Titan (10 page)

He thought his way ahead, through the uncertainties of the next few minutes. He would have to manage his energy. He actually had to accelerate, to get to the ground with enough airspeed; by the time he got down to ten thousand feet he needed to have picked up to two hundred and ninety knots, plus or minus a few percent.

He pitched
Columbia’s
nose down. His airspeed rose sharply.

“Flight, Surgeon. I got six bail-outs. We lost one.”

“… Six? Capcom—”

White said, “
Columbia
, Houston. What’s going on? You’re dropping out of fifteen thousand. Tom, you asshole, are you still on the flight deck?”

Fahy climbed away from her workstation and crossed to the capcom’s station. She plugged her headset into White’s loop. “Tom, this is Fahy. Get your ass out of there.”

“You’re breaking up, Barbara. Anyway, since when has a Flight Director spoken direct on air-to-ground?”

There was a stir among the controllers.

A picture of the orbiter had come up on the big screen at the front of the FCR. It was hazy with distance and magnification. White contrails looped back from the wings’ trailing edges. And black smoke poured from the OMS engine pods.

Thirteen thousand feet.

Lamb looked down at the baked desert surface. It was flat, semi-infinite, like one huge runway. It was why Edwards had been sited out here in the first place.

Columbia
flew over the straight black line of U.S. 58.

This would make a hell of a tale to tell the boys over a couple of Baltics at Juanita’s, like the old days.

Fahy was still talking.

Patiently, he said, “If you’re going to be the capcom, give me my heading.”

“Tom—”

“Give me a heading, damn it.”

“Uh, surface wind two zero zero. Seven knots. Set one zero niner niner. Tom—”

Now he was down to ten thousand feet, and that dip had earned him around three hundred knots extra velocity. Not so bad; he ought to be able to land within six or seven miles if he worked at it…

He got another master alarm. Main bus undervolt. That last power unit was giving out on him. But it wasn’t dead yet.

He punched the red button to kill the clamor.

There was no sound at the press stand, save the barking crackle of the PA’s air-to-ground loop.

The recovery convoy was racing off across the desert surface, towards the orbiter’s projected touchdown position, miles from the runway. They raised a dust cloud a thousand feet tall.

The orbiter was huge as it came in, impossibly ungainly. It was gliding down a steep entry path, as smooth as if it were mounted on invisible rails.

You could tell the bird was sick. Even Hadamard could see that, at a glance. There was some kind of black smoke billowing out of the fat engine pods at the orbiter’s tail. The pods themselves were badly charred and buckled. And there were yellow flames, actual flames, licking along the leading edge of that big tail fin. The public affairs officer said that was hydrazine, leaking out of ruptured power units over the orbiter’s hot surfaces.

But it wasn’t a disaster yet. In the distance Hadamard could see five billowing white parachutes, like thistledown, drifting down through the air.

Hadamard tried to think ahead. He was going to have trouble with that arrogant old asshole Tom Lamb, when he emerged from this, covered in fresh glory. He’d have to be kicked upstairs to somewhere he and his old Apollo-era buddies could be kept quiet, once the first PR burst was over…

Arrogant old asshole.
Suddenly he pictured Tom Lamb sitting on the flight deck of that battered old orbiter, alone, struggling to bring his spacecraft home.

His calculation receded. Hadamard found he was holding his breath.

To increase his rate of descent, he pushed forward on his stick. The back end of the bird came up a little, and the attitude change increased his sink rate.

It was a steep descent: at seventeen degrees, five times as steep as the normal airliner approach, dropping three feet in every fifteen flown. He was pretty much hanging in the straps now, falling fast. He tried to keep his speed constant, by opening and closing the speed-brake with the throttle lever. He could feel the brake take hold, dragging at the air.

Way to his right, he could see where the runway had been painted on the bare desert surface, remote, useless. Beyond it was a group of drab, dun buildings: it was the Wherry housing area, where he’d once lived, when he’d flown F-104 chasers for the X-15s. But that had been in the middle of a different century, a hundred lifetimes ago.

Two thousand feet.

“Beginning preflare.” Using his hand controller and his speed-brake, he started to shallow his glideslope to two degrees.

Columbia
responded, sluggishly, to the maneuver. But his speed was about right.

It was still possible. Even if the landing gear collapsed, even if the orbiter slid across half the Mojave on its belly. As long as he held her steady, through this final couple of thousand feet.

The baked desert surface fled beneath the prow of the orbiter, already shimmering with heat haze.

At a hundred and thirty-five feet, the orbiter bottomed out of its dip. He lifted the cover of the landing gear arming switch, and pressed it. At ninety feet, he pushed the switch.

He heard a clump beneath him, as the heavy gear dropped and locked into place.

“Columbia
, Houston. Gear down. We can see it, Tom.”

“Gear down, rog. I’m going to take this damn thing right into the hangar, Marcus.”

“Maybe we’ll dust it off a little first.”

Just a few more feet. Damn it, he could jump down from here and walk into Eddy.

“Coming in a little steep, Tom.”

“Yeah. Could do with a little prop wash right here.”

“Hell,” said White, “stop complaining. You never had to nurse a sick jet home to a carrier, in pitch darkness, in the middle of forty-foot Atlantic swells. Even a black-shoe surface Navyguy like you can handle this…”

Now for the final maneuver, a nose-up flare, to shed a little more velocity.

But now the master alarm sounded again. He didn’t have time to kill it.

According to the warning array, the last power unit had failed.

He jammed on the speed-brake, and shoved at his stick. If he could pitch her forward, get her nose flat—maybe there would be just a little hydraulic pressure left—

But the stick was loose in his hand, the throttle lever unresponsive.

The orbiter tipped back.

He heard an immense bang from the rear of the craft, as the tail section struck Earth.

Columbia
was still traveling at more than two hundred knots.

The orbiter bounced forward, tipping down as its aerosurfaces fluttered. He could feel the bounce, the longitudinal shudder of the airframe. And then came the stall The orbiter had lost too much of its airspeed in that tail-end scrape to sustain lift.

The nose pointed to the ground.

Now—with the master alarm still crying in his ear, and the caution/warning array a constellation of red lights—the Mojave came up to meet him, exploding in unwelcome detail, more hostile than the surface of the Moon.

Barbara Fahy watched every freeze-framed step in the destruction of STS-143.

The second impact broke the orbiter’s spine. The big delta wings crumpled, sending thermal protection tiles spinning into the air. The crew compartment, the nose of the craft, emerged from the impact apparently undamaged, trailing umbilical wires torn from the payload bay. Then it toppled over and drove itself nose-first into the desert. It broke apart, into shapeless, unrecognizable fragments. The tail section cracked open—perhaps that was the rupture of the helium pressurization tanks—and Fahy could see the hulks of the three big main engines come bouncing out of the expanding cloud of debris, still attached to their load-bearing structures and trailing feed pipes and cables.

The black smoke billowing from the tail section was suddenly brightened by reddish-orange flames, as the residual RCS fuel there burned.

The orbiter’s drag chute billowed out of its container in the tail. Briefly it flared to its full expanse, a half-globe of red, white and blue; then it crumpled, and fell to the dust, irrelevant.

White thought of Tom Lamb. It was like a vision, blinding him.

… Tom came loping out of a shallow crater, towards White. Tom looked like a human-shaped beach ball, his suit brilliant white against the black sky, bouncing happily over the sandy surface of the Moon. Tom had one glove up over his chest, obscuring the tubes which connected his backpack to his oxygen and water inlets. His white oversuit was covered in dust splashes. His gold sun visor was up, and inside his white helmet White could see Tom’s face, with its four-day growth of beard…

Damn, damn. It was as if it was yesterday. That was how he was going to remember his friend, he knew; as he was during those three sun-drenched days they’d had together on the Moon, both of them feeling light as feathers: the most vivid moments of his life, three days that had shaped his whole damn existence.

He turned away from the FCR screens.

The morning California sunlight was bright. It illuminated the expanding cloud of dust and smoke, turning it into a kind of three-dimensional, kinetic sculpture of light, set against the remote hills surrounding the dry lake beds.

Hadamard, beyond calculation, knew he would spend the rest of his life with this brief sequence of images, watching them over and again.

Jiang gazed at the glistening curvature of Earth: the wrinkled oceans, the shadow-casting clouds stacked tall over the equator. Outside the cabin, all the way to infinity, there was no air; just silence. She felt small, fragile, barely protected by the thin skin of the
xiaohao.

Where she passed, she relayed revolutionary messages, reading from a book she had carried in a pocket of her pressure suit. “Warm greetings from space,” she said. “Everything that is good in me I owe to our Communist Party and the Helmsman of the Country. This date is one on which mankind’s most cherished dreams come true, and also marks the triumph of Chinese science and technology…”

The words were so familiar to her, homilies from classes in politics, as to be almost meaningless. And yet, here, alone in the blackness of space, with the blue light of Earth illuminating the pages of the book, she felt filled with a deep, unfocused nostalgia. She felt growing within her an abiding attachment for her huge country, for the billion-strong horde of her countrymen: the brash entrepreneurial class in the bustling coastal cities, the peasants still scratching at their fields as they had done for five millennia. She was of them, and so of the Party which, after seven decades, still ruled; she would, she knew, never be anything more or less than that.

But now the ground controllers were telling her, in clipped sentences, of some disaster involving the American Space Shuttle. They sounded jubilant, she thought. They had her intone words of sympathy, of fellowship, broadcast from orbit.

The truth was she felt little concern, for whatever might have befallen the American astronauts. This was her moment; nothing could diminish that.

Though she knew she would be under pressure to become an ambassador for the space program, for the Party, and for China, Jiang intended to battle to stay within the unfolding program itself. The Helmsman had stated that a Chinese astronaut would walk on the surface of the Moon before 2019: the seventieth anniversary of Mao’s proclamation of the People’s Republic. Jiang felt her grin tighten as she thought about that. It would be a remarkable achievement, an affirmation that China would, after all, awake from her centuries-long slumber and become the dominant world power in the new millennium.

And it was only fifteen years away.

Jiang would still be less than fifty. Americans and Russians had flown at much greater ages than that…

And so she read the simple words of soldier and Party leaders, as she sailed over the skin of Earth.

Paula Benacerraf, suspended, could hear sounds, drifting up to her from the huge, empty ground below. Her own breathing was loud in her ears.

This was the end of the U.S. space program, and the end of her own career.

Earth was claiming her. For the rest of her life.

She could see her future, mapped out. Her destiny was no more than to be a survivor of
Columbia,
and somebody’s mother, somebody’s grandmother, for the rest of her life.

She’d never get back to space again. She’d never again drift in all that light, never see the lights of her spacecraft as it drifted in its own orbit beneath her.

Like hell, she thought. There has to be an option.

She tucked up her legs, keeping away from the Earth as long as she could. But the impact in the dirt, when it came, was hard.

W
hat did you think you
were doing, Rosenberg?”

Marcia Delbruck, Rosenberg’s project boss, was pacing around her office, formidable in her Berkeley sweatshirt and frizzed-up hair; she had a copy of Jackie Benacerraf’s life-on-Titan article loaded on her big wall-mounted softscreen. “You’ve made a joke of us all, of the whole project.”

“That’s ridiculous, Marcia.”

“You let this woman Jackie Benacerraf get to you. You just can’t handle women, can you, Rosenberg?”

Actually, he thought, no. But he wasn’t going to sit here and take this. “All I did was speculate a little.”

“About life on Titan? Jesus Christ. Do you know how much damage that kind of crap can do?”

“No. No, I don’t really see what damage that kind of crap can do. I know it’s bad science to go shooting my mouth off about tentative hypotheses before—”

“It’s not the science. It’s the PR. Don’t you understand any of this?” She sat down behind her desk. “Isaac, you have to look at the situation we’re in. Think back to the past. Look at 1964, when the first Mariner reached Mars. It was run out of JPL, right here—”

“What has some forty-year-old probe got to do with anything?”

“Lessons of history, Rosenberg. Back then, NASA was already thinking about how to follow on from Apollo. Mars would have been the next logical step, right? Move onward and outward, human expansion into the Solar System.

“But Mariner found craters, like the Moon’s. They’d directed the craft over an area where they were expecting canals, for God’s sake.

“All of a sudden, there was no point going to Mars after all, because there was nothing there except another sterile, irradiated ball of rock. You could say that handful of pictures, from that first Mariner, turned the history of space exploration. It Mars had been worth going to, we’d be there by now. Instead, NASA was just wound down.”

“I know about the disappointment,” he said icily. “I read Bradbury, and Clarke, and Heinlein. I can imagine how it was.”

“NASA learned its corporate lesson, slowly and painfully.” She thumped the desk with her closed fist to emphasize her words. “Look how carefully they handled the story of the organic materials they found in the Martian meteorite…”

“Careful, yeah. But so what? They still haven’t flown a Mars sample-return mission to confirm—”

“It’s not the point, Rosenberg,” she snapped. “You don’t promise what you don’t deliver. You don’t yap to the media about finding life on Titan.”

“All I talked about was the preliminary results, and what they might mean. You can hear the same stuff in the canteen here any day of the week.”

She tapped the clipping on her screen. “This isn’t the JPL canteen, Rosenberg.”

“Anyway, what does NASA have to do with it? JPL’s an arm of Caltech; it’s organizationally independent—”

“Don’t be smart, Rosenberg. Who the hell do you think you are? Maybe it’s escaped your notice, but you’re just one of a team here.”

The team lecture, he thought with dread. “I know.” Rosenberg pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets. “I know about the line, and the matrix management structure, and my office, division, section, group and subgroup, I know about the organization charts and documentation trees.” It was true. He did know all about that; he’d had to learn. An education in JPL’s peculiar politics was like a return to grade school biology, learning about kingdoms and phyla and classes.

“Then,” she snapped, “you know that you occupy one space in that organization, one little bitty square, and that’s where you should damn well stay. Leave the press to the PR people; they know how to handle it right… Look, Rosenberg, you have to come to some kind of accommodation with me. I’m telling you there’s no other way to run a major project like a deep space mission except with a tight, lean organization like ours. And it works. As long as we all work within it.”

“Come on, Marcia. We shouldn’t be talking about organizational forms, for God’s sake. At the very least we’ve got evidence of a new kind of biochemistry, something completely new, out on the surface of that moon. We should be talking about the data, the results. About going back, a sample-return mission—”

“Going back?” She laughed. “Don’t you follow the news, Rosenberg? The Space Shuttle just crashed. Nobody knows what the hell the future is for NASA. If it has one at all.”

“But we have to go back to Titan.”

“Why?”

He couldn’t see why she would even pose the question. “Because there’s so much more to learn.”

“Let me give you some advice, Rosenberg,” she said. “We aren’t going back to Titan. Not in my lifetime, or yours. No matter what
Huygens
has found. Just as we aren’t going back to Venus, or Mercury, or Neptune. We’ll be lucky to shoot off a few more probes to Mars. Get used to the fact. And the way to do that is to get a life. I understand you, Rosenberg. Better than you think I do. Probably better than you understand yourself. Titan is always going to be out there. What’s the rush? What you’re talking about is yourself. What you mean is that you want to discover it all, before you die. That’s what motivates you. You can’t bear the thought of the universe going on without you, its events unfolding without your invaluable brain still being around to process them. Right?”

This sudden descent into personal analysis startled him; he had no idea what to say.

She sat back. “Look. I know you’re a good worker; I know we need people like you, who can think out of the box. But I don’t need you shooting your mouth off to the press. It’s not three months since
Columbia
came down. We’re trying to preserve
Cassini,
the last of the great JPL probes; you must know we haven’t secured funding for the extended mission yet. If you attract enough hostility, you could get us shut down, future projects killed…”

Slowly, he realized that she meant it. She was expressing a genuine fear: that if space scientists attracted too much attention—if they sounded as it they weren’t being “responsible,” as if they were shooting for the Moon again—then they’d be closed down.

In the first decade of a new millennium, a sense of wonder was dangerous.

Discreetly he checked his watch. He was meeting Paula Benacerraf later today. Maybe he could find some new way forward, with her. And…

But Delbruck was still talking at him. “Have you got it, Rosenberg? Have you?”

Rosenberg came to pick Benacerraf up, in person, from LAX. She shook Rosenberg’s offered hand, and climbed into the car.

Rosenberg swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. For a few miles they drove in silence, except for the rattling of the car, which was a clunker.

Rosenberg, half Benacerraf’s age, seemed almost shy.

Rosenberg’s driving was erratic—he took it at speed, with not much room for error—and he was a little wild-eyed, as if he’d been missing out on sleep. Probably he had; he seemed the type.

JPL wasn’t NASA, strictly speaking. She’d never been out here before, but she’d heard from insiders that JPL’s spirit of independence and its campus-like atmosphere were important to it, and notorious in the rest of the Agency.

So maybe she shouldn’t have been surprised to have been summoned out here like this, by Isaac Rosenberg, a skinny guy in his mid-twenties with glasses, bad skin, and thinning hair tied back in a fashion that had died out, to her knowledge, thirty years ago.

“This seems a way to go,” she remarked after a while. “We’re a long way out of Pasadena.”

“Yeah,” Rosenberg said. “Well, they used to test rockets here. Hence ‘Jet Propulsion Laboratory’ …” He kept talking; it seemed to make him feel more comfortable. “The history’s kind of interesting. It all started with a low-budget bunch of guys working out of Caltech, flying their rockets out of the Arroyo Seco, before the Second World War. They had huts of frame and corrugated metal, unheated and drafty, so crammed with rocket plumbing there was no room for a desk… And then a sprawling, expensive suburb got built all around them.

“After the war the lab became an eyesore, and the residents in Flintridge and Altadena and La Canada started to complain about the static motor tests, and the flashing red lights at night.”

“Red lights?”

He grinned. “It was missile test crews heading off for White Sands. But the rumors were that the lights were ambulances taking out bodies of workers killed in rocket tests.”

She smiled. “Are you sure they were just test crews? Or—”

“Or maybe there’s been a cover-up.” He whistled a snatch of the classic
X-Files
theme, and they both laughed. “I used to love that show,” he said. “But I never got over the ice-dance version.”

He entered La Canada, an upper-middle-class suburb, lawns and children and ranch-style, white-painted houses, and turned a corner, and there was JPL. The lab was hemmed into a cramped and smoggy site, roughly triangular, bounded by the San Gabriel Mountains, the Arroyo Seco, and the neat homes of La Canada.

Rosenberg swung the car off the road.

There was a guard at the campus entrance; he waved them into a lot.

Rosenberg walked her through visitor control, and offered to show her around the campus.

They walked slowly down a central mall that was adorned with a fountain. The mall stretched from the gate into the main working area of the laboratory. Office buildings filled the Arroyo; some of them were drab, military-standard boxy structures, but there was also a tower of steel and glass, on the north side of the mall, and an auditorium on the south.

Crammed in here, it was evident that the only way JPL had been able to build was up.

Rosenberg said, “That’s the von Karman auditorium. A lot of great news conferences and public events took place in there: the first pictures from Mars, the
Voyager
pictures of Jupiter and Saturn—”

“What about the glass tower?”

“Building 180, for the administrators. Can’t you tell? Nine storys of marble and glass sheathing.” He pointed. “Executive suites on the top floor. I expect you’ll be up there later to meet the Director.”

The current JPL Director was a retired Air Force general. “Maybe,” said Benacerraf. “It’s not on my schedule.” And besides, she’d had enough Air Force in her face recently. “I wasn’t expecting quite so much landscaping.”

“Yeah, but it’s limited to the public areas. I always think the place looks like a junior college that ran out of money halfway through a building program. When the trees and flower pots appeared, the old-timers say, they knew it was all over for the organization. Landscaping is a sure sign of institutional decadence. You come to JPL to do the final far-out things, not for pot plants …”

She watched him. “You love the place, don’t you?”

He looked briefly embarrassed; it was clear he’d rather be talking at her than be analyzed. “Hell, I don’t know. I like what’s been achieved here, I guess. Ms. Benacerraf—”

“Paula.”

He looked confused, comically. “Call me Rosenberg. But things are changing now. It seems to me I’m living through the long, drawn-out consequences of massive policy mistakes made long before I was born. And that makes me angry.”

“Is that why you asked me to come out here?”

“Kind of.”

He guided her into one of the buildings. He led her through corridors littered with computer terminals, storage media and printouts; there were close-up
Ranger
photographs of the Moon’s surface, casually framed and stuck on the walls.

But those Moon photographs were all of forty years old: just historic curios, as meaningless now as a Victorian naturalist’s collection of dead, pinned insects. There was an air of age, of decay about the place, she thought; the narrow corridors with their ceiling tiles were redolent of the corporate buildings of the middle of the last century.

JPL was showing its age. It had become a place of the past, not the future.

How sad.

He led her out back of the campus buildings, to a dusty area compressed against the Arroyo and the mountain. Here, the rough-hewn character of the original 1940s laboratory’ remained: a huddle of two- and three-story Army base buildings—now more than sixty years old—in standard-issue military paintwork.

Rosenberg pointed. “Even by the end of the war there were still only about a hundred workers here. Just lashed-up structures of corrugated metal, redwood tic and stone. See over there? They had a string of test pits dug into the side of the hill, lined with railroad ties. They called it the gulch. You had to drive to the site over a bumpy road that washed out in the rainy season… It was as crude as hell. And yet, the exploration of the Solar System started right here.”

“Why are you showing me all this, Rosenberg?”

He took off his glasses and polished them on a corner of his T-shirt. “Because it’s all over for JPL,” he said. “For decades, as far back as Apollo, NASA has starved JPL and space science to pay for Man-In-Space. And now, hell, I presume you’ve heard the scuttlebutt. They’re even going to close down the Deep Space Network. They’re already talking about mothballing the Hubble. And Goldstone will be turned over to the USAF for some kind of navel-searching reconnaissance work.”

“It’s all politics, Rosenberg,” Benacerraf said gently. “You have to understand. The White House has to respond to pressure from the likes of Congressman Maclachlan. They have to appear in control of their space budgets. So if they are throwing money at new launch vehicles to replace Shuttle, they have to cut somewhere else …”

“But when we all calm down from our fright about the Chinese, they’ll just cut the launcher budgets anyhow, and we’ll be left with nothing. Paula, when it’s gone, it’s gone. The signals coming in from the last probes—the Voyagers,
Galileo, Cassini
—will fall on a deaf world. Think about that. And as for JPL, those sharks in the USAF have been waiting for something like
Columbia,
waiting for NASA to weaken. It’s as if they’re taking revenge. They’re going to turn us into a DoD-dedicated laboratory. The NASA links will be severed, and we’ll lose the space work, and all of our research will be classified, for good and all. The Pentagon calls it weaponization.”