Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Jiang looked at him sharply. “Refurbishment?”

  White knew he shouldn’t say any more. But there was no point in living seven decades and flying to the Moon and back if you couldn’t shoot your. mouth off to a young girl once in a while. So he said, “Sure. You know, manufacturing has come a long way since the Saturns were put together. CAD/CAM techniques, total quality programs, composites and aluminum-lithium alloys that are a lot lighter and stronger than this old aluminum shit… It we were to rebuild this bird, we could upgrade her performance a hell of a way.”

  Jiang laughed, but not unkindly. “Perhaps. It is a fine dream. Certainly I sense how angry you are at this, the condition of your ‘big S.’”

  “I guess the bad guys did a pretty good job of killing off this old lady after all. All they had to do was let her lie here and rust. And they got to show her off as their capture.”

  Jiang grimaced. “Like a trophy from a hunt. Yes; humans are rarely logical, even within a space program. But it could have been worse. At least the remaining Saturn hardware is honored as a relic of a great triumph.”

  White ran his hand along the corroded hull of AS-514. “A relic,” he repeated.

  This kid seemed to understand. She’d picked the right word. Relic. Maybe. But not for much longer.

  His anger dissipated as he thought about that. The technicians crawling over the rocket were busy, competent, bustling. They nodded to White, smiled at the girl.

  Okay, there had been some savage mistakes in the past, and this poor broken bird was a symbol of them. And maybe NASA was never going to be the same again; maybe it even deserved to be busted up and subsumed into Agriculture or whatever. But he had the feeling that the old days were coming back, just once more, as it had been working on Apollo, when everyone worked a hundred and ten percent and the color of your carpet didn’t matter so much as what you knew and what you could do. For just a short time, maybe NASA was going to pull together again, to achieve the Titan mission, to achieve one more moment of greatness.

  If it came off, it would be a hell of a thing.

  The Houston Coliseum was a huge underground arena that reminded Jake Hadamard of nothing so much as a gigantic, hollowed-out car park. Today, the roof was hung with cute little models of the Lei Feng Number One spaceship. The air-conditioning, he thought, was typically Texan, which is to say the whole place was so chilly you could have stored corpses in here. As they waited for the Chinese party, everybody seemed to be standing up, and Hadamard found himself shivering in his suit jacket.

  There were hundreds of people here, standing in rows: bands, police and firemen and National Guard in neat ranks, politicians and industrialists in open-topped convertibles. And Hadamard himself had brought a little party of senior NASA people: Marcus White, Paula Benacerraf and her family, some of the managers from JSC.

  On a stage at one end of the arena stood Xavier T. Maclachlan, the ambitious Texas Congressman who had engineered the event. He was a thin, jug-eared man of about fifty. Now he whooped noisily into a microphone, and waved his big ten-gallon hat in the air, and gladhanded his guests.

  Hadamard, bored and cold, checked his watch; there were still some minutes to endure before the Chinese spacewoman arrived.

  Al Hartle came bearing down on him, resplendent in his Brigadier General’s uniform. He was clutching a full tumbler of bourbon. Hartle was a power in the USAF Space Command; Hadamard had encountered him in briefings for the Cabinet. “This is some display,” Hartle said. “Some fucking display.”

  Hadamard was amused; Hartle was upright and rigid, his head like a steel cylinder jutting up from his great box of a body. But he was clearly a little drunk, and anger seemed to be seething inside him, hot and deliquescent, like a pupa within its rigid chrysalis.

  He prompted, “You think so?”

  “In 1961 we sent John Glenn on a fucking world tour. Now we’re on the receiving end of the tours, and we have to kowtow to some damn Red Chinese.”

  “Well, they have made it to orbit, Al.”

  “For the same reasons we did,” Hartle growled. “Geopolitics. Just to prove their balls are as big as ours.”

  “Space as the symbolic arena. Well, I guess you’re right. But they hardly need symbols, Al. China’s GDP passed ours years ago.”

  “I know. That, and this woman in orbit, and this damn Shuttle crash, have sent us all into a fucking panic. I tell you, it’s like Sputnik all over again. And look what came out of the dumb decisions that were made when Sputnik went up. Apollo. Holy shit. A disaster that has reverberated for fifty years.” He eyed Hadamard. “So you still throwing money down the john for another Shuttle?”

  Hadamard laughed. “I’ll tell you all about it when you tell me about your Black Horse program, Al.”

  Hartle grunted, and took a deep slug of his bourbon. “And your space cadets haven’t responded to our L5 proposal yet.”

  The L5 proposal was the Air Force’s official recommendation on what to do with the left-over Shuttle and Station technology. The Station should be completed, and converted to a surveillance station—maybe even some kind of weapons-bearing battle station—and towed out to L5, the stable Lagrangian point two hundred and forty thousand miles from Earth, at the third corner of a triangle including Earth and Moon.

  Hartle stabbed a finger at Hadamard’s chest. “You heard the case. It’s the new heartland of space. Circumterrestrial space encapsulates Earth to an altitude of fifty thousand miles. Who rules circumterrestrial space commands Earth; who rules the Moon commands circumterrestrial space; who rules L4 and L5 commands the Earth-Moon system.”

  Hadamard sipped his drink. “Maybe you’re right, Al. But—”

  “The Red Chinese,” Hartle hissed. “The Red Chinese. Those bastards think this is going to be their century. They’re making expansionist noises all over, impacting ten countries, from Taiwan to Russian East Asia to the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea… Christ, even the Australians are worried.”

  Hadamard murmured, “Is it really so bad? Our weaponry is still so far ahead of theirs that we can contain them for a long time to come. And—”

  But Hartle wasn’t listening. “If we don’t take Lagrange soon, we’ll find the damn Red Chinese up there waiting for us. And then we’ll have lost, Hadamard. We’ll be paring tribute to the bastards for the rest of time. Just like the days of the Qing Dynasty Read your history, boy.” He approached Hadamard, and thrust forward his hawklike face, weathered by altitude and desert sun, and that inner anger burst to the surface. “Listen to me,” he said, his voice a thick rasp. “I know some of those assholes in the NASA centers are putting forward dumbass schemes about leveraging this Chinese-in-space stuff into some big new Flash Gordon adventure in space. They want to start the whole damn thing over again. But that’s bullshit. You hear me? You try to fly any such damn thing and we will shoot you down, boy.”

  He backed off, fixing Hadamard with a final glare, and stalked off into the crowd.

  Good grief, Hadamard thought. He found himself trembling. He took a slug of his own drink, to regain his composure.

  What anger. But we’re not at war, he thought, cowed by Hartle’s intensity. For all his political antennae, he couldn’t tell if Hartle’s anger was representative of the thinking inside the closed doors of the military, or it Hartle was some kind of aging maverick, frustrated because he was unable to get his case accepted.

  In fact Hadamard still had to make his decision, about disposing of the Shuttle assets.

  Nobody wanted to go back to a regular flight schedule with the three remaining orbiters—the cumulative risk was just unacceptable—but some kind of one-off mission was still plausible, politically. And besides, he was still waiting for Benacerraf’s recommendation.

  Anyhow, Hartle was threatening the wrong guy. Hadamard was no space butt. He was interested, he told himself, solely in managing budgets; it NASA never flew more than another July 4 skyrocket he could care less.

  … But, oddly
, against his expectations, he found himself leaning more towards proposals like the ones coming out of Marshall, about fantastic jaunts to the Moon or Mars or Venus, rather than building some monstrous Buck Rogers space battle station in the sky.

  He couldn’t get the image of the crashing orbiter out of his head, the idea of the grizzled old Moonwalker at the controls to the last.

  He found Paula Benacerraf, who was here with her daughter, and a kid: a boy, who looked bored and restless. Maybe he needed a pee, Hadamard thought sourly. On the daughter’s cheek was an image-tattoo that was tuned to black; on her colorless dress she wore a simple, old-fashioned button-badge that said, mysteriously, NED.

  Hadamard grunted. “I’ve seen a few of those blacked-out tattoos. I thought it was some kind of comms problem—”

  Jackie Benacerraf shook her head. “It’s a mute protest.”

  “At what?”

  “At shutting down the net.”

  “Oh. Right.” Oh, Christ, he thought. She was talking about the Communications Decency Act, which had been extended during the winter. With a flurry of publicity about pedophiles and neo-Nazis and bomb-makers, the police had shut down and prosecuted any net service provider who could be shown to have passed on any of the material that fell outside the provisions of the Act. And that was almost all of them.

  “I was never much of a net user,” Hadamard admitted.

  “Just to get you up to date,” Jackie Benacerraf said sourly, “we now have one licensed service provider, which is Disney-Coke, and all net access software has built-in censorship filters. We’re just like China now, where everything goes through the official news agency, Xinhua; that poor space kid must feel right at home.”

  Benacerraf raised an eyebrow at him. “She’s a journalist. Jackie takes these things seriously.”

  Jackie scowled. “Wouldn’t you, if your career had just been fucked over?”

  Hadamard shrugged; he didn’t have strong opinions.

  The comprehensive net shutdown had been necessary because the tech-heads who loved all that stuff had proven too damn smart at getting around any reasonable restriction put in place. Like putting encoded messages of race-hate and smut into graphics files, for instance: that had meant banning all graphics and sound files, and the World Wide Web had just withered, He knew there had been some squealing among genuine discussion groups on the net, and academics and researchers who suddenly found their access to online libraries shut down, and businesses who were no longer allowed to send secure encrypted messages, and… But screw it. To Hadamard, the net had been just a big conduit of bullshit; everyone was better off without it.

  Jackie was still droning on, in the sanctimonious way that might have been patented by serious young people. “This is the greatest reverse in free access to information since Gutenberg. The net was never meant to be sanitized and controlled. The shutdown will hit technological development, education, jobs…”

  Hadamard was quickly bored. His glance was caught again by Jackie’s button-badge which sat, he couldn’t help notice, over her breast, which was small and firm. Her little boy clung to her leg.

  “NED. Who’s that, a rock star?”

  “New Luddites,” Paula Benacerraf said.

  “Oh. I heard of them.”

  “Believe me, Jake, you don’t want to get into that either.”

  Maybe I do, Hadamard thought.

  He knew Xavier Maclachlan had picked up on some of what the Luddites were arguing for. The Luddites had attracted a broad band of the younger generations who responded to a core anti-science message with, it seemed to Hadamard, their guts, not their heads. And that gut response was what Maclachlan was tapping into.

  In his heart, Hadamard was uncomfortable with Maclachlan: his protectionism, his fundamentalist Christianity. But Hadamard had to concede that Maclachlan was hitting popular nerves among the electorate. It was, he thought, entirely possible that Maclachlan would indeed become the next President, just as the polls said. And if that happened, Jake Hadamard would be going to him for a new job.

  Maybe I do need to figure out what’s going on inside the head of the likes of Jackie Benacerraf, he thought.

  Benacerraf said, “Speaking of Luddites, I hear we lost the Mars sample-return mission.”

  “Yeah.” Now, there was a pisser, even for a space cynic like Hadamard. “You know how they stopped it in the end? We had to apply to register the returned Mars samples with the Department of Agriculture in the state we planned to land. Just in case there was life aboard, like in that meteorite a few years ago. But you could crashland anywhere, so we were forced to apply in every state in the Union. And then we had to start applying for similar permits abroad. All that damn paperwork, the legal tangles. And when the first refusal came in, that was pretty much it.”

  Benacerraf shook her head. “So we lost another fine mission, and any chance of confirming the biological stuff from the meteorite. Damn, damn. Once, we sent spacecraft to Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, out of the Solar System altogether. Now, we’re too scared to bring home a handful of Martian dust… You know, our attitudes don’t seem to be shaped by the rational any more.”

  Hadamard shrugged. “It was predictable. The slightest suggestion of bugs from Mars was always going to raise a panic. It’s the times we live in.”

  But now Jackie started in again, arguing with her mother.

  Hadamard tuned out. He was still bored and cold, and he was getting no closer to Maclachlan like this. He made his excuses and moved on, abandoning Benacerraf to her dysfunctional family.

  Up on the stage, Maclachlan started making a short, crass speech of welcome; evidently the Chinese party was on its way.

  It seemed to Hadamard that Maclachlan was working his audience here almost greedily, as he stared into the camera lights. It was ironic that Maclachlan, the great protectionist and anti-space campaigner, was here to welcome a spacegirl from China. But it was politics. Maclachlan was turning this event, like everything else he touched, into just another part of his populist build-up towards what everyone expected would be a winning bid for the Republican nomination for the White House in 2008.

  Hadamard glanced around the crowd, sizing up who was here, figuring how he could get to maximize his own contact time with Maclachlan.

  There were ragged cheers. Hadamard turned. The Chinese party was arriving in their hard-top limos, rolling smoothly down the ramp from the overground. Led by Maclachlan, the waiting hundreds broke into noisy applause.

  The limos did a brief turn around the Coliseum floor. Before stopping at Maclachlan’s feet the cars came close to Hadamard; he found himself looking into the pretty, oval face of Jiang Ling, from no more than ten feet. She looked young, he thought, and scared. As she had every right to be.

  When she got out of the car, accompanied by some fat Chinese official, she turned out to be slim, about thirty-five, delicate-looking in what looked like a peach-colored Chairman Mao jumpsuit with a neat little jacket over the top. She climbed the few steps up to meet Maclachlan, who grabbed her possessively and stuck his ten-gallon on her head.

  Hadamard tried to imagine this fragile girl being launched into space, in the mouth of one of those huge, unreliable, 1950s-style Chinese boosters. Not for the first time the idea of spaceflight seemed monstrous to him: like a human sacrifice, to serve geopolitical ends.

  But, he thought ruefully, as the head of the Agency which had just crashed a Space Shuttle he had no grounds for complacency.

  Maclachlan, holding onto Jiang, finished up with a Chinese phrase, clumsily delivered. “Ni chifanie meiyou?” Jiang looked disconcerted; Maclachlan laughed and hugged her anew. “I said to her, ‘Have you eaten yet?’ Exactly what I’d be asked if I visited your home. Right, Ji-ang?” The slim Chinese girl smiled nervously. “Well, you sure as hell will eat fine here in our home—Texas-style! Enjoy, folks!” He whooped, the amplified noise ear-splitting.

  And now the covers were taken off ten big barbecue pits, set up in the
middle of the arena, and suddenly the air was full of the rich, cloying stink of burned cattle flesh. There was an eruption of applause. The girl astronaut looked utterly bewildered.

  Maclachlan, holding tight onto his human Sputnik, clambered down off the platform and began to work his way through the crowd. Hadamard stepped forward, discreetly, towards the platform.

  A year after the crash, Benacerraf’s daughter, Jackie, came to stay for a couple of days. She brought her two children, Ben and Fred, four and five respectively. The boys seemed to fill Benacerraf’s ranch house at Clear Lake with light and noise, and she spent as much time as she could with them. She got into a routine of working through the day at JSC, spending the early evenings with the children, and staying up nights to work on drafts of her recommendation to Hadamard.

  One night, Jackie disturbed her. She came padding barefoot across the kitchen floor to where Benacerraf sat with her softscreen spread out over the big walnut dining table, at the center of a pool of scattered notes and documents.

  “Mom, you must be crazy,” Jackie said gently. She went to the refrigerator, and returned with glasses of apple juice. “Do you know what time it is? Three A.M.”

  “So it is,” Benacerraf said. “I don’t know where the time goes.” She rubbed her face; the balls of her eyes felt gritty, the muscles aching and sore.

  Jackie sat at the table. “So how long has this been going on?”

  “Oh. Ten, eleven months or so.”

  “Ten months? My God, Mother”

  “It isn’t so bad. I travel a lot; I catnap on flights or in the car. And there’s an end in sight. I’m working on a project. When it’s done I’ll be able to rest.”

  “Mom, you’re not as young as you were.”

  Benacerraf sighed. “I guess it’s a daughter’s job to say things like that. Well, neither are you.”

  “But I know it. And you won’t catch me working like that.” Jackie smiled, vaguely. “Life’s too short, Mom. After all, what job is worth wrecking your health for? Seriously, you shouldn’t let them push you so hard.”