Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  He was in a big room, white walled, surgically sterile. He was sitting up in a chair. Christ, some guy was shaving his chest.

  Then he figured it. Oh, hell, it was all right. It was just a suit tech. He was in the MSOB. He was being instrumented. The suit tech plastered his chest with tour silver chloride electrodes. “This won’t hurt a bit, you old bastard.” He had the condom over his dick already. And he had on his fecal containment bag, the big diaper. The suit tech was saying something. “Just so you don’t piss yourself on me one last time.”

  He lifted up his arm. He didn’t recognize it. It was thin and coated with blue tubes, like veins.

  It must be the pressure garment, a network of hoses and rings and valves and pulleys that coated your body. Yeah, the pressure garment; he could feel its resistance when he tried to move.

  There was a sharp stab of pain at his chest. Some other electrode, probably. It didn’t bother him.

  He couldn’t see so well now; there was a kind of glassiness around him. That was the polycarbonate of his big fishbowl helmet. They must have locked him in already.

  The suit tech bent down in front of him and peered into his helmet. “Hey.”

  “It’s okay. I know I got to wait.”

  “What? Listen. It was just on the softscreen. The other one’s just died. What was his name? How about that. You made the news, one more time.”

  “It’s the oxygen.”

  “Huh?”

  “One hundred percent. I got to sit for a half hour while the console gets the nitrogen out of my blood.”

  The suit tech shook his head. “You’ve finally lost it, haven’t you, you old bastard? You’re the last one. You weren’t the first up there, but you sure as hell are the last. How about that.” But there was an odd flicker in the suit tech’s face. Like doubt. Or, wistfulness.

  He didn’t think anything about it. Hell, it was a big day for everybody, here in the Manned Spacecraft Operations Building.

  “A towel.”

  “What?”

  “Will you put a towel over my helmet? I figure I might as well take a nap.”

  The suit tech laughed. “Oh, sure. A towel.”

  He went off, and came back with a white cloth, which he draped over his head. He was immersed in a washed-out white light. “Here you go.” He could hear the suit tech walk away, laughing.

  In a few minutes, it would start. With the others, carrying his oxygen unit, he’d walk along the hallways out of the MSOB, and there would be Geena, holding little Bobby up to him. He’d be able to hold their hands, touch their faces, but he wouldn’t feel anything so well through the thick gloves. And then the transfer van would take him out to Merritt Island, where the Saturn would be waiting for him, gleaming white and wreathed in cryogenic vapor waiting to take him back up to the lunar beach, and his father.

  All that soon. For now, he was locked in the suit, with nothing but the hiss of his air. It was kind of comforting.

  He closed his eyes.

  Paula Benacerraf and Bill Angel, two human beings from Earth, were climbing the highest mountain on a moon of Saturn. They were seeking water ice, to supplement their life support systems.

  Toiling up the slope in their bulky white suits, and with their sleds sliding across the gumbo, they must look, Benacerraf thought, like two grubs hauling chunks of cast-off exoskeleton over the skin of some huge animal.

  Benacerraf’s suit felt hot, and chafed at her groin and armpits, and she could feel blisters forming across the soles of her feet. Every step she took in the snowshoes, going up the gumbo slope, she had to angle her feet and dig in to get traction sufficient to haul the mass of the sled another few feet. Her visor was misted up from her breath, and she could feel her heart hammering.

  She paused for breath. She leaned into the sled harness—it was adapted from an Apollo couch restraint—and she rested her gloved hands against her legs. Her helmet lamp splashed light over the glistening slope before her.

  As he slogged ahead of her up the gumbo slope, dragging his sled, Bill Angel sang some kind of marching song to himself. Just a couple of phrases of it, over and over. It was easy for him to find his way, sight or no sight; he was just following the line of maximum slope. He was already maybe twenty yards ahead of her, and his form was dimming a little in the murky air, although his stained white suit still showed up brightly against the black layer of methane clouds that hid the mountain’s summit, and the splash of light of his helmet lamp—she made him wear it as a beacon—was clearly visible.

  He was as encumbered by his sled as she was by hers. The sleds were just cone-section panels of Apollo Command Module hull, so big they would be impossible to pull under Earth gravity, even empty as they were right now. But this wasn’t Earth. And Angel just marched on, dwarfed by his sled, his legs shoving at the gumbo like pistons.

  Rosenberg called from Tartarus, via S-band, his signal bouncing off Cassini.

  Clumsily, Benacerraf flicked a switch on her chest panel. Rosenberg had rigged up two separate S-band frequencies: one open to the three of them, and the other available to Rosenberg and Benacerraf alone.

  On the private band, Rosenberg said: “How’s it going up there?”

  She lifted up her arm; there was a reflective panel there that let her read her chest panel. She had rigged up her panel so she could cycle it between the status of her own suit and Angel’s. “He seems to be doing okay. Heartbeat a little high, maybe…” She switched back into Angel’s voice loop for a second. “Still, he goes on with the damn singing. Over and over.”

  “Singing I can forgive. Check your marker.”

  She looked back down the slope. It was vertiginous—under Titan’s weak gravity, this ice mountain had a gradient of maybe one in four for most of this ascent—and they were already a couple of thousand feet above the reference level where Discovery sat. The mountain was a flat cone, thrusting out of the landscape. It was maybe nine miles across, two high. An ice mountain as steep as this would have been impossible on Earth because of the higher gravity; the pressure at its base would have melted the ice, and the form would subside, leaving hillocks only a fraction as high. From here, the base of the mountain was hard to see, washed out by the eternal murky haze. She could barely see the last marker she’d planted; it was just a ghostly vertical line of white metal against the dark-stained tholin slush.

  From the pile in her sled she dug out another marker—an aluminum strut from Apollo—and rammed it into the gumbo.

  When she turned, Angel was almost invisible, still ploughing upwards.

  “Bill, don’t get too far ahead.”

  His singing cut off as if she had turned a switch. He stopped moving; he straightened up and turned, as if looking down towards her.

  She took a slug of stale recycled water from the nipple in her helmet, and leaned into the harness once more.

  When they were side by side, maybe thirty yards apart, Angel started to toil upward alongside her. Singing.

  “Where did you learn the song, Bill? The Air Force?”

  Again, that switch-like cut-off. “Nope,” he said.

  “Then where?”

  “My father. Dad would take me walking in the hills. I’d scramble along behind him, over scree and bare rock…” Angel laughed. “That old bastard would walk me until my feet bled into my sneakers.”

  Benacerraf frowned. “It sounds kind of hard.”

  He tilted towards her, and, through his visor, she could dimly make out his sunken eye sockets. “You’re not some Freudian, are you, Paula? Did my dad’s cruelty make me what I am? Was his ghost there to push me aboard Endeavour that last time? Is it his fault I went crazy halfway to Saturn?”

  Benacerraf felt out of her depth. Was he really being so self-reflective? … or was even this remark just another thread in the tapestry of his irrationality?

  She said, “What do I know? All I said was it seems tough, to drag some little kid over the kind of terrain you’re talking about.”

&
nbsp; “Maybe. But I learned a hell of a lot.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like how to endure. You see, you got to have some kind of mantra, to get you through experiences like this, Paula. Crap that just goes on and on. You can sing, you can fantasize about sex, you can talk to yourself. Anything, to take your mind off what you got ahead of you, the pain in your feet and legs.”

  “It sounds like auto-hypnosis.”

  “Maybe it is. Mind-traveling, my dad called it. Seventy percent of any climb is mental. If you’re going to get through a slog like this, you got to fight the demons inside. Maybe you should take a leaf.”

  “Maybe,” she said.

  Within a couple of minutes, Angel had resumed his singing.

  She considered switching off his loop. But it she did that, she couldn’t tell if he was in difficulty. She compromised. She turned down the gain, so Angel’s voice was reduced to a kind of bass insect-whisper.

  Soon her shoulders, back, feet and crotch were aching again, and her body was telling her it wanted to stop, now.

  Maybe I ought to try it, she thought, Papa Angel’s patent balm for the soul.

  Always a little further, pilgrim, I will go. Always a little further…

  Oddly, it seemed to work. Her thoughts started to diffuse, and she entered a kind of orange, mindless tunnel, of pain and effort and tholin slush that stretched on, up the hillside above her.

  Always a little further.

  After a time, the going underfoot seemed to be getting a little easier. She didn’t sink quite so far into the gumbo, and it wasn’t so sticky when she tried to lift up her snowshoed feet.

  Then, at last, she felt a scrape of some more resilient surface under her aluminum snowshoes.

  She stopped, and leaned into her harness. She tipped up her foot and dug at the gumbo with the lip of her snowshoe. There was some pale gray substance, like fine gravel, mixed in with the purple-brown gumbo.

  “Hey, Bill,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think I found ice.”

  He laughed. “I been crunching over some shit for a hundred yards or more.”

  She looked up, tipping to balance the mass of her pack.

  The slope pitched up before her as steeply as ever. But now she could see that the purple-brown gumbo layer had been washed away, exposing gray-white streaks beneath. And when she leaned back to look further up the slope, she saw the surface turned into an almost pure white, streaked here and there with tholin rivulets. The white continued all the way up through the orange air, until it disappeared into the lid of gray-black methane cloud which hid the summit of Mount Othrys.

  “How about that. Rosenberg, I think we did it.”

  “You found bedrock?”

  “Water ice.”

  “How high are you?”

  Benacerraf was carrying an altimeter, cannibalized from one of the Apollos; she wore it on a chain that dangled from her backpack. She reached around clumsily, and pulled the altimeter up before her face.

  “A shade over three thousand feet,” she said.

  “Good,” Rosenberg said.

  “Good?”

  “Sure. You’re well above the limit altitude of the rain. It only rains on the summits, never on the plains. It’s just what I would have expected…”

  “Theory later, Rosenberg,” Benacerraf said.

  “It’s just nice when you figure something, and it works out. Makes the Universe seem a little less scary.”

  She let herself out of her harness, and made sure her sled wasn’t going to slide back on down the gumbo. Then she walked forward, until the gumbo beneath her feet had thinned out, and she was stepping on bare ice. She kicked off her snow-shoes, and left them at the edge of the gumbo.

  The ice surface wasn’t hard; it crunched beneath her booted feet, the noise sharp in the thick air.

  She looked around. “The edge of the gumbo is quite sharp,” she reported to Rosenberg. “I guess we could feel it thinning out for a few hundred yards. But it’s clearly keyed to the altitude and its edge is a definite line. Like a tree line.”

  “A gumbo line,” Angel said.

  “The surface isn’t solid, here. It’s some kind of regolith. The ground here is very fine-grained. Almost powdery, not like ice at all. I can kick it up loosely with my toe, and it is sticking in fine layers to my boots.”

  “Is it supporting your weight?”

  “Yes. But I sink into the surface a little, maybe a half-inch, before it compacts. It’s a little like walking on even snow.”

  “Snow it ain’t,” Rosenberg said. “We’re two hundred degrees below the freezing point of water here… What you’re walking on is impact-gardened regolith. Ancient ice, smashed to pieces by meteorite and micrometeorite impacts, over billions of years. Like Moon dust, pulverized to a depth of inches or feet.”

  “But this isn’t the Moon,” Benacerraf said. “Wouldn’t that thick atmosphere shield out the bolides?”

  “Yes. But some, the big ones, will still get through. And remember that Titan isn’t particularly geologically active; that ice has probably lain there exposed almost since Titan first accreted, four billion years ago.”

  “That’s time for a lot of gardening,” Angel said. “Hey, double-dome. We could go skiing up here.”

  “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Rosenberg replied drily.

  She lifted up her boot. “It has a lot of cohesion. I’m leaving firm footprints here; the regolith seems to take a sharp slope, of seventy or eighty degrees. Cohesion and adhesion.”

  “Probably from organic deposits on the grain surfaces,” Rosenberg said.

  “It’s going to be easy to walk here,” she said. “Much easier than on the gumbo. I guess we can leave the snowshoes behind.”

  Angel was walking over to Benacerraf. Free of his harness, he seemed to bounce between each step; he floated over the ice like a human-shaped beach ball, she thought, his white suit still streaked with gumbo. He looked like a floating ghost, in the murky light.

  Benacerraf stared at her own footprints, crisp and sharp and white, in the virgin Titan ice.

  Benacerraf and Angel harnessed themselves up once more, and renewed their haul up the ice slope. The footing was much easier, and the aluminum carapaces of the sleds scraped easily over the crisp, firm ice.

  Soon their footprints stretched down the flank of the mountain behind them, partly obscured by the snail-like trails of the sleds.

  The whiteness of the ice underfoot was a sharp contrast to the gray-black lid of methane clouds. Through gaps in the clouds overhead she could see the upper haze layers, a uniform orange which seemed lurid to eyes which were becoming accustomed to the Earthlike gray-white of the ice. Again, she had the disorienting feeling that she was traveling through some false-color VR landscape; Angel’s suit looked underlit by the white below, the contours of his body shaded by the burnt orange above.

  Another couple of thousand feet higher, Benacerraf called a halt. She felt hot and cooped up in her suit. She felt as if she could just open up her faceplate, take a deep breath of this cool mountain air, and rub a little snow in her face.

  Angel slowed and stopped. Over the VHF link between them she could hear the rattle of his vacuum-damaged throat, the slurping of water from the nipple in his helmet. Discreetly, Benacerraf checked his suit diagnostics on her chest panel. He was using a lot of consumables, but no more than she was.

  “What do you think?” he said at length. “Is the regolith deep enough here?”

  “It’s hard to tell. It all feels the same underfoot.”

  “The depth is probably pretty uniform, away from the gumbo layer,” Rosenberg said from Tartarus. “It’s just, the higher you go, the cleaner it should get.”

  “This will do as well as anywhere,” Benacerraf said. “Come on, Bill. Let’s get these damn sleds filled up.”

  She bounded down the few paces to the side of her sled and lifted out her shovel.

  As it happened, the sh
ovel was the same piece of equipment she’d used to bury Nicola Mott.

  Using both hands, holding the handle away from her body, she pushed the rounded edge of the shovel blade into the regolith. There was a hiss of metal against ice grains.

  The blade sank in easily for a few inches, but resistance built up quickly. When the blade was maybe five inches deep, she couldn’t push it any further in. She hopped forward and leaned over the crude handle of the shovel, propping it under her belly with her hands still wrapped around it, trying to use her weight to push the shovel deeper.

  She achieved maybe another inch of penetration. In this gravity, her weight didn’t count for a lot.

  She straightened up, panting, and lifted up the shovel. Some of the ice she’d raised so laboriously just floated off the blade.

  She swiveled to the sled, and dumped in the ice regolith. It fell slowly, and rattled as it hit the aluminum hull of the sled.

  She straightened up again. “It’s not going to be easy,” she said to Rosenberg. “When you push in the blade, the regolith compacts after a couple of inches. It feels more like sand than snow—”

  “It isn’t snow,” Rosenberg said.

  “Whatever. It’s going to take a long time to fill the sleds like this.”

  “Paula.” Bill Angel said. “Try this.”

  She turned to look.

  He was bending, closer to the ground, so that his blade was entering the regolith almost parallel to the surface. “See?” he said. “It slides easy into these looser top layers. Then you can scoop up a big shovelful. I can feel it.” He was right, she saw, he was managing to lift big, tottering heaps of the regolith, which he dumped into his sled.

  “I guess he’s right,” Rosenberg said. “You’re gathering raw materials for life support, Paula, not digging for a core sample. Get it whichever way is easiest.”

  She bent, and started scraping up the regolith the way Angel did it. The first couple of times she managed to come away with piles of loosely-packed regolith on her blade as big and precarious as Angel’s. But the constant bending and straightening, against the stiffness of her suit, began to tell on her lower back and thighs.