Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  On it went, and Rosenberg became steadily more enmeshed in the procedures and practices and jargon of this huge organization. And yet, he thought, if you looked at it sideways, the whole Titan program was a remarkable event: here was a bureaucracy, dry and sane, devoting itself to the surreal: a gigantic adventure which everyone was committed to, but whose purpose and logic and meaning nobody could agree upon.

  The hulking form of the B-52 sat on its runway in a puddle of light cast by a circle of big portable floods. Trailers and carts were clustered around the bomber. A fog of crisp liquid oxygen vapor shrouded the contours of the big plane, and people moved through the mist, speaking to each other calmly, working on the aircraft.

  The X-15 itself hung from bomb shackles under the wing of the B-52, black and sleek, dark even in the glare of the floods, as if it actually absorbed the light.

  There was a pungent stink of ammonia, which reached Gareth Deeke even across a hundred yards.

  The smell, suffusing this gray January dawn, triggered his memories sharply, and he felt the years fall away from him; it was as if he was back at Edwards, preparing to burn off another vodka hangover in the exhilaration and terror of a high-altitude flight.

  But as he walked towards the B-52, the ground crew parted before him and avoided his eyes; there was none of the good-natured bull which he recalled from his days at Edwards. As if we are all doing something different now, he thought. Something wrong.

  Here at Canaveral Air Force Base, he was only ten miles or so to the south of Kennedy Space Center, where Endeavour was being prepared for the last Shuttle launch of all. He peered into the north. Maybe he’d be able to pick out the illuminated pad: on clear nights the visibility of the pad’s lights, looming on the horizon, was a symbol of the failure by Hartle and his contacts to impede or even slow the preparations for the final Titan launch, to stem the tide of public support which still seemed to be flowing, generally, in favor of the mission. Certainly, on launch day, this whole damn area would be flooded with rocket light. But today the mist was lingering in the cold January dawn, and to the north there was only darkness.

  He reached the bomber.

  X-15 looked more like a missile than a plane. Big frosted pipes lay on the surface of the runway, feeding liquids and gases into the rocket plane. But the black lines of the X-15 were spoiled by the attachment of a slim white cylinder, round-nosed and tinned, under the center line of the forward fuselage.

  It was an ASAT.

  Gareth Deeke, heart pumping, walked around his bird. X-15, restored from the museum where it had waited out the decades, looked ready to fly, but today was not its day; this morning, under cover of darkness, the ground crew were rehearsing the procedures they would use to mount and fly the bird.

  If it came to that.

  The rocket plane was just a big propellant tank, made of a tough heat-resistant nickel-steel alloy, with a cockpit on the front and rocket engine on the back end. The tanks were nested cylinders, with a long, skinny pipe containing high pressure helium pressurization gas embedded within the big liquid oxygen tanks towards the front of the aircraft. The fuel tank, containing anhydrous ammonia, made up the rear section of the airplane.

  Deeke walked past the frosted-up walls of the lox tank. He didn’t get too close; the tank seemed to suck the warmth out of the air around him, cold as it was already. You could always tell how much lox was left in the tank by the level of frost on that outer skin. He could make out the three main fittings holding the rocket plane in place, and the quick-disconnect lines snaking out of the B-52 which topped up X-15 with nitrogen and liquid oxygen. Reaction control jet nozzles gaped in the hull around the nose, two on top, two on the bottom, and two to cither side. Beside the nozzles there was a stenciled notice saying BEWARE OF BLAST.

  He reached the cockpit, an aluminum box which would be pressurized with nitrogen to thirty-five thousand feet equivalent, and suspended inside the hull of the aircraft itself, isolated to keep it cool. Behind the cockpit was a big pressurized bay containing over a thousand pounds of instrumentation, to measure airspeed, altitude, pitch, yaw and roll rates, control surface positions, bending loads, temperatures… He had been assured that the handling characteristics and controls of the plane would be just as they had been back in 1961, though he didn’t know how the hell they had got all that antique electronics to function again after forty years. Maybe they had cannibalized X-15A-2, the other surviving X-15, which was mothballed at the USAF museum at Wright-Patterson AFB.

  He reached the engine compartment at the back of the plane. The XLR-99 rocket nozzle gaped at the back of the aircraft, two feet long. The rocket, which hadn’t been fired in anger for forty years, looked as fresh as if it had come out of the Thiokol factory yesterday.

  He allowed himself a stab of anger. He’d long lost count of the number of press releases he’d read which said the Shuttle’s main engine was the world’s first truly throttleable engine. The XLR—99 engine was a throttleable, restartable, reusable rocket engine, with almost as much thrust as the throwaway Redstone booster which had thrown Shepard and Grissom up on their first Mercury suborbital lobs. The USAF had been happily flying the thing ten years before the Apollo Lunar Module’s much-vaunted throttleable rockets had carried men to the Moon, and twenty years before Shuttle had first launched, years before NASA had started pronouncing you couldn’t build such a thing.

  We threw all this away, he thought, all the possibilities summed up in the sleek black hide of this thing, because of stupidity and greed, and fear of the Russians, and damn bureaucratic infighting, a millennial madness reaching its final flowering over on Pad 39-B even now.

  In its flight days the X-15 had borne USAF decals on its wings and fuselage, and big NASA strip decals on its tail. But today, the hull was a bare black, unmarked save for information and warning stencils, and its serial number, AF 5-6670.

  And that, Deeke reflected sourly, was entirely appropriate.

  The mist cleared a little. There were stars in the sky. One of them, bright and clear, passed smoothly through the constellations, directly above him. That was the Shuttle orbiter Discovery, its wings reshaped for Titan’s thick air, already in orbit with its cluster of fuel tanks and equipment, waiting for its crew.

  It had to be stopped.

  Determination surged in him. He put aside the doubts and qualms of the ground techs. He had no doubts.

  On the day, if the call came, he would be ready to fly.

  At last, the schedule for STS-147 was firmed up.

  STS-147 would be the last Shuttle launch: the last flight of Endeavour, the mission that would take the crew—including Paula Benacerraf—up to Earth orbit.

  When the launch date was finalized, Benacerraf found herself staring at it, on her softscreen, for minutes at a time. It was like the date of her own execution. She would not see the dawn of the following day—and, perhaps, no dawn on Earth ever after.

  As that epochal day approached, the tempo of Benacerraf’s life accelerated. She was doing three jobs now. As head of the Shuttle program she had responsibilities to discharge beyond the Titan mission, such as the disposal of the program’s assets around the country after the final flights—including thousands of staff. Then, too, she retained a lot of responsibility for the Station hab module conversion, and she spent long hours at Marshall and Seattle working on that.

  Finally she was an astronaut, trying to prepare for the mission itself.

  And, in the midst of this crescendo of activity, Paula Benacerraf—human, grandmother—prepared to leave Earth.

  After all, the Titan expedition was going to be an open-ended mission. So she figured she ought to shut down her life, here on Earth, as if she was indeed going to die.

  She spent a lot of hours scanning images—photographs, movies and videos of Jackie and the grandchildren, a couple of pictures from the walls of her home—onto high-capacity, radiation-toughened discs. She sold everything she owned of value—her apartment, her car, her furn
iture, her books, her clothes—and what she couldn’t sell she was going to give away to friends, or to charities. She wanted Jackie to have first choice. All she saved for herself was the few pounds of personal items she was going to be able to take to Titan. She had some bits of jewelery, and even a couple of precious paper books, sealed in baggies and wrapped up in her fireproof Beta-cloth Personal Preference Kit.

  Benacerraf made out a will. But she tore up the draft. Instead she had her hank draw up authorization for Jackie to become a joint holder of Benacerraf’s accounts.

  But she would need to meet Jackie, one last time, to finalize the transfer. And Jackie had refused even to take her calls, for more than a year.

  Benacerraf kept trying.

  Jackie would only agree to meet her in Green Town, a net Island.

  Benacerraf hated the net and she resisted this. It was just another way of Jackie expressing her disapproval. But she had little choice.

  Benacerraf had always refused to have any kind of net interface equipment in her home, beyond simple e-mail and browser But there were plenty of public net cafés in downtown Houston; she found one in the Galleria which—though expensive—had a good variety of up-to-date equipment, and private booths you could lock yourself into.

  Inside her booth, she wrapped the sensor mask across her face, and the gloves over the palms of her hands. She stood on the treadmill-like motion simulator, and—tumbling a little with the switch—dimmed the lights.

  The mask on her face was soft and damp like flayed skin, she thought and, in the first few seconds of the immersion, quite dark. Then the moist contact pads on the surface of her eyes filled with light, blurred shapes of silver, black and green. She forced her vision muscles to relax; the images were set at virtual-infinity, and it did her no good to try to focus on the covers on her eyes.

  The image resolved.

  She was standing on a lawn of green grass.

  Her arms held out for balance, Benacerraf stepped cautiously forward, over the glowing grass. It felt cool and damp under her feet; it was fresh cut, and she could smell the rich domestic scent of the crushed blades. A sprinkler was turning, droplets of water dancing in the sunlight.

  She looked up, taking care not to move her head too quickly. Even so there was a characteristic delay between the motion of her head and the change in virtual scene in response; they said you got used to that with time, your sensorium accommodating the built-in delay. Benacerraf wasn’t adapted and sure as hell didn’t want to be, and the delay just made her feel motion-sick.

  The lawn she was standing on was a little square, bordered by empty roads. The town was green and still. She could see houses of red brick and white-painted wood, with little white picket fences around their lawns. There were maples, elms and horse chestnut trees, their branches softly rustling in the breeze. There was even a church steeple, with a bell hanging silently. There was some kind of ornament on the lawn, a sculpture; it might have been an iron deer.

  The sky was tall and blue, scattered with fluffy clouds. It felt like morning, and the sun was low, its light on her face flat and warm…

  The sky wasn’t all that impressive, actually. The color looked pretty-pretty fake and too uniform, and those clouds were lumpy, a fairly obvious application of fractal technology. That lawn sprinkler was actually the most ambitious part of this whole scene, she thought. The motion of the droplets had been modeled realistically, with the effect of the gentle breeze on the shape of the droplet cloud captured well. And when she looked more closely she could see how each droplet splashed and broke up when it hit the grass, and scattered in dewlike beads over the blades.

  She could see nothing that looked as if it post-dated, say, 1940. But there was nothing to pin down the time and place here specifically, one way or the other. This was Green Town, probably Illinois, and as far as she was concerned it was just an anal-retentive fantasy, a dream of a middle America that had never existed anyhow, modeled with gigamips of processing power and the most up-to-date VR technology.

  Decadent as all hell.

  One of the houses seemed to stand out from the rest, its colors and outline a little more vivid. So that was probably where she was supposed to go. It was a tall brown Victorian design, the low sunlight making it look like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting. It was elaborately adorned, covered with rococo and scrolls, and its windows were stained, blue and pink, made, of diamond-form leaded glass. There was a broad porch at the front, with a swing that rocked gently back and forth in the breeze, creaking.

  She walked towards the house. She stumbled once, but recovered easily. The little iron deer was in her way, but she didn’t bother to step around it; she walked right through the deer, and it disappeared in a burst of pixels.

  She tramped heavily up the wooden stairs of the house, and onto its porch. The front door was open. She walked in, through a bead curtain. Wind chimes tinkled as she passed.

  She entered a parlor. The furniture was old, covered in a maroon fabric, worn with use and obviously comfortable. There was a piano—an acoustic one—its legs covered up Victorian style. There was a piece of sheet music on the stand. Beautiful Dreamer

  Jackie emerged from a door at the back of the room. She was wearing a trim long dress of gingham, that pretty much covered her from neck to toe. Her hair was brushed back, and her face was recognizably her own—though, Benacerraf thought sourly, rather smoothed-over and more symmetrical than the real thing.

  “Hi,” Jackie said neutrally. She was carrying a glass pitcher of iced lemonade, which moved in viscous waves as she walked. “You want some lemonade?”

  “Hell, no. I mean, no thanks.” Eating or drinking in here meant letting the mask push its way into her mouth and throat.

  They sat on overstuffed Morris chairs, beside a fireplace, under a framed painting.

  Jackie poured herself a glass, and sipped it deliberately, watching her mother. Benacerraf thought she wore the same stubborn look she’d had since she’d learned to be defiant, at the age of five.

  “Are the kids here?”

  “They’ll be over later,” Jackie said. “It’s a school day. So they’re over on Nintendo Island right now. You have any trouble getting here?”

  Benacerraf didn’t much feel like playing this game; she didn’t reply.

  Jackie lit up a cigarette. The smoke curled into the air, blue and white, its form another complex application, Benacerraf thought, of fluid-mechanical modeling. And all utterly pointless.

  “You know, you’re honored,” Jackie said. “Your fame must have spread. The great Saturn explorer.” Her tone was contemptuous. “They don’t normally let you land in the square; there’s a port on a neighboring island, and you have to get a boat over here, then walk from the coast.”

  “So many rules,” Benacerraf said.

  Jackie shrugged. “It’s a world in here, Paula. Of course you have to have rules. They underpin the world. Like the physical laws that govern us in RL—”

  “Oh, come on,” Benacerraf snapped. “This is virtual reality, for God’s sake. Why the hell shouldn’t I fly like Superman if I want to?”

  “You think this is all too cute,” Jackie said sourly. “Well, maybe. It’s pretty much all we’re allowed since the government opened up the net again. You know, police monitoring engines consume twice as many mips as the VR software itself.”

  Benacerraf waved a hand deliberately quickly, so fast the processing couldn’t keep up, and she left a trail of pixels, ghostly shadows of her fingers. “But so what? None of this is real. None of it is even unpredictable, challenging. You bind yourselves up in these endless rules, and—”

  “And by contrast,” Jackie said coldly, “you and your little band are going off to break ground on the high frontier.”

  “Isn’t that true? Isn’t that more worthwhile, more real than this?”

  Jackie said bleakly, “There’s nothing out there but a collection of dead rocks and ice balls. Even the Earth is falling apar
t.”

  “So where else to go but inward, retreating into your own head? Right?”

  Jackie sighed. “Is this why you’ve come here, Paula? To attack me again? Because if it is—”

  Benacerraf held her hands up. “Time out, kid. Whenever we get together, we fall into the same old rut.”

  Jackie shrugged and didn’t respond.

  Showing she didn’t care about their flawed relationship was, Benacerraf thought, the most hurtful response she could have made.

  “So,” Jackie said at length. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “I need you to sign some documents.”

  Benacerraf explained her plan.

  “Virtually all my assets are in the accounts, and my salary will continue to be paid into it, as long as I’m alive. I think you ought to have immediate access to those funds. But you have to sign authorization papers; we can do that here, electronically, in Green Town. I also tried to have my pension contributions made over in your favor, but they couldn’t do it. Administrative reasons.” It was ironic, thought Benacerraf; here was NASA busting all the technical and political barriers in the way of a ten-astronomical-unit mission to Titan, but the bean counters couldn’t find any way around their own rule books…

  Jackie listened to all this, her virtual face expressionless and unreadable. Benacerraf realized, belatedly, that she didn’t even know where her daughter was.

  In the end, Jackie wouldn’t agree to Benacerraf’s proposals.

  “Look, Mother, you don’t really care about me, or the kids. If you did you wouldn’t be indulging yourself in this ludicrous jaunt to Saturn.”

  “I’m trying to make you a gift, of all my property, for God’s sake—”

  “No,” Jackie said, with a harshness not matched by the china-doll prettiness of her virtual face. “You’re just trying to ease your damn conscience. Well, I don’t see why I should make it so easy for you. I won’t sign anything; I won’t have any part of this.”