Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Anyhow, she retrieved the nozzles; she wiped them out and replaced them. She made a mental note that in a couple of weeks, after the next wheat crop, she would have to clean out the culture media.

  If only they were using soil, she mused, then she could take off her gloves and dig in with her fingers; she would need tiny spades and forks, not spanners and screwdrivers. But at least she got to handle the little plants, the green growing things. She breathed on them, enriching their atmosphere with her carbon dioxide.

  It had taken a lot of care to select the plants. In typical NASA fashion, plants had been studied in a way traditional farmers would never have recognized, in terms of parameters like edible biomass produced per unit volume, growth period from planting to harvesting, and biologically recoverable calories.

  So there was wheat and rice, for calories, starch and protein; white potatoes for carbohydrates, vitamin C and potassium; soybeans for protein and amino acids; peanuts for protein and oil—although the peanuts were difficult to grow and harvest—lettuce for vitamin A and vitamin C.

  Wheat was the staple. They got a crop every sixty days. They even had ovens on board (fan-forced—no convection, without gravity) so they could make their own bread. And they were trying out an experimental dwarf spring wheat crop developed in Utah called Apogee, which gave a higher yield.

  The warm scent of bread filling the hab module was one of the most pacifying elements of their whole environment.

  She turned to her next chore.

  Working in microgravity presented its own challenges, as usual. She had to get some kind of foothold, so she jammed her body into the space between the racks using her muscle tension and her legs to hold herself in place. She had a lot of reach—her work envelope, as the mission planners called it, was wider than on Earth, because she could just sway from side to side as she needed to, like seaweed in a current. But her legs, holding her in place, were in tension instead of compression, as they would be on Earth, and she had to take frequent rests to relieve her muscles.

  She liked to shut out the noise of the pumps and fans of the nutrient systems and air blowers; she wore earplugs, like today, or sometimes the headset of a walkman. She found that in here she preferred thin, cold, almost abstract music: complex Bach fugues, perhaps, or late Beethoven string quartets. There was something about the voiceless, precise compositions which seemed to complement the lush warmth and visual brightness of the farm.

  She was bending the rules by wearing the plugs, though. There was a danger she wouldn’t be able to hear the master alarm, if it sounded; there were visual alarms built in here—flashing red lights fixed to the walls—but, from amongst the racks, they were difficult to see.

  But Libet figured the danger was minimal. The worst that could happen was probably a micrometeorite puncture—and then she would feel any loss of pressure as rapidly as it happened—or a radiation pulse, a solar particle event. But even so she was safe; the farm was just about as heavily shielded from radiation as the hab module. Plants had higher radiation dose limits than humans, but exceeding the limits would have just as lethal effects. She would just have to wait out a storm in here, for as long as it took.

  As she worked, she thought a lot about Nicola.

  Niki’s depression seemed to be deepening. She went through the work assigned her with no enthusiasm, and not much concentration. And she was having trouble sleeping at night, and was reluctant to wake in the morning. She seemed to have no appetite—hell, none of them did but she was a lot less determined about keeping up her diet and her fluid intake than the rest.

  Libet thought she understood. The isolation, the cramped quarters, the growing unreliability and shoddiness of their equipment—and the utter, utter impossibility of being able to get away from the others—all of that was working on them all in some way, and, it seemed to Libet, they were all changing, adapting to the situation.

  Bill Angel, for instance, seemed to be shedding a lot of the bluff humor that Libet had recognized in him on Earth. He had grown an undisciplined black beard—he didn’t even look like himself any more and he spent a lot of time bawling out the mission planners and controllers who, he said, were grinding them all flat with their instructions and demands and routines—or Paula Benacerraf over some chore he’d been assigned that he wasn’t happy with, like the work on the balky SCWO waste-reduction reactor which still wasn’t functioning as it should…

  All this bull just washed over Libet. Angel was a pilot with nothing to do, just spinning his wheels. He was just finding ways to cope with his situation. Likewise Rosenberg, with his endless, obscure chains of experiments. Ways to cope.

  But with Nicola it was different. Nicola didn’t seem to be finding the inner resources to handle this. She didn’t find anything a comfort any more: the work they did, the entertainment materials they’d brought along.

  But at least they had each other.

  It had taken the two of them a month to work up the courage—and to get over their space adaptation syndrome—but now Libet and Mott were regularly spending their sleep times in each other’s quarters.

  It was a small ship, and the rest weren’t stupid. She’d intercepted one or two quizzical smiles from Benacerraf, exasperated glares from Bill Angel. Only Rosenberg seemed too sunk in his own world to figure it out.

  Sharing quarters designed for one person was pretty cramped, but that was okay for Libet; she seemed to find the closeness of another human body—the warm smoothness of Niki’s skin against hers—a great comfort.

  Like the farm, maybe: elemental human contact, as a barrier against the huge searing dark outside.

  A farm this size needed around sixteen hours work a day: planting, harvesting, wheat grinding, preventative maintenance, adjusting the nutrient solution. So that was work for two people, every day.

  Libet did more than her fair share. But then, this was her favorite place in the spacecraft cluster.

  She hadn’t expected to react like this, to hanker after growing things. She was a city girl. And after all she’d spent months in low Earth orbit, on Station.

  But there, right outside every window of Station, had been Earth itself. Here on Discovery, between planets, Earth had been taken away. The only object that showed as more than a point of light anywhere in three-dimensional space all around the orbiter was the sun, huge and bright.

  Oh, Venus was approaching; in a month or so they would make their first pass past the planet, for the first of the two fuel-saving gravity assists. It would be spectacular. But Venus was just a big white featureless billiard ball, hot and hostile and hidden. Venus didn’t count.

  The orbiter was like an isolated island, suspended in blackness. And she missed Earth. She missed having that huge sky-bright skin below the craft all the time, complex and dazzling, throwing soft, diffuse light into the cabins. She missed having home so close. She was, she was realizing belatedly, a true creature of Earth; she just wasn’t designed to be out here, in all this emptiness, with only the hard, pitiless light of the sun around her.

  And so she spent as much time as she could afford here, in this little bubble of light and life, ignoring the huge dark beyond the walls.

  Angel pushed buttons to open up the protective doors over the various solar telescopes. The cameras provided images of the sun at a variety of wavelengths, each generated by a different temperature, and so corresponding to a different depth in the star. In the H-alpha wavelength the sun was a fat, roiling sphere of white gas, peppered with black specks that churned, slowly and grandly, like some huge bowl of boiling oatmeal. In the extreme ultraviolet, the sun was a disc of irregular patches of color, without pattern or meaning he could detect. And in X-ray the sun was a fantastic landscape of blue, black and orange, showing up the areas of greatest activity and heat.

  As soon as he brought up the X-ray image he could see what the problem was.

  There was a big fat dark blue patch, like a bruise, right in the middle of the sun’s disc. That was a coro
nal hole, a part of the solar surface where the corona—the sun’s outer atmosphere—was less dense. Magnetic field lines could sprout vertically out into space, gushing out heavy particles at twice the normal velocities, like a hose. And that powerful jet was slamming into the slower-moving solar wind that lay between the sun and the spacecraft, churning it up into vast disturbances with tangled magnetic fields.

  And all that shit was coming down on Discovery.

  Angel hit the master alarm. The hab module was filled with a loud, oscillating tone, and four big red push-button alarm lights lit up on the instrument panels around the cabin.

  A second later the automatic flare alarm joined in, triggered by the radiation pumping against the hull of the ship.

  Benacerraf came stumbling out of her quarters. She was in her underwear, and Angel could see the curves of her small, blue-veined breasts. Her hair was stuck to the side of her face, and her eyes were huge.

  Angel hit a button to kill the alarms.

  “What? What is it?”

  “SPE,” he said. Solar proton event: a solar storm. “We got to get everyone in here.”

  “Rosenberg is supposed to be asleep, and Nicola is in the centrifuge.” She looked about. “Siobhan must be in the farm—”

  “She’ll be safe if she stays in there,” Angel barked. “You bring Nicola in. I’ll talk to Siobhan, make sure she stays put for a few hours.”

  As he snapped out the orders, he felt exultant. At last, they were going to see some action; at last, after these months of dullness, he could do something.

  Angel tried the squawk box, but got no reply from Libet. So he went back to the science station to try to get more data on the SPE.

  Soon, four of them were here: Angel, Benacerraf, hastily dressing, Rosenberg looking sleepy and confused, and Nicola Mott, still sweating from her time in the centrifuge.

  Angel found his gaze wandering over Mott’s body, what he could see of it inside her shapeless Beta-cloth clothes. She was sunk in on herself, but she was cute as hell, dyke or not. It would be interesting to make her sweat some other way, he thought.

  “How come those assholes on the ground didn’t warn us about this?”

  Benacerraf shrugged. “They probably didn’t know themselves. We’re a lot closer in than they are; the storm may not have reached them yet.”

  He tried the squawk box again. “Damn it. I still haven’t spoken to Siobhan.”

  Mott looked horrified. “Then she mightn’t know what’s going on. Maybe I should go find her. You know what she’s like. She spends hours in that farm with her earplugs in—”

  Benacerraf said, hesitant, “The access tunnel isn’t shielded. Wait until the storm passes. Anyhow, even if she has her plugs in she should see the alarm lights.”

  Mott frowned, and started to chew at her fingernail, industriously.

  Angel tried the squawk box again; there was no reply. “Ah, the hell with it. If there’s nothing you can do, make the best. Right? I’m hungry. Who wants to eat? Paula, who’s on chow detail?”

  Rosenberg sounded disgusted. “I’m going back to bed. You asshole, Bill.”

  The women turned away from him. Benacerraf said, “Keep trying Siobhan, Bill.”

  Chicken-livered dykes, he thought.

  He turned once more to the X-ray image in the monitor, and watched the gray-black coronal hole work its way across the boiling surface of the sun.

  When her work was done, Libet stowed away her tools and cleaned her hands with disinfected wet-wipes. She was due for her daily four hours in the centrifuge; her legs seemed to ache in anticipatory protest.

  She stripped off her coverall and hat, and stowed them away. She opened the hatch to the connecting tunnel which would take her back to the hah module. The tunnel, a few yards long, was light, flexible.

  Unshielded.

  She had to dog closed the hatch behind her. The hatch was heavy and tended to stick, and had taken some shifting; by the time she had it closed she was tired and felt ready to rest, briefly, in the tunnel.

  She let herself drift in the air, and she could feel her relaxing muscles pulling her into the usual neutral-G fetal position.

  She closed her eyes. After the breezy farm, the tunnel was cool and still and comfortable. Maybe she could nap for a few-minutes; it wouldn’t do any harm.

  A line of light streaked across her vision, a tiny meteor against the dark sky of her closed eyelids.

  In the farm module, unnoticed, a red lamp was blinking.

  There were no alarms in the access tunnel.

  Benacerraf drifted in her sleeping bag, her reading light on, listening on the squawk box to the reports from JSC.

  Solar plasma was buffeting the Earth’s magnetic field, making it shudder, and huge electric currents were surging around the upper atmosphere.

  The power grid serving the Canadian province of Alberta had gone down. In Britain, the northern lights were visible as far south as London. The Global Positioning System was breaking down; navigational fixes from the GPS satellites were unreliable because of the changing properties of the atmosphere. The Chinese had lost Echostar 3, a communications satellite. The energetic electrons racing around the Earth had caused a build-up of charge; a spark had generated a fake command to turn Echostar’s solar panels away from the sun. After a couple of hours, its batteries ran down, and it was lost. The energy of the storm was also heating up the outer atmosphere, making it expand; satellites as high as two or three hundred miles were experiencing a twenty-fold increase in atmospheric drag…

  She fretted about Siobhan. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do until the storm passed.

  Discovery was designed to shield them from the radiation hazards of deep space—hazards from which Earth’s magnetosphere and thick layer of atmosphere sheltered the rest of mankind.

  The system had to cope with three kinds of ionizing radiation, high-energy particles and photons which could knock apart the atoms of the body as they sleeted through it. There was a steady drizzle of solar cosmic rays—the regular solar wind, a proton-electron gas streaming away from the sun, boiled off by the million-degree temperatures of the corona and galactic cosmic radiation, GCR, a diffuse flood of heavy, high-energy particles from remote stars, even other galaxies, which soaked through the Solar System from all directions. And then, in addition to the steady stuff, there were SPEs—solar proton events, the kind of storm they were suffering now, intense doses of radiation which persisted for short periods, a few hours or days.

  Astronauts tended to think of solar and galactic radiation as career-limiting, and SPEs as life-threatening.

  Discovery’s aluminum shell would shield them from the worst of the effects of GCR, reducing their cumulative six-year dose, anyhow, to maybe three hundred rem. That was high—and significantly increased the risks they all faced of cancer and leukemia later in life—but within the four hundred rem advisory career limit.

  Of course it meant they wouldn’t be able to sustain another six-year journey home again, without improved shielding.

  But to shelter from an SPE they had to retreat to their storm shelters, either the hab module or the farm, with their heavy plating of aluminum and water tanks clustered around the walls.

  It—just if—Siobhan was caught in the storm, she could expect a dose of a hundred rem. At least. That would give her nausea, vomiting for a day or so, fatigue. And some long-term damage to the more sensitive parts of her body—the gonads, lymphoid tissues.

  If Siobhan was unlucky her dose might rise five times as high.

  And anyhow, there was no safe lower limit, Benacerraf knew. However small the dose, you were at risk.

  To Benacerraf, huddled in her cabin and waiting out the storm from the sun, it felt as if the metal walls of the ship, the elaborate precautions and dosimeters they had taken, counted for nothing, as if Discovery was no more protection than a canvas-walled tent, in this storm generated by huge and remote and impossibly violent events. She had never felt s
o far from the protective embrace of Earth.

  The Discovery crew truly had stepped outside the farmhouse door.

  In the access tunnel, Libet started awake.

  She could see more flashes, within her eyeballs: little streaks and curves and spirals.

  She knew what that meant, of course: the flashes were caused by heavy particles, lacing into the matter of her eyes. She thought she could feel the radiation sleeting through her, warm and heavy. Those heavy nuclei would be ramming into the molecules of her body, smashing away electrons in little cascades.

  Hard rain, she thought.

  She really ought to open the hatch to the hab module, she thought. But, as she peered up through eyes that were laced with flashes and spirals, it seemed a long way away, and an awful lot of effort. Maybe soon.

  And anyhow she was starting to feel ill. Nauseous, a little giddy, tired. Maybe it was space adaptation syndrome back again.

  And she thought she could smell ozone, like a beach.

  She closed her eyes again, and drifted like a fetus in the air.

  Poor Niki, she thought.

  The flashes and spirals continued, as if a shoal of some tiny fish were swimming through her head.

  Day 325

  The blood trickled sluggishly out of Angel’s arm.

  As he tended the donation bag, Rosenberg couldn’t tell what Angel was thinking.

  Bill just didn’t seem the same guy Rosenberg had got to know down on Earth. Floating around up here in the usual semifetal position, so many of his gestures and postures had changed: he would never sit with his legs crossed like he used to, or stand with his hands on his hips, or cross his arms… Microgravity had even messed up their body language. Rosenberg just couldn’t read Angel any more.