Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  Bart cleaned him up, dressed him, and fed him with some tasteless pap. Then he dumped him in a chair in the day room. Bart stomped off, still muttering about the business with the catheter.

  Asshole, White thought.

  The day room was a long, thin hall, like a corridor. Nothing but a row of old people. Every one of them had his own tiny softscreen, squawking away at him. Or her. It was hard to tell. Every so often a little robot nurse would come by, a real R2-D2 type of thing, and it would give you a coffee. If you hadn’t moved for a while, it would check your pulse with a little metal claw.

  The softscreens were still basically TVs but you had to set them with voice commands, and he never could get the hang of that; he’d asked for a remote, but they didn’t make them any more. So he just had his set tuned to the news channels, all day.

  Sometimes there was news about the program, if you knew where to look. Which he generally didn’t.

  He’d heard they were doing more EVAs on Titan, which was a hell of a thing, but he hadn’t seen a single damn picture about that. Of course it was different back then. When the Eagle set down, he’d watched the walk itself at Joan Aldrin’s house at Nassau Bay. When Buzz first came on screen she kicked her feet and blew kisses at the screen. Those creaky old pictures, like some kind of silent movie. And then he’d gone on to one hell of a Moonwalk party with some of the guys…

  But there wasn’t even anybody up in LEO nowadays, except a couple of Red Chinese, maybe.

  He couldn’t find anything about Titan. He folded up the screen in disgust.

  He tried to read. You could still get paper books, as opposed to softscreen, although it cost you. But by the time he’d gotten to the bottom of the page he would forget what was at the top; and he’d doze off, and drop the damn thing. Then the fucking R2-D2 would roll over to see if he was dead.

  The door behind him was open, letting in dense, smoggy air. Nobody was watching him. Nobody but old people, anyhow.

  He got out of his chair. Not so hard, if you watched your balance. He leaned on his frame and set off towards the door.

  The day room depressed him. It was like an airport departure lounge. And there was only one way out of it.

  Unless you counted the happy booth. A demographic adjustment, Maclachlan called it.

  Maclachlan was an asshole. But White couldn’t really blame them, Bart and the rest. Just too many old bastards like me, too few of them to look out for us, no decent jobs for them to do.

  Outside the light was flat and hard. He squinted up, the sweat already starting to run into his eyes. Not a shred of ozone up there. The home stood in the middle of a vacant lot. There was a freeway in the middle distance, a river of metal he could just about make out. Maybe he could hitch a ride into town, find a bar, sink a few cold ones. But he had the catheter. Well, he’d pull it out in the john; he’d done that before.

  He worked his way across the uneven ground. He had to lean so far forward he was almost falling, just to keep going ahead. Like before. You’d had to keep tipped forward, leaning on your toes, to balance the mass of the PLSS. And, just like now, you were never allowed to take the damn thing off for a breather.

  The lot seemed immense. There were rocks and boulders scattered about. Maybe it had once been a garden, but nothing grew here now. Actually the whole of the Midwest was dried out like this.

  At least this was still the United States of America, though. At least he was still an American. Things could be worse. At least he hadn’t become a fucking New Columbian.

  He reached the freeway. There was no fence, no sidewalk, nowhere to cross. He raised an arm, but he couldn’t keep it up for long. The cars roared by, small sleek things, at a huge speed: a hundred fifty, two hundred maybe. And they were close together, just inches apart. Goddamn smart cars that could drive themselves. He couldn’t even see if there were people in them.

  He wondered if anyone still drove Corvettes.

  Now there was somebody walking towards him, along the side of the road. He couldn’t see who it was.

  The muscles in his hands were starting to tremble, with the effort of gripping the frame. Your hands always got tired first, in microgravity…

  There were two of them. They wore broad-rimmed white hats against the sun. “You old bastard.” It was Bart, and that other one who was worse than Bart. They grabbed his arms and just held him up like a doll. Bart got hold of the walker, and, incredibly strong, lifted it up with one hand. “I’ve had it with you!” Bart shouted.

  There was a pressure at his neck, something cold and hard.

  The light strengthened, and washed out the detail, the rocky ground, the blurred sun.

  He was in a big room, white walled, surgically sterile. He was sitting up in a chair. Christ, some guy was shaving his chest.

  Then he figured it. Oh, hell, it was all right. It was just a suit tech. He was in the MSOB. He was being instrumented. The suit tech plastered his chest with four silver chloride electrodes. “This won’t hurt a bit, you old bastard.” He had the condom over his dick already. And he had on his fecal containment bag, the big diaper. The suit tech was saying something. “Just so you don’t piss yourself on me one last time.”

  He lifted up his arm. He didn’t recognize it. It was thin and coated with blue tubes, like veins.

  It must be the pressure garment, a network of hoses and rings and valves and pulleys that coated your body. Yeah, the pressure garment; he could feel its resistance when he tried to move.

  There was a sharp stab of pain at his chest. Some other electrode, probably. It didn’t bother him.

  He couldn’t see so well now; there was a kind of glassiness around him. That was the polycarbonate of his big fishbowl helmet. They must have locked him in already.

  The suit tech bent down in front of him and peered into his helmet. “Hey.”

  “It’s okay. I know I got to wait.”

  “What? Listen. It was just on the softscreen. The other one’s just died. What was his name? How about that. You made the news, one more time.”

  “It’s the oxygen.”

  “Huh?”

  “One hundred percent. I got to sit for a half hour while the console gets the nitrogen out of my blood.”

  The suit tech shook his head. “You’ve finally lost it, haven’t you, you old bastard? You’re the last one. You weren’t the first up there, but you sure as hell are the last. How about that.” But there was an odd flicker in the suit tech’s face. Like doubt. Or, wistfulness.

  He didn’t think anything about it. Hell, it was a big day for everybody, here in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.

  “A towel.”

  “What?”

  “Will you put a towel over my helmet? I figure I might as well take a nap.”

  The suit tech laughed. “Oh, sure. A towel.”

  He went off, and came back with a white cloth, which he draped over his head. He was immersed in a washed-out white light. “Here you go.” He could hear the suit tech walk away, laughing.

  In a few minutes, it would start. With the others, carrying his oxygen unit, he’d walk along the hallways out of the MSOB, and there would be Geena, holding little Bobby up to him. He’d be able to hold their hands, touch their faces, but he wouldn’t feel anything so well through the thick gloves. And then the transfer van would take him out to Merritt Island, where the Saturn would be waiting for him, gleaming white and wreathed in cryogenic vapor: waiting to take him back up to the lunar beach, and his father.

  All that soon. For now, he was locked in the suit, with nothing but the hiss of his air. It was kind of comforting.

  He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Paula Benacerraf and Bill Angel, two human beings from Earth, were climbing the highest mountain on a moon of Saturn. They were seeking water ice, to supplement their life support systems.

  Toiling up the slope in their bulky white suits, and with their sleds sliding across the gumbo, they must look, Benacerraf though
t, like two grubs hauling chunks of cast-off exoskeleton over the skin of some huge animal.

  Benacerraf’s suit felt hot, and chafed at her groin and armpits, and she could feel blisters forming across the soles of her feet. Every step she took in the snowshoes, going up the gumbo slope, she had to angle her feet and dig in to get traction sufficient to haul the mass of the sled another few feet. Her visor was misted up from her breath, and she could feel her heart hammering.

  She paused for breath. She leaned into the sled harness — it was adapted from an Apollo couch restraint — and she rested her gloved hands against her legs. Her helmet lamp splashed light over the glistening slope before her.

  As he slogged ahead of her up the gumbo slope, dragging his sled, Bill Angel sang some kind of marching song to himself. Just a couple of phrases of it, over and over. It was easy for him to find his way, sight or no sight; he was just following the line of maximum slope. He was already maybe twenty yards ahead of her, and his form was dimming a little in the murky air, although his stained white suit still showed up brightly against the black layer of methane clouds that hid the mountain’s summit, and the splash of light of his helmet lamp — she made him wear it as a beacon — was clearly visible.

  He was as encumbered by his sled as she was by hers. The sleds were just cone-section panels of Apollo Command Module hull, so big they would be impossible to pull under Earth gravity, even empty as they were right now. But this wasn’t Earth. And Angel just marched on, dwarfed by his sled, his legs shoving at the gumbo like pistons.

  Rosenberg called from Tartarus, via S-band, his signal bouncing off Cassini.

  Clumsily, Benacerraf flicked a switch on her chest panel. Rosenberg had rigged up two separate S-band frequencies: one open to the three of them, and the other available to Rosenberg and Benacerraf alone.

  On the private band, Rosenberg said: “How’s it going up there?”

  She lifted up her arm; there was a reflective panel there that let her read her chest panel. She had rigged up her panel so she could cycle it between the status of her own suit and Angel’s. “He seems to be doing okay. Heartbeat a little high, maybe…” She switched back into Angel’s voice loop for a second. “Still, he goes on with the damn singing. Over and over.”

  “Singing I can forgive. Check your marker.”

  She looked back down the slope. It was vertiginous — under Titan’s weak gravity, this ice mountain had a gradient of maybe one in four for most of this ascent — and they were already a couple of thousand feet above the reference level where Discovery sat. The mountain was a flat cone, thrusting out of the landscape. It was maybe nine miles across, two high. An ice mountain as steep as this would have been impossible on Earth because of the higher gravity; the pressure at its base would have melted the ice, and the form would subside, leaving hillocks only a fraction as high. From here, the base of the mountain was hard to see, washed out by the eternal murky haze. She could barely see the last marker she’d planted; it was just a ghostly vertical line of white metal against the dark-stained tholin slush.

  From the pile in her sled she dug out another marker — an aluminum strut from Apollo — and rammed it into the gumbo.

  When she turned, Angel was almost invisible, still ploughing upwards.

  “Bill, don’t get too far ahead.”

  His singing cut off as if she had turned a switch. He stopped moving; he straightened up and turned, as if looking down towards her.

  She took a slug of stale recycled water from the nipple in her helmet, and leaned into the harness once more.

  When they were side by side, maybe thirty yards apart, Angel started to toil upwards alongside her. Singing.

  “Where did you learn the song, Bill? The Air Force?”

  Again, that switch-like cut-off. “Nope,” he said.

  “Then where?”

  “My father. Dad would take me walking in the hills. I’d scramble along behind him, over scree and bare rock…” Angel laughed. “That old bastard would walk me until my feet bled into my sneakers.”

  Benacerraf frowned. “It sounds kind of hard.”

  He tilted towards her, and, through his visor, she could dimly make out his sunken eye sockets. “You’re not some Freudian, are you, Paula? Did my dad’s cruelty make me what I am? Was his ghost there to push me aboard Endeavour that last time? Is it his fault I went crazy half-way to Saturn?”

  Benacerraf felt out of her depth. Was he really being so self-reflective…? or was even this remark just another thread in the tapestry of his irrationality?

  She said, “What do I know? All I said was it seems tough, to drag some little kid over the kind of terrain you’re talking about.”

  “Maybe. But I learned a hell of a lot.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how to endure. You see, you got to have some kind of mantra, to get you through experiences like this, Paula. Crap that just goes on and on. You can sing, you can fantasize about sex, you can talk to yourself. Anything, to take your mind off what you got ahead of you, the pain in your feet and legs.”

  “It sounds like auto-hypnosis.”

  “Maybe it is. Mind-travelling, my dad called it. Seventy percent of any climb is mental. If you’re going to get through a slog like this, you got to fight the demons inside. Maybe you should take a leaf.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Within a couple of minutes, Angel had resumed his singing.

  She considered switching off his loop. But if she did that, she couldn’t tell if he was in difficulty. She compromised. She turned down the gain, so Angel’s voice was reduced to a kind of bass insect-whisper.

  Soon her shoulders, back, feet and crotch were aching again, and her body was telling her it wanted to stop, now.

  Maybe I ought to try it, she thought, Papa Angel’s patent balm for the soul.

  Always a little further, pilgrim, I will go. Always a little further…

  Oddly, it seemed to work. Her thoughts started to diffuse, and she entered a kind of orange, mindless tunnel, of pain and effort and tholin slush that stretched on, up the hillside above her.

  Always a little further.

  After a time, the going underfoot seemed to be getting a little easier. She didn’t sink quite so far into the gumbo, and it wasn’t so sticky when she tried to lift up her snowshoed feet.

  Then, at last, she felt a scrape of some more resilient surface under her aluminum snowshoes.

  She stopped, and leaned into her harness. She tipped up her foot and dug at the gumbo with the lip of her snowshoe. There was some pale grey substance, like fine gravel, mixed in with the purple-brown gumbo.

  “Hey, Bill,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think I found ice.”

  He laughed. “I been crunching over some shit for a hundred yards or more.”

  She looked up, tipping to balance the mass of her pack.

  The slope pitched up before her as steeply as ever. But now she could see that the purple-brown gumbo layer had been washed away, exposing grey-white streaks beneath. And when she leaned back to look further up the slope, she saw the surface turned into an almost pure white, streaked here and there with tholin rivulets. The white continued all the way up through the orange air, until it disappeared into the lid of grey-black methane cloud which hid the summit of Mount Othrys.

  “How about that. Rosenberg, I think we did it.”

  “You found bedrock?”

  “Water ice.”

  “How high are you?”

  Benacerraf was carrying an altimeter, cannibalized from one of the Apollos; she wore it on a chain that dangled from her backpack. She reached around clumsily, and pulled the altimeter up before her face.

  “A shade over three thousand feet,” she said.

  “Good,” Rosenberg said.

  “Good?”

  “Sure. You’re well above the limit altitude of the rain. It only rains on the summits, never on the plains. It’s just what I would have exp
ected…”

  “Theory later, Rosenberg,” Benacerraf said.

  “It’s just nice when you figure something, and it works out. Makes the Universe seem a little less scary.”

  She let herself out of her harness, and made sure her sled wasn’t going to slide back on down the gumbo. Then she walked forward, until the gumbo beneath her feet had thinned out, and she was stepping on bare ice. She kicked off her snowshoes, and left them at the edge of the gumbo.

  The ice surface wasn’t hard; it crunched beneath her booted feet, the noise sharp in the thick air.

  She looked around. “The edge of the gumbo is quite sharp,” she reported to Rosenberg. “I guess we could feel it thinning out for a few hundred yards. But it’s clearly keyed to the altitude and its edge is a definite line. Like a tree line.”

  “A gumbo line,” Angel said.

  “The surface isn’t solid, here. It’s some kind of regolith. The ground here is very fine-grained. Almost powdery, not like ice at all. I can kick it up loosely with my toe, and it is sticking in fine layers to my boots.”

  “Is it supporting your weight?”

  “Yes, But I sink into the surface a little, maybe a half-inch, before it compacts It’s a little like walking on even snow.”

  “Snow it ain’t,” Rosenberg said. “We’re two hundred degrees below the freezing point of water here… What you’re walking on is impact-gardened regolith. Ancient ice, smashed to pieces by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts, over billions of years. Like Moon dust, pulverized to a depth of inches or feet.”

  “But this isn’t the Moon,” Benacerraf said. “Wouldn’t that thick atmosphere shield out the bolides?”

  “Yes. But some, the big ones, will still get through. And remember that Titan isn’t particularly geologically active; that ice has probably lain there exposed almost since Titan first accreted, four billion years ago.”

  “That’s time for a lot of gardening,” Angel said. “Hey, double-dome. We could go skiing up here.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Rosenberg replied drily.