Titan

by Stephen Baxter

  The rations were based heavily on what was left of the dehydrated stock they’d brought from Earth. Benacerraf hated to exhaust these final supplies, making them almost totally dependent on the CELSS farm thereafter, but Rosenberg insisted. Their diet, he said, was crucial. He had calculated they would each need five thousand calories per day. He showed her how the diet he planned would be high in fats—nearly sixty percent—whereas their normal diet was more than half carbohydrates.

  When the load was assembled, Benacerraf had trouble closing her canvas over the top of it. She had to repack a couple of times, trying to balance the mass of the load and to give it all an even shape.

  At last she had it tied up with rope. The sled, bound together, was the size and shape of a coffin. Benacerraf hoped that wasn’t an omen. When she was done, she felt exhausted already: she was hot, her breath pumping, her limbs aching from fighting the suit’s stiffness.

  Rosenberg estimated that each of their sleds, on Earth, would weigh more than five hundred pounds: the best part of half a ton. Here, gravity reduced that to seventy pounds.

  Five stone, to be hauled across a hundred and twenty miles, in full EVA suits.

  She pulled her harness around her torso.

  The sled harness was improvised from Apollo seat restraints and Shuttle orbiter foot loops. There was a bandolier set of straps she lifted over her shoulders and chest, and a belt around her waist. There was a buckle at the front of her chest, relatively easy for suited fingers to reach and manipulate, and adjustable straps on the shoulders. The most difficult thing about designing the harnesses had been ensuring they would not foul any of her suit’s essential equipment, like the control panel on her chest, and the umbilicals carrying oxygen and water from her PLSS.

  She leaned forward, and let the straps take her weight. She adjusted the shoulder straps until they felt comfortable through the layers of her suit.

  She thought it was ominous that her sled didn’t move at all in response to her body weight.

  Benacerraf looked back, one last time, at Tartarus Base.

  Discovery looked like a DC-10 that had come down in the ice. But her white upper surfaces were uniformly coated with tholin, obscuring what was left of the colorful Stars-and-Stripes and NASA logos. The big windows on the flight deck, streaked by tholin, showed no lights; the interior of the orbiter was black. All the nonessential systems in the orbiter had been shut down, so they could save every last erg from the Topaz reactors while they were away. And that meant almost everything, save the heating and the nutrient, lighting and air supply for the CELSS farm. She played her helmet lamp over the orbiter’s flanks, which glistened with gumbo; it looked as if Titan was drawing Discovery gradually into its icy belly.

  She stood beside Rosenberg.

  “You remember to cancel the newspapers?”

  “Yes,” he said gently.

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  She turned her face resolutely away from the orbiter. Her helmet lamp cast a ghostly ellipse of white light on an anonymous patch of gumbo. The greater darkness beyond, which they must penetrate, was concealed.

  She leaned into her traces, with her full body weight. Her snowshoes pawed at the gumbo. The harness rubbed at her shoulders and hips.

  The sled, stuck to the gumbo, wouldn’t move.

  She straightened up and looked back. There was a hummock in the gumbo, just in front of her sled, to its right. She was catching on that.

  She turned again, and leaned into the harness with her left shoulder. She jerked at the harness, throwing her weight into it, trying to keep her footing in the tholin.

  She felt something give. She almost stumbled over.

  She looked again. The sled had moved forward, a couple of feet.

  Rosenberg whooped. “Way to go, Paula.”

  “Sure,” she said. She’d covered two feet, out of a hundred miles.

  She leaned into the harness again, and jerked. The sled moved forward, coming free of the sticky gumbo with a slurping noise.

  She pawed at the slush, trying to keep a steady rhythm. It got easier once she’d started, as long as she maintained the momentum of the sled. Whenever she stopped, she could feel the sled sink back into the welcoming mud. Still, her movement was jerky and uneven, stop-start.

  Soon it felt as if the canvas band around her stomach was crushing her insides against her backbone.

  It would be a comfort to think the sleds would get lighter as they proceeded, as the two of them ate up the food. But Rosenberg was insisting that they retrieve every piece of waste they produced—every drop of piss, every dump—and haul it back to feed the hungry CELSS farm. It made sense. But the thought of hauling bags of her own shit for a hundred miles across the surface of Titan did not chime with her romantic dreams of what exploring an alien planet should be like.

  A wind blew up. It came straight in her face, heavy and dense, and the gumbo rippled sluggishly before her. Her suit temperature dropped as a wind chill set in; she could feel the hot diamonds of her heaters trying to restore the balance.

  Rosenberg called, “We have to expect a lot of this. That wind is a katabatic. A gravity-fed wind, blowing downhill, out of the heart of Cronos—”

  “Shut up, Rosenberg.”

  She bent her head and pushed at the gumbo, the harness digging at her shoulders and hips, Rosenberg’s katabatic wind shoving against her chest, driving onwards.

  The light level rose slowly. A burnt orange glow seeped uniformly into the sky.

  The gumbo glistened before her, like a plain of dried blood, unmarked and without frontier.

  It wasn’t like a dawn on Earth.

  As the light came up, there was no sense of opening out, of liberation from the confines of the night. The horizon was so close by, just a couple of miles, and obscured anyhow by the murky mist and haze. And the sky overhead, even on a cloudless day, was a lid, complete and orange and seamless. It was like being in a box: orange haze above, purple-black slush below, bound in by a horizon as close as a fence. And as she walked, bringing nothing but more miles of tholin slush into view—no roads, no trees, no gas stations—she became oppressed, trapped by the lifeless murk.

  Benacerraf started to develop sharp twinges in her shoulder muscles, and shooting pains in her shoulder blades. And besides, her right foot was beginning to feel cold and raw. Forward motion was only possible with sharp tugs at her load; she could feel the pressure points in her shoulders, waist, knees and feet.

  She stopped, trying to work the stiffness out of her shoulders, but confined in her movements by the heavy suit. The pressure of the harness bands on her chest and gut receded, briefly; she could feel bruises gathering, and burns about her hips where the harness was too tight.

  She dropped her head, and ploughed forward again, yanking the sled away from the cloying gumbo.

  They spoke rarely.

  Mostly, she was alone with the rasp of her breathing, the high-frequency whir of the fans in her backpack and the hiss of oxygen across her face.

  She tried to dull out her thoughts, not to think about what lay ahead of her and behind her, how every step was taking her further from Discovery. She concentrated, for instance, on the familiar noises of her suit; she tried to imagine she was in space again, in low orbit above the glowing, beautiful Earth, and that the suit was a bubble of warmth and comfort around her.

  But the pain broke through that too easily, from her sore foot, her hands, her shoulders.

  She tried not to think about the silence on the comms links.

  The extinction of mankind. Rosenberg, figuring from what he knew of the parameters of the rock the Chinese had dropped, said there could be little possibility of human survival. It was the K-T boundary event over again, he said.

  What proportion of “mankind” could she have met during her life? A few thousand? And how many did she care about?

  Three people, she thought. Just three. And now she couldn’t even find out if they were dead or alive.
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  Way to go, Paula.

  Later, she got angry.

  She got mad at her balky sled, every time it stuck in some particularly viscous patch of gumbo and dragged her backwards, yanking at all her sore points. She got mad at the dull Titan weather, at the winds that chilled her but failed to freeze the gumbo to a useful surface.

  She got mad at Rosenberg. That wasn’t hard.

  She could sink inside herself and pick over some aspect of Rosenberg—the things he said, the body stink when he opened up his suit—and chew on it inside her head—for hours, she found, building up the irritation to a near-hatred. Even those CELSS farm baby carrots, too bitter for her to eat, which he religiously devoured, insisting they were good for oxygen deficiency.

  She could plod like this, steadily hating Rosenberg, and then, when she looked at her astronaut’s Rolex, she’d find—if she was lucky—that maybe an hour had passed, bringing her that much closer to the moment she could stop.

  After a time, though, even the anger didn’t work. There was too little stimulation for her mind, in the dull landscape of gumbo and haze; she was turned inward, her thoughts stale and repetitive, churning and festering, with no external distraction to relieve her.

  Sometimes she wanted to howl, to raise her face to the orange sky and just scream like a frustrated ape. But she knew she couldn’t. If she did, it would let out the beast at last, the Bill Angel craziness she suspected lay deep within her. She would lose her ability to manage this, once and for all.

  So she plodded on, muttering. Stick it. Stick it. Stick it. Until the urge to howl dissipated, and the blackness receded a little.

  After five hours, they had completed six miles. Benacerraf was exhausted, the little water spigots in her helmet running dry, the air circulating in her suit stale.

  Rosenberg pulled alongside her. He ran a gloved finger over her bandolier. “Look at this,” he said, and he lifted up a harness joint with a fingertip. The stitching was torn, and Benacerraf’s harness was twisted. “This joint is double-stitched, but these couch harnesses were never designed for the kind of stresses we’re subjecting them to now. I guess you didn’t notice. You’ve been dragging the sled with the harness out of alignment. Your torso must have been twisted. No wonder your shoulders hurt.”

  “Rosenberg, I’m done. Let’s get the tent up.”

  “We haven’t completed the schedule, Paula. Another three or four miles and—”

  “I know about the schedule. I don’t care about the damn schedule, Rosenberg. I’m telling you I need a break.”

  “It’s just that right now we’re in as good a position as we’re going to be. We’re still full of food, and our core body temperatures are high, and we’ve had plenty of reasonably natural sleep back in the hab module. Later, it’s going to be harder to—”

  “Help me raise the fucking tent, Rosenberg, or you’re going to get a sled runner up your ass.” She pulled the parachute fabric off her sled.

  Still complaining, he helped her haul out the tent.

  The skimmer tent was a ball eight feet across. The airtight skin was reinforced with parachute canvas, to give it additional strength. Rosenberg roughly inflated it with a feed from oxygen and nitrogen tanks. They anchored it to the gumbo with ropes and wide, flat, anchorlike spikes, driven deep into the slush. The tent sat on the slushy surface of Titan like a sad beachball, its muddy yellow surface drab and uninspiring, fat air and power lines snaking into it from the tanks in Rosenberg’s sled.

  Now the two of them worked with the snow shovels to cover the tent over with a thick layer of slush. This ought to retain some of their heat. It was slow work; the slush at first just slithered off the canvas, and it took long, hard minutes of labor before the tent was covered over.

  Rosenberg led the way into the tent, crawling through the crude airlock. Benacerraf followed. In her bulky suit, she kept colliding with Rosenberg’s limbs and helmet; she felt like some bug crawling around inside a cocoon.

  Rosenberg hooked up a low-watt light and an electric heater. “Wait a few minutes until we warm up.”

  The elements of the heater started to glow crimson red, a sharp color very unlike Titan’s dull orange. She sat close to the heater, watching the elements grow brighter, seeing their multiple reflections from the layered visors of her helmet. It was, she thought, heat brought to this ice moon from the remote center of the Solar System.

  Rosenberg spent the time fiddling with the spare PLSS. This backpack—intended for Nicola Mott—had been rigged with a powerful vacuum pump and blower. They would use it to keep the tent air circulating through its lith hydroxide carbon dioxide scrubbers. If either of their packs failed during the march, this spare would serve as a backup.

  At last, Rosenberg said the air and temperatures were okay.

  Benacerraf cracked the seal of her helmet.

  Chill air gushed into her helmet, at her neck and over her face. Her breath immediately misted before her face, and gathered as frost on the glass of her faceplate. She coughed, and took a deep breath. The air was so cold she could feel it burning at her lungs, and digging into the flesh of her face. The warmth of her suit seemed to gush out at her neck, and the cold seeped deeper into her.

  “My God, Rosenberg.”

  “Can you breathe? What can you smell?”

  She sniffed, but her nose seemed blocked. “It’s so damn cold.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. It isn’t going to get a lot better.”

  She tried again, dragging the air through her nostrils. The cold of it seemed to scour at her nasal passages, the back of her throat.

  The air stank.

  “Bad eggs,” she said. “Farts.”

  Rosenberg cracked his own helmet now; she could see steam billow out around his face, as it his suit was a mobile sauna. He grimaced. “Methane,” he said. “Other shit, too. Welcome to Titan, Paula.”

  “Let’s get this over with.”

  Benacerraf took off her boots and gloves; her fingers immediately felt numb and the tips turned pasty-white, but despite the cold, it was a relief to get the boots off her sore feet.

  She began digging around inside her suit, opening zips, trying to get at her urine bag. When she had it, she tipped it up into a larger plastic storage bag. She tried to keep the whole operation sealed up, but her cold hands were clumsy, and a few drops of the thick piss escaped and splashed on the gumbo-streaked fabric of her sleeves. She sealed up the bag and passed it to Rosenberg; he pushed it into a corner of the tent, far from the heater, where it would freeze quickly.

  Mercifully, neither of them had taken a dump into their suit collectors during the walk. That was something to face another day.

  She plugged her PLSS into the power feed, to charge up its batteries. She checked the status of her lith canisters and other consumables.

  Rosenberg had brought a couple of bags of Mount Othrys water into the tent. These had refrozen, of course, during the haul; now he held them close to the heater and mashed them up with his boot.

  There was enough water for seven or eight days, enough to be able to make it back to Discovery from the edge of the ice sheet without resupply. After that, they would be on the ice of Cronos, and ought to be able to collect local water.

  When the ice was melted, they used the water to drink, and to resupply the spigots in their helmets, and to rehydrate a couple of packets of food.

  Washing, they had decided, was a luxury for this trip.

  The menu was soup, rice, biscuits and chocolate, with a handful of baby carrots. Benacerraf gulped down her food as rapidly as she could. The soup made a tiny warm place at the center of her body. The carrots still tasted bitter, but Rosenberg devoured his, and she passed him her portion.

  Rosenberg measured the amount she drank. They had to watch out for dehydration. Cold air couldn’t hold much moisture, and with every breath she took, her nose and mouth were trying to humidify the air. She could lose a gallon of water a day that way, through her nose and breathing
passages. It was a vicious circle; the more she dried out the less thirsty she would feel.

  She gulped down the last of her ration. “I’m done,” she said, shivering. “I think I’ll seal up again.”

  He checked the Rolex strapped to his wrist. “Not yet, Paula. Remember what we said. We have to leave the suits open a full hour before sealing up; we have to get the moisture out.”

  Benacerraf thought of arguing against that, but he’d already relented on the schedule today.

  Anyhow he was right. If the dampness from her body seeped into the suit’s layers, it would shortout their insulating effect. She could even freeze in there.

  “Let me look at your foot,” Rosenberg said now.

  “It’s just a friction injury.”

  “Then let’s stop it getting any worse,” Rosenberg said mildly. “Come on, Paula. Doctor’s orders.”

  With great reluctance, Benacerraf removed the sock she was wearing on her right foot.

  The side of her foot was rubbed raw, all the way back to the heel. Rosenberg rubbed cream into it, and stuck a plaster over the worst of her blisters. “If this keeps up we’ll have to think about cutting a chunk out of that boot. I guess it wasn’t designed for hiking.”

  “No. Thanks, Rosenberg.”

  When Benacerraf had sealed up her suit again, she lay down on her side, facing the soft plastic wall, away from Rosenberg. When she reached out to the wall and touched it with her gloved hand, she could feel how stiff it was, and a rime of frost gathered from their breath and the moisture emitted by the hot Earth-born bodies inside their suits scraped off on her fingertip.

  She would be waking up to darkness again, she realized, to another day of tough hauling across the bleak, featureless gumbo.

  It was impossible to settle her head inside her helmet. The damn thing wasn’t designed to be a pillow, after all. Tomorrow night, she’d put some kind of cushion inside here, something from the sled. Anything soft, even a scrap of parachute canvas.

  She closed her eyes and tried to ignore the stiffness of her shoulders, the way her hip dug into the ground, the soreness of her feet, the sucking cold of the icy slush below her.