Titan (54 page)

She monitored the Command Module’s clunky systems, waiting for the next glitch, the next anomaly.

She tried the periscope display. This was an oval piece of glass about a foot across set in the middle of the instrument panel before her. The periscope gave her a fish-eve view of the surface, looking down past the scorched white tiles of the hull:

A layer of thin white cloud, like cirrus, came ballooning up around her. Methane ice. Once through that, she looked down on a rolling, unbroken layer of thick, dark methane-nitrogen clouds, hiding the murky ground below. The clouds were almost Earthlike: fat, fluffy cumuli…

She could turn the periscope this way and that, with a little joystick in front of her. She imagined the tiny lens poking out of the hull and swiveling, above her head. The periscope had actually been cannibalized from an antique Mercury capsule, one of the original production run, which had been designed without windows; the periscope had been installed after protests from the astronauts to give them a view.

Even the effort of twisting the joystick seemed to deplete the muscles of her hand. It was going to take her a good while after landing before she had acclimatized enough to clamber out of her couch and try cracking the hatch.

After fifteen minutes the Command Module’s velocity was reduced to a hundred and twenty feet per second, and she was ninety miles above the surface. Now, with a crack of pyrotechnics above her, the main chute was jettisoned.

For an instant she was falling freely.

And then the final chute, the paraglider, opened up; and she was jolted back into her couch once more.

She let out her breath. She was through another command sequence which hadn’t gone wrong. Maybe she would live through this vet.

The paraglider was just a shaped canopy, marginally steerable. It was another old idea, that had been tried out for Gemini. Thus, a Gemini paraglider and a Mercury periscope should let Mott fly an Apollo capsule, like Dumbo, down to the wreck of a Shuttle orbiter, a billion miles from home…

Fifty miles above the ground,
Jitterbug
was immersed in thickening orange petrochemical haze. But the sun was still plainly visible as a brilliant disc, surrounded by an aureole, a yellow-brown halo.

Mott swiveled her periscope until Saturn was fixed at the center of her oval window. But already the water-color yellow wash of Saturn’s surface was becoming fainter, obscured by the uniform brown smear of the smog. She stared into the periscope until at last the planet’s fat, elliptical outline was lost, as if fading out on a poorly tuned TV screen, and the cloud closed over.

The sun, she saw, had vanished too. She had watched her last dawn, her last sunset. She was stuck clown here, for good or ill.

Forty miles high,
Jitterbug
fell out of the condensate haze, into a layer of clearer air. Then, at thirty miles, it penetrated the fat methane clouds. The temperature was close to its minimum here, at minus two hundred degrees Centigrade. The clouds were dark, brooding, as if stormy. Deep within the clouds, the cabin grew dark, and the lights of the instruments on the panel before her seemed to glow brighter.

Suddenly the altimeter kicked in. She was at a hundred and fifty thousand feet, it said. Feet, not miles: the measure of an aircraft, ballooning down through Titan’s atmosphere.

Jitterbug
emerged from the base of the clouds, which now hid the orange sky.

Gradually, through mist and scattered cloud, for the first time, Titan’s surface became visible to human eyes.

… Fluffy clouds of ethane vapor lay draped over glimmering circular lakes, which were cupped in continents of water ice. The liquid in those lakes was black to her vision, the round ponds puncturing the red-brown carcass of Titan like neat bullet-holes. It might have been a high-altitude view of Earth’s surface, though rendered in somber, reds and browns, a twilit panorama…

She reached out and took hold of a handset on the panel in front of her. The handset controlled the paraglider, by tweaking at its cables. Using this she ought to be able to fly the Command Module right in to the orbiter, with an accuracy of—the designers had told her—a hundred yards or so. And in the limited VR sims they’d set up, she’d consistently scored better than that, getting down to within thirty or forty feet of the target.

But first she had to spot her target, the orbiter on the surface.

She peered anxiously into the periscope. The surface of Titan—in the fish-eye view, bulging towards her—was resolving into a landscape of mud and crater lakes. The smaller lakes, a couple of miles across, were simple circles. But she could see central peaks protruding from the centers of some of the larger lakes, their shores washed clean of muddy slush.

And now
Jitterbug
drifted over a pair of giant craters, each perhaps fifty miles across. In one of these the central peak seemed to have broadened into a dome, so that the ethane pool was contained in a thin ring around a central island. But she could see a pit at the center of the dome, itself containing a small pool, so the whole structure had a bull’s-eye shape, with the solid circle and band of dark fluid contained by the circular crater rim. And in the second of the big craters, the outer annulus of fluid seemed to be heaped up against one wall of the crater—perhaps by some tidal effect—so that the lake was in the form of a semicircular horseshoe.

The landscape was strange, even the shape of the lakes bizarre.

This is Titan,
she reminded herself with a shiver. You are a billion miles from home. And there’s nothing in human experience to guide you as to what you’ll find here.

The Command Module shuddered, the hull groaning.

She gripped her seat, hard. She could feel the hard metal frame through the thickness of her pressure suit gloves. The Command Module felt fragile around her; it was like being inside some flimsy aluminum bathysphere, descending into this murky orange ocean.

Now she was suspended over a mountain range, wrinkles in the glimmering surface. The peaks were exposed, dark gray water ice bedrock, and the uniform orange coating of the lower ground lay in streaks that followed the contours of the mountain, like snow runs.

The area looked familiar from Rosenberg’s
Cassini
maps. She turned the periscope, jerking it from one side of the ship to the other.

There.
A little way away from the range was a crater lake, the muddy liquid pooled in the shape of a cashew nut.

It was Clear Lake: just like the radar images. And Mount Othrys must be somewhere in that range below her.

… She caught a glimpse of white, embedded on the dried-blood surface like a splinter of bone protruding from a wound.

It was a delta-shape.
Discovery.

She grinned fiercely, her spirits rising for the first time since Saturn had disappeared. She wouldn’t even have to steer the paraglider much; now all she had to do was glide her way down this last ten thousand feet and—

There was a snap, somewhere in the wall high above her.

Murky air billowed into the cabin, above her face. There was a stink, of swamps and marshes and…

And methane. Titan air. And, mixed in with it, the sharp tang of nitrogen tetroxide, oxidizer from the RCS.

She couldn’t believe it; she sat staring as the orange mush billowed down towards her. Following some antique command, the cabin pressure relief valve had opened. The valve was a two-inch nozzle designed to let in warm Pacific air, for returning Moon voyagers. It was
not
supposed to open on the way down to Titan.

It was the failure she had been waiting for. This had to be some consequence of her failing to follow the correct automation sequence earlier. Another untested logic path. But why the hell hadn’t that damn valve simply been welded shut?

It was a multiple failure. Multiple failures always got you, in the end.

And while she lay here and thought about it, she had sucked in a lungful of freezing, toxic Titan air…

She closed her mouth and eyes and pulled her faceplate down. It snapped into place, and she felt a cool blue blast of oxygen on her face. She breathed out, trying to empty her lungs. But that, she realized, was only going to start the methane and nitrogen tet circulating in her life support.

The stink of swamp gas was overwhelming. And the nitrogen tet seemed to be burning at her lungs and eyes; she could barely see.

She considered trying to find some way to close that relief valve. But now she could barely see the instrument panel.

Anyhow, maybe it was better for the oxygen in the cabin to be overwhelmed by Titan air. It that methane caught a spark,
Jitterbug
would explode.

She was coughing, her throat and lungs aching.

The descent was nearly over, anyhow.

The cold air of Titan wrapped over her limbs. She found herself shivering already. When she got to the ground, she’d have to move quickly to get to the heated EVA suit. She rehearsed the moves she would make. Stand up, as best she could, and reach under the couch for the big net bag there; haul out the suit…

Jitterbug
crashed into the tholin slush.

The fall was no more severe than if
Jitterbug
had been dropped on Earth from five or six feet. But to Mott it felt like a huge impact, an astonishing eruption of agony throughout her bruised body.

… And now the Command Module tipped to the right. She could feel the roll, see the orange-black landscape wheel past the windows. Perhaps the paraglider hadn’t come loose, and was dragging
jitterbug
over. Or perhaps she had landed on some kind of slope, a crater wall maybe, and was rolling.

Orange-brown mud splashed across the glass of the windows to her right, and turned them dark. Mott found herself hanging there in her straps, with cabin trash raining down around her: bits of paper, urine bags, discarded washcloths. The Stable 2 position, she thought. Upside down. One whole side of
Jitterbug
must be buried in the icy slush of Titan.

For a moment there was stillness, a cramped creaking as the hull cooled.

Then a window to her right cracked in two. Orange-black slush forced its way into the cabin, flowing, viscous.

Mott, suspended, began coughing again.

She was stuck in her seat. She couldn’t move. She was going to freeze. Help was two hours away, or a billion miles, depending on how you looked at it.

When the Titan slush lapped against her legs, she could feel the cold of it seep into her bones.

No footprints and flags for me, after all. But I got here. I got to touch Titan.

The slush was rising. It would reach her head in a few seconds. She tried not to struggle.

So quickly, it was over.

Heat and cold, she thought; fire and ice. That’s what separates Siobhan and me: fire and ice, at the extremities of the Solar System—

The slush forced its way through her faceplate, driving shards of plexiglass before it.

A
fter its muddy splashdown,
Command Module CM-115A settled deeper into the icy slush of Titan, its aluminum hull creaking as it cooled.

A wall-mounted camera peered at Benacerraf, as she lay in her couch, making history. She felt flat, deflated, battered by the events of the entry, the loss of contact with Nicola.

But she had her role to play.

She said, “Houston,
Bifrost.
Tartarus Base here. We have landed.”

“Amen to that,” said Rosenberg.

Without enthusiasm, she imagined how their words would be collected by
Cassini
and hurled across eighty light minutes, dispersing and growing fainter, to whoever on Earth was left to listen…

She turned her head. Every neck muscle ached; her head felt like a sack of water, ungainly and heavy, strapped to the top of her spine.

Rosenberg was sitting in the left-hand ouch, Benacerraf the right. Angel was sandwiched between them in the center couch, his bony body swathed in its bubble of orange pressure suit, pressed up against Benacerraf. He was apparently at peace, Benacerraf thought, his sedated madness contained for now within the orange high-technology bubble of his suit.

The window to her right was already frosted, the condensation from their breath and sweat frozen against the glass. She could see little of the landscape, in the murky twilight beyond. Even after just a few minutes on the surface, the tholin drizzle had coated the windows of
Bifrost
with a thin, purple-brown, organic scum; it streaked down the window like leaking oil.

The contrast with the warm, brightly-lit, mundane interior of the Apollo was marked; to leave here, she thought, would be like stepping out of your mom’s kitchen into a stormy night.

But Rosenberg seemed to feel differently. Elated.

“We’re here,” Rosenberg said. “My God.”

“Yes. We’re here. But do you really think anybody gives a damn any more?”

“I do,” he said, his tone defiant. “I do. We achieved what we set out to achieve. This is
Apollo 11
, all over again.” He turned to face her; there was a smile on his face, framed by his open visor. “This is history, Paula. There’s a new world out there. You’ll be the first: the first since Armstrong—”