On the Shores of Titan's Farthest Sea

by Michael Carroll

  Abby rubbed her hands together. “Gee, you’ve really got me in the mood for breakfast.”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  “Sure.” What could she say?

  As they passed through the hatch into the galley, a twiggy woman stood to the side to let them through. Her strawberry blonde hair, normally pulled into a ponytail, hung forward, disheveled. “Hey Troy. Hey Abby.”

  “Hi Tanya. Where you headed?” Abby asked.

  “I…” She leaned against the wall.

  “Hey, hey, you okay?” Abby reached for her. “Come sit down.”

  Tanya stared at the floor while the two ushered her to the nearest chair. “Thanks, guys. Just little bits dizzy,” she mumbled. She looked up. Tears filled her eyes.

  Abby put a hand on Tanya’s. “What’s going on?”

  “Did you guys hear? About Kevin?” They shook their heads, puzzled. “They found him this morning in his bed. He was dead, Abby. Dead.”

  “Oh…n-no.” Abby was shocked.

  “What happened?” Troy asked. Tanya buried her face in her delicate hands and made indecipherable noises.

  Troy leaned toward Abby. “Between her blubbering and that Russian accent, I can’t understand a thing she’s saying,” he whispered.

  Abby glanced at Troy. He looked like he was fighting off a panic attack, and losing. Poor guy, she thought. Typical male. No clue what to do with an emotional outburst.

  “Why don’t you get Tanya some water, Troy?”

  “Yes, yes. Good idea.”

  Troy launched himself from the table. He slalomed across the room, dodging the maze of identical, cafeteria-style furniture reflected on the clinically clean floor. The place reminded Abby of the canteen in her college dorm. It smelled of disinfectant and yeast.

  Abby put her hand on Tanya’s shoulder, felt the sobbing ebb, and handed her a tissue. Troy, sensing that it was safe to return, sat down with a cup of water and put it tentatively beside Tanya’s elbow.

  Tanya blew her nose. She said nothing. Abby said nothing. Troy studied his boots. “Apps, would you like a water?” he tried.

  “Never drink the stuff. Coffee is my drink of choice. Hot tea. Hot cocoa. Just hot, ever since I got here.” She shivered.

  “Can I get you some, er, tea then?”

  Abby had to smile. He was trying. And he was avoiding staring at Tanya.

  Tanya sniffled and spoke quietly. “He died of, you know, cold—hypothermia.”

  Troy did a double take. “He froze to death?”

  She nodded her head behind another tissue.

  “In bed?”

  “That’s what Doc says.” The tissue muffled her voice.

  Abby cut in. “That’s ludicrous. How could somebody freeze to death asleep in their own heated room?”

  “It is nature of life here. We have seen accidents, no matter how we are careful of things. Titan is not place that forgives.”

  Tanya didn’t have to remind Abby of the past year’s events. There was Levon Danfield, the journalist, who died when his rover stranded him. He broke the primary rules of thumb: have a buddy, have a backup plan, and always check your communications equipment, including the emergency batteries. And that scientist from Solus Lacus on Mars, Jenine something. Simple suit leak. She probably hadn’t sealed it correctly. She just went to sleep on a dune out by the shore and never regained consciousness. Then there was the organic chemist from Oxford—the Oxford in England, not the one on Ganymede. He had simply disappeared. His body was probably a popsicle at the bottom of a methane lake, or he might have slipped into one of the quicksand pits.

  “Guess it’s just part of life’s rich pageantry on Titan,” Troy grumbled. He slapped his palm against the tabletop. In the low gravity, everyone’s drinks rose into small stalagmites, quivered midair, and sloshed back down, threatening to breach the rims of cups and glasses. “This is, hands down, the weirdest place I’ve ever been. And it got weirder when they started drilling that big hole out in the lake.” He tipped his head toward the window. Beyond it, in the tawny fog, loomed a great, dark tower, reflected in the shimmering waves of Kraken Mare.

  “Don’t blame us,” Tanya said, her Russian accent bleeding through. “That will be big science, very big science, when we break through to the water ocean. You will see.” She said it with little enthusiasm, and let out a slow breath. “But for this monument, I think I will take day off.”

  “Moment,” Abby corrected. “For this moment. You want company?”

  Tanya waved her off. “Thanks, but I am okay now. This moment. You guys eat.” She stood and wandered, zombie-like, through the hatch.

  Troy leaned toward Abby conspiratorially. “I’ve always thought there was something weird going on with that guy.”

  “With Kevin?” Abby frowned as she sat back down. “He was such a sweetie.” She thought about his gentle demeanor, his quietness despite the fact that there was so much he had to say, so many deep things, and followed through on anything he offered to do. He listened to you like you were the only person in the world, even when you were surrounded by people. He certainly made Abby feel that way. Maybe that’s what set him apart, that willingness to take time, even when the world was spinning out of control and the deadlines were looming.

  “He was a nerd. Apparently a careless nerd.”

  Abby glared. “I’m not a superstitious person, but it is tacky, at the very least, to speak ill of the dead.”

  Troy’s hands fanned the air in front of him. “No, really, check this out: why would a university send a hydrologist—a water expert—to a place where water behaves like rock? Kevin was always scraping up ice samples and melting them. Not something a hydrologist would do. A geologist I could understand. Not a hydrologist. I may be a lowly organic chemist, but that strikes me as just crazy.”

  “I assumed he was studying what’s in that water, like a geologist would study what minerals are in a rock.”

  Troy was shaking his head before she finished her thought. “That’s my point. That’s not what a hydrologist does. A hydrologist studies what water does, not what little beasties it’s got floating around in it. Isn’t that right? They would have sent a chemistry expert. Or somebody familiar with the ice moons. Not someone who charts rivers and sediments on the terrestrials.”

  “Titan has lots of rivers. They’re methane, but liquid is liquid, right? Maybe that was it. I never really talked to him specifically about it.”

  Abby scoured her memory of Titan rainfall pattern studies. Rains washed across Titan’s polar regions with totals adding up to about 100 hours each Titan year. Since Titan’s year lasted 30 Earth years, that was a pittance of precipitation compared to the green world. But the dry equatorial regions had it even worse. Those regions could endure droughts lasting a millennium. The gentle rains that Mayda had been experiencing were not typical of some areas farther north and to the south, where violent cloudbursts were the order of the day. Dry river channels flowed from mountainous regions like Xanadu into broad drainage basins. Some of those deltas fanned out in a scale similar to the River Thames. The icy moon’s surface was not as heavily eroded as that of Earth. For some reason, the methane rivers did not cut through the ice in the same way that water rivers cut through Earth’s rocky landscape. Still, they had familiar forms: oxbows, meanders, serpentine pathways, dendritic valley systems. In them, Abby saw echoes of other rivers: the Earth’s Nile, the Mississippi, the Amazon, and Mars’ Nanedi, Ma ‘adim and Reull rivers, full to the banks since terraforming. Her Norwegian colleagues would be perfectly at home on the shore of some of those more northern Titan “waterways,” where liquid methane had engraved fjords into coastal cliffs.

  Troy brought her back to the moment. “Yeah, but Kevin never went anywhere near the riverbeds. They’re all south of here, right? He spent his time in the hills to the west, beyond the dunes. And I asked him once about the erosion in the Grand Canyon on Earth—how it compared to Valles Marineris or the canyons south of Xanadu here�
�and he got this panicked look, like he was trying to remember some speech he’d memorized but couldn’t quite recall.”

  “I know that feeling.” Abby said.

  “Something’s up, Apps.” Troy stared at her and waited. He reminded her of an owl, unblinking.

  She tapped a finger on the table. Kevin was her friend. Surely he would have confided in her, wouldn’t he? Heat inched its way up the sides of her neck. Why had Troy always been so gifted at making her feel cornered? Finally, Abby blurted, “Well, what do you want me to do about it? I’m just a gas girl.”

  Troy stood and began to pace between tables, alarming the handful of fellow diners in the room.

  “I—I don’t know. You’re the one who’s always doing stuff, leading the pack, organizing things. This thing needs organizing. The whole Kevin Nordsmitt thing was irregular from the beginning. He was always sneaking around with his little filters and microscanners and stuff that would fit a bio guy more than a water scientist.”

  “He was shy.”

  Troy stopped mid-stride and fixed her with his remarkable green eyes. “He was secretive. There’s a difference.”

  The silence between Abby and Troy stretched. Abby let out a long breath, let it puff up her cheeks for a moment. “Maybe you’re right. Think I’ll go have a chat with Doc Mason, see what she’s got to say about all this.”

  “I’ll pass. I’ve got work to do. Besides, I don’t think she likes me much.”

  “Doc Mason? Why do you say that?”

  “Just a feeling, Apps. But let me know what you find out. It would probably be good for us to know how he died, why he died. The whole thing creeps me out.”

  Now that she thought of it, the whole thing creeped her out, too.

  © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015

  Michael CarrollOn the Shores of Titan's Farthest SeaScience and Fiction10.1007/978-3-319-17759-5_3

  3. Baffled and Bewildered

  Michael Carroll1

  (1)Littleton, CO, USA

  “So just how could someone freeze to death in the confines of a heated science outpost, under their covers, in bed?” Abby stood in the medlab, hands on hips. Above her, a forest of scanners, tubes, and cones nested in the ceiling, awaiting the doctor’s orders to come down and prod away at patients. Abby didn’t look up.

  Doc Mason sat behind her desk, interlacing her fingers. She looked puzzled. “I asked myself the same thing. And that’s not all. He had burns on his hands, as if he’d taken his gloves off out there. Shoulders, too. Upper back. Cryogenic burns. Like frostbite on steroids. I am completely baffled, I don’t mind telling you. I just don’t get it. He was so popular around here. Everybody liked Kevin.”

  “You could always count on him to do just about anything. He fixed my microwave food generator in the middle of the night once. Very handy guy.”

  “Generous. Talented. I suppose we should save all this for the memorial, if they have one.” The doctor glanced toward the back of the room, in the direction Abby had been avoiding. A single gurney glowered in the corner, a form hulking beneath its sheet.

  Abby tried to anticipate Mason’s suspicions. “So, you think it was—”

  “Foul play? Maybe, maybe not. Am I going to do anything about it? We need to put controls in place over our team members when they go out. We need to restrict people from going out alone. We need a better system for checking out the rovers and boats.”

  “And what if Kevin’s death went beyond that? What if he didn’t stumble into bed and die of delayed hypothermal symptoms? What if it was no accident?”

  Mason pushed herself up from the desk and walked over to the small porthole in the wall. Tawny light softened her striking features. Her high cheekbones and narrow eyes betrayed a Mongolian ancestry. Gray streaks wandered through her black hair like milk poured into coffee, framing her rich, bronze skin. Flecks of amber floated within her ebony eyes. Abby had always thought of the doctor as stunning. She should have been a model, Abby thought. Models don’t need bedside manners.

  The doctor stared out the one small window behind her desk, as if willing the orange fog away. She seemed to wilt before the porthole. “Abby, I am up to my eyeballs in work and government red tape. I’ve been asking for backup for nearly a year, and nobody’s on the horizon. Not a med student or an RN…at this point I’d even take a first-year veterinary student with a felony rap. Somebody’s got enough bucks to drill that big hole in the ice—” She nodded her chin toward the dim outline of a massive tower in the distant fog. “Wish they’d send some our way. If I go telling the authorities that somebody was murdered here, the documentation will be twice as bad as the mountain I’m already facing. We might as well hang up the science we have and become bureaucrats, all of us.”

  “Come on, Doc. That doesn’t sound like you.”

  The doctor turned from the window, her hair undulating in the light gravity. Suddenly, she looked older, the subtle creases around her eyes and mouth accentuated by Titan’s twilight. “The bean counters are running the place now. They’re far less concerned about science than about us crossing our I’s and dotting our T’s.”

  Briefly, Abby wondered what alphabet the good doctor was using. “And you want to protect the station,” Abby said. “But at what cost?”

  “At just about any cost. Still, for Kevin…” She put her hand on the windowsill. The orange light gave the doctor a supernatural glow.

  Abby huffed. “If he froze to death, he must have done that outside, right?”

  Mason nodded, then shrugged. “He could have been exposed to toxic levels of gases through a bad suit seal, or chilled down to a point of no return before he hopped into bed. Look, Abby, when something momentous happens in life, we sometimes attach significance to it beyond what it really merits. An accidental death takes on deeper meaning when it becomes premeditated.”

  “Or a tragic mishap becomes foul play,” Abby added. “I hope it was an accident. I would hate to think that someone—”

  “Yes, well, don’t. Someone didn’t. Titan is a place just waiting to kill its visitors in a multitude of ways. Kevin just got caught in one of them. Sadly.”

  “But there must be a record from the airlock cameras, something showing him coming in from outside.”

  Mason frowned. “I thought of that, too. No good. I asked Piers to show me the feed. There’s a blank section in the records for about twenty minutes during—”

  “The power glitch,” Abby moaned. “That was convenient.”

  “Wasn’t it?” the doctor said blandly. “They still don’t know the cause. Somebody clearly needs to look into that power failure. Brian told me he and his techs found some suspicious footprints out by the main cabling that leads to those west transformers.”

  “Suspicious footprints? Like Bigfoot or something?”

  Mason seemed deep in thought. “But who to call is the other question. Technically, Mayda Research Station falls under the supervision of Port Dardanus on Ganymede, but the nearest real authority for something like this is down on Mars.”

  Abby wasn’t sure if Mason was talking about the mystery of the power or the death of Kevin Nordsmitt, but either way, she felt better taking some kind of action. The mysterious demise of a friend, no matter how accidental it might seem, needed to be investigated, didn’t it? What if the cause of Kevin’s death might happen again to someone else? What if he had run into a problem that somebody else might stumble into? Was anybody safe, really? “I have a—a—friend who used to be with the TriPlanet Bureau of Investigation. He once probed a case back on Mars for us; somebody made off with a million bucks worth of meteorology equipment. He’s a private investigator or some such thing now.”

  “Oh?” The doc raised an eyebrow. “So you worked together, huh?”

  “Yes. What?”

  “You just sounded like it was more than a working relationship.”

  “Nothing romantic. Friend of the family. He’s my parents’ age. And very discreet. Would tha
t help?”

  Mason squared her shoulders. “Former TBI sounds good. Discreet sounds even better. I’d prefer that to sending out the alarm and getting some incompetent fed from Ganymede. I’m skeptical of all this cloak and dagger stuff. Titan throws enough deadly barbs at its residents without us needing to call upon Jack the Ripper. But we might as well have you make the call. You’ll have to wait a week or so. I think we’re at opposition, aren’t we?”

  “Someone really needs to do something about celestial mechanics. This business of the Sun getting in the way is annoying.”

  “Mars will be back out soon enough. And a few days before, you can relay through Vesta center.”

  “I’ll get in touch, see what’s up with good ol’ Jeremy. I want to find out what happened here. We owe it to Kevin.”

  The doctor walked over and put her hand gently against the mound on the gurney. “That we do,” she murmured.

  With a start, Abby admitted to herself just what was on that gurney, under that thin veil of plastic sheeting. That mound of cold flesh, that inert vessel, used to be someone, a person with warmth and energy, dreams and plans, someone with a mother and father and friends. She shook her head, tried not to think about it. It was time for some distraction, or at least a channeling of her feeling of helplessness.

  Abby headed for the researchers’ quarters. She stopped at a door that was plastered with bumper stickers and posters of various equations and puns. “Support Random Acts of Science.” “Can’t be two places at once? Try Quantum Physics.” “Io is Gnarly.” “Aristotle was Right.” “Newton Had a Concussion.” “Are You Sirius?” She didn’t understand some of the more obscure references, but she liked the cartoons that went with them. A large, tattered poster hung askew near the transom, a photo of an ice skater on one of the melt ponds on Europa.