Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  They started to argue again.

  It was like resuming a conversation, even though they hadn’t spoken for so long.

  Benacerraf struggled to understand.

  Perhaps, she thought gloomily, this is more than some kind of generation gap. Perhaps the species has reached a bifurcation. One branch reaching for other worlds, the other receding into an online sea, swimming in great mindless shoals, twitching and turning in unison. Beautiful, but empty.

  In another century, we may not recognize each other.

  Or maybe, she thought gloomily, I’m just getting old.

  Maybe it’s just as well I’m getting the hell out, of a world I don’t understand any more.

  She tried, one last time, to marshal her thoughts.

  “Jackie, your life is your own—as is mine, to do with as I please. And I think it’s better to do this, to go to Titan—or die in the attempt—than to stay around here, getting steadily older, becoming a cliché for you. I’m sorry if it hurts. But I don’t owe you anything.”

  “And what about the kids? What will I tell them when I have to explain they can’t see grandma any more?”

  “Oh, come on,” Benacerraf said sadly. “In a few years they wouldn’t be interested anyhow. And besides, there will be telecasts from the mission—”

  Jackie stood up. “Don’t you get it? Nobody will watch the telecasts. Nobody has cared for years. Only you, you old people. Nobody will give a damn, as you drift off into the darkness. If you go, I’ll tell the boys you’re dead,” she said evenly. “That’s the truth, isn’t it? What is this, but an elaborate suicide?”

  On and on.

  They parted without affection. Jackie came forward to hug her, but Benacerraf couldn’t bear to submit to such an electronic embrace.

  Benacerraf walked out of the house, and back down the steps to the lawn where she’d first arrived. So, at the end of it all, they were reduced to this, a mother and daughter able to face each other only by locking themselves away in darkened rooms, hundreds of miles apart, with their faces buried inside electronic masks.

  She tramped over the grass, fumbling at the mask which covered her face.

  When she emerged into the booth in the Galleria, she got out as quickly as she could. She half-ran out of the mall, and when she got outside, under a murky sky, she sucked in great lungfuls of hot, smoggy Houston air.

  As the launch itself approached, the intensity of the training slackened, and it seemed to Rosenberg that they started to enter a realm of tradition, and superstition, and magic.

  A couple of weeks before the liftoff, for example, they all went down to the Outpost Tavern. This was a wooden shack outside the gates of KSC, and the tradition was that every astronaut had to drink in there. Its walls were encrusted with signed photos of grinning spacemen, and Rosenberg learned—it was incredible—that the Outpost had originally been situated at Ellington, near Houston, and moved out here plank by wooden, beer-stained plank.

  He didn’t dare question any of this stuff. It was understandable when you remembered that space travel was almost fifty years old now, and like any other human activity it was bound to accrete its own traditions. If these NASA people, under their WASP technocratic hides, believed some kind of white magic was necessary to get their birds off the ground, Rosenberg wasn’t going to start arguing now.

  And then, a week before the launch, they were moved into the quarantine facilities at Houston, and then the crew quarters at the Cape, and now nobody from the outside world was allowed in—not even families—unless they passed a strict medical. That made sense to Rosenberg; he had no wish to take infection into space.

  But, incredibly, a couple of days before leaving, they were allowed to greet their families one last time, face to face in the open air, on a grassy sward close to the crew quarters, separated only by a fifteen-foot ditch. Rosenberg couldn’t believe it. He recognized Jackie Benacerraf, Paula’s daughter, over there with her boys, and, standing there in cold January sunshine, they had a short, shouted, embarrassed conversation about life on Titan.

  He observed how tough it was for the others—particularly Paula—to say good-bye, this one last time, without even being able to touch their family members. As a quarantine procedure it was dubious. And as a piece of psychology, he thought, it was truly, spectacularly dumb.

  And then there were two days to go.

  And then one.

  And then, a subtle knock by a WASP fist on the door of his room, and he was awake on Earth for the last time, for it was the morning of the launch.

  He even had a personal checklist:

  9:00 P.M. Wake up

  9:30 P.M. Breakfast

  2. 58 A.M. Lunch and crew photo

  3:28 A.M. Weather briefing

  3:38 A.M. Don launch and entry suits

  3:50 A.M. Crew suiting photo

  4:08 A.M. Depart for pad 39-B

  Rosenberg went through the routines he’d practiced so often in a daze; he let the various techs just manage him through.

  It took him a full hour to be loaded into his pressure suit, for instance. The rubber sleeves and neck were tight, and he had to squeeze in there, like putting on a tight-fitting sweater. The suits were actually a post-Challenger modification designed to close a few more non-survivability windows in case of malfunction. Nobody had been prepared to tell Rosenberg, for all his pressing and all the training time they’d spent on disaster recovery, whether in the pinch the suits would be any use at all.

  There was a lot of tension, forced humor, in that suiting room. The US Alliance technicians were bland, smiling and competent, like well-trained nurses preparing him for an operation.

  Angel was in his element. At one point he slapped Rosenberg on the back. “How do you feel, buddy? Just like being in the locker room before a basketball game at high school. Right?”

  Wrong, thought Rosenberg. Dead wrong.

  There were more rituals, as they headed out of the building towards the bus that would take them to the pad. There was a card game called Possum’s Fargo that they had to play, for instance, with a couple of the techs. Rosenberg couldn’t believe his eves. Here they were, the five of them, like huge insects in their glaring orange pressure suits, standing around a table to play what seemed like, to him, a kid’s version of poker. But—rigid tradition had it—they couldn’t leave, until the commander, Angel, in this case, had lost a hand.

  It took six hands.

  They emerged into the chill pre-dawn.

  The five of them clambered, bulky and clumsy, into a bus. The bus was cramped, depressingly ordinary. Rosenberg, short of sleep, felt compressed by mundanity, the gritty ordinariness of things; he felt irritable, as if his imagination had been switched off.

  He suspected much of the news of the day was being kept from them, but he’d heard a little scuttlebutt over breakfast. The launch, possibly the last spectacular space event at KSC, was attracting crowds, to the bayous and motels of Florida. But the forces which had opposed the Titan program were gathering too. USAF spokesmen were steadily denouncing NASA. There were demonstrations at the security gates, and there was talk of a group calling themselves Nullists who had got as far as the pad itself, and lain down their bodies in the flame bucket. Even within NASA, there wasn’t a unanimity of support: Rosenberg had heard of resignations from Barbara Fahy’s team of controllers at JSC, problems with suppliers here at the Cape…

  It was all falling apart at last, he thought. But it just had to hang together a few more hours, long enough to release him from Earth.

  The road stretched ahead, straight-infinite, glowing in the headlights of the bus. And on the horizon, at the end of the road, he could see the pad itself, the glowing Shuttle waiting for him in a pyramid of searchlights.

  At the pad, three hours before launch time, they were taken up the gantry elevator to the White Room, all of two hundred feet above the Earth. And now, at the far end of the room, Rosenberg found himself facing the spacecraft at last, a slab of End
eavour’s powder-white tiled skin, the tight round scuffed-metal hatch embedded in it.

  He took a breath. Salt. It seemed entirely appropriate, he thought, that his last lungful of Earth air should smell of the sea.

  He had to crawl into the orbiter through the tight hatch, as if being born in reverse. A white-suited tech was there to peel off his rubber overshoes, and to place him in his metal-frame seat, tipped up so he lay on his back, gently placing his helmet and parachute pack.

  The tech had the US ALLIANCE logo on his back; he wasn’t a NASA employee, Rosenberg reflected, but a worker for the lowest bidder in a contracted-out operation. Comforting.

  “… Okay, real good. Put your other arm through there and I’ll hold it for you. Okay. Now your comms check. Talk to the OTC on that button.”

  Rosenberg pressed the button. “OTC, this is MS-1.”

  “Loud and clear. Good morning.”

  The tech said, “Now put your visor down on the right.”

  “It’s down.”

  “Tighten your helmet a little bit at the back. Make sure it’s snug but not too tight. Push this button right here and tell the LTD comm check.”

  “LTD, MS-1. Comm check.”

  “Loud and clear.”

  “Now raise your visor with a little push with your right hand. Right hand there. That’s good. Now we’ll put this little air pack where it feels most comfortable to you, about here, beside your seat. Feel it there? Okay? You’re ready. Doing good. Watch your arm there, Isaac. Now, while I hook up Nicola you’re going to lose comms for a while…”

  And thus Rosenberg, already toilet-trained, was fussed over as if by a parent loading a toddler into a push-chair, as he was strapped into this couch, upended between two gigantic rocket boosters, while a mountain of liquid fuel was pumped in below his spine.

  The Shuttle was launched from the Cape, and, in the course of its routine operation, was supposed to come back down to the Cape, to America. After landing a version of the White Room was clamped onto the hatchway of the Shuttle, clean and enclosed and populated by more smiling, hand-shaking technicians, and the shaky astronauts were helped down, and delivered to their families once more, as if they’d never left, as if Shuttle was just a huge elevator system, he thought, lifting Americans in hygienic enclosure to the stars and back again, with all the mystery washed out by routine.

  Except today, he thought, this old elevator is going up to the sky, and ain’t never coming back down again.

  The long count continued. And as supercooled fuel was pumped into the stack, the metal walls creaked and moaned.

  At Canaveral Air Force Base, Gareth Deeke was woken by a phone call. A one-word command.

  He closed his fist. He was going to get his flight.

  He climbed out of bed and marched to the shower. On the wall, a softscreen TV, activated by his movement, filled up with pictures of a glowing Shuttle.

  “Endeavour, resume countdown on my mark. Three, two, one. Mark. Ground launch sequencer auto sequence started.”

  Bill Angel was lying on his back in the left-hand commander’s seat. Benacerraf was behind him once more, in the flight engineer’s position. Siobhan Libet, for this last flight, was pilot.

  With the orbiter in its vertical takeoff position, the cabin was upended. To Benacerraf, in her flight engineer’s seat, Angel and Libet were precariously suspended above her, like pupae in their orange partial-pressure suits. The rest of Endeavour’s final crew—Mott and Rosenberg—were in the mid deck area behind Benacerraf.

  Angel reached over and pressed a button on a center instrument panel. “Event timer switched to start,” he called. “Operations recorders confirmed on.”

  “Copy, Bill. Have a good trip, you guys.”

  “We’ll send Endeavour back home to the Smithsonian in a week, safe and sound…”

  Now; the software controlling launch events had started its operation; the event timer, a clock on the flight deck’s instrument panel, started counting down.

  So, it started. Barring malfunctions, there would be no more holds. To Benacerraf this moment was like falling off a cliff; now she was falling through time, all the way towards the launch, with the inevitability of aging.

  Endeavour’s windows, pointing upward, were open to the sky. Benacerraf could see a slab of gray, forbidding cloud. The flight deck was warm and comfortable, the calm voices of the pilots over the whir of pumps steady and reassuring.

  But she had already cut her ties with Earth.

  The complex prelaunch ritual continued.

  Inside the suit van, Deeke stripped down to his long johns. Here—refurbished and restored, just like X-15 itself—was his pressure suit.

  The suit was of reinforced rubber, fitted with hoses, knobs and a big metal neck ring. It was tight and uncomfortable, like a full-body girdle. The damn thing had always been a chore to put on, even when he was a lot younger and more lithe than he was now.

  When the inner garment was zipped up, the techs helped him into a silver-colored coverall of a tough artificial fabric, designed to protect the pressure garment in case he had to eject. Next came boots, gloves and helmet. He made sure his mirrored glasses were firmly set in place before the helmet was lifted over his head. When he was a kid, he hadn’t needed any optical correction, of course. Those days were long ago.

  A lengthy check-out followed. The suit techs pressurized his garments and checked every joint of the forty-year-old gear for leakage and mobility. Deeke stood there in the van, enduring the prodding and fingering of the techs.

  These guys were all pretty young; even the senior officer here in the van looked no more than thirty-five. They avoided his gaze. Their expressions were blank, busy, competent. They seemed to typify, to him, the newer generation of military people: calm, assured, expecting to be cocooned and protected and fed information by the high technology systems in which they were immersed. Different from the old days: different from Deeke’s generation, and those who’d gone before, those who’d fought in Vietnam and Korea and the Pacific, who built birds with their bare hands, who’d been prepared to fly to Moscow loaded with nukes.

  He wondered what those old guys would think of him and his mission, when they heard.

  Now there was a call for pilot entry. Equipment specialists formed up to either side of him, carrying a portable liquid oxygen breathing and cooling unit, hooked up to his suit.

  Deeke stepped out of the van. Outside, light was starting to leak into the sky.

  Deeke walked across the tarmac to the X-15. Inside the pressure suit it took some effort just to move his legs forward, and by the time he got to the bird he could feel his lungs dragging at the oxygen fed to him by the suit.

  He climbed the ladder to the access platform over the open cockpit. The roomy cockpit was dominated by the big ejection seat. He could see the seat’s folded-up fins and booms, designed to bloom out after ejection, and the big beefy handles pivoted around the arm rests that would lock his arms and upper body in place in case he had to eject. He’d always found the massive seat terrifying; he’d never had to trust himself to its crushing, over-complicated embrace, and hoped he wouldn’t have to today.

  He slid on in. Suit techs began to strap Deeke in, pulling harnesses around him and hooking him up to his bailout kit, the aircraft’s breathing oxygen supply, and the suit pressurization and cooling gas.

  The seat wasn’t adjustable. He had to have pads for the seat, back and armrests.

  As he looked around the little cabin, he felt his heart thump. The cockpit equipment had the bolted-together look of every test airplane Deeke had ever flown. Its hard-wired analogue instruments struck him as startlingly old-fashioned, though, in this age of glass cockpits. And the whole thing was generally scuffed and worn, despite its refurbishment. This X-15 model had been the first to fly in the test program, and the last. And it showed.

  But now, sitting in this familiar cocoon, it was as it thirty years had fallen away from him; he felt young again.

>   He was surrounded by control panels. The front panel, dominated by a big eight-ball attitude indicator, was encrusted with barometric instruments to help with control and guidance. But for most of the flight the X-15 would be outside the sensible atmosphere, and such instruments were useless; he would have to rely on inertial data, computations performed by the onboard processor.

  For atmospheric flight there were control rudder pedals and a control stick to his right-hand side, which moved the aerodynamic control surfaces. There was also a center stick, but in the course of the flight program it had become a macho thing never to touch that center stick but to rely on the side stick and pedals. And then on the left-hand instrument panel was mounted another hand controller, to operate the manual reaction controls: the little rockets which controlled attitude outside the atmosphere.

  X-15 was built to fly like an aircraft when it had to, and as a spacecraft when it had to.

  The crew closed the canopy.

  The canopy was a solid box, save for a mailbox window to the front and the sides. Deeke was sealed in, inside this little bubble of nitrogen, unable even to lift his faceplate to scratch his nose. All he could smell was the cool oxygen in his helmet; all he could hear were the intermittent crackles of radio voices. Deeke was in a world over which he had complete control. He could make it hotter or cooler, brighter or dimmer; if he wanted he could even shut out the radio voices with his volume control. He was secure in here, safe. He felt himself receding deeper into the recesses of his own mind, his memories, and it was a nice place to be, excluding the complexities and doubts of the murky future outside.

  Now the bomber’s engines started, and Deeke could feel the deep thrumming transmitted to him through the connecting bomb shackles.

  The B-52 began its taxi to the duty runway. He could hear little of the noise of the plane’s big engines, the nearest just feet away from his head. Ground vehicles drove alongside, eight or ten of them, their headlights making great elliptical splashes of light over the dark tarmac. It was a rough ride for Deeke, with a lot of hard, jarring vibration to his spine. Probably the wheels of the B-52 had got out of the round during the long wait.