Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Maybe the worst problem was that the five of them had, prior to Libet’s accident, come to some kind of accommodation with each other, and with their situation. But the injury to Libet during the solar storm, and now her likely death—the loss of her skills, her muscles, her dedication to the farm, her contribution to the collective personality of the crew—was likely to destabilize them all, he feared.

  Or worse. It might destroy them altogether.

  … In sleep, her skin was smoothed out, almost glowing in the soft light of her cabin’s reading lamp. She looked young, trouble-free, save for the occasional grimace, pain echoes which crossed her face.

  It was an odd thing, but he’d never really gotten to know Libet, in the years they’d spent together training for this mission, even the months they’d been cooped up together in this hacked-up Space Shuttle. To him she was a kind of sketch, a collection of barely understood traits: her readiness to laugh, her obvious sense of wonder, her youthful impatience to fly in space, her relationship with Mott.

  But then, he hadn’t really gotten to know any of the rest of the crew, except in so far as their interests crossed his own. It was only now, when he had been forced more or less to suspend his own work on the Titan data and had been reduced to a kind of low-level nurse for Libet, that he had started to see her as some kind of human being.

  There was a person in there, he realized now: an interior presence as deep and complex as his own, inside this shell of damaged flesh. And she was suffering.

  He hadn’t quite understood his own reaction when he saw how Mott, in her distress, held Libet, and how Libet responded to her. He had been baffled, angry, as if Mott was intruding.

  It was a funny thing, but it was as if, out here, so isolated from all but this ill-assorted handful of people, Rosenberg was starting to gain some kind of psychic connection with his fellow-humans, for the first time in his adult life. And it wasn’t all that hard for him to figure out why he had gotten so angry at Nicola Mott, Libet’s grieving lover.

  It was because—in a stupid, unworthy way, now that she was utterly dependent on him—he was falling in love with Libet himself.

  Rosenberg was jealous.

  When he got back to the common area, he found Angel and Benacerraf screaming at each other.

  Paula had algal growth smeared over her cheek. “Were you aware of this?”

  “Aware of what?”

  “What he’s been taking.” She stabbed a finger at Angel, who loomed in the air beyond her, his beard floating, his body hunched over in the shape of a huge, brown-jacketed claw.

  “Are you talking about drugs?”

  Paula seemed to be trembling, so extreme was her anger. “God damn it, am I supposed to watch over every damn thing on this fucking ship? Rosenberg, you’re the surgeon up here. You got a responsibility for this stuff.”

  “Woah.” Rosenberg held his hands up. “Back off, Paula. As far as I’m concerned all I have is a field assignment. I’m no doctor, and I sure as hell will not accept sole responsibility for our medical supplies.” Now it was his turn to point at Angel, who laughed at him. “If that asshole wants to shoot himself up, that’s his responsibility. There’s no lock on the cupboard, and I’m not prepared to hold any key—”

  “Fuck this,” Angel snapped now. “Look, Benacerraf, I’m not taking any orders from you over this.”

  “Then you can take them from NASA.”

  “NASA are ten million miles away,” Angel yelled. “We’re on our own out here. Don’t you get it?”

  Benacerraf tried to face him, but they were both bobbing in the air as they gestured, their centers of mass adjusting as they threw their arms back and forth. It added an air of absurdity to the whole situation, and was maybe even extending the row.

  “Steroids,” Rosenberg said.

  They turned to look at him.

  “Anabolic steroids. That’s what this is about, isn’t it? He’s taking steroids, against microgravity wasting of his bones.”

  “Steroids,” Benacerraf said, “and fluoride to promote calcium growth. That’s what I’ve been able to trace anyhow.”

  Angel shrugged. “Sue me,” he said. “It’s a hell of a sight easier than those dumb hours in the arm.”

  “It doesn’t work,” Rosenberg said. “What is it you’re using, the nandrolone? Look, steroids work by increasing muscle strength, not by acting directly on the bones. The stronger the muscles, the more stress they impose on the skeleton; and your skeleton adjusts itself until it’s just strong enough to withstand muscle stress. But here’s the catch, Bill—you still have to do your exercise to get the benefit. Don’t you get it? And as for the fluoride, that really is dumb. You’ll start getting calcification where you don’t want it. And—”

  “Up your ass, double-dome,” Angel said savagely. “You’re no doctor. What do you know?”

  Rosenberg shrugged. “Fine. Your choice. Don’t come to me when your tendons ossify.”

  “Fuck you,” Angel said. He pulled himself into his quarters, and slammed the door closed behind him.

  Now that the shouting had stopped, the routine noises of the hab module became more apparent: the whir of the high-speed fans, the hiss of the vents, sixty decibels of white noise.

  For a moment Benacerraf hung there in the air, her legs drawn up towards her chest. Her breathing was rapid, her face flushed, her eyes, over puffed cheeks, red-rimmed and irritated. Rosenberg wondered vaguely about the state of her heart. “Rosenberg,” she said now, “I want you to take responsibility for this. I want you to find a way of locking those damn drugs away from Bill.”

  He didn’t respond.

  He had no intention of locking away anything. He sure wasn’t going to intervene in some argument between Benacerraf and Angel, for the benefit of a control freak like Benacerraf.

  Anyhow, he figured, he had enough responsibility already.

  He got away from Benacerraf. He made his way past the debris of the laundry, and in the galley he tried to find something easy to fix for lunch.

  Hadamard was in Washington during the inauguration of Xavier Maclachlan, after his wafer-thin win in the 2008 election.

  Maclachlan called it a “liberation of the capital.”

  Armed militia bands came in from Idaho and Arizona and Oklahoma and Montana, to fire off black-powder salutes to the nationalist-populist who promised to repeal all gun control laws. In the crowd, Hadamard saw a couple of Ku Klux Klan costumes, a sight he thought had gone into an unholy past. Come to that, there was a rumor that a former Klan leader was being made ready to become a future White House chief of staff. And in his speech Maclachlan appealed to the people to end what he called the “Israeli occupation of Congress”…

  And so on.

  As soon as Maclachlan lifted his hand from the Bible, U.S. peace-keeping troops in the Balkans and Africa started to board their planes to leave. Foreign aid stopped. The U.N. was being thrown out of New York, and there was a rumor that Maclachlan was planning some military adventure to take back the canal from Panama.

  Army engineers set in place during the handover from the last Administration started to build a wall, two thousand miles of it, along the Mexican border, to exclude illegal immigrants. While it was being built, troops brought home from peacekeeping abroad were operating a shoot-to-kill policy.

  There was chaos in the financial markets. Maclachlan had withdrawn the U.S. from the North American Free Trade treaty, from the World Trade Organization, from GATT. Reviews of the country’s membership of the World Bank and the IMF had started—arms of an incipient world government, Maclachlan said, designed to let in the Russians. He had raised tariffs—ten percent against Japan, fifty percent against the Chinese—and world trade collapsed.

  The Chinese, particularly, screamed. And so Maclachlan sent the Seventh Fleet to a new station just off the coast of Taiwan.

  Meanwhile all the strategic arms treaties with Russia were torn up, as Maclachlan ordered his technicians to dig out the blu
eprints for Reagan’s old dream of SDI. In fact, Maclachlan wanted to go further. He was inviting ideas for what he called his “da Vinci brains trust.” The press was full of schemes for fantastic new weapons: smart remote sensors; dream mines that could shoot at passing traffic; smart armor that would use explosive tiles to deflect incoming projectiles; maybe even an electrical battlefield in which electricity-propelled shells would be zapped in by low-flying aircraft.

  And back home, Maclachlan had cut off any remaining programs which benefited blacks and other minorities, and any funding that appeared to support abortion, which had been made illegal in any form.

  Xavier Maclachlan was a busy man, and he was fulfilling his campaign promises.

  Jake Hadamard was still in his job at NASA, trying to maintain support for the Titan mission, still coping with the fallout from the Endeavour launch. Not that anybody seemed to care much about that any more. The scuttlebutt, in fact, was that Maclachlan was lining up Al Hartle as Hadamard’s replacement. Maclachlan couldn’t have sent a clearer signal as to what he thought of the X-15 incident.

  Hadamard had thought he could work with Maclachlan. All his life, Hadamard had put himself, his career, first; he’d thought he could work with anybody.

  Maybe he’d been wrong.

  He thought Maclachlan was causing a lot of people a lot of misery, needlessly. He was stirring up hate that might rebound on him. And he was taking one hell of a risk by enraging China like this.

  Hadamard felt afraid of the future. But his greatest fear was that Maclachlan might actually be right. What if his protectionism and military bristling actually gained back the advantage for the U.S., as they all entered the second decade of what the commentators were calling “China’s century”? What if his own, Hadamard’s, vestigial moral doubts were exposed as the confusion of a weakling? What then…?

  The future, his personal future and the nation’s, was more cloudy than ever before.

  Marcus White asked to meet him at the KSC Visitors’ Center. He parked his car and walked through the Kennedy rocket park. Hadamard remembered how you used to be able to see the rockets as you approached the Visitors’ Center, sprouting from the far side of the freeway, white and silver, like the ash-coated stumps of burned-out trees, tied to the ground by their stay-wires.

  Now, though, those silver treestumps were almost all fallen; those that hadn’t been dragged away to be dismantled lay against the hot ground like discarded matches.

  He was early.

  The old Visitors’ Center was deserted—the ticket booths closed up, the once-sparkling VR displays of the Moon and Mars just empty stages—but the main work of dismantling the place hadn’t yet begun, and as Hadamard walked the click of his patent leather shoes on the floor echoed.

  He walked around the old-fashioned displays of real hardware: Gemini, Mercury, Apollo. The Mercury capsule—America’s first manned spaceship—was just a cone of corrugated metal, packed with equipment, enclosed in a glass sheath; the controls were glass and Bakelite and metal toggles, clunky and crude. It was hard to see how a man in a pressure suit could get inside there, let alone fly the thing into space.

  Even the Apollo Command Module seemed small, dingy and primitive: impossibly cramped, with the metal frames of those three couches jammed in together. The interior finish had faded to a muddy yellow. There was big chunky machinery on the hatch, and tiny, thick windows, and Velcro patches everywhere.

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  The gravelly voice in his ear made him jump. He turned. In the dimmed lights he made out the tough leather face of Marcus White.

  “I know what you’re thinking. How the hell did they go to the bathroom in there? Well, I’ll tell you. You had to strip naked, see, and then take this plastic bag and clamp it to your ass. And when the turds came out you had to hook them down into the bag with your finger, through the plastic. No gravity; nothing to make stuff fall by itself, right? And then—”

  Hadamard forced a smile. “Marcus,” he said, “I know how Apollo astronauts went to the bathroom.”

  “So you came to see these old birds before they are taken out for scrap?”

  “They’re not being scrapped, Marcus,” Hadamard said patiently. “As you know. They’ll be put in storage, here at the Cape or at Langley or Vandenberg. It’s just—”

  “I know. Nobody wants to see this old junk any more. Right? So, you believe that too, Jake?”

  Hadamard shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know any more, Marcus. Most of the population is too young to remember Apollo anyhow. And the opinion polls say most of them don’t believe it ever happened, that it was all faked, a Cold War stunt. Attendances here have dropped right off. What do you want to see me about?”

  White let his mouth drop open. “You don’t know what’s going on here—you, the big cheese?”

  “I don’t get to hear everything.”

  “Sure. Not since Maclachlan took the oath, right?”

  Hadamard stiffened. “So tell me.”

  White made an odd, growling sound at the back of his throat. “I’ll show you. I was called in to do a VR recording. For the new arcade. They called us all in, those who are left alive. Pete, Neil… Quite a reunion.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  “Not really.” They walked on, past more mummified, dust-covered 1960s hardware. “You know, I see these guys once every five or ten years. And all I can think is, once you could bounce around on the Moon as light as a feather, and now, my God, look what all this gravity has done to you…

  “Anyhow, come on. You won’t believe your fucking eyes.”

  The new arcade was a lot smaller and more compact than the old, sprawling Visitors’ Center—it had an atmosphere more like a chapel, in fact, as opposed to the old center’s VR whizz-bang. There were no Geminis suspended from the ceiling, no wax dummies of spacewalking astronauts, no Jim Lovell space-suits or Lunar Rovers on faked-up moonscapes. There were a few simple decorations—abstract paintings of the Earth, Moon and stars—and a discrete row of VR booths, almost like confessionals.

  White pulled back the curtain on the first booth. It showed a simulated Buzz Aldrin, as he’d been when aged around seventy: tanned, seated, relaxed in a sports shirt and slacks. As the curtain opened he went into action.

  … I remember reading about Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing when they got to the summit of Everest, in 1953, the VR said. They just had a few minutes on the peak. Hillary acted like a conqueror. He took pictures down the sides of all the ridges, to prove to everyone that they had made it. But Tenzing knelt down and hollowed our a little place in the snow, and filled it with offerings to his God. You see, for him, it was more like a pilgrimage.

  If anyone was going to top that for a pilgrimage to a strange and remote place, it was Neil and me.

  We had a quiet moment, after we’d settled down from the post-landing checks. In my Personal Preference Kit I’d packed away a little flask of wine, a chalice and some wafers. There was a little fold-down table just under the keyboard that worked the abort guidance computer. I keyed my mike, and said something like, “This is the LM pilot. I want to ask everybody listening in, whoever and wherever they may be, to pause for a moment and contemplate the events of the past few hours, and to give thanks in his or her own way.” So I poured out my wine; I remember how slowly it rolled out of the flask in that gentle gravity, and curled up against the side of the cup. And I read, silently, from a small card where I had written out a quote from the book of John: “I am the vine and you are the branches/Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit/For you can do nothing without me…”

  “Are these recordings?” Hadamard asked.

  White shrugged. “Some recordings, some cleaned-up and digitized, some straightforward faked-up sims. The story about Buzz’s communion on the Moon is true, though. Look at this next one.” He pulled back a second curtain; another spectral simulation popped into life.

  My name is Jim Irwin, and in 1971 I
traveled to the mountains of the Moon. I was captivated from my first footsteps off the LM, when I nearly tipped over, and found myself staring back up at the sparkling blue of Earth. When I stepped into that distant, untrodden valley, I felt buoyant, elated; I felt like a little child again. The Lunar Apennines weren’t gray or brown as I had expected, but gold, in the light of the early lunar morning. Golden mountains. They looked a little like ski slopes, actually. Others called that place stark and desolate; I have to say I found it warm, friendly, welcoming. The mountains surrounded our little base like a hand cradling a droplet of water, of Life. I felt at home on the Moon… At one point we had a problem deploying our ALSEP, our science station, that we had never encountered in training. The cord that was supposed to deploy the central station broke. Well, I prayed for guidance; as I often did during those three days, I recited a phrase from the Psalms which goes: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills / From whence Cometh my help? / My help cometh from the Lord.” And you know, I knew straight away that the answer was to get down on my knees and to pull that cord with my hands. And it worked. I had this glow inside me; I felt we could solve anything that came up, that nothing could go wrong. I sensed that God was near me, even in that remote place… I knew then that God had a plan for me, to leave the Earth and to come back to share the adventure with others, so that they could be lifted up in turn…

  Irwin looked thin, pale, wasted to Hadamard; two decades after his return from the Moon, Irwin had died of a massive heart attack.

  White was looking into his face, waiting for a response.

  Hadamard spread his hands. “Maybe this isn’t so bad, Marcus. After all, maybe we’ve been too hot on the technology, rockets and capsules, for all these years. Maybe we neglected the spiritual side too much. This is just a—course correction.”

  “Bullshit,” White growled. He stalked forward and pulled another curtain.

  … I could see the crescent Earth rise, glowing, through the windows of the Command Module. We were returning home. The pressure was off after the Moonwalk, and we could relax and try to make sense of what had happened to us. And as I worked, just routine stuff keeping the spacecraft going, I was filled with a kind of gentle euphoria, a great tranquillity, and a sense that I understood. It was as if I had suddenly started to hear a new language—one spoken by the Universe itself. No longer did the Earth, or anything in the Universe, seem random to me. There was a kind of order—I could feel it out there—all the worlds of the Solar System, the stars and galaxies beyond, all moving like clockwork together. It was a sudden revelation, you must understand; one moment I was a detached observer, stuck in my head as if inside some kind of armored tank of flesh and muscles—just like you must feel—and the next I could see, for sure, that I was part of it all. And as I worked on I had a sense of being outside myself—as if I was a robot, and somebody else was turning the knobs and tracing down the checklists. I knew I had been enlightened, although right there I didn’t know how or why; I guess I have spent the rest of my life figuring it out. But I knew, even then, it was the most important moment of my life; it even overshadowed walking on the Moon itself…