown swirl around Benacerraf’s feet. The thick air of Titan was forcing its way into the lower-pressure cabin of Bifrost. She watched the little dials on the instrument panel, yellow and green and red, bright primary Earth colors. The smog of Titan dimmed them, washing the dials over in an orange-brown murk.

  “Okay,” Rosenberg said. “Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalize with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch…”

  His voice is becoming stilted, Benacerraf thought. He’s speaking for the camera. For the history books.

  The hiss died away.

  Rosenberg checked his gauges. “That’s it,” he said. “One and a half bars; pressure has equalized. You should be able to open the hatch now, Paula.”

  Her heart thumping, suddenly conscious of the camera on her, Benacerraf turned.

  Apollo’s hatch was a rectangle, two feet high and three wide, behind the center couch of the cabin. There was a window in the middle of it, already stained with tholin smears.

  Benacerraf pulled at the hatch’s single handle. She could hear the twelve locking latches click open. The hatch swung outward, easily.

  The open doorway framed a rectangle of mud-brown ground, laced by some darker substance. The Command Module seemed to have sunk into the slush, almost to the depth of the door frame.

  She looked back at Rosenberg, who was standing between the two couches, watching her. Angel still seemed to be unconscious, sprawled like a flaccid white balloon on the right-hand couch.