The Titan Probe

by Brandon Q Morris

  “One moment,” Hayato continued. He turned around. “I am going to get a lighter.” He left Martin standing there while he returned to the lander. Ten minutes later he was back, seemingly with empty hands.

  “So?” Martin looked at Hayato.

  “Turn the valve wheel,” Hayato told him. Then he reached into the tool bag at his belt and pulled out a lighter wrapped in cloth.

  “Quickly!” he ordered. “Otherwise the propane gas will freeze inside it.” He held the lighter in the oxygen’s current and moved the friction wheel. A spark flew, then a flickering flame appeared, and finally the oxygen stream ignited faster than Hayato could move his hand away. Martin saw the fire spread to the entire length of the stream.

  “That was close,” the Japanese astronaut said, examining his glove. “No harm. Good thing we did not try this at home. Without the glove I would be fried now.” Hayato laughed. Martin did not have the time to join him in laughing. He was struggling with the flame. The oxygen tank was unwieldy. It’s not really meant to be a flamethrower, he thought.

  Their idea was working—fire defeated ice. The lander module already began to tilt. Damn, Martin thought. They should have thought about that beforehand. Hayato would never be able to hold the massive lander on his own, even though it only weighed a seventh of its Earth weight.

  “We are going to need something to support it,” he called to his fellow astronaut. Hayato ran off, and Martin could not watch him without taking his eyes off the flame. Then Hayato returned with a boulder of ice. It was impressive seeing this slight man carrying such a large boulder. The reduced gravity and the low density of the material made it possible. Hayato placed the boulder outside the reach of the flamethrower, but still below the lander. Then he went to fetch a second one.

  “Now quickly weld them in place, please,” he instructed.

  This time Martin immediately understood what Hayato wanted. He used the flamethrower to melt the ice boulder near its base. At these low temperatures, it would refreeze immediately and attach itself firmly to the ground. After the lander received a new substructure, they needed to remove the landing struts. Hayato already pulled out a tool. Standing halfway in the water, he removed two struts from the left side.

  “Total scrap,” he said, and showed Martin the spots where they had snapped off. Then he crawled below the lander and unscrewed the two right struts, so they would not freeze in place again.

  “More scrap. You can turn off the flamethrower now.”

  The lander was still standing at an angle. They couldn’t launch like this.

  “We need two more boulders of similar height,” Hayato said. They looked around. Martin was surprised because the scenery had changed. The ‘sand’ around the lander module now formed a kind of wall, maybe one meter high.

  “Was this here earlier?”

  “I do not know,” Hayato said. “I did not notice it. We should look at the older recordings on the computer later. But now let us...”

  “Sure, sure, you’re right.”

  Martin climbed over the wall. At a distance of about 30 meters he found a rounded ice boulder of the appropriate size. Hayato also returned successfully.

  The rest was done in silent cooperation. They put down one of the boulders behind the lander. Then they used the landing strut as a lever and utilized their combined strength to raise the module.

  “Heave-ho,” Martin said. They pushed down on the metal strut and the lander obediently moved up. Hayato used his foot to slide a second boulder beneath it. They slowly let go, and with a creaking sound the bottom of the lander came to rest on its new foundation of ice. For security’s sake they pushed the second boulder underneath it, too.

  “That’s it,” Martin remarked. Now they only had to wait for Francesca’s return. He tried to contact her via the helmet radio, but a connection could not be established. Just as he was about to enter the capsule, he saw a thin lightning flash on the far horizon.

  He did not forget about the fresh wall of sand. He sat down at the computer and called up the camera images captured during the past few hours. Shortly after the landing, no structure was visible. It only changed much later. The wall seemed to come from afar and contracted around the lander module. Martin compared the time codes. The process must have started about the time he had activated the flamethrower.

  December 31, 2046, Enceladus

  Two hours had passed since Marchenko had sent his message. Valkyrie’s batteries were at a charge level of 17 percent. He would not be able to send a second message until the day after tomorrow. He was sitting at the monitor for half an hour, hoping for a reply. While he anxiously waited, he had bitten off loose skin near his fingernails, scratched the dry spots on his left lower leg raw, and rubbed his eyes until they hurt. Then he admitted to himself the attempt had failed.

  He did not know the reason for the failure. The transmitter in Valkyrie did not report any errors. If it had been defective, there should have been warnings. The most likely explanation was ILSE was currently in the radio shadow of Saturn or one of its moons. This would have been bad luck. The cosmos was huge, and there was an enormous amount of space between celestial bodies, but it just so happened when he had something to say, a planet had gotten in the way.

  Marchenko put his head on his arms. The right arm still hurt now and then, but the pain also anchored him in reality. Maybe all of this was only a dream after all? He recalled the crash on Enceladus. He could not have actually have survived it, could he? And yet, here he was, waiting for a rescue that probably would not come, since the crew of ILSE was probably considering him dead already. What did it matter what he was doing here? Marchenko was no Christian, so for him there was no afterlife. Despite this, all of his life he believed there was a justification, a reason for all of his activities, and indeed this reason always seemed to show up at some point. It was not always at the start. Yet if in doubt, he gave life a chance to prove itself, and this usually turned out to be a good strategy.

  What about now? To the entire world he was dead, no matter how alive he felt at the moment. It did not matter what he did at this point; even if he suddenly came up with a ‘Theory of Everything,’ it would not matter because he would have to take it with him to his grave. Was he really still alive, the way he used to be? Marchenko intentionally placed more weight on the injured arm. The pain shot through the entire right side of his upper body. It was his pain, he felt it, it concerned him. He thought about the day his strict father had locked him in an ice-cold room, without contact with the outside world. He had been all alone until his mother managed to smuggle some bread to him. He could not even remember why his father had done this to him.

  In a strange way he was grateful to his father today. After all, that incident had first inspired the feeling the cosmos began within himself. He never told anyone about it. People probably would have considered him crazy, although he did not consider himself to be the center of the universe. It was more a question of perspective, what was inside and what was outside. He imagined little Mitya in the dark room and felt close to his former self. He was released from the room by his father, but he would not get released from Valkyrie. It did not matter now.

  Marchenko got up and straightened his body. It was too early for such thoughts. He would charge the batteries again and send another message.

  “Happy New Year, Mitya,” he said to himself.

  December 31, 2046, Earth

  Robert Millikan shut his book, left his comfortable easy chair, and got dressed. Then he got into his pickup truck and drove through the snowy New Year’s Eve night toward the Science Park. The snow came down in thick flakes. Robert lowered the window to hold his ID card against the reader at the entrance barrier. The machine wished him a nice evening. There was a strong smell of wet forest reminding him nature was slowly reclaiming the area. Robert left the window open, even though snowflakes were being blown into the cab.

  He could not stand staying at home any longer. His book sudden
ly seemed boring, the highly praised plot trite. Instead of empathizing with the protagonist, his thoughts wandered out into space. He asked himself why he had, up until now, paid so little attention to the international Enceladus expedition. He told himself it was due to all the hype about it, but he suspected it had more to do with his son.

  Then he remembered the radio telescope. He was one of the few people in the world who could listen to the expedition live. Its communication with Earth went by way of the antennas of the Deep Space Network, to which Green Bank Observatory used to belong a long time ago. For transmissions from Earth there was almost unlimited energy available. A spaceship, on the other hand, had limited resources and could not answer as loudly. The giant radio dishes balanced this asymmetry by listening in specific directions. By chance he, alone, had one of the dishes available, and could listen to his heart’s delight.

  Robert parked directly in front of the building containing the Jansky Lab. This evening, during the last night of the year, he certainly would not run into any doctoral students. All the people he knew, and luckily this was a small number, had been invited somewhere to a party. Acting happy on command was the last thing he wanted to do.

  When he entered, the hallway smelled of floor polish, so the cleaning woman must have been here earlier today. The heavy door to the control room opened with a squeaking sound. In the quiet of the night it seemed to be particularly loud. Robert looked around nervously, as if he was about to do something forbidden.

  While the control console and the evaluation computer were booting up, he tried to look outside through the window, but could only see snow flurries. I hope it won’t interfere too much with the reception, he thought. Robert did not know where ILSE was currently located. If he was going to receive its weak signals, he required an exact position. Should he ask his acquaintance at NASA? He looked at his watch. It was only seven thirty, so he had more than enough time for a search. It seemed logical to start where ILSE had been four days ago, on Enceladus. While the antenna was moving to its position, he launched a computer simulation searching for a logical return trajectory the spaceship might take. Then he would be able to systematically search its path. He did not believe ILSE had already left the Saturn system.

  He liked the work, but there used to be a time when it would have seemed meaningless. His colleagues either listened to extraterrestrial signals that never came, or they served as glorified mailmen for NASA. The really exciting research, like the core of active galaxies at the edge of the observable universe, was increasingly taken over by X-ray telescopes in space, or by the Chinese with their huge, government-financed dishes.

  A beep told him the antenna had reached its first target position. He let the computer display a spectrum, just to see if everything was in its familiar place. The printer chattered while Robert was already looking for the first position of ILSE. He checked the printout and froze. This really can’t be true. There was another line that should not be there, though now in the X-band instead of the S-band as it had been on Titan. He loaded the entire data set. 8404 MHz, a frequency often used by Deep Space probes, but also by ILSE. Had he perhaps already found the spaceship, even before starting his search? He made the antenna record a new spectrum and then compared the measurements. The signal was gone. Here, on the left sheet, there was definitely a transmission, there on the right one only the static created by the magnetic field of Saturn and a few hydrogen and methane lines.

  Robert was confused. It could not be ILSE, since the ship was sending a continual carrier signal to Mission Control. This would not just suddenly disappear, and it should also be stronger, as the spaceship aimed its high-gain antenna directly at Earth. The peak was too clearly defined for a random spike, a broadcast from the civilian sector would present differently, and he was absolutely certain about the equipment. Robert took a closer look at the signal. It could be a data transmission. Too bad he did not record its temporal pattern. This way he could only say something was there, but did not know what it was. He might be able to find out how much energy the transmitter used, though. Robert launched a math program and calculated the strength of the signal from space at its origin. If the sender did not specifically aim at Earth, this would have required several kilowatts. Robert was impressed. He tried to run a Fourier analysis to reverse the averaging of the signal and thus get to the content somehow, but he did not receive any meaningful results.

  Oh well. He could not do much more. Yesterday, CapCom Devendra Singh Arora had sent him an email thanking him for discovering the Titan signal, without mentioning any further details. At least now he had the correct email address of the CapCom—and he knew this man would not consider him a crackpot. He sent him an email with all the data he had just recorded, and hoped he had made the right decision.

  January 1, 2047, Titan

  It had stopped raining—at least no drops could be heard anymore. Francesca opened the zipper of her tent. Outside it seemed to be as dim as before. She hesitated for a moment. Her bowels and bladder called for attention, even though—or because—she only used liquid foods. Just standing in the Titan landscape and loosening her sphincter seemed inappropriate to her. Therefore she preferred to relieve herself in her diaper while inside the tent. It was still unpleasant, but there was no alternative. In a few hours, back in the lander, she would be able to clean herself up.

  The tent was steaming. The warmth of her body must have heated its interior by several degrees. Now the methane rain that had fallen was evaporating. The air was definitely clearer than before. From her elevated position she had a fantastic view and shivered as she took it all in. Francesca Rossi was the first human to be able to see this. This is how discoverers must have once felt on Earth. She gazed across the desert with its giant dunes that appeared so earthlike. But the perspective seemed distorted—the horizon was unnaturally close, and she almost felt like she could see the curvature of this moon. In the distance, toward the north, she saw the thunderstorm moving away along the mountain range. Again, lightning forked through the cloud layer, but it did not reach the ground. Francesca started to count in order to estimate the distance. “Twenty-one, twenty-two...” at forty-two she heard a deep rumbling, much deeper than she was used to on Earth.

  What was the speed of sound in the atmosphere of Titan? Aerodynamics had been part of her basic pilot training. The speed of sound was the square root of the ratio of the compression coefficient K to the density of the gas. If she simplified matters by assuming nitrogen dominated, like on Earth, and disregarded the effect of the temperature on the compression coefficient, while the density was five times higher here, then on Earth sound would be faster by the square root of 5, about 2.23 times faster than on Titan. Perhaps 150 meters per second, instead of 340? Therefore, the thunderstorm must be about 3.3 kilometers away.

  She turned around. Small currents of methane were running down the slopes of the mountain in front of her, revealing the ground ice. The area seemed a bit brighter, as if the rain had washed away dust and dirt. Francesca knew the Alps on Earth fairly well. This mountain range looked different. The wall in front of her much more resembled the fracture edge of a large ice floe. Francesca would have hardly been able to get across this if erosion had not created some access paths and narrow valleys leading upward. They were steep, but at a seventh of Earth’s gravity, they should pose no problem, particularly since she could leave the sled behind. She packed the tent, though, just in case of further downpours.

  Francesca marked the location of the sled on her arm display. A huge drop of liquid methane seemed to fall into the display, out of a clear sky. Slowly it spread into an oily film, then evaporated, leaving a greasy residue behind, that she wiped off with her sleeve. The radar map recommended climbing through a valley to her right. To check, she glanced upward and then started walking. At the bottom of the valley she had to cross a few sticky sediments. The material looked dark brown, which did not mean much under these lighting conditions. It was as viscous as tar. She
took a sample and smeared some of it on an analyzer. The result was a long list of organic compounds. If it was a bit warmer, it might be the ideal culture medium for the development of life. At minus 180 degrees, though, most reactions ran too slowly. Accordingly, the analyzer found no signs of life.

  The ascent made Francesca sweat, though she did not mind. She was glad to exert herself, to start a fight against the mountain she was determined to defeat. The ice might be hard as granite, but the feeling during the climb was comparable with a climb in the Alps. Her body was so much lighter, and at the same time she occasionally came across spots that were covered with a thin layer of ‘topsoil,’ those organic sediments she had already analyzed. In those places she needed to be careful not to slip, but in reality, the sharp edges that could damage her spacesuit posed the greatest danger.

  After half an hour she reached the top of the ridge. She again tried to reach the lander, but she could only hear static in the radio channel. From now on Francesca would be completely in the radio shadow of the mountain range.

  The similarity of the range to a tilted ice floe became even more apparent. She now descended at a gentle angle. The layer of organic compounds was a little thicker. When it rained the methane currents ran more slowly here, so they did not dig channels as deeply into the ground. Francesca sprinted forward. The faster she reached her destination, the sooner she would be back.

  The ground around her got a bit lighter in color with every kilometer. Now ice sand dominated, like in the desert, but it did not seem as deep because she was not sinking into it as much as before. She took a closer look at the ground. There was an oily film, probably remnants of the rain. No wonder she could walk better. The ice sand was wet and therefore more stable—just like she knew from beaches along the Adriatic.