Titan

by Bova, Ben

  Eberly hesitated a heartbeat. “Why is she here? Does she intend to stay, or will she return to Earth?”

  Shrugging, Holly replied, “She says she came here to spend the holidays with me. As for how long she’ll stay, you’ll have to ask her.”

  “I was hoping that you could ask her,” said Eberly. “My one meeting with your sister wasn’t all that friendly.” He rubbed his jaw again.

  Holly suppressed a giggle, just barely. “Okay, sure. I click. I’ll ask her, no prob.”

  “Good,” Eberly said. “Thank you, Holly.”

  “No prob,” she repeated, as she got up and left his office.

  Briefly, Eberly thought of calling Aaronson back to soothe his ruffled feathers. Then he decided against it. He’ll be calling me for every little piece of equipment that goes out of whack, Eberly said to himself. Fixing machinery is his job, not mine.

  On the other side of the village called Athens, Nadia Wunderly sat in her laboratory and stared disconsolately at the video imagery hovering before her eyes. It was as if the lab’s far wall had disappeared, to be replaced by the black depths of space—and the glittering splendor of Saturn’s rings.

  She saw again that wandering chunk of ice-covered rock that had blundered into Saturn’s gravity well. A fugitive from the Kuiper Belt, she told herself for the thousandth time; a Trans-Neptunian Object that got kicked out of its orbit all the way out there and fell into Saturn’s grip.

  In the speeded-up video the icy rock dived past Saturn once, twice, and then looped around the planet to fall into an orbit within the rings.

  “Extreme slo-mo,” Wunderly called to the lab’s computer.

  The new arrival’s motion slowed to something like taffy being pulled on a cold day. Wunderly saw the rock plow into the B ring, the broadest and brightest of Saturn’s intricate complex of rings.

  To be greeted by a flurry of ring creatures. Like glittering snowflakes they swarmed over the new arrival and began chewing it apart. Of course, Wunderly admitted silently, it looks like a blizzard engulfing the newcomer. It’s a big leap to say that those particles are alive, or have living creatures in them, directing them, steering them to the new ice chunk like a pack of scavengers swarming around a fresh carcass.

  The top biologists back on Earth flatly refused to believe that the ring particles contained living creatures. Too cold for active biology, they claimed. What do they know? Wunderly grumbled to herself. So it’s near absolute zero in the rings; so what? Those Earthworms can sit in their campus offices and claim I haven’t proven they’re alive. Well, I’m going to. I’ve got to. My career depends on it.

  That can’t be a natural, abiological reaction, she told herself as she watched the swarming ice particles eat through the new moonlet. It can’t be just natural abrasion. Those particles actively moved to the intruder and chewed it down to the bare rock. She backed up the video and watched it all happen again, in ultra-slow motion.

  “Damn!” she said aloud. “Why don’t they believe me?”

  She knew why. Sagan’s dictum: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. She was claiming that there were living creatures in the ice particles of Saturn’s rings, and that they actively maintained the rings, kept them big and dynamic, despite the fact that particles were constantly bleeding off the inner edges of the rings and were pulled down into Saturn’s clouds in a perpetual snowfall.

  Wunderly was convinced that if the rings weren’t being constantly added to by the deliberate actions of living creatures, they would have disappeared eons ago. Hell, she said to herself, Jupiter’s bigger than Saturn and its ring system is just a puny sliver of carbon particles. Soot. Same thing for Uranus and Neptune. Saturn’s rings are huge, beautiful, so bright that Galileo saw them with his dinky little telescope nearly five centuries ago.

  But the big-shot biologists back Earthside won’t believe me until I can give them enough proof to choke a hippopotamus. And the only real evidence I’ve got is these views of the ring dynamics, and Gaeta’s dive through the rings. They won’t believe a stuntman’s testimony, even though the creatures almost killed Manny while he was in the rings.

  My career hangs on this, she thought. My whole life. I’ve made an extraordinary claim. I need to get enough evidence to prove it’s true. Otherwise I’ll be finished as a scientist.

  I need to send probes into the rings, Wunderly told herself. I need to study them close up, in real time. I need some biologists here, and some way to capture a sampling of the ring creatures. Otherwise nobody who matters will believe me.

  She consoled herself by remembering Clarke’s First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

  By elderly Clarke meant over thirty, for a physicist. That means I’ll be elderly in another year, Wunderly realized. With a weary sigh she told the computer to shut down the display. I’ve got to get help. I’ve got to get enough evidence to prove that I’m right and they’re wrong. But Urbain’s so warped over his precious Titan Alpha lander that he won’t even talk to me.

  Wunderly sat alone in her silent laboratory, a chubby young woman with hair dyed brick red, wearing a shapeless knee-length tunic of sky-blue faux silk, wondering how she could get her superior’s attention long enough to get the help she so desperately needed.

  Then she sat up straighter and smiled. Manny Gaeta! He went into the rings once. Maybe he’ll do it again—not as a stunt this time, but as a scientific expedition.

  27 DECEMBER 2095: AFTERNOON

  The computations of time that humans use meant nothing on the cloud-shrouded shore of the frozen sea. Titan Alpha sat where it had landed, unmoving, uncommunicative. But not inert.

  Its sensors were making measurements. Outside temperature-181 degrees Celsius. Atmospheric pressure 1,734 millibars. Atmospheric composition: nitrogen, methane, ethane, minor hydrocarbons and nitrogen compounds. Tactile pads in its treads reported on the tensile strength of the spongy ground. Infrared cameras swept across the landscape, recording the black snow that was sifting down from the dirty-orange clouds slithering sluggishly across the sky.

  Titan Alpha’s internal logic circuits concluded that the broad expanse of dark and flat material down at the base of the bluffs must be an ice-crusted liquid of some sort. Microwave radar detected waves surging sluggishly beneath the crust, making it heave and crack. A sea. Priorities built into the central computer’s master program demanded that the sea’s composition be investigated. Titan Alpha fired a microsecond burst of ten megajoules from the laser mounted in the swivel turret on its roof. The mass spectrometer identified a host of chemical compounds in the ice evaporated by the laser: water ice mostly, but lots of methane and other hydrocarbons as well.

  The command protocol built into the communications system called for transmitting these data through the main uplink antenna. But a subroutine in the computer’s master program prevented this. No communications outside. Store the data but do not communicate. Wait. Observe and wait.

  “It’s what we call engineer’s hell,” said one of the engineers who had helped to design and build Titan Alpha. “Everything checks but nothing works.”

  Urbain sat at the head of the conference table, outwardly calm and under control. Only the slight tic beneath his right eye betrayed the tension within him.

  His eight lead engineers sat around the oval conference table. One of the conference room’s smart walls displayed schematics of Titan Alpha’s various systems: propulsion, electrical power, sensors, communications and more. Urbain had not invited his scientists to this meeting; the problem with Titan Alpha was one of engineering. Something had malfunctioned and it was up to his engineering staff to determine what had gone wrong and to fix it. Besides, the scientists would swamp the meeting with bright ideas they hatched on the spur of the moment and drive everyone to distraction.

  He was surprised and annoyed, then, when
the young woman who was supposed to be monitoring the satellite hovering over Titan Alpha’s landing site burst into the conference room.

  “It fired the laser!” she fairly shouted without preamble or even asking pardon for interrupting the meeting. “Squirted off a shot into the Lazy H Sea.”

  Urbain jumped to his feet. “Are you certain?”

  “Got it on vid,” she said excitedly.

  Without bothering to adjourn the meeting, Urbain raced for the door and down the corridor toward the control center, followed by all eight of the engineers.

  The control center was much quieter than two days earlier. Wexler and the other VIPs were preparing to leave Goddard and head back to Earth. Urbain desperately wanted to have some results from Titan Alpha before they left.

  The young scientist slipped into the chair of her console and clapped her headset on. She spoke briefly into the pin-sized microphone at her lips and her display screen lit up.

  Urbain had placed an observation satellite in synchronous orbit above the site of the landing, a feat that was not as easy as he’d first thought it would be. Synchronous orbit for a body revolving as slowly as Titan was hundreds of thousands of kilometers above the moon’s surface. And although the satellite included a two-kilometer-long tether system that was designed to generate electrical power for its internal systems and maintain itself in proper position, unexpected bursts of electromagnetic energy from Saturn had incapacitated the tether, making it necessary to use positioning thrusters to keep the satellite in place. Constantly perturbed by the gravitational pulls of mammoth Saturn and its rings, the satellite devoured station-keeping fuel ravenously to maintain itself in its proper position; Urbain had already been forced to schedule a refueling mission.

  Standing behind the seated woman, he bent over her shoulder and stared at the display screen: nothing more than a mottled sphere of dull orange. “Where is the infrared view?” he demanded impatiently.

  The young woman held up a finger as she muttered into her mike. The sphere on the screen abruptly changed. The clouds disappeared and Urbain could see the bright glints of Titan’s rolling, hilly ground and the dark shapes of its seas. One looked like the head of a dragon, another somewhat like a child’s drawing of a dog. Then there was the H-shaped one, where Titan Alpha had landed.

  “Magnification,” he snapped.

  The view zoomed in. The H shape of the methane sea was oriented east-west, rather than standing up as the letter is made in actual writing. Nearly a century earlier the Americans, with their usual cowboy attitude, had dubbed it the Lazy H Sea.

  “That’s the best magnification we can get,” said the scientist.

  Urbain could not see his lander. We need satellites in lower orbits, he told himself. An entire fleet of them so that Titan Alpha is under constant surveillance.

  “So?” he insisted. “Where is this laser flash?”

  “I’m running it back—there! Didja see it? I’ll run it forward again.”

  Urbain saw the briefest of glints on the edge of the methane sea. He straightened up, disappointed. “It might have been a sparkle in the electronics. A bad pixel.”

  The young woman shook her head stubbornly. “No, I checked its duration and it’s consistent with a laser pulse. Just a small squirt, no more than ten kilojoules. Ran the light through a spectral analysis, too, and it’s water and methane and the other carbon gunk from the sea.”

  Urbain stared down at her. “Titan Alpha actually fired its laser?”

  “Yes, sir, it surely did.”

  One of the engineers said, “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, Dr. Urbain. We’re still getting telemetry from the lander. It’s sending up continuous data on its internal condition. Everything’s working fine.”

  “But it will not uplink data from its sensors.”

  “That’s the one glitch,” the engineer admitted.

  Urbain glared at him. “This glitch, as you put it, makes Titan Alpha useless, pointless, stupid.”

  Returning his glare without blinking, the engineer insisted, “I think it’s the central computer. Some kind of error in the programming. Everything is fine in the lander except for the data uplink. For some reason it’s not sending data back to us. The sensors seem to be working as designed, but the vehicle isn’t uplinking the data it’s collecting. It’s got to be a computer glitch.”

  “In other words,” Urbain said coldly, “you are telling me that the patient is in fine condition, except that she is catatonic.”

  27 DECEMBER 2095: EVENING

  Kris Cardenas could see the tremendous strain that Urbain was under. As the only Nobel laureate in the habitat, she had invited Dr. Wexler, Pancho, Urbain and his wife to a small farewell dinner at Nemo’s restaurant, the swankiest eatery aboard Goddard.

  Nemo’s was decorated to look like the mock-Victorian interior of Jules Verne’s fictional Nautilus: Brass bulkheads and thick pipes running overhead. Display screens shaped like portholes showed teeming schools of fish, slithering octopuses, sleek deadly sharks.

  Manny Gaeta looked uncomfortable in a maroon turtleneck shirt and ivory cardigan jacket, as close as he would come to formal dinner wear. Cardenas wore a flowered short-skirted frock, Wexler a dark blue finger-length tunic over a midcalf skirt. Pancho was in a comfortable pantsuit of hunter green, while Jeanmarie Urbain had decked herself in a clinging black sheath decorated with intricate embroidery that showed her trim figure to excellent advantage.

  “I had hoped that this would be a celebration,” Cardenas said, trying to make her tone light, cheerful, “with champagne and congratulations. I guess that will have to wait for a while.”

  Urbain opened his mouth to respond, then simply shook his head and reached for the glass of fruit juice in front of him.

  “The celebration will come,” said Wexler, forcing a smile. “It’s too bad I won’t be here when the probe finally starts sending up data.”

  “You leave tomorrow?” asked Jeanmarie. “So soon?”

  “Ms. Lane’s craft departs tomorrow and there won’t be another ship out here for many months,” Wexler replied.

  “I could hold it here for a coupla more days,” Pancho said. “But the bean counters back at Astro Corporation’s headquarters would get twitchy.”

  “Tell ’em to twitch,” Gaeta gruffed.

  Pancho grinned at him. “If I was still CEO I could and I would. With me retired, though, they’re doin’ me a favor as it is.”

  “I couldn’t stay a few more days in any event,” said Wexler, glancing at Urbain and then swiftly back to Pancho. “I’ve got work piling up back home.”

  “You think you’ll be able to fix the glitch in a few days?” Pancho asked Urbain.

  He forced a sickly smile. “Perhaps.”

  “It should take not much longer than that,” Jeanmarie said, quite firmly. “After all, they know the machine is working. Its internal systems are functioning. The only problem is the communications link, is it not?”

  Urbain nodded morosely.

  A human waiter came to the table hesitantly, holding large leather-covered menus. Cardenas nodded to him. Better to have them reading the menu and ordering their dinners than moping over the probe’s silence, she thought.

  Although she was the oldest person at the table, Kris Cardenas looked like a vibrant outdoorsy woman in her thirties, thanks to the nanomachines that coursed through her body like a purposeful, almost intelligent immune system that destroyed invading microbes, cleared blood vessels of plaque, repaired damaged tissues. She had the broad shoulders and bright blonde hair of a California surfer, and cornflower blue eyes that sparkled in the candlelight of the dinner table. Exiled from Earth because of the nanos inside her, she had lost her husband, her children, had never touched the faces of her grandchildren. She had spent years in bitter hatred of the know-nothings on Earth who had totally banned nanotechnology, then more years of repentance as a medic for the rock rats of the Asteroid Belt at Ceres.

  Now sh
e was beginning a new life aboard this habitat orbiting Saturn, with handsome, hunky Manuel Gaeta, who had retired from his career as a stuntman to be with her.

  As their appetizers were being placed on the table before them, Gaeta asked Urbain, “Do you have any idea why the beast won’t talk to you?”

  Urbain, sitting across the table from Gaeta, raised his brows as he tried to interpret the man’s question. Finally he frowned slightly and said, “We are working on several possibilities. It is very puzzling.”

  Wexler laid a clawlike hand on Urbain’s sleeve. “It’s always very puzzling, Eduoard, until you get the answer. Then you wonder why it puzzled you for so long.”

  “I’m sure Eduoard will come up with the correct answer in a day or so,” said Jeanmarie.

  Her husband scowled at her.

  “You remember the first time we met?” Gaeta asked him. “In Professor Wilmot’s office?”

  Urbain nodded warily.

  A crooked grin broke out on Gaeta’s rugged face. “I wanted to go down to the surface of Titan. Be the first human being to set foot on the place. I thought you’d have a stroke!”

  Smiling weakly, Urbain said, “We cannot have humans on Titan. The contamination …” He let his voice fade away.

  “I agree,” said Wexler sharply. “There are unique life-forms down there. It would be criminal to contaminate them with terrestrial organisms.”

  Gaeta raised his hands in a mock surrender. “Hey, I’m retired. I got no interest in doing stunts anymore.”

  But Pancho arched a brow. “Y’know, maybe what your lander needs is a repairman. Or woman.”

  “You volunteering?” Gaeta kidded her.

  “I was an astronaut, ’way back when. I’ve fixed more’n one balky robot in orbit. I remember once, before Moonbase became the nation of Selene …”

  Pancho regaled the table for the next hour and more with tales of her exploits on the Moon.