“You’re going to feed him to the water oxidizer.”
“Damn right. Now he’s frozen out there, he will be easier to, uh, dismantle. I’m no wet butcher, Paula.”
“My God,” she said. “Sometimes I think you’re as crazy as he is.”
“Was.”
“Won’t it give you any qualms, to feed off life support loops containing the corpse of a human?”
“Why should it? We’ve been eating each other’s waste products for two billion miles anyhow. Look, if it bothers you, I’ll just pass him through the SCWO and vent the products, discard the residue.”
“The main thing is to get him burned, right?”
“Do you object?”
She pictured Bill Angel coming at her, and shuddered. “It was my fault,” she said slowly. “I handled him wrong, from the beginning.”
“What the hell could you have done?”
“He seemed so competent,” she said.
“This helps us out with our life support equations. But the logic of our situation hasn’t changed, Paula. In fact—”
“What?”
“We had news from home.” He looked at her, searching her face. “They raised the stakes on us again, Paula. It’s even more important we survive.”
She felt chill. Bill had said something… She’d thought he was raving. “What do you mean?”
He smiled. “I ought to fix up that lip of yours,” he said.
“Later, Rosenberg.”
“Sure… You know, there’s always work to be done in the farm.”
The farm. That was what she was supposed to be doing today.
The thought of entering the tight walls of the old Apollo, with the racks of green, growing things under their sunlight lamps, was suddenly powerfully appealing to her.
“Yes,” she said. “The farm.” She sipped the coffee from Earth, trying to make it last.
Rosenberg went to the comms panel, and tried to find a signal from Houston.
BOOK FIVE
Extravehicular Activity
A.D. 2015 — A.D. 2016
In 1990 its controllers had had Voyager One look back and take one last picture sequence before shutting down its camera.
Voyager swivelled its instrument platform and shot a panoramic view of sixty images, encompassing in a single sweep every planet from Neptune, past Jupiter, past Earth, in to the sun. It was already so far from home that it took more than five hours for each pixel, travelling at the speed of light, to reach Earth.
The sun was still striking, a brilliant point object millions of times brighter than the brightest star. But the planets, even the gas giants, were mere points of light.
Even so, had Voyager repeated the experiment now, it would have been able to observe the changes that swept over Earth, in the year 2015.
As the clouds rolled across the face of Earth’s oceans, the planet became a brilliant point source of reflected sunlight, its color lightening from blue to white, a twin of scorched Venus.
Patiently, conserving its attitude fuel, the blocky spacecraft sailed further from the sun, pointing its antenna home, obeying its iterated software instructions, calling steadily to Earth.
* * *
As Titan’s long night drew to a close, Benacerraf and Rosenberg prepared for their expedition to El Dorado, the crater on Cronos, in search of kerogen.
Working in the scuffed-up gumbo around the orbiter, they prepared to load their sleds. The sleds — six feet long, two wide — were improvised from Command Module hull sections, and had a covering of parachute canvas. Right now the sleds were configured to slide across gumbo; later, on Cronos, Rosenberg expected them to face a surface of raw ice, so they were carrying runners made from steel struts.
The equipment pile was dauntingly high.
Benacerraf bent and started to haul gear up onto her sled, the heaviest stuff at the bottom. The bulky items responded oddly in the low gravity; she had to haul to get them moving, but then inertia took over and she had to guide them, rather than lower them, into the right place on her sled. She checked each item off on the ring-bound checklist she had strapped to her wrist.
The first item was the S-band radio they would use to navigate, triangulating off Cassini. Next came a light, high-density power cell, cannibalized from the skimmer, and bottles of oxygen and hydrogen to feed it. Every time they stopped and made camp they would have to recharge the batteries in their EMUs; and the power cells would have to keep them warm during the “nights.” There were spare lith canisters for scrubbing carbon dioxide from their suits’ circulation: precious, irreplaceable. Benacerraf packed a tent, the flimsy hemispherical affair taken from the skimmer.
There were skis, improvised from pieces of Jitterbug’s frame. A length of rope. A small bag of tools. Spare parts for the gadgets that would have to keep them alive, Clancy clamps and silver bell wires. Their snow shovels. A medical kit, assembled by Rosenberg: cream for their hands and Benacerraf’s lips, powder and gel and antiseptic cream for skin afflictions and wounds, plasters for blisters, cuts and rubbed raw patches of skin, drugs and painkillers, Lomotil for diarrhea. They had pethidine and morphine — opium derivatives — and various forceps, scalpels, hypodermics and stitching needles.
The rations were based heavily on what was left of the dehydrated stock they’d brought from Earth. Benacerraf hated to exhaust these final supplies, making them almost totally dependent on the CELSS farm thereafter, but Rosenberg insisted. Their diet; he said, was crucial. He had calculated they would each need five thousand calories per day. He showed her how the diet he planned would be high in fats — nearly sixty percent — whereas their normal diet was more than half carbohydrates.
When the load was assembled, Benacerraf had trouble closing her canvas over the top of it. She had to repack a couple of times, trying to balance the mass of the load and to give it all an even shape.
At last she had it tied up with rope. The sled, bound together, was the size and shape of a coffin. Benacerraf hoped that wasn’t an omen. When she was done, she felt exhausted already: she was hot, her breath pumping, her limbs aching from fighting the suit’s stiffness.
Rosenberg estimated that each of their sleds, on Earth, would weigh more than five hundred pounds: the best part of half a ton. Here, gravity reduced that to seventy pounds.
Five stone, to be hauled across a hundred and twenty miles, in full EVA suits.
She pulled her harness around her torso.
The sled harness was improvised from Apollo seat restraints and Shuttle orbiter foot loops. There was a bandolier set of straps she lifted over her shoulders and chest, and a belt around her waist. There was a buckle at the front of her chest, relatively easy for suited fingers to reach and manipulate, and adjustable straps on the shoulders. The most difficult thing about designing the harnesses had been ensuring they would not foul any of her suit’s essential equipment, like the control panel on her chest, and the umbilicals carrying oxygen and water from her PLSS.
She leaned forward, and let the straps take her weight. She adjusted the shoulder straps until they felt comfortable through the layers of her suit.
She thought it was ominous that her sled didn’t move at all in response to her body weight.
Benacerraf looked back, one last time, at Tartarus Base.
Discovery looked like a DC-10 that had come down in the ice. But her white upper surfaces were uniformly coated with tholin, obscuring what was left of the colorful Stars-and-Stripes and NASA logos. The big windows on the flight deck, streaked by tholin, showed no lights; the interior of the orbiter was black. All the non-essential systems in the orbiter had been shut down, so they could save every last erg from the Topaz reactors while they were away. And that meant almost everything, save the heating and the nutrient, lighting and air supply for the CELSS farm. She played her helmet lamp over the orbiter’s flanks, which glistened with gumbo; it looked as if Titan was drawing Discovery gradually into its icy belly.
She stood besi
de Rosenberg.
“You remember to cancel the newspapers?”
“Yes,” he said gently.
“Let’s get out of here.”
She turned her face resolutely away from the orbiter. Her helmet lamp cast a ghostly ellipse of white light on an anonymous patch of gumbo. The greater darkness beyond, which they must penetrate, was concealed.
She leaned into her traces, with her full body weight. Her snow-shoes pawed at the gumbo. The harness rubbed at her shoulders and hips.
The sled, stuck to the gumbo, wouldn’t move.
She straightened up and looked back. There was a hummock in the gumbo, just in front of her sled, to its right. She was catching on that.
She turned again, and leaned into the harness with her left shoulder. She jerked at the harness, throwing her weight into it, trying to keep her footing in the tholin.
She felt something give. She almost stumbled over.
She looked again. The sled had moved forward, a couple of feet.
Rosenberg whooped. “Way to go, Paula.”
“Sure,” she said. She’d covered two feet, out of a hundred miles.
She leaned into the harness again, and jerked. The sled moved forward, coming free of the sticky gumbo with a slurping noise.
She pawed at the slush, trying to keep a steady rhythm. It got easier once she’d started, as long as she maintained the momentum of the sled. Whenever she stopped, she could feel the sled sink back into the welcoming mud. Still, her movement was jerky and uneven, stop-start.
Soon it felt as if the canvas band around her stomach was crushing her insides against her backbone.
It would be a comfort to think the sleds would get lighter as they proceeded, as the two of them ate up the food. But Rosenberg was insisting that they retrieve every piece of waste they produced — every drop of piss, every dump — and haul it back to feed the hungry CELSS farm. It made sense. But the thought of hauling bags of her own shit for a hundred miles across the surface of Titan did not chime with her romantic dreams of what exploring, an alien planet should be like.
A wind blew up. It came straight in her face, heavy and dense, and the gumbo rippled sluggishly before her. Her suit temperature dropped as a wind chill set in; she could feel the hot diamonds of her heaters trying to restore the balance.
Rosenberg called, “We have to expect a lot of this. That wind is a katabatic. A gravity-fed wind, blowing downhill, out of the heart of Cronos—”
“Shut up, Rosenberg.”
She bent her head and pushed at the gumbo, the harness digging at her shoulders and hips, Rosenberg’s katabatic wind shoving against her chest, driving onwards.
The light level rose slowly. A burnt orange glow seeped uniformly into the sky.
The gumbo glistened before her, like a plain of dried blood, unmarked and without frontier.
It wasn’t like a dawn on Earth.
As the light came up, there was no sense of opening out, of liberation from the confines of the night. The horizon was so close by, just a couple of miles, and obscured anyhow by the murky mist and haze. And the sky overhead, even on a cloudless day, was a lid, complete and orange and seamless. It was like being in a box: orange haze above, purple-black slush below, bound in by a horizon as close as a fence. And as she walked, bringing nothing but more miles of tholin slush into view — no roads, no trees, no gas stations — she became oppressed, trapped by the lifeless murk.
Benacerraf started to develop sharp twinges in her shoulder muscles, and shooting pains in her shoulder blades. And besides, her right foot was beginning to feel cold and raw. Forward motion was only possible with sharp tugs at her load; she could feel the pressure points in her shoulders, waist, knees and feet.
She stopped, trying to work the stiffness out of her shoulders, but confined in her movements by the heavy suit. The pressure of the harness bands on her chest and gut receded, briefly; she could feel bruises gathering, and burns about her hips where the harness was too tight.
She dropped her head, and ploughed forward again, yanking the sled away from the cloying gumbo.
They spoke rarely.
Mostly, she was alone with the rasp of her breathing, the high-frequency whir of the fans in her backpack and the hiss of oxygen across her face.
She tried to dull out her thoughts, not to think about what lay ahead of her and behind her, how every step was taking her further from Discovery. She concentrated, for instance, on the familiar noises of her suit; she tried to imagine she was in space again, in low orbit above the glowing, beautiful Earth, and that the suit was a bubble of warmth and comfort around her.
But the pain broke through that too easily, from her sore foot, her hands, her shoulders.
She tried not to think about the silence on the comms links.
The extinction of mankind.Rosenberg, figuring from what he knew of the parameters of the rock the Chinese had dropped, said there could be little possibility of human survival. It was the K-T boundary event over again, he said.
What proportion of “mankind” could she have met during her life? A few thousand? And how many did she care about?
Three people, she thought. Just three. And now she couldn’t even find out if they were dead or alive.
Way to go, Paula.
Later, she got angry.
She got mad at her balky sled, every time it stuck in some particularly viscous patch of gumbo and dragged her backwards, yanking at all her sore points. She got mad at the dull Titan weather, at the winds that chilled her but failed to freeze the gumbo to a useful surface.
She got mad at Rosenberg. That wasn’t hard.
She could sink inside herself and pick over some aspect of Rosenberg — the things he said, the body stink when he opened up his suit — and chew on it inside her head for hours, she found, building up the irritation to a near-hatred. Even those CELSS farm baby carrots, too bitter for her to eat, which he religiously devoured, insisting they were good for oxygen deficiency.
She could plod like this, steadily hating Rosenberg, and then, when she looked at her astronaut’s Rolex, she’d find — if she was lucky — that maybe an hour had passed, bringing her that much closer to the moment she could stop.
After a time, though, even the anger didn’t work. There was too little stimulation for her mind, in the dull landscape of gumbo and haze; she was turned inward, her thoughts stale and repetitive, churning and festering, with no external distraction to relieve her.
Sometimes she wanted to howl, to raise her face to the orange sky and just scream like a frustrated ape. But she knew she couldn’t. If she did, it would let out the beast at last, the Bill Angel craziness she suspected lay deep within her. She would lose her ability to manage this, once and for all.
So she plodded on, muttering. Stick it. Stick it. Stick it. Until the urge to howl dissipated, and the blackness receded a little.
After five hours, they had completed six miles. Benacerraf was exhausted, the little water spigots in her helmet running dry, the air circulating in her suit stale.
Rosenberg pulled alongside her. He ran a gloved finger over her bandolier. “Look at this,” he said, and he lifted up a harness joint with a fingertip. The stitching was torn, and Benacerraf’s harness was twisted. “This joint is double-stitched, but these couch harnesses were never designed for the kind of stresses we’re subjecting them to now. I guess you didn’t notice. You’ve been dragging the sled with the harness out of alignment. Your torso must have been twisted. No wonder your shoulders hurt.”
“Rosenberg, I’m done. Let’s get the tent up.”
“We haven’t completed the schedule, Paula. Another three or four miles and—”
“I know about the schedule. I don’t care about the damn schedule, Rosenberg. I’m telling you I need a break.”
“It’s just that right now we’re in as good a position as we’re going to be. We’re still full of food, and our core body temperatures are high, and we’ve had plenty of reasonably natura
l sleep back in the hab module. Later, it’s going to be harder to—”
“Help me raise the fucking tent, Rosenberg, or you’re going to get a sled runner up your ass.” She pulled the parachute fabric off her sled.
Still complaining, he helped her haul out the tent.
The skimmer tent was a ball eight feet across. The airtight skin was reinforced with parachute canvas, to give it additional strength. Rosenberg roughly inflated it with a feed from oxygen and nitrogen tanks. They anchored it to the gumbo with ropes and wide, flat, anchor-like spikes, driven deep into the slush. The tent sat on the slushy surface of Titan like a sad beachball, its muddy yellow surface drab and uninspiring, fat air and power lines snaking into it from the tanks in Rosenberg’s sled.
Now the two of them worked with the snow shovels to cover the tent over with a thick layer of slush. This ought to retain some of their heat. It was slow work; the slush at first just slithered off the canvas, and it took long, hard minutes of labor before the tent was covered over.
Rosenberg led the way into the tent, crawling through the crude airlock. Benacerraf followed. In her bulky suit, she kept colliding with Rosenberg’s limbs and helmet; she felt like some bug crawling around inside a cocoon.
Rosenberg hooked up a low-watt light and an electric heater. “Wait a few minutes until we warm up.”
The elements of the heater started to glow crimson red, a sharp color very unlike Titan’s dull orange. She sat close to the heater, watching the elements grow brighter, seeing their multiple reflections from the layered visors of her helmet. It was, she thought, heat brought to this ice moon from the remote center of the Solar System.
Rosenberg spent the time fiddling with the spare PLSS. This backpack — intended for Nicola Mott — had been rigged with a powerful vacuum pump and blower. They would use it to keep the tent air circulating through its lith hydroxide carbon dioxide scrubbers. If either of their packs failed during the march, this spare would serve as a backup.
Titan n-2 Page 56
