Titan

by Stephen Baxter

“We’ve lost our satellites,” another officer said bluntly.

  “How? Anti-satellite strikes?”

  “ASATs aren’t necessary,” Deeke said. “It’s easier and cheaper to soft-kill a satellite: damage, distort, even reprogram the information it processes and transmits. You can jam, intercept, spoof, hit the ground stations, break into the comms networks… Al, this is knowledge warfare. We have to assume that there are troop movements, going on right now. Launches of their CSS-2 IRBMs. Stuff we can’t see any more—”

  “Knowledge warfare, horseshit. I’ll tell you what this is,” Hartle said. “This is an electronic Pearl Harbor. The Red Chinese have blinded us. They’re doing to us what we did to them over Taiwan, back in’ 12. We just didn’t think big enough, is all; we never thought they would attempt this—”

  “And of course we have a rather larger problem,” Deeke said mildly.

  Hartle turned to Fahy.

  “Miss Fahy,” he said, glowering at her. “Welcome to hell. Now, tell us about 2002OA.”

  Fahy, nervous, fumbling, stood up and walked to the head of the table, opposite Hartle. “2002OA is a NEO. A near-Earth object, an asteroid. We have four dedicated NEO search programs. Three in the northern hemisphere, one in the south. The U.S. has been running planet-crossing asteroid surveys for four decades now out of Mount Palomar, Kitt Peak and the Lowell Observatory. The surveys use photographic methods, with some upgrade to electronic methods. Palomar alone is responsible for the discovery of one-third of the NEO population known today. All these observatories are situated in the southwest of North America, and so cannot reach southern declinations. In response, a program called the Anglo-Australian Near-Earth Asteroid Survey was initiated in the 1990s…”

  “So,” Hartle snapped, “where the fuck is 2002OA?”

  She fumbled with her softscreen, working through the presentation she had prepared, at last bringing up the image she wanted: a pencil of possible orbits, fanning out from 2002OA’s present position. The orbits enveloped the Earth.

  “The orbital elements of 2002OA arc not precisely determined, yet. For one thing it is only visible from one NEO tracking station, the one in Australia, though we’re trying to bring more resources to bear. It’s possible, but not certain, that 2002OA will collide with Earth. We certainly can’t be specific about where, precisely, in geographic terms. The orbital data is too fragmentary at present to be able to—”

  Hartle closed his eyes. “Which hemisphere?”

  “I can’t tell you that, sir.”

  Deeke said, “NORAD and NASA are refining their projections all the time, Al.”

  Hartle said, “But if we can’t even figure out where it is heading, how was it possible for the fucking Chinese to aim it?”

  Deeke shrugged. “By placing a spacecraft on the spot. By doing navigation from there, they could achieve much greater precision. Maybe they even sent up a man to do it, General. After all, they aren’t scrupulous about spending human lives.”

  “And what damage is this fucker going to do to us?”

  “General, we think the Chinese miscalculated,” Fahy said, flicking through the projections her staff had prepared. “2002OA is a big rock. Bigger than they need, if they just wanted to strike at the U.S. We think they intended some kind of glancing blow, or maybe to calve off a piece of the rock. Then we’d face localized destruction, maybe something like a nuclear winter. A Tunguska rock on New York. A Meteor Crater where Washington is. We think that was the plan. But 2002OA is too large. Instead, we may be looking at some kind of Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary impact—”

  Hartle turned to Deeke. “What the fuck?”

  “A dinosaur killer, General,” Deeke said softly.

  There was a moment of silence.

  Hartle said to Fahy, “So tell me how we shoot down this motherfucker.”

  She fumbled through her notes. “In general, the strategy for dealing with incoming objects requires spacecraft capable of rendezvousing with a threatening NEO and deflecting it by incrementing its velocity with a delta-vee—that is, an impulse—sufficient to cause them to miss the Earth. There are two generic strategies: remote interdiction, when the collision is predicted several orbital periods away, and terminal interception—when the collision is imminent, with the projectile less than one astronomical unit away—that is, days away from impact—and closing. Remote interdiction requires relatively small delta-vees, terminal interception much larger. In both cases, a deflection velocity is applied sufficient to cause it to drift from its original trajectory by at least one Earth radius. In cases of terminal interception it is best to apply the impulse perpendicularly to the projectile’s motion, which imparts an eccentricity to its orbit. The deflection delta-vee required is inversely proportional to the distance from Earth. And because of this—”

  “Jesus Christ,” Hartle said. His body was unmoving as he watched her, as if carved from granite, his contempt etched on his face.

  Deeke said, “Tell us about Clementine, Ms. Fahy.”

  “Right …” Fahy scanned ahead through the slides on her softscreen, and began stumbling through a hasty presentation on a space mission called Clementine II

  Clementine had been an experimental 1990s deep-space mission cooked up by NASA and the Air Force Space Command. Clementine’s primary purpose had been to serve as a test-bed for the performance of advanced defense technologies in deep space, up to ten million miles from Earth. But it was also a test of techniques for asteroid interception. It had been sent to close rendezvous with three asteroids and had been equipped to fire probes—yard-long cylindrical missiles—into the asteroids’ surface. In the event, Clementine had failed after the first rendezvous, but that first mock-interception had gone well.

  “Clementine was essentially target practice,” Fahy said. “It was criticized by the science community for that reason—”

  “Fuck the science,” Hartle said. “Why the hell didn’t we follow this up?”

  Fahy felt even more nervous. “Sir, the scientists won the day, in the end. They argued that the money would be better spent on ground-based instruments that could detect an Earth-bound incoming. Better to survey the problem, rather than try flying spaceborne weaponry at this stage. Then there was opposition from the liberal lobby, who argued that the build-up of a deflection capability might be a simple cover for the continuation of weapons programs, in the wake of the end of the Cold War, by vested interests: the military labs, the defense suppliers. Carl Sagan at Cornell was vocal in—”

  “Carl Sagan,” Hartle growled. “Miss Fahy, for once in your goddamn life, get to the point. Listen up. Right now money is no object, for NASA. I’ll give you what you want: Delta IVs to launch up as many nukes as you could wish for, all the ground-based resources you ask for. Now. Tell me about 2002OA. What options do we have for deflecting this goddamn incoming?”

  She frowned. “I’m sorry, sir. I thought you knew. We don’t have any options.”

  Hartle seemed baffled rather than angry. “There is always an option, damn it.”

  “Not in this case. We detected it too late. We’re already in the terminal interception phase. Right now, 2002OA is only four times as far away as the Moon. The delta-vee we would have to apply is more than three hundred feet per second. It is impossible for us to achieve such a deflection, no matter what we threw at it. The best we could achieve would be to break the rock up. But then you’d have a multiple impact instead of one, along with an immense cloud of dust and debris hitting the upper atmosphere…”

  Gareth Deeke said, “Like it or not, we no longer have the Delta IVs in the inventory anyhow, Al. We’ve run down too far. We just don’t have the launch capability any more.”

  Hartle’s nicotine-stained fingers drummed at the table. “You’re telling me we can’t shoot this thing down?”

  “No, sir. Of course we don’t know for sure if it’s going to hit Earth anyhow.”

  “Let’s start talking about what we do if it does. Gareth, are we prepa
red to strike at the Chinese? Should we launch before the impact? And what—”

  An aide walked in, a girl. She walked towards Hartle. He watched her approach, impassive, his face like a piece of Mount Rushmore. Her gait was awkward, Fahy thought, her steps uneven, as if she were close to fainting.

  “Sir,” she said. “We heard from NORAD. They have a fix on the incoming’s ground zero…” The girl officer started to cry, big salty drops rolling down her cheeks.

  Everyone was standing now; orders were shouted back and forth.

  The Atlantic, she heard. The Atlantic.

  Two young officers had clustered around Al Hartle. “Come on, sir; we have to get you out of here, over to NORAD. There’s a chopper waiting…”

  Holy shit, Fahy thought. They got confirmation. This isn’t just some military’ wet-dream fantasy of Al Hartle’s. It’s real; it’s going to happen.

  I’m going to die.

  Holy shit.

  Jake Hadamard parked at the foot of the Vehicle Assembly Building. His car was the only one in the lot.

  When he looked up at the face of the VAB, it was like peering up at a cliff. In the flat morning sunlight he could see that the wall was heavily weathered, streaked with seagull guano, and there was even some lichen, he saw, busily burrowing into the face of the VAB, as if it was some immense tombstone. It was a little difficult to believe that modern humans, in some epochal moment of madness, had built such a monument.

  He had a sudden, jarring sense that history was going to end, here, today.

  He walked away from the VAB, towards the press stand.

  The uncompromising old wooden bleacher was evidently abandoned now, its roof broken open to the daylight, dune grass colonizing the lower levels. He climbed a few steps and found a seat; he brushed it clear of dirt and sand and sat down, looking east.

  He was looking towards the ocean, across the Banana River, and, beyond a treeline, towards Launch Complex 39. The sun, still early-morning low, was bright in his eyes. The press portakabins that had once stood here had long since been hauled away, and the other relics of human launches—the gigantic countdown clock, the flagpole—were gone, too. Nothing remained but obscure concrete podiums and platforms, already crumbling under the assault of sea and vegetation.

  Beyond the treeline, on the other side of the river, he could see the two LC-39 launch complexes, side by side, blocky mechanical towers blue-misted by distance. Now 39-B was all but demolished; little had been left after the scrap teams had moved in but a shell of rusting iron set on a concrete platform.

  An effort had been made to preserve 39-A, however; for the benefit of the tourist trade, Disney-Coke had erected a gigantic carbon fiber mockup of a Saturn V to stand alongside the launch gantry. It was easily visible now, a slim white tower, more than three hundred and sixty feet tall, tapering up from the flaring fins of the S-IC first stage, all the way to the pencil-thin escape rocket at the tip of the dummy Apollo spacecraft at the apex. But it was unpainted, many of the details missing, so that it looked like a child’s unfinished model.

  The sun was to his right and in his eyes, already hot. Hadamard was dressed in a suit, his tie loosely knotted. He adjusted his sunglasses for greater opacity.

  He wondered if he ought to put on some sunblock.

  He checked his watch. Well, if what he’d heard from his contacts inside NASA and NORAD was correct, he wouldn’t have long to wait. He could risk doing without the sunblock.

  Rosenberg and Benacerraf huddled together at the galley end of the hab module. The door to Bill Angel’s quarters was closed; there was no sound from within.

  Even so, Rosenberg and Benacerraf were talking in whispers.

  “Sixty miles,” Rosenberg said. “It’s not so far. If we could manage ten miles a day, we could be there and back in a couple of weeks…”

  Rosenberg was in a mood Benacerraf had learned to recognize, and mistrust: a mood of excitement, in which he would be carried away by some new idea.

  The trouble was, around here it was only Rosenberg who came up with any ideas at all.

  “Tell me again,” she said. “You’re sure this is a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite crater?”

  “As sure as I can be.” Rosenberg had spotted the crater, punched into the border of the big Cronos plateau, in Cassini orbital radar imaging. “The size is the thing. Look, Paula, the nature of the impacting bolide determines the cratering profile. The most common type out here, far from the inner System, will be weak, icy, cometary bodies. It an object is small and weak, it’s going to break up in Titan’s thick atmosphere. For a bolide of a given yield strength you have a minimum radius below which you shouldn’t find any craters. For the ice bolides, that comes at around thirty miles. The stronger the material, the smaller the crater it can create.”

  “I get it. And the crater you’ve found on Cronos—”

  “—is about twenty miles wide. Below the turndown limit for the icy bodies. Carbonaceous chondrite meteorites would have four or five times the density, and a hundred times the internal strength.”

  She tried to think it through. “So the crater you found can’t have been caused by a cometary-ice impact.”

  “It’s possible, but unlikely.”

  It was typical of Rosenberg to play the cautious scientist when he was asking her to make a decision that would put all their lives on the line.

  “But it could be something else,” she said doggedly. “A stony or iron meteorite.”

  “Yes, that’s possible. But the flux rates for objects like that, out here so far from the sun, are small,” he said. “Much smaller than at Earth. Really, Paula, a carbonaceous chondrite is the best explanation. And the crater I’ve found is the most likely chondrite crater for a few hundred miles. Paula, we’re lucky to have found something so close.”

  She sighed. “So we have to go there.”

  “You know it. Paula, you’ve seen the figures. We just aren’t able to achieve closure of the life support loops, particularly of the amino acids and some of the trace elements—sulphur, potassium, chlorine. Even Titan itself can’t supply everything. So we have to look for manna from heaven, in the crater of a carbonaceous chondrite meteorite. We need that kerogen.” He smiled, his thin face dreamy. “Before it fell out of the sky, the meteorite must have drifted around for five billion years, a fragment of the original circumsolar nebula. Food, cooked up in the interior of the first generation of stars…”

  This kind of stuff was what worried her. This was Rosenberg’s personal escape hatch, his way of retreating from the dull horrors of their life on Titan. Her worry was, what if there were other options for survival which he wasn’t considering, because he was caught up with the idea of digging out the celestial stuff of life from some crater on Cronos?

  “A hundred and twenty miles, across the surface of Titan. My God, Rosenberg. Do you really think it’s feasible? The longest surface EVAs in NASA history were the last Moon-walks. Seven or eight hours outside the Lunar Module; a traverse of a few miles, every minute timelined, in those damn Lunar Rovers. All controlled from the ground, and all of it within a walk-back limit of the LM. Now, we’re going to have to figure out how to survive independently of Discovery for two weeks or more.”

  He shrugged. “It will take some preparation. But I think it’s possible, Paula. We’ll need the sleds, of course, with food and water and stuff, and some kind of surface shelter. But remember we should be able to haul along a lot of mass, in the low gravity—”

  “Rosenberg, we haven’t reached a crisis yet. Maybe we should wait.”

  He looked confused. “What good would waiting do? We don’t have any smarter options. It’s better to attempt this now. While we’re still reasonably healthy. Before the equipment starts to wear out. Before the life support loops start failing.”

  “You’ve worked this out, haven’t you, Rosenberg?”

  “Paula, I really don’t think we have a choice,” he said seriously.

  He started talk
ing about more expeditions they could mount later. For instance to the crater of an iron meteorite. Maybe they could find some way to refine the metal, and…

  She listened with weary patience. He was off in his dream-world of technology and science and achievement, that realm where all his schemes came to magical life, and where Tartarus became the hub of a spreading, glittering complex of science and technology.

  None of it had anything to do with the real problem they faced about this EVA, she thought. Which was what to do with Bill Angel.

  “El Dorado,” he was saying now. “That’s what we’ll call the crater.”

  “Whatever you say, Rosenberg.”

  In the chaos, it wasn’t difficult for Barbara Fahy to get out of the complex. She rode a steel elevator to the surface, and emerged into the early hours of a spring morning in Washington, D.C.

  She checked her watch. It was nearly 6.00 A.M.; the briefings had gone on all night.

  The streets were all but empty: there were a couple of street cleaners, a girl in a short skirt and inert image-tattoos making her way home, maybe from some club, one or two tense-looking office workers in suits, strutting anxiously towards their workplaces. The traffic lights were working, but randomly, it seemed to her.

  She wondered where the President was this morning. Nowhere near here.

  She walked.

  She reached the Tidal Basin, and walked among the cherry trees near the Jefferson Memorial, around the reflecting pool walkway The canopy of white blossoms filtered the morning light, so that it was like the glow of a skylight, shadowless, diffuse, warming.

  She passed a small colony of homeless, huddled under paper and cardboard against the softscreen-coated wall of a bank. The softscreen shed flickers of light over clothes that had been reduced by rain and sunlight to shapeless, colorless pulp. But this morning there was no pattern to the softscrecn’s display, just formless gray static.

  Maybe, she thought, she should warn someone. But what was the point? Let them enjoy the morning. Let them sleep, if they could.

  Maclachlan had said he’d sweep the homeless from the streets. At the end of two terms—and as Maclachlan aimed to change the Constitution to allow him to run for a third—there were more of them than ever. And malnutrition in the Bronx, and cholera in Georgia…