Titan (21 page)

He went into a slow-motion fall. It took maybe a second to drop to the footpad, but on Earth it would have taken less than halt that. The difference was pleasingly noticeable. He couldn’t feel the invisible harness supporting him at all.

He was in deep shadow here.

“I’ve also been receiving more proposals from the USAF for disposing of the Shuttle fleet,” he said to Benacerraf.

“Proposals that went straight to you, over my head,” she said mildly.

“I guess so. Well, that’s the way it works, Paula. Those guys play for keeps.”

“The USAF proposals are entirely destructive.”

“I don’t think that’s entirely fair,” he said. The USAF had given up on their grandiose L5 schemes. Now they proposed to use the remaining orbiters as unmanned testbeds, on suborbital flights inside and outside the atmosphere, probing hypersonic, high-altitude flight regimes which were still only partially understood. “We could get some good data out of there.”

“For what purpose? The data, such as it would be, would sit locked away in big USAF databases. And for that dubious benefit they would destroy the orbiters, a national treasure.”

But it would get Al Hartle off my back, he thought. “Give me a single good reason why I should recommend we go to Titan,” he said.

“Because it represents the true high ground,” she replied immediately. She turned, and started to Moonwalk; she drifted across the glowing lunar ground, dreamlike.

“That’s a worn old phrase.”

“But in this case, I think it applies,” she said. “Titan is the key to the rest of the Solar System. You’ve seen Rosenberg’s detailed plan—”

“Yes.”

“It’s almost like a business plan,” she said. “On the surface it seems fantastic. But in fact it’s orderly, logical.”

“It’s a dream,” he said. “You’re talking to an accountant, remember. It’s not a business plan at all.”

“Jake, we’re overdue for a breakthrough in booster technology. That’s been obvious for a couple of decades. The Shuttle system uses technology that goes back to Goddard in the 1920s. The Shuttle is just a V-2 with air conditioning. Somebody’s going to make the breakthrough, sooner or later, to routine, cheap access to space. And once that happens, there will be an explosion off-world. You’ll see factories, farms, power stations in LEO … and the next words spoken on the surface of the Moon will be Chinese. Or Korean, or Vietnamese. Soon after that, those guys will make it to Mars, the asteroids. We aren’t investing in the right stuff, the core technologies. Any Americans who want to go will have to book passage.

“We’re about to lose out on an historic opportunity, Jake. We’ve already lost the inner Solar System. Despite the panic, the rush to invest in space since the crash, I don’t see any way to avoid that. We’ve spent too long looking inward, retrenching, cutting back, to change now.”

Actually he agreed. Decadent, he thought. That’s what we are now. We deserve to be overtaken, by younger, more vigorous economies.

She said, “But, right at this moment,
we have the ability to get to Titan.
And if we do that, we’ll have control of a world of resources that are scarce in the rest of the System. Do you get it, Jake? We’ll have just that one little island in the sky, but it will represent the high ground. As a nation we will still be in the game, in the medium and far future.”

He grunted, unimpressed. “Is that all you have? This visionary crap?”

“No. I have a lot more visionary crap.”

“Such as?”

“Jake, here you are on the surface of the Moon. Or as near as damn it. I’ve brought you here for a reason.”

He laughed. “To sway me with flashy Disney-Coke virtuals.”

“No. Well, maybe. Look, Jake, there are whole generations out there much too young to remember Apollo. It we don’t give them this, they’ll be left with nothing more than the memory of a Shuttle crash. We’ll deserve to sink back into all the anti-rational garbage that’s threatening to drown us. But if we act, now… You could be a hero, Jake.”

Her voice, over his VHF loop, was thin, persistent, scratchy.

A hero. In tact, that had already occurred to him.

He wasn’t about to tell Benacerraf this, but he hadn’t in fact dismissed the Titan proposal out of hand, when it first came across his desk. On reflection, he’d calculated, it was possible that a lot of constituencies could be brought to unite behind this bizarre proposal: for instance there would be plenty of work, at least in the short term, for the NASA centers, which were engaged in their usual turf wars over the latest set of cutbacks. This last project could help in the management of the final decline and shutdown much of NASA faced.

The USAF would be more problematic. But even they—or most of their internal warring factions anyhow—could be brought into line, Hadamard thought, if it was pointed out that this exercise would at least destroy the Shuttle fleet, just as surely as using the orbiters for destructive tests or advanced weapons target practice.

And meanwhile, inside the White House, there was—he had perceived—some pressure to keep NASA flying. Unusually, this Administration was trying to think ahead, beyond its own expected political death in 2008. They feared for the future of the country if—when—Xavier Maclachlan came to power, a future in which it seemed America was likely to lapse into fundamentalism, and isolationism, and a kind of high-tech Middle Ages.

A huge technological program already underway when Maclachlan took office—an immense deep space mission lasting years, perhaps even spanning beyond Maclachlan’s term—might be a way to keep the spark of rationalism alive. Surely even Maclachlan wouldn’t be able to justify’ closing down the new launcher program if it meant stranding astronauts among the moons of Saturn.

And, Hadamard reflected, he himself could indeed become some kind of popular hero. When this was over—even if the mission failed in space, even if it failed to get off the ground altogether—he could present himself as more than a costcutter, a man who could combine the fiscal targets of his employers, even the final run-down of NASA, with a genuine sense of vision.

He could move from NASA, afterward, to his pick of jobs.

Benacerraf’s proposal, all this crap about the higher ground, was just a ridiculous power fantasy to him, one in a long line of such dreams to emanate from the centers of NASA. But maybe he ought to back it, even so; maybe it could even be made to serve his own personal objectives.

And maybe it would even work. Maybe it would turn a few young heads back towards engineering, instead of aromatherapy or goddamn homeopathy.

And by the time it all failed, as it surely must, he would be long gone.

A part of his mind wondered if Benacerraf knew what he was thinking, if she wasn’t as naive as she seemed. Maybe she was manipulating him on some level he didn’t recognize. If so it didn’t matter; all that counted, when it came to his decision, was the coincidence of this proposal with his own interests.

And, he sensed, the decision was shaping inside him, as the various factors slotted into place in his subconscious.

Perhaps Benacerraf would never know how. But, he suspected, she had won her argument today.

He, Jake Hadamard, was going to send astronauts to Saturn.

Good God. He’d come a long way since he took this job.

A soft chime sounded in his ears, reminding him that he was holding up the VR immersion. For a moment he forgot his lines; then the prompter scrolled across the bottom of his visor. “Uh, I’m at the foot of the ladder now. The LM footpads are only depressed in the surface about one or two inches. Although the surface appears to be very fine, fine grained, when you get close to it, it’s almost like a powder. Down there it’s very fine…”

Eagle
looked like a gaunt spider, looming above him in the glaring sunlight, a filmy construct of gold leaf and aluminum, standing on this broad, level plain. He found it hard to concentrate, with Benacerraf standing there, tilted slightly forward under the weight of her backpack, watching him. A grandmother on the Moon was definitely not a part of Armstrong’s original experience, he thought.

He got hold of the ladder with a gloved hand, and turned to his left and leaned outward. “I’m going to step off the LM now.” Carefully, he raised his left boot over the lip of the footpad, and lowered his blue overshoe to the dust. He felt his heartbeat rise, and he felt foolish, knowing he was being monitored by invisible techs just a few feet away.

He felt as if he had stepped onto snow; the surface seemed to crunch as it took his weight. But then, a fraction of an inch in, he reached firm footing.

There he was, one foot on this angular machine from Earth, the other on the Moon itself.

It was time for the line.

“That’s one small step for a man…”

Christ, he thought. He had a lump in his throat.

If only it hadn’t been Armstrong, he thought. If only it had been someone less thoughtful, a bullshitter like Pete Conrad, who would have cracked a joke and whooped as he somersaulted down the ladder of the LM. Then we could all have dismissed the whole thing for what it was, a stunt, and got on with the rest of our lives.

Damn Neil Armstrong.

The lunar surface dissolved. The blocky walls of the immersive VR tank—the centerpiece of the visitors’ center here at Kennedy—coalesced around him, breaking through the dark lunar sky. The harness suspending him relaxed, and his full weight descended on his shoulders once more, heavy and eternal. That feeling of buoyant lightness dissipated, and he was trapped on Earth.

So, he thought, it had all been a dream.

He felt a deep, sharp stab of regret, of loss.

B
enacerraf called them all to
a meeting at JPL. Rosenberg wanted to review landing sites. In the end, such were their commitments to the accelerating refurbishment and training programs, only Mott and Benacerraf could make it.

To Benacerraf, Rosenberg seemed more isolated than ever from his JPL. She’d expected some kind of excitement here at the heart of planetary exploration, now that Hadamard had announced the Titan program formally. But as they made their way through JPL’s corridors, lined with pictures of Mars, hardly anyone acknowledged Rosenberg—though some of the natives, aging hairies, stared curiously at Benacerraf herself, the most media-friendly survivor of
Columbia.

No wonder Rosenberg wants to leave so badly, Benacerraf thought. There is nothing here for him, even at JPL, his spiritual home.

Rosenberg had booked them a meeting room, a plain box with a big wooden table, over which he’d spread out a gigantic softscreen. A multicolored map filled the softscreen. It was a Mercator projection, of the surface of a world, pock-marked by craters.

It might have been a map of the Moon—or Mercury, or the southern hemisphere or Mars, or any of the small bodies of the Solar System.
But this was Titan.
Much of the map was coarsegrained, and it featured long white strips where no terrain was shown at all, particularly towards the poles.

Rosenberg said, “This map was assembled from radar images returned by
Cassini. Cassini
is using Titan’s gravity well to provide assists to climb on to other targets, but on each approach the radar sends back a noodle—a strip of the map, as it surveys a swathe of surface—and each time
Cassini
is occulted we study its radio signals, squeezing out a little more data about the nature and structure of the atmosphere…”

Mott said, “Why the radar? Why can’t we see the ground?”

“Because of the smog,” Rosenberg said. “Titan has virtually no magnetic field of its own—unlike Earth—so the solar wind and the magnetospheric plasma from Saturn can get at the upper atmosphere directly. Beams of electrons, plus ultraviolet light from the sun, fall on the upper air of Titan, and drive a lot of chemistry.

“The uv destroys upper-atmosphere methane, which then combines with nitrogen to form complex molecules like ethane, benzene, hydrogen cyanide, other nitriles. The hydrogen cyanide combines in big multimolecular groups to form adenine, a constituent of nucleic acids. The uv manufactures the simplest hydrocarbons, electrons, the rest…

“The hydrocarbons cluster in complex organic solids called tholins. The tholins make up the smog in the upper atmosphere, and they rain steadily down onto the land. And they’ve been doing it for four billion years… Now; Titan’s deep cold has a number of subtle effects. To begin with, once molecules are synthesized down there, they are going to stick around: the higher the temperature, the faster molecules tall to pieces. On Titan, even the oldest molecules might still be there, in the deepest slush layers. Like deep-frozen primeval soup.”

The map was color-coded for relief; one whole hemisphere was, Benacerraf saw, significantly brighter than the other. “Here’s the dominant surface feature on Titan,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a plateau, the size of Australia, sprawled across one whole hemisphere. Two and a half thousand miles across. A continent of ice. The mapmakers at the U.S. Geological Survey called it Cronos.” He looked at them for response and got none. “Mythology. The leader of the Titans. Now, Titan is tidally locked to Saturn; as it completes its sixteen-day orbit of Saturn, just like the Moon around the Earth, it keeps the same face turned to its parent all the time. And this Australia-sized lump, Cronos, is on the leading edge, as Titan pushes around its orbit.”