Titan (40 page)

In the farm module, unnoticed, a red lamp was blinking.

There were no alarms in the access tunnel.

Benacerraf drifted in her sleeping bag, her reading light on, listening on the squawk box to the reports from JSC.

Solar plasma was buffeting the Earth’s magnetic field, making it shudder, and huge electric currents were surging around the upper atmosphere.

The power grid serving the Canadian province of Alberta had gone down. In Britain, the northern lights were visible as far south as London. The Global Positioning System was breaking down; navigational fixes from the GPS satellites were unreliable because of the changing properties of the atmosphere. The Chinese had lost Echostar 3, a communications satellite. The energetic electrons racing around the Earth had caused a build-up of charge; a spark had generated a fake command to turn Echostar’s solar panels away from the sun. After a couple of hours, its batteries ran down, and it was lost. The energy of the storm was also heating up the outer atmosphere, making it expand; satellites as high as two or three hundred miles were experiencing a twenty-fold increase in atmospheric drag…

She fretted about Siobhan. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do until the storm passed.

Discovery
was designed to shield them from the radiation hazards of deep space—hazards from which Earth’s magnetosphere and thick layer of atmosphere sheltered the rest of mankind.

The system had to cope with three kinds of ionizing radiation, high-energy particles and photons which could knock apart the atoms of the body as they sleeted through it. There was a steady drizzle of solar cosmic rays—the regular solar wind, a proton-electron gas streaming away from the sun, boiled off by the million-degree temperatures of the corona and galactic cosmic radiation, GCR, a diffuse flood of heavy, high-energy particles from remote stars, even other galaxies, which soaked through the Solar System from all directions. And then, in addition to the steady stuff, there were SPEs—solar proton events, the kind of storm they were suffering now, intense doses of radiation which persisted for short periods, a few hours or days.

Astronauts tended to think of solar and galactic radiation as career-limiting, and SPEs as life-threatening.

Discovery
’s aluminum shell would shield them from the worst of the effects of GCR, reducing their cumulative six-year dose, anyhow, to maybe three hundred rem. That was high—and significantly increased the risks they all faced of cancer and leukemia later in life—but within the four hundred rem advisory career limit.

Of course it meant they wouldn’t be able to sustain another six-year journey home again, without improved shielding.

But to shelter from an SPE they had to retreat to their storm shelters, either the hab module or the farm, with their heavy plating of aluminum and water tanks clustered around the walls.

It—just if—Siobhan was caught in the storm, she could expect a dose of a hundred rem. At least. That would give her nausea, vomiting for a day or so, fatigue. And some long-term damage to the more sensitive parts of her body—the gonads, lymphoid tissues.

If Siobhan was unlucky her dose might rise five times as high.

And anyhow, there was no safe lower limit, Benacerraf knew. However small the dose, you were at risk.

To Benacerraf, huddled in her cabin and waiting out the storm from the sun, it felt as if the metal walls of the ship, the elaborate precautions and dosimeters they had taken, counted for nothing, as if
Discovery
was no more protection than a canvas-walled tent, in this storm generated by huge and remote and impossibly violent events. She had never felt so far from the protective embrace of Earth.

The
Discovery
crew truly had stepped outside the farmhouse door.

In the access tunnel, Libet started awake.

She could see more flashes, within her eyeballs: little streaks and curves and spirals.

She knew what
that
meant, of course: the flashes were caused by heavy particles, lacing into the matter of her eyes. She thought she could feel the radiation sleeting through her, warm and heavy. Those heavy nuclei would be ramming into the molecules of her body, smashing away electrons in little cascades.

Hard rain, she thought.

She really ought to open the hatch to the hab module, she thought. But, as she peered up through eyes that were laced with flashes and spirals, it seemed a long way away, and an awful lot of effort. Maybe soon.

And anyhow she was starting to feel ill. Nauseous, a little giddy, tired. Maybe it was space adaptation syndrome back again.

And she thought she could smell ozone, like a beach.

She closed her eyes again, and drifted like a fetus in the air.

Poor Niki, she thought.

The flashes and spirals continued, as if a shoal of some tiny fish were swimming through her head.

T
he blood trickled sluggishly
out of Angel’s arm.

As he tended the donation bag, Rosenberg couldn’t tell what Angel was thinking.

Bill just didn’t seem the same guy Rosenberg had got to know down on Earth. Floating around up here in the usual semifetal position, so many of his gestures and postures had changed: he would never sit with his legs crossed like he used to, or stand with his hands on his hips, or cross his arms… Microgravity had even messed up their body language. Rosenberg just couldn’t read Angel any more.

It sure didn’t help them all get along, cooped up in here.

Now Rosenberg watched, irritated, as the clear plastic bag suspended from Angel’s arm slowly filled up. “Clench, God damn it, Bill.”

Angel’s fist closed harder around the little rubber grip, and the dripping flow of blood accelerated a little. “Fuck you, double-dome. You should be grateful. I got better things to do than bleed myself to death to preserve that shriveled dyke in there.”

Paula Benacerraf came out of her quarters and joined them in the common area of the hab module. She looked as if she had been sleeping; her face was slack and baggy, and she was struggling into a grubby T-shirt. They were all wearing stinking, dirty clothes right now, because the laundry was malfunctioning again—clogging and leaking water—and none of them had had the will to fix it. “I think we’ve all heard what you have to say, Bill, a dozen times.”

“Oh, you have. Then screw you.” Angel pulled the loose bandage off his arm, and began to tug at the needle protruding from his skin.

Rosenberg said, “Hey, leave that alone. You’re not done.”

“Yes, I am.” The needle came loose, and Rosenberg hastily swabbed at the puncture wound in Angel’s flesh. Angel glared at him, his eyes wild above his tangle of floating, graved beard. “This isn’t a God damn nursing home. We don’t have the resources for this. I say we cut our losses.”

Rosenberg held up the half-full bag. “Paula, he didn’t complete the donation.”

Benacerraf looked at him from eyes sunk in pads of puffy flesh. “Make it up from stores, Rosenberg.”

Rosenberg kicked off the wall and caromed in front of Benacerraf, thrusting the bag in her face. “Don’t you get it? We don’t have any stores. This is all there is.”

“Make it up,” she said wearily. Without waiting to see if he complied, she pulled herself along the hah module to the waste management facility.

Angel snorted contempt, and went into his own quarters, slamming the door closed behind him.

Rosenberg was left alone in the common area, his own anger surging. He threw the bag of blood against a wall. It bounced off, soggily, and began drifting away from him, the viscous blood undergoing complex, slow-motion oscillations.

After a couple of minutes, his heart still rattling with anger, he scooted along the module to retrieve the blood.

Rosenberg’s personal theory of Angel was that he was the kind of bad-mouthing asshole who would always bitch at any leadership shown by anybody else, but would always be unwilling to take any real responsibility for himself. He reacted, not acted, and in the meantime made life a living hell for the rest of them stuck here with him.

But strictly speaking, of course, he was right about Libet.

Rosenberg was a biochemist, but he was also doubling up as the nearest thing
Discovery
had to a doctor. He’d done a crash basic medical training program. At the time he hadn’t taken it all that seriously: as the only crew member with any real grounding in the life sciences, he was the logical choice, but somehow he’d never thought he’d have to put any of this into practice.

But here they were—still inside the orbit of Earth, with a deep space maneuver and their second Venus flyby still to come—and not even one of the six years of the mission elapsed. Yet already one of the crew was basically hospitalized.

The purpose of the crew’s med training had been to enable them to prevent biological death. They had all rehearsed in resuscitation procedures: mouth-to-mouth, sternum compression to get the heart pumping, electroshock paddles, endotracheal intubation, cricothyroidotomy, tracheostomy. They had even—back in the remote early days of the mission when they had all still been talking to each other—tried to rehearse such procedures under microgravity conditions. It had soon become comically obvious that grappling with a limp crewmate in microgravity was physically awkward, distasteful, almost grotesque. And many of the steps in their manuals—
tip the victim’s head back at forty-five degrees
—no longer made any sense…

Anyhow, the theory of their training was that if they could just stabilize whatever situation came up, there would be time to wait for radio waves to crawl across the Solar System and bring advice from the medics on the ground.

But they simply weren’t geared up to nursing anyone—even one person, twenty percent of their crew—long term. This was a marginally capable interplanetary craft, not a convalescent home.

The blood had been the first, and most visible, stock to be diminished; the almost daily routine of drawing blood from the crew who were already weakened by their own reactions to microgravity had jammed the cost of maintaining Libet’s life in the faces of everybody on board.

Then there were the drugs. There was a pretty wide range of products in long-term storage. They had intravenous fluids, whole blood, crystalloid solutions: both saline and normal serum albumin, morphine sulphate, lidocaine, digitalis preparations… But the difficulty they faced now was that Libet had already absorbed a lot of the resources they’d started out with. And that had caused growing resentment among everybody else. Including, Rosenberg admitted, himself.
Why the hell do we pour this stuff into Libet? This is all we have to keep us alive for the next decade or more… Anyway, getting caught by the flare was her own damn fault.

He tried not to think about it. There were other problems to face.

He dug out his softscreen, with his copy of today’s checklist. He was scheduled to put in a little time in the centrifuge himself right now. But he could feel the steady whir of the arm as it rocked the spacecraft. That was Nicola Mott; even as Libet declined, Mott seemed to be taking an obsessive interest in her own health, and was putting in extraordinary hours up there.

He listened for a moment to Mott wheeling overhead, grimly fighting back the tide of microgravity changes. Whump, whump.

According to the checklist, Mott should have been putting in some time in the farm. Rosenberg decided he might as well cover for her.

He pulled himself through the hab module hatchway, along the little flexible access tube, where Siobhan had gotten her dose, and into the CELSS farm. He pulled on the protective gear—now, after months, rank with the sweat of others—and began to work around the racks of plants.

He didn’t like it in here.

Most of Rosenberg’s work, though on living systems, had been at the microbiological or biochemical level. The fact was, he hadn’t had much contact with living creatures, human or otherwise, and he found these ranks of straining plants a little sinister.

Overall the hydroponic system was working as it should, and he could see that many of the plants had the large leaves and small roots characteristic of such a facility. But he could also see, at a glance, there were the usual mechanical problems with the facility: clogged irrigation nozzles, a couple of failed fans, a suspiciously dark hue to the solution in one tank, indicating maybe a problem with the nutrient mix. And here was one place where the solution looked aerated, full of fat, sluggish bubbles which clung to the roots of the plants. Aeration was bad. The roots had to stay in contact with the solution to prevent dehydration and nutrient starvation, and to Rosenberg those plants looked, even to his naked, inexpert eye, undernourished.

There were more fundamental problems. Within the muddy hydroponic nutrient he could see roots growing—not downward—but in straight lines away from the seed plate, and at bizarre angles to the shoots. And in these late-generation growths, healthy plants were dotted among many unhealthy and abnormal growths.

It wasn’t a surprise to Rosenberg that after billions of years of adaptation to a gravity well the plants were having trouble with microgravity. There were gravity-related mechanisms that controlled branch angles and leaf orientation, and gravity dominated plant cell growth, elongation and development. Without gravity, the physical stresses and loading on cells disappeared. In fluids buoyancy was lost, and gas-filled volumes and vesicles would not move as they should…