Titan

by Bova, Ben

  Now I have to wait until they get my message and think about it, Gaeta said to himself. Screw that. I’m not sitting here with my thumbs up my butt. I’m gonna fix this problem.

  “Computer, uplinking data would not harm the life-forms in the ground.”

  Yes it would.

  “how?”

  Silence.

  Fuming, Gaeta rephrased his question: “How would uplinking data damage the life-forms in the ground?”

  Additional probes would be sent here. Each new probe increases the risk of contamination.

  “But that’s a risk we have to take. We can’t learn about the life-forms if we don’t send probes to study them.”

  Contamination must be prevented

  “Contamination must be avoided, if possible.”

  Contamination must be prevented by all available means.

  “We can’t study the life-forms without some risk of contamination.”

  Humans are carriers of contamination. They must not be allowed to study the life-forms.

  Christ, Gaeta thought, he sounds like Urbain. Why not? Urbain directed the computer’s programming.

  “Look, pal, the reason you exist is to study the life-forms and to report what you find to the humans who built you.”

  Logic tree: I uplink sensor data to humans. They will want more data. They will send more probes. Inevitably, they will send humans. Probes are possible sources of contamination. Humans are certain sources of contamination.

  Geez, he’s got it all figured out. How can I shake him out of this programming lock?

  “Hey, computer: I’m a human, and I’m not contaminating the life-forms.”

  For several seconds the computer did not reply. Gaeta thought he had exceeded its ability to understand. But then:

  HUMANS ARE CARRIERS OF CONTAMINATION.

  The ten-megajoule laser mounted at the rear of Alpha’s roof rose from its recessed niche and began to swivel toward Gaeta.

  28 MAY 2096: TURMOIL

  Timoshenko drifted slowly out of the airlock, floating like a leaf on a pond. Turning, he saw the immense curving bulk of the habitat, a huge metal structure created by human minds, human hands.

  A place of exile, he said to himself. All that thought, all that care, all that genius went into building a fancy prison for people like me.

  Rising above the habitat’s tubular shape as it turned slowly on its long axis, Saturn’s glowing radiance filled his eyes with light. The planet’s hovering rings gleamed with dazzling light like a field of glittering jewels, circles within circles of sparkling ice.

  More than a billion kilometers from home, Timoshenko thought. They sent us here to make certain we could never get back home again. They exiled us among the stars, tied us to an alien world, a constant reminder of how far away from Earth we’ll always be.

  Earth. Katrina. What good is living if I can’t be home, with her?

  With gloved hands he felt along his waist for the remote control unit he’d brought. With one press of his thumb, he could shut down the superconducting wires that produced the habitat’s magnetic shield against Saturn’s deadly radiation. One press of my thumb, he thought, as he clutched the remote in his hand, and within an hour the people inside will begin to die.

  They could restart the superconductors, he told himself. But that will take hours. By the time they realize what is happening to them it’ll be too late. They’ll all die. Including that lying bastard Eberly. Him most of all. He’s the one I want dead.

  And me? I’ll go drifting out to the stars. I might be the first human being to reach Alpha Centauri. He laughed bitterly at the thought.

  Timoshenko held the remote in his right hand and lifted it to the level of his helmet visor so he could see it. One touch of my thumb and they all die.

  Then his tether reached its limit and tugged at him unexpectedly.

  HUMANS ARE CARRIERS OF CONTAMINATION.

  Gaeta saw the laser turn toward him. His brain raced: the laser puts out a ten-megajoule pulse; how much energy is that? Can it puncture my suit?

  Clumsily he began to crawl toward the laser. If I get close enough to it I can get under it, where it can’t hit me. Or I’ll rip the sonofabitch out of its mounting and throw it overboard.

  “The laser!” Habib shouted in his earphones.

  “How much energy can it put out?” Gaeta asked, scrabbling across Alpha’s roof.

  No answer. And he was suddenly brought up short. The wire connecting him to the central computer’s access port had stretched to its limit. Gaeta fumbled with the communications unit at the waist of his suit to free himself from the wire.

  Something slammed into his shoulder. It was like being hit by a bullet. Still on his hands and knees, Gaeta was rocked back onto his haunches, then instinctively rolled and dropped flat onto his stomach. Wildly he checked the life-support displays. Nothing. All the lights were in the green.

  “I’m pulling up the specs on the laser,” Habib’s voice came through. “Ten megajoule pulses, ten per second. That works out to a bit more than two kilograms of TNT in explosive power.”

  “Christ! Like a hand grenade!”

  Again that damned communications lag. Gaeta thought furiously: The suit’s armored, it’s been hit by ice chunks in the rings and taken tumbles snowboarding down Mt. Olympus. But a fucking hand grenade?

  He felt a thump on his back and suddenly half his life-support telltales flashed into the red. Gesoo! The damned fucker hit my backpack! Gaeta disconnected the wire connecting him with the computer access port and began to crawl as fast as he could toward the laser’s slim mounting.

  “I’ll rip that son of a bitch out by its roots!” Gaeta’s shout came through the speaker of Habib’s console.

  “No!” Habib snapped reflexively. “Don’t damage the laser if you can avoid it.”

  One of von Helmholtz’s technicians pushed through the crowd gathered around Habib’s console, his face drawn, sweaty. Grabbing Fritz’s slim shoulder, he said, “Life support’s gone critical.”

  Jumping to his feet, von Helmholtz said, “We’ve got to get him out of there!”

  Habib turned back to his console. “How do we shut down that laser?” he shouted.

  “We can’t!” one of the engineers wailed. “The beast isn’t receiving any commands from us. It shut off its downlink antennas, remember?”

  “My god,” Habib groaned. “He’s a dead man.”

  Gaeta huddled around the strut supporting the laser, his heart hammering so hard he could hear his pulse in his ears.

  Okay, he told himself. Simmer down. You’re safe here. The chingado laser can’t shoot you, you’re underneath it. Take a deep breath. Another. Slow down your heart rate. Fritz’ll never let you live it down; he’s getting all this on the life-support telemetry; he’ll say you crapped in your pants.

  He squinted at the life-support readouts displayed on the inside of his helmet. Son of a bitch hit my air tank. It’s leaking. Gotta get out of here.

  But if I move out from under this fregado laser it’ll start taking potshots at me again. Catch-22: if I stay here I’ll asphyxiate; if I make a run for the return pod I’ll get shot.

  “Fritz,” he called as calmly as he could. “You got any ideas about this?”

  Silence.

  And Gaeta saw that the black snowstorm was closer than ever, almost upon him.

  Cardenas and Negroponte walked determinedly from the biology lab to the mission control center. They had sent a hurried message to Wunderly, on Earth, and now were heading for Urbain to tell him that the creatures in Saturn’s rings were nanomachines.

  Nanomachines. Cardenas still found it hard to believe. Why? she asked herself. You think you’re the only one in the universe who can handle nanotechnology? You’re not even the only one in the solar system.

  But the instant they pushed through the unguarded double doors of the mission control center, her thoughts about nanomachines and alien intelligence evaporated. Cardenas could tell fr
om the tension crackling in the air, from the huddles of engineers and technicians hunched in tight knots around consoles, that something had gone wrong.

  “Urbain isn’t here,” Negroponte said. “He must be in his office.”

  Cardenas barely heard her. She rushed to von Helmholtz and his crew, clustered around one of the consoles, while Negroponte headed for Urbain’s office alone.

  28 MAY 2096: ACTIONS

  Timoshenko hovered in emptiness, staring at the slim line of the tether that attached him to the open hatch of the airlock. He didn’t remember attaching the tether. He thought he would simply drift away from the habitat forever.

  I must have attached it automatically, he said to himself. Without thinking consciously of it. Just part of the routine of putting on a space suit and going outside.

  He knew the tether was made of buckyball fibers. Strongest material known, he thought. My safety line. My link to life.

  The tether led arrow-straight to the airlock built into the curving flank of the habitat. Timoshenko saw its huge bulk rotating slowly, carrying him with it, the mammoth cylinder studded with airlocks and observation ports. He hung there as if paralyzed and watched one of the maintenance robots scooting faithfully along its track.

  Ten thousand men and women, he thought. I can kill them all. I can become a mass killer. Not as big a murderer as Stalin or some of the tsars, but at least I’ll have the distinction of killing everybody in my community. Every last one of them. One hundred percent.

  Gaeta’s life-support telltales were blinking red. The leaking air tank had started a cascade of failures. Air pressure in the suit was slowly falling. The suit’s heater was automatically turning up the internal temperature to compensate. Gaeta tried to open the small emergency air tank; no response. Must’ve been blown away by the damned laser, he realized.

  You got minutes, amigo, he told himself. If you don’t get off this glorified garbage truck and back to the transfer craft in the next fifteen-twenty minutes, you’re a dead man.

  A flake of black snow plastered itself against his visor. Looking up, he saw that the storm had reached him. Black flakes of tholins were drifting down out of the cloud-laden sky.

  Fritz’s voice crackled in his earphones. “You must leave the lander immediately and get to the escape pod before it’s covered with snow.”

  “Right’” he replied. “But if I move this estúpido laser is going to zap me again.”

  There’ll be no answer for twelve seconds, he knew. Fumbling in the pouches attached to the waist of his suit, Gaeta found the thin metal cylinder of the diagnostic probe for the uplink antenna. He snapped its wire off, then slowly got to his feet with a grinding of servomotors.

  The laser started to swivel, but Gaeta grabbed its shaft in both his servo-reinforced pincers and pushed it upward until it was pointing at the sky. Then he forced the metal plug into the laser’s ball-and-socket mounting, jamming it in place.

  “Okay, wiseass,” he muttered. “Let’s see you shoot me now.”

  He could hear the laser mount’s gearing grind painfully, but the plug stayed jammed in the socket and the laser just vibrated slightly, like a horse trying to shake off an annoying fly.

  Satisfied that he was safe for the moment, Gaeta scrabbled on his hands and knees back to the access hatch in the center of the roof. The lander’s roof was covered with slick black snow and it was getting rapidly thicker. As he started to push the accumulating tholins with his gloved hands, trying to clear the area where he’d dropped the comm link with Alpha’s central computer, he thought about his childhood in Los Angeles and how much he’d wanted to play in the snow when he was a kid.

  “What are you doing?” von Helmholtz demanded sharply. “Get to the escape pod at once!”

  “Got a job to do first, Fritz,” he said. And he clicked off his communications link.

  He brushed more of the black snow off the roof. There! He found the comm line, still connected to the computer’s access panel. Picking up the loose end, Gaeta plugged it into his suit.

  He was panting. Can’t be exertion, he thought. Air level’s getting low.

  “Okay, computer,” he said, surprised that his throat felt raspy, “listen to me.”

  No response from the central computer.

  “Humans are a source of contamination, right?”

  YES.

  “And your logic tells you that if you uplink the data you’ve taken in from the sensors, more humans will come and contaminate the area.”

  MORE HUMANS OR THEIR MACHINES.

  “All right.” Gaeta coughed. “Now listen. No humans will be sent to Titan. None. I’m leaving and no humans will come here after I leave. Understand?”

  For a heartbeat Gaeta thought the computer would not respond. But then its synthesized voice said flatly:

  UNDERSTOOD.

  The snow was falling thickly now. Gaeta felt as if he were inside an inkwell.

  Brushing black flakes from his visor, he turned on his helmet lights. “And no machines will be sent to Titan either,” he said to the computer. “There will be no more contamination. Understand that? You will be the only machine on Titan and no humans will come after I leave.”

  Again the computer was silent. Then:

  UNDERSTOOD.

  “So you can uplink the sensor data and reopen your downlink antennas. There won’t be any other sources of contamination coming here.”

  The yellow message light was blinking frantically. Gaeta ignored it.

  Well, I’ve done the best I could, he said to himself. Now it’s up to this bucket of chips to figure out what to do. He pulled the line from the computer’s access panel and stuffed it into a pouch at his waist, then reopened his comm link.

  Gaeta clicked to his other frequency. “Fritz, it’s darker than the bottom of hell down here. You gotta talk me to the return pod.”

  And then he climbed to his feet and stood erect on the edge of Alpha’s roof, waiting for Fritz to direct him back to safety.

  28 MAY 2096: DEATH

  Geata wiped at his visor again; his glove left a black smear acoss the glassteel. C’mon Fritz, he urged silently. I’m leakin’ air down here. His life-support displays were all in the red now.

  “Air supply critical,” came the suit’s computer voice. “At present loss rate, air supply will be exhausted in twelve minutes.”

  There’s air in the suit, Gaeta told himself. Suit’s full of air. Even if the tank goes dry I can last another ten-fifteen minutes on the air inside the suit before I use up all the oxygen in it.

  He peered out into the swirling dark flakes. The return pod’s out there, off to my right somewhere. Seventy-two meters away. I could throw a football that far, almost. It’s covered with this black crap by now, but if I get close enough I’ll see it sticking up like a fat phone booth.

  “The escape pod is thirty-four degrees from your position,” Fritz said, his voice brittle with tension. “If you are facing the rear of the lander the pod is on your right in the two o’clock direction.”

  “Two o’clock, copy.” Gaeta knew there were ladders built into both sides of Alpha. He got down onto his knees again, servos groaning, and looked up and down the lander’s flat metal flank.

  “I see the rungs. Starting for the ladder.” It was easier to crawl. “Got the ladder. I’m going down now.”

  Wondering how much the audience could see in this black blizzard, Gaeta felt his way cautiously down the metal rungs.

  “I’m on the ground now,” he said, turning around. Then it hit him. “I’m standing on the surface of Titan!” he exulted. “My boots are on the methane snow!”

  Fritz must have already been speaking to him, because his voice came through immediately: “ … on the ground with your back to the lander, the escape pod is seventy-two meters from you. Your heading should now be ten o’clock.”

  “Gotcha,” Gaeta replied. He started walking. “Ground’s kinda mushy, like slogging through wet snow, maybe ankle deep. Not easy
going.”

  “Air supply critical,” the computer reminded calmly. “At present loss rate, air supply will be exhausted in ten minutes.”

  Cardenas stood frozen behind Fritz’s seated form. Ten minutes’ worth of air! Manny’s going to die down there!

  As if he could hear her thoughts, von Helmholtz turned in his wheeled chair and looked up at her. “He’ll make it,” he said flatly. “There’s enough air inside the suit itself for him to make the rendezvous in orbit.”

  “You’re sure?” She could feel her pulse machine-gunning through her chest.

  Fritz pointed at the display screen. “The numbers show that he’ll make it.” But she noticed that his extended finger was trembling. And then he added, “If he doesn’t stumble into any obstacles before he gets to the escape pod.”

  Timoshenko floated serenely at the end of the tether that connected him to the airlock. Saturn sank behind the habitat’s dark bulk, a spectacular sight with its saffron clouds and glittering rings disappearing behind the knife edge of Goddard’s flank.

  I can’t kill them, Timoshenko told himself. I’m not a murderer. Eberly, yes. I’d throttle him with my bare hands if I could. He deserves it, the lying bastard. But not the others. Not ten thousand people. I can’t.

  Then what can you do, idiot? snarled a savage voice in his head. Here you are hanging onto the end of a rope and thinking about life and death. Whose life? Whose death?

  Gaeta slogged across the mushy ground, his boots sinking into the black mud. With each squelching step he had to pull his feet out of the mire; the boots came loose with an obscene sucking sound.