Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  White seemed to be grinding his teeth; big animal muscles worked under the silvery stubble of his cheeks. “They’re calling this display ‘Testimony.’ They want a contribution from each of us, the Moonwalkers, the story of our spiritual revelations on the Moon, or in space. For the guys who died, like Irwin and Tom Lamb, they’re assembling VR sims using old interview clips and autobiography stuff.”

  “You won’t cooperate?”

  “Like hell I will. Jake, believe me, it just wasn’t like that. It was about getting through the checklist, and not screwing up. No damn hand of God helped me wipe my butt in one-sixth G…”

  Hadamard shrugged. “I guess this is what you get if you out-source your visitors’ center to the Foundation for Thought and Ethics.”

  “That bunch of fucking creationists?”

  “They have buddies in the White House now, Marcus. Look, you just have to go with the flow on this one. It’s a sign of the times. Maybe we’re entering a more spiritual age.”

  “Come on, Jake. You don’t believe that. This is all just Maclachlan and his tub-thumping fundamentalism. We’re going to get dragged back to the fucking Dark Ages if we go on like this. You know they’re teaching creationism again in the schools?”

  “I know.” Hadamard sighed. In fact there was more, probably unknown to White: for instance NASA press releases were already being “vetted” by a monitor appointed by the Foundation for Thought and Ethics, for any antireligious “bias”; the archive of images garnered from the Hubble space telescope and other satellite observatories was being “purged” of any images which might directly support theories like the Big Bang, in a manner which was not conducive to a “reasoned response” from proponents of alternative “theories”…

  “So it goes, Marcus,” Hadamard said gently. “I guess you heard about the RLV.”

  “Yeah.”

  The final cancellation of the much-delayed, budget-strangled Reusable Launch Vehicle program had been one of Xavier Maclachlan’s first executive decisions.

  “I’d like to think,” White said heavily, “that the decision was made over your head.”

  Hadamard made, routinely, to deny that—then hesitated. “Effectively. I didn’t have much choice, after the President and his budget chief got together to beat up on me. The basic argument is the need to free up federal funds to counter the secession threats from Washington State and Idaho. Not to mention Nevada, if Maclachlan goes ahead with his threat to shut down the godless gambling in Vegas… Maclachlan thinks that the whole point of us launching off the Titan mission before he got elected was so we would have a peg to hang the RLV program on. He thinks we tried to pre-commit him to an expenditure of billions on space, year on year ongoing, before a vote was cast in the ’08 ballot. So he just shut the damn thing down.”

  “So we don’t have a way to retrieve those guys. My God. A year out, and we already abandoned them.”

  “That’s not the official position. That’s not my position. I have study groups in all the centers working on retrieval options without a new RLV. But I admit I had to fight even to ensure the resupply Delta IV launches… Marcus, space just isn’t where the President wants his head to be.”

  “But at least you argued against the shutdown,” White said evenly. “Maybe you’re more than the paperpushing fucker we all thought you were, Jake.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Hadamard said drily.

  The thing of it was, White was right. Hadamard had argued against the decision, and he probably had damaged his career prospects in Maclachlan’s eyes, and he’d gained nothing in the process.

  He was still trying to figure out why he’d done it.

  It sure wasn’t anything misty-eyed to do with the safety of Our Men and Women in Space. To hell with Benacerraf and the rest, frankly; they had known the risks, technical and political, when they climbed on board that last Shuttle.

  For Hadamard, it was something deeper than that.

  Hadamard found himself resisting Maclachlan, on whatever turf he could defend.

  It all seemed to be becoming symbolic, for Hadamard. My God, Jake, he thought. I think you’re growing principles, in your old age.

  But White was still talking. His praise, Hadamard thought drily, was less than unqualified.

  “Of course you got it all wrong,” White said.

  “How so?”

  “Going to Titan in chemical rockets is a truly dumb thing to do. I supported Paula’s suggestion, because it was all we had. And I thought it would be the start of the future, not the end.”

  “So what we should be doing is—”

  “What we should be doing is building for the future. An integrated program. With this Chinese scare we had the chance to change hearts, to thrill and terrify, to lead America to space… We should be building the new RLV, and launching fission rocket stages to orbit, and going to Mars and back in a fort-night. We need an integrated vision of the colonization of the Solar System: Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, beyond. It’s not impossible, technically. It’s just will, and politics. Politics is just paperwork. And this country has carried through great, world-changing projects before. Look at World War Two. And…”

  Hadamard let the old man talk for a while, until he ran dry.

  Then he said, “We’ve been here before, Marcus. In the 1950s we dreamed of Tsiolkovsky: the orderly conquest of space. But in the 1960s, what we built was Apollo. That’s the kind of species we are, it seems. And the smart guy, the guy who achieves things, is realistic—about what we’re capable of, what we’re willing to do—and works in that framework.”

  “Like Jim Webb.”

  “Like Jim Webb. In the middle of the Vietnam war, after his President was shot out from under him, Jim Webb got you to the Moon. He did it by playing hard politics; and he couldn’t have achieved any more. And in the same way, with forty-year-old technology and Maclachlan coming down my throat—”

  “You sent us to Titan.”

  “Hell, yes. I know it’s not ideal, the smartest thing. But we ain’t so good at doing the smart thing, Marcus. You have to do what you can. Anyhow, would you rather not be going to Titan? Would you rather you hadn’t had those three days up there on the Moon?”

  “No. Of course not,” White rumbled. “It’s just I’d rather have had half a lifetime…”

  “That wasn’t an option,” Hadamard said severely. “We do what we can.”

  They walked on through the rest of the half-finished center. White’s temper didn’t improve, as he picked out more VR highlights for Hadamard: Ed Mitchell’s cislunar ESP experiment, endless items from NASA apocrypha—“sightings” by astronauts all the way back to Armstrong of UFOs and alien bases on the Moon, a reconstruction of the supposed “lost” transcript of the last couple of minutes of the Challenger disaster, with its terrified astronaut’s voice reciting The Lord Is My Shepherd…

  White was getting very upset, the muscles and veins in his neck standing out like steel cords.

  “You know, when I was a kid, Titan was just a point of light in the sky, like thousands of others. Now, we’ve landed a probe there. It’s a new fucking world. We have maps of the surface. We have a crew on the way to land there, for Christ’s sake. But if Maclachlan and the Foundation for Thought and Ethics and all those other assholes have their way, in another hundred years Titan will just be a dot in the sky again. How the hell can we lose all that knowledge, Jake?”

  Hadamard said, “But you walked on the Moon. Whatever else happens, they can’t take that achievement away. Not for all time.”

  White studied him. “You are changing, paperpusher.”

  “Or maybe the world is changing and leaving me behind.” He took White’s arm; he could feel bunched muscle, still hard, through a light cotton sleeve. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’ll buy you a beer.”

  They walked out, towards Hadamard’s parked car.

  In the rocket park, a wrecking crew was hauling down the Atlas-Mercury. It was a slim silver
cylinder topped by the dark cone of a Mercury capsule, the configuration that had taken John Glenn to orbit. The Atlas left the vertical with a groan of tearing metal.

  Day 504

  When Siobhan finally died, Mott realized that she had no framework for coping. She had no prayers to say, no hymns to sing, no rational or social structure which could accommodate death.

  But then, the rest of the crew didn’t know how to handle this either.

  Bill Angel argued for breaking down Siobhan’s body and using it as nutrient in the farm. “She always wanted to be a farmer in the sky,” he said, his face hard. “Now she can be. Just dumping her body overboard means losing raw material, a loss we can’t afford.” He stared at Mott, as if challenging her. “We’re on the edge here. Life must go on. Our lives.”

  He’d actually had some endorsement for that, from the surgeons on the ground. Although they would have wanted Siobhan’s flesh and bones treated before being ground up for consumption by the plants.

  Benacerraf opposed it, and Mott and Rosenberg backed her up.

  At last they came up with a solution they could all accept.

  Benacerraf clambered into her EMU, her EVA suit, and hauled Siobhan’s body out of the airlock and into the orbiter cargo bay. The body was wrapped in a Stars and Stripes—a flag that should have fluttered over the ice of Titan—and bound up with duct tape and Beta cloth.

  Benacerraf braced herself in the payload bay and just thrust that body away from her, letting it drift away.

  Benacerraf, floating in the payload bay, said some words, her voice a crackle, distorted by static.

  “I want to read to you what Isaac Newton wrote to John Locke, on looking into the sun. I think it’s kind of appropriate…”

  In a few hours I had brought my eyes to such a pass that I could look on no bright object with either eye but I saw the sun before me, so that I durst neither write nor read but to recover the use of my eyes shut myself up in my chamber made dark for three days together and used all means to divert my imagination from the sun. For if I thought upon him I presently saw his picture though I was in the dark. But by keeping in the dark and employing my mind about other things I began in three or four days to have some use of my eyes again and by forbearing a few days longer to look upon bright objects recovered them pretty well, though not so well but that for some months after the spectrum of the sun began to return as often as I began to meditate, upon the phenomenon…

  “I think that sums it up,” Benacerraf said gently, her voice scratchy on the radio loop. “Siobhan looked, too long, into the face of the sun. We won’t forget her.”

  Mott sat at the window of the flight deck and watched the body ascend past the shadow of the high-gain antenna. In the ferocious glare of trans-Venusian sunlight, it exploded with brilliance.

  At last it was lost in the sky.

  Mott tried to come to terms with all this, with her loss.

  Part of her was frankly glad that it wasn’t her, Mott, who had been caught in that access tube. And another part was guilty as all hell about that.

  But mostly, when she looked into her own soul, she found only incomprehension.

  It proved impossible to forget Siobhan, to restore life to normal. Bizarrely, grotesquely, Siobhan hadn’t actually departed so far. The small impulse that Benacerraf had imparted to the body had done little more than send it on a slowly diverging, neighboring orbit to Discovery’s. Poor Siobhan was still tracking Discovery on its complex path around the sun.

  It was as if Siobhan had never gone away. As if her absence, the hole she left behind, was a real thing, which pursued Mott, no matter what she tried to do: the hours of grueling exercise she burned up in the arm, her work in the corners of the cluster like the farm or the Apollos, the time she tried to lose in the emptiness of sleep.

  After a time, Mott realized, she was barely functioning, so far sunk was she in black despair.

  Barbara Fahy, recently appointed head of the Office of Manned Spaceflight, heard the news on a copied e-mail, passed down the chain of command from Jake Hadamard. Al Hartle—now working as a senior adviser to the President—was trying to block the release of the Delta IV boosters for the resupply of the Discovery crew.

  Fahy couldn’t believe it. But she checked with Canaveral and Vandenberg. The payloads that had been under preparation for the first Delta IV launches—consumables and other equipment to follow Discovery to Titan—had already been stood down, and were being disassembled and placed in storage.

  So it was true.

  She called up Hadamard, in his office at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. In the image in her softscreen, Hadamard looked tired, his face slack.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes, it’s true. I would have told you in person, but—”

  “But what? You couldn’t stand to face me?”

  “I don’t know, Barbara. Hell.” The screen flashed up a blasphemy-filter warning.

  “Jake, I didn’t want this job in the first place. How am I supposed to carry it through if you don’t keep me informed?”

  “Washington’s a tough place right now. Do you really want me to involve you in every battle I have to fight?”

  “If it involves the lives of our crew,” she said, “the only crew we have up there, then, hell, yes, I do.” Blasphemy warning. She poked reflexively at the softscreen, but there was no longer any way to turn off the obscenity filters. “We’ve already stranded them up there, without hope of retrieval. If we cut the resupply—”

  “I know the implications,” he snapped. “I’m not a fool, Barbara. But right now there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do about it. I can’t win every battle. I have to pick my ground.”

  “What ground is more important than this, the lives of—”

  “I have to make that judgment,” he said, his voice laden with stress. “Look, I have a head-to-head with Hartle at nine A.M. tomorrow. In my office. I want you here.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s better if you find out then.”

  “What shall I prepare?”

  He smiled. “Just bring along the look you had on your face when you called me up. Use it on Al Hartle, instead of me…”

  On flights into Washington nowadays, the airlines gave out smog filters and compact respiration packs, as standard to every passenger. And when Fahy reached the limo sent for her, outside the terminal building, the cloudless sky was so smoggy it was actually a little orange.

  Maybe that was an omen, she thought. Titan weather, come to Earth.

  Hadamard’s office was long, plush, old-fashioned, in the NASA Headquarters building.

  When she arrived, Hartle was already there, with an aide, a thin officer in a sober blue uniform. He introduced himself as Gareth Deeke. He nodded curtly at Fahy, a small grin on his mouth, as if amused to see Fahy here. His eyes were hidden behind big insectile mirrored shades.

  Deeke had unrolled a softscreen and plastered it over the office wall; it was filled up with a glowing, full-color map of the Pacific rim. This was, as far as Fahy could figure, some kind of military strategic briefing.

  This might still be Jake Hadamard’s office, she thought, but it sure as hell wasn’t Jake’s agenda any more.

  Deeke resumed his briefing.

  “… This is the Asian century,” Deeke said. “Our analysts were predicting that twenty years ago, and it sure has come true. We can’t assume our geo-economic dominance is going to last a lot longer; we are going to enter a period in which we are just one of a number of players around the rim of the Pacific. We face Japan, Korea, Vietnam, several others, and the powerhouse of the whole area—”

  “Red China,” Hartle said softly. “Red fucking China. Now the biggest GDP in the world, the fastest economic growth, the fastest military expansion: six million men under arms, ten thousand combat aircraft…”

  Graphics of China; schematic starbursts around its periphery. Deeke said, “We know that China has a whole series of expansionist aims around its bor
ders, by land and sea, some of which it has pursued for decades. Recently Chinese gunboats have been taking offensive action against Petro Vietnam-Conoco oil rigs here, in the South China Sea, southeast of Ho Chi Minh City. I don’t need to remind you that China and Vietnam fought a border war in 1979. This whole area is crisscrossed by shipping lanes; any conflict between China and Vietnam could draw in Malaysia, Taiwan and the Philippines.

  “Look up here,” he said, tapping another part of the map. “Vladivostok, the heart of what the Russians call their Pacific Maritime Territory. It was ceded by Beijing to the Russians in 1860, when the French and British were at China’s throat. Well, the Brits and the French have gone now, and China wants its province back. This is a key area. At stake is China getting hold of a port in the Sea of Japan; right now, you can see they are landlocked by Russia and Korea. And besides, the population density on the Chinese side of the border is three times that on the Russian side. It must look tempting…