Titan (22 page)

Benacerraf studied the map more closely. The whole surface of the moon was covered with craters, up to a couple of hundred miles across. Some of the crater floors were filled in with a pale blue color, up to a certain contour. And some had central peaks, which protruded from the washes of blue. The continent, Cronos, had less filled-in craters than the other, trailing hemisphere.

Rosenberg said, “The cratering is a record of Titan’s history. Cronos appears to have an older surface, with a peak crater size of about ten miles—maybe a thousand of those—but also a handful of craters up to two hundred miles wide—big, old, eroded walled plains, their ice walls subsiding back into the landscape. The mapmakers call them palimpsests. Shadow craters. On the lowlands the cratering density is much less, and there is a peak size of crater of around forty miles diameter. That’s consistent with a young surface-renewed by ammonia-water vulcanism—with the larger, older craters, and the smaller ones, pretty much wiped out by the geology…”

The meaning of the craters’ blue coloration was obvious.

Benacerraf pointed. “Filled-in craters. Right?”

“Right. Titan is what you’d get if you flooded the Moon with paraffin: circular seas and lakes filled with liquid hydrocarbons.

“The nature of this hidden surface was the biggest mystery before
Cassini
got there. You see, the air should be depleted of methane in ten million years, by the photochemical processes that destroy it in the upper atmosphere. Titan’s a lot older than that, and it has methane. So the methane must be replenished.”

Mott asked, “Are the oceans made of methane?”

“No. It’s too hot. But there should be a lot of liquid ethane down there. The oceans are liquid hydrocarbon—seas of paraffin—with methane dissolved in them. That is the source of the methane. But there’s still a problem.

“The orbit of Titan isn’t a perfect circle. It’s elliptical. So, even though Titan rotates to keep the same face to Saturn, any surface liquid is going to slosh back and forth:
tides.
Which means a dissipation of energy by tidal friction, which means the circularization of the orbit. Like the Moon around the Earth. So you need an ocean to get the methane; but with a big ocean, you should have a circular orbit. It was a paradox. Oceans, or no oceans? Because of that mystery the planners didn’t know what they were sending
Huygens
into. They designed that little probe to float, or sink in a less dense ocean, or to land in slush…”

“But now we know the answer,” Benacerraf prompted.

“Now we know the answer.” Rosenberg twisted to look at his map. “Those crater seas are big enough to serve as methane reservoirs, with maybe twenty percent of the fluid bulk provided by the methane. But in bodies of fluid that size the tidal friction should be negligible.

“Besides, it now looks as it Titan may have a partially liquid interior. That ought to dissipate the orbital energy even more quickly than the surface reservoirs, so the whole question of the tidal constraint is still open. Anyhow, so there you have the solution to the puzzle. The answer was obvious ail along; we just weren’t thinking Titan…”

As she stared at the map, Mott tried to smile. “And this smoggy bombsite,” she said, “will be home.”

Benacerraf touched her shoulder. “Hell, if you’ve lived in Houston long enough, a little smog is nothing.”

Mott said, “What’s it going to be like for us down there, Rosenberg?”

“Different,” Rosenberg said bluntly. “Titan is an ice moon, like Pluto, Triton, Ganymede. The difference is, it’s overlaid by that fat atmosphere. At the core is a ball of silicate, overlaid by a shell of ice, six hundred miles thick. And on the surface, over a water-ice crust, lies that slush of complex organic compounds.

“You have to understand that
Titan is not like Earth.
Its ‘bedrock’ is water ice, with a little silicate. We may see plate tectonics, for instance, and even volcanoes. But if so they are driven by ammonia-water vulcanism, deep in the icy mantle. We call it cryovulcanism. We’re going to see a lot of unfamiliar processes… And the weather is shit,” he said. “Cold. And overcast. Smoggy, as you can see.”

“How cold?”

“Co—o—old. At the surface, we’ll find a temperature of about ninety-four K—nearly two hundred degrees below the freezing point of water. And that’s with a boost from a greenhouse effect; it could actually be worse. But the deep cold is the reason such a small world has been able to cling onto its air. And, under the smog, it’s
dark.
We should pack flashlights, Paula.”

Mott said, “Can we see Saturn?”

“From the surface? No. Sorry.”

“Jesus.”

“So, landing sites,” said Benacerraf. “We have to choose an equatorial landing site, because that’s all we can reach.”

Rosenberg said, “Correct. But wherever we land it’s going to look superficially the same. The atmosphere is so thick that the temperature scarcely varies, from pole to pole. What we need to find—for the science, and so we can supply our own needs—is an interface between geologic units. An area where several different types of terrain come together.”

“You have a suggestion?”

“Yeah.” He stabbed a finger at the map, near the center, close to the “coastline” of the continent, Cronos. “There’s a mountain range here, sprawling right across the equator. And a few degrees to the south of the equator, just here, is the highest mountain on Titan. The Survey called it Mount Othrys.”

Mott asked, “More mythology?”

“Yeah…”

Benacerraf said, “Why do we need to be near a mountain?”

“I told you everything is covered” in slush, in tholins. We’re going to need water ice, however. But there is rain. Ethane and methane rain,” he said. “The rain evaporates before it reaches ground level. But it should wash the tholins off the elevated ground. So the peak of Othrys will be exposed bedrock.”

“Bedrock,” Mott said, not following.

“Think Titan,” Rosenberg said.

“Oh. I get it. Exposed water ice.”

“All right,” Benacerraf said. “So we come down somewhere near this mountain.” Just to the north of the mountain, she saw, there was a large crater, maybe twenty miles wide, filled with a cashew-nut shaped lake. “How about here?”

Mott studied the map. “The crater has no name.”

Rosenberg shrugged. “The USGS didn’t name anything much below a hundred miles across…”

“Then we’ll have to,” Benacerraf said decisively. “Niki, you got any suggestions? This is going to be home, after all.”

Mott smiled. “A dingy stretch of fluid, overlaid by twenty-four-hour smog, and stinking of petrochemicals? Paula, as you say, it’s just like Houston. We’ll call it Clear Lake.”

“Clear Lake it is.”

They fell silent, then, and looked at each other, here in the muggy Californian warmth, the bright light of the meeting room.

Clear Lake.

Benacerraf thought, What the hell are we doing?

She tried to imagine how it would be down there, on the surface of Titan. In the pitch dark, laboring through freezing, sticky slush. Completely alone, without resource, save for the companions she took with her and whatever they could land.

Possibly, probably, for the rest of her life.

It would be a cold version of hell.

But her heart was beating, fast, and she smiled.

Jackie’s right, she thought. She was being selfish. Who could turn down an adventure like this?

The moment broke. The three of them pored over the map, picking out more features, assigning tentative names, on the world that awaited them.

G
areth Deeke, Air Force officer,
drove steadily north on Colorado Highway 115. He drove with the windows down and his sun-roof open, despite the crisp chill of the autumn air. The sun, high and small, beat down on his scalp from the immense blue sky; but his eyes were shielded by his mirrored glasses, and visibility was good—in fact he could see for miles, as if the air was glass.

Deeke loved the mountains: the emptiness, the huge sweep of the landscape, the sense of scale and frozen geological drama opening out all around him. He relished the feeling that he was embedded like a fly in amber, in this flashbulb moment of time.

He reached the right turn for Cheyenne Mountain with regret.

He could see the car park. It was the tabletop of a plateau, which jutted out massively from the side of the mountain. The steel bodies of cars glittered on its surface, in their neat rows, like ranks of insects.

The plateau was artificial. It had been constructed by piling up the granite which Air Force engineers had scooped out of the heart of the mountain.

He really didn’t want to descend into some hole in the ground, not on a day like this.

But he had his duty.

He was pretty sure the reason he’d been summoned here today was to do with the new NASA announcement, the incredible news that they were planning to send astronauts to Saturn.

Deeke, like many within the USAF, was no fan of NASA.

He was of the same vintage as the early astronauts, but his own career had run orthogonally to the Moonwalkers’. He was an old lifting-body man: after Patuxent, he’d flown the X-15, the youngest pilot to do so. When Shuttle came along, his X-15 experience paid off. The X-15 was an unpowered glider, when it landed. Just like Shuttle.

A still-young Air Force officer, Deeke had taken the first test orbiter,
Enterprise
, on captive flights—where it had been strapped to the back of a 747—and later on its first free landing tests. Then he’d flown on the third orbital flight, one of the system’s shakedown cruises.

Later, when STS had become operational, Deeke had flown exclusively Department of Defense missions on Shuttle.

Deeke and his buddies had launched reconnaissance satellites, and tried out some techniques for orbital manned reconnaissance, they’d even tried out core technology for some of the more exotic anti-satellite weaponry system proposals, like lasers and particle beams, which had come out of SDI.

Nobody outside the military knew exactly what he’d got up to on those missions. But Shuttle was, after all, a military vehicle.

But after
Challenger
, the military missions had dried up, and it looked as if Deeke wasn’t going to get to fly again.

Since then he’d assumed responsibility for advanced projects, in the USAF and outside. For instance he was an observer on NASA’s RLV program. It was interesting, varied, senior work.

But it wasn’t like flying. And as the years wore on, even as he got older and slowed up, he got steadily more frustrated.

But now NASA was launching this ludicrous jaunt to the outer Solar System, and he’d had the call to come here to Cheyenne from his old commander, Al Hartle, and his instincts were telling him something pretty exciting was coming down.

So here he was.

A neat little electric vehicle like a golf buggy took Deeke along the glowing length of the central tunnel, deep into the heart of the mountain. Then there was a left turn, through big blast doors—each of them steel plates three feet thick, like battleship hull—and into the heart of the command post itself.

He worked through the elaborate security clearances. He even had to pass through a series of chambers, like airlocks; at the heart of the mountain the incoming air was stringently filtered against chemical, biological and radioactive agents.

He’d been prepared for the delays; he sat patiently in the echoing, blue-painted, boxy rooms.

This complex, dug out of the granite core of the mountain, covered more than four acres. The rooms were all steel shells, supported on big metal springs which would act as shock absorbers, in the event of the nuclear attack which had never come. From this base, any aerospace battle over the U.S. would have been coordinated, and there were hot line links to the Pentagon and the White House. The place was designed to survive. It was hardened against EMP Blast and heat from any explosion would have been channeled through that big entrance tunnel and vented on the other side of the mountain…

There was no reading matter in the waiting rooms, but there was public net access. He logged onto
Time,
and found himself staring at an image of the thin, serious face of Jake Hadamard, the NASA Administrator. The accompanying article lauded Hadamard and his team; the proposed Titan project was striking a chord, right now, with the public—although there was opposition, from the Luddites and various religious groups—and the project was turning out to be a “fitting capstone” to the u.s. manned space program. Far better to remember a final great triumph to conclude forty years of endeavor, than the sour memory of the
Columbia
fiasco. And so on.

Hadamard was clearly using the Titan proposal to propel himself from the relative obscurity of his previous accounting background to the front rank of national figures. Once the Titan mission was launched, and NASA’s final affairs wound up and devolved, Hadamard would have his pick of jobs, in industry or politics. Hadamard, the article said, had every chance of becoming man of the year.

Deeke had to grin at that. Hadamard was one shrewd guy if he could turn a Shuttle crash into a good career move.

Somehow it was typical NASA. All bullshit.

At last an aide—a young MP—collected him, and walked him to the office of Brigadier General Albert Hartle.

Hartle came out from behind his desk, and shook Deeke’s hand vigorously. “Gareth. It’s good of you to come out here.”

The MP brought Deeke a coffee. It was good quality, potent and rich. Then the MP left, closing the door behind him.

Hartle smiled thinly. “I’d offer you a drink. Baltics, that’s what you Edwards boys used to drink, right?”

“I understand, sir. Not here.”

“No. Not here.”

Deeke sized up his surroundings. The office was just a box, like all the chambers in the complex. Hartle had left the walls unpainted; the bare steel shone in the harsh fluorescent strips. The biggest item of furniture was Hartle’s desk, a severe battleship-gray affair that looked like it had been welded together out of gun metal. Its surface bore a blotter, a fountain pen, and a small old-fashioned computer terminal.

The only item of adornment on the walls was a North American Air Defense Command crest, behind Hartle; the NORAD badge was a shield, with a sword and eagle wings upraised before the North American continent, sheltering it from the lightning strikes above.

Hartle was approaching sixty. The Brigadier General was small, trim and upright in his decorated uniform, his strong hands folded up before him.

He looked, Deeke thought, like part of the room, an extension of its severity.

This was Hartle’s habitat. As far as Deeke knew Hartle had no family: nothing in his life but the Air Force, and what he saw as his mission. It was hard to imagine the old Cold Warrior anywhere else but here.

They’ll probably have to bury him here, Deeke thought.

Hartle was studying him, his blue eyes predatory.

“I think you’d better tell me why I’m here, sir.”

“Gareth, I want you to indulge me. I want to go over a little history with you. Because if we don’t learn from the past, we’re condemned to repeat it. Right? And by the end of the story, I think you’ll agree with me that we need to take action now. A single, affirmative, decisive action. There are others who will support us…”

“Action, sir?”

“Bear with me.”

Hartle started to tell Deeke how he had gotten involved in America’s space activities as far back as the 1970s, after Apollo.

“Of course you know the truth about Apollo. McNamara—the Defense Secretary—supported the lunar thing to President Kennedy. Why the hell should the DoD support a big civilian man-in-space boondoggle? But in retrospect it’s clear. McNamara had wider goals. With a big new program like Apollo, outside the reach of the USAF, McNamara could please the aerospace lobby and Congress, taking the pressure off himself, so that he could get on with budget-paring defense programs. Our programs.

“You must understand this point clearly, Gareth. The civilian space program, and its Agency, were actually used as bureaucratic weapons against the USAF. And hence, of course, against the national interest.”

So, Deeke thought, our interpretation of history is that the U.S. went to the Moon in order to beat up on the USAF. Deeke suspected it wasn’t as simple as that; he knew the USAF’s space programs had been riven by infighting within the Air Force from the beginning. But it wasn’t a bad theory.

Maybe old Al Hartle has been down this damn hole in the ground too long.

… But Deeke found he wanted to hear more. It all fit in, he realized, with his own instincts.

It had been years since Deeke’s last visit to the complex.

Deeke was surprised by the subdued atmosphere, He remembered a buzz about the place, a sense of purpose and vigor. It the Big One had ever come, this might have been one of the last outposts of civilization, as the bright young people here monitored the launching of nuclear-tipped missiles across the planet. They could have survived down here for weeks, months even; there were big steel reservoirs, for instance, storing six million gallons of cool, uncontaminated Colorado Springs water.

The sense of mission, of power, had been palpable. Deeke missed it all, damn it.

But now it was different, right across the country, even the world; now, in hardened Minuteman silos that had cost millions to develop, farmers were being allowed to store grain.

Sometimes, Deeke thought, he just couldn’t recognize the world, this odd, fragmented future into which he was slowly sliding, helplessly. None of the old certainties seemed to hold any more.

He could understand how Hartle felt, with his recitation of forty-year-old history, of historic crimes for which retribution’ was coming.

“Go on, sir.”

“We had to accept the Moon, hut at least we were able to stop those assholes flying to fucking Mars…

“I worked on the study group that came up with the Shuttle recommendation. We forced NASA to accept a delta-winged orbiter, to give the bird a low angle of attack atmosphere entry—more heating, but greater cross-range abilities. And that big cargo bay was built for anti-sat work. The Shuttle was a military vehicle, no doubt about it. Then we started work on the Vandenberg launch site. We even essayed an orbital bombing run, over Moscow. But we were faced with nothing but delays and overruns. And then came fucking
Challenger.

“Think how far back we’ve slipped, since the X-15 you flew. A fucking museum piece, but still the fastest aircraft in the world. Do you remember what we planned? The X-20, the B-70—a Mach 3 bomber—and the F-108—a Mach 3 fighter—all canceled by 1968. My God, they even canceled the Supersonic Transport because of the fucking environmentalists who said the human race would become extinct if it ever took to the air. Right now the USAF does not have a plane to catch the Russians’ Foxbat…

“Gareth, NASA has been a thorn in our flesh ever since it was founded, by Eisenhower. Even when it hasn’t been used as a positive weapon against us, it’s acted to disrupt our programs and limit our capabilities. My God, if I had my way there would be NASA managers hauled into the courts to answer charges of treason, such is the damage they’ve inflicted.

“But it’s been a long game. NASA has been weakening since 1969. It’s been a slow decline but it’s been steady. And now, at last, we’re in a position to kill it.”

“Kill
it, sir?”

“Listen to me now. This damn Titan stunt is one last throw of the dice by those NASA assholes. If it succeeds, they’re figuring, maybe they’ll get back in the public eye, start clawing back some of the power and prestige and funding they’ve blown. We can’t let that happen, Gareth.

“Look, we’re working at many levels to stop this. We’re pulling strings in the Pentagon and up on Capitol Hill. I’m calling in every favor I can. And, frankly, we can count on Xavier Maclachlan’s support. If we can just delay the damn thing until Maclachlan gets into the White House in ‘08 we’ll have won…

“But anyhow, this is an historic moment, and we must have the courage to act, to shape the future. Otherwise, we might have no future to shape.
The Red Chinese
, Gareth. Asia is stirring from its thousand-year sleep. Red China will soon be on the march. Think about that.”

“You talked about action, sir.”

Hartle came forward, and rested his thin hand on Deeke’s uniformed shoulder. His face was a mask, the wrinkles in his cheeks pulled straight by his severe frown, and his shock of crewcut white hair was like a metal helmet. “I think we
can
stop this before they get to a launch. But we have to plan for the worst. You’re going to be my linebacker. My last line of defense. I want you there in that hole, if that runner tries to break through…”

Deeke thought, Hartle has gone rogue. But he has backers. And a vision.

He felt adrenaline spurt in his system, as it he were once more in the cockpit of a rocket plane, readying for ignition.

Holy God, he thought. I’m going to get to fly again.

Hartle looked into Deeke’s face, and nodded, as if satisfied.

M
arcus White wanted to fly
himself straight into Edwards for the F-1 test fire. But he couldn’t get hold of a T-38. Like a lot of other NASA resources, the little needle-nosed supersonic trainers, used by the astronauts like sports cars and taxis, were being quietly withdrawn from service.

It was deeply shitty, White thought; there was a stench of decay about the whole enterprise. The sooner we get this damn Titan mission assembled and away the better.