Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  Okay. Everything is go. We are just waiting for the cabin pressure to equalize with the exterior sufficiently to open the hatch…

  You ready for your one small step?

  Astronaut humor, Jackie thought bleakly.

  The irony was, science was making a certain comeback. The environmental problems were becoming so pressing and complex that Maclachlan had re-opened some of the university science labs and departments he’d ordered shut down. Even in Seattle, a clear-plastic uv filter over your lawn was now almost as common as a sprinkler system.

  It was as if humans were studying the ecology by testing it to destruction, in a kind of huge, one-off, millennial experiment. Maybe when we’ve reduced the whole thing to the grass and the ants, she thought bleakly, we’ll understand how it all used to work.

  You’re lined up nicely Come back towards me… Okay, put your foot down … you’re doing fine… A little more.

  It was the plankton crash in the oceans that seemed to be scaring the scientists most. The plankton crisis, it was said, might actually make the planet uninhabitable, ultimately. And in the short term the big problem was the rice crop. There was a blight with an unpronounceable name that was laying waste to rice crops all over the planet. The price of rice in the Seattle stores—particularly Italian rice, for some reason—had gone through the roof. In the longer term, it was said, people would soon be starving, especially in the major rice-producing countries: China, India, Britain.

  It was all to be expected, said the doom-mongers. World-wide, humanity got more than fifty percent of its calories from three carbohydrate-rich crops: wheat, rice and maize. Gigantic monocultures, exceptionally vulnerable to disease.

  It was all hubris, fourteen-year-old Ben explained to her earnestly. Humanity had been pursuing a gigantic project, the construction of a technosphere, within which the human species could effectively be freed of its dependence on the Earth: isolated, like grandmother in her metal ship, Ben said…

  She let him talk. Jackie had a bigger argument to win with Ben. The destiny of the species was a piece of ground she could afford to concede.

  Okay, the picture’s good. A little dark and drab maybe, but nothing that a little image processing can’t fix.

  Now, at last, the screen filled up. In the foreground Jackie could see what looked like the white-tiled hull of a Command Module, splashed with some kind of mud, and a little further away the ghostly form of an astronaut, a bulky suit topped by a visor that returned brief highlights from the cabin lights. Beyond, no landscape was visible, save only a few yards of what looked like orange-brown swamp.

  The astronaut seemed to be pawing at the surface with one foot.

  It was, Jackie thought, probably her mother.

  The picture was full of digital flaws, rectilinear cross-hatchings and missing pixels, so that you could never forget it was artificial. When the astronaut moved about, so poor was the image quality that she trailed ghosts, pale shadows of limbs and head and torso. It was oddly like the films she’d seen of the first, crude television pictures from Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin moving around like ghosts up there.

  I’m in the hatchway. The Command Module has sunk into the surface through several inches, before the slush compacted to stop it. I can’t see any exposed ice…

  Still analyzing, Jackie thought. Still doing science, even out there, a billion miles from home, one little woman scratching at the surface of a whole world. As if any conclusions she came to made a damn bit of difference.

  Still, this wasn’t Apollo 11. Hardly anyone was watching these four-hours-old images. The broadcast, on a minor cable channel, wasn’t exactly illegal, but it also wasn’t encouraged by the authorities either. After all, here were these Americans bounding around in a place the current orthodoxy said didn’t even exist…

  What bullshit it all was; what damage space had done to the cause of science, in America and the rest of the world. Twenty-billion-dollar golf shots. Maybe, she thought, we ought to see the space program—not as the culmination of some huge project of science and technology—but as a gigantic, alienating disaster. Maybe if not for the space program, my kids wouldn’t be forced to listen to two-thousand-year-old cosmology every day.

  If only it had been done differently: with imagination and daring and style. NASA’s ultimate triumph had been to reduce everything—even the Moon, even Titan—to the dull, the bland, the predictable.

  But probably, on the other hand, space had made no difference. Jackie was becoming receptive to a thesis put about by some academics now that science and technology had anyway reached the end of their usefulness. Humans were becoming overwhelmed by their own sophisticated machinery, because the intelligence required to build a certain level of technology was less than that needed to survive it. There were endless examples: all the nuclear-industry catastrophes leading up to Chernobyl, her own mother’s Columbia crash, even the new airborne AIDS variant…

  Her mind came back to the kids, to Ben, with a wrench.

  To hell with science, the future of the species, the space program. Who is there to tell you what to say when your fourteen-year-old son comes home and says he wants to get pregnant?

  Ben said he was gay. He was in love, with a boy a couple of years older. He wasn’t a virgin any more, he said. And, he said, he wanted a kid.

  Of course that was possible now, with cloned fetuses being implanted directly into the stomach wall of a father. It was even safe, they said, more so than natural childbirth.

  Jackie argued against it. She had found herself sounding like her own mother again, and she hated it. You’re too young. Wait. Don’t make any decisions now that you can’t unpick later. Finish your education…

  But then, she reflected, if it made Ben happy now, maybe she should let him go ahead. Maybe I should just let Fred go too, go seek a better solution in the jungles.

  She wasn’t convinced that to plan for a long and happy life was a rational decision any more. In her opinion, you could forget the plankton and the uv; the most likely thing to end it all for them was a bunch of Chinese ICBMs flying over the Pacific.

  Sometimes she fell into despair, when she thought about the future her kids were going to have to negotiate. She hated her own lack of control over that future, her impotence in the face of the huge changes sweeping like winds across the planet.

  Her mother, moving about in the dense orange atmosphere of Titan, looked less than human. Like some kind of deep-sea fish.

  All right. I’m going to step out of Bifrost now.

  Jackie leaned forward. This is it, she thought. This is the peak of my mother’s life. Her crowning achievement, her moment in history.

  This is the stuff of life, her mother, on Titan, said, and she stuck her hand in the mud.

  Oh, God, Mother, I wish you were here.

  Rosenberg, suited up, began his daily inspection tour of Tartarus Base. His boots squelched as he dragged them through the icy mud. He walked like an old man, shuffling and huddled over, his helmet lamp splashing yellow light over the glistening slush. He just couldn’t get used to working in this stiff suit, where it took an effort to make the slightest movement, and he was always overcompensating, so that he blundered about like a fool, slamming into equipment and the others, sometimes without even realizing it. Dragging the suit around, in fact, even without attempting anything constructive, was as hard work as shoveling snow, or climbing a ladder on Earth.

  But he liked the feeling of being embedded in a gravity field once more, after all those zero-G years He felt as if he was somewhere. Oddly, it made him feel less lonesome.

  The Base was, if he cared to be charitable about it, looking a little more like a permanent encampment now, and less like a couple of crashed spacecraft.

  He walked around the Shuttle orbiter. It looked like a bulky, downed aircraft, all of a hundred and twenty feet long, its cut-down delta wings ploughed into the gumbo. The trail it had dug on landing still stretched off behind it, into the murk that c
oncealed the horizon. But slowly, that shallow valley was filling in: the gumbo was relaxing, seeping back into the trench. Rosenberg had installed markers—just bits of aluminum and plastic from the wreck of Jitterbug—at various points along the valley floor and walls; the creep ought to give him a good understanding of the viscous and mechanical properties of the gumbo.

  He stepped up onto the left wing. There was gumbo coating the upper surface of the wing, thrown up there by the landing, and a more uniform coating from the tholin drizzle since. But it was a thin layer, and Rosenberg found it a relief to step onto this hard surface, after a few minutes on the uniform gloopy mess that was Titan’s ground.

  The orbiter’s payload bay doors were open, resting on the wings, like folded-back pieces of the hull. After the landings, the crew had discovered the doors had gotten stuck, and they had to be cranked open by hand. Now Rosenberg clambered up onto the curved inner surface of the payload bay door and, his feet clattering, walked along the sixty-feet length of the cargo bay, inspecting its contents.

  The payload bay wasn’t completely exposed to the elements of Titan. They had rigged up a crude canopy, of parachute fabric on aluminum struts, over the bay, like a tent; the centrifuge arm held it up to some extent. The canopy caught the worst of the tholin drift, but it was already sagging under the accumulated weight. Some day he was going to have to get up there and knock the crap oft, like a suburban homeowner clearing snow from his roof.

  The bay was equipped as it had been during the cruise to Saturn, with the big hab module closest to the orbiter flight deck, and then a short crawl-through tunnel to the reworked Spacelab module that had housed the CELSS farm. Behind the Spacelab lay the Topaz reactors, beneath their heavy shielding. The centrifuge cabin on its big swing arm lay across the top of all this, abandoned now. Its dismantling was on Rosenberg’s long list of things to do; that big motor ought to he useful for something.

  Rosenberg jumped off the wing. Briefly, he enjoyed the childlike sensation of drifting down as slow as a snowflake in Titan’s feeble gravity, and settling gently into the slush.

  Then he ploughed his way across the gumbo to the nose of the orbiter.

  The upper surface of the orbiter’s flight deck, the white felt thermal tiles there, was streaked and stained by tholin gunge. Discovery looked battered, aged, as if the mushy landscape of Titan were dragging it down into terminal entropy. But if he bent down and looked underneath the chin of the orbiter, at the black thermal protection tiles sheltered there, he could still make out the scorching of entry. This had once been a spacecraft, after all, and here it still showed. Even if the payload bay had been turned into a shanty town.

  But at that, he reflected, this was surely a better fate for Discovery than to have finished up as a museum piece on the lawn of some fading NASA center.

  Later he was going to have to run an internal check on Discovery’s systems. They were having some trouble with balky heaters. Fixed heaters had been installed throughout the orbiter’s hull, to help insulate the life-bearing hab module at its heart. The heaters responded to commands from the command software and temperature sensors. There were also small radioisotope heating units, mounted on movable mechanisms, that could vary the heat applied to particularly cold areas.

  But the heaters ate up a lot of power. Rosenberg had ideas on how they could coat the Base’s main components—the orbiter, Bifrost—with blocks of water ice, like igloos. That would retain a lot of heat, and enable them to reduce the power output from the Topaz reactors, so extending their life. Maybe they could build airtight tunnels between the components to give themselves more space, maybe even put up independent igloos, sealed somehow…

  Of course such grandiose schemes depended on getting access to water ice, which was proving a difficulty; on this ice moon. The problem was the tholin slush. As far as Rosenberg could tell they were sitting on top of a gumbo layer at least fifteen yards thick; as far as they’d dug, they hadn’t reached bedrock water ice.

  When he looked up at the lighted windows of the orbiter’s flight deck, he thought he could see the blind face of Bill Angel. But the glass was obscured by purple stripes of tholin, and it was hard to be sure.

  He walked over the gumbo the fifty feet to where they had dragged Bifrost, their intact Apollo Command Module. Using components from Jitterbug, they had fixed up a crude airlock over Bifrost’s side hatch. Power cables stretched from Discovery, through the slush, to the Apollo. Rosenberg had rigged up the CELSS farm in Bifrost, after stripping out the couches and other movable gear. That had given the crew in Discovery the extra living space of the old Spacelab module.

  Fifty feet further on from Bifrost was a small pile of gear, covered by another hunk of parachute fabric. This was salvage from Jitterbug, disassembled and hauled laboriously across the tholin by Rosenberg and Benacerraf. The shell of Jitterbug still lay in the gumbo where it had come down, its base and chunks of its hull chopped away, the improvised grave of Nicola Mott close by.

  Rosenberg had developed a habit of peering under the stiffening fabric over the gear pile every day. He did it now. It was a waste of time, of course. He was on a lifeless world, here: there were no thieves to disturb the pile, no rats or dogs who would chew the tarpaulin. And there never would be, as long as he lived.

  He walked on.

  The closeness of the horizon, his immersion in this perpetual murk, made it seem as if he was stuck inside the close walls of some opaque orange bubble. Some deep part of his brain, he suspected, still believed that things must be different a little further away: a few miles from the camp, maybe over Titan’s close horizon. Some place where there were all the elements he had grown up with: people and animals and buildings and cars, and a blue sky with white, fluffy clouds…

  But it wasn’t true.

  It was an odd thing, a small detail, but to Rosenberg the lack of disturbance to the equipment piles emphasized their isolation on this lifeless moon more than any amount of theorizing.

  Benacerraf and Rosenberg, cleaned up, sat on the flight deck of Discovery—away from Bill Angel—and chewed the fat about equipment problems.

  What they were really doing, of course, was not talking about Bill.

  Rosenberg was suspicious of Angel, on some deep level. Bill seemed to have stabilized since the landing, as the NASA psychologists had suggested he would. But Rosenberg didn’t think the creature in the hab module was Bill Angel any more. The way he talked, the body language… He seemed to be coming in at an angle to the rest of the world. As if his head was stuck in some fourth dimension.

  Benacerraf shut Rosenberg up when he talked like this. How come scientists are so precise and picky about their specialties, but always prepared to bullshit about stuff they know nothing about, like psychology? As far as she was concerned this situation wasn’t about trust; it was about management. Benacerraf approved of Rosenberg’s plans for their survival. But to achieve those plans they were going to need resources: time, muscle power, intellectual energy. She wasn’t convinced that the two of them, alone, were sufficient. She thought they needed Bill Angel to close the design. If they were going to survive here, they had to manage all their resources effectively. And that included Angel. She saw it as her job to manage Bill, the way they were going to have to manage other pieces of equipment, balky or otherwise.

  So now Rosenberg sat here and spoke, not about Bill, but about the Sabatier unit. The Sabatier was a simple piece of kit, basically a pipe surrounded by nichrome heaters. The Sabatier cracked carbon dioxide, collected from the life support system, by reacting it at high temperatures with hydrogen, in the presence of a ruthenium catalyst, to produce methane and water. The water was collected in a condenser coil, and the methane was vented to Titan’s air.

  “I think the catalyst is being poisoned by a build-up of amine vapors… The trouble must be further upstream, in the process, at the SAWD.” The solid amine water desorption unit removed carbon dioxide from the air by passing it over beads of resin in
side steel canisters. Rosenberg started to list the steps he was taking to test this out. He said, “At least the systems are easier to work with, now we have a little more space to move around in. And every damn component doesn’t float off into the air every time you turn around…”

  And so on, a parade of detail.

  Benacerraf was chewing on a spindly carrot from the CELSS farm. “Rosenberg, how are we doing overall? What else do we need to do, that we’re not doing?”

  He clasped his hands behind his head, and rocked back in his seat. “Let’s go back to basics. During the cruise, where we had to rely on nothing but the resources we carried, we tried to close all the life support loops. We recycled all our waste, solid and liquid, and fed nutrients to the plants we grew, and cleaned the air… We did well; we survived six years in interplanetary space. But even so the closure was never perfect; we lost about five percent of most materials as they passed around the life support cycle, to leakage, unrecoverable waste, whatever.

  “Here on Titan, outside resources are available to us: water, in the form of bedrock ice, nitrogen and methane from the air, hydrocarbons like the ethane and propane we can get from Clear Lake and other compounds, like nitriles and ammonia. That means we can open up some of the loops.”

  Benacerraf said, “Water. We’re still recycling every drop we drink. I can taste the six-year-old piss in it, for God’s sake.”

  “If we could bring fresh water ice into the system we’d cut down the bulk we’re recycling by forty-five percent. And that would give us a system much better buffered against instabilities.”

  “We’re going to have to climb that damn mountain, aren’t we?”

  “It’s why we chose to land here, Paula.”

  She held her hands up. “I know. It’s just that mountaineering on Titan seems a much dumber idea down here than it did from orbit. What else? What about all those amino acids you say we need?”

  Rosenberg scratched his head. “Well, that’s the hole I can’t plug right now. We’ve taken a lot of samples from the air, the tholin slush. No aminos; all I’ve found is the prebiotic organic stuff I expected. If we’re not to be resupplied, there are some trace elements we need as well.”