Titan n-2

by Stephen Baxter

  She tried to think it through. “So the crater you found can’t have been caused by a cometary-ice impact.”

  “It’s possible, but unlikely.”

  It was typical of Rosenberg to play the cautious scientist when he was asking her to make a decision that would put all their lives on the line.

  “But it could be something else,” she said doggedly. “A stony or iron meteorite.”

  “Yes, that’s possible. But the flux rates for objects like that, out here so far from the sun, are small,” he said. “Much smaller than at Earth. Really, Paula, a carbonaceous chondrite is the best explanation. And the crater I’ve found is the most likely chondrite crater for a few hundred miles. Paula, we’re lucky to have found something so close.”

  She sighed. “So we have to go there.”

  “You know it. Paula, you’ve seen the figures. We just aren’t able to achieve closure of the life support loops, particularly of the amino acids and some of the trace elements — sulphur, potassium, chlorine.

  Even Titan itself can’t supply everything. So we have to look for manna from heaven, in the crater of a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. “We need that kerogen.” He smiled, his thin face dreamy. “Before it fell out of the sky, the meteorite must have drifted around for five billion years, a fragment of the original circumsolar nebula. Food, cooked up in the interior of the first generation of stars…” This kind of stuff was what worried her. This was Rosenberg’s personal escape hatch, his way of retreating from the dull horrors of their life on Titan. Her worry was, what if there were other options for survival which he wasn’t considering, because he was caught up with the idea of digging out the celestial stuff of life from some crater on Cronos?

  “A hundred and twenty miles, across the surface of Titan. My God, Rosenberg. Do you really think it’s feasible? The longest surface EVAs in NASA history were the last Moonwalks. Seven or eight hours outside the Lunar Module; a traverse of a few miles, every minute timelined, in those damn Lunar Rovers. All controlled from the ground, and all of it within a walk-back limit of the LM. Now, we’re going to have to figure out how to survive independently of Discovery for two weeks or more.”

  He shrugged. “It will take some preparation. But I think it’s possible, Paula. We’ll need the sleds, of course, with food and water and stuff, and some kind of surface shelter. But remember we should be able to haul along a lot of mass, in the low gravity—”

  “Rosenberg, we haven’t reached a crisis yet. Maybe we should wait.”

  He looked confused. “What good would waiting do? We don’t have any smarter options. It’s better to attempt this now. While we’re still reasonably healthy. Before the equipment starts to wear out. Before the life support loops start failing.”

  “You’ve worked this out, haven’t you, Rosenberg?”

  “Paula, I really don’t think we have a choice,” he said seriously.

  He started talking about more expeditions they could mount later. For instance to the crater of an iron meteorite. Maybe they could find some way to refine the metal, and…

  She listened with weary patience. He was off in his dream-world of technology and science and achievement, that realm where all his schemes came to magical life, and where Tartarus became the hub of a spreading, glittering complex of science and technology.

  None of it had anything to do with the real problem they faced about this EVA, she thought. Which was what to do with Bill Angel.

  “El Dorado,” he was saying now. “That’s what we’ll call the crater.”

  “Whatever you say, Rosenberg.”

  In the chaos, it wasn’t difficult for Barbara Fahy to get out of the complex. She rode a steel elevator to the surface, and emerged into the early hours of a spring morning in Washington DC.

  She checked her watch. It was nearly 6:00 a.m.; the briefings had gone on all night.

  The streets were all but empty: there were a couple of street cleaners, a girl in a short skirt and inert image-tattoos making her way home, maybe from some club, one or two tense-looking office workers in suits, strutting anxiously towards their workplaces. The traffic lights were working, but randomly, it seemed to her.

  She wondered where the President was this morning. Nowhere near here.

  She walked.

  She reached the Tidal Basin, and walked among the cherry trees near the Jefferson Memorial, around the reflecting pool walkway. The canopy of white blossoms filtered the morning light, so that it was like the glow of a skylight, shadowless, diffuse, warming.

  She passed a small colony of homeless, huddled under paper and cardboard against the softscreen-coated wall of a bank. The softscreen shed flickers of light over clothes that had been reduced by rain and sunlight to shapeless, colorless pulp. But this morning there was no pattern to the softscreen’s display, just formless grey static.

  Maybe, she thought, she should warn someone. But what was the point? Let them enjoy the morning. Let them sleep, if they could.

  Maclachlan had said he’d sweep the homeless from the streets. At the end of two terms — and as Maclachlan aimed to change the Constitution to allow him to run for a third — there were more of them than ever. And malnutrition in the Bronx, and cholera in Georgia…

  But, she thought, all these problems would soon be swept away, more rapidly and effectively than even Xavier Maclachlan, in his wildest dreams, could have planned.

  She felt she’d lived through an immense paradox. After that steel cavern, she could understand why people felt that science was a terrible thing. Maybe even an evil thing. But the fact was that one nuke, in the right place at the right time, could have deflected this incoming, the Chinese rock. There was the paradox. What do we do when the dinosaur-killer comes? Accept it as inevitable? Throw philosophy books at it?

  But in the end it was science and technology which had delivered the evil on their heads. The paradox deepened.

  She just hoped there would be people around to debate this tomorrow.

  According to the projections prepared by her staff, everything depended on the geometry of the impact.

  A hell of a lot of kinetic energy would be released downwards, into the crust, and upwards, into the atmosphere, first as a vapor plume and then as an airblast. If there was an ocean strike there would be earthquakes: Richter eight or nine. A lot of dust and salt water would be injected into the middle atmosphere; nobody cared to guess what that would do to the weather. And they were going to get global oscillations of the atmosphere and ionosphere. Upper atmosphere heating, high intensity atmospheric disturbances. Hydrogen-mixing would wreck the ozone layer, for good and all. A lot of nitrogen would be burned, into nitrogen dioxide, nitric acid. Acid rain. And the high-speed plasma plumes from the shock, reaching up to the geomagnetic field, were going to play hell with the radiation belts…

  Funny weather. Storms. Auroras. Lousy communications. Stunning sunsets, from all that dust. The skies would be spectacular.

  Even if the impact itself wasn’t too severe, secondary effects could do a lot of damage. Nuclear waste repositories. Hydroelectric power stations and dams. Chemical plants. Nuclear power stations. She imagined a dozen Chernobyls, scattered along the eastern seaboard…

  Still, it was possible humanity — even civilization — could survive the impact itself and its consequences. But then, everything would depend on the war that would surely follow, when the Chinese came over in their clumsy ships, and Al Hartle and his boys emerged from their bunkers in Cheyenne, and they started the work of finishing off whatever the asteroid left behind. Even given enough survivors, she thought bleakly, it might be impossible to climb back. The post-impact world would not be a blank slate for a new civilization, now that they’d used up ail the most accessible raw materials — ore, coal, oil. And besides the biosphere was already unstable. This might trigger the final plankton collapse, for instance…

  It seemed incredible, here in the morning sunshine, on a day like all the other days, stretching back to her
first bright memories. But today could be the last day of all. Maybe, she thought, in a couple of centuries, all that will be left of us will be a few relics on the Moon, whatever Paula builds on Titan, a handful of ageing space probes heading out of the System.

  She reached the Lincoln Memorial. She climbed the steps, and stared up at Lincoln’s impassive face.

  She sat on the step at the top of the Memorial. She was looking east, in the direction of the Atlantic. The sun was well above the horizon now, the sky a clear blue dome. Traffic was beginning to seep into the brightening streets, and its distant noise rose to an oceanic roar, suffusing the landscape.

  Sitting here, with the warmth of the sun on her face, the solidity of marble beneath her, she tried to comprehend that by the end of this nondescript day, all this — the labor of centuries — could be lost.

  She was hungry, she found.

  Benacerraf lay cocooned in her sleeping bag, on an improvised mattress of insulation material and space clothing.

  Every time she woke, she had two priorities: to keep warm, and not to open her mouth.

  There were several layers of hull metal and insulation — the base of the hab module and the orbiter’s cargo bay — lying between her and the hundred-and-eighty-below slush of Titan. Even so, the miles of ice below her sucked the heat out of her ageing body during the night. She woke up in exactly the same position as when she’d fallen asleep, as if she’d trained herself not to move in her sleep, no matter how stiff she got. She’d found that if she lay still, on the patch of her sleeping bag that her body had warmed up, she could stay relatively comfortable. But if she moved, she would tip over onto a colder place, and the warm air she had gathered around herself would spill out, leaving her shivering.

  So she lay, hanging on to the last fragments of the night’s warmth, before she had to face the day. She opened her eyes slowly.

  Her reading light was turned off, but enough light leaked around the door to let her make out the lines of the little room: the aluminum mirror on the wall, the lashed-up shelf with her softscreen and her precious paper books, the toothbrush with the broken handle she’d had to tape together…

  The realization of where she was pushed its way into her consciousness with all its usual, unwelcome force, and she felt black dread welling inside her.

  She sat up. The sleeping bag fell away from her shoulders, and immediately she was shivering, despite the thick Beta-cloth clothing she wore as pajamas.

  Still in the dark, she got to her feet. The sleeping bag made a cloth puddle at her feet. She could see her face, dimly, in the scuffed aluminum mirror. She saw an old woman, her face lined and patched with shallow frostbite scars, her hair a dirty cloud, crudely cut, her mouth a bloody mess.

  She opened up her tube of lip salve. She smeared it over the lumpy, scabs on her lips. Then she started to work the tip of her tongue gently against the lips, from the inside, until, slowly, they began to part, with little damage to the scabs that had welded together during the night.

  Her lips had got damaged during an EVA, when her helmet seal had sprung a leak. She knew she had been lucky; she’d been just a few feet from the airlock. The cold, crowding into her helmet, had been intense. Startled, she had almost fallen, and her lips and chin had come into contact with the cooling glass of her visor. She had pulled her face back, leaving chunks of ripped flesh behind, and a violent burning sensation around her mouth.

  She had clamped her eyes shut, and fumbled for Discovery’s airlock.

  She got through with no serious frostbite damage. But her lips were a mess. Now, every time she ate, she got a salty mouthful of blood; and every spoonful of soup she lifted to her mouth was streaked with crimson. A couple of times, just after the injury, she’d opened her mouth during the night, or on waking, and had torn the night’s new lip scabs right off.

  Cautiously, she stretched her mouth a little wider. The clustered scabs ached, and she could see how some of the deeper crevices had-opened again, so that they glistened bright red.

  She thought ahead. She was due to spend most of today in the CELSS farm, cleaning out the nutrient pipes. And later she would have to find some time to work with Rosenberg on the details of the El Dorado EVA—

  The door behind her opened quietly.

  She turned, startled, and nearly fell; she banged her elbow against the shelf.

  There was a figure in the doorway, silhouetted against the brightness of the hab module floods.

  Anger welled up in her. This was her quarters, damn it, her one little island of privacy. “Rosenberg, I don’t care what the emergency is. Get out of here.”

  “No,” he said; and that single, gruff syllable told her everything she needed to know.

  It wasn’t Rosenberg. It was Bill Angel.

  And, she realized with sudden horror, today his long decline was going to reach some kind of conclusion.

  As the sun climbed and the mist burned off, the colors of Launch Complex 39 emerged more clearly. The snow-white of the toy Saturn was strongly contrasted with the battleship grey of the gantry which enfolded it.

  After losing his NASA position to Al Hartle, Hadamard had entered semi-retirement. He couldn’t have gotten another position in Maclachlan’s Administration anyhow, and nor would he have wanted it. He had received a large payoff — that had been written into his contract when he was recruited from industry — and so he was financially comfortable. He had kept on his house in Clear Lake, but he hadn’t spent much time in Houston.

  He had no living family, no particular ties. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life.

  To Hadamard, looking back, his years at NASA had represented a kind of slow crisis for him, like a long breakdown.

  He had gone into NASA to dismantle the Agency, much as he had dismantled and reassembled several corporations and Government departments before. By the time he emerged, he had spent years trying to defend it.

  He toured the country, visiting relics of the space program: the rusting tracking station at Goldstone, the mothballed Shuttle launch facilities at Vandenburg, the old Saturn construction and test facilities around the country, abandoned or converted by Boeing and Rockwell. He gained a sense of the impermanence of it all; it was as if some insane occupying power had swept across the country, developed these immense facilities at enormous cost, and then abandoned their foothold.

  Jake Hadamard, after years running NASA, still didn’t understand the meaning of the space program, nor even his own shifting reaction to it.

  Perhaps there was no single meaning, no single valid reaction; perhaps the event was simply too huge for that. But he’d come to suspect that it was only for space — human footprints on the Moon, and on a satellite of Saturn — that his nation would, in the longest of terms, be remembered.

  Or even, he thought, his species.

  When he’d heard leaked reports of the incoming rock, he’d decided there was only one place he wanted to be.

  …There was a spark of light, high in the sky.

  Hadamard shielded his eyes with his hands and looked up, searching for the source. It had been hot, yellow, liquid, like rocket light.

  It came in at an angle, far to the east, a blindingly white line scrawled across the sky. It was a crack in the Aristotelian dome, Fahy thought, allowing in the monsters.

  Asteroid 2002OA had arrived.

  She had to turn away, it was so bright.

  It was going to be an ocean strike, then. Just as NORAD predicted. A few hundred miles off the coast, she guessed.

  The dazzling light had faded now.

  So it was true. She thought she’d imagined, with some soft unscientific part of her, until this moment, that it might be just some fantastic hypothesis.

  Well, Earth hadn’t suffered a strike like this for millions of years. Human written culture went back maybe five thousand years. There was no institutional memory of such an event as this. No wonder it was hard to comprehend, even to plan for. It should be.
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  Clouds were boiling, scudding across the sky. The spectacle was playing out in an eerie silence. Even the traffic noises seemed to have stilled.

  The atmosphere would have provided no effective shield against the strike; the asteroid must have reached the ocean with no significant loss of mass or velocity: a mountainous mass of rock, moving at orbital speeds, through the delicate atmosphere of Earth. There was essentially an immense cylindrical explosion going on right now, its effects scouring outwards over the surface of the planet.

  From orbit, she thought, it would be a hell of a sight: the crater still visible, a glowing red puncture miles across, keeping the sea at bay with its raw heat; an immense column of dust and pulverized rock and vapor rising up above it, its lip extending tens of miles into the atmosphere; the clouds bubbling outwards in ranks, like the concentric rings around a bull’s eye target.

  A breeze, warm and heavy, pushed against her face, pressing from the east. There were flecks of moisture on the wind. She licked her lips. Salt: ocean water, scooped up and hurled across hundreds of miles.

  Maybe there would be tsunamis. But the geometry was dicey; it depended precisely where the impact was, the topography of the ocean bed. Gradual slopes could reflect the wave energy back to the Atlantic…

  There was noise now, at last, a deep bass rumble like remote thunder. The light continued to fade.

  The ground shifted, the solid marble of the Memorial’s vast plinth shuddering like a live thing.

  For the first time, she was scared. The ground wasn’t supposed to move under you, damn it. It was as if some deep superstitious part of her had woken, an animal peering up at a violent sky in terror.

  With her back against the wall of her quarters — the little room wasn’t much bigger than a closet — Benacerraf held up her hands, palms out. “What is it, Bill? What do you need? Are you hungry?”

  With sudden, brutal force, he pushed his way into the quarters. She squirmed back against the wall, but his chest and legs pressed against hers, and she could smell the milky sweetness of his breath.